The Mammoth Book of Ghost Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  She did not notice the gathering of clouds to the west.

  Her bundle ready, Agnes sat down to her last task as an unmarried woman. She wrote a letter to her parents, which she intended to leave on her bed.

  Dearest Mother and Father,

  Please do not be cross when you find this letter and understand what I have done. I do not mean to cause you pain, but I love John Parker with all my heart and cannot bear to be without him. We are quite determined we shall not be kept apart. Do not come for me, for by the time you read this, we will have crossed into Scotland and will have pledged our lifelong devotion to one another. We intend to reside in York, where John has arranged the let of a small house on Queen Street. Esme will want my chamber, and I am pleased that she should have it.

  Your devoted daughter, Agnes.

  The rain began just after eight that evening. The family was gathered in the drawing room, where Father liked to read from the Scriptures. Agnes’s eyes were trained on the mullioned windows, watching the rivulets of rain on the panes of glass. A gust of wind rattled one window that was not entirely closed; Mrs Whitstone hurried to latch it shut. “Good heavens, it will be quite a storm,” she said, shivering.

  As her father droned on from the Gospel of Mark, Agnes fretted. She reasoned that the storm would surely pass by midnight. But the storm did not pass. The deluge continued with great sheets of rain, long after the family had retired. Agnes prepared nonetheless; she retrieved the letter she’d written to her family and gathered her bundle. She dressed in a sturdy traveling gown and cloak, and boots. When the clock struck midnight, Agnes looked out of the window and winced. It was still raining, and the wind was blowing quite strongly. But it seemed that the lightning had moved to the east. Agnes blew out her candle, picked up her bundle and opened the door.

  She made her way carefully along the darkened corridor. As she reached the top of the stairs, she saw something below that looked like the flicker of a candle. Agnes froze. She peered into the dark, straining to see.

  There it was again – someone was moving about downstairs, carrying a single candle. Agnes jumped back, her heart racing. Who was it, her mother? God help her, but she’d heard her mother complain there were nights she could not sleep. Agnes hurried back to her room and shut the door. She stood with her back to the door in that darkened room, desperate to know what to do, imagining John at the potter’s shed, waiting for her.

  Agnes whirled around and pressed her ear to the door, but it was impossible to hear anything with the storm raging outside. She looked at the window; a thought occurred to her, and she rushed to the window and opened it. Rain lashed her face and cloak; Agnes reared back and quickly pulled her hood over her blonde hair, then leaned out again.

  The drop to the ground was quite a long way, but she tossed her bundle out all the same. Directly next to her window was a tree with an overhanging limb. There was a time she had excelled at tree climbing, and had managed this limb more than once. It scraped against the house, and she could stand on the window ledge and catch it, then swing down to a spot on the tree where she could stand. She’d done it dozens of times.

  Agnes looked down. There was her bundle on the ground below her, getting soaked by the rain. Her beautiful gown – it would be ruined! She pushed the window up higher and maneuvered one leg out. Then the other. Using the edge of the window recess, she managed to inch her way up to her feet.

  The rain seemed to fall harder, and the branch danced before Agnes. She drew a breath, thought of John, and jumped. But the wind gusted at the moment she jumped, pushing the branch just out of her reach.

  Agnes’s last conscious thought as the ground rushed up to greet her was that John would think she hadn’t come.

  In the years that followed, people would say it was the worst storm they’d seen in a generation. Agnes was not found until the following afternoon. Agnes’s mother thought she’d done her daughter a kindness by allowing her to sleep while the wretched rain fell, but by mid-morning, there were too many chores to do to allow the girl to sleep the day away. When Agnes’s mother found the note, and saw the open window, she screamed for her husband. She did not look out the window; she assumed Agnes was well on her way to Scotland.

  The groundskeeper found Agnes’s body while friends searched for the young lovers. She was a bit waterlogged, and her neck was bent at an odd angle. Her hair had come undone and was strewn across her blue face like gold seaweed.

  John Parker was found in the apple orchard near an old potter’s shed the following day. He’d died by his own hand, his fingers still curled around the gun. He’d left a note, full of the anguish of guilt and loss of his beloved.

  There were those in the villages around Whitstone House who privately hoped the young lovers would be united in the hereafter.

  Matthew and Hillary Sparks rocked down a pitted road in a rented car so small that one might have sworn it had previously housed two servings of peas. They came to a dead stop where the road met a circular drive and both leaned forward, peering through the bug-splattered front window of the car.

  “That’s it?” Hillary asked.

  “I guess so,” Matthew said. He turned off the car and climbed out.

  Hillary reluctantly did the same. She was not exactly thrilled with this latest development in their lives. When Matthew’s mother had died last year, he’d discovered that he and his two siblings had inherited an old house in England. England ! It was the first the three of them had heard of any house in England that any of them could recall, and they were shocked to discover that their mother had inherited it from a distant relative fifteen years prior. She’d never mentioned it, but then again, his mother had been suffering from a form of dementia. Perhaps she never understood she’d been willed a whole house.

  Matthew was astounded and especially curious about the place. Of all of the siblings, he could afford to be – he’d been laid off from work when the recession hit. In some ways, Hillary believed this house had become a substitute for a job.

  One day, when Hillary came home from work, Matthew told her they were going to England. “Neither Craig nor Elaine can go right now,” he’d explained, referring to his siblings. “So we need to.”

  “I can’t go,” Hillary had said quickly, shocked that he would think that she could. She had a thriving real estate business in the Hudson Valley, specializing in high-end properties. How could she go to England? Had he forgotten that she was the sole source of their income?

  But he’d said, somewhat dismissively, “You can go. I talked to your mom and she said she’d be happy to have the twins for a couple of weeks this summer.”

  “You talked to my mother before you talked to me?” Hillary’s blood pressure had begun to rise, but that was par for the course these last few months. Their marriage was on shaky ground, and, apparently, he’d decided they would take their troubled marriage and go to England, right in the middle of the house-buying season in the States, to see some old house that his mother hadn’t even mentioned. Hillary could picture it: a dump, some crumbling little cottage where cows walked in and out, feasting on the thatched roof. It would be more work than it was worth. And for that, she was supposed to take time away from the job that kept a roof over their heads.

  Matthew no longer spoke to her – he informed her of decisions he had no right to decide, like some king on a throne.

  It had been like this between them since Matthew had lost his corporate job at a national mortgage company. The housing industry had turned belly up like some diseased whale, and it was a miracle that Hillary had managed to hang on to her business. But then again, she’d spent ten years cultivating her clients, and she was dealing in properties that were recession-proof.

  But Matthew seemed to grow more distant the more apparent it became that she could provide them with a good living and he couldn’t find a job.

  At the beginning, he’d believed he’d find another job very quickly. “I’ve got some major experience,” he’d said c
onfidently when the pink slip had come. “I’m not worried. I don’t want you to worry, either.”

  She didn’t worry. In the first couple of months, Matthew had papered banks and mortgage companies and financial institutions with his stellar résumé. He had been upbeat when he’d called his contacts. Several people promised him he had a leg up.

  But the weeks dragged by and nothing came of it.

  “The economy sucks right now, bro,” his friend, a banker at a national bank, told him. “No one’s hiring. You might have to ride it out.”

  Hillary knew that men tended to be defined by their jobs and their incomes, and without them, they could feel emasculated. Matthew was not the sort of guy who could ride things out. He needed to be doing, to be moving and shaking, and it had become clear that when he wasn’t doing those things, he didn’t quite know what to do. Six months after the pink slip came, Matthew was starting each day in his pajamas, in front of ESPN Sportscenter. He snapped when Hillary asked him what his plans were. He grew impatient with their six-year-old twins, Mickey and Mallory. Hillary and Matthew’s sex life took a long vacation.

  Hillary tried to talk to him about it. “I feel like we aren’t . . . connecting,” she’d said one day when he’d met her for lunch. They weren’t connecting emotionally, sexually, or even casually.

  But the moment she’d said it out loud, Matthew had looked down at his plate and sighed. “Hillary, come on,” he’d said. “I’m going through a hard time. Can you just . . . let it go for now?”

  She had let it go, not because he asked but because she honestly didn’t know how to proceed with him. Was she supposed to be the patient wife and wait it out? Was she supposed to prod him along? And really, how long was she supposed to wait for her husband to come back to her?

  These were the questions swirling about her head when his mother’s estate had been probated and the mysterious house in England had been discovered.

  Hillary hadn’t paid much attention to all of the chatter between the siblings about the England house. She had enough on her plate trying to be a top-producing realtor, a mom, and wife to a man who was clearly mired in a major depression. She was too busy cooking dinner after working all day, then picking up around the house after a day of Matthew. She remembered looking at him as he’d talked about that damn house, wondering if they were ever going to make love again, or if she was going to be stuck in one of those loveless, sexless marriages. She missed Matthew. She missed the guy she’d met twelve years ago who’d made her laugh and sent her roses for no reason. The guy who never started a day without a smile, who could not keep his hands off her.

  And then he’d announce they were going to England, and he’d already arranged it, and they had a huge argument in which they’d both hurled words that were probably better left unsaid. At the end of it, Hillary had pleaded with him. “I can’t go on like this,” she’d said. “Our marriage is falling apart.”

  “Just do this one thing for me, Hillary,” he’d said. “Just this. Please.”

  Hillary had caved. And now, here she was in England, gazing up at the house that was so important to Matthew. It was bigger than most of the houses they’d passed on the way up from London, but it looked old and dilapidated. Matthew had told her it was manor house – it looked more to Hillary like an overgrown cottage. Even with her professional realtor’s eye, she couldn’t see much potential.

  The west end of the house was covered with thick, leafy green ivy, but where stone was exposed, it looked dirty and crumbling. It was a two-story structure, with two rows of eight windows across the top and bottom, several of them broken. There were four chimneys, a weathered double door and small round stoop.

  “Wow,” Matthew said. He was grinning. “This is great.”

  “It looks kind of run-down to me,” Hillary said skeptically.

  “Are you kidding? It will look like a palace once we get it cleaned up.”

  For this house to in any way resemble a palace would take much longer than the two weeks they planned to be in England, which she wanted to point out to Matthew, but he was already on the stoop, trying to fit the key into the door.

  Hillary followed him inside.

  “This is spectacular,” Matthew said.

  To Hillary, the house did not improve on the inside. There were no furnishings save a table in the foyer and a single chair beside it. On the table was a cardboard box full of candles, which Hillary did not see as a fortuitous sign. She understood that the house had been without an inhabitant for several years and had been looked after by an occasional caretaker, but the dirt and grime and general ramshackle appearance was overwhelming.

  “Look at this woodwork,” Matthew was saying, his fingers running along the molding around the door frame. “And these windows. Do you know how much windows like this cost these days?”

  “No clue,” Hillary said, looking up. There was a lighting fixture hanging from the ceiling, in the center of a papier-mâché medallion. The walls were covered in dark wallpaper, the floors a dull, pitted wood.

  “Come on,” Matthew said, and disappeared into a dark corridor.

  They walked through the ground floor. There was a large room with an enormous fireplace, which Matthew said was likely the drawing room. Next to it, a dining room, which he guessed from the wainscoting. Hillary had no idea when he’d become an expert on old English manor houses, but he seemed to know a lot about them.

  There was another room with a smaller stone fireplace that he guessed would have served as a sitting room. “Where the ladies practiced their piano and needlework.”

  “Who are you?” Hillary asked, and Matthew laughed. He looked happier than she’d seen him in some time.

  The kitchen looked positively medieval, with a wooden table in the middle of a stone floor, an old industrial sink and a gas stove that she doubted would actually fire. There was also an old-fashioned icebox, complete with an ancient refrigeration unit on top. “Oh my God,” Hillary groaned.

  “Hey, if it works, who cares what it looks like?” Matthew asked. “Hillary, please try to enjoy this. We’re in England, stomping around an old house. Can you try? It’s important to me.”

  “Why?” Hillary asked. “Why is this so important?”

  He pushed his fingers through his dark hair. “I don’t know. It just is. I’ve felt drawn to this house since I saw the words printed on the probate papers.” He didn’t say more than that, but turned his back on her, as was his practice these days, and walked down the corridor ahead of her, his shoes clapping loudly on the wood floors and kicking up dust, which made her sneeze.

  “Look at this staircase,” he said, pausing at the bottom. It curved up to the landing. The steps were covered in what Hillary guessed was red carpet underneath all the grime.

  The upstairs was a series of bedrooms, two smaller rooms that had been turned into baths, and a large family area. There was something about the emptiness of the house, about the dusty drapes and floors, that felt strange to Hillary. Something just not quite right, although Hillary had no clue what it was. She wandered over to look out of the window. The grounds were, predictably, overgrown. There was a faded barn and a clothesline that stretched across the garden. She could see a small pile of trash, as if someone had quickly tidied up the grounds before they’d arrived.

  There it was, that feeling again, a sense that the energy in this house was a little off.

  After an hour of looking around, Hillary was tired and hungry and still suffering from jet lag. “Shouldn’t we go find a hotel?” she asked, checking her watch. “I am dying for a hot bath, and I really need to make a few calls.”

  “A hotel?” Matthew said. “We’re staying here.”

  Hillary looked up. She looked around the empty landing. “Are you kidding?”

  “No.”

  “Here?” she cried. “There is no here! This house has been closed up for years – we can’t stay here, Matthew. That’s insane.”

  “We’ll open some windows an
d air it out,” he said quickly. “We’ve got time to clean a room tonight.”

  “And what, sleep on the floor?” she exclaimed. Not only was he suggesting they stay there, he wanted her to clean? “Not to mention there is no food or cleaning supplies.”

  “All easily resolved,” he said. “We’ll go into the village to the pub and have dinner, stop in at the market and stock up for a couple of days. We can get some bedding and some sleeping bags and camp out.”

  “Be reasonable,” Hillary pleaded. “We can come back first thing in the morning – we don’t even know if there is water or electricity.”

  “There is water,” he said. “I checked. And the toilets work,” he added quickly before she could mention it. “And there should be electricity. I spoke to the estate agent about it last week.”

  She groaned. “And if there is no electricity?”

  “Then there is a basket of candles in the front hall.”

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “Hillary.” He tried to smile. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “This isn’t adventure; this is you trying to make me miserable.”

  Matthew sighed. He shrugged. “I really don’t have to try this hard, do I? I mean, you’re miserable all the time.”

  “What do you expect?” Hillary demanded. “You don’t consult me about anything, you just announce your decisions.” God, she did not want to do this now. She just wanted to take a hot bath. She just wanted things to go back to the way they’d been before Matthew was laid off. Back when they’d loved each other’s company, when he didn’t cling to some rustic, run-down old English house like it was his lifeline. But he had seemed so excited, and she hadn’t seen him excited in a long time, and really, where was her sense of adventure? “Matthew, I—”

  “Look, I am staying here,” he said curtly. “You can get a hotel if you want.”

  Just like that, he pushed her into a corner again. “Fine,” she said irritably. “Far be it from me to interfere with whatever this is,” she said, gesturing to him and the empty space around him.