Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall

by Guy Sheppard

  ‘I love your house,’ I called after her. ‘Have you, like, lived here long?’

  She shouted to me over her shoulder.

  ‘Lord Hart sold it to me when his brother died. He said it brought him nothing but trouble.’

  ‘Er, in what way, exactly?’

  ‘Most houses this old are a bloody nuisance, aren’t they?’

  *

  Because the stone floor echoed right up to the rafters, one unintelligible word soon repeated itself in close mockery of another. The room positively flooded with gibberish until I seemed to sink deep underwater. Empty black mouths gaped at me as if we were all sinking. ‘This is how it would be if our dearly departed could attend our parties,’ I told myself. ‘Because the dead outnumber the living, would they not soon drown us out with their hellish babble? Come to that, who then would dare talk at all when they could be our witnesses?’

  A moment later, there came a touch on my elbow. It was Laura again, peering at me intently.

  ‘Come, the roasted pig is ready. Listen up, everyone! You’ll find plates and food laid out for you in the marquee in the garden. Grab and go. Grab and go.’

  ‘So where’s Lord Hart?’ I asked, joining the awful throng.

  ‘Oh, he never stays long. Won’t eat a thing with other people. Ever.’

  Of my own hesitancy I said nothing.

  *

  Laura led the way into the pyramidal white tent from the top of which fluttered a red pennant reminiscent of some courtly tournament. With Lord Hart absent, I maintained a certain hauteur by suitably expostulating and intoning after his manner. That’s to say, I paused before replying or simply ignored what was said should I deem the topic of conversation too far beneath me. Unfortunately, there was much dark muttering about a boundary dispute between neighbours.

  ‘What do you say, Mr Walker?’ asked Matt, twiddling a glass of wine in his hand. ‘Would you go to court to settle a line in the sand? In olden days the local lord would have decided all such disputes in his great hall. Your word would have been law.’

  I was about to extol the obvious merits of feudal ownership when my gaze came to rest on a woman wearing a greenish-gold gown in the tent’s narrow entrance. Only I seemed to notice her. Otherwise she stood awhile trying to decipher or interpret the significance of the signs, movements and conduct of all those who passed right by her without a word. With dark, sunken eyes and almost lipless mouth where its flesh had shrunk from her teeth, she resembled someone whose face was literally wasting away to nothing. The opportunity to join us induced in her an insatiable hungriness for our company, yet any celebration was uninviting when insufficient courtesy was shown to the invited.

  It was the same woman I had glimpsed at the roadside near Slack’s Cottage when I had nearly been run down by the National Express coach to London, I realised. Since then she had torn the gimp lace lining of her worsted petticoat so that its braid of black silk unravelled behind one of her green velvet shoes.

  Still she would open and close her mouth like someone who would remember how she once needed food.

  ‘No!’ I thought. ‘It can’t be.’

  As I started towards her, I saw her wobble. With her face turned away, she hid her features behind the long curls of black hair that she kept brushed forward from her brow. The dress she was wearing was very old. She trailed its beautiful silks through the mud. Otherwise the gown looked as it might have done, unimpaired and magnificent for centuries, except for the gaping, frayed edges where perspiration had rotted holes under her armpits.

  But she rallied.

  With skeletal fingers now resting for support on one of the tent’s guys she left me in no doubt that it was not necessarily my help she was seeking. She easily stayed upright like someone who had only just realised into what world she had stumbled.

  ‘Wait,’ I shouted.

  Even as I spoke the chef revolved the stuck pig on its spit and everyone cheered. I was drowned out. In a cloud of odorous smoke, the meat spat and steamed. I had to jump aside but not before I saw the apparition make a motion to vomit. She kecked at the sudden smell of hot, meaty juices that dripped on hot coals, then choked in the fumes. She revolted at the scalding stench of an animal being basted with its own sizzling juices.

  Lizzie had never been able to tolerate the smell of meat much, either.

  But this was not that revolt.

  Sure enough, her lips mouthed some other protest.

  Fanning hot steam out of my eyes, I rushed out the tent’s exit and gazed up and down, stood there feeling sick on the ghastly, noxious vapours that rose from my stomach to my brain. Too late. She was gone, leaving me to feel gutted. Yet, despondent was I not and for certain did I not despair.

  Torn in the tent’s thick, white canvas were nine long rents from her sharp fingernails.

  *

  ‘You leaving already, Inspector?’ asked Laura, tapping ash off her cigarette.

  Looking about me, I had come to a standstill in a cobbled courtyard next to an old scullery and washhouse, I observed.

  ‘As you can tell, it’s been quite a day.’

  Laura clutched a warm shawl round her shoulders.

  ‘I hope it wasn’t the bacon, I’m sorry if it was rock hard.’

  ‘Not the food, not at all.’

  ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost, Inspector.’

  ‘Didn’t you notice? A woman came to the tent and looked in. She was very pale and dressed in fine but odd clothes. I went to speak to her when she vanished.’

  ‘Most likely it was Marigold.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘Everyone does.’

  ‘Doesn’t explain why she goes about in rags.’

  Laura shrugged.

  ‘When young she was a talented but anorexic actress. She gave up her career to live with Lord Hart. He saved her life, some say, except now they don’t live together any more.’

  ‘Lord Hart? I had no idea.’

  ‘Ever since they separated recently she has taken to living in the old tollhouse in the woods. Everyone calls her the countess.’

  ‘You think she’s crazy?’

  ‘Not crazy, Inspector. But how do you live with a man who has grown sick of living?’

  ‘Please, call me Colin.’

  Her touch broke the spell.

  ‘Poor Patrick, I feel so sorry for his family, don’t you?’

  My hostess’s eyes met mine with all the force and stricture that went beyond casual concern, she really would have me banish whatever it was that still caused me to peer so anxiously all around.

  ‘Will the dead not rest if no one will mourn them?’ I wondered, nervously.

  ‘Dear me, what an odd thing to say. Why do you ask?’

  ‘H’m, well, no reason,’ I lied, then sought to distract myself further. ‘My stepfather has no idea if I’m alive or dead. Nor I, him. So what are we to each other now? Ghosts?’

  ‘We may try to be dead to one another, but the living can’t ever make ghosts of the living.’

  ‘No? I wonder? When a man denies himself all feeling for long enough does he not become dead to himself?’

  ‘Come, Colin. Walk with me. Some fresh air will do you good.’

  ‘Seems sensible. Have you, like, ever felt haunted by anyone?’

  ‘You’re talking to an archaeologist. I deal with the dead all the time. Consider this house, for instance. When I had it remodelled I discovered that the cellar had been built by the Normans. Left behind were several old floor tiles. Would you like to see them?’

  She shot me a winning smile, knew how not to appeal to my vanity in vain.

  *

  ‘Talking of finds, I have something to show you,’ I said.

  ‘Allow me,’ said Laura, examining the forged spike in my hand.

  It was big enough to pin a man to a cross.

  ‘Adrian was burning the last of some very large, very old timbers in the farmyard at Slack’s Cottage when this nail shot out the fire
at my feet.’

  ‘From a medieval tithe barn, no less.’

  ‘It’s sad, in a way, to know.’

  ‘Thing is, Colin, that barn was bulldozed before I arrived, so I never saw it in all its glory. But go back centuries and the farmers round here would have stored grain in it for the benefit of St. Peter’s Abbey in nearby Gloucester. The monks owned the land, you see, and made the tenants pay them a tax of one-tenth of their crops each year.’

  ‘So why wait until now to burn the last of the timbers?’

  ‘I can’t say, but for as long the past is forgotten it stays a shut book. Then, one day someone arrives to add an afterword.’

  ‘Don’t look at me.’

  She handed me back the nail.

  ‘Not me,’ I repeated.

  *

  With each long and short skip, we danced hand in hand among the icy puddles. Laura hooked up her dress so that she could step from brittle floe to brittle floe and not lose her balance, led us to a stone shed where she unlatched its stable doors, top and bottom.

  ‘I didn’t know anything about the tithe barn until I met Paul Mitchell,’ she said, moving fat, plastic bags of Happy Hoof from our path.

  I dodged a rat that ran over my toes.

  ‘Seriously? That awful little man with the ridiculous moustaches like Genghis Khan?’

  ‘That’s him. He lives in a caravan where the tithe barn once stood.’

  I held up my trouser bottoms as high and tightly as I could.

  ‘Must you dig in such dark corners?’

  ‘Forgive me, Colin, no one before you ever asked.’

  She squeezed past other bags of gnawed horse feed.

  ‘What are these blue pellets on the floor?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s only rat poison.’

  ‘Perhaps you should try something else?’

  Laura had to bend almost double between the shed’s low sloping rafters on her quest for her archaeological treasures.

  ‘What are these pictures doing here?’ I asked, by way of distraction.

  ‘That’s her. I forget her name, but she’s the one Paul found dead on a pile of firewood in the tithe barn all those years ago.’

  Steel drawing pins had corroded virtually to nothing, but two postcards and one photograph hung off a beam, I observed.

  ‘Dead, you say? How come?’

  ‘She was clutching a postcard like that in her hand when he found her. No one had written on it. She must have brought it with her as some sad reminder of home. Everyone hated that barn ever after.’

  ‘Honestly? That it? You think the tithe barn was bulldozed because of a few bad memories? Adrian told me that it was to be a listed building and that’s why it was knocked down – no one wanted the expense of repairing it?’

  ‘I can’t rightly say. I don’t know much more about it.’

  *

  In this most inaccessible of places the dark-haired girl in the picture looked to be just a teenager, in my estimation.

  ‘Been here a while, has she?’

  ‘Since 1979, by all accounts,’ replied Laura. ‘That’s when she fled Communist Poland, the same year the Pope visited Gdansk. Their uncle worked in the shipyard and thanks to him she stowed away on a ship to Sweden. How she reached England, Paul didn’t say.’

  ‘Who’s that with her?’

  ‘That’s her brother. I remember him, he’s Viktor.’

  Sweeping aside appalling cobwebs, I could make out a young man whose fair hair was closely cropped and very militaristic. His smile was more effusive than his sister’s and more reckless. He had tight hold of her arm, I noticed. Brother towered above sister until, with his broad shoulders and massive hands and feet, he could have been a giant. His mouth twisted somewhat oddly to reveal one very sharp canine but given the modest size of the photograph, it was hard to say if this was due solely to the malformation of an unreconstructed hare lip or whether he hated smiling for the camera. Both siblings had been snapped against a background of old-fashioned trams and brutal skyscrapers whose concrete monstrosities had come to dominate so many European cities rebuilt after the devastation of the Second World War.

  The girl in particular looked like someone on a perpetual diet whereas in reality good food had often been expensive and hard to come by during the Communist era. Angular and lean, she could have been a model on a catwalk. It was the dark, sunken eyes that betrayed how hard her life had been. Her smile was infectious, though. Clearly, when the photograph had been taken she had already made the decision to make a run for it.

  ‘You say she’s sad, but she doesn’t look sad to me.’

  Laura leaned over my shoulder to peer at the print.

  ‘You’re right. Strange, she is smiling. I see it now. I must have been thinking of what happened later.’

  I dabbed dust off the photograph with my fingertip, while I fixed my eyes hard on the girl’s face. Not only was I wordless, I was an actor in a mime show. I was pointing and poking, yet had to look twice to be certain, had to see for myself the stretched, skinny and angular face from whose nose, chin and eyes more familiar features were descended. This was no chance photograph but the dream in my head. She was every question and every answer. Ghost of my ghost, was it not her body I had seen rest so recently on her deathbed? For a moment I signed with my frantic deaf and dumb alphabet, pressed the heel of my hand to my mouth to deaden the gasp. Only then did I dare trust myself to admit out loud the blindingly obvious.

  ‘Lizzie looked just like her.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘H’m, well, yeah, this is Esti Dryzek. She’s my mother-in-law.’

  *

  Otherwise I was literally speechless. A picture from so long ago should not have evoked so much present emotion. That way, everything and everyone had a place in time, but what if somebody refused to stay put in a sequential past or particular period? What if they should resume their story after a long pause or provisional ending? When someone defied any continuous methodical dating and recording, did they not become timeless and endless, even animistic?

  Laura smiled.

  ‘Do you believe in astrology, Colin? I do, I’d say the stars meant you to find that picture for a reason.’

  ‘Perhaps it is all connected.’

  ‘In the short term things worked out better for Esti than Viktor.’

  ‘Stay long in Upper Coberley, did they?’

  ‘Dear me, no. Once Gerald Turner was gone, they were, too.’

  ‘Gerald Turner?’

  ‘The farm manager. Now are you ready to look at these tiles or what?’

  ‘Later,’ I replied and fled back to the party.

  *

  ‘You seen Paul Mitchell, at all?’ I asked, the instant I burst into the marquee.

  ‘Paul went home a few minutes ago. Said he felt funny in the head,’ advised Matt, who otherwise proved quite useless.

  I conducted a thorough search of house and gardens but the illusive Mitchell was nowhere to be seen. Nor did any woman dressed in rotting clothes stand looking for someone in the marquee’s chilly entrance.

  I made some excuse and departed.

  Terrified myself, I refrained from terrifying. As I scurried along the lane, grey clouds massed low in the sky. Nothing could diminish the chilly sensation that, in the otherwise empty road, somebody else trod close on my heels. But it was nothing. My eye simply retained an after-image of that odd woman at the party. Any revenant could only be less consequent that antecedent? They would have us believe that they were the conditional proposition on which life following death now depended? But Laura was right, no one should expect to feel more alive with the dead than the living.

  Of what else had I to be afraid? The afterlife?

  I refused to call it conscience.

  Afterlove was more like it.

  20

  ‘Colin, you look like shit.’

  ‘So nice to see you, too, Sergeant.’

  Chilled, I tried not to let my
real thoughts dwell on the charnel-house that once housed displaced bones in the crypt beneath my feet. We had agreed to meet in the Lady Chapel of the Parish Church of St. John Baptist in Cirencester. At least Jan had answered my cri de coeur, only now I felt a bit of a fool.

  Shunting me sideways on my pew, she hooked a curl of blonde hair out of her face in order to plant a quick kiss on my cheek.

  ‘So what have you, like, done to yourself, then, Colin? Apart from not shavin’, that is?’

  ‘Seems harsh.’

  ‘I mean, where did you acquire that awful tweed cap and coat you’re wearing? What is that funny smell?’

  Hastily I turned down my moleskin collar.

  ‘Er, everything belongs to Lord Hart’s dead brother Philip. Sorry about the mothballs.’

  ‘No, not that. I smell nicotine. You aren’t smoking again? Are you?’

  ‘It can be as cold as the grave on the Cotswolds.’

  ‘Then thank your lucky stars that I have in my car a suitcase full of your clothes.’

  ‘I never intended to stay this long.’

  Jan uncoiled her slim leg into the aisle and admired her new red shoes at the end of her grey cashmere trousers.

  ‘Seriously, Colin, why a church? It’s freezing.’

  ‘Somewhere like this has to be so much quieter and calmer.’

  ‘You think? I just researched this place on my phone. Says here that when Prince Rupert stormed the town in 1643 he used the nave as a prison. So desperate did the captured parliamentarians become that their loved ones smashed the stained glass windows to pass food and drink to the sick and wounded.’

  ‘Do you good to learn a bit of history.’

  ‘Right now what I need most is a coffee.’

  ‘No, honestly, thanks for coming.’

  ‘I nearly didn’t. I had to drive through two feet of water round Oxford. You working a case, or what?’

  ‘Yeah, no, I don’t know.’

  Such, however, was the reality.

  ‘I thought I recognized that cold look in your eyes. But you can’t. You’re in limbo. That is what compulsory compassionate leave amounts to, i’n’t?’

  I corkscrewed my buttocks on the excruciatingly hard wooden seat. A moment later, I directed my gaze at the nave and back again.