Poor Tom's Ghost

by Jane Louise Curry

  “Fourteen inches?” Tony grunted. “Some chimney!”

  “It might be a bend in the flue,” Roger suggested.

  “Not that much of a bend. Has to be a right angle.” Tony pulled out the measure and rolled his shirt sleeves well above the elbow. With his right hand he groped upward through the opening. “Hah! You’re right at that. It does angle upward, but only barely.” He brought his grimy forearm out with a frown. “And it’s smooth, except for the soot. Feels more like a stove pipe than a proper chimney. Here, let’s have that measure again.” Guiding the steel ribbon past the sharp angle in the flue, he fed more and more of its length into the black hole. At last it met some resistance, but at the next insistent push twanged dimly and moved on reluctantly, as if it had rounded another corner. Then it jammed and could be forced no further. Carefully, Tony pulled it down to the second bend and took hold of the tape at the flue opening with thumb and forefinger to mark the length.

  “What is it?” Roger was excited by the intent frown on his father’s face. Jo, watching idly, noticed with some surprise that Tony’s eyes, like Roger’s, were underlined with shadow. Odd, when he had slept well. It made the two of them, crouched before the fireplace, look strangely more like brothers than father and son.

  “I’m not sure,” Tony said slowly. He pulled the tape free to have a look at the number beside his grimy thumb. Five feet, it read. “Allowing for the straight-up bit, it looks as if for the first four feet the blasted thing aims for the stair landing in the hall, not for the roof. Then it turns up.” He sat back on his heels.

  “Does that mean anything?” Pippa asked for all of them.

  “One thing at least,” Tony said. “This can’t be the original fireplace. It must be set at the front of a deeper one. Deeper and older. Well, well, well!” His voice softened to a whisper.

  “It would fit,” Jo said slowly. “At least, the house looks as if it’s been seriously messed about at some point. Do you suppose we have an eighteenth-century swan lurking inside our mucky duckling?”

  “Only one way to find out.” Tony straightened purposefully, looked at his blackened hands, and crossed to the kitchen stairs. In a few moments he emerged again, wiping them dry on the Dutch handkerchief he wore as a neck-scarf. “Now. Where’s our new crowbar?” Jo looked a little worried. “You’re not going to do anything drastic, are you?” But as Roger produced the short chisel-ended iron bar, her eyebrows quirked up in a caricature of resignation. ‘You are going to do something drastic. And if you’re wrong, it will probably cost a packet to put it right again. I’ll end up giving up my long holiday, and having to do that ITV play after all.”

  “Oh, do shut up,” Tony growled good-humouredly. Lifting the now-clear makeshift table free of the shelf of the middle wall cupboard, he propped it up and pulled the upended tea case across to the hearth. Testing first to see that it would bear his weight, he climbed onto it, carefully placing his feet near opposite corners. The wedge end of the crowbar he jammed forcibly into the right-of-centre seam high on the painted panelling near where the damp had buckled it out from the cornice, but below the worst of the water stain. It went in with a soft thwump!

  “Rotten.” Tony’s grimace was gleeful as he worked the bar in and leftward under the panel until he had leverage. With a slow, careful outward pressure he pried until the top of the central panel groaned outward with a soft, ripping sound. Pippa, who had temporarily lost interest when the chimney failed to produce birds’ nests or bat skeletons, was suddenly on the spot with a tin of Old El Paso tortillas to wedge behind the loosened panel. Roger shoved the tea case aside after his father climbed down, and held his breath as the crowbar bit into the lower seam. The wood there was not rotten, and it was only after a lot of patient prying back and forth and not-so-patient commentary, that the bar was worked in far enough for one great wrench.

  “Out of the way, you lot,” Tony grated.

  His audience scattered. The panel, when it gave, sprang loose with an explosion as sharp as a rifle shot. It flew against the opposite wall with a noisy clatter and only narrowly missed shattering the panes of the nearest French door. The tortilla tin caromed across the room and rolled down the kitchen stairs.

  Where the panel had been, a four-foot width of badly stained plaster extended downward to slightly below shoulder height. The space from there to the top of the inset iron fireplace had been completely filled in with unmortared brick.

  Jo whistled softly. “Well, well, a cigar for the gentleman.” But then her voice sharpened in alarm. “Tony? What is it?”

  “Pa? Are you all right?” Roger crossed quickly from the front room doorway. Tony, suddenly pale, had turned to press his forehead against the cool plaster. After a moment he mumbled, “I’m all right,” and brushed the crumbled plaster from his brow. “Things slipped out of focus for a moment. Gave me a bit of a fright, that’s all.”

  Roger let go of his father’s arm reluctantly. “You’re sure?”

  “I’ll make you a cup of tea,” Jo said quietly.

  “Thanks.” Tony shook his head as if to clear it and retrieved the crowbar from the floor. “Now then,” he said firmly. “Let us see whether it’s a swan or a flatfooted bustard we’re landed with. This plaster is what I’d call ‘dead.’ It’s been pretty coarse stuff to begin with, and the water seepage has finished it.” He raked the crowbar down its surface, cutting into it as if it were soft chalk.

  But a foot above the brick fill the biting iron rang against stone.

  Roger’s eyes met his father’s for one frozen moment, and the crowbar dropped to the floor with a clatter. Tony pulled out his pocket knife, and Roger grabbed the kitchen knife Pippa fetched from the cupboard. When Jo reappeared from the terrace with a steaming mug of tea, they had chipped free of plaster the central portion of a shallow arch of stone.

  “Looks like we really have something,” Tony exulted as he scraped carefully at the plaster imbedded in the carving in the stone. Bit by bit his knife revealed a simple strapwork knot cut into the arch’s apex. In the knot’s centre was the letter G, and numbers set between the corners of the knot appeared to spell out a date.

  “Am I crazy,” Tony whispered incredulously, “or does that say 1603?”

  It was almost two o’clock before the Nicholases (and Sammy), dusty-haired and happy, straggled down to the Apprentice for a lunch of bread and cheese on the crowded terrace at the river’s edge. They were oblivious to the faintly ghostly appearance they presented in the midday sun in their dusting of plaster, and quite unaware of the open curiosity of children and the amused recognition of a few of the adults. Heads together over the table, they made a list of items they would need: wood scrapers to clean the plaster from the oak wainscoting that was the original facing of the chimney wall, stiff nylon brushes for the line work, a wire one for the wide stone arch, bucket and sponge mop—and a proper wrecking bar. While Jo added to the list of foodstuffs they would need if they were to stay over for Sunday supper and Monday breakfast, Tony edged back into the crowded pub for a second pint of bitter and a few moments on the telephone to Alan Collet.

  “Could you get hold of him?” Jo asked when the met outside the door nearest the parking area and made their way across Church Street.

  “No problem. He was in the middle of making up for this afternoon’s performance and didn’t quite appreciate the interruption, but he did come to the phone. He’ll be here for brunch tomorrow at eleven and, yes, he’s bringing our junior architect.”

  “Jemima!” Pippa crowed.

  “Jemima. They won’t stay the night, though. She has to catch an early train back to Cambridge Monday morning.”

  “Let’s hope she knows her regional architectural history well enough to tell me how to start tracking down the tale of Castle Cox,” Jo remarked as she and Tony rounded the curve in the footpath past the church. Pippa and Roger were already far ahead. “I do wish Rog had some friends his own age,” Jo added unexpectedly.

  Tony seeme
d startled. “Hasn’t he? He always seems to be busy enough.”

  “With us. When we’re on hand. Or swimming, or off on his own at a cricket match. Or lugging his blessed cello off to a lesson with that utter zero of an Albert Cluck.”

  “Clock, chucklehead.” Tony put an arm around her shoulders and drew hers around his waist. “I shouldn’t worry. Old Roger’s used to looking after himself. After all, he used to look after me until you took the job on. No, he’ll be turning up with a girl friend one of these days, and you’ll go tacking off in the other direction.”

  “Umm. Perhaps. But I do wish he didn’t tread through life so warily. You’d think the Great Cake of the Universe was going to fall if he put a foot wrong.”

  “Roger? Don’t be silly,” Tony scoffed. He gave her an affectionate squeeze and when they turned in at their own drive, added a kiss that effectively put Roger out of her mind.

  By teatime the shopping was done, the whole of the original fireplace wall was exposed, the iron Victorian fireplace dragged clear and toppled down the steps into the garden (where it shattered a terrace paving stone), and the insulating bricks chucked over the railing at the side of the garden stairs to be stacked at leisure. There was still a great deal more to be done in the way of cleaning—the wainscoting was grey with soaked-in plaster and some mildew—but they could sit on the floor with buttered raisin bread and mugs of milk or tea and contemplate the patterned wall and the graceful flattened arch of stone enclosing a deep, fire-blackened fireplace some four feet high and seven wide.

  “Next,” Tony said with a determined gleam in his eye, “we measure the entire house, outside and in, to give us some idea of what else might be lurking inside the walls of our plaster castle. Pips, you’re the artist. Rog and I can measure and you can put it down on paper. I said right from the first that the proportions were all wrong, didn’t I? I’ll wager that in every case it’s because something has been tacked on or covered over. We, my dears, are going to pare it down to its seventeenth-century heart.”

  When Roger drifted into sleep at last, he fell to dreaming of tape measures that wrapped themselves around corners and slithered up and down walls like flat, silver snakes. Seventeen feet, two-and-a-quarter inches, they hissed. Fifty-four feet and half an inch. Nine feet pre-cisely.

  When you touched a finger to their backs, you felt a ripple, like a pulse, almost, and when their silver tongues whispered out they sighed Cruel, cruel Roger to use me so. Unreasonably—he knew it was nonsensical—Roger began to be afraid of what they might measure out: a house hidden within a house, meanings hidden in words, feelings bravely tricked out in smiles. Ah Kitten, why? whispered one as it wrapped round his ankle and set to work to measure him.

  Roger came half awake with a start, the sensation of an icy-cold band round his ankle so real that he lay paralysed, his heart racing, until it died away. It-was-only-a-dream, his mind said, the message shaping itself in some far-off corner and floating towards him. The words were as hard to capture as soap bubbles. Dream? His mind flickered more sharply. Was he awake now, then? His body was a heavy weight, thick, inert as clay; and as his mind struggled towards the surface, his body lay below, dreaming its own dream, like a rock lying on its side in the river bed. Move, he commanded. Stretch. But it would not. Puss? Kitten? Who were they?

  In the next room he heard a muffled crash, then the creak and slam of what might have been a cupboard door opening and shutting. No grieving. Only angry footsteps, and a heavy door wrenched open. Look. See. Who’s there? Roger’s brain signalled frantically, and after an endless time his eyelids dragged open and he saw the moonlit rooms. Both. For there were two of them: his own, bare and ugly, and under it—within it?—not a room, but a wainscoted passageway and the heavy, carved balustrade of a broad stairwell, shimmering half-seen, like a darkly lit stage setting behind a heavy scrim.

  Roger blinked heavily. The illusion did not go away; and he could not move his head even to see the downward flight of stairs that must lie at his bed’s foot. In that room within his own—that wide upper landing—no hall doorway opened opposite the window at his back. A shadowy carved chest stood against a wall just there, an empty candlestick atop it. And the pale yellow light spilling across the floor not seven feet from Roger’s numb gaze came from the empty master bedroom. Through a door that was-not-there.

  From that not-room, a man burst into the passageway to stand half dazed, candlestick in hand. He was tall and dark and, but for the face, might have been Tony standing there, costumed for some play in doublet, trunk hose, and half-cloak, a plumed hat under his arm. But the face was nothing like. It was a good enough face, but the grief and anger wavering there had made it ugly. The man’s right hand, white-knuckled, gripped the haft of the poniard that hung on a gilt and silver chain from his belt. Roger, frozen fast, saw every link of the chain, every point of lace edging the falling bands at his neck.

  Then, abruptly, the man moved, hurling himself towards the stair and passing out of Roger’s view. He was gone, but the sound of footsteps pelting down and the thud of a heavy outer door were a long time dying.

  Move. Wake up. Stop the dream. Blood thrummed in Roger’s ears like deep, plucked bass notes on a cello, an underwater sound, until the stone that was his body stirred and stretched and sat up shivering, half naked, in the wash of moonlight through the open window.

  The terrifying thing was that he knew he had been awake all the time.

  It would haue much a maz’d you

  PIPPA CAME OUT OF HER ROOM IN shorts and a Snoopy T-shirt just as Roger started down the stairs. “I heard it again last night,” she said in a hushed, conspiratorial voice. “Did you? Are you going to tell them?”

  Roger kept ahead on the way down, careful not to meet those curious, excited eyes. “No. I was too tired to stay awake,” he said shortly. “Anyway, Pa’s right. An old house with chimneys and a Swiss-cheese roof can make as many sounds as an organ.”

  He had decided in the middle of the night, after two sleepless hours, to say nothing of what he had seen. His father would greet such a tale with impatience or irritation or, worse, amusement masked by a caricature of concern. “Ought we to try communicating with this antique gentleman? We could have a go at table-rapping, but we haven’t a proper table. Do you reckon he would settle for our door?” Jo might be more open-minded, but she would be bound to be uneasy at the prospect—however doubtful—of sharing premises with a ghost. Pippa? Well, Pippa would probably see a ghost as one more creature in need of aid and comfort, so she would be no problem. But for Tony and Jo, it would be better if they were a lot more deeply involved in re-doing the house before they found out. Time enough when the roof was repaired and they moved across the hall into the master bedroom. Besides, there was always the possibility that when he—“it”?—had slammed out of the house last night, he had gone for good.

  At the bottom of the stairs Roger turned to Pippa to ask with casual curiosity, “What was it you thought you heard?”

  “Like before, only not so long. Are you sure you didn’t hear anything?”

  “I said I didn’t,” Roger answered impatiently, but half-way along the hall he slowed. “Why? You didn’t see something, did you?”

  “No. Not exactly.” Pippa frowned. “But I put Sammy and Bast to bed in their baskets so they wouldn’t sit all over me if I wanted to get up. And when I heard what-ever-it-was I got up and went down the hall to where it was coming from.”

  “But you didn’t see anything?”

  Pippa shook her head. “No. And that was funny too. Funny-peculiar, I mean. My room was all moonlighty, but I could hardly see into the big room at all. It was all murky, like there was a wall of something across the doorway. It was so spooky I ran and got into bed and zipped the sleeping bag clear up over my head.”

  A wall. There might very well have been a wall, Roger thought. The old house and Castle Cox seemed to differ in more ways than one. “You must have been dreaming,” he told Pippa offhandedly. Takin
g hold of her lopsided ponytail, he neatly refastened it and gave it a parting tug. “Where’s Sammy?”

  “Upstairs with his basket door open. I told him he’d have to come down on his own this morning,” she said primly and went on in to breakfast.

  Tony was there, in a foul temper, complaining about the state of his egg and accusing Jo of having boiled the coffee. He looked as haggard as if he had sat up half the night.

  “Cooking on that thing is a little unpredictable,” Jo granted. “But one more word and you’re on your own tomorrow morning. I am sorry about the egg, but the coffee most assuredly did not boil. That sour taste is last night’s celebration come back to haunt you.”

  “Two pints of beer do not make a celebration,” Tony snapped.

  “Two?”

  “Well then, three,” he growled. “And this morning I mean to celebrate my early Jacobean house by ringing friend Collet and telling him to stay at home.”

  “You can’t,” Jo said. She stilled Roger’s threatened protest with a look. “Not before twelve, and they’ll be here before then.”

  “I needn’t wait until the pub opens to phone. There’ll be a kiosk somewhere. Dammit, there’s too much to do, and I don’t feel up to Alan’s unbridled cheerfulness on top of it all.” Tony snatched up an orange and headed for the French doors.

  “Temper, temper! And hours too late,” said a disembodied voice.

  Pippa was closest to the front door. “It’s Alan!” she announced through a mouthful of toast. Swallowing quickly, she demanded, “Where’s Jemima?”