Free Shiverton Hall by Emerald Fennell Page B

daughters out of their carriages. Having made their money in textiles, it seemed that each member of the Gordon clan felt compelled to wear all of their materials at once; each of them was bedecked in a startling rainbow of colours. Against the severe, grey landscape, a servant remarked that it looked like ‘a cage of parrots had been released ’.
    The Gordons were a jovial, excitable lot, still not quite accustomed to the extreme wealth that had poured from their factories like smoke, and they ran through Shiverton Hall in a flurry of silks, squealing and laughing and pointing at all of the staid furniture and pictures. Mrs Gordon planned to paper the walls purple and silver the moment she could hire a specialist from London, and Mr Gordon planned to host an enormous ball as soon as he could get the invitations out. The teenaged Misses Gordon squealed even more loudly at this idea, since it was an opportunity to have new dresses made and to flirt with all the local gentry. As Mr Gordon loved nothing more than indulging his daughters, the date was set and the theme planned before they had even sat down for their first lunch.
    The servants, some fresh from London, others experienced hands from Grimstone, were thrilled to have Mr Gordon as their master. There had been some initial mutterings below stairs that the Gordon family were not appropriate tenants for such a large and famous house as Shiverton Hall, but these reservations melted away in the warmth of the Gordons’ good temper. The servants wondered, between themselves and under their breath, whether they should inform the family of the Shiverton curse, but the hall itself felt so light and joyful that after a few weeks they rather doubted that such a thing had ever existed.
    The house, for so long a cold, dark place, had become a bustle of happy activity. In one room, a daughter would be hammering away at the harpsichord; in another there would be a raucous game of sardines; in the ballroom someone would be practising their dancing. The hall echoed with Mrs Gordon’s ebullient laugh because Mr Gordon felt obliged to tickle her every time he asked her a question about anything, so that an enquiry as to what they were having for supper was invariably punctuated with Mrs Gordon’s delighted squawking.
     
    One morning, as the Gordon daughters and their mother gossiped over their poached eggs, Mr Gordon appeared at the breakfast table with a rare furrowed brow.
    ‘Whatever is the matter, my love?’ Mrs Gordon asked, ladling lamb kidneys on to her husband’s plate.
    Mr Gordon glanced nervously at the servants and leaned confidentially towards his family. ‘I must admit, my dears, I had not a single wink of sleep last night,’ he said, mopping at his forehead with his napkin.
    ‘Why ever not, Papa?’ the youngest daughter asked. ‘It takes at least three attempts to wake you most mornings!’
    Mr Gordon raised his eyebrows at his daughter, but had to concede that this was true. Usually he would say goodnight to his wife and walk across the hall to his bedroom, where he would immediately fall into a heavy sleep for a full ten hours. But on the previous night nothing could have been further from normal.
    ‘It was most extraordinary,’ he said, poking at the kidneys. ‘I got into bed, put out the light, and was just beginning to doze off, when I had the peculiar sensation of someone tickling my nose.’
    ‘Tickling?’ Daughter Number Two giggled.
    ‘Yes,’ Mr Gordon continued quite seriously. ‘As though I were being tickled by a feather.’
    ‘Well!’ Mrs Gordon said, eyeing her offspring. ‘That’s easily explained. I expect our girls were playing a trick on you.’
    The Misses Gordon denied this vehemently, with the eldest bursting into tears at the accusation. Once Mr Gordon had calmed her down and assured her that he had not for a moment suspected his darling daughters, he described what happened next.
    ‘I lit the candle and found nothing in my bed