The Ghost of Fiddler's Hill: Corazon Books Vintage Romance

by Sheila Burns

  It was a remarkable view.

  She sank down into a chair which matched the curtains. The octagon shaping of the room was unusual, something she had never seen before. The furniture was quite lovely, the round polished table set for a meal, the Chippendale chairs and the feeling of comfort, of riches, and of security. Yet she was insecure. She was on edge with fear, for that first fear of the sound which had greeted her on the step had not yet left her.

  Simon brought her a brandy. ‘What a silly little girl it is!’

  She spoke the truth, for he was the man to help her. ‘The house frightens me, it is creepy.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘It just scares me, I have the feeling that it does not like me,’ and this was what she felt deep down within her.

  ‘The house doesn’t know you yet, neither do you know the house.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true … But somehow …’

  That was the moment when she looked up and saw the superb portrait of the girl which had been built into the mantelpiece above the carved shelf. The girl would have been in the early twenties, confidently beautiful. Her eyes were like pansies in a springtime garden, they looked to be purplish and Lindy had never seen anyone with purple eyes before. The girl looked out of the big canvas and she laughed at the world. To her it was an absurd joke! Her hands were dug into her trousers pockets; she wore a creamy pair of slacks and a loose shirt which opened very low indeed, almost audaciously. Yet the girl did not give the idea of impudence, but of a challenge to life. She would venture anything, one knew, she dared defy the world, and she seemed to be asking a question to which she would only accept one answer. It HAD to be the answer that she wanted.

  Her hair followed no set shape, it was lovely glowing hair not brown and not gold. Behind her lay a background of the sea, running into the far distance and paling to nothing as it went. The picture was fascinating and it attracted Lindy’s attention.

  ‘Who is that girl?’ she asked.

  ‘It is Edna.’

  Instantly her mind went to his second wife, the one whom he never seemed to wish to speak about, perhaps because she had run away with another man and he could not forgive her. It seemed all wrong that anyone so provocatively beautiful could ever die. The world had need of that challenging defiance, the eyes like pansies, and the fairish hair. One felt that she was entirely in command of any situation which arose, the type of girl who knew what she wanted and would see that she got it.

  ‘Edna? Your second wife?’

  ‘Yes, but don’t let’s talk of her.’

  ‘But why not? She looks quite lovely. She looks quite exciting. Why can’t we talk of her?’ and again she stared at the half defiant girl, her hands dug deeply into her trousers pockets, her eyes laughing.

  Simon said, ‘I wanted to have the picture removed, but it wasn’t easy. It was built into the wall when the room was built.’

  ‘But this room is part of the house, how could it be built separately?’

  He answered with little emotion. ‘We had the beautiful reception rooms, my study, the boudoir, but I had ideas of entertaining here, perhaps lavishly, and we simply had not got a dining-room.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘This room was a sort of outhouse with three of the walls in the same stone as the house itself. I built on to it. I liked the shape and wanted to use it. When I first planned it, that picture was being painted, and the architect asked why not fix it over the mantelpiece and make it the only picture of the room? He sold me the idea. I liked it immensely at the time.’

  ‘It’s quite lovely. She must have been very, very beautiful.’

  He paused a moment. She got the idea that to talk of Edna annoyed him; he showed that strange look which had come when he had gone quiet this afternoon, a look which she associated with that quietness. Had she irritated him? She might have done, but it was too late to go back. ‘Yes. She was very pretty.’

  ‘And it’s a most beautiful picture.’

  ‘I thought so once. Sometimes I think I hate it now,’ and there was finality in his tone.

  Lindy said no more. She had got the impression that she trod upon a stretch of beach where lay a quicksand. There was something about Simon’s tone which silenced her, something which made her afraid. She had not felt fear until she came here to this house tonight. She had not forgotten that first glimpse of it when they came to the top of Fiddler’s Hill, with the thatched bungalow on one side of the road, and ahead this lone house. She sat there in the very comfortable chair not knowing what to do, and she drank the brandy. It calmed her.

  Then she asked him, ‘Show me all of it? Do show me! You see, I am going to share it with you, and I am so eager to see it.’

  He was flattered by that. He got up at once. ‘Of course. I want you to see it. I want you to love it. I love it so much myself. It means something to me.’

  They went first into the big drawing-room with its niched walls. It was a room of ice blue, and the curtains were a shade of heliotrope which went exquisitely with the blue. The carpet matched them. In the niches there were most lovely pieces of blue china. On their blue a shade deeper than the ice of the walls, were green leaves, again another lovely colour. The furniture was elegant, big sofas and chairs, small occasional tables, and silver candlesticks. She went to the far window and stood there staring out at the view which she knew would soon be so familiar to her. A view of marshland and of sea. The bungalow a little further towards the town, the estuary coming in in a wide sweep, islanded in places, and now with a couple of sails gliding along.

  He had been right in what he had said about the other rooms in the house. His study was comfortable, yet you could not have used it as a reception room, and the library beyond was austere. There was a room which he had said she could use for her own sitting-room when she wanted one.

  Hand in hand they went up the exquisite stairs, their footsteps completely silenced by the deep amber carpet. They went to the big bedroom where her bag had already been placed, a room of cerise and palest blue. It opened on one side into a dressing-room, the other side into the sort of rich man’s bathroom which as yet she had seen only in expensive glossy magazines. Mrs. Burman had thought the bathrooms good at the other Fiddler’s Hill, but they could not hold a candle to this one.

  ‘I love it!’ she said.

  There were spare rooms.

  ‘You see there is plenty of room for your friend Alan to come and stay,’ he said, and laughed at her little frown. How nice he was when he was gay! She wanted to turn to him and say ‘Never be quiet. Never be harsh with me, because I can’t bear it.’ Somehow she did not feel that she knew him sufficiently well and she said nothing, just walked on, hand in hand with the man she had married only today.

  She washed and came down to dine. Now, so Simon said, they needed food, but Davies appeared in person before the food arrived. He had managed to get here in record time, because foreseeing difficulties he had not gone up to London to wait at Liverpool Street station for the next train. He had a friend in Hindhead who had a lorry, and was delivering in Colchester, and he had arrived triumphantly in Colchester almost before they did. From there he had thumbed a lift. It was Lindy’s private opinion that Davies would be pretty good at lift-thumbing and would never be left for long at the roadside.

  Davies had no hesitation in saying that he thought the house was IT. It was so much better than he had expected, and he was taken upstairs to the top floor by a daily char (by the name of Ethel, she did not appear to have any other name), and apparently he liked it up there.

  Davies would serve them well. He was not a lazy man, but he was a man who lived by his wits, and the problem would be what to do if he started any of his sidelines. Only time would prove whether he had turned over a new leaf or not.

  There was an exquisite dinner.

  Afterwards they went into the drawing-room and they sat there listening to the most perfect record-player that she had ever heard. They were far away from
the world. The nearest house was that thatched bungalow, and that was out of earshot. Across the sea, Holland. The sea itself beyond the far point, and the estuary on the side. So far away from everyone, so far from the world, but it was absurd now to be frightened by the sound of a woman crying.

  She was deeply in love. That first faint fear had gone completely, submerged in her emotion for Simon. He explained a little about the house, and the staff. Mrs. Baker was a good cook, and a dear person without a doubt. Ethel who helped was the daughter of an alcoholic gamekeeper, the other daily help, called Ellen, a chatterbox, who was for ever telling you of her virtues and abilities.

  He hoped that Davies would fit into this picture. Davies had served the coffee in one of the two white coats he had brought along from the hotel. He explained that as they were marked Fiddler’s Hill on the lapel, he thought they ought to come with him!

  When Simon made love to her, Lindy forgot everything else, and all her apprehensions, in the exciting experience of being married and in love, of everything having changed so completely. Her whole world had altered. She was to live in an entirely new world, one which was quite alien to anything she had ever known. She was a new self in that world.

  Later on, of course, they laughed about that first night of all when she had been both nervous and restrained, and had not grown accustomed to the sound of the wind in the big chimney stack which gave that curious impression of a woman crying.

  Later still when she grew more accustomed to him, she told herself that she would not feel worried for those quiet moments when he would walk out of the house and along the cliff, not returning for hours, and often too late to come to her room. She convinced herself that in many ways she was glad that he was reserved, though she wanted to know more about poor Marigold who had died so young, and Edna, with the dominant personality who watched her from over the dining-room mantelpiece. She did not want them to be ghosts in her life, she would much prefer to know about them.

  Just at first she asked no questions, why should she? They were idyllically happy, and the hot springtime weather lasted, it seemed to go on for ever. The flowers came out, and there was a hyacinth scent about the place.

  ‘Why was I afraid of the house?’ she asked him one day.

  ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘When I saw it that evening, it looked forbidding.’

  ‘Poor old house, it has never hurt anybody.’

  ‘I thought I heard the woman crying.’

  ‘I have never worried about ghosts, you know,’ and he meant it.

  ‘I’ve often been scared by them.’

  But at that first sight she had got the idea that the square grey house was grim, that once it could even have been a gaol. It had been, he told her.

  They sat in the garden at the time. He said that at the time when all England was terrified of the Dutch invasion which they had believed would most certainly come, prisoners had been brought to this house. The watch boat had been but a little way off, lying against the shore of the estuary below the house. The prisoners ‒ Dutch spies ‒ had been held imprisoned in this very house, men already condemned to die, even though they had not heard their sentence. They were ultimately shot. Lindy listened and hated the story, and she felt that much of their agony of apprehension must have stayed behind them.

  ‘It’s so long ago,’ he said, ‘I doubt if any of that remains any more.’

  In a way the house was lonely for the grounds were large, and it was a long way from the small town at the foot of Fiddler’s Hill. The moment she said this Simon bought her a runabout car for herself, so that she could go down into the town and shop whenever she felt like it. He was so spoiling. She had but to express a wish and he fulfilled it.

  At the end of those halcyon ten days the weather broke, and a cold wind blew across the garden, so that they had to start fires again to keep the place warm. That was the day when things began to happen. Simon had an urgent call from London which sent him flying up to the city, promising to return that evening. When he did come back they had kept the meal hot for him because he was so late. Lindy asked what had happened.

  That was the first time when he went intolerably quiet. He pretended he had not heard her, then glared at her. Suddenly she realised that this was another Simon, a man with whom you could go too far. He said that he detested talking about his personal affairs, and he did not want to talk about himself. Amazed, Lindy got the impression of having walked out to meet him with both arms outstretched and a mouth ready for kisses, and finding that Simon himself had gone; she was facing just a heavy curtain which had been drawn between them. Worse, she could not pull it aside.

  A second call sent him rushing up to London, and she sat sewing in the beautiful drawing-room, and that was when she thought she heard the phantom fiddler playing. Mrs. Baker had spoken of him. The wind must be in the right direction, Lindy told herself, and listened to it. It was the far away sound of tinny music, an old man playing, she imagined, and she recognised the tune.

  My mother said I never should play with the gipsies in the wood.

  It did not alarm her. Just the wind, she thought, no more, and when Davies brought her in some coffee she asked him if he heard it. He heard nothing.

  When she had finished the coffee, she walked out into the sunshine, along the wild land which stretched to the farthest point where the sea swept round. It was beautiful in the extreme. She loved the salty flavour of it, and the strange feeling that the air was wine. She loved the pallid blue of the horizon, and the picture of ships coming and going. Perhaps everything that she had felt that first night of her honeymoon, when she had come here, had been tiredness. So much had happened in such a remarkably short space of time. She had turned giddy with it.

  She had made one or two small changes in the running of the house. She liked Mrs. Baker, and she liked both Ethel and Ellen who came in as dailies to assist. Davies was a tower of strength, and if only he did not get into some personal trouble could stay here for ever. But one had the idea that Davies must sooner or later get into trouble again. Simon had talked to him, and had warned him of the danger of this. Davies had been surprised that anyone could suspect him of being changeable. He had not been born lucky; that was his major trouble. The world treated him badly, it was no fault of his. He then assumed that rather overdone innocent face of his. One of these days he was bound to get into some really big trouble.

  Simon returned from London very late indeed that night, and snatched up a letter waiting for him. Lindy had kept his dinner waiting, and then when he arrived, he was lost in one of his strangely silent moods. When she said that she had the food ready for him, he complained that it was foolish, for he had stayed to eat at the Woolpack in Coggeshall. The only thing he wanted now was some fresh air.

  He went out for a walk along the cliff, on the wild land where she had gone this morning. Lindy ate her own meal with little real appetite for it, and felt half ashamed that she ate it at all. Then she went into the drawing-room with the coffee and waited there for his return.

  The hall clock struck midnight with the Westminster chimes, and that startled her. She had had no idea that it was quite so late. For a moment she wondered if something had happened. The wild land was rough going, it would be so easy to put a foot into a rabbit hole and fall and twist an ankle. She became nervous.

  She went into the hall, took down her mink coat and went to the door; as she did so she heard that woman weeping again. It was a quietly resigned sobbing which caught the echo, and this echo, even though very faint and far away, made her heart stand still. She paused. She looked at the trees, now in leaf, and she saw instantly that there was no wind. It isn’t the wind in the chimneys, she thought quickly, Simon said that to quieten me, but it isn’t true. She shut the door behind her.

  She must shut out the sound of that weeping woman.

  She turned out of the garden and went on to the wild land beyond leading to the north. There were the gorse bushes, dark smudges brill
iantly lit by the flame of the flowers which seem to be always there. She turned her back on the house and walked on, and that was when she saw him. He had on an overcoat, which was unusual for him, a short one, and his hands were crammed down into the pockets so that for a moment it looked as if he had no arms. The fair hair was untidy, which surprised her for she had already noticed that there was no wind; then realised that every little while he ran his fingers through it, and left it shaggy behind him.

  He was coming back home again, and she did not care where he had been as long as he returned. She ran to meet him.

  ‘Simon? Simon … I have been so worried.’

  He looked at her for a moment almost as if he did not see her clearly. He was rather like a man who is walking in his sleep, and this in itself was startling.

  ‘What’s the matter, Simon? What has happened?’ and she clung to him.

  He set his hands on either of her arms above the elbow, pinioning her, and he stared down into her face, looking at her intently. He seemed to be a stranger and not himself at all, with that fair hair rumpled and his eyes worried. He still said nothing.

  ‘Simon, what is the matter? What was in that letter? Why did you go rushing off to London, and why are you out here now, when you should be in the house with me?’ There was the sound of tears in her voice.

  He did not speak for a moment, and when he did she thought that even his voice was strangely different. He was acting in a very curious way, almost like another man, and it bewildered her. But she loved the other man too. Simon could do nothing to change the one glowing certainty within her, she was so much in love with him.

  He said, ‘Look here, I have to live my own life in my own way. I warned you that I could be difficult. There are always times when I want to be alone, absolutely alone with all this,’ and he indicated the wild unkempt land about him, and the sea just the other side of the earth cliffs murmuring more dominantly as the tide came in. ‘Listen to me, Lindy, listen and understand. Maybe I am two men, myself and another. Some people are made this way. That letter and my trip to London was just my own business. I’d have told you about it if I had wanted to do so. I didn’t. That was why I said nothing. I didn’t want to talk.’