Ghostbird Read online

  ‘That is so not funny.’

  Lili said it was hilarious, and Cadi said not as funny as the way everyone seemed hell bent on keeping her in the dark.

  ‘Not this again,’ Lili said, more startled than she hoped her face betrayed.

  ‘You’re as bad as her. Everyone’s lying to me, and it’s getting really boring.’

  ‘No one’s lying, Cadi.’

  ‘You’re splitting hairs.’

  ‘No I’m not.’ Lili banged the washed cutlery into the drainer.

  After a pause Cadi said, ‘Just because she’s a liar doesn’t mean you have to be one too.’

  Cadi and Lili rarely argued. At worst they made fierce eye contact, exchanged pithy words and withdrew until their feathers unruffled.

  Lili rinsed the dishcloth and hung it over the tap. ‘I’m not a liar, so don’t call me one. It’s insulting. And in any case, I don’t see what I can do. I can’t make Violet tell you anything.’ Lili knew Cadi didn’t believe her – she thought making magic was as easy as making bread. ‘I don’t think you ought to call her a liar either. One woman’s lie is another’s survival mechanism.’ Taking off her apron, she hung it behind the door. ‘Violet can’t bear to think about it. It’s a kind of silent rage. The wanting to speak weighed against the consequences.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. You’re calling it lies when, in the end, it’s a story, cariad. And it’s hers.’

  ‘I know. But it’s mine too.’ Cadi pinched her lips together. Sensing the change in her mood, the cat jumped down and disappeared.

  ‘Yes, of course it is.’ Lili smiled. ‘Remember what I told you – about the birds?’

  ‘You’re always telling me stuff about birds. And you’re changing the subject.’

  ‘No.’ Lili turned a chair to face Cadi and sat down. ‘A bird builds her nest one twig at a time. I told you this when you went to the high school and you were apprehensive. I said to do it the same way.’

  Cadi did remember, and said most of her twigs ended up scattered over the floor and she got in trouble for making a mess.

  ‘You’re so sharp, one of these days you’ll cut yourself.’ Lili smiled again. ‘I tell you what; let’s see if we can conjure a bit of kind magic this evening. Okay?’

  Cadi nodded. ‘Okay.’

  Reaching for an envelope on the end of the table, Lili said, ‘Go and have a bath and wash your hair before the day disappears, and by the time you catch up with it I’ll be done. We can go to the post office together if you like. Get some naughty shop cake?’

  ‘You’re alright,’ Cadi said. ‘I’ll wait.’

  Lili picked up the telephone.

  ‘Where are my pictures?’ Sylvia said.

  Lili laughed and said no sooner the word than the deed. ‘You read my mind. I’m packing them up right this minute. They’re wonderful.’

  ‘Why else do you pay me?’ Sylvia’s expansive voice echoed down the phone line. ‘Although why you won’t settle for me sending them online still beats me.’

  ‘I like to see the colours.’

  ‘Can I come and stay? Say yes and I’ll forgive you. If you say no, I may have to kill my children.’

  ‘Bring them! Come soon! Sooner than soon.’

  ‘Not likely! I want a break.’

  ‘So come now. The sun’s out.’

  ‘I bet it’s raining too.’

  ‘In between. I’ll hex it. Sell my soul to Jesus. Anything, just come.’

  ‘Sounds like you need cake, lovely.’

  ‘Make it that upside-down, sticky apple thing you make, and you can move in.’

  ‘As bad as that?’

  ‘Not really – be good to see you that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll organise my men and call you back.’ Sylvia let out a squeal of joy. ‘Wicked.’

  ‘Did you mean it about the cake?’

  ‘Send my pictures back today and I’ll make two. Deal?’

  ‘The best one I made all week.’

  Twenty-five

  In Lili’s newest story, a mother scolds her daughter for spilling milk and tells her to go away.

  The girl walks into a wood, finds a magical book made of feathers. She falls asleep and into another world…

  When her mother finds the book, dew-soaked and deserted, she weeps as she realises her child is lost to her forever…

  A voice whispers to her and she understands…

  She ought to have been careful what she wished for…

  Lili considered Violet, who hadn’t wished her baby away, had lost her anyway and been left with her cuckoo child.

  There were times Lili thought her the most selfish person she knew.

  I ought to put her in a story, send her to sleep for a hundred years. See how she likes that. She sighed and looked around her, all at once aware of her surroundings.

  Houses are not indifferent places. They are the sum total of their previous inhabitants. Lili was the descendant of generations of Hopkins women. She had lived here her entire life. The idea of familial ghosts satisfied her need for continuity, and the gift of belonging, something she knew Violet rarely felt. Lili knew the certainty of the space she occupied.

  Tŷ Aderyn stood on the permanence of rock, on deep veins of flint reaching into the earth. And under the gardens, Lili had always imagined other worlds and the roots of her stories.

  Sylvia called what they did together, alchemy.

  Maybe it was. And maybe it would be kinder to wake Violet.

  Walking toward the white house, she wondered who the new owner might be.

  In the face of diminished prosperity, people made do and mended, lived off the land or left. Unless they found farm work, people commuted to the nearest town to work in shops, offices and factories. Houses lay empty, beyond the wallets of local people. Someone from outside buying a property quickly became gossip.

  Trees crowded an overgrown garden, partly obscuring the pretty house beyond. Ancient boughs of lilac lurched against a stone wall, their heart-shaped leaves dark as velvet. Lili paused, her eyes drawn to a brick path winding away from a wrought-iron gate as complicated as a signature.

  ‘I don’t suppose you know anything about lilacs.’ From behind the wall a woman appeared, brandishing a pair of wicked looking secateurs. A halo of red-gold hair escaped from a green scarf. ‘Oh hell, sorry, did I make you jump?’ Her voice held a richness reminding Lili of Sylvia.

  ‘No worries.’ Lili cast an eye over the rampant lilac. ‘Wait until spring – the flowers will be sensational. Probably not the best time of year to cut back lilac; any tree really. February maybe?’

  ‘I thought as much.’ The woman placed the secateurs on the wall. ‘This hedge is vast though. It all is.’ Her arm swept out in an extravagant arc. ‘And to think I bought the place because of the garden. I must be mad.’

  She stood an inch taller than Lili, slight, almost wiry. Her faced looked flushed, whether it was from exertion or its natural state, Lili couldn’t tell. She wore jeans, and a shirt splashed with green paint.

  ‘Pomona Edwards,’ she said, thrusting her hand across the lilac, a wide grin marking her tanned face.

  Lili blinked. ‘Lilwen Hopkins,’ she said. ‘Everyone calls me Lili.’

  Pomona’s handshake felt firm and surprisingly cool. Her fingers hovered in Lili’s, like a brave bird.

  ‘Hello, Lili.’ She stared for a moment, not impolitely, taking in Lili’s face.

  Is she flirting with me? Lili didn’t want to seem rude, she wanted her hand back though – she sent a spark to her fingers.

  Releasing Lili’s hand, Pomona frowned and rubbed her own. ‘Leave the lilac then. I’m sure you’re right.’ She picked up the secateurs and turned her attention back to the mass of foliage. ‘Don’t get complacent, you monster, I’ll get you after Christmas.’

  Lili smiled. ‘My mother always left them to it. She called lilacs wise and said they remembered. The goddess, Syringa escaped the attentions of P
an by turning herself into a lilac bush.’

  Why the hell had she said that?

  ‘Did she now; how clever of her. And your mother too.’ Pomona raised her eyebrows and Lili couldn’t decide if she was being mocked or dismissed.

  ‘I better get going.’

  Pomona peered at the sky. ‘That was some downpour first thing this morning. Come to think of it, it’s rained every day since I moved in.’

  ‘Yes, it’s August. It rains every day here in August.’

  ‘Good lord, does it? Why?’

  Lili said she didn’t know; it just did.

  Pomona nodded. ‘I guess you must be local.’

  The question was unspoken, but nevertheless there.

  ‘Yes.’ And I don’t think I want you to know where I live. ‘I really do have to go.’ Lili indicated her envelope.

  ‘Well, thank you for the advice. I expect I’ll see you around.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lili said. ‘And you’re welcome.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Pomona smiled again before disappearing into the shadow of the tangled garden.

  It wasn’t until she got home, her hair netted with fresh rain, that Lili realised she had forgotten all about posting Sylvia’s illustrations.

  Twenty-six

  Cadi lay soaking in the bath, running Lili’s words through her head.

  In the end, it’s a story… and it’s hers…

  Story or a lie, what difference did it make? Cadi had listened to stories all her life: the real and the made-up. Lies were extra.

  ‘You are the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of witch women,’ Lili often reminded her. ‘It’s important you know where you come from.’

  It’s even more important to know who you are.

  Lili conjured dark forests and never-ending enchantments, magical birds with the ability to grant wishes and underwater lands where everything was a shade of green. Wild winds danced through Lili’s stories. Crones beckoned toward gingerbread houses with ovens too small for anything but trays of honey cakes. In the elemental world of fairytales, the air sang, trees wept and standing stones danced under blood red moons.

  Cadi ran more hot water into the claw-footed bath. I’m not living in a fairytale though. She lay back, her hair floating like weed. I’m living in a ghost story. And it’s real. The idea that Dora might have come back to haunt her both alarmed and intrigued her. I need to know. If the story about Dora and my dad is real, why wouldn’t my sister’s ghost be real too?

  Once she became old enough to ask, they told her Teilo died in a car crash. He’d collided with a tree on a bendy lane, a tragic accident. When she dreamed of him, she saw her father as clearly as she saw her own reflection. It was Lili’s photographs she found confusing. The pictures were too flat, too one dimensional and drained of energy as if the developer had leeched his spirit out.

  Violet’s brief and rare allusions to Teilo, and Lili’s guarded ones, made it hard for Cadi to catch more than a glimpse of who he might have been. She would wake up knowing he wasn’t a memory, sensing him in much the same way she sensed her sister.

  Except that Dora felt more real than any dream.

  She sat up, and the water streamed down her back.

  There’s a hollow place inside me. She wanted to ask Lili if it would stay that way, if the hole would shrink, and if her sister’s ghost could possibly be real. And if so, what she ought to do.

  Don’t tell… Peidiwch â dweud…

  Not crying when you need to is as exhausting as continuous weeping. Cadi knew she wouldn’t get anywhere if she behaved like a child. (If Lili and Violet wanted to treat her like one, it was their business.) Let Lili kid herself she was acting in Cadi’s best interest and avoid the truth to save her own skin. Let her mother hide behind her selfish grief. She couldn’t hide forever.

  If Violet thinks ignoring me will make everything go away, she’s in for a big surprise. I’m damned if I’m going anywhere. There’s a secret and I want to know what it is. Her bath done, she wrapped herself in a towel and curled up on the window seat. And when I do find out, it can be your fault, Lili.

  The sun shone through the stained glass. As she untangled her hair, she looked out across the garden, beyond the flowers and vegetables to the trees, past the cherry planted by Lili’s grandfather to where the ghost of another garden lay, and in it, another story.

  When Iolo Jones came to live at Tŷ Aderyn with Gwenllian Hopkins, they moved into the big cottage.

  ‘It’s yours and Iolo’s home now,’ Morwenna told her daughter. ‘It’s how it works, cariad. Your father and I will be fine next door.

  Gwenllian inherited the larger garden too. She carried on where her mother left off, her hands green-fingered and mindful. She always thought of it as her mother’s garden though, and when Morwenna passed away, scattered forget-me-not seeds in her memory. And when Gwenllian died, Lili did her best to keep on top of both gardens.

  Tradition dictated the larger garden passed to Violet, but her interest was at best ambivalent. Unkempt and yet undaunted, year after year, the flowers a line of Hopkins women had planted continued to flourish. A mass of delphinium soared through the weeds. Old roses, woody through lack of attention managed a myriad blooms, and the forget-me-nots ran in rivers of blue.

  And in the spring of Cadi’s birth, in the middle of a new moon night, creamy meadowsweet had appeared. A clump of broom took root, the flowers as yellow as butter. Barn owls came and went, roosting in the old stone shed at the bottom of the garden by day, gliding out at dusk, slow-hunting until the early hours.

  Shadows moved across Cadi’s bedroom ceiling in flat, dark clouds. As usual, no sound came from her mother’s room. How could she be so silent? Through the rest of the house, Cadi heard creaks and settlings and outside, the swish of jasmine against the window.

  She heard the owl and told herself it was practising for the following night. When she and Lili went out to greet the moon, she wondered if she might see Dora’s ghost and if, after all, it might be okay to tell.

  Twenty-seven

  Violet picked at a dropped stitch, cross at her own carelessness.

  Sitting in her kitchen, she wondered if she was going mad. Was this how it happened? Not with shrieks and hysteria, but quietly, falling into the shadows. Sometimes, as she dressed in the morning, her clothes felt like fog, drifting over her body, chilling her bones.

  Her eye was drawn to the telephone. She’d unplugged it but still it sat, as if it might yet ring and drag her again into the past. Please, make him go. Make him not be here.Make me not be here.

  Outside her window, some birds set up a racket. The previous day she found a dead blackbird lying by the back door like a lost glove. Knowing it would upset Cadi, she threw it into the overgrown border.

  Did birds grieve for their offspring? Violet thought not. Nature was as indifferent as people.

  She set aside her knitting and stared out of the window.

  How many plants in my garden, she wondered, might kill me if I ate them?

  Lili would know. Lili would be able to advise which flower or herb, which innocent looking fungi or poisonous pod might do away with her. Witch women’s gardens, surely, were full of this stuff? You wouldn’t dare though, would you?

  Her mother told her she was spineless. Violet knew otherwise. It wasn’t a spine she lacked, it was a heart. Her heart had become a plaything: her mother broke it, Teilo stole what was left and in its place had left a ragged stone.

  There had been a short time when Violet had considered herself lucky. She married Teilo and came to live in the village in a fairytale cottage. It had nothing to do with her mother’s idea of good fortune. Luck, to Madeleine meant a rich man, expensive clothes and the roof of a large house over her head.

  ‘Diamonds really are a girl’s best friend,’ she told her daughter. ‘And a fur coat will keep you warm longer than love does.’

  ‘What about happiness?’ Violet asked.

  ‘So long as I get what I want,
I’ll be happy. You’ll find out.’

  Teilo had given Violet the run of his house and for the first time in her life she had felt free to do as she pleased. In the beginning she had been happy; the only fly in the ointment had been Lili.

  Violet knew Lili hadn’t wanted Teilo to marry her. She might have been naïve; she wasn’t an idiot and knew the reason went beyond family tradition.

  There was something unknown about Lili. Often Violet didn’t see or speak to her for days. Her sister-in-law would be busy with her writing, or at the surgery. Violet would take care of the house, take care of Teilo.

  In the end, it was Lili who made the effort. Violet acknowledged this yet still found it hard to trust her; convinced she just wanted to please Teilo. When Lili emerged from days of writing isolation wearing her satisfied smile, it would be as much as Violet could do not to scream.

  ‘Shall I read to you?’ Lili would say to her brother. And Teilo’s eyes would shine.

  These days Lili read to Cadi. It was another reason for Cadi to slip next door, and for Violet to feel left out.

  Even so, the sight of Cadi was, now and then, more than Violet could bear. During the early years, there had been little resemblance. Now there was a look of him. She looked like Lili too. Over the years the stone had become bigger and harder until only the thinnest edge of Violet’s heart still beat.

  A mother without a heart can’t love her child. Everyone knew that.

  And there would be Lili, with a heart as big as a pillow, wanting nothing more than to cushion Cadi in her love.

  When people mistook Lili for Cadi’s mother, Violet felt history repeating itself. Selfishness seeping down the years like poison. Her mother’s mistakes ran through her arteries and her child could tell.

  She imagined a life free of it all, another place, far from the village where she didn’t have to reveal her secrets to be accepted. And where her past couldn’t find her.

  As the day faded, Violet thought about poisons and stones and running away.

  Twenty-eight

  ‘I collected some feathers.’

  Lili put her arm round Cadi’s shoulder. ‘Beautiful.’ And you are too pale.