The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [33]
116
‘I hardly know it,’ answered Sarah Jane Smith, who was looking unbelievingly at her reflection. Having been taken in hand by Louisa and lent an even more becoming gown (as Louisa called it) she had allowed the fifteen-year‐old to have the fun of ‘dressing her hair’, entailing the application of heated irons which had produced a tumble of unlikely curls on the top of her head and a faint smell of scorched hair.
‘There,’ said Louisa, giving her creation a final pat.
‘You look sweetly pretty again. Upon my honour, when I first saw you – rescued from a watery grave – you resembled the wild girl in The Wreck of the Cerberus! – and you know what a horrid end she came to!’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t read The Wreck of the Cetberus either,’ said Sarah, faintly. She looked like a Sindy doll, she decided.
‘You do not read novels, Miss Smith?’
‘Sarah, please.’
Louisa’s smile was pure rapture. ‘Oh, Sarah! I knew at once we were to be the dearest friends. It has been the most vexing thing you could imagine, to have no friends. Why, to be sure, Powly is a most agreeable man – and Miss Grinley an angel rather than a governess, I do assure you – but I have prayed this age for a real friend, a particular friend, a friend I could tell my secrets to!’
117
Sarah smiled at her. Even though they really had nothing in common, the idea wasn’t so preposterous.
Nobody could have helped liking the little creature. She was as full of life and love as a three-month‐old puppy.
But she mustn’t forget why they had come. On the other hand, maybe Louisa’s ‘secrets’ weren’t just the usual prattle about boys and jealousies and who was whose best friend and all that stuff. How could they be, stuck as she was on this tiny island miles from nowhere? Perhaps her secrets were to do with the poltergeist. What if she were faking it, to get a bit of attention? How to bring the subject up, that was the question.
‘…and of all things,’ Louisa was saying, ‘I delight in tales of long lost heirs, and skeletons, and mad monks and ghosts! Does not the very word send a shiver through you?’
Well, thank you very much! thought Sarah. Her new friend had saved her the trouble. ‘Have you ever seen a ghost?’
‘Not seen, no. But we do have one in the castle. Is that not vastly pleasing?’
Ah, yes of course – the lady in white.
‘We must try to see her, while I’m here,’ said Sarah.
‘I doubt it is a lady, Sarah. An angry boy more like, a mischievous child cut off in the very spring of life, a naughty spirit who delights in tricks.’
118
‘Tricks?’
So Louisa told her of the things the ‘naughty spirit’ had done: five plates flung across the room to smash upon the wall; a scattering of pebbles – ‘from nowhere; they just appeared!’ – which made Miss Grinley fall and twist her ankle; Louisa’s pianoforte – her dear little pianoforte, brought from Napoli at vast expense – turned upside down onto its lid but, merciful Heavens, not in the least broken; the list seemed endless and was clearly to be catalogued in its entirety had it not been interrupted by the gong – the same gong, judging by its sound, which had summoned them yesterday (or getting on for a couple of hundred years in the future, whichever way you cared to look at it, thought Sarah).
‘Dinner,’ said Louisa.
Dinner? At five o’clock in the afternoon? Still, whatever they called it, it hadn’t come a moment too soon.
‘Powly becomes more vexed than you can conceive if we are late,’ said Louisa, leading the way out of the door.
‘Oh, and don’t speak of the ghost in front of him. He is a Rational Man’ – you could hear the capitals, thought Sarah, following her down the winding stairs – ‘or so he says.
Indeed, I sometimes feel that it may be true, alas. Talk of ghosts and such throws him into a pet.’
119
Sarah thought, Does it now? That’s going to put a spanner in the… No, a fly in the… Oh, for Pete’s sake! A fly in the Doctor’s works, a spanner in his ointment, whatever. He’s only come here to talk about ghosts.
In the event, however, even Paolo Verconti would surely have to