Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall

by Guy Sheppard

  And there, pinned to a post at the roadside was a cocky little arrow marked ‘diversion’. Instead of being directed over the stile, all walkers were now to stay on the narrow, grassy bank despite the dangerous proximity to the traffic. Unbeknown to me, my path had been rerouted.

  My chin was bloody and putting my fingers to my chest I felt it rasp with each frantic breath I could manage. A moment ago, I had not cared nearly enough if I had consigned myself to oblivion, but for now I had to marvel at an escape that felt like a miraculous stay of execution.

  Whatever misplaced hints of spring there might have been in the yellow hazel catkins in the leafless hedges or scattered daisies that spotted the banks, a chill entered my bones. It was not only the prospect of frequenting Coberley Hall’s gloomy walls that alarmed me when I passed under the leering looks of its unfriendly gargoyles, it was that ugly shout that had caught me so dangerously off guard in the middle of the road.

  I should have demanded from Susan why she had so brazenly barracked me, but I was already late for my appointment. As for my ‘earful’ it was soon distant to my ears:

  That poor dead girl. Will she ever rest?

  10

  My heart ticked furiously, my lungs panted and there was a dryness on my tongue. Deliberately I straightened my shoulders and strode forwards into a long narrow room where the lightest touch of my toes caused ancient floorboards to groan.

  The heavy oak door clicked shut behind me.

  I could stand the tension in my head but not in my bowels.

  ‘Is anyone, like, there, at all?’ I asked, swallowing hard.

  With the best will in the world, I was a fool if I counted on a friendly reception.

  ‘Damn it man, come closer where I can see you. What the devil kept you? I was all set to send out a search party.’

  Someone formed a misshapen huddle in front of a far off window, I realised. A man appeared in black profile on a white background like somebody cut out of darkness and dazzle. Suddenly he rode straight at me in his wheelchair. Dressed in an immaculate white suit and dark tinted glasses, he gathered speed on the dirty boards, then squealed to a halt by the fire. He looked me up and down.

  Although instructed, I was intruding.

  ‘Walker? Is it really you?’

  Either I had changed a great deal or he could not tolerate the sight of a face that it was not in his best interest to remember.

  I still felt a queasiness of my own.

  ‘It’s been a while, George.’

  ‘So sorry I wasn’t there to welcome you yesterday,’ he said darkly. ‘I was feeling a little indisposed.’

  ‘Honestly, some things can’t be avoided.’

  ‘I trust James took good care of you?’

  ‘I’m staying in the countess’s room, apparently.’

  ‘You cold, at all?’

  ‘Pretty much, yeah.’

  ‘Pull up a chair by the fire.’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

  ‘Not that one!’

  With a lunge, my host described a savage arc in the air, he drove his dragon-headed cane into my thigh before I knew what was happening. I forgot the person I had met briefly years ago. Instead I saw someone dreadfully agitated – staringly, thrillingly, passionately so. Anticipation and prospect marked every crease of his face. Worry was no less a feature. His white suit was stained with spit, his long hair he wound tightly round his fingers in a way which was both nervous and child-like. If he appeared physically wild so was he also sufficiently mentally agitated for some to have said that he belonged in a madhouse.

  ‘Excuse me, old chap, I didn’t mean to startle you but don’t sit in that chair. Please, use the other one.’

  ‘That’s in the house rules, is it?’

  ‘Now see here, Walker…’

  Whereupon he used his cane as a prop in order to infer something – in a house as old as this and according to ancient courtly manners, was it not uncomely to approach a fire nearer than others?

  ‘Forgive my lateness, sir, I shouldn’t have gone to see the farm manager.’

  The rumbling rubber treads of his chair circled me on the uneven, disjointed boards.

  ‘Damn it, Colin, drop the niceties. You’re only here for one reason. The house. You’ve come to kick me out.’

  ‘Is this place even worth saving?’

  *

  ‘Now then, old chap,’ said Lord Hart, picking his large red nose, ‘don’t act so unimpressed. Not only did an earl and countess once parade up and down these very boards for their daily winter exercise but so did King Charles I. Twice during the English Civil War, he stayed under our roof.’

  ‘He probably thought he’d get arthritis and rheumatism, too.’

  He gave a quick laugh. Diamond rings flashed on his fingers as his face set in a scowl.

  ‘Well, now that you’ve had the brass neck to show up here, you skinny bastard, tell me, how is it you’ve lost so much friggin’ weight since I last saw you? Have you been ill?’

  ‘In a way, yeah.’

  ‘Been in the wars, have we?’

  I felt my hand rise involuntarily to my freshly grazed face.

  ‘Not that. Your brow. Looks awful.’

  ‘I wrecked my 1978 MGB Roadster, but I’m all right now.’

  ‘Devil take you, old chap, how long has it been? Ten years? Last time we met I was walking my niece down the aisle at your wedding. What were you, then? Twenty stone?’

  ‘Sixteen. It’s only these last few months…’

  ‘By the look of you, you haven’t had a decent meal for ages.’

  ‘Food isn’t always a friend.’

  ‘Remind me. How old are you now?’

  ‘Forty-five.’

  ‘Must be the strain, you look so anaemic. Such a rotten business. The whole thing stinks. And so bad for you! I read about it in the Daily Telegraph. I must say you made a very strong case for yourself. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Tell me, where does a man like you go from here? What’s his future? How can he bear to wake up and look himself in the mirror each morning after everything that has happened and been said?’

  ‘As someone mentioned to me on my way here, a smile works wonders, usually.’

  ‘If only we could move on and be sure to leave our troubles behind us, is that it? Do you believe in a new start? Should we even try to forget our loved ones once they have departed? And what if we can’t? What comes after?’

  I poured myself a much needed glass of wine from a decanter that stood warming in the hearth, when the white, one-eyed, greyhound trotted past. The slim, three-legged creature went straight to the forbidden chair. Once curled upon it, the dog flicked one flea-ridden ear at me as though some unseen hand fondled it rather roughly. By day it appeared thinner and more battered than ever.

  Lord Hart smiled at his companion that, according to his butler, should not have existed.

  ‘You’re a hard man to read, Walker. Always were. That’s it, drink up. It’s claret from my own cellars.’

  It would have been churlish of me not to have been charmed by his sudden volte-face, not to mention vintage, obvious tactic though it was to gain some advantage as yet unknown to me.

  ‘I’ve written to my solicitors, George. According to a codicil in the will you have the right to continue to stay under my roof for as long as you live.’

  ‘Please, Colin, I think we should talk about Lizzie first, don’t you?’

  *

  I could not help admiring his directness and insensitivity. Given that I was the widower it was perhaps inevitable that my wife’s uncle should seek to pain me with the one person who had brought about this very meeting. For as long as he made Lizzie a stipulation of our reunion it was likely that she would forever be the one condition that I could never fulfil.

  I could think of no other way to explain the abrupt, unseen resentment that I felt rise up between us. It fell to me to strike first, so to speak.

  ‘I’m sure Lizzie would want what is best f
or both of us now that she is gone,’ I said.

  ‘I think so, too, old chap. You might see only the dead hand of time here, but she didn’t. This is where she came into the world.’

  ‘So it’s not, you know, possible that something about this place could have come back to haunt her as she lay dying?’

  ‘Good God, Walker, is that why you’re here? To ask me for forgiveness?’

  ‘Would that be so stupid?’

  *

  I watched Lord Hart lean again on his cane. With a need less physical than psychological, he seemed weighed down by some burdensome presence beyond mine. When, however, he stood up slowly but thoughtfully from his wheelchair, he drew on unseen reserves of resilience.

  ‘This room was Lizzie’s favourite, Colin. As a child she would bounce up and down on the sprung leather seat of that very old chamber horse by your side. Most of all, she liked to sit cross-legged on the floor and draw its paintings. Believe me, this is the place where she first thought about becoming an artist.’

  ‘That it? Her school considered her a weird loner, but in this room it did her good to be around hideous people? What are they, anyway?’

  My restive host waved his cane at a circular gold-framed picture of a bare-breasted woman of exotic Arabian origin. A droopy ostrich feather adorned her dark glossy hair while she regarded herself against the sun’s golden rays in her mirror. She was VISVUS, first in the row of Five Senses.

  ‘Out of SMELL, HEARING, TOUCH and TASTE, it was SIGHT that was Lizzie’s favourite. “So what are you trying to capture?” I once asked her. “Her eyes, uncle,” she replied. “I want her eyes.” ’

  I failed to see why my obsessive host should become so absurdly worked up about something so trivial.

  ‘You and I both know that I’m not here to look at pretty pictures,’ I said, clicking my heels. ‘So, back to business.’

  ‘Isn’t Lizzie our business? Isn’t she the real reason you’ve come, old chap?’

  ‘The legalities. Naturally.’

  ‘Don’t be a damned fool, Walker.’

  I followed his rude, restless glances while he sank, over-excited, into his wheelchair.

  ‘Lizzie’s dead,’ I declared. ‘That’s an end to it.’

  ‘Not if you’ve brought her with you.’

  *

  There was no telling whose hypocrisy was greater, his or mine, but I scowled quietly to myself at his presumption.

  ‘People will always say that I did it for the money.’

  ‘I never said that,’ replied Lord Hart. ‘I never believed you’d do something so stupid, as such.’

  ‘You must think you were very wrong to entrust me with her happiness, but it’s the aftermath we have to contend with now.’

  ‘The estate’s, especially.’

  ‘While sorting through papers to settle probate, I discovered that Coberley Hall had been put into a trust for Lizzie by her mother until she was thirty. How come?’

  Lord Hart tapped his dragon cane, set its lucky black ball spinning between its fangs.

  ‘Because Lizzie should never have had it.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘It’s complicated. And personal.’

  ‘That’s not what you wrote me in your letter.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘Okay, but if everyone had come clean about it all from the beginning Lizzie and I could at least have lived in Coberley Hall for a while. Who knows, we might have tried for another child.’

  ‘You mustn’t blame Lizzie, the devil you mustn’t. For years, I actively discouraged her from returning here. I didn’t want her falling under its spell again.’

  ‘So much for Coberley Hall being her great inspiration.’

  ‘Tell me, how do you tell someone that their father is mentally ill when others were so eager to label her the same?’

  ‘Stop there. Yeah. Please do. You ‘managed’ the family secret all this time because you thought it best for us all. Really?’

  ‘My brother was a very complex person, old chap. To see him shambling about dressed in ill-fitting clothes like a Wild Man made me want to scream, the devil it did, because at times I thought he would drag the rest of us to hell with him. Fact is, it was better for everyone if Philip and Lizzie had no proper contact those twenty-five years.’

  ‘You mean you let her think her father had abandoned her.’

  At which Lord Hart whipped off his glasses. His cool, blue eyes were two small dots as he fought to hold in his fury.

  ‘Never speak that word in this house, it’s too … dangerous. She was always someone’s daughter.’

  ‘Technically.’

  His laughter rang bitterly off the coved plasterwork ceiling.

  ‘When a father sacrifices what is most precious to him he does not necessarily do it simply because he won’t hear or listen to reason, he does what’s best for the other person whether child or adult, he puts motive and cause before his own unreasonableness. My brother did what he had to do because he had no other choice, he wanted to save her from himself.’

  ‘Actually he didn’t.’

  ‘No, actually, I did. I kept the estate going for us all.’

  ‘She deserved better. So did I.’

  ‘And what good would it have done you to have acquired Coberley Hall any sooner? I didn’t want her putting one life on hold because one day she would inherit another. I didn’t want her to be that lazy. As it is, she became an accomplished art critic and portrait painter. You do know I followed her career every day?’

  ‘You’ve been far too keen to keep everything to yourself. You’ve been that selfish.’

  Lord Hart stared at the dog on the chair.

  ‘They say absence makes the heart grow fonder but they don’t talk of the heartache, they never imagine the consequences or choices that follow on.’

  ‘At the end, Lizzie spoke of this place in a way that suggested she feared it, but not once did I hear her blame her father.’

  ‘Lizzie might not have lived here after the age of seven but this was always where she belonged, body and soul.’

  ‘No, yeah, I don’t know.’

  ‘As I said, Coberley Hall is where she came into the world, Colin. Her life began in the countess’s room.’

  ‘That explains one fucking thing at least,’ I said ungraciously.

  ‘What’s that, old chap?’

  ‘As Lizzie lay dying she was forever alluding to someone she called the countess. She was back in the room where she was born, I suppose.’

  My host chewed one arm of his shades very slowly and carefully.

  ‘Is it not wonderful to think that she wandered happily here on this very spot? She and Lizzie.’

  ‘That her friend?’

  ‘She called her Lucy.’

  ‘Lucy who?’

  ‘Didn’t I say? She’s the chatelaine, she’s Countess of Downe and rightful owner of Coberley Hall.’

  ‘You mean she once was, centuries ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m saying.’

  ‘You seem to confuse Lucy with Lizzie.’

  ‘It isn’t always true that the people who have died or passed through a place haunt it the most, Colin, it can be the non-existence or want of something still felt by the living. That’s what makes a house like this so special. Lizzie could have visited us if she’d wanted to. I wouldn’t have stopped her. That’s a fact.’

  ‘Which is what I find so odd. What daughter doesn’t want to be with her father, no matter what?’

  ‘Why should you worry, old chap? You’re the one who wished her dead. Are you even willing to talk terms?’

  I threw down my poker before it grew too hot in the fire.

  ‘Forget all that for the moment, I’m asking you if Coberley Hall has a bad past?’

  ‘You and I like to call it the past, Colin. We say our prime is past or talk of a person’s past life. Once upon a time people spoke of a woman with a past as though it wouldn’t
bear inquiry. But really ‘before’ and ‘now’ are not so different, they’re like two sides of the same coin. For everything that is put away and buried there is room afterwards for doubt, don’t you think? The unresolved walks with us.’

  ‘Walks?’ I queried nervously.

  ‘Is it not our worst bogy man?’

  ‘The past dies with the dead, I know it.’

  ‘Be honest, Colin, you’d like your wife back. Would you?’

  ‘Let’s begin with the farm’s accounts, shall we? If I’m to own this estate I might as well know the worst before I get started.’

  At which Lord Hart propelled himself quickly at the door. Before riding off to some obscure part of the house from which I was to be firmly excluded, he spoke once more over his shoulder.

  ‘You’ll find most of what you want in the library. One other thing, Colin, do you believe in mediums, at all?’

  ‘In a word, no. I’ve tried.’

  *

  Left to myself I paced awhile up and down feeling chilly on the room’s grubby boards. Tall pilasters ran from floor to ceiling and divided up the walls into neat little bays that contained each of the Senses. Before I knew it, I had arrived at a place on the panelling where one painting looked very different against all the decorative squares and octagons. How I had not noticed it before I had no idea, but unlike the others ODORATVS did not turn her tense black eyes my way. Within her more intricately stencilled picture frame of petals and foliage, she was totally resolved not to be distracted from the bouquet that she was busy arranging in a small stripy vase.

  Not for long could I resist her resistance. With heightened sensibility to my surroundings, I smelt the sudden scent of violets.

  A whole lifetime flashed by me, I could not shake off my feeling of complete fixation with such a perfume. My soul did its best to pass out of my body.

  I was in danger of floating…

  It wasn’t my life but Lizzie’s.

  Not floating, but flying.

  I felt raised up. Violets had been my wife’s favourite perfume. I was standing where she had once stood as a child and gazed at the painting perhaps for the first time. I felt her rapture for oils, if not her artistic inspiration. It was like revisiting the life-changing moment that had decided her whole future.