Page 22 of Secrets and Seashells at Rainbow Bay
Tom’s eyes twinkle as he surveys me for a moment. ‘Interesting . . . I like your style, Amelia. All right, you’re on,’ he says, bounding over to shake my hand. ‘Give me a week and I’ll impress not only Dorothy and Arthur, but hopefully you as well, boss.’
He holds on to my hand as his eyes gaze directly into mine. ‘And I get the feeling that you, Amelia, might be my hardest challenge of all.’
‘So Tom is staying, then?’ Charlie asks that night when I’m tucking him into his old bed in his new room. Charlie has happily spent the rest of the day with Dorothy in the castle kitchen learning how to bake cakes, while I’d spent it finding a room for Tom to stay in, along with the somewhat harder task of persuading Arthur to give him a chance.
Eventually a spare room had been found alongside Joey, who like Tiffany has his own small room tucked away in the north wing of the castle – an area that had been used in the past for the staff of any visiting guests. I discover too that Arthur and Dorothy are the inhabitants of the little cottage in the grounds we’d seen earlier, and that they’ve lived there since they first got married.
‘Yes, Tom is staying, for now anyway.’
‘Goody, I like him.’
‘I know you do. But then you did have a bit of an adventure with him today in the tower.’
‘Yeah . . . ’ Charlie frowns. ‘Sort of.’
‘What do you mean, sort of?’
‘Well, the end of the adventure was with Tom when he rescued me from the tower, but the beginning was with someone else.’
‘Who?’ I ask, sitting down next to Charlie on the edge of the bed.
‘Ruby.’
‘Who’s Ruby?’ I ask, puzzled.
‘My new friend.’
I look at Charlie lying snug as a bug under his dinosaur duvet. Surely I’d been introduced to everyone at the castle today. Who was Ruby?
‘Your new friend, eh?’
‘Yeah, she’s cool; she can just appear and disappear like that.’ He lifts his hand from under the duvet and clicks his fingers.
‘Can she now? Does Ruby live in the village?’ I ask, thinking perhaps one of the local schoolchildren knew their way around the castle.
‘No, she lives here at the castle. She told me.’
‘She does, does she?’ Did one of the staff have a child they’d not told me about? But whose child could it be? Arthur and Dorothy were far too old to have a young child. Joey wasn’t a dad, was he? Perhaps it was Tiffany’s child? But she was a bit young too.
‘Thisisa child you’re talking about, isn’t it?’ I suddenly ask, in case Charlie has made friends with a dog or a cat or something. He’d said she’d spoken to him, but Charlie, being an only child, had a very, very vivid imagination, and talking to animals certainly wouldn’t be beyond the realms of his creativity.
‘Yeah,’ Charlie says indignantly. ‘Of course, she’s a kid like me.’
‘Sorry, of course she is, and she’s called Ruby?’
‘Yup, and she’s lived here at the castle for over a hundred years. She told me that, too.’
I blink a couple of times in disbelief. ‘Surely you misheard her, Charlie? She can’t possibly have lived here all that time now, can she?’
‘She can if she’s a ghost,’ Charlie says matter-of-factly. ‘Night, night, Mum.’ He yawns, pulling the duvet up around his ears. ‘I’m really tired now.’ And he closes his eyes. ‘See you in the morning.’
Ten
‘He said what?’ Tom asks as he puts down his axe for a moment and ceases chopping up the fallen tree that Arthur has tasked him with this morning.
‘He said his new friend Ruby was a ghost. I tried talking to him this morning at breakfast to see if he was making it up, but he’s adamant that’s what she is.’
Tom had eaten breakfast in the main kitchen with the rest of the staff. Apparently he’d settled in well last night and seemed to be a popular addition to the household with everyone but Arthur (as I suspected might be the case). Even Joey had taken this newcomer in his stride, and said that at least he wouldn’t be left to doallof the manual labour on the castle estate now.
