It was Martha’s favourite time of day. She had the entire castle to herself. For a few minutes every evening, she could almost believe it was hers and hers alone. She had worked there for a little over five years and yet she still enjoyed the fantasy each time she locked up. Close her eyes and she was a princess, sweeping across a courtyard past her subjects. But she always had to open her eyes and see the reality, the faded burn on the back of her hand a permanent reminder that she was no princess, she was just daydreaming damaged goods.
The sun was slowly setting behind her, colouring the grass in the soft light that only came at that time of day, taking the edge off the jagged stone of the chapel wall. She crossed the drawbridge over the earthworks, glancing down to check below. It wasn’t unknown for people to try and hide under the drawbridge at closing time, teenagers for the most part, hoping to remain on site after the staff had left, unaware that Martha lived in one of the houses next to the castle, close enough to hear their laughter on the few occasions it had happened. It hadn’t happened since she’d begun making a point of checking every potential hiding place before locking up.
The castle consisted of a roughly rectangular curtain wall, complete in some places, down almost to nothing in others. Within the boundary was a wide stretch of grass containing the remains of the East Tower, the Great Hall, the chapel and two underground storerooms, reachable down crumbling stone steps. The tower was missing one wall, pulled down during the Civil War, the roofless insides open to the elements. The Great Hall, in contrast, was still complete, the rooms divided up into exhibition spaces.
Walking through them, Martha ducked down the spiral staircase to what was once a secret escape route out to the earthworks, now a door to nowhere. In front of the permanently locked door was the alarm and she punched in the code, counting down the seconds as it beeped loudly in time with her counting. She had half a minute to get outside, any longer and the alarm would go off. She made it in twenty seconds, locking the door with the heavy iron key as the sound faded to nothing.
Once that was done, she paused, looking around her at the growing darkness. The place was so peaceful when the visitors left, just her and the pigeons which waddled slowly across the grass. Through a gap in the curtain wall, she could see the town, the castle overlooking it, built on high ground, designed to impress and command the surrounding population during the middle ages. Amongst the pantiled roofs was the one that belonged to her. It brought a warm feeling to her heart to think of it. A place of her own. She might not have paid to buy it, she might only be renting it from the owner, the same man who owned the castle, who had given her the job all those years ago. But it was still hers, a sanctuary.
For a long time, she hadn’t had a home, somewhere she could return to, somewhere she felt safe. For too long she’d felt lost, the result of everything that had happened to her as a child. Sometimes, most often when a happy family passed through into the castle grounds, she felt a flare of jealousy, wondering what it would be like to have a childhood that wasn’t filled with fear and self loathing. But she had no way of knowing and she knew if she let thoughts like that in, they would consume her. They almost had, for more than two years after the fire, she had sunk into the depths of despair, wishing she had died in the blaze, not survived to feel the guilt of leaving Sophia, Janet, and Clare behind. They would never grow older than twelve. It was a thought that ate away at her for a very long time.
Taking the job at the castle had saved her really, given her a purpose, a distraction, a way of redefining herself. She wasn’t a victim anymore. She was a survivor. And when she was alone, looking at the town from inside the castle, she was a medieval princess.
She was glancing that way, squinting as the light continued to fade, when the wind began to pick up, the leaves on the trees that surrounded the car park beginning to rustle softly. The weather was due to turn, the last of the autumn warmth due to die out in a storm according to the forecast. She zipped up her coat as she began to walk back towards the gatehouse, passing through and looping around the earthworks for one final check before returning to the visitor centre to finish up the paperwork. The castle had been put to bed for another day.
When she walked into the office that adjoined the gift shop, she found the red light on the phone was blinking urgently. Someone had left a message. She hit the button, fairly certain it would be from Peter, wanting to know if his baby had been put to sleep properly. For a man heading towards retirement he didn’t seem to find it easy to let go of control of the place. Even on his days off, he’d pop in to check on her and the other staff, to dust the shelves, to talk to the visitors, tell them about the history of the place. Martha doubted he’d ever retire. Even when he did, she couldn’t imagine him sitting at home completing jigsaw puzzles. He’d probably be haunting the place long after his death, joining the ranks of ghosts said to roam the grounds late at night.
The site had been owned by his ancestors for generations, all the way back to the 1700s when the family who built it, the Especs, decided it was too old fashioned for their needs. They’d built a mansion a couple of miles up the road, the descendants still living there. The castle itself was left empty for fifty years, long enough to begin to crumble, a process sped up when local residents began carting away stone to build their cottages almost up to its doorstep.
The Robertson family had bought the place in the late eighteenth century, looking after it ever since, slowly consolidating the ruins, keeping the ivy in check, employing first sheep to cut the grass, then lawnmowers as the twentieth century began. It had been open as a visitor attraction since 1890 at a shilling a time with a free glass of lemonade thrown in. Times had changed but the castle had remained pretty much the same since then, though the visitor centre had been built in the 1970s to accommodate the growing number of day-trippers who were drawn to Helmsley and the moors beyond.
A voice emerged from the answerphone, filling the office as Martha listened. “This is Doctor Harris at York Hospital.” Her heart began to race. A doctor ringing was not going to be good news. “I’m trying to reach Martha Coleman. We have a Peter Robertson here with us, he’s been in an accident. Could you please ring as soon as you pick up this message.”
Martha scrambled for a pen as he read out the number. She hit play again, making sure she had it right before punching the number into the phone.
Ten minutes later she was in her car, heading towards York. The doctor had refused to be drawn over the phone as to how serious it was but she could tell by his voice that it was bad. Peter had been driving out of Helmsley when a lorry had come barrelling down the hill. At the bottom, just as you entered the town, there was a humpback bridge, the road narrowing over it. Martha had had a few near misses herself driving over it. The lorry hadn’t slowed, assuming anyone coming the other way would react quickly enough to move. But Peter hadn’t been able to swerve in time, or the lorry had been going too fast. Either way, the result was he’d been slammed into by a vehicle four times the size of his, ending up trapped in what was once his car, crushed between the side of the lorry and the stonework of the bridge.
He’d been rushed to hospital and had regained consciousness long enough to give them her name and location which was why they’d rung her.
She tried not to cry as she drove, knowing that if the tears started to fall, she’d risk being in an accident of her own. She’d just driven over the bridge, seeing the missing section of wall where it had fallen into the river, pushed off by the impact of Peter’s car. The sight shocked her, it must have been a hell of a smash. She tried not to think of her parents, how they’d died in a car crash all those years ago. Was it her? Was she cursed?
She put her foot down, catching up with the car in front before swerving out and around it. She would have set off sooner if it wasn’t for having to deal with the man knocking on the visitor centre door, asking if he was too late to look around. She had tried to get around him but he’d blocked her path, trying to be polite in his needling. “Just a couple of minutes,” he said. “I won’t take long.”
“Come back tomorrow,” she’d replied, pushing roughly past him and heading for the car park. That often happened. Visitors would expect her to work on their time, not accepting that she might need a break after slogging solidly for twelve hours or more. Normally, she was polite, explaining to them the hours of business, how much they valued their visitors. But not when her employer might be dying.
It took forty minutes to get to the hospital. She left the car haphazardly parked in the Accident and Emergency car park, crossing the few yards to the entrance at a run, getting inside and skidding to a halt by the desk. “Peter Robertson,” she said to the nurse who looked up at her. “Where is he? I’m Martha Coleman. Doctor Harris rang me.”
“Through that door, turn left,” she replied. “He’s expecting you.”
She ran over to a set of automatic doors which remained stubbornly closed.
“You need to push the button,” the nurse called after her, pointing at the side of the door.
Swearing under her breath, Martha saw what she meant, hitting the green button on the wall, waiting impatiently as the doors slid open. She marched through, turning down the corridor, the smell of disinfectant knocking her back. She was just turning another corner when a man walking the other way bumped into her. He stopped short, looking at her with tired eyes. “Miss Coleman?”
“Martha, yes.”
“I’m Doctor Harris.”
“How is he, Doctor?”
“I’m not going to lie, it doesn’t look good. He lost a lot of blood before we could get him stabilised. His left leg’s broken in two places and he’s cracked a couple of ribs.”
“He’ll live though, right?”
“If we can get the swelling of his brain to come down, then he’s in with a chance but if he’s got any relatives, you might want to get in touch with them, just in case.”
“Can I see him?”
“Not at the minute. My team is still working on him. Does he have any family that you know of?”
“A son and an ex-wife. That’s it.”
“Are you in touch with them?”
A voice called out from behind the doctor. “Martha, is that you?”
“That’s Peter,” she said.
Doctor Harris spun on his heels and stuck his head in the room behind him. “Wait there,” he said as he disappeared inside. She caught him asking, “Is he conscious?” as his voice faded away.
Peter shouted out again. “Martha, get in here.”
She stood in the doorway, torn between the doctor’s command and her employer’s. For a few seconds she couldn’t move but then she pushed open the door, finding Peter laid on the bed surrounded by people. “Just try and relax,” Doctor Harris was saying. “Someone get a hold of him before he does any more damage.”
Martha moved around the bed, finding Peter’s flailing hand and wrapping it around hers. “I’m here, Peter,” she said. “I’m right here.” She tried to focus on his eyes, not wanting to look at the blood, the swelling, the way his body looked so broken.
“I told you to wait outside,” Doctor Harris snapped at her.
“She stays,” Peter snapped right back at him, turning his gaze to her. “Take care of the castle for me, Martha, won’t you? Don’t let her get her claws into it.”
“Don’t worry,” she replied, squeezing his hand. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“He’s going downhill,” someone shouted.
A nurse took Martha by the arm, pulling her away as the activity grew more frantic, Peter’s eyes closing. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s wait outside for a minute.”
Martha looked back over her shoulder at the man who had taken her in, who had looked after her, given her a new life. He was out of sight, there were too many people around him.
Once in the corridor the nurse paused to say, “If there’s anyone important in his life, you should ring them,” before heading back inside, leaving Martha to walk in a daze towards the chairs at the end of the corridor, the subtext all too obvious from the nurse’s expression. She sank into a chair, realising her hands were trembling. Was he dying? Should she ring Ben?
She had never spoken to Benjamin Robertson, his son. She’d had the pleasure of taking a number of calls from the ex-Mrs Robertson, each of them laced with passive aggressive abuse aimed at Peter. But of the son, she knew only his name and his number. She knew his name because there was a framed photograph in the office at the castle of him as a boy. She knew his number because it was listed in the ancient phonebook that lived on the desk next to the enamel Dad’s Army mug filled with pens and the ledger which Peter still used instead of a computer to keep his accounts in check. The phone number might not even be up to date.
Should she try and ring him? Peter had mentioned that he had a son who he didn’t speak to, though she didn’t know why. She was just taking her phone out of her pocket when she noticed the sign on the opposite wall, a mobile phone in a red circle with a line through the middle. Standing up, she walked slowly back to the reception area, heading outside and taking a deep breath of night air. She rang Chloe.
“Hi,” she said when Chloe answered. “I know it’s your day off but I need you to do something for me.”
Chloe was a decent if ditsy employee. She was eighteen, had been working at the castle for a year and luckily didn’t ask any questions about why she was being sent back to work on her day off and long after closing time. She rang Martha back ten minutes later. “I’ve got the number for you,” she said. “It was in the book like you said. Are you ready?”
“Hold on.” Martha put her on speaker, getting ready to type the numbers in as they were said. Once she had it, she thanked Chloe before hanging up. She paused for a second. What was she even going to say? You don’t know me but your father is dying and you need to get over to York. What if the number wasn’t valid anymore?
She thought about Peter, about how the doctors and nurses had looked as they dashed around him. How she’d regret it if she didn’t even try. Then she rang the number Chloe had given her and waited for Benjamin Robertson to answer.