PING!
“A million and seven points to me. Your go!” Stella stared at her aunt, her eyes bulging with fury.
“Oh no, silly me, I’ve forgotten. Both your arms are broken! Looks like I’ve won again.”
“I never wanted to play.”
“No one likes a bad loser, Stella.”
“I need to know what has happened to my parents!” shouted the girl.
Alberta shook her head at her niece’s behaviour. “Now if you can be quiet for just a moment, your aunty-waunty will tell you exactly what happened!” She often spoke in this baby talk. It made Stella’s skin crawl. “You have no memory at all of the accident?”
“N-n-no.” Try as she might Stella could not remember anything. She must have hit her head hard. But how? “Please! Tell me!”
“Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Oh deary deary me.”
“What?! Tell me! I’m begging you!”
“Hush! This instant!” hissed the woman.
The girl had no option but to fall silent.
“Now Auntie can begin.” It was as if she was telling a bedtime story. “It was a rainy morning. You were sat in the back seat of your father’s Rolls Royce, on your way into London. Your father had another appointment with the bank manager, while your mother was going to take you to see Buckingham Palace. But alas! Your jolly jaunt was not to be.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Perhaps your father had been drinking…”
“He never drank!” protested Stella.
“…and he must have been driving too fast…”
“He never drove too fast!”
But Alberta was in full flow now and there was absolutely no stopping her. “The Rolls Royce was speeding along a coastal road. Your father lost control of the car on a sharp bend and…” Suddenly the woman paused, for dramatic effect. It was as if she was enjoying being the bearer of bad news.
“What?!”
“It plunged over the side of a cliff!”
“NO!” Stella screamed.
“Yes! Smashing on to the rocks below,” Alberta said, before adding her own sound effect.
“BOOM!”
Stella was sobbing now.
“There there!” said Alberta, patting her niece on her head as if she were a dog. “You, child, are very lucky to be alive. Very lucky. You have been in a coma for months.”
“What about Mama and Papa?” she pleaded. Stella feared the worst, but she hadn’t quite given up hope yet. “Where are they? Are they here in the house? Are they in hospital?”
Alberta fixed her niece with a stare. A pained expression crossed her face.
“Oh poor, poor child.” Aunt Alberta shook her head and perched on the side of the bed, her hefty frame causing the mattress to tip violently to the side. Her stubby fingers tiptoed over to her niece, and she rested her clammy palm on top of the girl’s tightly bandaged hand. Tears welled in Stella’s eyes. Soon those tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“Please! Tell me what’s happened to my mama and papa!”
A trace of a smile crossed her aunt’s face. “Now, I have some rather upsetting news about your parents…”
“Dead?” Stella was in floods of tears now. “Please, please, tell me this isn’t true? Tell me this is all just some terrible nightmare!”
Aunt Alberta looked upon her niece with pity. She took a long, deep puff on her pipe, as she pondered her reply. “Dead, child. As dead as dead can be. Deader than dead. Completely deadest. In fact so totally dead they were buried under the ground months ago. I don’t think there is much hope for them now.”
Memories of her beloved mother and father flashed through Stella’s mind. Her papa taking her in a rowing boat on the lake, making her giggle as he clowned around with the oars. Her mama twirling her around the ballroom of Saxby Hall, teaching her to dance. The memories already seemed like scratchy old black-and-white films, the pictures fuzzy and jumpy, the sound muffled. She fought to make them clearer. This was all she had left of them now.
“Months ago?” spluttered Stella. “So I missed their funeral?”
“Mmm, child. It was a terribly sad day, seeing their two cheap coffins lying side by side. Luckily the vicar gave me a discount for the funeral service as it was two people being buried in one go.”
“Did you arrange some flowers from me?”
“No. To be honest with you, they were so dead by that point that they wouldn’t have known.”
The little girl couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How could her aunt be so uncaring about her brother and his wife – Stella’s dear mother and father. It was no secret she deeply resented Lord and Lady Saxby, even though they had treated her with nothing but kindness. Alberta even had a wing of Saxby Hall all to herself. Without Chester the woman would have been homeless, having squandered all her own money and plenty of her brother’s. However, she never once said thank you or did anything kind in return.
Even when she was very little Stella had noticed the cruel way her aunt behaved around Chester. Alberta would roll her eyes whenever he spoke, and sneer whenever he offered her a smile. If it was someone in the family’s birthday, Alberta would slink off to her very own greenhouse, at the bottom of the long sloping lawn. Unusually the woman had blacked out its windows with paint. Stella was sure this rather defeated the idea of it being a greenhouse as no sunlight could shine in. Who had ever heard of plants that could grow in the dark? Still, whatever it was that Alberta had hidden inside, it was free from everyone else’s prying eyes.
“So I have been in a coma all this time?” asked Stella, her sobs slowing down a little now.
“Yes. Months now. You hit your head in the car crashy-washy, and were rushed to hospital in an ambulance. The doctors and nurses did their best for you. Of course I was on the phone to them every hour, asking for any news of my only niece, I was so worried your condition might worsen.”
“But if all my bones are broken why aren’t I still there?” demanded the girl.
The woman took another puff on her pipe, giving her time to think. “Because my little niecy-wiecy, who better to look after you than me? Hospitals are full of ghastly people who are all illy-willy. How much better to be at home in your own bed, under the watchful eyes of Wagner and I. Isn’t that right, Wagner?”
The woman kissed her owl’s bill, as she often did. Stella always found this distinctly