by Sarah Rayne
‘For one who has no sight? I have not read the books for myself, but when you have money it is possible to pay others to read them for you. I was taught most straitly never to discuss money,’ she said. ‘A sordid subject, it was always thought. But I ceased to care long ago about that.’
Without warning she began to chant again, crooning the lines about open lock to the dead man’s knock. Her face seemed to change, as if a looking glass had splintered, and she sank to the floor, wrapping her arms around herself, sobbing pitifully, writhing and screaming and beating on the ground with her fists.
Father instinctively moved forward – I think to comfort her or prevent her from injuring herself – but before he could do so the door was flung open and the grey woman who had brought us here darted across the room. In her hands she held a thick leather strap, and before either of us could speak or move, she had it wrapped around the woman – not too unkindly, but firmly. I had backed away to a corner of the room by then, but I saw how the strap pinned her arms to her sides.
‘He’s not here,’ said the grey woman. ‘You’re safe. He’s not here.’ She looked back over her shoulder. ‘Best go now,’ she said. ‘This one won’t be lucid for at least a day. And we know what to do for her. You had the speech with her you wanted, did you? The speech she wanted?’
Father began to say he had no idea, but the grey woman had already dismissed him, and so without saying anything we went out, and somehow – I cannot remember how – we found our way back down the stairs and out into the sweet fresh air.
We sat for a long time on the side of the road, not speaking. Then, finally, I summoned up enough courage to say: ‘Who was she, that woman?’
He took a long time to reply, but at last he said, ‘She owns the house that will one day be yours. She told you that, didn’t she?’
‘Why doesn’t she live in it if it’s her house?’
‘Because she’s – she’s very poorly. Her mind is sick, Harriet. Always remember that it’s possible for people’s minds to become ill, as well as their bodies.’
‘Who lives in her house now?’
‘Nobody. It’s looked after by people called solicitors. They keep it clean and tidy the garden and make sure it’s all right.’
‘Would she like to live in it if she could?’
‘I don’t know. She was there when she was a little girl. But she’s lived in that place – Brank Asylum – for a very long time.’
‘She has no eyes,’ I said, and he shuddered.
‘No. You heard her say she can pay for people to come in to read to her. She pays people to write letters as well. She asked her solicitor to write a letter to me.’
‘Will she ever get better?’
‘No. She’ll have to live there for always. That’s why she sent the letter – she wanted to meet the people who will inherit her house after she dies.’
‘Is she going to die soon? Is she very old?’
‘Oh, Harriet, she can’t be much more than thirty. That’s the great tragedy.’
Thirty was quite old, though. I said, ‘Is she my aunt? What’s her name?’
‘I’m not sure of the precise degree of relationship,’ said Father. ‘She’s a cousin to me – perhaps a third cousin. So she’d be a cousin to you, as well. Her name is Elvira Lee.’
Elvira Lee. The name seemed to jump out of the page and snatch Michael’s throat. Elvira, who had been commemorated on an old, forgotten grave as a dearly loved daughter of Elizabeth. Elvira, who Ellie insisted was in danger, and Beth said was being sought by the man in her nightmare.
If Harriet’s journal could be believed, Elvira had ended her life, blind and insane, in a place called Brank Asylum.
Michael suddenly wanted to talk to Nell about this, but saw it was after eleven already. He would phone her tomorrow. But he would read some more of Harriet’s journal before going to bed.
FIFTEEN
17th February 1939
9.15 a.m.
Sunlight is pouring into my room at the Black Boar, and it’s almost dispelled the ghosts. But not quite. I can’t stop remembering Elvira Lee, poor haunted creature, incarcerated in Brank Asylum for all those years – thirty years at least. How much of those thirty years did she spend inside that dark madness?
She was fifty-eight when she died – I know that because the solicitor sent me her birth and death certificates. She was born in 1880 at Charect House, and she died in 1938 in Brank Asylum of arterial embolism. I looked that up in Mother’s old Home Doctor reference book, and I think it’s what we would call a stroke.
Even all these years later I can remember how sane Elvira sounded when she talked about her own madness. I can remember her terror of the man she believed searched for her, as well.
After breakfast, I asked at the reception desk for directions to Charect House. The man gave me a slightly startled look, but said it was easy enough to find.
‘Out of the village, and along Blackberry Lane, past the old carriageway to the manor – that’s long since gone, of course – and there you’ll be. It’s a fair old walk, though. I could telephone the local taxi service. They’d be here in a matter of minutes, well, always supposing they’re free.’
A ‘fair old walk’ might mean anything from a mile to five miles, so I’ve accepted the taxi offer, and I’m writing this in my room while I wait for it to arrive. The romantic in me would like to walk by myself to the home of my ancestors, savouring every blade of grass and every breath of atmosphere, but the pragmatist knows perfectly well I should get lost in the bewilderment of lanes around here. So I shall approach my inheritance, Father’s cherished dream, in a cloud of exhaust fumes.
3.15 p.m.
In the end I compromised. I asked the taxi driver to let me down at the end of Blackberry Lane so I could walk the rest of the way. With a faint echo of my childhood, I arranged for him to collect me in an hour’s time.
Blackberry Lane is like any other English country lane. It’s fringed with hedges, and at this time of year there’s the promise of cowslips in the fields and of May blossom and lilac to come. As I walked, my spirits rose, and the lovely evocative line that opens Rebecca was strongly with me.
Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again . . . The ruinous Manderley with its iron gates and blackened walls and sad secrets would not be at the end of the lane. But whatever was ahead, it was mine. I was coming home.
Everywhere was so quiet and still, I could almost have believed I had stepped back to the days when Elvira Lee lived here. There are places in England – I dare say all over the world – that have that effect. As if, here and there, something has puckered the fabric of time and tiny shards of the past can trickle out.
I went past the ruined carriageway, pausing to glance along it and sparing a thought for a manor house no longer there. I do know it’s more important for ordinary people to have decent houses and a bit of garden, but it’s such a shame that so many of England’s great houses have been lost – to fire, to flood, to improvidence or debt. If this war that’s coming lasts as long as the war that took my Harry and all those other young men, I suppose even more of them will be lost.
I don’t think Charect House will ever be lost, though. It has such a stubborn air of survival. It stands well back from Blackberry Lane behind overgrown gardens, and it’s one of those four-square red-brick houses built about a century and a half ago. (Which means everywhere will be crumbling or sagging or rotten, and it will probably cost far more money than I shall ever possess to restore it . . .)
Tacked on to the gate was an oblong of wood with the house’s name and a rusting chain that snapped in two when I lifted it. When I unlocked the door and pushed it open, there was the most tremendous feeling of ownership. Again, I thought: I am coming home.
What did I expect from the inside of the house? Gothic gloom, shrouded rooms, dusty sunlight lying across oak floors . . . ? I got that, all right. But I also got the depressing, bad-smelling evidence of forty years of neglect a
nd dereliction. The best ghost stories don’t mention the smell you get from an old, deserted house. They don’t mention the damp, dank stench – decades of ingrained grime and mouse droppings and rusting taps that drip into green-crusted sinks.
(Actually, there was a faint sound of water dripping all the time I was there – there’s something so lonely about the sound of a tap dripping, and this was a particularly insistent, very nearly rhythmic dripping. It seemed to follow me into every room.)
I don’t have very much knowledge of houses or what goes wrong with them, but anyone can recognize when age or rot has caused window frames to crumble, and sprawling grey-green patches of damp on walls. There was, in fact, a particularly unpleasant patch on the main landing wall. As I went up the main stairway I had quite a scare because it looked for all the world like the figure of a man, rather stocky, standing there watching me. I didn’t quite scream, but it was several minutes before my heart resumed its normal rate.
But even with wallpaper peeling from the walls, and plaster mouldings fallen from the ceilings – even allowing for the army of invisible creatures undoubtedly nibbling industriously at the woodwork – the house is lovely. Someone has at least had the housewifely good sense to cover most of the furniture with dust sheets. I dragged them off because I wanted to see everything, and clouds of dust rose up nearly choking me. But when the dust settled it was worth it, because the furniture is beautiful. And valuable as well, I should think. If I really do need money (and it’s looking as if I shall), I may be able to sell some of the better pieces. But I’d like to keep most of it: there are deep armchairs with faded rose-patterned fabric, a writing bureau, a round rosewood table, a long-case clock . . .
What daunted me far more than the elegant dereliction, though, were the boxes and trunks stuffed with papers and letters and fabrics and household miscellany. They’ll all have to be opened and properly investigated. For all I know poor old Elvira might have murdered half a dozen people and secreted their remains in the two big cabin trunks. I don’t really think she did, and I know that, just as anything of any value will have been destroyed or sold, every scrap of boring minutiae will have been diligently preserved. But there’s always the faint chance that Great Uncle Somebody squirrelled a few Holbein sketches among the rubbish, or that great-grandmamma tucked a first-folio Shakespearean manuscript between the leaves of a cookery book.
All the time I was in the house I had the feeling of being watched. I do know that’s quite common in empty houses though. It felt strongest in the library – that’s a rather grand term for a house of that size, but the room is lined with books that nobody thought to pack away. There are rows upon rows of them, floor to ceiling. There’s a big, leather-topped table and several deep chairs, and a long-case clock in a corner. It’s long since stopped, of course, so winding it and setting the time is another task for me.
When my self-appointed hour was up, I locked the doors and went out to Blackberry Lane to meet the taxi.
I have no idea how much actual money (if any!) comes with this legacy or the likely cost of the work needed at the house, but tomorrow I shall ask the solicitor.
In the meantime, it’s almost midnight and I’ve retired to bed. Charect House’s atmosphere is somehow still with me though – and I don’t mean the smell of damp or rot. It’s that impression of being watched that’s stayed with – that, and that persistent dripping tap. And – let’s be honest in these pages if nowhere else – it’s Elvira’s tale about a nameless man who sings that macabre song – it’s from the Ingoldsby Legends, that rhyme, I found that out years ago – but whose mind touched a deep, unwholesome core, like the old apple tree’s roots. On balance, I really could wish I had never heard that story, and I certainly wish I had never met Elvira herself.
18th February Midday
Today I’ve brought my diary to Charect House with me. It will provide a welcome respite from all the sorting out, and it will be company in the silence of the place.
It isn’t entirely silent, of course. No house ever is. And there’s still the constant drip of water somewhere. It started to annoy me after a while, but although I’ve explored the sculleries – grim, badly-lit caverns – all the taps were dry. I hope it isn’t something in the roof – I should think roofs cost the earth to mend – but if rain has got in and is leaking into the house somewhere, it will need to be dealt with.
I never realized before what a huge responsibility a house is! Harry and I used to talk about how we would have a cottage in the country after the war. We visualized log fires and latticed windows and chintz. We didn’t get as far as leaking roofs and rusting taps, or crumbling window frames. If Harry was here now, he would laugh my fears away and probably trace the source of the lonely dripping tap or pipe quite easily, either mending it himself or arranging for a plumber to do so.
But it’s an unsettling sound, that rhythmic drip-drip. I really do not like the thought of something dripping away somewhere in a dark, unreachable space . . . I don’t like, either, how regular the sound is – it’s almost like a small mechanism, or like someone lightly tapping a tattoo on the very tiny drum, or small, thick wings beating against a glass pane.
But whatever it is, I shall try to ignore it. I’ve made the library my headquarters. The Black Boar can provide a Thermos flask of coffee, together with a pack of sandwiches each day, so I shan’t have to return there for lunch. It’s bitterly cold in the house, of course – the cold of a house unheated and unlived-in for forty years – so I have arranged for a small delivery of logs (the taxi driver has a brother-in-law who can supply them). Providing it doesn’t smoke out the entire house, I shall build a fire in the library hearth.
20th February 2.30 p.m.
I’ve had a very useful morning, and quite soon I shall lock everything up and go out to meet my friend the taxi driver who is going to pick me up here at four o’clock.
The logs duly arrived midway through the morning, and I’ve built a fire in the library hearth. It smoked furiously for about ten minutes, but now it’s settled down to a very pleasant crackle and the room is nicely warm.
I’ve even set the old clock going. The hinges of the door protested like a soul in torment, but they aren’t rusted and the pendulum with its weight turned out to be perfectly workable. When I touched it, it moved at once, and (I know how fantastical this sounds) it was as if a heart was struggling into life after a long stillness. And then the rhythmic ticking began, and I reached up to move the hands to the correct time and closed the door.
I dare say a good deal of craft went into that clock, but I don’t much like it. To my eye it’s Victorian workmanship at its most florid. It has one of those vaguely macabre faces over the main dial – a swollen moon-face, which I suppose marks the passing of the moon’s cycle. The sphere representing the moon has been lightly marked to indicate features – like children’s books with the Man in the Moon smiling benignly down from the night sky. The face is half visible, which I suppose means it was midway between moons when it stopped. Still, at least the ticking seems to have smothered the dripping tap. Perhaps it’s ticking exactly simultaneously with it.
Regarded as a spyhole into the house’s earlier occupants, the contents of the boxes are fascinating. I’m trying to make notes of it all as I go along. I’ve just found some letters from a Mrs W. Lee, who had entered into a somewhat vituperative correspondence with the fishmonger over an order of herring that appeared to have been dubious. I can’t imagine why such letters were preserved, but it’s interesting to speculate who Mrs W. Lee was. There are also a few old concert and theatre programmes from performances at one or two local theatres, with notes made in the margin by a neat, masculine-looking hand. The writer compares one performance of The Bells unfavourably with Henry Irving’s appearance in the same piece, which he had apparently seen in London a few years earlier. Personally, I shouldn’t have expected a small provincial theatre to even come close to Sir Henry’s incandescent acting, but it all makes absor
bing reading.
There’s something soporific about a firelit room and a ticking clock, and despite Sir Henry and the herring, I’m having to fight the compulsion to drift into a half-doze . . .
It’s so restful in here. Not entirely silent, but then no house is ever entirely silent. As I make these notes, I’m hearing voices, just very faintly. They’re a long way off, though. Children, perhaps, playing somewhere in a field. Or would children be at school at this time on a weekday? Whatever it is, it sounds as if they’re singing . . .
It’s rather a nice sound – it makes me think of peaceful, soothing things. Warm honey running off the spoon into a dish. Dappled sunlight coming through the trees on a green and gold summer’s afternoon, and bees humming among the flowers. Soft rain in a forest in autumn, and the scent of chrysanthemums . . .
I think someone tapped at the door a few moments ago, but it was a soft, light tap and I was so comfortable and so drowsy that I couldn’t be bothered to wake up enough to see if anyone was there. If it was important, whoever it was will come back.
I don’t think the singing I can hear is children. It’s a single voice – a man’s voice . . . I can’t quite hear the words, but it sounds like one of those old-fashioned chants . . .
Black Boar: 6.30 p.m.
I’m not at all sure I shan’t destroy these pages, but for the moment it’s calming to write down what happened at Charect House this afternoon.
Sleep is a curious thing. It’s a like an ocean. There are shallow parts and very deep parts, and there are currents that can pull you into very strange places indeed . . . The only explanation I have for what happened to me this afternoon is that one of those strange currents had me in its arms and took me to a curious, none too comfortable, place.
At first I enjoyed the gentle undertow that tugged at my mind. At one level I knew I was falling asleep, that I was on the borderlands of dreaming, but it didn’t seem to matter. I even thought: perhaps Harry will be in the dream. He is, sometimes. He comes walking towards me, smiling, holding out his hands, and he looks so dashing in his uniform, and I’m so proud of him and filled with such soaring delight at seeing him after so many years . . .
