House of Shadows Read online

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  What’s your first memory? Mine is of darkness, of weightlessness, of waiting. A stir of awareness, a drifting up towards consciousness only to sink back into nothingness.

  ‘Kate? Kate, can you hear me?’

  I can hear a voice. I don’t know who Kate is, but she doesn’t answer. Perhaps she is like me, floating, suspended in the dark. It feels peaceful, this blankness. A thick, cushiony absence of sensation. Whenever I drift close to its surface, the blackness is jagged with shards of pain and a clamouring terror that sends me scuttling back into the shelter of the dark.

  It is later, I think. There’s a sound I don’t recognize: a lazy hiss, a long sigh, but too regular to be human. In my head, the sense of waiting is stronger, spiralling slowly at first into insistence, and then urgency. There is something I need to do, something important, but a nameless, shapeless horror is licking its lips at the edges of my consciousness, and I’m afraid. I know I must wake up, I must remember, but I can’t, I won’t. It’s safer to stay hidden in the dark.

  Fragments.

  ‘How long can she go on like this?’ A voice, fretful.

  ‘She’s breathing on her own now. The doctors say we just have to wait.’ A different voice. Calm, cold. No way of telling if the voices belong to a man or a woman. They come to me from a great distance, distorted by the depths of my unconsciousness.

  ‘It would have been better if she’d died.’ Bitterly.

  ‘Don’t say that.’ A pause. ‘Not here.’

  It could be a dream. Does that mean I am asleep? I think I must be.

  A sensation of not being alone, a hand cool against my wrist, and dread, stabbing out of nowhere. Someone bending over me. I can feel the press of a body, feel breath on my cheek, and a whispering in my ear, rank with malice.

  ‘You were supposed to die.’

  It is quick, so quick I may be imagining it, but I’m sure of the relief that floods through me when the fingers slide from my arm and whoever it is straightens.

  ‘Oh, nurse, how is she doing today?’

  That may be a dream, too. I hope it is. I hope I am dreaming.

  Remember. You must remember. The thought struggles through the dark and the fear and a white glare of pain, but it is like putting a shoulder to a stiff door. I strain to open my mind, but when I force a crack all I can see is terror swooping towards me and I try to scream but I can’t open my mouth. I can’t breathe. I can’t move. I can’t move!

  ‘I think she might be coming round.’

  Brisk footsteps, competent fingers at my wrist. ‘I’m just going to give you something for the pain, Kate.’

  A prick, lightning quick, and then a plummet back into the blissful blankness.

  There are huge weights on my eyelids and a relentless, unnatural noise is nagging me awake. Beep, beep, beep, beep. With a huge effort, I manage to open my eyes. I see a wall, flat and bright and somehow strange, and something about it makes my mind throb with alarm. I hurt all over and my mouth is so dry I can’t swallow.

  My eyes drop from the wall to a sheet. It is white and smooth. A bed. I am in a bed. At last something that makes sense.

  But I can’t move. I try to lift an arm, to twitch a toe, but my body won’t respond. An invisible beast has me pinned to the bed, and my heart panics like a trapped bird, battering frantically in my chest, as I let my eyes close.

  ‘Good God! Fiona! She just opened her eyes!’ An urgent rustle, like paper being hastily discarded.

  Are you sure?’

  A body leaning over me. I smell fine wool, dogs, a reassuringly familiar hint of leather. ‘Get the nurse! Kate? Kate, can you hear me?’

  ‘Jasper, stand back. Let the nurse see.’

  A pause, and then an authoritative hand is laid on my wrist. ‘Kate? Can you open your eyes?’

  I don’t know who Kate is, but the voice is clearly speaking to me. I force my lids open to see a woman dressed in a blue tunic. The colour hurts my eyes and there is a wrongness to her clothes that I can’t identify.

  ‘Where . . . ?’ There is something blocking my throat, a pipe of some sort that makes me gag, and the woman squeezes my hand kindly.

  ‘Don’t try to speak, Kate. You’ve had an accident, and you’re in hospital, but we’re looking after you and you’re going to be fine.’ She smiles at me. ‘Would you like to see your family while I call the doctor?’

  She steps back to reveal a man with frayed features and a weak mouth. There is a faint twitch under his right eye. Beside him is a woman. Her hair is an elegant ash blonde, and neatly combed. It’s difficult for me to judge how old they are. In their fifties, maybe? The man’s fair hair is faded, and it flops over his forehead. Once he must have been very attractive, but now he looks worn, blurred, as if the edges of him have been rubbed out.

  I don’t recognize either of them.

  My eyes dart back to the nurse. I want to say, They’re not my family, but I can’t speak past the tube in my throat.

  ‘Hello, Kate,’ says the man, trying a jovial smile that doesn’t quite work. ‘What a fright you gave us!’

  ‘Jasper!’ the woman says with a warning look. ‘There’s no need for that now.’ She is a handsome woman, but her eyes are cool. ‘We’re very glad to see you awake, Kate,’ she says.

  I try to shake my head, but all I can do is shift it slightly against the pillow. There is so much that is wrong, I can’t take it in. They are strange people, in strange clothes, speaking in strange voices. And why do they keep calling me Kate? My name isn’t Kate. It is . . .

  I don’t know, I realize. I don’t know who I am. Horror yawns around me and I close my eyes in desperation.

  ‘Don’t worry if she doesn’t know you at first,’ the nurse says over me. ‘It’s quite common for patients to be confused when they first regain consciousness, and it may take some time for her memory to return. It’s best to let her come round slowly, but it’s very good news that she’s out of the coma. We’ll call you if there’s any change overnight, of course, but let her sleep now.’

  They have taken the tube out of my throat. It hurts to talk, but I have had a drink through a straw and I feel properly awake for the first time.

  Now I am lying propped up in the bed, attached by a bewildering number of wires to various machines. My eyes are skittering around the room. I don’t recognize anything. There is something profoundly wrong about this world, with its pale, painted walls and its pervasive smell that is both pungent and curiously blank at the sam
e time. The windows are covered by strange slatted hangings, and they seem to open into another room rather than onto a street or a garden. I can’t see the sky. The light is unnatural, constant. I have no sense of time. Is it morning, or evening? There is no way of telling.

  Sounds are subdued in here. I strain my ears for something familiar – a laugh, a dog barking, a child crying – but there is nothing I recognize, just lowered voices, the faint squeak of shoes outside the door, and the slow, painful thud of my heart, while in my head, terror roars. I don’t dare turn my mind, don’t dare face the dull dread that looms out of the dense, impenetrable shadows where my memory should be. I have tried to remember, but it is like groping blindly through fog: impressions of shock, of the sudden, sickening sensation of falling, tumbling horrifyingly through the air. A figure is there, but the harder I try to make out its face, the more it recedes.

  I don’t know who I am or where I am. I know only that I am alone and I am frightened.

  I’m in a different room. I don’t know how or why I came to be here. The bed is the same, high and narrow and curtainless, but there is a window with great glass panes and this time it looks outside, which is a relief, although all I can see is sky. The clouds are a pale, mottled grey and the light seems peculiar, although I can’t put my finger on why.

  Two women are standing by the bed. One is dressed in the same harsh blue as the woman who told me not to try to speak. Nurse. The word floats into my mind and I clutch at it. She is a nurse. I’m not sure how I know this, but I do, and I know what a nurse does. She cares for the sick.

  The other woman wears a white coat. She has smooth skin, brown as a nut, and her hair is black and shiny. She is looking at a board in her hand, but as if sensing my gaze, she looks up and offers a brief smile.

  ‘I’m Dr Ramnaya, Kate. How are you feeling?’

  I think about it. I feel as if I have been beaten all over with cudgels. My head booms and throbs, and there is a relentless pain in my leg, but worse than that is not understanding where I am or who I am. ‘Afraid,’ I say. My tongue is so thick and unwieldy in my mouth that I can barely form the word, but she seems to understand.

  ‘You’re quite safe now,’ she says.

  ‘Have I had the sickness?’

  ‘You’ve had a very nasty fall,’ she tells me.

  Falling. Tumbling awkwardly, terrifyingly. My legs over my head. My arms flailing. My heavy skirts dragging me down, down, down. The scream blocked in my throat.

  Dr Ramnaya is lifting my eyelids and shining a light into my eyes. Can she see my confusion, my fear? ‘Can you remember what happened?’ she asks me.

  I moisten my lips and try to speak again. ‘Don’t remember anything,’ I manage with difficulty.

  ‘It’s quite normal to lose your memory after a traumatic brain injury,’ Dr Ramnaya says as she steps back. ‘You’ve fractured three ribs and your left femur – the bone in your thigh – has been badly broken. We’ve pinned that with an intramedullary nail, and stabilized your fractured pelvis with an internal plate. But we were initially more concerned about the fracture to your skull. Given that you fell over thirty metres, you’re very lucky to be alive at all,’ she tells me. ‘Fortunately, it seems that the branches of a tree broke your fall, but you were in a coma for almost a week, and retrograde amnesia is quite common in these circumstances.’

  I can’t make sense of what she is saying through the pounding in my head. I understand ‘tree’, ‘fall’, ‘week’, but the other words are tumbling and jarring around my brain as I try to work out what they mean. My confusion must show in my face, because Dr Ramnaya tries again.

  ‘You may forget who you are and incidents in your life, and you probably don’t remember much about being in the intensive care unit where you were taken at first, or being transferred to this hospital when your condition became more stable, but you’ll retain general information about the world – how to speak, how to ride a bicycle, that kind of thing.’

  What is a bicycle? But I am too confused to interrupt her.

  ‘You might also remember facts, but not the names of the people closest to you.’ Her fine brows draw together as she registers that I am struggling to follow her. ‘For instance, you probably know what the Queen is called?’

  She looks at me encouragingly, and I search my mind desperately, pushing aside all the words that are clamouring for an explanation. There must be something in there. And sure enough, as I probe the darkness, a name rises to the surface. ‘Elizabeth,’ I say slowly, and relief spills through me as I see her nod. Thank God, I have remembered something.

  ‘See?’ she says. ‘Your other memories may take more time to come back, but you should regain most of them eventually, and until then, try not to force it. The more you try, the less likely you are to remember, so let’s concentrate on your physical condition for now.

  ‘In the meantime, you’re in good hands,’ she tells me briskly. ‘You’ve been moved to a private hospital near York so that your family can visit you more easily. Although they’re able to care for you, they’ve explained that the house is very old and can’t be adapted, so you’ll need to be able to get up and down stairs before you can go home. Lord and Lady Vavasour have been very concerned.’

  Vavasour. The name chimes within me, and Dr Ramnaya must see my expression change, because she glances at the nurse.

  ‘That means something to you?’

  Already the feeling of recognition, the certainty that I am on the brink of remembering something important, is fading. ‘No, it’s gone,’ I say, frustrated in spite of what she has said about not trying too hard to remember.

  ‘Well, it’s not surprising that you recognize the name,’ she says. ‘It’s your name. Kate Vavasour.’

  No. It is the only thing I am instantly sure of: that is not my name. ‘I’m not Kate,’ I whisper. It is all I know. I am not Kate.

  ‘Try not to worry about it,’ the nurse says, squeezing my hand. ‘Give it time, and you’ll start to remember who you are, but for now, let’s concentrate on getting you better.’

  The couple who were here when I woke up before come back. I remember his floppy hair and the tic under his eye, her controlled smile. It feels good to be able to remember something, even if it is only since I woke up in hospital. Very gradually, the whirling confusion is settling, and a corner of my mind has cleared, just as Dr Ramnaya said it would. I do know what a bicycle is, of course I do. I know what a hospital is, too, and a stethoscope, and a television, and when they tell me that I’m in York I can picture the city perfectly. I understand what ‘amnesia’ means, and the nurses’ blue tunics and trousers no longer look unutterably strange. I can recognize that my visitor’s jumper is cashmere, and that he wears green cords and a navy Guernsey with a checked shirt and tie.

  But I still don’t know who I am.

  I have tried and tried, but all I remember is fear and a drumming sense of urgency. There is something I have to do, someone I have to find. I must remember, but I can’t. I cling onto the things that I do know, because if I try to think about anything else, my mind simply closes down in desperation.

  My visitors sit in the uncomfortable-looking chairs that are provided on one side of the bed. They tell me that they are Jasper and Fiona, Lord and Lady Vavasour, my parents-in-law. They say that I was married to their son, Michael, but that he died almost three years ago. Everything about Fiona is cool – her hair is pale, her jumper an icy blue, the pearls at her throat a gleaming ivory – but when she talks about her son, her hands close tightly around the arms of her chair and her knuckles show white.

  I am a widow, they say. I live with them now at Askerby Hall.

  No! I want to protest. No, my husband is not dead. He cannot be! I would know, I would feel it. But when I try to conjure up an image of him, there is nothing, just the rushing darkness in my head, and that frightens me more than anything. How could I have forgotten my dearest dear, my heart?

  My throat closes and I turn my f
ace away from the grief in their eyes. I should weep, but how can I cry for someone I cannot remember?

  ‘But you have a son,’ Fiona says, and my pulse leaps with a recognition that lifts me off the pillow, careless of the pain in my ribs.

  My son! Yes, yes, I have a son! Of course.

  And it comes back to me, the terror, not for myself but for him. I don’t know why, but I have been terribly afraid for him. ‘He is safe?’ I ask urgently.

  ‘Of course he is safe.’ Impatience feathers Fiona’s voice as I crumple back against the pillows, the relief so sharp that I close my eyes at the sting of tears.

  ‘Thank God,’ I say, my eyes squeezed shut still, my fingers tight on the sheet, and I let out a shuddery breath. ‘Thank God.’ I have not realized until now why I have been so afraid, but of course it has been for my son. I open my eyes after a moment, when I am sure that I am not going to cry. Something tells me that Fiona will despise tears. ‘Can I see him?’

  ‘We didn’t want to upset him by bringing him in,’ Jasper says apologetically. ‘You’re still a bit . . . bashed up.’

  ‘We thought seeing you like this would distress him.’ Fiona is cooler.

  ‘We brought you a photo, though.’ Jasper produces a picture and puts it into my hands. ‘This is bound to jog your memory. There’s Felix.’

  I stare at the image of a small boy of about three, fair-haired, blue-eyed, with an alert, mischievous expression and an engaging smile. An endearing child, for certain, but not mine. I know it in my bones, and my heart hollows with dread.

  I shake my head. ‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s not my son.’ I can’t remember his name, but I know it isn’t him. I know it. I let the photo drop onto the blanket and look from Fiona to Jasper, these people who claim to be my family but who show me a child who is not mine. ‘Please, you have to tell me. Where is my son?’

  Chapter Two

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘Gently, old thing.’ Jasper tries to lay a calming hand on Fiona’s arm, but she brushes it aside. ‘The doctor said we have to be patient.’

  ‘Haven’t we been patient enough with her?’ Fiona’s voice cracks and she presses her fingers to her forehead, fighting for control. ‘Dear God, if we have to go through all that again . . .’