Hannah Emery - Secrets in the Shadows

‘Louisa,’ Hatty appeared then, grasping at Louisa’s elbow gently. ‘What are you doing? Our train will be here any minute.’

‘I don’t want to leave,’ Louisa wept.

Hatty took a deep breath, a breath which seemed to say I’ve been expecting this . ‘Darling, I know that the idea of going home must seem a little overwhelming. I know how close you were to your father. But there is so much to sort out, and we’re all going to help you. Once the funeral is over, perhaps we could return to Blackpool, if that’s what you’d like.’

‘But I need to find out what happened to my mother,’ Louisa said, noticing that she was crying. How long had she been crying for? She couldn’t remember.

Hatty’s pretty face crumpled into a frown. ‘Your mother?’

‘Yes. My mother. I lived here in Blackpool with her, before I knew you. She disappeared.’

Hatty’s features blurred with confusion. ‘Louisa, I don’t understand. You’ve never mentioned living in Blackpool before. I thought that your mother was … well, I thought she was dead,’ Hatty finished in a whisper. ‘I’m worried that you’re confused,’ she said finally, her face suddenly snapping back to perfection. She steered Louisa towards Mr and Mrs Kennedy and spoke conspiratorially into their ears. They looked at Louisa with inclined heads and matching frowns.

‘You all think I’m mad, don’t you?’ Louisa wailed. ‘Well, I’m not! My mother disappeared, and I want to know why, and so I need to find the boy with the purple eyes! I know you don’t believe me, and that you think I’m shocked by my father’s death, but the truth is that I knew he’d die, I could see it all in my mind before it happened, and that’s why I came here with you. I knew he’d die after eating his fish supper last night, and I know that the plate he had his fish on will still be in the kitchen stinking the house out when I get home because the maid’s gone now that he has, and I knew that I’d get a visit from the hotel manager, and that I would be wearing my blue dress with the white belt. I knew it all!’

‘Let’s get you home, Louisa,’ Mrs Kennedy said. ‘Here comes the train, see, and we all have a ticket to get on it. Perhaps you could have a little nap when we are settled, and then before you know it—’

‘You’re treating me like a child!’ Louisa screamed.

The station stopped. The people stared, their conversations frozen by the hysterical teenager and the possibility of one last Blackpool spectacle before the dreary trip home. Well, Louisa wouldn’t give it to them.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly.

Mrs Kennedy, her face flushed by the slap of Louisa’s outburst, nodded silently, gesturing for Louisa to step a little closer to the platform; a little further away from her.

And so Louisa didn’t remain in Blackpool that day. She returned to the house on the hill, now hers, and dealt with papers and letters and stiff visits from people her father had known, and finally it was time for his funeral.

The first time Louisa met her father, his face was grey and his hands were grey and his life was grey. But slowly, as Louisa grew and ate side by side with him and walked with him and chattered to him about colours and stories and painted him pictures and asked him questions, he began to have more colour. His cheeks became pink with lively conversation, his hands brown from walking in the sun, and his life coloured in.

Now, as Louisa stood before his imposing coffin, and looked down at his sunken cheeks and that Roman nose she knew so well, and those kind eyes closed in final resignation, she noticed that her father was grey once again.

Things had come full circle.

Rose, 1921

The last heat of the summer had made the train to Blackpool smell of other people’s sweat. Rose could still smell it when they stepped out of the carriage onto the swarming platform. She looked up at the sharp blue sky, wondering if the whole holiday would smell brown and dirty, until her worries were melted away by what she saw.

Past people’s hats, past people’s faces that were blurred from Rose’s jerky movements through the crowds, and up, up in the sky, was the place she had wanted to see for all of her eleven years. It was just as wonderful as the picture her father had shown her: Blackpool Tower stared down at Rose proudly, calm amongst the hullabaloo of the station.

Rose, who had only ever been to Scarborough on her holidays, stared up at the Tower all the way to their hotel. She didn’t look at anything else. She tripped over twice and was scolded by her mother four times for not watching where she was going. But she didn’t care. It would take something very, very special for Rose to want to look anywhere except way up above her, to the tangle of iron crisscrosses that stretched high, high up into the sky, to the beautiful peak that floated in the clouds.

It wasn’t until the middle of her holiday that something very special took Rose’s mind and eyes from Blackpool Tower.

Rose and her parents had been walking along the promenade, from the north to the south, for what felt like a very long time. Rose kept glancing backwards to look into the sky, and every time she did, Blackpool Tower bore down upon her. The crowds of people moved slowly along the promenade, for everybody was gazing at something: the endless roaring sea, or the sands crammed with families, or the fairground rides that soared round and round. The walk to the Pleasure Beach was taking so long that when Rose’s mother spotted a space on a bench, she pulled Rose and her father over to it so that they could all rest their aching legs.

They had been sitting on the bench, the early September sun blazing down on them, for only a few minutes before Rose’s father spotted a friend of his walking by. Rose’s father jumped up and patted his friend heartily on the shoulder as they exclaimed about the chances of spotting each other away on holiday, and Rose’s mother smiled politely at the man’s wife, who wore a fancy yellow hat.

As her parents stood and laughed about things Rose didn’t understand, she stared up at the Tower some more. When the sun began to make tiny white dots on her eyes, and her neck became sore, she dropped her gaze and looked along the colourful promenade that was shining with people. She looked at the green trams and the stalls selling salty seafood. She looked up towards The Pleasure Beach, at the row of hotels opposite a man holding some donkeys, and it was there that she spotted the door.

A tiny handwritten sign above it made every little hair on Rose’s body stand on end in excitement.

Gypsy Sarah. Fortunes Told Here.

Rose knew that her mother would scold and her father would frown if she moved from her spot on the bench, but something inside Rose made her stand and wander over to the door. The door was blue, which was Rose’s third favourite colour. Rose pushed at it, wanting to know what was behind it so much that her insides seemed to quiver a little as it gave way.

Colours and shapes that Rose had never seen before in her quiet Yorkshire life dangled and jingled behind that door. And amongst all the purples and pinks and golds and crystals and gems sat the oldest woman Rose had ever seen.

Gypsy Sarah’s crinkled face puckered as she saw Rose hovering in the doorway.

‘Are you here for a reading?’ she whispered, gesturing to Rose with a hand that looked as though it was made of the brown paper Rose’s dresses were sometimes wrapped in when they were new.

Rose tore her gaze away from Gypsy Sarah, and turned to see her mother and father still deep in conversation with the people near the bench. She could quite possibly have her fortune told before her parents even noticed that she’d gone.