HOLLY - CHAPTER SIX
• Jayne Sharratt

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“But when can we go to the beach?”
Nic was wearing her new blue tankini, and she was carrying a see through beach bag with a towel, sun cream, her mobile phone and some drinks and sandwiches her mother had made in it. Her short dark hair was pulled away from her face by a pair of sunglasses which she wore on her head.
Holly clearly had other ideas. Max had led them up the main staircase in the house this time. It was wide and covered in an ancient, worn red velvet carpet. All around them there were huge family portraits, but the canvas had become so darkened over the years, and there was so little light in the Hall, that it was impossible to see any of the features of the people in them.
“Just think, all these people are related to you, Max,” Holly said.
“You’re not actually a Tempest, are you?” Nic asked. “What is your name?”
“I’m Max Verne,” A grin broke out on Max’s face. “Maximilian Virgil Kirkland Verne III, to be exact.”
Nic was impressed. Sam and Holly just laughed.
“I wonder if there’s a picture of him here?” Max said.
“Who?” asked Nic. They were now stood in a wide gallery with wooden floor boards and panelling. There were portraits here as well.
“James Tempest. The one who hid the treasure, remember?”
“Oh, I forgot,” Nic said.
There was some light streaming in through a large diamond paned window at the far end of the gallery.
“We should be out in the sunshine,”Nic said. Even so, she did not complain too much. It was almost as if the house was casting a spell over them all, making them quieter, more respectful, more polite.
“How can you forget about treasure, Nic?” Sam asked.
“I wouldn’t forget if I thought it existed. But this is all a story, isn’t it Holly?”
Holly shook her head, but said nothing.
“I don’t know where we’d start to look for clues,” Max admitted. “Any ideas, Holl?”
“Where’s your Gran?” Sam asked, while Holly remained in a day dream.
Max knew what he meant. He tried to avoid his Gran as it was, but he really didn’t want her to meet Holly again. He had no idea why she had reacted the way she did the day before when she had met Holly, but he had stopped wondering at anything about Tempest Hall after his first day there. “Gran always sleeps in till midday, we should be fine until then.”
“I think we should go this way,” Holly said suddenly, as if she had been shaken from a dream. She led them through an arch and into a corridor. The mesh of rooms and
passages was maze like, but Holly navigated her way through them without hesitation, almost as if she had been there before. Nic, who suspected Holly of sneaking and spying, thought she probably had been there before, maybe even accidentally scaring the old lady. The boys just thought Holly was guessing. Finally they came to a dead end.
“We couldn’t possibly be lost, could we Holly?” Nic asked sweetly.
Holly shook her head. “You didn’t have to follow me,” she said.
They were in a long and low room. There was nothing in it except a book case which ran all the way along the opposite wall to where they had come in through the door.
Max looked out the window. He could see how they had walked around in a loop from the main gallery in the centre of the house, because they were now back near the central block of Tempest Hall, only this time they were overlooking the overgrown gardens and woods. What he didn’t understand was why there was no way through.
“It’s really weird,” he said. “There must be another room between here and the gallery. If you look out the window you can see - it just doesn’t join up.”
“There must be an entrance to it off the gallery somewhere then,” said Nic.
“No, there isn’t,” Max said. “That’s the part of the house I have checked out. There’s only one way off it at this side of the house, and that’s the way we took. All the other doors go to the west wing.”
“Well there must be a way.” Nic said a little sulkily.
“No, don’t you see,” Holly was excited. “This is just what we’ve been looking for. This is the part of the house which was lived in by James Tempest. These could have been his rooms. And here there must be a secret room.”
“Why must there?” Nic asked.
“Because there just must be,” her brother replied. It seemed obvious to him. Those book shelves just obviously weren’t real. Nobody could ever have wanted all those musty bound books. So they must have been brought in to hide something. He’d seen things like it in films. Sam went closer to the shelves, and began to pull a few books out, and to examine the edges. Holly and Max copied him.
Nic sighed. She couldn’t quite believe they were all stood there pulling at books, thinking something was going to happen. She had heard Holly talk about a lot of things - pirates, smugglers, ghosts, secret passages, caves. Now they were going to find a secret room. Things like that just didn’t happen in real life. She leaned back against the wall, and gave a shout...the solid wood panelling was giving way behind her. The whole of one panel had caved in and set her off balance, sending her sprawling to the floor.
“What are you doing, Nic?”
Max, Holly and Sam had all turned around to stare at her. But Nic wasn’t looking at them. She was staring open mouthed at what was happening behind them. Silently, the whole of the wall opposite her was sliding backwards in a smooth arc.

“I...I...look. I’ve found the secret room,” she stuttered, getting to her feet.
The others looked behind them, and then stared at Nic. “How did you do that?”
Nic shook her head. She was shocked by what could happen when you least expected it to. It seemed amazing to her that you could look for a secret room and find one, even in a house like this. She looked behind the wood panel which had given way.
“There’s a lever here,” she said. “It must be what caused the wall to swing back.”
“We’ll have to make sure it doesn’t slide back again, then,” Max said, and jammed the broken panel of wood up against the lever, so that it couldn’t move. “Let’s go then.”
They moved towards the dark area which had been opened up. It didn’t have any windows, and they couldn’t see far in.
“Do you think this is where the treasure is?” Sam was excited.
“Don’t be stupid,” Nic told him. “You don’t even know what this treasure you’re looking for even looks like. We’re not just going to find it after one morning looking, when people have supposedly been looking for hundreds of years. That is, if it even exists at all,” All the time she was talking, Nic looked pointedly at Holly. It was almost as if Holly was hanging back, once she had gone so far. Watching them, waiting for them to find things she already knew were there. Well, she was watching Holly too... “See,” Nic felt triumphant. She had reached the back of the hidden space, she was touching the wall, and they had found nothing. It was another bare room. No treasure at all. “There’s nothing here,” she said, relieved.
“Yes, there is,” Max was in the darkest corner, furthest from the windows and the sun. The suppressed excitement could be heard in his voice.
Sam pushed to see. “A staircase,” he exclaimed. “A spiral staircase.”
Before anyone could say anything, Holly began to climb up it. The others hung back a little nervously.
“I could go and get a flash light,” Max said.
“We won’t need one. This is one of the towers. There’ll be windows up there,” Holly called behind her. “I bet you don’t even have a torch, anyway. You’re just not the kind of boy who would.”
Max frowned. “Well, we’d better follow her,” he said, and did.
“What could there be up there to be scared of anyway?” asked Nic, pushing her brother ahead of her.
“Ghosts,” said Sam. He was trying to be brave.
“Don’t be so stupid,” Nic told him for the second time.
“So why are you making me go first?”
“I’m just encouraging you.”
“You know the ghosts are more likely to get the last person in the line, not the first,” Sam said, and then yelled, when his sister’s fist dug into his back.
They emerged, still bickering, through a trap door. They were in a round room filled
by a greenish light, and thick dust. Sam began to cough. In the centre of the room was a large table, with drawers underneath it. There was a large globe on one side of the room, and at the windows a telescope was set up.
Max used his shirt sleeve to wipe away the damp green dust which festered on the glass. “Look,” he said. “The telescope is pointing out to sea. The cliff there is to the left of our secret beach.”
The view was amazing. The tower was one of the few points of the house higher than the trees, and their eyes scanned over the line of woodland to the wide sea beyond. It looked calm and beautiful.
“We should be on the beach...,”Nic said quietly.
Max blew the dust off the telescope. “This is so old,” he said. “D’you suppose it could really belong to James Tempest?”
“He was a pirate, kind of, or at least a smuggler, or something. A spy.” Sam noticed Holly glaring at him. “Anyway, whatever he was, he had to look out to sea.”
“Of course he did,” Holly said. “These are his maps and charts. Look Max.”
Max moved from the table to her side. The table was piled with thick parchments. “You have to be really careful with them,” Holly warned.
“You know this room could have belonged to anyone,” Nic said, walking along the curved line of the wall, tracing a pattern in the must with her fingers. “It might not even be a secret, Max, your Gran may know all about it. I mean what do you expect to find? A treasure map, and X marks the spot?” Her voice trailed away. She began to scrub at the corner of one of the charts fixed to the wall, which looked like a plan of a series of buildings. Round towers could clearly be made out by Sam, who joined her.
“This is it, it must be a plan of the Hall, it’ll show where the treasure is,” Sam was almost shouting.
“No,” Nic said, still urgently rubbing away the dirt until she had revealed the words in the corner of the plan. In bold italics the word Bastille was seen. “It’s a prison in Paris, Sam,” she said, unable to disguise amazement, and excitement. “At least, it was. I don’t know if it’s still there. Remember I did about the French Revolution in school last year? They kept people in the Bastille before they took them to the guillotine, and chopped off their heads. Holly, you did say this James Tempest, who hid the treasure, he used to rescue prisoners from Paris?”
Holly nodded. The two girls exchanged looks from shining eyes.
“There’s more here,” Holly said. “Plans of chateaux, maps of France, maps of Paris, and plans of other cities.”
“Then it’s true. That story you told. It was really all true. You didn’t just make it up.” Nic sounded awed.
“Of course I didn’t make it up,” Holly said.
“Then there really could be treasure,” Nic said. She looked at Max and caught his eye. Neither of them had really quite believed in it until now. They still weren’t sure,
but they saw it was possible.
“If we could just find a map which looked like it might show somewhere here, the coastline, or a plan of the Hall, it could have the treasure marked on it,” Max said, turning to the piles of papers on the table.
“It couldn’t be that easy, could it?”
“It has been so far.”
Nic carried on searching the wall charts for clues.
“What’s this?” Sam had found a large ledger book of sloping handwriting in copper coloured ink, faded.
“It’s a list of something. Like a catalogue, I guess,” Max said. “I don’t know...it’s hard to make out, I think it’s in French...”
“It must be about the treasure. I found it,” Sam was jumping about, making the dust fly. He sneezed loudly.
“It could be a clue,” Max said. “Whatever it lists, there’s pages and pages of it.”
Nic peered over his shoulder. She had started learning French the year before at school, but she couldn’t make out a single word of this. Max had been learning for much longer, and had spent a summer in Paris with his mother once, but he did not do much better.
“I think that word is ... library? There’s quite a lot about God I think, too,” He flicked through the pages.
“There’s something loose inside the pages, I saw it..” Holly put her hand between the sheets of manuscript and pulled out a smaller, lighter sheet. She spread it out on the table. “It’s a poem, I think...”
Nic, Sam and Max all gathered around her, craning to see. It was hard to make out all the words, but some stood out and seemed to leap off the page...
“Chloe!”
“Tempests”
“A love poem?”
Holly shook her head She pointed to the words ‘ships’ ‘peril’, and ‘treasure’. “It’s a treasure hunt. I’m sure it is. See how short the verses are? Each verse is like a separate clue. If we could follow them...”
“What would we find?”
“I don’t know.”
Sam was sneezing and coughing again. “We should go outside and read this,” Holly said.
Nic looked at her watch. “It’s lunch time,” she said. “We could take some food down to the beach with us.”
They went back down the stairs and through the book case. Max pulled the lever in the panel so that the wall slid back into place, and tried to prop the wooden panel back in place so that it didn’t look unusual. “It’s cool though,” he said. “Gran would never
come here.”
Holly was carrying the manuscript. The others carried food. On the beach they ate a picnic of tinned tuna pasta twists, Kit Kats and Coca-cola. The tide was on it’s way in but they sneaked through Holly’s gap in the rock as they had the day before, on to the broader expanse of the secret beach. In the clear sunshine the discoveries in the tower room seemed less real and urgent. Nic lazily lay in the sun, while Max and Sam stripped to their shorts and ran for the sea. After a while Nic realised she was bored, and ran into the sea as well, but Holly stayed where she was, hugging her knees and puzzling over the scrap of paper.
“Holly! Come in!” Sam called to her.
Holly laughed at them, and shook her head. She tucked the manuscript into the pocket of her shorts and started to walk along the length of the beach. She clambered onto the rocks furthest along the coast from the village. When she returned Sam, Nic and Max were resting and drying out in the sun.
“I think there might be a creek at the other side of that headland of rocks,” she said. “I’m sure there must be hidden coves and secret caves further along the coast, that the smugglers used.”
Nic rolled her eyes, as if she was bored. “What does it matter?”
“I thought you wanted to find the treasure. You seemed excited enough earlier.” Holly sounded disappointed and anxious.
“Well, I’ve been thinking. Nothing we found today proves there really is a treasure. I mean there may have been someone living here a long time ago who went to France a lot, and had to keep it a secret. But that’s all the secret tower room proves.”
“Nic?” Sam nudged his sister.
“What?”
“You’re so boring some times.”
“I’m not. I’m just being ...realistic.”
“You could have a bit more imagination, you know,” Max said.
“You only believe this whole story because it’s your family. You just want the treasure.”
Max shook his head. “I know chances are there is nothing in it. But what we found today was...y’know maybe nobody’s been in that room for hundreds of years! Just think if we could find this treasure. Imagine if we solved the mystery and brought home the treasure. Think of the attention we’d get. People would have to notice us then. We’d have done something really worth doing, and we can’t not try, just because it’d be easier to sit around on a beach.”
Nic sucked her lip and looked out to sea. She imagined her mother’s face if she could walk into the house and dump a chest of gold coins down on the kitchen table. “I s’pose,” she admitted. “I don’t see what’s the point of nearly killing ourselves, clambering about on rocks, though.”
“Don’t you see? If we could find the caves the smugglers used we’d be getting somewhere,” Holly said. “I bet there’d be secret passages going up into Tempest Hall. There always is, you know. Or passages going somewhere, anyway. And James Tempest knew the smugglers’ hideaways. If he had to hide something, don’t you think he might have used that?”
“What about the treasure hunt we found?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t seem to make any sense of it,” Holly admitted.
“But surely you know everything?” Nic asked innocently.
Holly shook her head. “It’s such a long time ago..”
“We should be able to do some research,” Max suggested. “In history books and local records, maybe. We could try a library, if there’s one nearby.”
Holly frowned. “I’m sure we don’t have to do that. I’m sure it’s all here, if only we could see. Maybe the ghosts could show us...”
“What?” Nic hated it when Holly talked about ghosts, as if they were perfectly normal and every day things.
Sam looked pale. He could feel an argument brewing. He had learned to hear the danger signs in Nic’s voice.
Instead Nic was falsely understanding. “You have fair skin, Holl, and I know the sun’s been strong all summer, it must really start to get to you. But not everyone’s going to be as nice as us, you know. Some people might think you’re a bit, well, mad.”
“I’ve seen them.”
“I’m sure you have.”
Holly was upset. She didn’t say anything.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” said Nic. “But why don’t any of us see them? Why’s it only you?”
Holly shook her head.
Nic laughed. “I mean what do you say to these ghosts when you’re having these long conversations? Are they good company?”
“It’s true!” Holly said.
“Don’t let her upset you, Holl,” said Max, as Holly had sprung to her feet.
Nic jumped up too. “Prove it to me,” she said. “Show me a ghost!”
There was a moment of silence. Holly looked blank and pale.
“OK,” she said. “I will. Come back to the mausoleum later. We’ll stay out there all night and you’ll see a ghost.”
Nic stared at Holly. She felt as if she had fallen into a trap.
Holly half smiled. “What’s wrong? You’re not scared are you?”

© Jayne Sharratt
NOW READ CHAPTER SEVEN

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