Tide - By Daniela Sacerdoti Page 0,65

be heard.

She wasn’t sure where to go, but her feet took her down the corridor, past the stained-glass window and down the stairs. She was shivering in spite of her jumper, and her feet felt cold on the steps. Still, in a strange way, she enjoyed feeling the stone against her bare skin, as if she were feeling the house itself, settling and creaking and breathing like a living thing. She put her right arm out, her fingers brushing the wall lightly. Step after step, the light of the candle illuminating her naked feet, and then the vast, high-ceilinged vestibule. She stopped for a second and breathed in. The house smelled of peat, of damp and of something else, something she recognized but couldn’t quite place.

Lilies?

She closed her eyes and inhaled again. Yes, lilies.

Sarah smiled to herself. She knew now where she wanted to go. Past the small living room where Niall had been taken when unconscious, past the library whose walls were covered floor to ceiling with bookshelves, past her grandmother’s study. The grand hall opened dark and cavernous to her left, but she turned right instead.

She entered the music room, where she’d spent so many peaceful hours listening to her grandmother and her parents playing, and practising the cello herself. She stepped into the darkened room, illuminating in turn a piano, a harpsichord and the shape of a covered harp, taller than her, resembling a bulky hunchbacked figure. Her fingers lingered on the piano. Carefully she opened its lid and played a few notes, balancing the candle with her other hand. The sound echoed in the silence of the night. Her mother Anne had been an extraordinary pianist, she remembered sadly.

Sarah closed the piano lid as the notes reverberated. She didn’t want to wake anybody, and she didn’t want to be disturbed in her journey through memory and time.

She walked on, towards the wall opposite, and fingered the soft, aqua and gold wallpaper. Under her touch, an invisible door hidden by the wallpaper opened. Sarah smiled, her secret hideout, the cosy, protected place where she went to read and daydream, was still there. It hadn’t been secret at all, of course – everyone knew of its existence – but it felt like that to her, as a child.

It was a tiny room – more of a cupboard – whose purpose had been unknown even to Morag and Hamish. They had no idea why whoever built the house many generations before had decided to carve that small chamber just off the music room. There was no rhyme or reason to it.

Sarah stepped in, the light of the candle illuminating the small space. It was covered in the same aqua and gold wallpaper as the music room, and along the back wall ran a small wooden ottoman. Knowing that Sarah loved sitting in there with a book, Morag had had the ottoman covered in blue velvet cushions. Sarah smiled to herself again, remembering her grandmother’s act of kindness. She placed the candlestick on the wooden floor carefully and kneeled in front of the ottoman, opening its velvet-covered lid.

It was full of treasures, intact from the last time she’d been in the room. As a teenager she hadn’t used the hideaway as much; the prized possessions she had placed in the ottoman must have been there for at least five years. Inside, there was a pink fabric bag, embroidered with little pink sequins. Sarah opened it, and gasped in delight to uncover the treasure it hid. It was a tiny wooden box painted with blue and green flowers – she had forgotten all about it. She lifted the lid, and smiled upon seeing a pair of blue butterfly-shaped earrings that her father had given her on his return from a trip to London when she was ten years old. Those earrings had been her very first piece of jewellery. She slipped the box in the pocket of her jumper.

Next, she took out an address book, with a white kitten on the cover. It was full of phone numbers of former classmates.

Mary Elizabeth McGregor

Sophie Singh

Patrick Thomson

Patrick Thomson! Her first crush. How she’d sighed because of him. And still, when he’d finally noticed her and asked her to go for chips, she’d chickened out of it. The poor guy had waited for an hour and a half in front of the chip shop. She felt a pang of guilt at the memory. Poor Patrick. One of the many boys who’d fallen for her