The Woman in Silk

by R. J. Gadney

  Over the tracks. Homewards bound. Over the tracks. Click and clack. Sumiko—Sumiko—

  A word in his ear: “Sir?”

  “What—?”

  “You’re going to Carlisle?”

  He looked up at the conductor. “Carlisle? Yes.”

  “This service is terminating at Leeds.”

  “No trains whatsoever?”

  “You wish. You’re lucky to have got this far.”

  LEEDS CITY STATION

  A Salvation Army band played “Silent Night.” He tossed a pound coin in the collection box and heard a familiar voice. “Captain Stirling.”

  “MacCullum. Good to see you.”

  “How are we, Sir?”

  “Fine, thanks. You?”

  “Bloody weather.”

  Of indeterminate middle age, Ryker MacCullum was a dour figure no more than five feet six inches tall. He wore a jacket cut too long to make him took taller. Tonight, as well as the usual long black coat with a velvet collar, he wore a funereal black hat. There was the look of the weasel about him.

  Like his father before him, MacCullum owned the village garage, the Moster Lees undertaking business and ran a sideline breeding pedigree saddleback pigs he butchered himself in his garden sheds. “Sister Vale’s asked me to collect you,” he said. “No more trains tonight. Not tomorrow either, I dare say, or the day after that.”

  “The roads passable?”

  “We’ll try ’em. Vectra’s in car park. We’ll get you home. Take a while, mind.”

  “When did you get here?”

  “Mid-morning. Funeral in Leeds.”

  “Anyone local?”

  “Not local you might say from Moster Lees. It were a twelve-year-old girl.” He fiddled with the band of white silk thread around his wrist from which a small ornament dangled. “Congenital brain damage. Never get over a child going. Mother’s suffering from traumatic grief. Can’t think of worse. It’s upset the wife. She were at school with the lass’s aunt. I always say it’s family what matters. Back home’s where we belong. That’s why we’ll be getting you home safely, Sir. No sweat. Like I say, Vectra’s in the short-term car park.”

  The Vauxhall Vectra was a gray six-speed air-conditioned hearse.

  “If snowplows have been out we may make it in just above of three or four hours.” He drove the hearse down the car park’s ramps. “If the snow gets worse I’ll be making sure The Towers doesn’t get cut off. If you’ve no objection I’ll be collecting the wife. Got to pick her up from the Queens Hotel. I’ve a folding seating deck in the back that the wife doesn’t mind.”

  MacCullum led his portly wife out of the hotel. In a black coat and hat she leaned heavily on his arm. Once she was installed with a pile of shopping bags in the back of the hearse it soon became clear to Hal she’d been drinking heavily.

  “Sorry, Sir. I’m so sorry.”

  He thought she was talking about his repatriation. “It could be worse.”

  “Yes. She could’ve lingered on in pain.”

  “Not now, Betsy,” MacCullum snapped.

  “Your mother …” Betsy said.

  MacCullum brought the hearse to a sudden stop. “Bloody hell. You heard what Teresa said.”

  “It’s not going to bring her bloody back.”

  “My mother …?” Hal said quietly.

  “She were lovely.”

  MacCullum hissed: “Shut up.” He turned to face Hal. “I’m sorry. Sister Vale gave us orders. She wanted to be the one to tell you—”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Your mother passed over two days ago. Rest her soul.”

  “But Sister Vale said she was alive a few hours ago.”

  “She wanted to keep it secret from you,” MacCullum said. “Until you got back to The Towers. So she could tell her yourself. They seemed to know she was sinking.”

  “I’d have thought …” Mrs. MacCullum said, “they’d have moved heaven and earth to tell you, Captain Stirling—you of all people, what with you her only son. She being so ill and all.”

  “The solicitor had us prepare her for the crematorium,” MacCullum said. “We had the funeral yesterday.”

  “Sun came out,” said Mrs. MacCullum. “Just for a minute. Your mother, Captain, you know something? She always did want the best for you. Saw to it you never wanted for any little thing. She was so proud of you.” She choked back tears. “We’re proud of all you boys in uniform.”

  MacCullum pulled out into the road and headed into the snow. “Sorry about all that,” he said.

  Mrs. MacCullum sucked her teeth. “Did I say something? Seems Mrs. Stirling only wanted nice Sister Vale and her daughter at the graveside. They’ve been wonderful to your mother. Francesca’s an angel. And the Vicar did it perfect in spite of his having the Asian flu. Solicitor was there too seeing to your mother’s wishes. She left orders. No fuss.”

  Hal stared at the snow falling across the yellowish streetlights.

  “Say if you want to stop off for a hot drink,” MacCullum said.

  “There’s a nice place in Skipton,” said Mrs. MacCullum.

  “We aren’t going to Skipton.”

  “Barnoldswick then?”

  “No, Betsy. Barnoldswick neither.”

  Tears overcame her. “Things have changed. I don’t like change.” She began to rummage in her handbag. “I need a cigarette.”

  “No smoking in the hearse,” MacCullum said.

  All arms and elbows, Mrs. MacCullum couldn’t prevent the handbag from spewing its contents across the floor.

  The airless hearse was overheated and Mrs. MacCullum fell asleep.

  “Do you want me to share the driving, MacCullum?”

  “Best keep going. The Towers—won’t be the same with your mother gone, Captain. Be different, won’t it?”

  “It will stay about the same, MacCullum.”

  “Daresay the future of the old place is now in your hands, Captain. There’ll be changes up there, then?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Moster doesn’t welcome change. So there’ll just be you and Sister Vale and her daughter up there? They’ll look after you, Captain. Salt of the earth. Strange that Teresa never married again. She’s classy, softhearted. More the governess type. You wonder where she sprang from. Mind, there’s plenty of fellers in the locality that fancy her. Voluptuous is the word, isn’t it? Keeps herself to herself, mind. Francesca’s a cracker too. And you, Sir, if you don’t mind me asking … will you be courting, then?”

  “Being in the Army, you know, it isn’t easy.”

  “Now you’re back you can settle down at home. Or will you be going back to Afghanistan?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “A good rest at The Towers over Christmas will do you the world of good. Christmas always lifts the spirits.” He fell silent a while and then suddenly added: “Country really appreciates what the boys are doing out there. Not that I could put me finger on the map and show you where Afghanistan is. Leeds, yes. Bradford, yes. Sheffield. Carlisle. London. Not Afghanistan. Must be a right shit-hole.”

  Hal made no comment and MacCullum concentrated on his driving.

  He thought of distant Helmand.

  *

  Heated rocks. Whirling dust storms. Apocalyptic thunder. Lightning streaking across the mountains.

  True, to some people, the Afghan helter-skelter landscape is terrifying. Not to him.

  The violent beauty of its colors beguiled him: scarlets, ultramarine, gold and silver; like colors from Byzantine icon paintings or crusaders’ coats of arms.

  Carmine, magenta and ruby. Venetian and Indian red, cherry and rose madder.

  No matter it inspires internecine warfare, breeds plagues of flies and locusts and gives you disabling diarrhea.

  It’s home to the Levantine vipers, the lizards and the scorps, the nomadic kuchis.

  In another life I could’ve made a home there too.

  “Shit-hole,” MacCullum said.

&
nbsp; “It’s actually rather beautiful.”

  “Not as beautiful as Moster Lees. You want my opinion?”

  Hal was sure he’d get it whether he wanted it or not.

  “Moster Lees,” MacCullum announced, “ … and The Towers is the most enchanted place on earth. I’d even say—when you see The Towers in the snow you might think you’d arrived at the gates of Heaven. Pure holy magic. And at Christmastime. You could say, in the snow … beneath the moon … Watched over by womankind. White magic.”

  *

  He stared at the condensation on the window and saw the blurred image of his mother forming. She’d have liked MacCullum’s turn of phrase. White magic. He heard her quavering voice: A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing—

  MacCullum was saying: “ … remember you as a young lad like it were yesterday. Yesterdays were better days. You remember?”

  He remembered.

  9

  Sleep denied him by the rainwater dripping from cracked ceilings clacking like metronomes into rusted buckets.

  Long and pleasantly anxious afternoons alone talking to himself about the disappointments of the world elsewhere: mooching, head down, shoulders bent, eyes on the alert like a detective investigating the perpetual twilight of empty rooms; listening outside the heavy door to the family crypt beneath the Chapel for any voices from the vaults, home to the skeletons of his forebears, home to the noiseless communities of rats and maggot hordes.

  Standing motionless, watching the play of watery sunlight shafts forming twisted rainbows in the fractures of the windows that hadn’t been boarded up, trying to interpret their signals as though they were part of a semaphore system bringing good news.

  A world more intense, more real and more human than that offered by the boarding schools whose teachers tried to educate him: tried to educate him, because he’d been born to educate himself and had spent most of his schooldays doing so.

  The more perceptive of his teachers judged him to be a boy who’d always been middle-aged, very much the only son, a solitary from the past, unselfish, courteous, kindly and hard-working; a small useful pillar of a small society with the makings of, say, a diligent provincial solicitor; even, because there was something of the fossil about him, a museum paleontologist.

  They seemed to know he belonged to a family shipwrecked on an island where news from the outside world never seemed to reach.

  If and when any of them raised the subject of The Towers, he said it was The Place of Fear.

  They said he was young for his age when he achieved four Grade As in A levels, entered RMA Sandhurst, distinguished himself in military, practical and academic subjects; and at the end of the Sovereign’s Parade marched up the steps of Old College to be commissioned Ensign in the Coldstream.

  Out of the blue, one former teacher wrote to him saying that was exactly what he’d foreseen in his “crystal ball.” He signed off: “Nulli Secundus,” the Coldstream motto. Second to None.

  Hal had acquired the taste for handling bombs at Sandhurst. And though he loved the Coldstream and was intensely proud to be serving in the oldest regiment in continuous active service, he was already listening to the bombs and surrendering to the whispering of their siren songs.

  In a different world, The Towers might have been Home Sweet Home: a world of unforgotten moments, his first kiss, where he first fell in love; where someone first told him that they loved him. The truth was different.

  He remembered his mother had been his father’s prisoner there. When he died she ruled over it. A barren place of dereliction, The Towers was the residence of broken souls. Time after time it drew the Stirlings back. It embraced and held them like a spider’s shroud.

  MacCullum continued talking: preoccupied with a story about the sighting of a ghost at the church in Haydon Bridge intriguing Teresa Vale.

  “St. Cuthbert’s bones are buried there,” he said. “Most of them are in Durham. But his skull and pelvis are buried near the altar. They were bricked up in the mists of time so as the Vikings wouldn’t take them. There was this lass who wanted a lovely coat of crimson velvet to attract a boy and when she saw the local tailor making a coat for some lady or other she asked if the tailor would run a crimson velvet one up for her as well. The tailor said he would. No fee. You know what he had her do?”

  “I never heard.”

  “All she had to do was go to the church and steal the St. Cuthbert Prayer Book from the altar for him. ‘Do that,’ he says, ‘and I’ll make the coat up for you.’ So she creeps into the church the same night, takes the Prayer Book and as she’s leaving, she hears these whispers in the entrance. Terrified, she hides herself behind the font and then she sees these two men coming into the church carrying a woman’s corpse with an arrow in her breast and she sees them jimmy up the flagstones and lower the body on ropes down into the crypt. They replace the flagstones. You know what’s next? The woman was alive. They’d bloody buried her alive. Then they ran for it. They’d had their way with her, the both of them, three-in-a-bed, and didn’t want her to tell on them.

  “Petrified, the girl runs home, trips on something, falls and twists her ankle. Then as she stands up she sees the thing she’s tripped over, a longbow. And she knows whose. You know whose? Her lover’s.

  “Next day when he calls on her she’s in her new coat and her lover tells her he’s leaving her. Good riddance. Narrow escape. She might’ve got a lovely coat. But she’s lost her lover. Then she went mad.

  “She’s the lass who appears every time there’s a burial at the church. That’s why Sister Vale wants to go there. She’s asked me to take her there.”

  “Why?”

  “To get a sight of her, that’s why.”

  “Do you believe this, MacCullum?”

  “She saw her.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “She bloody did. I saw her too.”

  There were no lights in the windows of The Towers.

  Battered by the whirling snow, Home was impenetrable, its windows hooded, its dark eyes watching the desolate moorland near Carlisle.

  THREE

  Horror. The state of mind expressed by this term implies terror, and is in some cases almost synonymous with it. He who dreads, as well as hates a man, will feel, as Milton uses the word, a horror of him.

  CHARLES DARWIN

  The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals

  10

  Seen from a distance, it could easily be mistaken for a forbidding country house that had seen better days. As you approached it seemed to be more suited to those the world prefers to ignore: recluses, solitudinarians withdrawn from worldliness and public notice, supernatural beings and the mad. Perhaps, because it stood high on a hill in isolation, it looked larger than it was. Its size and shape only served to emphasize its aura of menace and fearfulness, mute repository of secrets and vague undercurrents of suppressed terror.

  Its quartet of neo-Gothic towers comprised the square Victoria Tower at the south end, the octagonal spire of the Central Tower; the East Tower; and the Bell Tower at the north end. When seen against the dying sun in silhouette its windows resembled ranks of suspicious eyes. In winter, veiled by ice and snow, they gazed at you like the living dead.

  MacCullum refused to take any payment for delivering him to the main entrance and he stayed resolutely at the wheel of the hearse with its engine turning over. It was as if he didn’t want to venture too close. He kept the hearse’s headlights on to make it easier for Hal to stumble through the blizzard toward the entrance.

  He passed the stone statue of the house’s creator standing in the portico. The likeness of the self-aggrandizing Sir Glendower Stirling was held to be the work of a follower of Sir Francis Legatt Chantrey. The family motto, Capax Infiniti or Capable of the Infinite, was carved into its marble pedestal. Sir Glendower�
��s fortunes, amassed in South East Asia, had funded The Towers’ original construction. Day and night Sir Glendower’s blank eyes gazed into the distance with the expression of an anxious soul hearing troubled voices.

  Hal struggled to unlock the entrance door. His hands were cold and he fumbled with the key. Finally the door opened and the snow and particles of ice seemed to follow him inside nipping at his ankles.

  The hearse’s headlights briefly illuminated the hallway and Hal turned, the glare dazzling him; and he gave a salute of cursory thanks to MacCullum who acknowledged the gesture with two dismissive hoots of the vehicle’s horn and drove away.

  He turned a light on in the hallway and began his walk across the flagstone floor to the dim passages leading to the Victoria Tower. The only sounds were of his shoes rapping against the stone, then muffled when he crossed threadbare floor rugs.

  Passing the wooden staircase rising to the gallery on the floor above, he smelled the familiar scent of damp soot. The Towers, it seemed to him, had always smelled of damp soot. Soot was the smell of home, the odor of dark memories.

  In a vain attempt to bring some life back to it, his mother had agreed to lease it as a country retreat, but the idea was soon abandoned, the result of visits by surveyors and officials from the Health and Safety Executive. One of them had been heard to say it was unfit for human habitation.

  Priscilla Stirling retaliated: “We Stirlings have lived here perfectly happily for a hundred and fifty years. As long as there is a Stirling, we will continue to do so until hell freezes.”

  The route to his room in the Victoria Tower took him through the interior of the Central Tower.

  Beneath the darkened ceilings he heard his father’s voice. “Recite the history after me …” His father had demanded that from an early age his son knew the history of the place. If the boy failed to offer a word-perfect recitation, the father would clip the child’s knuckles with his Parker pen and call him an ignoramus.