Ellen Long-Common Remember Me

Remember Me

Prologue

It’s always night in the cave and the woman curled on the floor could be asleep. But when brightness flickers across the dark surface of the mirror, she darts up from her nest of rags and moves over to it, quick and silent as star-fall.

Light pulses across the smooth black oval again, warm, like candlelight in the gloom. The woman’s waxy fingers clutch at the crumbling stone wall around the mirror. She stares at its glassy surface for a long time and when the light doesn’t return, she growls.

It was so tantalising… that glimpse of change to come. She can feel it in the matted hanks of her long dark hair. Her bones ache for it.

She releases her grip on the stone and twirls away from the dark mirror, the tattered skirts of her gown suspended, her silk-robed arms outstretched. Spinning, with her eyes closed, she is overtaken by a faded memory – a fragment of an old life. In it, she dances among mortals at a grand ball. Warmed by the blush of their cheeks, she drinks in the animal smell of their breath. The swish of their clothing is like a thousand voices that whisper to her, needing her, adoring her…

A bitter wind gusts through her cave and distantly, something howls. She opens her eyes and sees that all is dark and cold as always. She is surrounded by black stone walls that sweat dank water. Jagged stalagmites reach up to an unfathomable ceiling.

She lifts the shard of flint from the cave floor and uses it to add another scratch to the wall. Once, she could count the marks and know how many days and years had passed. Now there are too many lines.

She glances at the mirror again. It reflects only her unchanging face, bleached as an empty shell, but she isn’t fooled. “I saw it,” she croaks, enjoying the feel of words in her mouth after all this time. “Change is coming and you can’t hide it from me.” She smiles wide at the dark mirror. “I’m getting out.”

Her name – one of them – is Eleanor Sheridan, and she is absolutely right.

1

Violet is starving but she doesn’t yet know when dinner is or where the snacks are kept. She has never been the kind of girl who can help herself to food in a stranger’s house, and that’s what her Great Aunt is: a stranger.

She ignores the growl in her belly and starts to open doors and pull out drawers in the room, looking for somewhere to put her clothes. The wardrobe is stuffed with coats, and as Violet opens it, the smell of musky furs hits her. While she’s coughing, Bullet takes his chance and bites down hard on the hem of one of them.

“No,” she splutters, tugging the fur from his mouth. “That’s not your manky old coat. Not for you.”

He whines.

Violet tries to rub the tooth marks from the coat’s leather lining. Great, she thinks. Put the vegetarian and the Jack Russell in the room with all the dead wearable animals. Old fashioned stuff is so gross. She struggles to close the wardrobe door, fighting with folds of wool and with Bullet, who wants to climb inside to see what else he can eat. Once defeated, he leaps onto the bed, curls up in the very centre of the quilt and watches her, brown nose on his white paws.

Gertrude has emptied three drawers in a tall, narrow chest of drawers. That seems to be the only space she’s made in the attic bedroom for the contents of Violet’s suitcase. Violet folds her jumpers, leggings and socks as small as she can to fit them neatly inside. Then she unfolds two of the jumpers she’s just folded and puts them on over the one she’s already

wearing. It’s freezing in this old house. The small chandelier overhead rattles as she shoves the stuck drawers closed.

She flops onto the bed next to Bullet, who licks her forehead, and stares around at the walls. They’re covered in wonky pictures of sad women in floppy hats, enclosed in gilded frames. Violet can’t tell if the room is small or if it’s just that it’s crammed with stuff. Mum said that Gertrude ran her own antiques shop before she made her fortune selling a rare Dracula poster to an American auction house and retired. Then again, Mum also said that, when she was a girl, she used to love it here.

Violet doesn’t see how anyone could love the town with the famous graveyard and the vampire ball. Whitby is totally weird.

“Whitby is totally amazing,” Mum had said in the car.

Violet couldn’t speak for the whole journey. The painful knot in her stomach tightened the closer they got to Sherwood, where they were to meet Gertrude. Violet was dreading the moment her mum would turn the car around, wave, and head for London, all alone. So she nodded.

“The abbey is spooky and the graves in Saint Mary’s church look like they’ve been melted. It’s a slice of history.”

Nod.

Mum had checked the rearview and her blindspots twice before changing lanes. “I love all the boats bobbing in the marina. Some are like little pirate ships. Maybe you could take a tour with a new friend from school.”

Nod.

“And the beach is glorious.” Mum had smiled her sad smile. “Bullet will be in his element.”

Violet knew that her parents had met in Whitby. She knew they had started the band, had her, and lived there for a while before moving south. Violet had promised that she would try to like the place.

She doesn’t.

She doesn’t like the constant smell of fish and chips. She doesn’t like Great Aunt Gertrude’s porcelain dolls in their miniature dresses and straw hats. She doesn’t like the collection of clocks in the living room,

which tick and sound the hour slightly out of time with each other. She doesn’t like cramming herself into three drawers.

What is so important about the stuff in this room that Gertrude couldn’t move it somewhere else, just for a few weeks?

Violet stomps over to the dressing table in the corner. Predictably, the two narrow drawers under the mirror are full of Gertrude’s stuff. Strings of pearls jostle seashell brooches and lacquered boxes decorated with little fish.

Everything in the drawers, Violet notices, is broken. There are necklaces without clasps and the lacquered boxes are chipped. A silver hand mirror is missing a section of mother-of-pearl.

Great. Guess I’m just one more broken thing for Gertrude to stash, out of sight, at the top of the house.

The drawers are also full of jet. Mum had told Violet all about jet in the car – the fossil that, when polished, looks like a shiny black jewel. Jet comes from the Whitby coast and every year hundreds of beachcombers search the sands for their very own chunk. Violet can’t see what’s so special about it. Earlier she passed shops rammed with the stuff when she took Bullet into town to stretch his legs.

In Whitby, jet jewellery is everywhere, and it’s expensive. If the shopkeepers of Whitby could see the beads, lockets, earrings and hat pins that Gertrude has in these drawers, broken or otherwise, they’d probably storm the place.

Curious, Violet lifts out a moth-eaten velvet jewellery box. It’s surprisingly light. Inside is another piece of jet jewellery, packed in crusty white sea salt. It’s a locket carved with a woman’s face, hanging from a string of glossy black beads. Violet has no idea why it’s in salt – maybe it protects the jet in some way. The pendant is clunky, as big as a hen’s egg, and it’s probably very old. Violet doesn’t care for old things, but this is… interesting. The woman looks pretty and bold. She’s staring back over her shoulder, right at Violet. She has rigid swirls of jet hair, a slightly upturned jet nose, bare jet shoulders and a long jet neck.

There’s a delicate silver clasp on one side of the pendant. Violet slides it up, expecting the locket to fall open, but it’s stiff. She tries to prise each half apart with her fingernails. “Open,” she whispers. It won’t.

Instead she walks over to the tarnished mirror set into the wardrobe door. She holds the locket at the perfect length, so that it sits just below her collarbone, and stares at her reflection. It changes her, somehow, having the locket against her skin. She looks older. Her pumpkin-red hair looks darker. She can almost imagine what she’d look like as a grown woman. Grown-up Violet isn’t pasty and thin; she suits her pale skin and small frame. She isn’t wearing grey jogging bottoms and an oversized, bobbly pink jumper. She wears midnight, and that darkness fills her eyes.

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

Violet almost drops the locket.

Great Aunt Gertrude is standing in the doorway. “Door was open,” she says.

Violet feels her cheeks burn and rushes, heart hammering, to put the locket back in its box of salt.

“Pass it here,” Gertrude says, before she can. She holds out a hand. “It’s a long time since I’ve looked at it.”

This is how she talks, Violet realises: straight to the point but not unkind; the absolute opposite of her sister, Emmeline, who refuses to let Violet call her ‘Grandma’ because she is, in her words, an earth mother.

Violet places the locket in her Great Aunt’s warm palm and tries to shake off the vision in the mirror. Good girls, she knows, don’t let their eyes fill with shadows.

Gertrude sits on the bed, tilts her head back and peers at it through the bottom of her spectacles. Bullet licks her trousers experimentally. Gertrude ignores him. “It’s a strange one, this. I found it at a boot sale in Scarborough. The woman selling it knew it was valuable but I knocked her down a bit because of the clasp. It doesn’t open. I expect you figured that out?”

Nod.

“It’s a mourning locket.” Great Aunt Gertrude continues. She pulls a cloth from her trouser pocket and rubs it over the curves of the face, as someone else’s aunt might have rubbed a sticky patch on a real cheek with a damp hanky. “A fine one, too. Right before we shook on it the woman at the car boot told me that it had been cursed by a witch.”

Violet snorts.

“Exactly. People will say anything to try to get a few more bob out of you.”

Violet knows that polite girls are interested in things that other people like, so even though she thinks antiques are pointless, she sits on the bed next to her Great Aunt and asks: “Where did it come from? Originally, I mean?”

“Whitby, of course,” Gertrude says. “This is the best example of a cameo locket I’ve ever seen. Someone very clever carved this, about a hundred-and-fifty years ago, if I’m any judge. Couldn’t have been made anywhere but Whitby.”

Violet takes in the curves of the woman’s face. “Who was she, do you think?”

“She might not be anyone,” said Gertrude. “She might just be an idea of a woman that the jet worker dreamed up. One day I’ll get it fixed and we’ll know. If she’s real, there will be something about her inside, mark my words. Her name, maybe her photo, or some hair.”

Gross, Violet thinks. One-hundred-and-fifty year old hair.

“Jet is made from fossilised monkey puzzle trees, did you know that? That’s why it always feels warm to the touch – it’s wood, not stone.”

Nod.

“Why don’t you have it, seeing as you’re so interested in jet?” Gertrude adds. “Don’t wear it, though. Leave it in the box and keep it safe. It’ll be worth a lot one day. You might be glad of it.”

Violet says: “Thank you very much,” because she knows it’s polite. She has no intention of wearing it. Ever.

“Now,” says Gertrude. “What do kids eat these days? Your mum tells me you’re a vegetarian. Beans on toast okay for tonight? It’s been a long day.”

Violet nods. She’s ready to eat all the beans on toast in the world.