The Unknown Ajax

by Джорджетт Хейер

  “I’m not so sure that I blame him!”

  She gurgled. “I wish you might have seen his face when Claud and I said that it was his duty to find the bones of our murdered foes, and give them decent burial! You see, we were the youngest, and we became wholly confused by the tales the others made up! I think the bones were Oliver’s contribution to the legend, and to this day I’m not perfectly sure how much belongs to the original legend, and how much was added by the boys. I must say I wish you may persuade Grandpapa to let you have the Dower House (although I fear you won’t!), so that you might do a little excavation, and confirm our ancient tradition! I’ll take you to see it tomorrow, if you would like it.”

  The Dower House was situated only some four hundred yards to the north-east of Darracott Place, from which it was hidden by a belt of trees, and a tangle of overgrown bushes. A carriage-drive gave access to it from a narrow lane, but Anthea took the Major there by way of a footpath through the wood, and entered the garden at the side of the house. A ditch surmounted by a black-thorn hedge enclosed the grounds, which seemed, at first glance, to consist almost wholly of a shrubbery run riot. Holding open a wicket-gate, which squeaked on its rusty hinges, Hugo glanced round, remarking that it looked a likely place for a ghost. Anthea, disentangling the fringe of her shawl from the encroaching hedge, agreed to this, and at once took him to see what she called the fatal window. It was at the back of the house, and faced south-east, on to what Hugo took to be a wilderness but which was, she assured him, a delightful pleasure-garden. “If you look closely, you will see that there are several rose-beds, and a sundial,” she said severely. “The lawn, perhaps, needs mowing.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” said Hugo, eyeing the rank grass with disfavour. “Myself, I’d have it ploughed up and re-sown, but I daresay it’s in keeping with the rest as it is.”

  “Well, I warned you how it would be. That is the window. The room was originally the best bedchamber, but after the accident—if it wasn’t a murder—none of the subsequent tenants cared to sleep in it, so it was reserved for the accommodation of guests.”

  “Ay, it would be. It must go to his lordship’s heart to think he hasn’t a haunted room at the Place: I don’t doubt I’d have found myself in it if there had been one. Is this where the lady walks?”

  “Oh, she walks all round the house, and in it, too, according to some! Very few of Aunt Matty’s servants ever stayed for long with her, but I never heard that they saw the ghost. They used to complain that they heard strange noises, but I fancy they wouldn’t have made anything of that if they hadn’t been warned by the villagers. None of them would dream of coming near the house after dark, of course.”

  She led the way, as she spoke, towards the front of the house. Here the trees grew so close to the building that a branch of one giant elm almost brushed the roof, seeing which, Hugo said decidedly: “I’d have that down for a start. Eh, but it’s a fine old house!”

  “I suppose it is,” Anthea replied, with a certain lack of enthusiasm. “It is older than the Place, I know, and said to be a good example of that style of ancient stone-building, but it has always seemed to me a dreadfully gloomy house.”

  “If all that ivy were stripped away, and the bushes uprooted, and some of the trees felled, it wouldn’t be gloomy. I allow there’s no prospect on this side, but there should be as good a one, or better, as there is from the Place, on the garden side, once a clearance was made.”

  “Is that what you would do?”

  He nodded. “I would, if I meant to live here. I’ve a strong notion that we have only to let in some light and air to lay that ghost of yours.”

  “But this is iconoclasm!” she exclaimed. “Lay the Darracott spectre? For shame! Have you no respect for tradition?”

  He looked quizzically down at her. “Nay, that’s a matter of up-bringing,” he said. “I wasn’t reared to respect Darracott tradition. Come to think of it, I doubt if I’d respect a ghost that scared the servants out of my house, whatever way I’d been reared. Can we go inside?”

  “Certainly—unless Spurstow has gone out, and left the doors locked,” she responded. “If he is in, he won’t accord us a very warm welcome, but don’t be dismayed! He has grown to be as eccentric as ever Aunt Matty was, and regards all visitors in the light of hostile invaders, but he won’t repel us with violence! He has lived for thirty years here, so you can’t wonder at it that he should be a trifle crusty.”

  “So he’s not afraid of the ghost?”

  “Oh, no! He holds poor Jane in great contempt—like you!”

  “Do you believe she haunts the place?” Hugo asked, walking beside her up the weed-grown drive towards the house.

  She hesitated. “N-no. At least—I don’t believe it at this moment, in broad sunlight, but—no, I shouldn’t care to come here at night! It isn’t only the villagers who have seen things: Richmond has, too.”

  “Has he, indeed? What did he see?”

  “A female form. He couldn’t imagine who it was at first. He says he went towards her, and suddenly she vanished. Ugh!”

  “Well, if that’s all she does she’s welcome to haunt the place,” said the Major prosaically.

  They trod up two worn stone steps into the flagged porch; but as Anthea grasped the rusted iron bellpull the door was opened by a grizzled man in a frieze coat. He looked the visitors over morosely, bade Anthea a grudging good-morning, and said that he had seen her coming up the drive, and supposed that she must be wanting something.

  “Yes, I want to show the house to Major Darracott,” she replied cheerfully.

  “If you’d have sent me word, Miss Anthea, you were coming here this day-morning I’d have had it ready to be shown,” said Spurstow, with considerable severity. “The rooms are all shut up, as well you know. You’ll have to bide while I get my keys.”

  With these quelling words, he admitted them into the hall, and left them there while he went off, grumbling under his breath, to his own quarters. When he presently returned he found that the Major, having opened the shutters covering the windows at the back of the hall, was standing in rapt contemplation of the Cromwellian staircase, while Miss Darracott, holding her flounced skirt gathered in one hand, looked with a wry face at the dusty floor.

  “It’s not my fault, miss,” said Spurstow, forestalling criticism. “You shouldn’t ought to have come without you gave me warning.”

  “I can see I shouldn’t!” she retorted. “But I have come, and I mean to take Major Darracott over the house, even though it be knee-deep in dust, so you may as well make up your mind to it.”

  This forthright speech appeared rather to please than to exacerbate the retainer. He gave a sour smile, and, with only a passing reference to the troublesome characteristics displayed by Miss Darracott in childhood, unlocked the door leading into the dining-parlour, and opened the shutters.

  It would not have surprised Anthea if the Major’s wish to inspect the Dower House had deserted him long before their tour of the ground-floor had been completed. Dirty panes and encroaching ivy darkened the rooms; there were several patches of damp on the walls; most of the ceilings were ominously blackened above the old-fashioned fireplaces; every room smelled of must; and a final touch of melancholy was added by the furniture, which had been huddled together in the middle of each room, and covered with newspapers, old sheets, and scraps of sackcloth.

  “I warned you what it would be like!” she told Hugo.

  “Ay, it’s in bad repair, but it could be put to rights,” he answered.

  “That could be done, but it will always be a dark, gloomy house.”

  “Nay, if the ivy were stripped from it, and all those bushes cleared away, you’d never recognize it,” he said. “The best of the rooms face to the south-east, but the sun’s shut out by trees and shrubs.”

  “Miss Matty, sir,” observed Spurstow, in hostile accents, “wouldn’t have the sun shining in, and fading the carpets.”

  “Maybe she wouldn’t,
but she wasn’t reared on the edge of the moors,” returned Hugo. “I’m not used to be shut in: I want room to breathe, and never mind the carpets!”

  A disapproving sniff was the only answer vouchsafed to this. Spurstow then conducted the unwelcome visitors to the upper floor, and volunteered no further remark until Anthea, showing Hugo Jane Darracott’s bedchamber, asked whether her ghost had been seen there. He said repressively that he took no account of ghosts.

  “The Major takes no account of them either,” said Anthea. “He thinks I’m telling him a Banbury story, but the house is haunted, isn’t it?”

  “Folks say so,” Spurstow replied. “I never did, miss. I’m not one to talk, and I don’t scare easy. I’ve lived here thirty years and more, and it’s done me no harm. I don’t take any notice.”

  Anthea gave an involuntary shiver, but the Major said: “Any notice of what?”

  Spurstow looked at him under his brows. “Aught I hear,” he said.

  “What do you hear?” enquired Anthea.

  “Nothing, miss. It doesn’t worry me,” he said. “Time was when I’d get up out of my bed, thinking there was someone got into the house, but it was all foolishness: you can search from the cellars to the attics, but you’ll see naught. Leastways, I never did. It’s only footsteps, when all’s said.”

  “Oh!” said Anthea rather faintly. “Only footsteps!”

  “Now, you don’t want to listen to the silly stories folks tell, Miss Anthea!” said Spurstow roughly. “The rest’s naught but the wind in the trees, or an owl, maybe. There are nights when it sounds like someone was moaning outside here pitiful, but lor’ bless you, miss, the wind can make queer noises! I don’t heed it!”

  Repressing an impulse to glance over her shoulder, Anthea moved rather closer to the Major, unexpectedly grateful for the presence of so large and solid a body. He looked down at her, and smiled reassuringly. “That makes another good reason for pushing the woodland back from the house,” he remarked. “As for the footsteps, I’d have in the rat-catcher!”

  His eyes were on Spurstow as he spoke, but that worthy said nothing. There was nothing acquiescent in his silence, however; his expression was that of one who might, had he chosen to do so, have made further and more alarming disclosures; and Anthea could only be glad that nothing more remained to be seen of the house than the cellars and the servants’ quarters. The Major obligingly disclaimed any interest in these, so they went downstairs again, followed by Spurstow, who broke his silence to inform them that whenever it rained the roof leaked in a dozen places. If they had gone up into the attics, he said, they would have seen the buckets placed there to catch the drips.

  On this depressing note they departed, Spurstow, slightly mellowed by the douceur bestowed upon him by the Major, holding open the door for them, and even going so far as to say that they would always be welcome.

  “If we were welcome, I’d be sorry for anyone that was unwelcome,” remarked Hugo, as they retraced their steps to the wicket-gate. “Did you say he’d been the old lady’s butler?”

  “Yes, but he was never trained to be a butler. Aunt took him out of the stables, because none of the butlers she hired from London ever stayed with her above a month. She didn’t care about his manners, and I must own that he was amazingly faithful to her, and, I think, fond of her, in his rough way. She let him do just as he pleased, and, of course, when she took to living in one room he managed everything, and never cheated her out of a groat, what’s more. He was born and bred on the estate, and his father and grandfather before him, but even Grandpapa wouldn’t have wondered at it if he had feathered his nest at Aunt Matty’s expense. She left him an annuity, but only quite a small one, which was why, I suppose, he was willing to stay on alone in the Dower House. I wouldn’t have done so for a fortune! Didn’t he make your blood run cold when he said it was only footsteps? Just as though that made everything right! I thought it made everything ten times eerier, didn’t you?”

  “Ay, he did it very well,” agreed Hugo.

  She looked quickly up at him. “Did it very well? Do you mean he was trying to frighten us? It didn’t seem so to me. He made so little of it! He even said the wind was to blame for the moaning noise.”

  Hugo chuckled. “So he did! If you could have seen your own face, lass! Not that I think it was you he was trying to scare away. What I did think was that as soon as he suspected I’d a notion of living in the Dower House myself he did all he could to set me against it.”

  She knit her brows. “Yes, I suppose that’s possible,” she said, after considering for a minute or two. “Unless you hired him with the house, which is not very likely, he would be obliged to leave, and I daresay—No, it can’t be that! The house was known to be haunted long before he came to it!”

  “If it was half as badly haunted as he’d have us believe, our great-grandmother wouldn’t have gone to live there in the first place, let alone have stayed there till she died!” replied Hugo. “Nay, lass! Spurstow wants to keep people away from it. That might be because he’s afraid of being turned out: I’m not saying it isn’t, but what I suspect is that he’s got some other reason—and a havey-cavey one at that!—for scaring the people roundabout here with his talk of footsteps and pitiful meanings!”

  “But Richmond saw the ghost!” she argued. “One or two of the villagers have seen it, too, though not as clearly as he did. Old Buttermere said it was a white thing, that glided over the ground, and vanished into the shrubbery.”

  “And a very good place for it to vanish, too,” said Hugo, wholly unimpressed. “Give me a sheet, and a night without too much moonlight, and I’ll engage to do the same!”

  “And the form Richmond mistook for a living person?”

  “If Richmond came up here expecting to see the ghost of Jane Darracott,” he suggested, after a moment, “and in fact saw that old rascal, draped in a sheet, the likelihood is that his imagination took hold of him, and made him ready to swear he’d seen a deal more than he did see. It’s a queer thing, imagination—and I’d say Richmond’s was a lively one.”

  She thought this over, saying at the end of her cogitations: “Well, if you are right, Hugo, I daresay I can guess why Spurstow wishes to keep everyone away from the Dower House. Indeed, I wonder that it shouldn’t have occurred to any of us! Depend upon it, the house is being used by free-traders!”

  Chapter 11

  The Major received this suggestion without any visible signs of surprise or disapproval; but after turning it over in his mind, he said: “I don’t know much about smuggling, but I should have thought the Dower House would have been too far from the coast to be of use.”

  “No, why? It’s not much more than ten miles, and you may be sure that those who carry the run goods inland know the Marsh so well that they can find their way on the darkest of nights. They must wish to store the goods as far from the shore as they may, because the land-guard keep their strictest watch on the dwellings nearest to the coast, but they can’t go very far, on account of the darkness. The goods are landed on moonless nights, you see: the darks is what they call them.”

  “Ay, they’d have to be. Do the smuggling vessels sail close in to the shore, of do the landsmen row out to them?”

  “Well, I don’t know precisely. I think they very often land their cargoes in creeks, and gaps, but sometimes, I believe, they cast the goods overboard at high tide. I remember once, when I was a child, that the tide-waiters captured a cargo of tea which had been thrown overboard. It was packed in oilskin bags, made to look like mackerel pots, my nurse told me. She knew a great deal about the trade: I expect her brothers had to do with it.”

  He could not help grinning at her cheerful unconcern, but he was somewhat startled, and said incredulously: “You nurse’s brothers were smugglers?”

  “Not master-smugglers, but hired to help carry the goods up from the shore,” she explained. “They worked on their father’s farm, and were perfectly respectable, I assure you!”

  �
�Nay!” he protested.

  She smiled. “Well, quite as respectable as their fellows at all events. You don’t understand, Hugo! In Kent and Sussex almost everyone has to do with smuggling in some way or another. The farm labourers hire themselves out as porters, and the farmers themselves sometimes lend their horses, and nearly always allow their barns to be used as hiding-places. We, of course, don’t have any dealings with smugglers, but if we found ankers in one of our outhouses we shouldn’t say a word about it. No one would! Why, Grandpapa told us once how a cargo of brandy was stored in Guldeford Church, with the Vicar knowing all about it, and saying from the pulpit that there would be no service on the following Sunday because the roof needed repair! Grandpapa could tell you hundreds of stories about smuggling: he used to do so when we were children, and he was in a good humour: we thought it a high treat!”

  “I’ll be bound you did,” Hugo said.

  She detected a little dryness in his voice, and said, with a touch of impatience: “I collect you think it very shocking! I daresay it may be, but it is not so regarded in Kent. When Grandpapa was a young man, he says there was scarcely a magistrate to be found who would commit a man charged with smuggling.”

  “So that made all right,” he nodded.

  “No, of course it didn’t! I only meant—well, to show you why we don’t think it such a dreadful crime as you do!”

  “Nay, you don’t know what I think,” he said, smiling down at her.

  “You will not be much liked here if you show yourself to be at enmity with the Gentlemen,” she warned him.

  “That’s bad,” he said, gravely shaking his head.

  She said no more then, but the subject came up again later in the day, when Richmond asked Hugo how he had fared at the Dower House. It was Anthea who answered, exclaiming: “Richmond, do you think that odious old man is trying to keep everyone away from the house?”