With the door of my bedroom closed – and just to be sure, a chair dragged over and jammed under the handle – I took the dried peas from my pockets and arranged the withered balls on the floor next to the fireplace. I tested one with my finger. Holy Mary, Mother of God. Forgive my sins. It was dry and hard, slipping under the pressure of my touch. The cross of Christ bears all pain, transforms my pain into love. I’d just finished reading ‘The Lives of the Saints’, and I longed to see a vision of the Virgin. If the Blessed Mother visited me, it would be a sign that my faith had been recognised and rewarded. There were girls around the world who’d had visions, who’d received heavenly messages, found their palms bleeding with stigmata. Miracles really could happen to the faithful, and they seemed to happen to teenage girls a lot.

  Also, I needed to ask God to give Mummy strength. After I came out of the hole, I’d taken some of her sister’s letters from her drawer and left them on Daddy’s desk. It was wrong of her to write to a divorced woman and wrong to disobey her husband. She’d be happier without her sister in her life, and it was only right for Daddy to know the truth. But Mummy had been crying ever since, drooping around the house, listless and dull as a rag doll without its stuffing.

  I hitched up my skirt, steadied my eyes on my crucifix, and cautiously lowered my bare knees on top of the dried peas. I gasped, let out a cry. Knives thrust through my flesh into my bones, hot needles of agony, blades of pain. I fell to the side, rubbing my indented kneecaps. I sat for a moment, breathing hard, telling myself I could do it – had to do it – and tucked my hair behind my ears, tried again. Suffering was necessary. Purifying. Shockwaves forced my body to become rigid, to shut down, but I remained kneeling, fists clenched, jaw grinding, eyes squeezed tight.

  Make him love me. Make him love me best.

  I was thinking of Jude, but it was Daddy’s face that slid before my eyes.

  I woke up. The dogs were barking. Pale luminescence slid over the carpet through the thin gap in the curtains. I stared through the darkness, wondering if the Labs were barking at a fox. Something felt different. My skin prickled. I pushed back the covers and went to the window, moving a curtain aside to look down at the drive. A shape moved. Bigger than a fox. I caught my breath. There was a person down there, and they seemed to be staring up at the house. A splash of moonlight caught their features, blurring and brightening the dips and hollows of eye sockets and cheekbone, making a mask of their face. I gripped the edge of the curtain, wondering if this was my visit from the Virgin. But the figure turned away and scurried into shadows, their body ungainly and human in its urgency. I heard an engine start, a crunch of tyres.

  When I woke the next morning, I thought I must have dreamt it. After breakfast, Alice and I got our satchels and coats to walk to the bus stop. As we shut the front door, Alice let out a scream. Something hung from the wood. Blackened, matted fur, a drooping lifeless body. It dangled by a nail through the scruffy end of a tail. ‘A cat,’ Alice said between gasps. ‘Fuck.’

  I crossed myself. The body was oddly flattened. ‘I think it’s been run over,’ she said, looking closer. ‘But why would anyone nail roadkill to our door? They must have come all the way up the drive to do it.’

  I looked away from the snarling mouth, white teeth like tiny tusks. Black cats were the Devil’s creatures. A dark drip of congealed blood hung like a pendant from its tongue. I thought of the figure standing in the moonlight. ‘We should throw it away before Daddy and Mummy see it.’

  Alice prised the nail out using a flint from the drive and held the dead thing’s tail by the tips of her fingers. It dangled gently next to her as we made our way down the long and winding walk to the end of the drive. ‘We should bury it, really,’ Alice said.

  ‘We don’t have time,’ I said.

  Alice pulled back her arm and swung, letting go of the tail. The cat flew in a heavy arc across some hydrangea bushes and fell with a soft thump into the undergrowth. Alice brushed her hands against her school skirt, a smear of blood on her left palm.

  As we stood at the bus stop, I hoped it was just a coincidence, asking for a sign, and getting a squashed cat. But that poor, tattered creature hanging on our door wasn’t a heavenly miracle bestowed by the Virgin, or an evil joke from the Devil. A living person had hammered it into the wood. It was a silent curse from someone, or a warning, and the woman in the library came into my head. Edith Baxter.

  18

  ALICE

  I go out, shutting the door behind me and double-locking it before slipping the keys back under the stone cat. The rain is unrelenting; fat drops bounce with the force of their fall, soaking me in an instant, plastering my hair to my scalp. I hoist my old rucksack onto my shoulder, shrugging up the hood on Cecily’s puffer jacket, and turn in the direction of the station, walking with my head down. Water seeps into my boots and the bottoms of my jeans. But although I should be hurrying, I can’t make myself walk fast. My feet drag, getting slower and slower, until I come to a stop. I look up into the unforgiving sky, the rain blinding me. ‘Damn you,’ I whisper. ‘Damn you, Cecily.’

  I turn around, stomping back to the house through puddles. I fit the key in the lock, and almost fall into the hall. My hands are shaking with anger. How can I abandon Bea and Gabriel? What would they think, coming back to an empty house, with no explanation waiting for them? No hint as to where she’s gone or when, if ever, she’s coming back. I snort at myself. This is my own fault. My sister took off the burden of her responsibility and passed it to me, and like an idiot I accepted it.

  I drop the rucksack on the floor, shrug off the sodden jacket and hang it on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, where it drips onto the floor. Then I grab the straps of the rucksack and go upstairs to Cecily’s room, trailing the bag behind me. There must be a clue to help me fathom what she’s doing, what she’s thinking. When we were children, I might have been able to get a better feel – we could often read each other’s minds – but it’s been too long a separation and when I try and concentrate on listening for a sense or a vibration from her, I tumble into an emptiness.

  I get out her crumpled note and reread it, seeing another sentence written at the bottom that I missed in my panic.

  P.S. My turn to do the church flowers this coming Wednesday. Details in notebook.

  She must have planned this if she’s written instructions for doing the flowers in her little book. When I’d stipulated, I’d only do a week, she already knew she’d force me to stay longer.

  ‘Liar! You bloody liar!’ I rage at the empty room. She’s tricked me into being her – the whole ‘poor me’ thing, the whining about needing time, wanting to get a divorce – I don’t believe any of it any more.

  I open her wardrobe and rifle through her clothes; every item would fit me perfectly, but I’d never choose to wear any of them. We’ve always had different tastes. I’m realising that my sister’s choice of clothes says a lot about her personality: stiff and sensible on the outside, and then the surprise of her hidden underwear, all that lace and wire, torturously, secretly sexy. What else is she hiding in her life? I check the shoe boxes lining the bottom of the wardrobe, lifting lids. I’m frustrated. I don’t know what I’m looking for. There’s nothing here that gives me a hint about why Cecily really wants me to take her place. I drag over the stool from the dressing table and stand on it to look in the top cupboard. It’s filled with a couple of folded blankets and an electric fan with the cord neatly wrapped around its base.

  I get down and push the stool back into place. Then I kneel and look under the bed. There’s a large wicker basket right in the middle, the kind you take on a picnic. I lie down and stretch my arm and shoulder to pull it out. Inside, instead of travel cutlery and plastic plates, there are sketchbooks. A whole pile of them. I sit with my back against the bed and open the first one, leafing through pages, finding drawings in Cecily’s familiar precise and delicate style.

  There’s a sketch of a cavalier in breeches with long curling hair, a sword at his side. As I turn the paper, my pulse skips. Hawksmoor. She’s drawn the house with the yew tree making a burgeoning darkness in the foreground. Then there are close ups of the battlements and Pele tower, the front entrance with the steps leading up to the balustrade. She’s made details of one of the stone lions, the frozen curls of its mane, its pricked ears. She’s sketched Mummy, the two Labs, Dilly with her pointed snout and low-slung belly. There’s me and Cecily together, our faces close, but one a simulacrum of the other, a fainter tracing of the same features, a shadow sister. I can’t tell which is which. It’s eerie. I lick my finger to flick forwards, and I’m looking at Henry. I trace the contours of his face, the firm nose and chin, his intelligent, dark eyes, his teasing half-smile.

  There’s a smaller pad at the bottom of the basket. A younger Bea holds a kitten on her lap, and on the next page, a little girl holds up the hem of her dress; she seems to be in a fairy costume. I compare the two faces, and I don’t think the girl in costume is Bea. Then I’m staring into Gabriel’s features. Underneath his portrait, she’s written in small, cramped letters:

  Till death do us part.

  I shut the book quickly. Does she love him, after all? Or did she do the sketch before she lost interest in him? My heart flaps like panicked wings inside my ribs. My body is liquid with nerves, and I have a strange sense that a cage is closing around me. I unfold my legs, wincing at the stiffness in my joints as I pace the room, recalling Gabriel saying that Cecily was angry with him for not wanting to live at Hawksmoor. But did she really expect him to move to the other side of the country, leave his job and take on the responsibility of a decaying pile of bricks?

  I sit on the bed and return to the pages of her sketchbooks, finding images of our father; she’s made him look almost Christ-like. I can’t look at him, and I skim pages fast. Here’s the interior of the chapel, the statues of the saints, the painted Madonna staring down at her child. Mouldy damp and musty incense clogs my throat.

  She’s written words over and around some of the drawings. Sentences worm across the page in no obvious order: ‘Offence against the natural law… no impact on legal status… a marriage continues in the eyes of God. Never ending. Never. Never.’

  ‘He’ll hate me. Disown me,’ she’s written in bold, underlining it with such hard strokes she’s torn the paper. And she’s right. Divorce would be the death-knell for her relationship with our father. On another page there’s one word written over and over, criss-crossing, overlapping: ‘DIE, DIE, DIE, DIE’.

  I push the sketchbooks away from me, stomach flipping with shock. Cecily had appeared rational in her last letter. She was upset and worried, but she hadn’t seemed unbalanced. These scribbled sentences tell a different story, and it seems suddenly obvious that she’s not going to leave her husband. Of course not. She’s Daddy’s daughter and a devout Catholic. So why lie to me about it? I know the answer to that – she guessed rightly that mentioning divorce would shock me into swapping places with her. She knew I’d understand what courage it would take, that it meant rebellion. The question I can’t answer is why does she really want me here?

  I haul myself up onto numb feet and hold my shaking fingers before me. I can’t keep them still. The books lie around me, pages splaying open, jumbled up sketches and snippets of sentences. I don’t know what’s real and what’s pretend any more, and I sit down hard on the bed, shivering. The room tilts, blurs as if air has become liquid and I am falling through it, drowning.

  A bang wakes me. The sound of the front door opening. I sit up and glance at the time. It jolts me back into the day. The afternoon has flown. I realise the rain has stopped; there’s a glimmer of weak sunlight gilding the wet window, the glitter of a rainbow. The sketchbooks aren’t lying around me any more. I kneel by the bed and pull the wicker trunk from under it. Opening the lid, I see that they are there, piled up neatly. I must have tidied them away. I push the trunk under the bed again, straighten my hair and go down to greet Bea.

  She stoops over the kitchen counter, spreading butter over slices of white bread. She glances over her shoulder, cheeks bulging. There’s a ripped packet of chocolate digestives open next to her. Our eyes meet, but her gaze is shuttered, blank. Remains of yesterday’s black kohl is smudged onto her cheeks. She turns away and goes back to slathering cherry jam on top of the butter.

  ‘Bea,’ I go towards her. ‘Is something wrong?’

  She shrugs. ‘No.’

  She’s piled a plate high with slices of bread and biscuits. She begins to make for the door, pushing a biscuit into her mouth.

  ‘Bea,’ I try again. ‘Remember, we agreed – we said we’d talk to each other?’

  She stops, swallowing hard. She drops her chin. ‘I can’t.’ She walks on. ‘I’m alright,’ she mutters.

  I listen to her going slowly upstairs and her door shutting. I follow, knocking briefly before entering. She’s sitting on the floor cross-legged, and she looks up with a furtive expression, mouth sticky. She scowls, chewing. ‘You can’t just come in here,’ she says, already reaching for more food.

  ‘I know it’s your space, and I’m sorry. But I can’t ignore this – something’s obviously happened.’ I perch on the edge of her bed.

  ‘Stop pretending you care,’ she says. ‘Go away.’

  I take a breath, ‘Please tell me, Bea. Did something happen yesterday?’

  ‘Why should I tell you?’ she says, her voice breaking.

  I look at my hand. My palm tingles. I seem to remember it making contact with her face. But I’ve never hit her. It was me that got hit. My father’s arm pulling back, the impact sending me sideways. Red roaring in my ears.

  I sit for a few seconds, collecting myself, breathing deeply. ‘Whatever I’ve done to upset you,’ I say slowly. ‘Can we put it to one side for a moment? Just tell me, honestly. Did something happen at Megan’s?’

  She shoves the plate away from her. ‘I… I think I’m going to be sick…’

  She pushes herself up and rushes next door into the bathroom. I can hear retching and the flush of the loo. I give her a minute and then follow. She’s leaning over the sink, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She turns on the cold tap and splashes water onto her face.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’m really worried now. What’s going on?’

  Her face crumples, and she drops her head into her hands. I’ve crossed the space between us in a second and folded her inside my arms. She’s rigid at first, but then she slumps against me. I press my face into the wild bird’s nest of her hair, reeking of stale perfume and cigarette smoke. Her body shudders, ribs and shoulders heaving. She cries in big gulps, sniffing and spluttering. Her sobs become hiccups, and I pass her a length of loo roll. She blows hard into folds of white.

  ‘Let’s go downstairs,’ I say. ‘I’ll put the kettle on. We both need a cup of tea.’

  I remember how Jane and Mummy would drink tea as if it were a cure for everything. Jane ladled sugar into hers and liked it milky; Mummy drank hers black with lemon.

  Bea is sitting opposite me at the table, her mug untouched. She picks at her cuticles, then rubs her cheeks hard. ‘I… I was an idiot… there’s this boy…’

  I grip the handle of my mug.

  ‘David. I thought he liked me.’ Her voice cracks and she presses one hand over her mouth. She looks at me as if assessing whether she really can tell me.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say, leaning forwards slightly. ‘Go on.’

  ‘There were a few of us hanging out at Megan’s… and he said… he said he fancied me; said I should trust him if he was going to be my boyfriend…’ she shudders. ‘We went upstairs.’

  I lean over the surface and place my hand over hers. ‘Did he, did he make you do anything?’

  She shakes her head, and I let out the breath I was holding. Her nose is running, and she wipes it with the ball of loo paper. ‘I got frightened when he put his hand under my top. I stopped him. Said I wasn’t ready.’

  I wait for her to continue.

  ‘He tried to persuade me. But I pushed him away.’

  ‘You did the right thing,’ I say.

  ‘But he didn’t really like me,’ she whispers. ‘As soon as he realised I wasn’t going to let him… you know,’ she blushes, bites her lip. ‘After that, he changed. He laughed. He said… it was all a joke. He didn’t fancy me. I was too fat to be anyone’s girlfriend.’ She stares at the table. ‘I felt so stupid. They all knew. They were laughing at me.’

  Anger builds in me. Where the hell were Megan’s parents while this was going on? I swallow my fury and try to stay calm. ‘You were brave to say “no”.’

  ‘I feel like an idiot,’ she whispers, tearing the loo paper into shreds.

  ‘You’re not an idiot, Bea,’ I tell her, speaking slowly, wanting every word to reach her. ‘You did the right thing by stopping him. And what he said isn’t true. You’re beautiful and kind and clever. He didn’t like being rejected, so he said mean things. He’s the idiot. More than that – he was abusive, cruel.’

  ‘The thing is,’ she says quietly, ‘the reason I stopped him wasn’t because I didn’t want him to… It was because I was embarrassed about my body.’

  ‘When you meet the right person, you won’t be embarrassed. It’s important you understand that people can’t touch you unless you want them to,’ I say slowly and carefully. ‘You must value yourself. And you have, Bea. You were right. He was wrong.’