Brightwood Page 3

  She carried on down the path and then through the bushes that fringed the Wilderness, retracing a route where the undergrowth had been pushed aside. There was a clearing where the peacocks liked to roost, high in the trees. Daisy sat down with her back against a tree trunk and made herself as still as she could.

  In a little while, three of the birds made their way into the clearing: two females, pecking and peering, and a male with a greenish breast and white crest. Daisy made a note of the time and place in her book and then a description of their coloring.

  For all their glory, they were lazy creatures. Their nests were just little holes they scraped in the earth, and they would rather run than fly. The fattest ones got eaten by the fox.

  Daisy liked this area of the Wilderness because the Christmas tree was there. She glanced across at it now. The tree had grown faster than her. It was already twice her height. Last year, even her mum wasn’t tall enough to fix the star on the top without a ladder. When the tree was decorated, it was a beautiful sight, all lit up among the dark trees. They scattered grain and dried fruit for the animals, and hung balls of seed so that birds would come and perch among the branches, as if they were Christmas decorations themselves.

  “Are we the only people who have a Christmas tree?” Daisy had once asked.

  “Oh no. Lots of people get them to put in the house.”

  “The house? How do the animals get their treats?”

  Her mum had smiled at that and squeezed her hand.

  Back then, she could talk to her mum about anything. Her mum told her stories about when she was a little girl, when Brightwood Hall was full of people and laughter. The meadow was still a lawn then, the grass kept short by a dozen gardeners, and the Wilderness was a well-­tended woodland, covered by bluebells in the spring.

  In those days, her mum slept in a bedroom with a garden painted on the walls, and the rest of the house was equally beautiful. The Fitzjohn silver was always polished and the windows gleamed. There were parties, her mum said. Such parties! The women wore dresses all the way down to the ground and danced through the night in the ballroom.

  “Where did they put all the covered-­up furniture?”

  “It wasn’t there. The ballroom was perfectly empty.”

  “Did you wear a long dress? Did you dance too?”

  “I wasn’t allowed to stay up so late . . . ”

  But now that Daisy was older, her mum didn’t seem to like her asking so many questions. Sometimes when Daisy was talking, her mum’s face would change, and if Daisy didn’t stop, she would start to run the heel of her slender hand against her forehead, over and over again. And whatever Daisy was talking about would lose all meaning, as if her mum were rubbing the words away.

  It was much easier to keep quiet and talk instead to Little Charles or Tar or the peacocks.

  FOUR

  It was long past lunchtime. But although Daisy was hungry, she walked back to the house as slowly as she could. The slower she walked, the longer she could hope that her mum had come back while Daisy had been in the Wilderness. On the way, she bargained.

  If she’s back, I will never say anything that will make her rub her forehead. I will brush my teeth every day and not lie that I did it. I will stop picking the paint off the wall behind my bed . . .

  She went in by the front door, crossed the reception area—stacked high with unopened deliveries—and entered the Marble Hall.

  “Mum?”

  Daisy made her voice louder. “Mum!”

  Nothing answered, not even an echo. She stood still for a second and then suddenly plunged into the maze of shelving, running as fast as she could up and down the narrow lanes, turning left and right, her eyes wide with searching, as if she could find her mum if only she looked hard enough. She stopped at last and pulled herself together.

  She should make lunch. Lunch was normal.

  Daisy went into the kitchen. She had been teaching herself to cook using recipe books from the library. Her mum never got into the habit of cooking because she had always had people to make her meals when she was growing up. Daisy, however, enjoyed it. The basement at Brightwood Hall was stocked with thousands and thousands of items, and she could always find the ingredients she needed. But today she wasn’t in the mood. She made herself a cheese sandwich.

  Tar was sitting on the table, waiting for her.

  “You should be careful,” Daisy told him. “Mum only lets me keep you because you’re not a wild rat. You look like you used to be someone’s pet. If she sees you on the table, she might change her mind. She told me rats shouldn’t be in the house at all. People put down traps and poison for them.”

  Tar’s gaze was nailed to the sandwich. “I’d never fall for that,” he said.

  Daisy waved the sandwich slowly to and fro in front of him.

  “Are you sure?”

  Tar didn’t answer. He was too busy following the sandwich with his eyes, his expression glazed.

  Daisy put the sandwich down abruptly. “You can eat it. I’m not hungry.”

  “The whole thing?” Tar sniffed it. “It’s fresh,” he muttered in a critical voice. “I suppose you can’t have everything.” He began to eat steadily, commenting appreciatively to himself between mouthfuls.

  “I wish we still had a TV,” Daisy said. It would have helped take her mind off the fact that her mum was now nearly five hours late.

  “There were a lot of interesting things on TV,” Daisy told Tar. “There was this one show about a huge family that lived in a tiny house. Every time they said anything at all, invisible people laughed! It was very funny.”

  Daisy had asked for a TV for her eleventh birthday. When the day came, however, she got a telescope instead. It was a magnificent telescope, powerful enough to see even quite distant stars. But she couldn’t help feeling disappointed.

  She left the kitchen and made her way upstairs to her mum’s room. It comforted her a little to be surrounded by her mum’s things. Her mum’s long, flowery dress hanging over the chair, her glasses on the bedside table, her dozens of paintings, all turned with their faces to the wall.

  Daisy lay down on the bed and hugged her mum’s pillow, staring at the photograph on the bedside table. It showed her mum’s family on the tennis court, years ago. It was odd to see the court free of grass and bindweed. Daisy’s grandparents had just finished a game of tennis and were standing side by side with their arms around each other. Her uncle Marcus was in the picture too and behind him, a group of other people. Daisy’s mum had told her all their names.

  There was Mr. Hadley, who drove the car and was very kind. And the housekeeper, Maggie, with a jug of lemonade in her hand, and one of the gardeners, who had volunteered to be the umpire. And there, towards the edge of the picture, stood a tall older boy with his face half turned away.

  “That’s James,” Daisy’s mum had said when Daisy asked about him. “He was some sort of cousin. He used to visit every summer. Then he stopped coming.”

  “Why?”

  Her mum paused. “I don’t know the details,” she said. “I think he stole a watch. Or they thought he had . . . I don’t remember what happened.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know,” Daisy’s mum said. She was never cross with Daisy, but her voice had sounded almost sharp. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

  Now Daisy hugged her mum’s pillow tighter, trying to fight the urge to look at her own watch.

  Had it been five hours, or closer to six?

  Perhaps she was worrying for nothing. Perhaps at that very moment, her mum was turning into the driveway. Daisy hurried downstairs. She seated herself on the stone doorstep, her gaze fixed on the distant gates. She thought perhaps if she stared for five whole minutes without blinking, it would make the car appear. Then she tried closing her eyes and counting to a thousand, not gabbling the numbers but saying each one slowly and clearly.

  Nothing worked. The shadows of the great trees grew long over t
he tangled meadow. It was evening now. Soon it would be dark. Daisy’s body flooded with panic.

  She has to come back! How will she do the Day Box if she doesn’t come back?

  FIVE

  Daisy’s mum was right about the house being cluttered but not dirty. It wasn’t dirty because they didn’t keep any old clothes or leftover food or rubbish lying around. Instead, Brightwood Hall was filled with three kinds of things. The first was furniture and household items, most of it valuable, which had been stacked in the ballroom, the spare rooms, or against various walls. The second was stores of food and grocery items. These filled the whole of the basement, most of the reception area, and a great portion of the corridors.

  The third was all the Day Boxes.

  There were nearly ten thousand of them. They were about the same size and shape as shoe boxes, except they opened from one end so that when they were stacked on top of each other, you could open one without disturbing the whole pile. At first they had all been kept in the Marble Hall. The shelving units had been specially built to hold them. But they had eventually filled up even that enormous space. They had spread into the Portrait Gallery and then into other rooms and empty corners, until you could hardly turn around without bumping into a pile of them.

  Every evening, another box was added to the collection.

  Daisy’s mum made them. She put things inside that she wanted to remember about the day. Everything held a memory, she said. If she didn’t put it into a box, the memory would fade and be lost. She would never be able to get it back again.

  Daisy sometimes contributed to the Day Boxes, but mostly her mum did them on her own. After she closed the lid of each box, she wrote the date on the side. She always used the same black marker, and she would never run out of those markers because there were thirty-­six packets of them down in the basement and each packet held two dozen pens.

  Daisy’s mum never missed a single day. Not even the time when she had a terrible fever and had lain a whole day and night moaning and shivering and saying strange things. Daisy had sat with her, cooling her face with wet towels, and in the evening, her mum had told her to fetch an empty box. Her hand crept out from under the covers to point out the things she had chosen for that day. Or maybe they were what the fever had chosen, because the things themselves didn’t make much sense.

  “Your shoe, Mum?” Daisy had said, putting it into the box. “Are you sure?”

  Her mum’s hand gestured feebly towards the wall.

  “That’s just a shadow, Mum. From the chair, see? You can’t put a shadow into a box.”

  Now Daisy leaped up from her perch on the doorstep and hurried back into the house. She crawled across the tops of the shelves in the Marble Hall. The tight passageways below were already plunged into darkness. But the chandelier still held a faint milky glitter as it caught the last of the waning light.

  She glanced into the library as she went by. The empty Day Boxes were stored there. They were made of a kind of cardboard that was almost as strong as wood. Her mum ordered them from a special shop and they were delivered twice a month.

  The library was another thing that Daisy was afraid of.

  There were hundreds of dark gaps in the shelves where books had been removed. Daisy knew if she slid her hand into any one of them, her fingers would meet nothing more extraordinary than the back of the bookcase. But what if they didn’t? What if her fingers just kept going, and then her hand and then her whole arm? What if there was nothing back there except nothingness?

  Daisy hurried to her bedroom and dragged a chair over to block the door. She sat on her bed with her knees pulled up tight to her chin and her arms wrapped around her legs.

  How could her mum do the Day Box if she wasn’t here?

  Her mum was very particular about the boxes and what was put inside them. On the day she turned five, for example, Daisy had wanted to put a slice of her birthday cake into the Day Box. It had been a beautiful cake. Her mum had decorated it with real flowers and tiny animals made of frosting. But her mum had explained that you couldn’t put food into the Day Box or anything that would rot and start to smell bad.

  “And nothing that will die,” she had said gently when Daisy once suggested including a stag beetle, which was lurching down the path.

  Daisy had always been interested in beetles and other insects. There were millions and millions of them, although you mostly never saw them. They lived in a secret world. It was huge yet invisible. There were doors to this world everywhere: in the cracks of the floorboards, on the underside of leaves, although the doors were too tiny for humans. Daisy squatted next to ant nests, magnifying glass in hand, watching where the marching lines went in and out of the earth. But magnifying glasses are good at making things bigger, not smaller, and Daisy would always be too enormous to ever escape into the insect world.

  She lost a lot of interest in her mum’s Day Boxes after she found out that you couldn’t put bugs into them. Instead her mum usually chose rather ordinary things such as books she had read, items of clothing, and other bits and bobs.

  Daisy lay down on her bed still fully clothed. Slowly she pulled the blanket over her head. She rested her cheek in her hand and tried to sleep.

  Mum will come back, she told herself. Sometime in the night, I will open my eyes and there she will be.

  DAY TWO

  SIX

  Waking up alone the next morning was by far the worst thing that had ever happened to Daisy. She lay half paralyzed by misery, her eyes filling with tears. There was a possibility that her mum had returned and hadn’t wanted to wake her up. She could be downstairs getting breakfast ready or preparing the schoolwork for the day.

  But in her heart, Daisy knew this wasn’t true.

  She got up slowly and went into the Portrait Gallery, determined to ignore Little Charles. She wasn’t in the mood for his demands.

  “I found my hoop!” he cried. “Where is Minette?”

  Daisy paused, despite herself. “Minette? Is she your sister?”

  “Not her!” His voice was an indignant squeak. “I don’t want her! She’s just a girl and my father says girls are a waste of space. Minette is my dog . . . ”

  “I can’t look for her now,” Daisy said. “I’ll look later. I promise, Little Charles.”

  She hurried by the General, keeping her eyes away. But she could tell he was watching her, his eyes as bright as the row of medals pinned to his scarlet chest. The house was completely silent. Fear rose in Daisy’s throat. It felt the same as wanting to be sick.

  She must act normal. There was nothing else to do.

  It was the first Tuesday of the month. She and her mum always collected trash along the perimeter wall on that day. Daisy went to the kitchen and found a black trash bag.

  The perimeter wall ran all the way around Brightwood Hall. It was fifteen feet high and made of brick. Over time, the ground beneath the wall had shifted slightly, and the bricks had left their perfectly straight lines to follow a more winding course. When they were new, they had all looked exactly the same. But sun and wind and creeping moss had left their different marks, and now each brick had its own face and its own story. Yet the wall was as strong as it had ever been.

  Daisy headed around the house and down the driveway. Beyond the perimeter wall there was a road that ran for almost the whole front of the grounds before curving away. The majority of the trash that came over the wall was in this area. Some of it came in from the wind. Mostly people threw it from the road.

  “Some people just like to litter,” her mum had told Daisy.

  There were always a lot of plastic bags and food wrappings, although Daisy often found other, more surprising items. Sneakers with their laces tied together. A plastic thing shaped like a lollipop that her mum told her was a “pacifier” for a baby. A bottle of whiskey that was still half full. A red woolen scarf. A pair of broken eyeglasses.

  Each object seemed too specific to be accidental. As if they weren’t just rand
om bits of litter, but messages of some kind, although Daisy could never quite figure out what the messages might be.

  There was nothing unusual in the trash today, however. She followed the line of the wall, gathering the usual scraps. When she was finished, Daisy put the bag in the bin by the gates and walked back up the driveway.

  From this distance, Brightwood Hall looked untouched by time, as elegant and grand as it had always been with its hundreds of windows glittering in the sun. You couldn’t see that the flagstones were full of gaps, and the stone balcony was covered with ivy and lichen.

  Daisy left the driveway and made her way across the lawn and through a clump of trees until she reached the topiary.

  A long time ago, the topiary had been a magical place. It had consisted of twenty boxwood trees, all trimmed into the shapes of people and animals. There had been an elephant and a man in a top hat and a couple dancing together and a fox and a rabbit. Now all that was left were dry branches twisted around rusty metal structures. The topiary looked more like a collection of ragged skeletons than a garden. But right in the middle, one tree remained green.

  It was a horse, a little smaller than life-­size, with arched neck and prancing leg. Daisy stroked its leafy flank.

  “Good boy, True. Good horse.”

  Beneath her fingers, the leaves seemed to shiver. She put her face against the horse’s side to catch the strange, musky scent of the plant. It was the smell of sadness and courage. The horse didn’t know how he had survived the boxwood blight that had taken his companions one by one. He didn’t even know why he was a horse. Some long-­ago gardener had shaped him that way to satisfy a fancy—that was all.

  Yet he kept his head high. He endured.

  Of all the creatures in Brightwood Hall, True was Daisy’s favorite.

  She reached for her waistband and pulled out a small antique hunting knife. Although it was old, it was extremely sharp and her mum had forbidden her to use it. But Daisy liked the feel of the handle and was always careful to keep the blade safe in its leather sheath. It came in useful when True needed a trim.