The Croaking Raven

by Gladys Mitchell

  “It certainly sounds as though we may have an uninvited guest at times,” said Dame Beatrice to Gavin, later.

  “I’m more than ever anxious to have a man about the place when I’m gone, then. A further thought occurs to me. Haven’t Jonathan and Deborah got a bloomin’ great Hound of the Baskervilles? Invite them to bring it with them.”

  Dame Beatrice did so, and Gavin drove off to post that letter and the rest of her correspondence. He got back to the castle at three and announced that he was going to attempt to photograph the interior of the keep. He had already photographed the outside from all angles, and, in addition, the flanking towers, the curtain walls, the gatehouse, the moat, the kitchen garden, the courtyard, and the Tudor house, so the announcement occasioned no surprise to his son.

  “The keep isn’t really much of a place inside,” said Hamish. “There’s nothing you’d want to take a picture of, I shouldn’t think. The outside is smashing, of course.”

  “Yes, but I’d like a complete record,” said his father, “and I haven’t much longer to get it. But there’s no need for you to come with me.”

  “Oh, yes, I’ll come, and then you can take a picture of me standing in front of the ghost.”

  “What ghost?” asked Laura, rather sharply.

  “Oh, well, of course, it isn’t really a ghost. It’s an optical illusion, I suppose you’d call it. I’ll show you.”

  “Right. Lead on, Macduff,” said Gavin. Entrance to the keep was by way of an outbuilding consisting of a steep, straight, well-worn flight of stone steps, roofed over, and protected at the foot and again at the top by stout, wooden, nail-studded doors, but these were open, and appeared to have been so for many years. At the top was a small, vaulted chamber, probably, Dame Beatrice thought, the chapel. To the left of this, two more stone steps led to a railed gallery which ran from end to end of the keep and terminated in a couple of small rooms. Beyond these, the gallery was continued along the other side of the hall.

  These rooms Gavin inspected with the utmost care, for here, if anywhere, did there appear to be adequate shelter for the supposed tramp. Even the closest scrutiny, however, failed to indicate the presence of any recent occupant. They opened out of one another by means of a chevron-moulded archway of late Norman workmanship, and from each of them rose a newel staircase built in the thickness of the wall and leading up to the crenellated parapet of the battlements.

  To keep up the fiction of requiring photographs, Gavin used his camera twice, and the party returned to the entrance to the chapel.

  “I haven’t noticed any ghost,” said Laura to her son.

  “No, you don’t if you walk all round the gallery as we’ve just done, but if you go up those two steps again and walk along nearly as far as those two little rooms, and then turn round and come back here the same way, I’m sure you’ll see what I mean. I only found it out by accident, and since then I don’t much like coming here on my own. I only do it when I tell myself to, just to prove to myself that I can take a dare.”

  Laura walked along the gallery and then turned round. Framed in the doorway to the chapel was a white figure, eerily human and completely motionless. As, feeling slightly shaken, she walked back towards it, it revealed itself as a trick of light and shade against the white-washed chapel wall, and became a Norman archway once more.

  “Well, mamma, could you see what I meant?” her son enquired. Laura nodded.

  “Gave me quite a turn,” she confessed. “You go and look, Gavin. I’d hate to be in this place by myself.”

  Gavin did as he was bidden, and then took the photograph of the little boy, but the child’s figure broke up the illusion. The ghost had disappeared.

  “Remarkable,” said Dame Beatrice, when Hamish had retreated into the chapel so that she, too, could observe the phenomenon. “Most realistic and impressive. Let us all go and have some tea.”

  “Well, we don’t seem to have proved anything about our tramp,” remarked Gavin, when Hamish had gone to bed. “I suppose you feel certain that Zena didn’t pinch that grub and invent the tale about the singing?”

  “You said that Hamish heard it, too.”

  “The girl may have overheard him tell me so, and used the idea to further her own ends. There certainly wasn’t a sign of anybody dossing down in that keep.”

  “I wonder what’s happened to the newel staircases?” said Laura. “Not those which go up to the battlements, but those leading to the ground floor, I mean.”

  “You wouldn’t need them, with that straight flight from the ground floor to the chapel,” said her husband.

  “You would, to get down to what was the undercroft.”

  “All right, I’ll have another look round in the morning, before we go off to this lunch affair with your boat people.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Laura; so together they made an after-breakfast tour of the keep, but all they could see as they peered over from the gallery were some broken-away remnants of what Laura declared might have been the bottom steps of a newel stair leading down from the original floor of the Great Hall to the store-rooms and guard-rooms beneath.

  “You couldn’t get directly into a Norman keep from the courtyard,” Laura explained. “In a place like this, you had to climb the grand stair, as we’ve just done, and then descend from the great hall or the kitchen into the depths. It helped to make it more difficult to take the keep by direct assault, you see. The floor of the Great Hall was the first floor, not the ground floor, of the building, but, of course, it’s gone now.”

  “Then our bird—if we have a bird—must occupy one of the flanking towers in the curtain wall when he’s at home,” said Gavin. “Let’s have a go at those, too, while we’re about it. After all, it was from that one at the end of the kitchen garden that Hamish heard singing.”

  But neither the flanking towers nor the porter’s room over the gatehouse showed signs of occupation.

  “It doesn’t prove anything, though,” said Laura. “If there is anyone, he knows how to cover his tracks, that’s all.”

  “The nights on which he seems to operate are suggestive, don’t you think?” asked Gavin, after a moment’s silence.

  “It hadn’t occurred to me. What, exactly, do you mean?”

  “It seems to me that he collects from us on the nights of the early closing day in the nearest town.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a tramp. It means he’s got money enough to buy his own food. He’s only caught short on Wednesdays, when the shops aren’t open, and, I suppose, on Sundays. Is that what you mean? But surely he could lay in a store, if that’s so?”

  “Well, no. I’m beginning to think that we have a permanent guest, and one who doesn’t want to leave any traces of his presence. He eats every scrap of food on the day he gets it, and that covers his tracks, you see.”

  “I suppose it couldn’t be Mrs. Dysey, could it? Anyhow, I hate the idea of our having a regular visitor.”

  “I agree. If Jon can’t come, I shall take you and Hamish away.”

  “Don’t go all Edward Moulton-Barrett on me! I should never leave Mrs. Croc. alone in a place like this, so come off it, please! Meanwhile, where do we go from here? At this moment, I mean.”

  “You will go to the room vacated by Zena and now tenanted by our bales and boxes, and I shall remain in the keep, from various portions of which I propose to lift up my voice in song. I shall choose sundry of our old Scottish airs, keeping a record of whereabouts I am when I sing each one; you will keep your shell-like ears flapping and make a note of which tunes, if any, you hear. Do not look out of the window.”

  “Right. It sounds a rather infantile reconstruction, but it may be none the worse for that. Hamish is wolfing soft fruit and young peas in the kitchen garden, though, and will see us. Won’t he wonder what we’re up to?”

  “If he asks, I shall reply, with the truth which is its own best concealment, that we are testing the acoustics of the place. Push off, then, and do an aural Sister An
ne. I will come and find you when the performance is at an end.”

  “You’ve got a baritone voice. What if the singer is a tenor, or even a soprano? We don’t know whether it’s a man or a woman, do we?”

  “Don’t quibble. Your job is to listen, and to listen good—and don’t use that famous imagination of yours!”

  When they foregathered in the room which had been Zena’s, Laura said,

  “I heard one tune. How many tunes did you sing?”

  “I sang five times. Once from the foot of the grand staircase, once from the chapel, once from the middle of the gallery and once from the archway between those two small chambers.”

  “That’s only four.”

  “As a check—you’ll see what I mean in a minute—I sang one tune twice. Which tune did you hear?”

  “Mary of Argyll—just before you came in here.”

  “I thought perhaps you would. I sang that one from the keep first of all, but I sang it again from the foot of that flanking tower at the end of the kitchen garden. It was from there that you must have heard it, if you heard it just before I came in here. Well, I think we’ve tracked this carol-singer to his lair. The trouble is that I shan’t be here next Wednesday night to lie in wait for him.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Guests at the Chalet Dysey

  “I’ll put cooks into my kitchen,

  And stewards in my hall,

  And I’ll have bakers for my bread,

  And brewers for my ale.”

  Fair Annie

  By a quarter to one, the mystery of the witching-hour singer shelved for a time, the Dysey Castle party, as Laura termed herself and the others, had reached the spot where the river flowed into the lake. Their hosts were at hand to meet them. Dame Beatrice and Laura were taken on board the boat with the auxiliary engine, which was controlled by the uncle, and Gavin and Hamish stepped into the punt and were poled upstream by the nephew.

  Names were exchanged and introductions effected when the parties had disembarked, and then the guests were taken up to the chalet for cocktails.

  “Heard about you,” said the older man to Dame Beatrice. “Oh, not only from this girl of yours,” he hastened to add, totally ignoring Laura’s status of wife and mother. “Was at Warwick Castle the other day. Saw your name in the Visitors’ Book—oh, it might not have been there—some other damn’ place, maybe. Asked about you.”

  “That was very kind of you,” said Dame Beatrice meekly. “And as you bear the same name as that of the castle in which I am staying, it would ill become me to suggest that Warwick Castle puts my present domicile slightly in the shade.”

  “Yes, Warwick does make our place look a bit on the small side,” said Laura, noting that her husband and Hamish were conversing earnestly with the younger man, whose name was also Dysey. (“Call me Henry. Saves confusion,” he had suggested.)

  “Don’t apologise,” said the older Mr. Dysey, to Dame Beatrice. “Warwick’s mostly fourteenth century. Modern, in fact, by Dysey standards.”

  “It began life as a motte and bailey, anyway,” said Laura, who had decided, at her first meeting with the older man, that the best way to get on with him was to disagree with him as often and as aggressively as possible. “1068, according to Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, and they ought to know. Besides, it’s still got the remains of a shell keep, so where does the fourteenth century come in? And what about our Tudor house?”

  “Dysey has been altered and added to, so has Warwick, of course. Don’t talk through your hat, young woman! Why, just look at the residential block at Warwick!”

  “Warwick was one of William the Conqueror’s castles, anyway,” retorted Laura. “It was contemporary, if not quite with Hastings, at least more or less with Nottingham, York, Lincoln, Cambridge, and Huntingdon. There are fourteenth-century additions, of course, and that reminds me—but never mind that now. I wonder why they hit upon the bear and the ragged staff, though, as the coat of arms? One knows about the Prince of Wales’s feathers, and Talbot and his hound, but whence derives the badge of the Earls of Warwick?”

  “It is said,” observed Dame Beatrice, “that the first earl (if we may call him so) was named Arth or Arthgal, from the Latin ursa, a bear. One cannot determine whether the appellation was intended to be complimentary or the reverse, but it is likely that it was the former, since he is reputed to have been a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table. The second earl, Morvid, vanquished a giant who was armed with a torn-up tree from which he had stripped the branches, thus providing himself with ‘the ragged staff.’ To commemorate his victory over this ogre, Morvid added the device to his father’s crest of the bear.”

  “I wonder how the Dysey crest and motto came about?” said Laura, looking at the bearer of the name. “I still think it’s a strange one. The ravens are all right, I suppose—although a bit reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe—but I can’t think what to make of the motto. Salve Domina! Do you know whether there was once a convent or a monastery on the site?”

  “Oh, it’s an old-wives’ tale,” said Dysey, impatiently. “The story goes that one of the Dyseys—it’s a very old name, you know—took for his second wife a woman who was said to be a witch. He had a son of seventeen by his first marriage, and, according to the story, it wasn’t long before the witch grew tired of the old man and tried to seduce the young ’un. When she found she couldn’t—the boy was thinking of taking holy orders, or some such unlikely nonsense—she revenged herself on father and son by turning them into ravens, together with the first wife, whom she resurrected. They’re said to have squawked around the village, nipping the children and terrifying everybody, until the villagers bribed a couple of the castle bowmen to shoot them. As they died they were changed back to their normal shapes and the witch had the bowmen hanged.”

  “And the Salve Domina motto?”

  “The heir, a distant cousin also named Dysey, is supposed to have come to the castle and greeted the dame with those words, but they were a signal to his men to take her prisoner. He burnt her for a witch and took the ravens as his crest and the treacherous words as his motto.”

  “And I suppose the boy and the witch and the two bowmen take it in turns to haunt the castle! We think we’ve got a ghost, you know,” said Laura, with an air of innocence.

  “A ghost? What sort of a ghost?” He sounded startled, she thought.

  “Well, he sings and he eats.”

  “Nonsense! Come on in and have lunch.”

  When lunch was over and the party were in garden chairs on the close-cut turf of the riverside garden, coffee was brought out to them by the housekeeper and, while they were drinking it, the older Dysey returned to the subject of the ghost.

  “Sings and eats?” he asked. Laura scowled at him and indicated that Hamish was now with them. Dysey accepted the unspoken rebuke, nodded and, turning to the boy, said, “Like to take a trip on the river with Henry here?”

  “Yes, please, if Mr. Henry Dysey doesn’t mind,” said Hamish, his face lighting up with pleasure.

  Henry finished his coffee and raised his eyebrows at Laura, but she smiled and indicated her husband.

  “Well, that’s settled that, then,” said Dysey, when the three had gone. “Now we can talk. Your ghost may be Tom, of course.”

  “Tom?” said Dame Beatrice.

  “Yes. Brother of mine who bashed his silly head in, falling down the steps of that damn’ tower.”

  “We heard something about that,” said Dame Beatrice. “But, granted that the deceased may indulge in ghostly song, would he also need to sustain himself with food purloined from my larder?”

  Dysey appeared to give the question close consideration.

  “If it isn’t Tom, then it would be Eustace,” he said.

  “Is Eustace still among us, I wonder?”

  “Well, it’s a nice point. He was, when I last saw him, but he’s been away for some time now. Has to go when Etta lets the castle, you see. At least, I suppose that’s the w
ay it goes.”

  “A man named Eustace Dysey was a patient of mine for some months after he was invalided out of the Royal Air Force at the conclusion of the last world war.”

  “That would be the fellow. Bats in the belfry, poor chap. Always trying to claim that the Dysey estate, such as it is, belongs to him.”

  “We talked about the castle when he was under my care. He seemed very proud of it, and always spoke of it as his home.”

  “It is his home to the extent that Tom and Etta let him live with them, but, actually, his claim is exactly the same as my own, so far as we know.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Laura, somewhat surprised that Dame Beatrice had not rebutted the charge that Eustace Dysey had been mentally afflicted.

  “It’s a silly story. Fact is, Eustace is—or was—my twin brother. How old would you say I am?”

  Laura dodged this embarrassing question.

  “As old as you feel, same like me, and I usually feel a fairly skittish twenty-two or so,” she said.

  “You do, do you? Well, I shall be fifty-one this coming November. I’ll bet you thought I was twenty years older than that. Come clean. You did, didn’t you, now?”

  “No, I certainly did not. I did think you were a little older than you say. But,” she went on, determined to get away from the subject, “if you had a twin, surely one of you, so far as the law is concerned, would be considered older than the other? I thought that when it comes to inheriting property, and so forth, the twin who was actually born first has to be considered the rightful heir.”

  “Ah, well, Tom, our older brother, was the heir until his death, of course, but that’s where the fun begins. Nobody claims to know whether Eustace or I was born first. We got mixed up, it seems. They tied a blue ribbon on to the one of us who was born first, and put a pink ribbon on the other—simply for convenience in telling us apart, you see—but my mother’s sister comes along and cheeps out that we’re both boys, so why have they cissied one of us up with a pink ribbon? Well, she picks us up and yells to a young housemaid, or some other stupid girl, to change the pink ribbon for a blue one, and by the time we’re both blued up and she’s put us back in our cots, she admits she may have switched us over, and she can’t say for certain which is which. So there you are. Not that it mattered until Tom took that tumble and died of it. Now it’s anybody’s guess who inherits. Depends whether the obvious heir is still alive.”