by Sarah Rayne
But all I can think of is that he will soon be here. Stephen. He’s dead, of course. He can’t come into this house. But what if he does? Will I see him? Will he see me? Is he the romantic war hero I thought him, a dashing spy, dying for his King and country? Or is he a villain, under sentence of death for some squalid crime, perpetually dodging those soldiers? And who is it that he calls to in this house? Could it be Leonora? Was she here, and is she part of Stephen’s story in some way? That thought brings a horrid, illogical jab of jealousy.
‘I’ve left the iron gate open to make it easier,’ Father said to me before we sat down to supper. He said it quietly, but he said it eagerly, like a child wanting to give pleasure, and I hated him for not understanding how much he was frightening me, and how incredibly stupid he was to believe in his mad idea.
A moment ago the little clock over the mantel chimed, breaking softly into the silence, and I jumped. And it’s as if the chiming released a trigger, because something is starting to happen. A moment ago I heard the faint screech of the iron gate. The hinges always screech like that if someone pushes them right back against the stone wall. If I turn my head a little I can see into the night garden – I can see the outlines of the trees, grey and black in this light – and I can see the wrought-iron gate and the walled garden beyond it. Is Stephen there?
If I stand close to the window I can hear soft rustlings and murmurings. And now there’s the soft light crunch of footsteps on the gravel path that circles most of the house. Stephen. He’s coming nearer, and I can see him now. A young man, wearing a long, dark overcoat. It’s called a greatcoat, I think. It’s what soldiers wore in that war – the Great War – Stephen’s war. I see him in the way you see a piece of film projected on to a screen. Not quite transparent, but nearly so.
‘Let me in … You must let me in …’
The words are faint and broken because the wind is snatching at them. I’ve wiped the mist from the glass so I can see better, and I’ve set the lamp on the desk so the light shines across the gardens.
He’s coming towards the window … I cannot write any more …
It’s almost midnight, and I’m in my bedroom. I know I won’t be able to sleep until I’ve recorded something of what happened earlier.
As Stephen approached the house, I could hear him sobbing quietly. With the sounds came a feeling of what I can only describe as impending doom. Written down, that looks impossibly dramatic, but it’s what I felt.
‘Let me in … For the love of God, let me in … Niemeyer’s butchers are already in the grounds …’
There was a space of time – it might have been two minutes or two hours for all I know – when I didn’t think I had the courage to do what Father wanted. But those pleading words, that harsh, desperate sobbing was too much for me. If I walked out of the room now, Stephen would come to this house every night like this, begging to be let in.
‘Niemeyer’s butchers are in the grounds …’
I leaned forward and opened the window.
At first I thought nothing was going to happen. There was a faint spattering of rain on my hands, and then, with heart-snatching suddenness, it was as if the massing darknesses and the furtive whisperings whirled their tangled skeins up and spun them into a tattered sphere that swooped straight at me. It was like being smacked across the eyes, and as I gasped and stepped back, a cold wind blew into my face. The sobbing was nearer, and there was such fear and such despair in that sobbing, as if someone was drowning in the dark, all alone …
And then he was there, framed in the window, barely two feet away from me. He was young and pale, there was a tiny scar on one cheekbone, and he was looking into the warm, lamplit room with such longing that it tore into my heart.
I said, in a voice I hardly recognized as my own, ‘Come into the house. You’ll be safe here.’
A hand came out, and even through my fear I saw the fingertips were raw and bleeding, the nails torn almost to the quick in places. The pity of it scalded through me, but I put out my own hand and he took it eagerly, his poor torn fingers closing around mine. They were cold, so dreadfully cold, and he clutched at my hand as if I was the only thing in existence that could save him … There are moments in life that stamp themselves for ever on some inner level of the mind – moments that will never really fade. For me, that moment has always been when Stephen Gilmore took my hand.
And then two things happened practically simultaneously. The door of the library opened, and my father stood there. The shadowy outline in the window and the feel of those torn, cold fingers holding mine both vanished.
He hadn’t been real, of course, I knew that, but it was as if something had been wrenched out of my body. A sense of aching desolation and loss swept over me, and I turned furiously to my father. ‘Why did you come in?’ I said, with an angry sob. ‘He was here.’ I pointed, stupidly, fruitlessly, to the window. ‘You came in and he went away,’ I said, and sat down abruptly in a chair, because I felt as if something had sucked all the bones out of my body.
‘No. Luisa, look there.’ My father pointed to the floor, and I saw faint damp footprints leading across the sitting-room floor and out to the hall. In a voice from which all the breath seemed to have been taken, he said, ‘He didn’t go away. He’s here in the house.’
Sixteen
So they let him in, thought Michael, leaning his head back against the chair for a moment. They both believed they had let Stephen in, and Booth Gilmore believed he could save him from the German soldiers – Niemeyer’s butchers.
In broad daylight, with people around and normality everywhere, he would probably have found this no more than rather sad – an indication of the introspection of a solitary young girl and a man with an obsession. Marooned in Fosse House with its whispering darknesses and darting shadows – with his own encounter with Stephen Gilmore still vividly in his mind – he found it chilling.
He turned to the next page of the journal. The entries seemed to be from around the same period, but they were mostly about ordinary, everyday things. Lessons with the governess, church, one or two mild local social events.
On one page, though, Luisa had written, ‘It is now more important than ever to fight Leonora. If she finally takes over my mind, I will have none of my own memories, only hers. There will be no memories left of Stephen – of the feel of his hand taking mine. I will not let her overpower me, I will not.’
Michael thought that whether or not Luisa’s fear of Leonora was due to some incipient madness, it was still deeply disturbing. For a wild moment he wondered whether Leonora had eventually succeeded – whether he had sat down to dinner and shared those curious conversations with Luisa or with Leonora.
The library room was warm, and Fosse House was silent and unthreatening. Michael was even starting to feel slightly drowsy. Through the drowsiness he heard the faint chimes of a church clock, and rowsed sufficiently to count them. Midnight. The dead vast and middle of the night, if you believed the Bard. The hour when drowsy darkness rolled over hushed cities.
It was ridiculous to remember all the myths and legends about midnight, but he was absurdly relieved to realize he had crossed its symbolic Rubicon, always supposing he had been worried about that, which of course he had not. But the chimes had woken him up, and perhaps it would be as well to stay awake if he could. There were only six hours until it would start to get light, anyway. He would divide those hours into sections. First he would finish reading Luisa’s journal, and then he would make a search of this room to see if he could find any more of Iskander’s insouciant chronicles. He might even risk a quick sortie to the kitchen for the radio; all the stations broadcast twenty-four hours a day, and a little night music might cheer up the spooks. Or there might be a phone-in programme on somewhere. He had an immediate image of himself phoning in and explaining he was forced to spend the night in what appeared to be a haunted house so he would be grateful for any helpful ideas on how best to pass the time. It would probably bring half
the weirdos in the country out of the woodwork, but it might make for an entertaining hour or so.
This reminded him he had a chapter of the current Wilberforce book still to write, and that Wilberforce might usefully be entangled in a broadcasting situation. This was such a promising idea that he reached for his notebook to write it down before he forgot it, and spent an absorbed half hour sketching out Wilberforce’s foray into a local studio to act as a disc jockey, during which he dropped most of the discs, sat on the rest, and the army of inventive and gleeful mice who were always on the watch invaded the studio to plug Wilberforce into the shipping forecast instead.
Michael made a note to ask Nell’s Beth what pop groups were currently in favour with the eight- and nine-year-olds who would read the book, and then, this satisfactorily dealt with, got up to stretch his legs by examining the contents of the bookshelves. In the main the titles were dry looking scholarly works, but the lower shelves held a rather ragged collection of paperbacks – Luisa’s Agatha Christies, and also what looked like some of her old school-books. He pulled one or two out and flipped through the pages, interested to see the teaching methods from the 1940s.
He was just thinking he would tackle the rest of Luisa’s journal when the church clock chimed one. As the single sonorous note died away, Michael became aware of other sounds from outside, and they were exactly the sounds he had hoped not to hear.
Soft footsteps, and whispering. He turned to stare at the window, his heart racing. Someone was certainly out there, but whether it was Stephen Gilmore again or an honest-to-goodness intruder, there was no way of knowing. Luisa had said Stephen could not get in by himself because of his wounded hands, but at one o’clock in the morning Michael was not inclined to place any great reliance on that. He thought if something tapped at the window and asked to be let in, he would probably grab his car keys and beat the hell out of Fosse House, trusting to luck that the road would no longer be blocked.
He was just thinking he might do that anyway, when there was a sudden cry from the gardens, either of pain or surprise, he could not tell which. But whatever it was, it made the decision for him, because dashing through the dark gardens and risking confronting whatever was out there was clearly out of the question. Instead, he looked frantically about him for a weapon. It was probably a pointless move, but there was still a chance that this could be some local, enterprising burglar who had heard about Luisa Gilmore’s abrupt removal to hospital, and was seizing an opportunity to snaffle whatever treasures the presumably empty Fosse House might contain. Michael glanced at his phone, lying reassuringly on the desk, dropped it into a pocket, and went cautiously to the window. Moving the lamp out of the direct line, he opened the curtains by about two inches so he could look out without being seen.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the shadows, but he could already see that the wrought-iron gate to the walled garden was open, which he thought it had not been earlier. This did not prove anything one way or the other, however. A ghost might not open a gate – it might not need to. But a straightforward burglar might not do so either, in case it attracted attention. His hand closed around the phone. It would take three seconds to tap out 999, but it might take twenty minutes for the police to get out here.
He was just managing to convince himself that he had imagined the sounds when they came again, and this time he saw dark shapes moving as well. There was a whippy little wind, and flurries of rain dashed against the windows, but through this he could hear whispers. Fragments of words and phrases. At first he could not make any sense of them, then he recognized one or two of the words, and realized, with a cold frisson, that the whispers were in German. Ruhig sein, which he was fairly sure meant quiet, or ‘be quiet’, and verbergen, which he thought was hide.
Be quiet and hide. Was this Hugbert Edreich’s men, creeping towards the house to capture Stephen? This was a bizarre thought, but Michael was beginning to think he had already seen so many bizarre things in this house that the addition of a quartet of German soldiers from 1917 was perfectly believable.
He leaned forward, and as he did so he accidentally caught a fold of the curtain, which fell more widely open. The light from the desk lamp streamed into the gardens, and there, caught in the ray of light, were two dark-clad figures, apparently carrying a third figure between them, while a fourth appeared to be giving directions or even orders. They turned sharply towards the house and the window, their faces pallid, featureless blurs, but their eyes wide with shock. For a moment Michael’s curiosity pushed aside his fear, and he leaned over the window sill, trying to see more. There was an impression of hazy, hasty movement, the sound of hurried footsteps, and then the iron gate swung shut, as if of its own accord. Darkness closed down again and there was only the sound of the rain beating down on leaves and grass.
Michael realized he was shaking, but after a few moments he managed to pull himself together sufficiently to close the curtains. He sat down in the deep chair facing the window and tried to sort out his thoughts. They’ve got him, he thought. Those were the German soldiers and they came for Stephen, and they got him. That’s who they were carrying.
Did that mean there would be no more disturbances? Had the finale of that long-ago tragedy been played out tonight, and would Fosse House now sink back into its own brooding half-silence? It was unexpectedly disturbing to think Stephen had finally been caught and, presumably, later executed, but it might at least mean the house would be spook-free for few hours. If so, it might be safer and more sensible to stay put. And even if the road had been cleared, he would still have to go outside and walk the twenty or thirty yards to his car. His mind presented him with a mental picture of his car, parked on one side of the building, in a small gravel area surrounded by dark, overgrown bushes.
In about four hours – say four and a half – it would be getting light. Could he get through four more hours in this house? He went to the window again and peered out. Nothing stirred. But would those men return? If there was any likelihood of it, Michael would brave the Serbonian bog and hell’s scalding pavements to reach the village. But had they returned? Was there any way of finding out? How about Luisa’s journal?
He made a decision. He would look through the next few pages of Luisa’s journal to see if there were any more references to Hugbert’s gang of merry men. Depending on what he found – or did not find – he would decide then whether to make a dash for his car and trust to luck that the road would not be blocked.
But, as far as he could tell, nothing moved anywhere, although rain pattered steadily against the windows. If Hugbert Edreich’s little band were still out there they would be getting drenched. Michael had a sudden wild vision of himself calling to them to come inside out of the storm, and offering them dry towels and hot toddies. ‘And do sit here, Hauptfeldwebel Barth, and tell me about the Kaiser. Is it true he once threw a deed box at Bismarck?’
He reached for Luisa’s journal:
Today I made a slightly surprising discovery. When I opened Father’s desk earlier, I found the translation he had made of the German soldier’s letter – the one he read to me and that I copied into my diary.
But also in the desk was a second letter from the same man, which Father has also translated. I hadn’t known about this letter, but it follows on from the one Father read out.
It’s another fragment of Stephen, so I’m copying it down here.
Michael spared a thought to wonder why Luisa had been looking in her father’s desk – Booth Gilmore had sounded fiercely protective of his work, and Luisa did not seem to have been permitted into the library very often. But perhaps Booth had gone off on another of his research expeditions, and Luisa had simply not bothered to record the fact.
He was aware of pity. Luisa seemed to have written a good deal of this while in her early teens, and she had led a more or less solitary life in a gloomy isolated house, with uncaring parents, and without any of the normal outlets of teenagers. Life in this part of the wor
ld in the 1950s would not exactly have been a riot of wild living, but Luisa’s situation had been very nearly Brontë-esque. But the Brontës had had their own strange and wonderful fantasy worlds, which they had spun out of the dark moors, and they had had each other. Luisa had had no one. It was small wonder she had succumbed to the slightly eerie fixation on Leonora, and even less wonder that she had focused with such intensity on the mysterious, romantic Stephen.
He began to read the letter she had copied down.
To Hauptmann Niemeyer
Sir,
I regret to report that our first attempt to carry out the sentence passed on Stephen Gilmore has been unsuccessful. You will no doubt wish to know why this was.
It was almost entirely due to the presence of Alexei Iskander in Gilmore’s house. We were all very surprised to find him there, although remembering Iskander’s friendship with young Gilmore in the camp – more to the point, remembering Iskander’s rebellious ways and disruptive influence – perhaps we should not have been so taken aback. He is a rogue and a ruffian, that one, and likely to be always at the epicentre of any kind of trouble.
We had approached the house under cover of darkness, careful to be silent and secretive, in line with all the training we had received. The four of us climbed over a wall and were creeping through the grounds (the house has large gardens – clearly Gilmore’s family are prosperous). It was an eerie experience; the gardens are overgrown and filled with thick, nodding shadows and murmuring trees. A bitterly cold and most inhospitable wind blows across this part of the land from the North Sea, and a person of any imagination might suppose the sighing of the trees to be the sighing of the dead. As we went along, a church clock somewhere chimed one, making us all jump nervously. It made Hauptfeldwebel Barth jump so violently that he tripped over a boulder and sat plump down in a nettle-bed growing untidily against a wall. I am afraid he gave vent to a loud curse of annoyance, which I am sure you will allow that anyone might do in such a circumstance, particularly since it later transpired that he had also stubbed his toe.
