Mirror of Danger by Pamela Sykes, 1973, 1974.

In the beginning, Lucy is an orphan who lives in the countryside with her elderly Aunt Olive. The two of them are very fond of each other. Then, Aunt Olive dies, and Lucy has to go live in London with her distant cousins. Even though Lucy inherited her aunt’s house, there were bills to settle, and the trustees in charge of Lucy’s legacy had to sell the house to pay them and provide money to help support Lucy. Lucy’s cousins have agreed to take her for Christmas, but Lucy isn’t sure whether or not she will be living with them permanently. It depends on how well Lucy gets along with the children of the family. People keep telling her “we’ll see” and reminding her to be brave and sensible and that changes are natural after someone dies. Her trustees and her aunt’s old friends want to do what’s best for Lucy, although they’re secretly a little concerned about whether their plans are what’s best for her. If she doesn’t get along with her relatives, they might have to send her to a boarding school, although they know that type of environment isn’t really suited to Lucy’s personality.

Since Lucy was raised and home-schooled by an elderly and old-fashioned woman, she is not accustomed to living in a big family or with other children and not even accustomed to any type of school environment. The adults who know her understand that Lucy is a quiet, reserved child who acts older than her age. Before she goes to stay with her relatives for Christmas, one of her trustees, Mr. Thomas, talks to Lucy about her life with her aunt and the need to give her other relatives a chance to be friendly. He says that Aunt Olive was an old woman who had a tendency to look back to the past, but Lucy is young and still has her future ahead of her. Mr. Thomas advises her to look forward. However, Lucy can only think of how much she already misses her life with her aunt and how she can’t imagine being happy with these relatives she’s never even met. She escapes thinking about these things by imagining herself other places, immersing herself in past memories.

Lucy feels out of place in her new home and worries if these relatives really want her. The father of the family, called Uncle Peter, is an architect, and the mother, called Aunt Gwen, is an artist who used to design theatrical costumes. Their three children are pretty close in age to Lucy. Patrick is the oldest, Rachel is closest to Lucy’s age, and Bill is the youngest. Their house is an old Victorian house, which pleases Lucy, but she doesn’t like it when she finds out that Uncle Peter is modernizing it. Home renovations are part of what he does as an architect, but Lucy prefers old-fashioned styles to the modern ones, which feel too stark and have garish colors. The children of the family are noisy, and Lucy has to share a room with Rachel, when she’s used to having a room of her own in a quiet, old-fashioned house. Rachel points out that they haven’t been in this house very long themselves, and there are rooms in this house that haven’t been renovated yet. When the renovations are done, Lucy could have one of those rooms for herself, but again, Lucy feels like the renovations are destroying the old-fashioned charm of the place. She doesn’t see why everything has to be new and modern. While she has no idea where else she could go, Lucy just can’t imagine herself living in this house with these people.

Then, Lucy makes an unusual new friend. Alice is a girl about Lucy’s age, and she used to live in the aunt and uncle’s house 100 years before. Now, she haunts it as a ghost. Lucy first sees Alice in a mirror in the attic, where there are many antiques that have been stored away from Alice’s time. Alice brings Lucy back in time to visit her in the Victorian era because Alice is lonely in the past. She has six older siblings, but four of them have already left home to marry or start careers, and two are at boarding school. Her parents are away much of the time, so most of the time, she is alone with her tutor, whom she calls Mademoiselle. Alice says that she really wants someone to play with.

Alice shows Lucy her toys and games, which are all familiar to Lucy, looking like the ones she always played with at Aunt Olive’s house. However, Alice is spoiled and cheats at games to win. The two of them argue about it, and then Alice sends Lucy to the attic because her tutor is coming, and Alice doesn’t want her to see Lucy. Lucy finds herself in the attic in her aunt and uncle’s house in modern times, unsure of what just happened.

Over the next few days, Lucy spends part of her time with her relatives, preparing for Christmas, and part of her time in the Victorian era with Alice, which is also around Christmastime. Things are still awkward between Lucy and her cousins. On the one hand, she has some fun with them, doing things that Aunt Olive would never have allowed her to do, like going to the movies without adults and eating take-out fish and chips. On the other hand, Lucy is still overwhelmed when her cousins get boisterous, and she is repulsed by their ultra-modern Christmas decorations. Although Alice intimidates and even frightens Lucy, whenever things get overwhelming for her in modern life, Lucy retreats into the past with Alice … only for Alice to get intimidating and frightening again as she tries to keep Lucy in the past with her.

In some ways, Lucy feels more comfortable in the past than she does in her aunt and uncle’s modern home. She likes the homey feel of the house as it was in the Victorian era. The old-fashioned Christmas decorations and Alice’s party are far more charming to her than the modern ones, and she likes the old-fashioned party games better than dancing to modern music. However, Lucy becomes increasingly afraid of Alice. Alice tries to trap Lucy in the past and make her forget all about the present. When Lucy resists and tries to remember things about her family or modern times, Alice gets angry and threatens her. She says that she’ll make something bad happen if Lucy tells anybody about her. Alice has sinister intentions for Lucy. Alice is a lonely and selfish child who isn’t above lies, cheating, and manipulation to get what she wants. She exists only in the Victorian era, and what she wants more than anything is a playmate to join her for all eternity. She says that she always gets what she wants. She wants Lucy.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The original British title of this book was Come Back, Lucy, which was also the title of the tv mini-series from 1978 based on the book. You can sometimes see trailers, clips, or episodes from this series online on YouTube. This fan page has more information about the tv mini-series and the book and its author.

My Reaction and Spoilers

The heart of the story is about looking back and living in the past instead of looking forward and living in the present. Aunt Olive, as an elderly woman, had a tendency to live in the past, bringing up Lucy as if she were a Victorian girl instead of a modern one. Because that was the only life Lucy knew from a young age, she clung to it after Aunt Olive’s death. It was what was familiar and comfortable to her when her life was changing, and she needed comfort. Her London relatives know that this is the case, but they’re not sure how to connect with her at first and to help her see that modern times and a new home can also become comfortable.

There’s a difference between just liking old-fashioned, vintage things and styles and the type of living in the past that Lucy does at first. There are people in modern times who still like the Cottagecore aesthetic and who try to live a slower pace of life and enjoy old-fashioned things and simple pleasures, something that came out of the coronavirus pandemic. But, just having a few vintage things and learning to slow down and appreciate the small things in life isn’t quite what Lucy does. It is the sort of thing she misses from the old-fashioned house in the country, where she used to live, but the problem is that she uses her memories of that time, Aunt Olive, and the stories that Aunt Olive used to tell her about life in the past to take her mind off the things and people in the present too much. Whenever things get stressful or upsetting to her, she retreats into past memories, so she doesn’t have to think about how her life has changed or learn to appreciate the things around her or get along with other people. Her relatives can tell that she’s shutting them out, and while they’re sympathetic to her struggling through her grief, it’s also hurtful that she’s rejecting them. She’s not just using her past memories or love of old-fashioned things for comfort but to avoid dealing with things in the present and forming new relationships.

At the same time, Lucy feels like her relatives don’t really care about her or the life she had before she came to them because they never express sympathy about Aunt Olive’s death or ask her any questions about what she was like. However, that’s due to a misunderstanding and miscommunication rather than her relatives trying to ignore Lucy or Aunt Olive’s death. If Lucy had bothered to read Aunt Gwen’s letter to her all the way through before she arrived at their house, she would have known that Aunt Gwen had told her children not to bring up the subject of Aunt Olive until Lucy did because she didn’t want them upsetting Lucy by forcing her to talk about her death if she wasn’t ready. Her relatives planned to wait for Lucy to feel ready to talk to them and for her to raise the subject herself. Because she was too upset to read the letter, Lucy didn’t understand that and has been waiting for them to talk to her first. At the end of the story, Lucy does read the letter, and she and her relatives have an honest talk about everything, including Alice. This is exactly what Lucy needs to free herself from Alice.

Alice is a similar sort of malevolent child ghost to Helen in Wait Till Helen Comes or Emily in Jane-Emily. She is selfish, and she has no concern for Lucy and Lucy’s life and future. Alice is dead, and she lives only in the past because that’s the only place where she can live. She has no future left. The one thing that past Alice is waiting for is a message from her parents, who are looking for a house in the country to buy. When the message finally arrives for her on December 21, 1873, Lucy has her final encounter with Alice on the 100th anniversary of the event. Alice is happy because she wants to move to the new house and live there with her parents, but she’s also decided that she’s going to bring Lucy with her by drowning her in an icy pond. In a frightening scene, she tricks Lucy into walking out on thin ice, but fortunately, Lucy is saved by her cousin Patrick.

After this incident and her brush with death, Lucy is finally able to release all of her bottled-up feelings about Aunt Olive and the changes in her life and explain everything to her relatives about Alice and how Alice has been influencing her to do and say things that upset them. Aunt Gwen had suspected that Lucy had seen a ghost or at least thought that she had, but she had thought that maybe Lucy had seen someone who made her think that she was seeing Aunt Olive’s ghost. Then, Aunt Gwen saw a door in the house open and close by itself, making her think that maybe the ghost was real. Rachel knew that Lucy was upset about someone named Alice because Lucy was talking in her sleep, but she didn’t know who Alice was. By the time Lucy reveals everything, all of her relatives have had encounters with Alice or things Alice caused to happen. Lucy isn’t sure when she explains things whether or not they all believe her that Alice is a real ghost. Aunt Gwen is convinced, and so is Bill because he met Alice face-to-face at one point and can describe her. Uncle Peter does consider the idea that Alice is a ghost in Lucy’s mind, inspired by all of Aunt Olive’s stories about her Victorian youth and the old house they now live in, but then, he looks through more of the things in the attic and finds Alice’s old scrapbook with her final note about moving to the countryside and starting a new life on December 21st. In the context of the story, Alice is a real ghost who posed a real threat to Lucy, and not just the imagining of a distraught child.

There are a couple of factors that end Alice’s threat to Lucy. The first one is getting past the 100th anniversary of Alice leaving the house, which seems to hold great significance to the ghost, like it was her last opportunity to connect with the house in the present. We never find out Alice’s full history or why she haunts the house as a child in the time shortly before she was supposed to move to the country. She simply disappears after her attempt to kill Lucy so she can remain in the past forever and go to her new home with her. Alice is a ghost who is conscious that she is a ghost, and she knows that Lucy lives in a different time period with people who inhabit her house in the future or present time. Because Alice is a child and seems forever stuck as a lonely child, it seems that she died young somehow and is aware of it, but we never find out exactly how that happened. I have a theory that she was killed in an accident on the way to her new home, but we are never told that. It feels like a let-down that we don’t get the rest of the story about Alice, especially because Lucy says that she would like to learn more about the historical Alice so she can think of her more as a person and less as a ghost.

There is a sequel to this book called Lucy Beware, so perhaps more of that information is revealed in the sequel. The sequel is much more rare than the original, book, though. It only rarely comes up for sale, even online. I’ve checked Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Alibris, and Abe Books, and currently, none of them have a copy. It’s not even on Internet Archive. (At least, not yet, as of this writing.) You can try to get the sequel through an interlibrary loan, but not all libraries will loan out books that are considered “rare.”

The most important factor that breaks Alice’s connection to Lucy is Lucy’s changing feelings. Lucy has some control over when she goes back in time and when she returns to the present, although it takes her a while to see it. There are times when she deliberately seeks out Alice in the past, even when Alice disturbs her, because she just finds the present time and her relatives so overwhelming. While she doesn’t really want to stay with Alice in the past forever, especially at the expense of her own life, Alice gives her someone to talk to about things that she can’t bring herself to talk about with her relatives and a place to retreat to so she doesn’t have to think about the present or her future. At one point, Lucy and Rachel are talking about the importance of making plans for the future. Rachel says that everyone needs to think of the future, and she is exhilarated by all of the possibilities that modern life has to offer for young women. However, because of her life with Aunt Olive, who lived mainly in the past, Lucy is unaccustomed to thinking about the future and finds the prospect frightening. To a woman like Aunt Olive, girls should simply receive a basic education and then get married. Beyond that, Lucy doesn’t know what she wants out of life. She has never considered having a career or learning to support herself because Aunt Olive never discussed things like that with her and never prepared her to make decisions like that. At the beginning of the story, Lucy finds it difficult to look much beyond the immediate future anyway because it seems uncertain where she will live since Aunt Olive is gone. However, once she and her relatives open up to each other and it becomes clear that they do want her to stay with them, her doubts and fears about her immediate future are resolved. She has people who love her, care about her feelings, and want her to talk to them about things, so she no longer feels so overwhelmed about her situation and in need of a retreat. Aunt Gwen says that Alice no longer has influence over her because, whether or not Alice still wants Lucy, Lucy no longer wants or needs Alice. Lucy can now face her present and future without feeling the need or temptation to escape into Alice’s past.

It’s true for people who are victims of living narcissists, too. Abusive people count on their victims being unable to leave them, and they even try to gaslight victims into thinking that they really need them in their lives, for some reason. As soon as their victims realize that they can escape and manage without them, their abusers lose their hold on them. Lucy has no more desire to return to her abuser/attempted murderer because she has dealt with the insecurities that made her vulnerable to Alice and kept her tied to the past, and she has forged new bonds with other people.

One other thing that I really liked about this story was the description of the antique games and game pieces that Lucy kept from Aunt Olive’s house. If you’ve never heard the term before, Spillikins is an old name for Pick-up Sticks. One of the more unique gaming pieces was the set of fish-shaped game counters. There were real fish-shaped game counters (link repaired 12-11-23) like that that were used in the 1800s for playing card games.