Property of a Lady

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘Oh God, I hope not,’ said Michael. He thought for a moment, then said, ‘I think I’ll just repeat that Charect House won’t be anywhere near ready for Christmas and ask him to phone so I can explain in more detail.’

  ‘Shall you tell him about our side of things with Elvira? When you get to speak, I mean.’

  ‘I think I’ll have to.’

  ‘It won’t sound as peculiar to him as it would to anyone else,’ said Nell. ‘He’s more than halfway there already.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Michael drew breath to tell her about finding Harriet Anstey’s journal, then changed his mind. He would keep Harriet to himself just a little longer.

  He sent the email to Jack and closed the laptop. As he got up to leave, Nell said, ‘Will you stay in touch?’ And then, hastily: ‘Because I do want to know what happens.’

  There were still smudges of tiredness under her eyes, and she looked small and vulnerable, and Michael discovered he wanted to put his arms round her. He said, ‘Of course I will. I’d stay in touch even without all this.’

  ‘Oh good.’ The words appeared to come out involuntarily.

  Back at the Black Boar, Michael arranged to have an early breakfast and to check out afterwards, then went up to his room. He would probably reach Oxford around mid-morning tomorrow, and providing he could find Jack’s mobile number he would phone him then. In the meantime, there was Harriet Anstey’s journal.

  He would not have been surprised if it had vanished like the chimera it probably was, but it lay as he had left it in the locked suitcase. Michael looked at the papers for a moment, trying to work out why he had not told anyone about them – in particular why he had not told Nell. He frowned, shook his head impatiently and took the papers out.

  16th February 1939 7.00 p.m.

  Tomorrow I shall finally see the house that lay at the heart of all father’s stories. And – more to the point – that lay at the deepest point of my own nightmare. The nightmare Father and I shared and that we never repeated to Mother.

  Charect House itself won’t hold any nightmares – how could it when I’ve never seen the place? But it feels remarkable to know I’m about to see it, and that’s why I’ve decided to keep this journal. There are moments in one’s life that one wants to erase for ever, but there are also moments – whole experiences – one wants to preserve. So that, a long way in the future, it will be possible to unwrap the memories and the experiences, and relive them and think – oh yes, that was the day I was really happy. You can’t preserve those things by coating them in isinglass like eggs, or putting a glass case over them like waxed fruit, but you can write them down while they’re still fresh. I wish I had done that on the night Harry asked me to marry him. I wish even more I had done so after that night in the old gardens with the air heavy with the scent of lilac and the grass soft under us . . . I have no regrets about that night – it was sweet and sinless and he was being sent to the front the next day and we both knew he might not come back.

  And if I had written it all down, that marvellous cascade of astonished delight, I could occasionally reread it and recapture fragments . . . How he looked and felt, and how, afterwards, he propped himself up on one elbow and smiled down at me, and traced the lines of my face with his fingertips as if he wanted to absorb every detail of how I looked, not just with his eyes, but with his skin and nerves and mind . . .

  But I promised myself I would not become sentimental in this journal and I won’t! Instead I’ll tidy myself for supper in the Black Boar’s dining room – and admit privately I’m a touch nervous about walking in there by myself, because no matter how emancipated we’re supposed to be, ladies don’t very often stay in hotels by themselves. I wonder if the locals will be curious – if they’ll see me as a mysterious lone traveller, or even think I’m an adventuress (ha!).

  Adventuress or not, I’ve been given a very pleasant room. Chintz curtains and matching counterpane, and a writing desk in one corner. The window overlooks what I think might have been the old coach yard – I can see the cobblestones and the big wide doors. Beyond that are gardens, fringed by whispering trees and with an old sundial half covered in moss at the centre of a velvety lawn.

  She stayed here, thought Michael, looking up from the slanting writing. In this room? There was a writing desk in the corner – had Harriet written these pages there? He went to the window and opened the curtains a little, and even in the darkness, he could see what was unmistakably the old tilt yard. The cobblestones had been replaced by a patio with wrought-iron chairs, but beyond that were the whispering trees and the mossy sundial. He returned to the bed and began to read.

  FOURTEEN

  16th February, 9 p.m.

  I thought I would remember everything about the Black Boar, but now I’m here I can only remember parts. But then it’s more than thirty years since I came here as a wide-eyed child, clinging to Father’s hand. One thing I do remember though is Mother saying to me beforehand: ‘You’ll be staying at an inn, Harriet. It’s a very grown-up thing to do, so you must be well-behaved and polite to everyone, and make Father proud of you.’

  She knew I would be well-behaved and polite, and so did Father. I was a polite child. Children were in those days. And I was wide-eyed with awe at the huge adventure of going on a train with Father, just the two of us.

  At the little station was a trap drawn by a fat pony, which took us into Marston Lacy and the Black Boar. Eating our supper in the dining room was another adventure. We had Brown Windsor Soup and roast mutton, and I was given half portions. Father had a joke with the waiter about whether he would only have to pay half of the cost for me.

  But what I do remember in clear detail is the trap returning next morning after breakfast to take us to the place we were here to visit.

  There are some memories that with time become buried, almost painlessly, beneath thick layers of scar tissue. They only hurt occasionally, those memories, and they’re natural and wholesome and part of the journey through life. The memories of Harry are like that.

  But there are other memories, darker, deeper ones, that never quite heal, no matter how much they become overlaid with other experiences. They stay raw, those memories, and from time to time something will jab into them, making them bleed. My memory of that morning when I was seven years old, and Father, dear impractical Father, was in quest of his improbable inheritance, is one of those painful, unhealed memories.

  I hadn’t intended to write an account of that time, but there’s more than an hour before I shall want to get into bed and I suddenly feel I would like to do so. Perhaps if I expose that deep, unhealed wound to the light, it will finally skin over and leave me.

  That long-ago morning began happily enough with breakfast and then another ride in the trap. I was allowed to stroke the pony’s velvety nose, and the driver showed me how to offer a lump of sugar to him, with my hand flattened.

  The trap jolted us through the centre of Marston Lacy, which was yet another adventure for me who had never been in a pony trap. I had never been outside our own Cheshire village either, although Marston Lacy had the same kind of village street with shops displaying their goods. But there were what Father called workshops here, as well: places where people made cabinets and chairs and clocks, and a blacksmith’s where a scent of hot iron gusted out into the street. I would have liked to see more of that, but the trap rattled its way on, all the way through the village and out the other side.

  Father pointed out to me the smudgy mountains in the distance. ‘That’s Wales,’ he said.

  But I had never heard of Wales, so I just said, ‘Oh, is it?’

  As we went between hedges and fields, the sky seemed to grow darker. ‘Rain,’ said Father, glancing up. I believe that was the moment when I stopped being excited and inquisitive and when fear scratched at my mind, because the dark sky did not seem like the start of an ordinary rainstorm.

  The trap turned into a narrow lane where the hedges gave way to high brick walls. I di
dn’t like them – they were too high and dark and if you were trapped behind them you would not be able to climb out because there were little hard bits of glass on the very top. Then, directly ahead of us, a massive building reared up. It seemed that one minute it was not there and the next it appeared between the trees. It had flat, dark-grey walls and tiny, mean windows with iron bars at some of them. I hated it.

  ‘Here we are,’ said the driver, pulling the pony up before black gates. Without the cheerful clatter of the wheels and the clip-clop of the pony’s hoofs it was suddenly and disturbingly quiet. There was lettering set into the gates, but although I leaned forward to try to read it, I could not.

  ‘This is where you wanted, isn’t it?’ said the driver.

  ‘I think so,’ said Father. ‘If this is—’

  ‘Brank Asylum,’ said the man.

  I didn’t know, not at seven years of age, what an asylum was. But the sound of the name frightened me – Brank. It made me think of iron and blackness, and it made me wonder why there had to be bars at all those windows.

  Father was handing the driver some coins. ‘You’ll come back to collect us in one hour?’ he said. ‘I shall pay you the other half of the money then.’

  ‘I will indeed,’ said the man, touching his cap and turning the pony’s head round.

  ‘We shan’t be as long as an hour, Harriet,’ said Father, taking my hand firmly and leading me forward. ‘But there’s someone in here who wants to meet you.’

  That sent the fear spiking even deeper. ‘Someone who wants to meet you . . .’ Like any child of the early part of the century, I had read the extraordinarily macabre fairy-tales deemed suitable then. It meant I knew what sort of people lived inside lonely forbidding houses and wanted to meet little girls. Witches who put children in cages and fattened them up for the ovens. Wolves who dressed up in human clothes and pretended to be human.

  Father rang the bell outside the huge main doors. He kept a firm hold of my hand – perhaps he thought I might suddenly bolt and run back down that long drive to the lanes beyond. I wish I had. I wish I had never gone inside Brank Asylum, and I wish, above everything in the world, that I had not followed Father and a grey-clad, slab-faced woman to the small, mean room at the end of one of the corridors. They smelt of food cooked too long, those corridors – unappetizing food, boiled cabbage and onions. Beneath that was another smell I had never encountered. I could not, then, put a name to it, but it made me think of people drowning in the dark. It made me want to cry.

  ‘In here,’ said the granite-coloured woman, opening a door and standing back to let us go inside. I hung back, but Father said, quite gently, ‘Come along, Harriet, it’s all right,’ and I had to go in.

  The sad, drowning-in-the-dark smell was much stronger, and there was a horrid smeary darkness in the room. I had the feeling that things might be hiding inside that darkness – things that never went outside, things that had become covered with layers and layers of cobwebs until the cobwebs had formed thick ropes that tangled in hair and coiled around ankles and wrists . . .

  But I stood obediently inside the door and waited to see what came next. At first I thought the room was empty, but then from the darkest corner came a voice – an ugly voice that made me think of a fingernail scraping across a slate surface.

  ‘You are Anstey?’

  ‘I am Frederick Anstey.’

  There was a blur of movement, as if the cobwebs gathered themselves together. I flinched and glanced behind me, but the door was firmly shut.

  ‘You have brought the child?’

  ‘Harriet. Yes. She’s here with me.’

  Father glanced down at me, and I managed to say, ‘How do you do,’ directing the words towards the dark corner.

  ‘They wrote to you?’ said the voice, as if I had not spoken. ‘They wrote asking you to come here?’

  ‘Yes. The solicitor—’

  ‘The details have no interest for me.’ The movement came again. ‘Tell the child to speak to me.’

  Father bent down. ‘Harriet, tell this lady how old you are and how you are good at lessons.’ He gave me the smile that meant: everything is perfectly all right. It wasn’t all right, of course, but I saw he wanted me to pretend.

  So I said, as politely as I could, ‘I’m seven. I like reading books.’

  ‘She is well-mannered.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Her mother?’

  ‘She is at our home in Cheshire.’

  ‘Harriet Anstey,’ said the terrible voice, suddenly addressing me directly, ‘one day somewhere in the future, after I am dead, you will own a house – my house. If your father is still alive then it will be his first, but he is older than I am so he will most likely die before me. You may not understand all this now, but you will do so in time.’ A pause. ‘When you finally own that house, if you go to live in it, he will come looking for you. That’s what I want to warn you of, in case there is no one to protect you by then. You must never – never – let him find you. You understand that? For if he finds you—’ The voice stopped, and then went on again. ‘You may lose your sanity, as I did. At times it still deserts me. At those times I am mad.’ There was a movement within the darkness – the impression of something shrivelled and brittle unfolding itself. ‘It may desert me at any moment, that sanity, so I must know quickly that you understand.’

  I said, ‘I will make sure he doesn’t find me.’

  The sounds came again – like the dry rustling of some ancient winged insect – and a figure walked slowly into the dim light at the centre of the room.

  I cried out, and at my side I heard Father gasp. A tall, thin woman, wearing – I don’t know what she was wearing exactly, but it was some sort of grey, shapeless garment that hung from her bony frame. Her hair was grey as well, but it did not look like hair, it looked like thick cobwebs.

  Where her eyes should have been were two deep, dark pits, which was fearsome enough in itself. But what was so much worse, what had made me cry out and Father gasp, was that both eye sockets were faintly crusted over with grey. As if spiders had spun webs over them, and as if she had not known or felt it happen.

  As she moved, her hands reached out in front of her, feeling her way towards me. I gasped again, and her head turned towards me. This time I thrust my clenched fist into my mouth to stop myself from making a sound. If she heard me she would know exactly where I was standing. If she touched me I would not be able to bear it.

  She did not touch me. She had taken four steps when she stopped and lifted her head as if listening.

  ‘Hear him,’ she said, and her voice was different – younger, almost a child’s voice. ‘Hear him singing. He’s coming along the passageway outside – here he comes. Tappety-tap, feeling his way . . . If you listen, you’ll hear his singing. You oughtn’t to hear it, for there are some things human ears were never meant to hear. But I hear it – oh God, I hear it every night, just as I heard it the night he found me . . .’

  In a cracked voice, she began to sing:

  ‘Open lock to the dead man’s knock . . .

  Fly bolt, and bar, and band . . .

  Nor move, nor swerve, joint, muscle or nerve,

  At the spell of the dead man’s hand.

  And now with care, the five locks of hair,

  From the skull of the murderer dangling there,

  With the grease and the fat of a black tom cat . . .’

  She stopped, and when she spoke, her voice had returned to the scratchy, ugly tone.

  ‘That’s not the real spell, of course,’ she said. ‘The real spell is far more ancient, far darker – it comes from the black marrow of the world’s history – and the world has many such blacknesses. He learned the spell when his own mind touched one of those black cores.’

  The terrible head tilted, as if trying to sense where we were standing, and Father seemed to understand this, for he said, ‘I’m still here. Harriet is with me. Say whatever you wish.’

  She
nodded, as if grateful. ‘He was once a cheerful man, so they say,’ she said. ‘An ordinary man – what they call Everyman. He enjoyed the company of his fellows – he would have a glass of ale with them at the end of his day’s work. He would laugh at a joke. That is what is said of him. But something happened. Something warped him.’ She paused again, and neither Father nor I spoke.

  ‘I wonder, Anstey and Harriet, if you have ever had an old tree in your garden which will not bear fruit. We had one when I was very small. An apple tree. Its roots had gone into unwholesome ground, and the branches were withering and dying. So my father had the tree dug up. I remember the day it was done – a sharp, cold winter’s day it was. I wore a scarlet scarf and hat. So vivid, that memory. I remember Father explaining it all to me – saying the roots were getting no nutrient from the soil, so we would replant it in better soil. Healthier soil. We made a little ceremony of it after the gardener had gone, just the two of us . . .’ Her voice broke again, as if some disturbing memory had come to her, then she said, ‘So it was with him. His heart went into unwholesome ground.’

  Father said, ‘I understand you. But that song you chanted . . .’ I felt a shudder go through him.

  ‘He likes to sing it.’ The ugly voice was almost eager. ‘But it is a – the child will not know the word parody, but you would know it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is a parody of the real spell. The essence can be found within the Greek writings of Herodotus. In the Petit Albert and in the Compendium Maleficarum, also. The enchanter Mohareb used it to lull to sleep the giant Yohak, who guarded the caves of Babylon. It is referred to in the Bible – Solomon had the secret of it, and the servant of Elijah, when he told his master that he saw from the top of Mount Carmel a cloud rise up from the sea like a man’s hand – he, too, spoke of it. That black cloud with flames issuing from it may have been the original of the dread and magical hand of glory.’

  Her voice faltered, as if a string was fraying. Father said, ‘You are extremely knowledgeable.’