‘So you wiped out your penance and gave the responsibility for the curse to another in the form of an entirely imagined scenario.’
‘I suppose. Guilt, shame, such negative emotions for me to hold, so I gave the anger to another and he became its vessel, reminding me of my punishment, my curse.’ He briefly shuddered.
I leaned against him and spoke softly, fighting to be heard over the crash of waves. ‘But, you know, after punishment comes the guilt and remorse, then forgiveness and redemption; you’ve travelled a long journey to reach here, Charles.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. A gentle, subtle acknowledgement. He blinked several times, visibly fighting the tangle of emotions.
There was one other mystery I wanted to solve before he went completely quiet on the subject. ‘You call her Beatrice; why not Nuri?’
‘It was the name she chose when she arrived at Heachley. She wanted to hide her background and her given name had unfortunate connotations, the kind which would have made life difficult for her. However, all the servants knew she was a Gypsy and behind her back they spoke cruelly about her. To me, she was beautiful and intriguing. I wanted her, as an eager young man does. In secret, away from prying eyes, I seduced her with ease, and we quickly arranged our trysts. She wasn’t educated beyond rudimentary schooling and I lent her books to read. It led her to trust me.’ His voice had grown quieter, almost inaudible over the crash of the waves.
We’d spoken enough of the past.
The sun had almost disappeared and only the fringe of it poked above the shimmering water.
‘So, where now? For us?’ he asked, breaking the awkward silence.
‘Heachley. I still have six months to live there before I can inherit the place and sell. But, you don’t want to be there, so...’ I stared out to sea, chewing on my lip.
‘I don’t, I admit.’ He squeezed my shoulder. ‘However, I’ve realised during the terrifying drive over here that I’m not suited to life beyond Heachley.’
I twisted around to see his face. The smooth skin had lost its paleness. His eyes dazzled once again, reflecting the low beams of the sunlight. ‘I don’t understand. You don’t want to leave Heachley?’
‘The world beyond the walls is so very different to my imagination. I’ve been a prisoner for a hundred and fifty years and to expect me to simply walk away from Heachley and live as you do, without some kind of preparation, it’s not possible. I’m sure I would go crazy. It’s a scary world you live in.’
I chuckled. ‘Sometimes it is for me, too.’
‘Cities, cars, all these electrical things you take for granted: the television, the cinema and aeroplanes – just seeing them fly overhead makes my knees go weak.’
I needed to inject some optimism into his bleak vision. I believed in Charles’s abilities, his intelligence and versatility, just as Felicity had done. She’d quietly educated him, giving him books to read and the radio to listen to, not only to feed his knowledge, it unconsciously taught him another thing: he’d lost his Victorian style of speech – for the most part, now and again, something antiquated slipped out of him mouth – otherwise, he looked and sounded like he belonged in the 21st century.
‘You’ll adapt. You’re very adaptable.’
He blushed and the colouration enriched his face. ‘I need time to complete my transformation from ghost to what I am now.’
‘We have that time: six months of it.’ I settled myself between his knees and held his hands in mine. ‘You would cope with Heachley?’
The pink tinge in his cheeks remained. Hands, rock steady, ready to saw and chop once again. ‘Yes, because I can walk out the gates. I can learn to ride a bicycle. But please don’t ask me to drive a car.’
‘One day you’ll want to do it – most people do.’ My laughter brought out his. ‘You need little doses of modern life. A gradual emergence and then, when I inherit, we can move on?’ Heachley needed to be free as much as Charles. The house would fall quiet, no creaking or rattling, and no more ash. The mist would shrink back to the seashore and the skies would lighten again. The little cabin in the woods would fall apart and the ivy would swallow it up.
‘Yes. Sell it. For six months I can paint and mend, re-hang the doors, pull up weeds. I don’t know, whatever needs doing to the place to make it attractive to sell. We’re a team.’
‘Felicity always intended me to sell it. She knew you were my real prize, not the house or money. I simply don’t have the income to maintain it if I stayed. When I’m finished here, my year and a day, we can move out.’ I thought about my poky flat and the view out of the window, which lacked greenery. The constant noise of traffic. ‘You won’t like Chelmsford.’
He chewed his lip. ‘I do prefer the country, but of course…if you…’ Urban life must terrify him. It didn’t me, but I’d changed my perspective from simply visual to something more encompassing of other senses. I felt places now.
‘Me too, the country, as long as it has broadband,’ I said, remembering the practicalities of working, but not too hard. Dad had got that part wrong.
He sighed. ‘Once again you speak of things I know nothing about, but I’m sure there will be somewhere for us both.’
‘By the sea.’ A vast space was a tonic to a life spent trapped in the woods and it showed in the sparkle of eyes and the way his tense body uncoiled. ‘Yes, the open sea. We’ll find a smallish property and I can draw and you can—’
‘Make things. I’ve learnt to use my hands and I can fashion wood. Is there much need for a carpenter?’
‘A good one, yes, one who makes bespoke furniture. I’m sure you can make a living from what you’ve done over the years.’
I’d arrived at Heachley expecting to be alone for a year. Instead, I’d met a kind soul and I was about to join him on a journey that began over one hundred and fifty years ago. We still had a lifetime ahead of us. I gave him an encouraging nod.
‘Maybe I’ll try gardening. I like being outdoors.’
‘You’ll have a trade, like me.’ I wanted him near me, not too far away, as we’d always been since we’d met.
He pursed his lips and nodded. ‘A thoroughly modern couple.’
We fell into a comfortable silence.
With the sun gone, I suggested we walk a little to keep us warm. The tide had uncovered a stretch of rippled sand and isolated rock pools. We skirted around the banks of seaweed and I picked up a few shells, putting them in my coat pocket. Charles kept sniffing, inhaling deeply through his nose and licking his lips. At one point he stuck out his tongue to taste the air. I laughed, but not at him. I understood the awakening of memories was a sensory experience.
If we decided to stay in Norfolk, which I was coming to see as something I would find more than agreeable, I’d have to sell my flat in Chelmsford. Two places to sell would be headache. I groaned as I imagined how that might go.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘God, I’d hate for Liz to buy Heachley.’
‘Me, too. She showed determination in wanting it. Pestering poor Felicity, threatening her behind Tony’s back.’
‘I came to Norfolk convinced Felicity had been a senile old woman. I had to know why she wanted me to live in the house.’ I turned away from the attentive Charles and looked behind us. In the soft, wet sand, we’d left two lines of footprints. A revelation bolt shot through me and a forgotten image sprang forward, and not of two tracks, but rather three: two side by side, and the third alone and some distance behind.
‘Something wrong?’ He placed his hands on my shoulders and I leaned back against him.
‘I’d been convinced I only remembered Felicity from when I was small, before Mum died, but now, I have this vivid memory of coming to visit her after Mum died. I think we’d come to tell her about Mum’s passing. Dad trailed behind Felicity and me – he was so sad, couldn’t speak, so we talked.’ I paused, recollecting the dark shadows under Dad’s red-rimmed eyes.
‘Go on,’ Charles murmured.
‘How does one draw sadness?’
‘With tear filled eyes and an emptiness.’
‘So you did? I wonder why she suggested such a melancholy activity to a child.’
‘Oh, she was wise, in her strange way, don’t you think? Creativity is sparked by all kinds of emotions. Those pictures, inspired me to draw others, happier ones, not straightaway, but it was good therapy. She understood grief, loneliness, rejection – all those tough emotions – and she saw past them to better times. I remember it clearly now. That day me and Dad went to Heachley to tell her Mum was dead.’ Walking up the drive…the lavender, the birds singing.
‘A challenging day.’
‘I didn’t want to go. But, he wanted me to. I played in the garden while they spoke. And then we went for a walk on the beach. She told me don’t rush, be comfortable with yourself before finding…love, although I don’t think she used that word. I was ten. If she made me captive at Heachley for a year and a day, it was because she wanted the rest of my life to be even happier. And you, I do think she had your interests at heart always. She did love you, like a son perhaps.’
Now wasn't the time, but one day when Charles felt secure in his future, I would tell him the reasons for Felicity’s decision to stay at Heachley and that I believed it was her faith in karma. She'd not gone back to India or pursued her dream of travelling elsewhere, instead she’d become a recluse, and believed, I was sure of it, that her self-sacrifice would lead her to a higher plane of tranquillity in death. She would see her fulfilment in another life, just as Charles would from this day on. I might not believe in ghosts but I was warming to the idea of reincarnation. As for myself? What had I achieved? I'd given Charles a second chance at love and life. Yet, I liked to think that wasn't Felicity’s only intention. Her foresight was more remarkable than rescuing Charles.
I'd last seen her when I was a fragile child, an introvert shielding my memories behind doors, grieving for one parent and in the process of losing the other. By returning me to Heachley, Felicity had dismantled those barriers and given me the confidence to love, to thrive in companionship. Grief comes in many forms, for Charles it was anger then despair and retribution, for me isolation. Time healed us; memories brought us together.
‘You’re a kind soul, Miriam. Brave, too. I wonder how many other people would live in a haunted house.’
‘I can think of a few who did.’
We chuckled over our secret.
The drop in temperature ended our sunset stroll and heralded the arrival of dusk’s thin red horizon, glowing clouds and darkening skies. The tide would turn soon and wash away our footprints. But that was okay, I told Charles as we walked back to the car. We’d make plenty more in the years to come.
EPILOGUE
Lynn News
Heachley Hall, an elegant Victorian house built on the outskirts of Old Hunstanton in 1843, has been sold at auction. The house and grounds, which include an extensive ancient woodland, had been the home of the Marsters family since 1875. The death of its previous owner, Miss Felicity Marsters, brought to an end the long lineage. Or did it? The surprise outcome of the auction, which involved a feverish amount of bidding by two parties – taking the offer substantially above its guide price of 1 million pounds and selling at 1.2 million – had led to speculation the house had been bought by a boutique hotel chain. The new owner, who outbid a local farmer, declared she’d purchased the house with the intention of renovating it and bequeathing it to her grandson.
Lady Primrose Fitzgerald, who is married to the successful entrepreneur and former Ambassador to Malaysia, Sir Hugh Fitzgerald, is a relative of the Marsters family through the marriage of her sister to John Marsters, the late Felicity Marsters’s brother. She lived in the house as a child and fondly recalls playing hide and seek in the gardens.
MEET THE AUTHOR.
Many sparks ignited this project and bringing them together has been a labour of love for several years. My earliest memories of walking along Old Hunstanton beach with my grandmother helped craft Miriam’s relationship with her great-aunt. All those fragments of memories I retain, but can’t quite piece together into a coherent picture of one particular day, are the relics of my childhood, as well as Miriam’s. The house is a composite of many I’ve visited and the woods are those I battled through as a Wellington clad child armed with a stick.
The story of Heachley Hall really belongs to the Charles. By telling his life through the women he met, I wanted to protect him from ghost hunters and create a different approach to solving the haunted house mystery. He was never simply going to die.
This book was made possible by the invaluable help of many. To my beta readers and editor, Kate, thank you for your input and advice. Thank you to my support network of family and friends who encouraged me to keep going when I lost my words. Also, many thanks to those I met at the Festival of Writing; the authors and writers, agents and publishers, all of whom has helped contribute to this publishing adventure.
For most of my working life, I’ve been a scientist and my love of creative writing has never ceased even when surrounded by technical reports and impenetrable patents. Among moments of mummy taxi, delving into museum archives, drawing pictures and flute playing, I shall continue to pen my stories.
If you enjoyed exploring Heachley Hall and you would like to leave an honest review, you can find me on Amazon and Goodreads. But please remember Heachley’s secret and don’t spoil it for others!
Find out more about my forthcoming books on my website.
Contents
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
PART TWO
The Journal
The Marsters Family (1873–1914)
The Great War and beyond (1914–1934)
The First Tenants (1934–1946)
The Hinderton Affair (1947–1953)
The Branston Family (1953–1965)
Felicity Marsters (1966)
PART THREE
The Grave
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
EPILOGUE
MEET THE AUTHOR.
The Women of Heachley Hall Page 35
