Secrets in the Shadows by Hannah Emery

Author:Hannah Emery
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007568796
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty One

Louisa, 1976

Louisa liked Lewis because he was connected to nobody. Louisa still had to see Jimmy and Penny at weddings and funerals and gatherings, because Jimmy was Mags’s cousin, and Penny had known Sheila all her life, and Sheila was Mags’s sister. Suzie was Sheila’s daughter and Suzie’s boyfriend Mark worked Saturdays in the chippy next door to Pete’s ice cream shop. Suzie’s boyfriend’s sister lived next door to Penny’s mum, Dorothy. Everybody was connected with sticky, tangled tape. But Lewis was different.

It was as though he had come from nowhere.

On the day that Louisa met Lewis, she noticed his eye colour before anything else: before his torn violet trousers, before the grease in his hair, before the way he gestured wildly with his hands when he spoke. She noticed all these things later, one by one. But firstly, she noticed his eyes. They were the exact green that her father’s eyes had been.

She wondered for a few seconds when she met Lewis and noticed his apple green eyes what might have become of her father’s apple green eyes, which were buried deep in the ground. Then she pushed the terrifying thought to the back of her mind and asked Lewis if he would like his eggs scrambled or boiled.

The first time Lewis arrived at the boarding house, it was morning. Most guests arrived in the afternoon, in time for tea. But Lewis was different from everybody else. Everybody else’s tea was Lewis’s breakfast. And so he arrived at 8 a.m. on the dot, on the seventh of July.

‘I’m performing in the Tower Circus and need somewhere to stay,’ Lewis said simply when he arrived.

‘Ah. So you aren’t staying with the other performers?’ Louisa asked.

‘No. I’m just temporary. I don’t know anybody else. They’ve got me in to cover somebody who was in a car accident.’

‘So, what’s your trick?’ Louisa felt as though somebody had opened a door somewhere, and a chill spread over her bare arms.

Lewis leaned forward and Louisa was suddenly in his world for a moment: animals and sequins and musty backstage smells and clapping crowds.

‘That would be telling. Do you have a breakfast for me? Or shall I find somewhere else?’

And so Lewis had his eggs scrambled and slept in Room 2, and stayed for much, much longer than a week.

When all the guests had gone home for the winter, and Louisa’s boarding house sighed with relief, Lewis stayed. He moved seamlessly from Room 2 to Louisa’s room.

‘I would have set up camp in here a long time ago,’ he told Louisa as he pulled off his boots and wriggled into bed, ‘but I didn’t want your guests whispering behind your back.’

‘I think they did that anyway,’ Louisa said. She had seen their dubious, judging glances as she poured Lewis extra tea and gave him the biggest slices of cake. And she didn’t care. They had talked about her when she had invited young men up to her room before, and so she was

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