The Staircase: A haunting romantic thriller Read online

  “Oh my God!” she said, her voice rising in panic. “I don’t believe it!”

  “It’s a coincidence.” Hal was saying over her shoulder.

  On the breath of hysteria, Helena answered, “But she’s wearing my clothes. Look Hal, look! You can even see the label.”

  It was true. Both of them could make out the shadow where the artist had painted in a suggestion of the designer label adorning the much-prized nightdress.

  Just for once Hal was silent, his great good sense defeated.

  “It’s me, Hal. You must admit it. It’s a portrait of me.”

  The sound coming from Helena’s lips was high-pitched, frenzied, drowning out all others. With horror she realised that every other voice had hushed, that every eye had turned to look at her, and that somebody somewhere with a cry like hers was screaming.

  “Quiet, Helena, quiet,” shouted Hal, shaking her violently.

  But it was too late. With a shriek she escaped from him and plunged headlong through the chateau’s great expanse, running as if her life depended on it towards the staircase. It was crowded, packed with people, their presence suffocatingly close to her. Almost without moving, Helena found herself being borne upwards and was strangely comforted.

  She had never noticed before how open the staircase was, how much one could observe through the beautiful marble balustrade. Glancing towards the central column which supported the spiral, Helena could see that it contained windows, or rather observation bays so that one could watch all the other people climbing – or was it descending. The inevitable party of Japanese were there and a flashy girl, encased in tight jeans. She was staring straight at Helena.

  “Oh my Gawd, Darryl,” the girl screamed, “I’ve seen the ghost.”

  “I’m not a ghost,” Helena cried, but the screamer had already gone.

  She was being tightly pressed now, long skirts swishing against Helena’s legs, and male feet in buckled shoes touching hers. She looked round and saw that she was amongst them, that strange press of silent people who resolutely climbed together, yet who never glanced at her, nor ever spoke.

  “Oh Hal,” she wept, “is this a dream? What’s happening to me?”

  And then the hand came out to help her and Helena took it. Grasped the long fingers and felt their touch, electric and exciting against her own. It was the man of course. Staring up, Helena saw the sheen of blueish curls and the dark eyes, rimmed with violet, as he pulled her towards him.

  *

  She was so close that she could smell his perfume but, more than that, as he held her against him she could actually feel the rhythm of his heart.

  So he was alive; somewhere, somehow, the creature of her dreams had substance.

  He spoke French, an archaic form, but strangely she understood his words. “You’ve come at last, and you are full grown!” he said. “You see I had this terrible fear that you might still be a child.”

  “You knew me as a child?” Helena shook her head in disbelief.

  “You don’t remember? When you crawled up the staircase?”

  “I crawled up. What are you talking about?”

  “My darling, you were only a year old.”

  Nothing made sense any more, there was no reality, only the beating of his living heart.

  “Am I dead?” gasped Helena. “Am I a ghost?”

  “A ghost only of what is to come,” he said.

  She fell then, down and down into a sickening, frightening darkness, to wake with a sharp smell beneath her nose and to see a ring of shocked faces all staring at her.

  “It’s okay, honey,” said an American voice. “I’m a nurse. You fainted, that’s all. You’re going to be fine.”

  “Hal?” said Helena wearily, and then realised that the arms which held her were his.

  “Darling,” he said thankfully, “thank God you’re all right.”

  *

  Lying in the car afterwards, skimming through the early evening and thankful that it was cooler, Helena finally spoke.

  “Hal, what happened? Did I really faint?”

  “Yes. Do you remember running away and up the staircase?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well, I followed you. I saw you step off at the landing and then, after standing there a moment or two, you collapsed.”

  “You saw me?” repeated Helena disbelievingly. “You actually saw me there?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  Immediately a warning bell went off in her brain. “No reason really. Was I on my own?”

  “There were tourists about but you were by yourself, yes. Helena, you didn’t ‘see things’, did you?”

  She looked at him very directly. “What a funny question. Why should I ‘see things’?”

  “Because this business of the portraits, not to mention that recurring dream of yours, is obviously getting you down. You know I had a second look at that ghost picture. What you took for your nightdress label could have been anything. A fold in the material. Anything.”

  “So you still think it is all a coincidence?”

  “Yes,” answered Hal stoutly, “I certainly do.”

  It wasn’t, of course, Helena knew that. But how could she tell him that she had touched another flesh-and-blood being, that she had been held so close to another man’s heart that she had heard its beat?

  Hal’s voice broke in on her thoughts. “After all you’ve endured I don’t suppose you will ever want to set eyes on Chambord again.”

  “On the contrary,” she answered lightly, “I won’t rest till I’ve been back and seen every stick and stone of the place.”

  She was rewarded with a startled look and rather a grim silence which did not disappear until they sat on the geranium terrace after their evening meal, watching the sun go down in ribbons of red.

  Then Hal said, “I suppose it was the staircase. The one you ran up, I presume it was the one you dream about.”

  She smiled a small, secret smile, remembering a pair of spectacular eyes and the hardness of the body against which, for one glorious moment, she had been held.

  “Yes, it’s the same,” she answered. “But I’ve lost my fear of it. I really want to go back and see the place properly. I think fainting must have cured me.”

  “And what about the portrait? Has that been exorcised as well?”

  “Now I just feel a healthy curiosity,” Helena insisted.

  Hal’s face was unreadable and at any other time Helena would have wondered what was going on behind his eyes, which seemed curiously shuttered and expressionless. But tonight she had no time to think of anything except the problem which absorbed her. If the man was alive somewhere, how could she find him again? Yet the “if” troubled her. Suppose that this had been just a more than usually vivid dream; that he was, in truth, nothing but a figment conjured up by herself.

  Her thoughts were interrupted abruptly by Hal asking, “Have you rung home?”

  Rather crossly Helena answered. “Not yet. Why?”

  “I spoke to my father this morning while you were in the bath. He seemed to think that congratulations were in order because we were staying on. So you had probably better disillusion them all before they open the champagne.”

  His voice held a bitter note, unusual for him, and Helena looked at him sadly.

  “Hal, I’ll tell Daddy the truth. That you’ve told me to make up my mind and I’m doing just that.”

  “So you won’t say we’re really on a ghost hunt?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tracking down Leonardo’s model, researching dream world staircases, to name a few supernatural items.”

  “No,” she said, feeling a stir of anger, and without saying more went into the hotel to phone.

  Her father’s voice spoke as clearly as if he was in the next room. “Helena, how lovely! Are you having a good time?”

  “Yes, marvellous,” she answered guardedly.

  “We had dinner with Rosalind and Richard last night. They told
us that you and Hal are staying on in France.”

  *

  He had that familiar note in his voice, the one Helena disliked so much. It meant he was once more looking on them as a viable couple. Determinedly, Helena spoke up.

  “Daddy, please don’t raise your hopes. It’s true that I have come here to make up my mind finally about Hal, but at the moment I am no nearer a solution than when I started.”

  With the acuteness which made him such a daunting adversary in business, John Holley said, “Is there someone else?”

  Caught completely off guard, Helena found herself saying, “In a way, yes.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “It’s someone even I don’t know, not well that is. And yet I can’t stop thinking about him.”

  John Holley again changed tack so fast that Helena was left gasping. “Then get to know him, my dear. Don’t waste time mooning. Seek him out and then make up your mind. Otherwise it’s not fair on you, Hal, or this other chap. Whoever he might be.”

  “But I don’t quite know how to reach him,” said Helena, half wishing she could tell her father everything.

  There was a muffled snort and then John answered, “Well, make it your business to find out. Of all the feeble excuses . . .”

  Helena laughed. “I love you. Daddy, and on this occasion you are probably right. The way will be fraught with difficulties but I’ll give it a whirl.”

  “Good girl,” he said cheerily, and hung up.

  Helena was smiling as she went to rejoin Hal on the shadowy terrace, and still, though faintly, as she lay sleepless beside him, staring at the moonlight and wishing she was back in Chambord.

  Up to that moment everything had seemed impossible, longing for a man who probably had no substance, then suddenly, almost as if she was receiving guidance, Helena knew what to do. Rising from the bed soundlessly, she took her clothes and dressed in the bathroom. Then, making sure that Hal still slept, she crept from the bedroom and out of the sleeping hotel.

  Once outside, Helena looked round. She had picked up the keys of Hal’s car from the dressing table and now she could see it, bathed in moonlight. It took only a second to open the door and turn the ignition, and the engine roared into life.

  Helena had a mental picture of Hal waking instantly, rushing to the window, then hurling downstairs to pursue her. But as she drove away, looking behind apprehensively, she saw that the hotel slept peacefully and there was no furious figure standing in the doorway shouting at her to come back.

  It seemed to Helena that she drove through a deserted land. The river Loire, whose course she was following, stretched supple and silver as it slithered past the towns and villages that slept dreamily on its banks.

  Helena drove on. Through Chaumont, to whose chateau, perched unbelievably high on a cliff above the river, Diana de Poitiers had been exiled by Catherine de Medici. Then on, through the outskirts of Blois, where Anne of Brittany had once held court and the same Medici queen had hatched many of her most merciless plots. Then, as she drove away from the town, the road forked right and suddenly she was heading for Chambord.

  Now that she could actually see the name on the signpost, Helena for the first time began to question her actions. What could a professional woman be thinking of, flitting round France in the moonlight in pursuit of a man who did not even exist? And the more she thought about it the more Helena was sure that she had dreamt everything.

  She stopped the engine and sat quite still, trying to decide the best course of action. Ought she to turn round and quietly drive back to Amboise, pretending to Hal, should he be awake, that she had gone for a solitary drive because she could not sleep? Or, if he still slumbered, clamber in quietly beside him, shamefaced as a schoolgirl breaking the rules? Or should she continue to seek the answer to the mystery, one way or another? Almost as if she could not help herself. Helena switched the engine back on and drove fast towards the chateau.

  She had half feared the gates to the estate might be closed against the night. But then she remembered that people lived in the village, that there was an hotel overlooking the chateau. Obviously the entrances would remain open. Nevertheless, Helena heaved a sigh of relief as the car turned into the forest of Chambord.

  Looking above the trees she saw that the moon had picked out towers and turrets, while the blue roofs of the chateau glimmered darkly, deep as an uncut sapphire. All the way along the road Helena kept staring until the bend came and Chambord was lost to view. But then, as she turned into the now deserted car park, it reappeared, looming magnificent and powerful.

  “Oh please be in there,” said Helena beneath her breath as, imitating a late returning hotel guest, she strolled nonchalantly up the tree-lined street, the souvenir shops now shuttered and dark.

  As with all great and stately houses, the chateau was securely protected against intruders. A wire fence, which Helena suspected might well be electrified, bounded the estate up to the point where the canal that had once been a moat protected the building. And it was to this canal that she now turned her attention. Knowing it was the only possible way in, Helena did not hesitate. She kicked off her shoes and dived, realising as she did that she was committing the greatest folly of her whole life.

  The water, heated by the sun all day, was reasonably warm and Helena, a strong swimmer, struck out in the direction of the chateau, passing beneath the arches of a bridge which echoed the splash and swirl of the river as she broke its calm surface. Looking round her, Helena saw that she had entered the grounds of Chambord.

  One thing she hadn’t bargained for was the steepness of the canal’s sides, entirely unscaleable if it had not been for some white paled railings beside the canal wall. With an enormous heave, Helena managed to clutch a post and drag herself up. Then stood, dripping in the moonlight, staring at the main façade of the chateau which once would have been approached by that great driveway through the forest, a bridge of stone crossing the moat.

  Helena shivered, in a state between elation and pure terror wondering, now that she had got this far, what her next move should be. The main door to the chateau, approached by a short flight of steps, looked well secured but the wing to Helena’s left had an exterior stone staircase, situated in a small tower. Without further thought she made for it, wondering what she would find at the top.

  She climbed a flight, then another, and to her astonishment found herself in an open gallery that ran along the outside of the wing’s apartments. Helena peered through one of the windows, aware that she was looking into a furnished room, though the outlines of the furniture were mere looming shadows beneath the three paths of light thrown by the three windows. In the centre path something was shining in the moonlight. Narrowing her eyes Helena saw that it was a diamond ring, large as an egg, lying on the floor.

  Even as she watched, a hand in a purple laced sleeve snatched it up and for a moment Helena stood on the point of screaming. Someone else had broken into Chambord that night and she was alone with an intruder. But then the owner of the sleeve stepped forward into the light and she saw him distinctly. It was the man, and yet in a way it was not, for everything about him was grey. Helena gazed on a shadow, a creature without reality.

  As she watched he came towards the window and saw her, a smile lighting up his grey features. He pressed his face to the glass.

  “Little one,” he said, with joy in his voice, “you have come!”

  “You’re a ghost,” Helena found herself saying, “you’re not really here at all.”

  He smiled at her, a sweet heart-stopping smile. “Funny little phantom,” he said and opened the window for her. “Come to me.”

  Very vaguely, as if from a million miles away, Helena realised that as she stepped through the floor-length casement a burglar alarm had started to ring somewhere in the chateau’s heart.

  “I’ve set the bell off,” she said slowly.

  “What bell?” he answered, looking puzzled. “There is no bell.”

  He stretche
d his hand out to her, as he had done so many times in her dreams, and Helena took it. Just for a moment it seemed cold to her touch and then she felt the life blood pound through it and that magical electricity that there was between them, that incredible sensation that she knew must be raw attraction between two lovers, shot through her.

  Without any further hesitation Helena stepped into the room and saw that the greyness which enveloped him had gone, that it had merely been a trick of the moonlight. His hair gleamed blue-black, his sensational eyes were the clear bright blue of stained glass, his teeth as he smiled at tier were strong and white.

  “Who are you?” she breathed as he bent to kiss her.

  “Etienne de Fleurmont, my love,” he said softly.

  She held him away one second longer, knowing that she had heard that name recently.

  “But . . .”

  “No buts, little one, for at last you have come to Chambord to be with me.”

  And with the kiss he gave her, wilder and more beautiful than anything Helena had ever known, she thought that indeed she had.

  Chapter Three

  Far below, Helena could see Hal cradling a motionless body, and to her horror she realised it was her own. But no one could hear her cries, for she was trapped in a time to which she didn’t belong . . .

  *

  The room in which Helena found herself now revealed itself in all its glory. Candles flamed in candelabra suspended from the ceiling by gold chains, while a blazing log fire threw more illumination from the grate. On the largest walls hung fine tapestries, all depicting Diana as goddess of the hunt, while the floor was covered with a red Turkish carpet, which was echoed in the bed which had a canopy above, an elaborately woven back of considerable height, and a stiff, formal embroidered bedcover.

  “What is this place?” said Helena, still held closely in Etienne de Fleurmont’s arms.

  “The bedroom in my apartment at Chambord,” he answered.

  Helena struggled loose. “Please tell me where I really am.”

  The expression on Etienne’s face changed dramatically and he turned away from her, the colour mounting in his thin-boned cheeks.