Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall

by Guy Sheppard

  I felt my feet freeze in my boots on the frosty ground. When someone felt that he was in pursuit of something he could leave no stone unturned. When he left no stone unturned he tried every possible means to persuade others to listen to his concerns. When they refused to listen to him he had no choice but to make accusations, he had to be prepared to cast aspersions on a man’s honesty or loyalty, he had to be prepared to throw a stone or two of his own.

  ‘All this business about bringing his brother back from the dead is guilt at what he did that night in 1982?’

  ‘Please stand aside. I must get back to my patient.’

  ‘What nurse treats a man who can’t live with himself, anyway?’

  ‘Best ask yourself that question, Colin.’

  ‘That it? You won’t give me an answer?’

  ‘One thing I have always been very clear about is that George can’t control his shifts in personality by himself. He has always made it plain that he needs me to act as his anchor as soon as he begins to drift from one hallucination to the other. I’m his lodestone that gives him direction. Unlike Marigold, I place the blame squarely on disease, not the dead.’

  ‘Really? What disease is that?’

  Rebecca took aim at a swan.

  ‘Doctors call it Lewy Body.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  She pitied my ignorance.

  ‘Rare it may be, Colin, but in America, for instance, it affects two million people. There’s no cure. A victim suffers hallucinations, trembling and fits until they lose all control of both mind and body. It can kill very slowly. In Philip’s case, it drove him to distraction.’

  ‘You’d dismiss a man’s belief in ghosts by reassuring him that he is dying the same way his brother did? What sophistry is this?’

  ‘Because most of the symptoms fit. His lordship has the same visions, too.’

  ‘Only, he thinks he’s cursed?’

  Rebecca turned her face away and into her eyes came tears.

  ‘I try to reassure him that what he sees is just another part of the disease he doesn’t want to admit having. That’s not to say that in his mind’s eye Marigold isn’t sometimes too strong for me. Each day, here we are, fighting her for his sanity all over again… It’s why I had him banish her to the woods six months ago.’

  Our hot breaths condensed into one spectral cloud in front of our faces.

  ‘Why fight her offer of help so cruelly?’ I asked.

  ‘Because the alternative is too awful to contemplate.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh yes you do, Colin. You understand only too well. Better a disease that drives you insane than hell itself.’

  ‘What makes you the arbiter of mind and soul?’

  ‘Because I have medicine for one but not the other.’

  *

  Suddenly the swan glided boldly by on the icy water and its awful amber eye challenged us with its defiant confidence.

  Or it knew how much I hated birds. In my hand I weighed my black, fire-tempered nail from the lost tithe barn, which made the perfect missile.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, rushing to keep pace with Rebecca over the bridge on our way back to the house.

  ‘I really don’t have time for any more of your questions, Mr Walker.’

  ‘If a man is sick to his soul from guilt or grief, will he not see ghosts without any illness?’

  ‘I don’t say ghosts don’t exist, I say they have no separate entity or being outside a person’s own mind.’

  ‘And if our mind’s eye should suffer its own form of vitreous detachment?’

  ‘I won’t stand by and let poor George’s ex-mistress or you scare him half to death because you’ve put it into his head that the dead can still survive.’

  ‘Consider yourself an expert on the afterlife, do you?’

  ‘The truth lies in your hands, Inspector. That nail comes from the barn that George pulled down to be rid of his demons.’

  ‘It’s where Esti Dryzek died of liver failure, I know that.’

  ‘Because of her, one man lost faith in the other.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean Philip stole her from under George’s nose even before Joseph Jones was cold in his grave.’

  ‘And I thought George might have betrayed Philip.’

  ‘Eventually Philip couldn’t live independently. Thanks to the disease, he became too delusional. Keeping him a virtual prisoner in the gatehouse was in his own best interests but it was also a punishment. George wanted to get his own back, which is another reason why he can’t forgive himself for his brother’s suicide. But it’s not the chief reason. He still loves his twin.’

  I felt my lungs work hard, the air being so thin and empty suddenly.

  ‘According to George, Lizzie never knew any of it.’

  ‘Oh, but she suspected all right, Colin.’

  ‘Did George never explain to her why he and Philip decided to send her away to be raised by some other family?’

  ‘You have to admit that Coberley Hall was no place for a child.’

  ‘So all this time there was this unspoken misunderstanding between them?’

  ‘Lizzie felt certain that her uncle harboured some dreadful secret which soured the Hall in her eyes forever. She was right. But no one told her exactly who her real father was or how he had come to blow out his brains. Not even her own mother. Esti couldn’t. She was in love with Philip. As far as he was concerned the child was his. It’s why George was so jealous.’

  I had to admit that my motive in being so inquisitorial went beyond my help or health. If I were to counter the plot against me I had to rebel against the very man who would have me doubt my own reason. I had to resist his nurse, too. But a vital ingredient in undermining me lay in Rebecca’s shameless and unhesitating appeal to common sense. She would have me believe that she knew the difference between physical and spiritual symptoms!

  *

  I caught up with her again at the end of the avenue of pleached lime trees. I tried to take her arm next to a trellis of tangled roses.

  ‘Are not you and he simply working together to drive me crazy?’ I said. ‘Have you not drugged me the same way you did Philip?’

  My belligerent carer stopped.

  ‘We only ever gave him what he needed.’

  ‘But you knew all your nursing was doomed to failure, so why do it?’

  Rebecca gave a toss of her head.

  ‘It was George’s decision to ‘manage’ Philip’s dreadful deterioration in his last few years. That’s why he hired me. The outer gates of Coberley Hall were kept bolted as well as the doors to the house, but only because he would escape to wander about stark naked like the Wild Man he said he met in the woods. He would bang on windows and claim to see the dead come alive on the lawn, until the only thing that would calm him was ketamine.’

  All of which was highly relevant to my mind in view of what else she had done to me.

  ‘Damn you, I see what you are. You’re Death incarnate. The only reason you want to consign all ghosts to their graves with your false hope of a cure is because you, and you alone, want to be Coberley Hall’s next chatelaine?’

  ‘If you think you’re so much better than me, why haven’t you left?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘When loved ones die we must give them space to forget and deny our presence. It’s for the best, don’t you think? How else can they ever rest afterwards?’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  Rebecca ran her hand through her hair and her cold, hard eyes fixed mine through her fringe.

  ‘Because I’m not like you, Colin, I can let go.’

  36

  They say an Englishman’s house is his castle. So it was that Coberley Hall infused into me not only a rightful regard for my surroundings but the novel state of mind with which I regarded them. When sitting at the high table in the great hall, I increasingly found myself in tune with its sepulchral walls. To eat wit
hin them was to enjoy magical effects by strange means, to drink was to perform similar marvels.

  I had a fancy to call myself its castellan, though had still to learn how to live like one.

  Of the dust-covered, cobwebby furniture and rusty Civil War armour I was less forgiving.

  I had the dream of happiness, if not yet the happiness dreamed.

  From high up in his portrait on the chimney piece, Joseph Jones stared down at me doubly hard. Seizing a pewter candelabrum from the table, I raised three lit candles to his grinning features. In them I now detected a crafty curiosity. At first, I could not see how I deserved his fresh attention, though clearly I did. Ever resplendent in his Cavalier’s silver lace, buttons and galloon, he did, I was sure, honour me with a peculiar and ugly triumph of his lip.

  Touching cracked oils, my fingers followed the leathery lines of his saddle while, on his horse’s shiny neck, serpentine veins boiled beneath the skin of glistening black paint. I pressed my palm flat to the canvas, absorbed hot, fire-lit skin of man and animal. Voluntarily, I heard myself hiss some voluble, clear and intelligible whisper, part thrill and part wonder. It was a guttural, growling, savage cry, the snort of a dragoon and his mount in the heat of battle.

  Not only did a knowing wiliness and corresponding cunning transform an old man’s worn-out features into this soldierly and more vigorous double-ganger, it hinted at something akin to eternal youth. His eyes contained some malevolent promise. Soon, he appeared to say – like the medieval saying on the plaque below him – that I would soon be like him:

  As we are so shall ye be.

  From where I was standing, that same translucency of flesh left him doll-like and pretty. While he impersonated so well a seventeenth century Royalist captain, he was distinctly wax-like. Although in the style of the Old Masters, his face was less masterpiece than death-mask.

  *

  Not long could I bear to stand amazed at the significance of the portrait’s reincarnation, but hurried away from hall to grand stairs. There I unlatched the spiky dog-gate and with the one-eyed greyhound hard on my heels, climbed the dusty oak treads. Above me, an impossibly youthful Adonis clutched Venus’s plump breast on the magnificent ceiling. Before, I might have had eyes only for the jealous, covetous goddess who stared at all who lingered. This time my heart reached out to her lover, too. Suddenly I sympathised as he fought to be free of his mistress to go hunting wild boar, yet so needed her embrace to stop him falling.

  As it was, I rushed up the last few steps to the candlelit gallery, felt myself pushed along by my own figure fashioned from darkness. I marched past the row of open-mouthed, gasping Cavaliers imprisoned in paint when, unexpectedly, the door ahead of me opened and closed. It was James.

  He was responding to some hullabaloo faraway in the kitchens.

  If I had not been so busy I might have investigated further.

  Instead I arrived with my heart pounding at the end of the landing. There I stared at Countess Lucy’s portrait. She half turned towards me in her low-cut, green and white dress in which she looked so magisterial and queenly. As a woman who had been wed first and foremost for her dowry, she was required to pose against the contrived background of classical ruins and leafy landscape. In much the same way, her husband had posed his pictures of dogs and horses. For an artist to capture her so casually in oils required some willing participation in the necessary device and artifice, she had to deceive to be both humble and haughty. So it was, she crooked a finger at me in a simple gesture which was both steely and inviting. Yet deceived was I not and absolutely did I not imagine it.

  Sure enough, her blood-red lips visibly acquired a vivid hue as of a living person. They not only embodied an air of self-possession but stood proud of the canvas where she would have me step up and kiss her.

  With new understanding I clamped my hands to each side of the picture’s bulky frame. Instantly, her dark eyes turned liquid and silvery. Where her thick, curving eyebrows almost touched mine head to head, she frowned in great concentration. Meanwhile the pearls at her freckled throat gleamed and glistened.

  ‘Trust me,’ I whispered. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  *

  The almost life-size picture tipped so awkwardly in my grasp that I was obliged to negotiate every step virtually blindly.

  On the worn, smooth stairs it was hard not to dip to the right very dangerously.

  Back in the great hall, the twelve sons of Jacob scowled at me from atop their screen, to observe what I was doing somewhat contentiously. Next minute, I offered up the painting to the recessed hole in the chimney breast with some trepidation.

  But not long did I hesitate to trust my own instinct. At once, the pairing of pictures restored a pleasing symmetry to the chimney piece’s elaborate stonework. No blank, recessed space rendered the Cavalier’s portrait unbalanced, even wistful. No more was he the odd survivor of a set of two, he was no misplaced complement to a couple whose corresponding parts were never meant to be displayed separately. No more did a pale, ghostly suggestion of the missing person cry out for redress or forever prompt the prospect of some as yet undisclosed purpose.

  For a chatelaine to lose her place at the head of the great hall was to lose her identity. If she lost her identity she could lose not only her title or home but also her place in history. As though the dead should ever be supplanted by the living!

  I shuddered. The logs in the fire basket cooled in a cruel draught that threatened to blow out my candles. Then it was I realised that I was making a terrible mistake. Yes, with his long, flowing curls, goatee and thin waxed moustache, the Joseph Jones I knew had successfully recreated himself as a fine dragoon. Yes, he held his plumed hat dextrously in one hand as he sat astride his gallant black Barbary horse. But he was no living, breathing portrait of any soldier, he was only ever a pathetic old man mummified in oils and varnish.

  Surely a much truer likeness of Captain Digby was what Lady Lucy really required to have mounted beside her?

  JJ had never truly caught her fancy. What a crazy fool to think he was the one! I could acknowledge the harmony of the pairing, but not of the two people paired.

  Instead, I felt driven to consign him to the gallery wall at the top of the stairs with all the other discarded, so-called suitors. He could hang with the other eight, heartless rejects to make nine bleeding hearts, as on the family shield. Anyone else who tried to pass himself off as Lady Lucy’s lover was unworthy.

  So long had her presence graced the house that she would always be its possessor, not possession.

  About an hour passed – it could have been an eternity – before the one-eyed sight-hound began to bark and growl most aggressively, not at all like an ordinary greyhound. No one was at my door. In the interests of sanity, I opened it with annoying regularity in order to surprise some invisible attendance.

  I had read not a few stories of haunted houses but had never thought to join in the haunting.

  *

  With fresh eyes, I was drawn to the domestic scene that hung over the desk in the closet. Within its black and gold frame her ladyship sat on her chair’s silky red cushion and rested one hand beside her pot of frangipane on its green velvet cloth. Only, this evening, she was considering what travel clothes to wear with the help of her gentlewoman, I decided? Tonight, did she not hasten to ready herself for some secret rendezvous at last? The light from real candles caused her long black hair and lovelocks to shine. Each glowing flame heated the oils in the picture and gave her gown its silky gleam even as she peered earnestly into her mirror set into the lid of her exquisitely carved jewellery box. Far from being immobilised in stiff paint hundreds of years old, this private moment in her existence was now forever ready to take on a life of its own. That it was Lady Lucy, I’d never doubted.

  Quickly she dabbed a blush of Spanish red on her bloodless cheeks, then powdered her lifeless hair to give it back its colour. From among her pots of musk and amber grease she chose to rub oily balsam into he
r withered fingers and perfume the insides of her shrunken wrists with the smell of red jasmine. Meanwhile, her astrological globe by the fireside stopped at Pluto, ruler of the underworld. The way her hands trembled, she was looking forward to something that would at last put an end to all her waiting?

  On her middle finger her blue and gold enamelled ring shone bright behind her bony knuckle. Aware, perhaps, of my reflection at the periphery of her mirror, she jerked her head my way. With hard, golden eyes she not only glared, she dazzled.

  *

  Restive clocks stayed their beat for a second.

  Suddenly a girl’s voice joined a man’s in the host of gathering shadows. Then, more frantic footsteps. I chose to hurry downstairs when I saw a light flash on the landing below me. My sensitised eyes were equally responsive to the gloom by night or day, such was the house’s effect on my world since it had suffered its strange reversal.

  I suppressed my shiver of slight alarm but not of bewilderment. The greyhound at my side followed suit.

  James waved a sconce about in wide circles. By his side hovered a fretful Sara.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I demanded.

  ‘Search everywhere,’ said James, ignoring me. ‘He has to be in the west wing.’

  The sullen kitchen maid shook her head.

  ‘Too late. I saw him run across the courtyard.’

  James rolled his head in perpetual, agitated motion.

  ‘Where is his lordship now?’

  ‘Gone after him. To the woods, I suspect.’

  ‘But it’s pitch black out there.’

  I descended a few steps to interrupt the confused discussion on the landing.

  ‘Can you please tell me what’s going on?’ I demanded.

  ‘Didn’t you hear, sir?’ said James. ‘Peter Slater is dead.’

  *

  I seized James by the arm. He was shaking more than usual.

  ‘Please, in your own time, tell me again what’s happened.’

  ‘Mr Slater’s dog came whimpering and whining to the farmyard at Slack’s Cottage. If Adrian hadn’t followed him all the way back to ‘The Firs’…’

  Confused myself, I tried not to confuse.