by Susan Hill
He shuddered suddenly, and got up and began to pace about the room, rubbing his hands together in agitation.
‘You speak almost as if you had known him, as if he had done you personal harm.’
‘Not I.’ he said. ‘Others.’
He faced me again. ‘Let him lie. Do not open the book.’
‘I am grateful to you, as I have said. I understand more now, much more. But I would ask you to trust me to read further for myself. I cannot leave it there and be so easily deterred, without proving things to myself at least.’
‘You are a stubborn man.’
Yes. In this matter I seemed to have become one, to be gripped by a force outside myself, an urge to go and penetrate to the heart of the mystery, and stare into it with my own eyes. I had never known such a determination, unless it had been at those times when I had passionately wanted to journey into some unknown region, some danger, following in Vane’s footsteps. I was aware that in this matter, as in no other, I was not myself. I was almost like a man possessed.
Then Dancer said, his voice almost a whisper, ‘Whoever touches, explores, follows after Vane, will be run mad, and will never afterwards rest his head or enjoy his peace or have a home. He will be haunted. He will be cursed. I saw what lay ahead, Monmouth. I drew back.’
A door opened. I heard the infant laughing, a soft, innocent laugh.
I looked at Dancer. ‘But,’ I said, at last, and realised the stark truth even as I spoke it, ‘unlike you, I have nothing at all to lose.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dancer’s manner changed. As soon as he understood, by my quiet determination, that I intended to continue with my plans no matter what, he dropped his solemn manner, and any attempt to prevent me, and became relaxed again and even cheerful, albeit in a slightly more restrained way than before. It was as though a shadow had fallen and an invisible barrier been set up between us, and for that I was sorry. I liked the man, and I wanted to retain his friendship – it might be that, in the days to come, I would need it.
I did not stay at his house for lunch. Instead, Dancer took me back through the schoolyard towards the cloisters, a quieter man now, no longer chatting about our surroundings, but, instead, telling me as much as he knew about the references to Conrad Vane that would be available to me.
‘I hope you will not be disappointed, and feel your visit here has been fruitless,’ he said. ‘What you will find is very dull stuff, lists and so forth – nothing out of the way at all, perhaps nothing to suit your purpose.’
I did not believe him, but I replied, ‘Perhaps not, but I have to make a start and this is the best place to do so. I daresay it will lead me elsewhere very soon.’
‘Possibly, possibly.’
He darted ahead of me, to open the baize door at the top of the steps. The panelled corridor was cool and dim but some sunlight came shafting through here and there, picking up the motes of dust which spun about within them.
‘I imagine there is rather more in the way of bustle and activity here, during the school term.’
‘A little, though the boys do not come here of course.’
‘Never?’
‘Not unless they’re in trouble! A senior boy might visit a tutor from time to time, but for the most part it retains its hushed and learned atmosphere.’
‘Do no families live here?’
‘No – as I said, we married men are housed in King’s Walk.’
We were reaching the end of the corridor. The library was ahead.
I wanted to ask directly about the crying boy, and dared not. As we came up to it, I could not restrain myself from looking left at the recessed oak door, behind which I had heard his desperate sobbing.
It was not there.
I stopped dead.
‘Is something wrong?’ Dancer was looking back at me with concern. He had taken out a bunch of keys and was sorting through them. I did not reply, but turned and walked slowly back, the whole way along the corridor, to the corner, and the entrance to my own rooms. Then I retraced my steps. Every other door was as I had recalled, and seen it, the brass plates there, as before. Only the dark door behind the half-drawn curtain was not.
Dancer was staring at me.
‘My dear man, are you unwell? You are deathly pale.’
I took several deep breaths, trying to steady myself. I did not want to tell him anything.
He watched me, grave-faced.
‘It is nothing. I am subject to these moments of faintness – giddiness – they are alarming to others but do not bode any ill, they are not at all serious. I daresay that it is merely a mild, inherited weakness.’ I heard myself, babbling on.
‘Very well.’
He did not pursue the matter, but turned back to the library door, continuing to search through his keys.
‘I have so many, there are so many doors in this place. If I have mislaid it, I shall have to step back and find Droggett, he will let us in.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said cautiously, ‘the door will be unlocked.’
‘No, no, the library is never left open, there are some very rare and valuable things. We have never surprised any thieves, but terrible damage could be caused by some accident, and the loss would be incalculable.’
Yet the library door had been open the previous night.
‘Ah!’ He selected a key. ‘It is very similar to two others.’
Now he would find it open. I supposed that the porter had been careless and would be in trouble for it.
Dancer was bending. ‘There – it is always a little stiff when no one has been in for a day or two.’ He gave a sharp twist of his hand and pressed down. For a second, the lock held and then gave. I heard a click and the key turned. Dancer opened the door.
The library was exactly as I had seen it the previous night, and quite empty. We stepped inside and he surveyed it, swept his hand round in an expansive gesture. ‘This is one of the most ancient parts of the school, as old as the chapel. It is known as the Old Library, to distinguish it from the school library, but also as The King’s Room – it was established by him. There are documents actually relating to King Henry, deeds, a royal charter – they are kept in strong boxes in the muniment room alas, and I do not have access to them. But I can show you other treasures …’
By the time I had followed him around the room for some fifteen minutes, I had recovered my composure and although I did not take in much of what he was saying I looked, with as great a show of interest as I could muster, as he opened cupboards and lifted up glass display cases, pulled out books, showing me the library’s most rare and precious volumes as proudly as if he himself were owner of them. Every so often, he shot me a keen glance but for the most part he was so carried away with excitement and enthusiasm that I might not have been there and did not need to do more than admire, as I was bid.
But at last he closed an early printed book, scattered with fine woodcuts of martyrs, snapped shut the brass clasp that bound it, and said, ‘Now – Vane. The archive is over here,’ and led me briskly back down the room to the shelves I had begun to examine the night before – if indeed I had, if the door had indeed been open, if I had not been dreaming.
But they were as I had seen them, the leather-bound school journals and records, row after dull row. I had been here.
Dancer went briskly about other bays, and twice up to the stacks in the gallery, as well as to some cupboards at the far end of the library, returning with piles in his arms, travel journals, volumes of letters, geography, a history of the school.
‘Anything by Vane, or which mentions him – and there is really very little and much of it will be quite without interest – it is all here.’
He stacked the books on a table in a window bay. Others were piled around it on the floor.
I looked out. The tall windows gave onto the gardens leading down to the towpath and the river. I could see the curve of the wooden bridge, and I let my eye rest upon it, a firm, sure thing, spanning the sparkling water,
it was a scene which I wanted to hold before my eyes as long as I could, for reassurance, for I had begun to feel that I might be slipping gradually and uncontrollably into some uncertain nightmare world, where things changed and shifted, and I could no longer trust to my own senses.
I realised that Dancer was waiting beside me, silently.
‘Thank you,’ I said hurriedly, ‘it is very good of you to go to so much trouble and, now I have everything I could possibly need, I will simply get down to work at once. I don’t want to take up any more of your time.’
‘You will find paper and writing materials, everything of that sort, in these drawers. If there is anything else …’
‘Indeed, yes. Thank you.’
‘We are always available to you – you are to come to us – you must not hesitate – join us, for meals, conversation – I do not want to think of you here too much alone.’
It was a welcome invitation and one that comforted me. I thanked him again, assured him that I accepted it in advance for whenever the need or desire for his company and that of his family should arise.
He left me, his brisk footsteps going off down the corridor, out of my hearing. The library was quite silent. I listened intently, but the breathing sound had gone. I stood on at the windows, looking out for a little longer at the sunshine on snow, and, as I looked, I saw a little line of people, and realised that they were Dancer’s wife, together with a young girl I took to be the nursemaid, and the children. They were going slowly towards the bridge, the little boys scuffling about and throwing snowballs – I could see them laughing and calling out, see their bright, rosy, upturned faces, their gleeful expressions, though I could hear nothing at all, they were too far below. The woman had set the baby down now and was urging it to walk a step or two, but it stood uncertainly, wobbled, and then plonked down in a flurry of snow, and the others crowded around it, laughing and prancing in delight, and it seemed to me then that the glorious morning, the sunshine, the snow, the blue sky and the beautiful old buildings all around, with the river beyond, were a sort of happy paradise and they enjoying it in their young innocence. But I was not part of it, I was excluded, and could only look on, sealed away behind the high windows in the room above.
I worked my way steadily through the books for about three hours with scarcely a pause, save for one trip back to my rooms to fetch overcoat and scarf – for it was very cold in the library, though Droggett appeared after a time with a bucket of glowing coals, to light a small iron stove that stood on a stone hearth in one corner. But the amount of heat that it gave out was pitiful indeed, and my fingers became white and stiff and I fumbled clumsily with the pages. But no one else disturbed me and there were no strange noises, not so much as the creaking of a board. I refused to allow my mind to contemplate the matter of the vanished door and the locked library, preferring to get on with the work in hand and tell myself that I had been hallucinating.
I found that Dancer had been right, the records were mainly uninteresting. I found Vane’s school dates and information about which had been his house, saw his name in one or two sports teams of the lower divisions, discovered that he had been a rowing coxswain and so forth. On first coming across his name, I felt a slight spurt of excitement, but that soon faded as I ploughed on without anything of greater interest coming to light. It was clear that, for his first two or three years at least, Conrad Vane had had an all-but-anonymous school career, in common with many hundreds of other unmemorable boys.
I glanced at the printed travel journals and other books of descriptive writings. They included Vane’s own three published works, and two or three essays which he had contributed to others, but there was nothing I did not already own, and had read many times. Other books covered much the same ground, and were written by men with whose names I was familiar, including two of those spoken of by Beamish, the bookseller. They mentioned Vane, but only in passing, and in a few he was merely referred to in a footnote.
I began to feel dispirited. I also wondered if Dancer had kept anything back from me.
Beyond the window, the light became grey as the afternoon wore on and the sun went behind the buildings. Once or twice I looked out, noting each time how the river changed from steel to black and that shadows fell across the snow, dulling its surface.
A few times, I paced up and down the long room in an effort to warm myself, and stood up close to the little stove, rubbing my hands. I did not want to eat, I simply read on and on in the peace of the old library, and felt no disturbance in the atmosphere around me, nor had any sense of being observed. All was remarkably tranquil and steadying to the nerves for most of that afternoon.
It was after two o’clock by the time I came to the first hint of anything of more than fleeting interest – a record of a senior school debate. It was upon the subject of Voodoo and Witchcraft, and ‘a prominent and vociferous speaker’ had been C.P.R. Vane. Shortly after that, in a copy of a magazine written and produced by some boys, I found notice of the proposed foundation of The Cloven Hoof Club, ‘a Private Society for investigation, discussion and experiment’, signed C.P.R.V. It sounded like nothing more than a schoolboy attempt to shock, to seem important, mysterious and wicked, without much real harm. I was made more uneasy by a notice, some months later, in the official school Record, that upon the order of the High Master, Dr Birdlip, the Club had been disbanded, and all its activities and any meetings between its former members proscribed.
So – Vane had dabbled in the occult, like many a stupid young man before and after him. It made him a fool, and an unpleasant one too, but I wondered if any of the tales and rumours I had been told amounted to more than gossip that had gathered colour over the years, and stories that had grown more alarming with every re-telling.
I went on turning the pages of the Record, fascinated by the picture it painted of the life of the school half a century before, wondering how much things had changed, discovering small items of interest, such as the fact that Dancer’s father had been Dean, before him, but this was the last volume I intended to peruse that day, for it had grown even colder, the afternoon was drawing in and darkening, and I fancied hot tea and toast, before my fire.
And then I came upon first the report, in the Record, and then, clipped to its page, the account taken from a newspaper, of the death of a boy at Alton. His body had been found, hanging from a beam in a locked room. He had been beaten, and it was stated that, when last seen, and for some days previously, he had appeared to be in a state of distress. He was thirteen years old and his family resided at Kittiscar Hall, in the remote village of the same name in North Yorkshire.
His name was George Edward Pallantire Monmouth.
CHAPTER NINE
In the middle of the night, I remembered the leather trunk.
I woke from an exceptionally deep and quite dreamless sleep into the soft snow-reflected light of the bedroom, and, as I did so, I had a clear picture in my mind of the shabby brown trunk, with domed lid and iron handles, which contained everything I had kept from the things in my Guardian’s bungalow in Africa. He had not hoarded possessions, and by the time I had cleared out, and given away the everyday domestic stuff, there had been mainly books left, together with a few treasures he had collected over his nomadic life, and some personal items I had not felt it right to part with. Immediately after his death I had gone very thoroughly through his papers, partly out of necessity, in order to clear up any business affairs, but also in the hope of finding something relating to myself, some small clue as to my parentage and background. There had been nothing. It was as though I had come newly into the world when I arrived here at the age of five, and had had no previous existence. Whether he had deliberately destroyed any papers I did not know, and, as soon as I saw that there was nothing, I had ceased to trouble myself about the matter; I had simply packed up what I wanted, or thought ought to be kept, and stored the trunk, along with a few things of my own, in a vault in the city some miles away. There they had remained until I
had begun to make my arrangements to return to England. Now, the trunk stood, still strapped and undisturbed, together with the rest of my belongings that had been delivered by the shipping company to Number 7, Prickett’s Green.
I did not know why it should now have come quite so vividly into my mind, but I lay and thought about the trunk, looked at it, as it were, in my imagination, unstrapped it and lifted the lid, but I could not recollect very much about what it contained, for I remembered little about that time. I only knew that I had to sort through everything anew, for I was even more desperate to find some trace of my former existence.
George Edward Pallantire Monmouth. Was it the purest and most bizarre coincidence that he bore my own surname? Had he anything whatsoever to do with me?
I would not rest until I had found out. In my heart, I was certain there must be some connection, that that was why I had been so driven by my intense interest in Conrad Vane. I believed that, in some way, my family had had dealings with him, and that the dead boy had some connection with me.
Was it his poor ghost that I had heard sobbing behind the door? Was he the pale boy? Had he been trying to attract my attention, haunting me in a desperate effort to seek my help? And what did he want? Peace? Succour? Or vengeance? All things seemed possible, that night, things I had never before dreamed of as likely, but would always have dismissed out of hand. My recent experiences had begun to open my mind, but it had not been until I had come here to Alton, read what I had read yesterday afternoon, and begun to uncover the truth about Conrad Vane, and above all seen the name, George Edward Pallantire Monmouth, set out before me, that I had been fully convinced of things that lay out of sight, below the surface of the ordinary world.
