Gleam

By Victoria Audley

Beatrice Collingwood is a quiet, unassuming girl living in the charming countryside town of Morromere. Her father's death marks the beginning of a vast change to Beatrice's world. Her mother remarries, and her cruel step-father sends Beatrice away to his ancestral home, Rasden Hall, in the cold, northern town of Colmouth. Upon arriving at the house and finding nothing there with which to survive, she realises he sent her there to die. Furthermore, the house seems to be haunted by invisible spirits that scream, wail, taunt, and terrify. She is faced with the decision to either submit to despair, or find out the secrets the house and the town are hiding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria Audley
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798201095338

Victoria Audley

Victoria Audley is a folklorist, museum educator, and ghost escaped from a gothic novel, currently haunting a seaside town on the north east coast of England. In her spare time, she plays too much D&D and makes friends with the neighbourhood crows.

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https://bio.link/vcaudley

For Jackson and Liam

who are now too old for bedtime stories

but you get one more anyway

I.

The world speaks through stories. Emerging from the shimmering depths of the sea, whispering in the winds howling from the mountains, nameless entities place their tales into the world, hiding them under the roots of trees, in the echo of dripping water in an underground cave, inside the bud of a flower waiting to bloom. They are always found, sooner or later, by those who go searching: explorers, caretakers, desperate souls grasping in the dark. Sometimes, however, the story must go searching itself to find the person who needs it.

People find stories, or stories find people. Huddled tightly in a circle around a fire in the desert, rocking in a creaking wooden chair in a cabin in the forest, or in the gilded bedroom of a small princess, the same stories are told, changing slightly as they travel in space and time, but remaining the same at heart. There once was a girl who slept for a hundred years, in India, in China, in Italy, and a prince woke her up, or perhaps he was a soldier, or no one at all. It matters little who they are, what they do, or where they live; what matters is that they live. They live, not only happily ever after, but simply in the telling of their tale.

Stories are written down, eventually. They are and they are not owned, by all who tell and listen to them and by no one at all. The beauty and her beast whisper their story to someone in Greece, someone in Russia, someone in China, someone in France. A tale wears different skins in different places: here a slipper of glass, there a leather moccasin. The storyteller creates something new with each telling, and on it goes until the sequence of precisely what happened disappears, and the truth the storyteller needs to speak and the listener needs to hear is all that remains. But nothing is truly lost. Stories grow to encompass all who find themselves in them, and in that massive sphere it can be difficult to find the ones who started it all. However, they are still there.

II.

There is, there was , there will be a girl named Beatrice. She lived with her parents in an unremarkable house, neither notably small nor large, at the edge of an unremarkable town called Morromere, of much the same description as their house. Her father, George Collingwood, was a respectable man who worked as a lawyer, keeping Beatrice and her mother, Anne, in comfort if not splendour.

Beatrice Collingwood was neither beautiful nor plain, with skin the colour of a young oak tree, rich and growing and alive with joy that filled her to the tips of her curly black hair. Despite her vibrant inner world, she was a quiet and well-behaved child. While she got along with children her age, she had no close friends, nor did she seem to pursue close relationships. She had little interest in playing games or being active. Her greatest joy was reading; when begged by her father to get some fresh air, she would simply take her book outside and continue to read. Though nothing outside her was particularly noteworthy, inside her mind she burst at the seams with colour. Carrying stories in her head, she saw wonder in grey skies just the same as blue, in dandelions and roses, in trains and horses.

To her, there was magic in sunlight and thunderstorms, winter and spring, towering buildings and the soft forest grass. Everything she saw sparkled with golden light. She did not spend much time thinking about the whys and wherefores of magic; she was content that it existed and to enjoy that mere fact. In her more thoughtful moments she wondered if magic existed everywhere in the world or just in Morromere. In either case, what she knew for certain was that she was remarkably lucky to live in a world that contained magic she could see, so that she could never forget that it surrounded her.

Anne listened to Beatrice talk about things she had read, and watched her as she drew the characters in her head and re-created scenes out of acorns and salt shakers. With a rueful smile on her pale face, she remembered being Beatrice’s age, when the world was full of magic and beauty. She remembered how it felt, but not what she had seen. It is the sadness of growing up that the world becomes less real as one learns to pretend. Evil in the world exists, and it is in those who insist that magic is childish and fictional; the more you pretend to be too grown-up to see beauty, the more the world hides itself from you, and the more it seems to have never existed at all. Anne had not yet lost all memory of the reality of the world and could recognise at least that what Beatrice saw was real. ‘Yet,’ however, is the patient demon waiting for all such who have already taken a step down that road.

George was a practical man—practical in the sense of pragmatism, and not unimaginative and scornful as many have come to associate with practicality. In stature he held himself with such strength as to be intimidating, were it not tempered by the warmth of his brown eyes, matching his skin. If he had ever known magic in the world, he did not remember it, but he was never one to believe that because he had no proof of something, it did not exist. This made him an excellent and well-regarded lawyer; his open-mindedness and willingness to accept if not believe drew attention from odd and hopeless causes far and near. As it related to his family, he believed Beatrice’s stories to be the fanciful imaginations of all young girls, but saw no harm in allowing her to believe in fairies and witches, in hope and love.

The world in which Beatrice grew up was understanding, accepting, and supportive. She never feared to tell her parents her ideas, never learned to doubt herself and keep her observations of the world secret. Since she kept to herself outside of her family, she never realised how singular this kind of courage is. Bravery is often regarded as charging into battle, fighting dragons, loudly proclaiming that evil shall die at your feet, but this is another instance of learning to misunderstand the world as we age. Bravery can be those things, but it is not all that bravery can be.

III.

Beatrice remembered moments in her life by what book she was reading at the time. The story of the red-caped girl in the forest was her sixth birthday, when her grandmother made her a honey and hazelnut cake. Her mother had said it was too advanced a flavour palette for a six year-old, only to turn around and find Beatrice licking icing off her fingers after eating an entire slice in under a minute. The princess asleep for a hundred years was the first thunderstorm she could remember, the booming thunder that shook the windows, rain so heavy it sounded like rocks on the roof, lightning that cast more illumination on the page in front of her than her candle did. The peasant girl attending the ball in disguise and winning the heart of the prince was the day her father died.

She walked home from school with the book in her hands, so lost in the story she saw nothing of the world around her. She did not shiver as clouds moved across the sky to block the sunshine, nor did she jump at the bare, rattling tree branches in the wind. The landscape of her mind was a shimmering candlelit ballroom, filled with the sound of an orchestra playing a slow waltz and the clack of heeled shoes on the marble floors, the smells of extravagant fruit pastries and delicately decorated cakes wafting from the kitchen. The wind grasping at her arms was a soft current of air as the prince and the peasant girl in her magical ball gown brushed past her as they travelled across the floor.

All spells break, as the peasant girl and Beatrice both found out in their own ways. Beatrice’s face fell as she turned the page and the clock struck midnight. The peasant girl fled, the enchantment melting away faster with each chime of the clock, leaving her alone in rags at the palace gate. Beatrice reached for the low wooden gate in front of her house habitually, walking through it without raising her head from her book. Her mother said her name, and Beatrice looked up with a small jump.

Anne stood in the doorway, the colour in her dress and in the hollows newly formed under her eyes the same deep black. She looked as if she were pulled down by strings below the earth, her back hunched, her shoulders sagging as she clutched the doorframe, struggling to stand. Beatrice closed the book with her finger inside, marking her place, and took quick steps toward Anne. Her mother reached out with her free arm, gripping Beatrice’s fingers almost tightly enough to crack as she reached her. She took a breath as if to speak, but