The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  The horde of spirits floated away on the air, as in a witches’ Sabbath, to the vault whence it issued. The doors swung on their rusty hinges, and closed behind them. Maisie stood alone with the hand that grasped her on the tower.

  The shock of the grasp, and the sudden departure of the ghostly band in such wild dismay, threw Maisie for a while into a state of semi-unconsciousness. Her head reeled round; her brain swam faintly. She clutched for support at the parapet of the tower. But the hand that held her sustained her still. She felt herself gently drawn down with quiet mastery, and laid on the stone floor close by the trap-door that led to the ladder.

  The next thing of which she could feel sure was the voice of the Oxford undergraduate. He was distinctly frightened and not a little tremulous. “I think,” he said very softly, laying her head on his lap, “you had better rest a while, Miss Llewelyn, before you try to get down again. I hope I didn’t catch you and disturb you too hastily. But one step more, and you would have been over the edge. I really couldn’t help it.”

  “Let me go,” Maisie moaned, trying to raise herself again, but feeling too faint and ill to make the necessary effort to recover the power of motion. “I want to go with them! I want to join them!”

  “Some of the others will be up before long,” the undergrad­uate said, supporting her head in his hands; “and they’ll help me to get you down again. Mr. Yates is in the belfry. Meanwhile, if I were you, I’d lie quite still, and take a drop or two of this brandy.”

  He held it to her lips. Maisie drank a mouthful, hardly knowing what she did. Then she lay quiet where he placed her for some minutes. How they lifted her down and conveyed her to her bed she scarcely knew. She was dazed and terrified. She could only remember afterward that three or four gentlemen in roughly huddled clothes had carried or handed her down the ladder between them. The spiral stair and all the rest were a blank to her.

  VI

  When she next awoke she was lying in her bed in the same room at the Hall, with Mrs. West by her side, leaning over her tenderly.

  Maisie looked up through her closed eyes and just saw the motherly face and grey hair bending above her. Then voices came to her from the mist, vaguely: “Yesterday was so hot for the time of year, you see!” “Very unusual weather, of course, for Christmas.” “But a thunderstorm! So strange! I put it down to that. The electrical disturbance must have affected the poor child’s head.” Then it dawned upon her that the conversation she heard was passing between Mrs. West and a doctor.

  She raised herself suddenly and wildly on her arms. The bed faced the windows. She looked out and beheld—the tower of Wolverden church, rent from top to bottom with a mighty rent, while half its height lay tossed in fragments on the ground in the churchyard.

  “What is it?” she cried wildly, with a flush as of shame.

  “Hush, hush!” the doctor said. “Don’t trouble! Don’t look at it!”

  “Was it—after I came down?” Maisie moaned in vague terror.

  The doctor nodded. “An hour after you were brought down,” he said, “a thunderstorm broke over it. The lightning struck and shattered the tower. They had not yet put up the lightning-conductor. It was to have been done on Boxing Day.”

  A weird remorse possessed Maisie’s soul. “My fault!” she cried, starting up. “My fault, my fault! I have neglected my duty!”

  “Don’t talk,” the doctor answered, looking hard at her. “It is always dangerous to be too suddenly aroused from these curious overwrought sleeps and trances.”

  “And old Bessie?” Maisie exclaimed, trembling with an eerie presentiment.

  The doctor glanced at Mrs. West. “How did she know?” he whispered. Then he turned to Maisie. “You may as well be told the truth as suspect it,” he said slowly. “Old Bessie must have been watching there. She was crushed and half buried beneath the falling tower.”

  “One more question, Mrs. West,” Maisie murmured, growing faint with an access of supernatural fear. “Those two nice girls who sat on the chairs at each side of me through the tableaux—are they hurt? Were they in it?”

  Mrs. West soothed her hand. “My dear child,” she said gravely, with quiet emphasis, “there were no other girls. This is mere hallucination. You sat alone by yourself through the whole of the evening.”

  Eliza Lynn Linton

  CHRISTMAS EVE IN BEACH HOUSE

  Eliza Lynn Linton (1822-1898) provides an interesting juxtaposition with the author of the previous story: while Grant Allen wrote in support of feminism, many of Linton’s writings took a strongly anti-feminist slant. A New York Times article in 1898 termed her “vixenish,” writing, “Her dislikes were many . . . toward modern society ways, thoughts, and manners . . . It is difficult to understand how a sweet-faced old lady with white locks, gold spectacles, and a placid manner wrote such sharp, incisive words.” Linton was the author of a number of novels, none of which were very successful, and she supported herself by writing hundreds of stories and articles for various periodicals, including this rare venture into horror fiction published in Routledge’s Christmas Annual in 1870.

  It seemed as if the Mackenzies were under a spell, and that none of the men were ever destined to die in their beds. We sometimes see this strange law of persistent accident run through a family, and generation after generation fulfils what looks like the ordained decree, either of violent death or loss by fire, either of shipwreck or that mysterious and sudden disappearance when a person “goes under” like a stone in the water, and is never heard of again. I, who write this, know of a family where the law of “running away” has been in force for four generations; one or more lads of each brood having run away from home, school, or legal master as the case might be—some turning up again after a season of wild-oat sowing, perhaps all the better for the process, but others gone for ever, and their ultimate fate a mystery never cleared up.

  The law of the Mackenzies was, as I have said, a violent end. Old Zachary the grandfather, and Michael the father, of Captain Charles, had both died of their sins, or as the traditional phrase went “died standing;” and Captain Charles himself had disappeared. He was a married man, but a wild one, according to the way of the Mackenzies; and ten years ago had been serving with his regiment in Cornwall, while his wife and two children were left behind in London. No one ever knew more of him than that he was reported absent when he should have returned to his quarters at Truro, after a week’s leave; and that from that time to this he was missing, and had left no trace behind. Every effort had been made to find him, but without success; and his family had by now almost given up the hope not only of seeing him again but of knowing what his end had been; though indeed his widow, poor soul, who loved him as certain women do love scampish men, handsome, affectionate, generous, and unfaithful, still clung to hope against hope, and refused to wear the conventional weeds, or do more than “provisionally” administer to his effects. Still, there the mystery of his fate remained, and it looked likely enough to remain a mystery to the end of time. Meanwhile the son grew up, and went out into the world; and now the daughter Alice had just married Walter Garwood, a young man of some means and roving habits, and so had begun life on her own account when this story opens.

  Walter Garwood, an artist by temperament and a rentier by profession—which means of no profession at all—had one absorbing passion, namely, a love for the wild sea-coast, which he must enjoy in the most absolute solitude if he would enjoy it at all. So he took Alice down for their honeymoon to Cornwall, a country which he knew by heart so far as its coast line went, though he was not a Cornish man by birth; and the fair delicate young London girl was soon initiated into the mysteries of loveliness to be found in rolling seas and weather-beaten crags, with a solitude almost as deep as death.

  At first they lived in small towns and villages, wandering from place to place as the fancy took them, and moving always farther away from anything like “centres,” till at last the proximity of a mere village seemed too close a contact wi
th humanity, and nothing but the completest isolation would content the eremitical young artist. When therefore he heard that Beach House was vacant—a lone place among rocks and cliffs, miles away from any town, and not within call of any other gentleman’s house, the nearest neighbours of which were half a dozen fishermen in a hamlet some two miles off—he resolved at once upon taking it, as a man who knows his own mind and who has found what he wants. It was in a dilapidated state enough. The garden, or what had once been the garden, was a mere tangled wilderness of weeds; the house wanted all sorts of repairs; but money and taste can do a great deal even when far removed from “centres;” and Alice was as yet too young a girl, and too fond a bride, to have a will of her own or to find a flaw in her husband’s. To be sure she was a little shocked when she saw the barren, deserted, God-forgotten ruin out of which Walter meant to build her a home that was to be the most beautiful thing in England; but if he said it would be beautiful she was sure it would be so, and in her simple faith began to take a profound interest in everything about the place, and to enjoy going over to superintend with her husband the alterations and improvements he was making. In time the work was done, though it had been a weary time about; but then, Cornish workmen are not the quickest in England; and just as October set in, the young people took possession, and began their home life in earnest.

  It was indeed a wild and lonesome home that Walter had chosen for his wife! Sea-fowl screamed about it, and the angry waves beat up on the iron-bound coast, and every now and then a vessel, mastered by the wind, drifted close upon the rocks where lay the doom of many men; but the scene in general was of nothing but a wild waste of waters, with the bold headlands to the side running far out into the sea, and the sunset flooding the sky with gold or bathing it in blood. The house itself was set on a secondary height overshadowed by a huge cliff; so that it was just out of the reach of the highest tides, though it was drenched with the spray flung up by the storms that break so often on that fierce northern Cornish coast. The rugged cliff that rose above seemed to shut off all access to the upper world, and the wild rough shore below was no pathway to civilization. The only road that led to or from the house was a steep winding way but little used; indeed it had been totally unused by all wheeled vehicles for the last six or seven years, during which time the place had been empty; consequently it had become overgrown with weeds, rutted and channelled with winter rains, and in parts as unsafe as it was everywhere unsightly.

  Truth to tell, Beach House had always been a difficult property to let. About eight years ago a family had taken it, after about the same length of time of desertion, but they had left it after a short term of uneasy occupation; since when it had got a bad name among the fishermen of the little hamlet, for more than the traditionary shelter it afforded to smugglers and wreckers—which indeed would not have much daunted them—and he would have been a bold man who would have denied the report that it was haunted—the fishermen said, with ghosts—the landsmen added, smugglers. Be that as it may, both fishermen and landsmen were shy of passing it any time after sundown; and more than one belated sinner had been scared into sobriety and religion for the rest of his life, by the nameless horror of what he had seen or heard at Beach House, somewhere about midnight.

  But the Thing haunting the place was not always equally terrible. It was only about Christmas-time that the worst and most deadly things happened—though indeed when you came to inquire closely, and probe deep, as to what those things were, you could find nothing more definite than, “I was skeared,” and “I dunno what it were, but there was a summit;” and “I heerd a grane and a sigh, and a patter patter of feet, and I rin.”

  The only man who was not afraid was Jem Penreath; and he had volunteered to take charge of the place while it was empty, and had therefore made it his home, and had always kept about it. When asked if he had ever heard or seen anything, he would laugh—and his laugh was not pleasant to hear—and say, “Nay, nay, the ghosts knows me, and I know un, and they know better nor to trouble me with their nonsense, that do un!”

  We may be very sure that nothing of all this was told to the new-comer, Walter Garwood; and when he bought and took possession he was as innocent as a child that the place had a bad name, or that it was supposed to be haunted with ghosts or with smugglers, with the disembodied or the embodied.

  This Jem Penreath was a man whose character fitted in with the house he chose to guard, and whose appearance fitted in with his character. Yet he was handsome in a way: a tall, brawny, broad-shouldered man, with a reddish-brown beard; long, thick, tangled locks also reddish-brown; dark, deep-set, fiery, eyes; and an expression of lawless daring, that, taken in connection with his tremendous strength, made one shudder. He was known as the most reckless and defying savage of the whole district, and the strongest. Smuggling, drinking, wrecking, or work that would knock up any other man—all came alike to him. He did not seem to value his life more than a rat’s or a crow’s, and no one’s else more than his own. Every one was afraid of him; every one fought shy of him; yet no one knew anything definite against him, or if they did they kept it to themselves. Folks said he had been much worse in these latter times, since Mary Mainfote so strangely disappeared some ten years ago. He had loved Mary all his life, but she had never said the word, and often told her friends she never would. She did not favour Jem Penreath’s addresses, and used to say, tossing her fair head with its wealth of golden hair, that for her own part when she had a man at all she would have one she was not afraid of, and knew the life of.

  “I do not take with dark ways,” she would add; and Jem Penreath’s ways were unquestionably dark.

  Jem swore, many a time, that if she would not be his she should be no other man’s; for that he would “scat the head on un,” if any one dared to take what he desired. And this threat seemed to have frightened his mates; for though Mary was the prettiest girl of the fishing hamlet to which Jem belonged by birth, no man had yet made her his wife, and she was past twenty when she disappeared.

  The last known or seen of her was on Christmas Eve—a wild one—after she had returned from Truro, where she had been staying with an aunt. An old man—he was dead now—said he saw her walking down the rough road which led to Beach House, with a stranger and a gentleman. He was not one of them, nor one he had ever seen before, nor a working man in his Sunday best; he was a gentleman, with black beard and curly hair, and he stood very upright, and they were walking down the road and talking—leastways he was talking to her as if he had summut to say very pressing—and as they got on he put his arm round her waist, and she didn’t seem to say him nay.

  No one else had seen them; at least no one who told anything; but there had been a pair of eyes watching them as well as old David’s, only he who saw them coming down that steep rough road said less than David, and kept his own counsel—as perhaps not being able to share it.

  David’s tale was accepted as final; and after Mary’s disappearance it was set down as a fact that she had gone off with the strange gentleman who was not known in these parts, and had come to no good, poor lass! But ever since her loss, Jem Penreath, savage as he always was, had become more savage still, more reckless, more Godless, more dangerous every way; till more than once the elders of the hamlet spoke about him among themselves, and said he would do his-self or some on un a mischief afore he was under grass.

  For his strength was something almost terrifying; and he knew, as well as any of them, that he was master of them all when he chose to exert his authority and put out his power.

  He was terribly annoyed when Beach House was sold to young Walter Garwood. It was turning him out of his home, he said, with many a bitter oath; and he prophesied but a short term of ownership for the new-comer.

  “The ghostes would do for un,” he said, with a short laugh. “Them and me bin old friends, but they do take on against new folk. Iss, sure enough the ghostes will do for un!”

  But though the Garwoods had been in possession from October
until now, near Christmas time, their home had as yet been very quiet, and they had heard nothing of either ghosts or smugglers. To be sure there were odd noises every now and again in the house, and queer things occurred about the place that could not be accounted for; but “rats” have broad shoulders, and bear heavy weights in country places. Alice, in her secret heart, added smugglers; but she thought that even if they were in the immediate neighbourhood—in some cave, maybe, among the rocks hard by, of which she and Walter knew nothing—yet so long as she and her husband did not pry, and did not discover, they were safe, and perhaps more than safe; the very fact of their living there—two young, innocent people, who did not smuggle on their own account, who had no connection with smugglers any way, who would not know how to set about smuggling if they tried, or what to do with the things if they had them—being so much of a guarantee for the respectability of the immediate beach, would be justly so much of a protection to their less reputable neighbours: which was not bad reasoning on the part of that young and timid London girl.

  There was one thing however that she did not like—the persistency with which Jem Penreath used to come about the place. From the first she had taken one of those strong, shuddering dislikes to him, not rare with a certain kind of nervous organization. She could not explain why, but his presence filled her with an infinite undefinable dread, and she could never meet his eyes. But she did not say anything to her husband beyond her first expression of dislike, which had not touched Walter very deeply. And he, a born artist, cared more for the man’s picturesque magnificence of build and face than he cared for the evil spirit lurking behind those deep-set flaming eyes; and because he made a striking accessory to the scenes he was so fond of painting, encouraged him to come as often as he liked, and went into raptures over the tones of his grey jersey which the red rays of the setting sun turned to purple, or the value of his scarlet cap among the bleached old rocks, or against the slaty background of the sea. Encouraged then as he was by the master, Jem had no cause to stay away, and every day he came to Beach House on one or other pretext—but as all, save Walter, saw for the main reason of keeping an eye on what was doing there—though neither maid nor man, still less the young mistress, who kept close to her own room when he was about, could divine what it was he wanted to watch, what it was he feared would be found out.