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

by Sheila Burns

Then he went off to see Davies about putting his things together. She herself was thinking, How I wish he wasn’t going away!

  The house seemed suddenly to have become strangely still, but a new restlessness encompassed her. She got up from her seat not really knowing why she did it, and she went out into the hall. She saw that the dining-room door was wide open, which was unusual, and standing inside the room was Mrs. Waterford. It was something which had not happened before, because she was one of those people who keep to themselves. She very seldom came into this part of the house.

  She was standing there with her back to the door and staring at the portrait of Edna which hung over the mantelpiece. Quietly Lindy crossed the hall and went into the dining-room and walked up behind her.

  She said, ‘She was very beautiful, wasn’t she?’

  Mrs. Waterford could not have heard her coming, for she turned sharply with an exclamation. Then she pulled herself together. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘very beautiful,’ and then, ‘Who was she?’

  ‘She was my husband’s second wife. She ran away with someone.’

  ‘So they had a divorce?’

  ‘Well, no, they didn’t. There was no need. She went over to the States and was killed in a dreadful train accident.’ Lindy paused. ‘It seems a shame that anyone so pretty could have died like that, for she ought to have been so happy.’

  ‘Yes.’ There was a pause, and Lindy became aware of it being a silence which had power behind it, even a destroying power. ‘You ‒ you knew her, my Lady?’

  ‘No, I wish I had, but I never met her. I am always so sorry for her,’ then, almost dramatically, ‘She has such truly lovely eyes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Again there came the silence. Then slowly Mrs. Waterford moved away. She went quietly back to the kitchen and left Lindy standing there alone staring into those miracle eyes of Edna, purple like irises, yet staring so defiantly at her.

  She WAS beautiful, she told herself, she was very, very beautiful.

  She had a dreadful night.

  She did not know why she was so desperately depressed and lay there awake for what seemed to be hours. When the daylight came, and early, for that was the time of the year, she would have fallen asleep, but then Simon had to get up. He had not told her that his would be an early start.

  She managed to conceal the fact that she felt so dreadful, but when he had gone she knew that she could not go on. She must have help, and she sent for Felix.

  With the irony of life she was feeling better when he arrived after morning surgery, though she was still in bed.

  He came cheerfully into the room.

  ‘Well, this is a silly thing!’ he said, and put down his bag.

  ‘I know. And Simon’s gone off to the States. I did not dare tell him. I think it is what people call a grumbling appendix. It keeps on hurting a little, not much, but enough to scare me. The sickness comes with it, and I’ve had a couple of faints.’

  ‘Do you faint a lot anyway?’

  ‘Oh no, it’s new, and I don’t like it much.’

  ‘Well, let’s have a good look round.’

  He was gentle and kind. Somehow when one met him as a guest in the house, a friend who had come to see them, one did not appreciate the fullness of his sympathetic understanding. He was so tender. He went into detail after detail taking great care. In the end he put his things back into his bag and snapped it together. ‘Well, that’s that.’

  ‘It’s an appendix, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, I would have said that your appendix was hale and hearty and not likely to worry you. It is something far more usual, for I think you are going to have a baby.’

  It was strange that she had not thought of this. She did not know how she felt about it. When she could speak, she said, ‘I am enchanted. I adore children, but Simon … Simon does not like them.’

  ‘He’ll like this one for it is the way it works in this world. He will think it the most lovely child ever, and that nobody else is ever quite like it. This will be good news for him when he gets back.’

  She looked at Felix, and began to giggle like a child who has seen a delicious toy and knows it will be its own. He gave her a few directions and a prescription to help her, and told her not to worry but to take care. She was perhaps doing too much, for most women did these days.

  ‘Slack off a bit,’ he suggested, ‘now you’ve got Mrs. Waterford.’

  He went back to the main trouble. ‘I should get up for lunch, you’ll get sick of this room, and sit in the garden. It’ll be fun getting everything ready for the baby. All women enjoy that.’

  ‘Yes, it will be lovely,’ she agreed.

  When he had gone she regretted the fact that she could not see Simon and tell him all about it at once. She got up and went downstairs, with the feeling that a whole world lay before her, and that she ought to be the happiest girl in all the world. Davies met her.

  ‘Doctor says you’ll be all right, m’Lady.’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, and it isn’t an appendix after all. I saw myself in for an op. which I should have hated.’

  ‘If you’ll excuse me saying so, m’Lady, me and Ethel knew it wasn’t that, though we kept it to ourselves,’ and he grinned. ‘We’re ever so pleased, m’Lady, ever so pleased.’

  She should have turned grand and pretended that he was quite wrong, but you could not turn grand with Davies. You enjoyed him! She said ‘You really are a dear, you know,’ and he went off chuckling.

  That afternoon Lindy went down to the hut.

  She rather liked the place, the one thing that Edna had left behind her, and it had a fascination. It was a dry day, quite easy to get down to it. She intended to ask Simon to have it done up for her. It would be rather a charming place in which to picnic, with its perfect view of the estuary and Suffolk lying on the far side of the water. It should not cost a lot of money, surely?

  She told Joan about her plans that evening when she came up to sup with her. Joan thought it would be an excellent idea to have it done up and made habitable again, refurnished too, with some of that awfully pretty garden furniture one could get these days.

  They sat and talked in the beautiful drawing-room with the china in the niches and the view of the water all round them. Joan spoke of the place with affection. Then she changed the subject.

  ‘Simon has gone off to the States rather suddenly, hasn’t he? Is something wrong?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He did not seem upset and he said nothing. He has some investments out there and I believe they were in a mess, but he never tells me. In his own life Simon does not talk a lot. I wish he did.’

  ‘I know. Some men are like that, and you can’t change them. Well, as long as it is not a big financial worry, it is all right. I myself have never had sufficient money to have big financial worries, and would not know what they are.’ Joan stubbed out a cigarette.

  ‘I never had any,’ said Lindy, and she told Joan about Mrs. Burman and the Fiddler’s Hill hotel. The way that she and Simon met very late at night when she was on duty. Of her own room there, a room which had once been a stable. ‘It was interesting, though,’ she said.

  Talking to Joan always put her in a good mood. This was, of course, one of those wonderful days, for she had started with the misery of an appendix op. ahead, and now she was going to have a baby instead. She walked to the gate with Joan, and the night was exquisitely warm. The moon was a huge golden ball hung over the sea, with a golden road beneath it across the water, ridged by little waves. The stars were thick. As she walked alone back into the house, not a grass stirred, not a leaf moved.

  As she opened the door again and saw the hall light, and the rising stairs, and smelt the scent of the flowers, she heard the woman crying. She sobbed bitterly. She sobbed for the sins of the world in a broken voice which was disturbing, and tonight she seemed to be much nearer than she had ever been before.

  Tonight for the first time, Lindy was not afraid. The child within her seemed to make her st
rong, already she had left girlhood behind her and stood as the protector of the babe. She waited. She listened to the sound of the weeping and then decided that this was not quite the same sound that she had heard before. It had about it a difference so that she could have vowed that it was real. This was no ghost.

  She went inside and closed the door soundlessly behind her. She went down the corridor to the little room just by the kitchens, which she had had made into a small sitting-room for Mrs. Waterford.

  Now the crying was much louder.

  It was just the other side of the door, echoing into her own heart, and absolutely real. She opened the door. Mrs. Waterford sat beside the small table, with her arms flung across it, and her face buried in them. Obviously she had not heard Lindy enter, she had heard nothing until Lindy spoke.

  ‘Mrs. Waterford, are you ill?’

  It was then that the woman lifted her head. The grey stringy hair hung round the scarred face which was quite ugly, and now she did not wear the black glasses. Lindy stared at her, and for a moment the two looked and there was not a sound.

  The eyes were those of Edna in the picture over the dining-room mantelpiece.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Instantly Lindy recognised Edna. The woman grabbed for her glasses, but it was already far too late. Lindy pulled herself together, and she knew that she had conquered all the doubt, the suspicion, and the wayward helplessness of girlhood, to grow up as she faced the tenseness of this moment.

  ‘You’re Edna,’ she said, and then rather tragically with a deep and abiding sympathy which was so much part of herself, ‘Oh, my dear!’

  The woman crouched a little in the chair. Her eyes had retained their radiance and their beauty. They had been unharmed in any way, and would have betrayed her so that she had had to cling to the hideous dark glasses. But the scar which ran down her cheek and to her throat, and there had changed her voice so horribly, was ugly. It gave her a grotesque leer which was repellent, it drew from the beauty of those tragic eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m Edna.’

  ‘You did not die in the train accident in the States?’

  ‘I have never been to the States,’ and she said it with defiance, almost pleased that she had made others believe that she had died there.

  ‘Where did you go? What happened?’ Lindy did not dare speak of the Hungarian with whom she believed Edna had run away. She faced this woman with the curtain down between them. They still stared, the one sitting, the other standing.

  ‘He left me. He cleared off.’

  ‘How dreadful!’

  Maybe the sympathy warmed her heart, she looked again at Lindy, and her tone became less hard. ‘He went. There was a car accident, but he was not killed as I said. I was the one who was hurt.’ She lifted a quivering hand and pointed at her face with a wavering finger. ‘Look what it did to me! Look! Look!’ Her hoarse voice became like an angry wind tearing round a chimney pot and threatening it with danger. She pointed to the once beautiful face now with its hideous leer. ‘Look!’ she croaked.

  ‘How dreadful for you!’

  She did not seem to be listening. She went on with the story, automatically, like someone wound up to a decision. Now she could not stop speaking of it. ‘No money. Nothing.’

  ‘But Simon would have helped you.’

  ‘You don’t know Simon. I do. I couldn’t stick him. The only person who ever helped me to get the better of him was my solicitor.’

  She was speaking like a mechanical record which gives out the recording and does not stop. Apparently she had employed a shady solicitor who was a friend of her own somewhat abandoned youth, for Edna had lived life. He had invented the accident in the States at the time when there was a big train crash and when Simon was proceeding with the divorce. The news of her death would stem the divorce and free him. Then Simon had married again, and he was not free to marry. It had been one of those positions which only the cruel could produce.

  As she spoke, her voice had no emotion left in it, it was the squeaky hoarse voice which did not care.

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘I came because I wanted to see what was going on. Because I knew that I had the right to some money, and I wanted to know how the land lay. I was sure that Simon would pay me to go.’

  ‘I am sure that he would give you money.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure!’ They stared again at each other, and slowly Edna went on. ‘Simon would never give me money for myself, he was too angry with me for that. But he might have to give me money! You are not married to him!’ She said it with triumph. ‘I am his wife, you are not.’

  ‘I am not married to him?’ For a moment Lindy felt as though the world spun round her, and she would fall; she could not believe that this was happening to her. Then she steadied herself, a hand clinging to the table.

  ‘I am here because I belong here, and this is my house. In your heart I think you have always known that this was my house.’

  ‘But you ran away?’

  ‘Only for a short time,’ then she laughed. Maybe the sound of that rather coarse hard laughter, made hoarse by the injured throat, was even more cruel than her bitter tears had been. Then she pulled herself together. ‘There is nothing you can do.’

  ‘No, there is nothing I can do, tonight.’ Lindy became aware of the fact that quite suddenly she was intensely tired.

  If when she had first come into the room there had been something pitiful about Edna, now that had gone, and there was something almost sadistic about her bitterness. She was a torturer who enjoyed it. ‘There is absolutely nothing that we can do tonight, but on Monday Simon will be back here again,’ said Lindy.

  ‘To find that his wife ‒ his real wife ‒ is at Fiddler’s Hill!’

  They glared across the table at each other. Lindy was feeling sick again, then she tried to check herself because whatever happened she must keep her nerve.

  Edna seemed to be gaining strength with every moment. The eyes defied her, now living and vitally real, where once they had been only something in a picture over the hearth. Calmly and with an immense satisfaction, she said, ‘There is nothing that you can do, Simon is a bigamist; I did not die. I was not even divorced.’

  Gently Lindy replied, ‘Today there is nothing that I want to do save wait,’ and then rather helplessly, ‘It would have to happen today.’

  ‘Why does today matter?’

  ‘Today I ‒ I feel so ill.’

  Again Edna laughed. ‘What is the good of shamming illness when that can’t help you out of it?’

  There came the silence of the grave. It was a cold silence, unbelievably still and grim. For a minute, and a minute is a very long time, those relentless eyes challenged Lindy. It seemed that they read her face and right down into her heart, and at last Edna spoke.

  ‘You are pregnant?’

  ‘The doctor told me today.’ Lindy said it rather tiredly, as though she had come to the end of her tether and wanted to admit the truth, a lovely truth.

  Again there was a grotesque silence, quiet, so still that the ticking of the clock became the throbbing of a great engine in the silence, and then Edna spoke once more. Her voice had changed, it had in it a quality of rapture and of desire, of something defeated, yet in strange contradiction the glory of something won. ‘I ‒ I always wanted a baby. More than anything else in the world. Much more.’

  There was something almost unreal about the way she said it, as though she had passed a climax and had come to a new attitude, a new perspective of life, and as a different woman. She was calm, the defiance had gone out of her eyes, and she was resigned. It seemed that she had ended everything in the way of argument when she confessed to her desire for a child, and that it was the culminating point in her whole life.

  Lindy felt her own youthfulness facing this, and with it a certain helplessness, as though she did not know what to do or say or how to emerge from the perplexed mood in which she found herself.

  The
y faced each other, both of them the wife of Simon. About Edna now there was a strong resignation, as though in the last few minutes she had come to a turning point in her own life, and this had changed everything. ‘I’ll go away,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t do anything until Simon returns. This is a matter the three of us have to face together; don’t you see that you can’t just go away, there is far more to it than that? We must talk it over, the three of us, and make some proper arrangement about it all.’ Then very quietly, ‘We can’t leave you like this whatever happened, or however you feel. You wouldn’t go away, Edna, you must stay for now.’

  ‘But there is nothing that Simon can do.’

  ‘There must be. We’ll find a way. We are both people who need caring for, and we have got to wait till Simon gets back.’

  Edna said nothing.

  She picked up her handbag from the table, tucking into it her moist handkerchief, snapping it together again, then turning away. It worried Lindy, for about Edna was an aura of hopelessness and of despair. There must be something that she could do now, some way out.

  ‘You must leave it to Simon, both of us must. It’s a dreadful thing to happen, but there are ways of putting dreadful things straight, and we’ll find the way together.’

  ‘There is no need for Simon to know,’ said Edna slowly.

  ‘But of course there is, he must know, can’t just let you starve.’

  ‘There is no need. If I just go away and day that I will never come back, surely that is sufficient?’ For a moment the eyes were defiant again.

  ‘I suppose it couldn’t be that way legally, and we have got to remember the baby.’

  ‘The baby’ll be all right.’ Edna was moving to the door.

  ‘We can’t do anything more tonight.’ Lindy was worn out. ‘Let’s go to bed now, then decide more in the morning?’

  ‘Yes. In the morning,’ and as Edna said it the hall clock struck. Lindy walked to the door, and looked back from it.

  ‘We are friends, Edna, we can be friends? I promise I will do anything I can to help you. Please ‒ please don’t do anything foolish.’