The Alchemy of Love and Death: The Janus House Secrets 1
All historians would love to travel in time, wouldn’t they? Abi’s not so sure…
A legacy allows historical researcher Abi Shaw to buy the neglected Georgian Janus House in Welhampstead. Abi thinks she has bought an interesting house in a pleasant historic market town, conveniently close to London, but what she discovers is that Janus House has secrets – portals into the past: 1811, to be exact.
Luckily her solicitor, Frank Ponsonby, knows all about Welhampstead’s links to the past and through him she meets his friends from her own time and from 1811. With their help she and Frank probe the mysteries that the house presents to them – three murders, a disappearing doctor and how to help an innocent young lady about to be forced into an unwelcome marriage.
Abi has a living to earn and a house to restore, but the secrets from the past are too much to resist. Her relationship with Frank is one distraction, the acquisition of a puppy, another – and then it all becomes very dark indeed and Abi’s life is in danger.
The first in a new series carrying on from Time Into Time and The Clock House.
Excerpt
Welhampstead, Hertfordshire. 7th May, not long ago.
Let me be quite clear about this. I do not believe in ghosts.
Unfortunately, this conviction was no help at all when, two days after moving into my new home, the options facing me were that a) the house was haunted, b) I was hallucinating, c) I was suffering from some kind of psychotic incident or d) I had intruders.
When you open a door that had been boarded up, find a staircase that you didn’t know existed and then see the back of someone disappearing down it, what are you to think?
I had seen the outline of the frame in the wall of the ground floor front corridor through the thick layers of old wallpaper. Some wanton destruction seemed preferable to more cleaning and unpacking, so I’d attacked it with a craft knife and a scraper. Underneath the stiff layers of paper was a perfectly good Georgian panelled door that matched the rest in the house, except that the moulding around the frame had been removed.
It was locked, but I’ve watched enough TV crime dramas to know the trick with a sheet of paper under the door and something to poke the key out. To my amazement, it worked – there was still a key in the lock on the other side, it fell neatly onto my paper and didn’t bounce off out of reach and the door opened after the application of some oil.
Delighted with my discovery I stepped through. In front of me was a landing and the stairs went up and down from it. My skin prickled, I shivered and, at that moment, saw a man below me, walking downstairs. A man not in modern clothes. I blinked at him for a moment, opened my mouth to say something, then common-sense kicked in and I crept back, closed the door and, snatching up the crowbar from my toolbox, dashed down to the basement to find the bottom of the staircase. Nothing, not a sign of it. Or him.
Time to take a cool, calm look at the situation, I told myself as I clutched phone in one hand, crowbar in the other. The choices appeared to be to rush screaming into the street, call the police or apply my brain.
The first lacked dignity, the second risked making a fool of myself, so that left intelligent thought. At least I had unpacked enough to have a functioning kitchen, so I made tea, found a battered packet of biscuits, ate three, felt mildly sick and did some deep breathing.
I’d had the external locks changed before I moved in, using a company that came highly recommended by my solicitor, and I had given no copies to anyone. The next thing to do was to check the windows and doors, which I did. They were all closed, properly latched and locked, which meant that there was either a way into the house that I didn’t know about, or that someone was already in when I arrived and was living here.
Those were actually rather more unsettling prospects than the idea of ghosts. I went back to reviewing the other possibilities.
I eliminated b and c on the grounds that everything else felt completely normal, I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol in forty-eight hours, I didn’t take any kind of drug, prescription or otherwise, and I’d had my eyes tested (they were fine) two weeks previously.
What was it that Sherlock Holmes had said? “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” That wasn’t much help, because I refused to believe ghosts existed, which left the rather more immediately worrying thought that someone was getting into the house.
I told myself to woman-up, found a torch, exchanged the crowbar for a rolling pin and a kitchen knife and went back to the door I had unblocked half an hour previously. Stupidly I’d left the key in the lock and hadn’t turned it when I’d bolted downstairs, but the torch, which I’d dropped, was still lying against the door, so at least no one had come through.
The staircase was cramped and tight – a servants’ stair, I realised. It was lit from above by a skylight. Dimly, of course because I doubt it had seen a window cleaner this century. But that was strange, because I could have sworn it had been brighter before and now it was deeply shadowed: I had seen the intruder quite clearly. The intruder wearing, I now realised, early nineteenth century clothing.
