I put my shoulder to the door and pushed with all my might It moved slowly at first and then flew open to disclose a gloomy passage which smelt of age and damp. We walked down this.
“We must be near the east buttress,” I whispered.
“There’s no need to murmur,” Gwennan shouted. “No one can hear us. We’re shut right away. Buttress is right. That’s where I’m taking you.”
My teeth were chattering—with excitement, not cold, although there was a chill hi the air.
“Fancy having all this and never coming here,” I said.
“Somebody went over it once and gave such an estimate for what had to be done that we forgot all about it That was the time when I came here exploring with Bevil.”
“When you were children?”
She didn’t answer. “Mind these stairs. Hold the rope.” We had come to a small spiral staircase; each step was steep and worn in the middle; the rope acted as a banister and a means of pulling oneself up the stairs. Gwennan stood at the top and grinned at me. She held up her hands. “Look at the dust.”
“What made you come here?”
“You’ll see. Look at this door. It was put in a long time after this place was built. Once there was just a panel which you could slide and let yourself into the room.”
“What room?”
“This leads to a sort of passage and then … into the haunted room. This door’s hard to open, too.”
It was; it gave a whine of protest which sounded like a human voice warning us not to go in—at least, that was what I suggested, and it made Gwennan shriek with laughter.
‘Trust you to think up that! Now.… through here. It leads to the buttress.”
The air was really chill now; the passage was narrow, the wall of stone. We were almost in the dark, and I reached for ‘Gwennan and clutched her skirt.
The passage opened out into what was scarcely a room— more like a circular aperture. There was no window but a slit in the deep wall open to the air, and through this came a little daylight.
“What a strange place!” I cried.
“Of course, it is. They used to keep prisoners here in the old days. Then, of course, he kept her here … and then it became haunted.”
“You are incoherent, Gwennan.”
She watched my amazement with gratification as I looked round the place. Strangely enough, there was a mirror propped against the wall; its glass was mottled, its frame tarnished, and there was a trunk, green with mildew. I noticed another passage like that we had come through and pointed this out to Gwennan.
“Come on, then. I'll show you.” She led the way into the passage, where, facing us, was another spiral staircase like the one we had just mounted. She began to climb it, counting the steep steps as she did so. There were forty, and at the top we were out in the open air on a narrow circular walk which took us around the buttress.
“This is where she used to come up for air,” Gwennan announced.
“Who?”
“Her, of course. If she really does walk, I reckon she comes up here.”
The sides of the buttress were battlemented. We knelt on a ledge and leaned over to look down from the very top of the house to the sea below. Gwennan pointed out the corbels on which, she said, they used to stand the pots of boiling oil they threw down on anyone who came attacking them. “Imagine them,” she said, “climbing up the cliffs and getting out their battering rams. That was years and years ago … long before she was here.”
I filled my lungs with the fresh air and clung to the hard stone of the battlement I thought then: How I love this house where so many exciting things have happened, and so many people have lived and died. I wanted wholeheartedly to belong to it, to be one of them.
Gwennan had started to tell me the story. “She was employed here as a governess to the children, and this Menfrey —my ancestor—fell in love with her. When Lady Menfrey found out, she dismissed her and told her to get out of the house. She thought she had gone, but she hadn’t. You see, he couldn’t bear her to go away, so he brought her to this place because no one knew it was here then. He used to visit her in that room down there. Can’t you picture him, Harriet, creeping into the disused wing and sliding the panel. I bet it was a panel then, and he’d have a candle or perhaps a lantern … and they’d be together. He had to go away for a while. To London, I expect … to Parliament … and the clock in the tower stopped. You know, the tower clock, which is supposed to stop when a Menfrey is going to die.”
“I didn’t…”
“You don’t know anything. Well, the clock hi the tower is supposed to stop when one of us is going to die an unnatural death. That’s why Dawney has to be careful to keep it going. We don’t believe these old stories—or we say we don’t … but other people do. That’s what Papa says, and we have to remember that. Goodness knows why.”
“Well, what happened? Why did the clock stop?”
“Because she died. She died up here … in that room down there … and so did the baby.”
“Whose baby?”
“Hers, of course. You see, it came before it should … and no one knew. They both died. That’s why the clock stopped.”
“She wasn’t a Menfrey.”
“No, but the baby was. It stopped for the baby. Then Sir Bevil came back.”
“Who?”
“I expect he was Sir Bevil … or Endelion or something … he came back and found her dead. They sealed off the room and never thought about it for years and years … until someone found it again and put the door in instead of the panel. But nobody would come here. The servants wouldn’t. They say it’s haunted. Do you think it is?”
“It feels cold and melancholy,” I said. She hung over the battlements with her feet off the ground so that I was terrified that she was going to fall. She did it purposely, I knew, to show how reckless she was. “Let’s go down,” I said.
“Yes, rather. There’s that trunk. I looked inside. That’s why I brought you. But I wanted to show you this first” We made our way back to the circular room, and Gwennan lifted the lid of the trunk. The green growth came off on her hands, which made her grimace, but the contents of the trunk caused her to smile.
She was tugging at what looked like a piece of topaz-colored velvet, but I wasn’t interested; I was thinking of the woman who had been loved by a Menfrey. “I thought you could have this brown thing,” she said. She dropped it onto the floor and brought a roll of blue velvet, which she began draping about her. I picked up the topaz-colored velvet. It was a dress, with a tight, square-cut bodice and wide sleeves that were slashed to show golden satin beneath. The skirt must have contained yards and yards of velvet I held it up against me, and when I looked at my reflection in that mottled mirror I could not believe I was looking at myself.
“It suits you,” said Gwennan, her attention momentarily distracted from herself. “Put it on. Yes, put it on.”
“Here?”
“Yes. Over your clothes.”
“It’s so cold I’m sure it’s damp,”
“It won’t hurt you for a minute. It’s just the thing for the ball.”
I caught her excitement as I slipped the dress over my head. She was beside me, pulling it, fastening it, and in a few seconds there I was … transformed.
It was cut low, and my gray merino showed at neck and sleeves, but that did not seem to matter. It became me in a way nothing else ever had. And as I lifted the skirt, something fell from it and, picking it up, I found it to be a snood, made of ribbon and lace and decorated with stones which might have been topaz.
“It goes on your hair,” said Gwennan, “Go on. Put it on.”
Now the change was complete. That was not poor, lame Harriet Delvaney who looked back at me from the mottled mirror. Her eyes were greener and much larger, her face animated.