‘But we did think it was a love match, didn’t we? You remember the way he looked at her? And she was very beaut iful. Why wouldn’t he love her?’
‘He said their marriage was dreadful. He implied she was unfaithful.’
‘Eloise? No! She wasn’t like that and, anyway, I would have known.’
‘Would you, Cathy? I don’t think she told you everything.’
That was certainly true. I stood up.
‘Let’s go for a walk. Just down to the beach. I need to clear my head.’
We walked slowly down the lane, between the little whitewashed cottages and the ancient stone walls with their wild flowers bursting from every crack and crevice. We’d once seen a dormouse here, tiny and bold as it perched on a rock, the sweetest sight I’d ever seen. And at night there were badgers and foxes scurrying furtively around the hedgerows, burrowing and searching for food. During the day though, the most constant presence was the sea, glimpsed blue and golden over every gate, every stile, its waves murmuring softly, beckoning you down to the cove.
‘Did Ted tell you anything about Arthur?’ I asked.
Chris shook his head. ‘No. Who’s Arthur?’
‘Eloise’s grandson,’ I replied.
Chris stopped. He turned to look at me, his face mildly amused, full of disbelief.
‘You’re being ridiculous. Her grandson? For God’s sake, she was only in her forties when she died. What on earth are you talking about?’
We sat down at one of the picnic benches at the café on the beach. The café was closed, the beach deserted. I reached forward and took Chris’s hands over the table.
‘Listen to me, Chris. This is important, really important. Eloise has been trying to tell me this story for so long but it was Juliana who actually fleshed it out for me today. It’s a long story, but what she told me is that Eloise had a baby when she was only thirteen.’
‘What?’ Chris interrupted. ‘That’s absurd. Surely we’d have known about something as … as huge as that.’
‘Please be quiet, Chris, and hear me out. Hardly anyone else knew. It was all kept very hush-hush, for obvious reasons. Let me tell you now … ’
From the time Eloise was small, a lonely only child, she was educated at a private school in Truro, quite a way west from her home. She was a weekly boarder, coming back to Roseland Hall every Friday afternoon. At that point, her parents still lived in the huge family mansion; but they had no male heir. There was money, but not enough to maintain the immaculate house and parkland indefinitely and Charles refused to countenance opening the estate to the public.
‘Ridiculous idea,’ he snorted whenever Juliana suggested that could be the way forward. ‘We’re not exhibits in a zoo. I don’t want the hoi polloi and their muddy boots all over the Long Gallery, or trampling through my shrubberies. My father would have had a fit.’
Charles was as snobbish as Juliana was pragmatic. She knew he would never agree, but she did tell him that the most practical option was to hand over the big house and estate to the National Trust. They would still have a considerable fortune, enough to ensure they and Eloise and any children she might have would never have to worry about money. They could live in the pretty old farmhouse in the grounds, which was more than adequate to house their small family in plenty of style, and they would no longer have to endure the suffocating responsibilities of running an enormous stately home that ate money.
But Charles hated the idea of giving up the house that was his heritage. He would have hung onto Roseland indefinitely, however much money it haemorrhaged, feeling that it was the emblem of his dignity, his worth as a man. In fact, he was less worried about money than the fact that he had no son to inherit the estate. He felt ashamed about that, obsessed with the fear that his Cornish peers regarded him as inadequate and emasculated.
It was while Juliana was trying to cope with her husband’s emotional crisis that her loving maternal eye became diverted from her only child. But Eloise, encouraged by her mother since she was young to keep a diary, recorded the events of the traumatic summer she turned thirteen. And then, years later after her father died, she allowed her mother to read it. And when she married Ted, she left the diary with her mother, making Juliana promise to keep it secret, and above all to ensure that her new husband would never find it.
Now, after Arthur’s miraculous appearance in her life, Juliana had at last decided to share Eloise’s record of that momentous summer with me. And because she knew so much of what her daughter had gone through at such a vulnerable age, her knowledge, combined with Eloise’s abandoned, love-ridden rambling notes, took me straight back into a world in which I had never known my friend; my dear, lovely girl whose life was now so cloudy, so lost to me.
In her neat, childish hand, Eloise wrote of how lonely she felt. She was shy at her boarding school and found it difficult to fit in with the other girls, burying herself in the roles she won so easily in the dramatic society. Back home every weekend, she was mostly on her own. Isolated, footsteps echoing round the vast empty rooms of the mansion which had once been so vibrant, so full of glamorous social gatherings, dances, musical evenings, dinner parties resplendent with the finest silver and most precious porcelain, she withdrew. She spent her weekends in her bedroom, reluctantly joining her parents for meals during which her father was silent, his eyes dull, eating little but drinking glass after glass of wine. And after dinner, when he went alone to his study, Eloise would watch from the stairs as the butler, Eric, brought him a decanter of whisky. Charles would not emerge from his lair, no matter how long she stayed up. Twice, unable to sleep, she got out of bed and walked down to the study, standing nervously for long minutes before she hesitantly opened the door. Both times, she saw her father stretched out on the sofa beside the dying fire, unconscious and snoring, the whisky decanter empty on the walnut table by his side.
The long summer holidays started on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. Both her parents were far too engrossed in their marital problems to pay much attention to their lonely little daughter. And so, as she wrote so wistfully in her diary, she whiled away her days wandering around the lovely parkland, daydreaming and occasionally settling into the little gazebo to read her favourite books, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
And she fell more and more into the company of the estate manager’s son, Jack.
Like Eloise, Jack was an only child, just a couple of years older than she. Although he went to the village school, and often had friends round to play football in his parents’ large garden, he was a wistful boy, dreamy, with huge blue eyes and a thatch of golden hair. A Cornish child, brought up on the beach, who could surf and swim like a fish. Eloise had always been in awe of Jack. He could do anything; he made campfires with kindling and cooked sausages for his friends as dusk fell. He knew his way around the strange and mysterious places on Bodmin Moor, telling hair-raising stories to his mates about the ghosts and boggarts that haunted the misty wild stretches around Jamaica Inn. He claimed he had seen apparitions, grey and terrifying, howling in terrible pain among the ancient stone circles that dotted the moor, souls tormented by unresolved passions, by desperate injustices they could not put right.
No wonder Eloise fell in love with him, this beautiful Cornish boy, blond as the hay and brown as a nut, with his fearless tales of those murdered innocents now doomed to roam the blasted heaths of Bodmin until they found release.
All that summer, she wrote, she couldn’t take her eyes off him. Shy and tongue-tied when she was among his friends, she longed to be alone with him. When she was, she told him about her favourite books. He hadn’t read them, but watched her with grave attention as she talked about Jane Eyre and her mysterious intimations of the madwoman in the attic, the final flight from her beloved Mr Rochester, and the supernatural voice she heard across the wilderness of the Yorkshire Moors, summoning her back to her blinded lover’s side.
And she told him about Cathy and Heathcliff, their dark, doomed love affair at Wut
hering Heights, and how their passion outlived Cathy’s death.
And he watched her, lying next to her in the fragrant grass, his head propped up on his hands.
Eloise’s thirteenth birthday fell on the thirteenth of July. Her mother, distracted as usual by her husband’s moods, asked Ellie how she wanted to celebrate.
‘Do you want a party, dear? We could ask some of your school friends. And have some lovely party games, perhaps with a magician or something?’
Eloise shuddered. She had hardly any friends, certainly didn’t want them to come home and watch her father drink. And party games? How horrible was that? It all seemed deeply unattractive. So she demurred. Said she really didn’t want a fuss. Would be happy just to celebrate at home with her parents, a birthday cake and maybe a ride on her beloved pony, Daisy.
Juliana was relieved. Charles had been particularly difficult lately. He was drunk every night and when he sobered up refused to discuss what was to happen to Roseland. The servants had sensed there was a crisis, so the atmosphere at Roseland was febrile and unpleasant, and it was all Juliana could do to smooth things over, to continue to behave as the gracious lady of the Manor, even though she woke every morning with her heart in her mouth, her stomach crippled with cramps of anxiety.
*
On Ellie’s birthday, there was a celebratory tea. Sandwiches, scones and a beautiful cake, made and elaborately iced by Annie. All the servants were there, plus the gardeners, the gamekeeper, and the Estate Manager and his wife, John and Angela Merchant. Their son Jack was there, too, the only other person in the birthday girl’s age group.
Everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday To You’ with gusto, and afterwards, when the grown-ups began drinking wine, Jack beckoned Eloise onto the Palladian terrace, and then, his finger to his mouth, across the lawns and around the side to the stable yard.
Juliana had showed me Ellie’s account of what happened next.
‘Ellie, do you want to come on a birthday ride with me?’
‘Where to?’ she squeaked with excitement.
‘Up onto Bodmin. I’ve got so many places to show you. Places so scary you wouldn’t believe. Honestly, Ellie, it really is full of ghosts. But don’t worry. I know how to handle them. I’ll look after you.’
Ellie and Jack rode out on their ponies; Jack on a restive creature called Red, Eloise on her own docile pet, Daisy.
Bodmin Moor, on a dank and foggy day, is not just forbidding and austere. Sometimes, when the mist wreathes round the gorse, and you can see only yards ahead, you feel a shivering of fear as you realise you don’t know where you are, that it would be so horribly easy to veer off the road, find yourself on a footpath that led nowhere. And all around you, the ghostly breaths of the ancient stone gods of this inhospitable country.
Jack was strong and confident on his pony. Although Eloise followed him with trepidation in the fog, she trusted him completely. She felt totally connected with him, knew he would keep her safe, protect her from any harm.
They reached Jamaica Inn, which had been standing in lonely isolation on the moor for over two centuries.
‘Now this,’ Jack told her quietly as they tethered their ponies to the hitching rail outside the inn, ‘this is a properly haunted place. Not just after dark, either.’ He pointed to a little meadow behind the building, visible in a sudden break in the mist. ‘See that meadow?’
Eloise nodded, too excited to speak.
‘There’s something not right about it,’ Jack said. ‘People don’t like walking across it. I know a woman who used to be a cleaner here who used to walk to work across the meadow, but she soon stopped, I can tell you.’
Eloise turned to him. ‘Wh – why?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘What happened?’
Jack shook his head slightly. ‘Nothing has actually ever happened – not to anyone. It’s the feeling they get when they cross it, going either way. A really strong sense that they’re being followed; and not by something that means them any good. I remember being here one day last summer, and I saw some hikers cutting through on their way back from Roughtor. As soon as they climbed over that stile you can see on the far side, and starting walking to where we are now, they started looking over their shoulders – all of them. They began to speed up and when they were close enough for me to see their faces, they were obviously seriously spooked. They couldn’t get out of that field fast enough.’
Eloise stared at the innocent meadow. ‘What do you think it is, Jack? What’s in there?’
He shrugged. ‘Search me. I have no idea. Do you want to try crossing it now, with me?’
Eloise shook her head violently. ‘No! Not at all!’ She shuddered and turned to look at the inn. ‘What about that – is it haunted too?’
Jack laughed. ‘Oh yes, Ellie. It is sooooo spooky … the oldest part of Jamaica Inn is the eastern side.’ He pointed to the right hand side of the building. ‘All the weird stuff happens in there.’
Eloise gaped at the east wing. ‘What weird stuff?’
‘Too much to tell you in one go. The restaurant’s supposed to be haunted by a man in a green cloak. I know someone who saw him leaving the restaurant and walking very, very fast to reception. When he asked one of the staff who it was, they went white and said he couldn’t possibly have seen anyone coming from the restaurant, because the door to it was locked. He checked, and it was!’
‘More! I want to know everything!’
Jack laughed. ‘We’d be here all day … ok, one more. One of my mates, his dad’s a plumber. He was called out to fix a leaking water tank in the east loft. He was up there all alone and suddenly felt absolutely petrified. He didn’t see anything, nothing at all, but he was convinced there was something terrible hiding up there and he was back down the ladder before you could say knife. Never went back. For all he knows, the tank’s still leaking.’
Eloise shivered. ‘I don’t want to stay here any longer. Please can we go, Jack?’
He grinned. ‘Have I scared you, Ellie? Sorry, birthday girl. OK, let’s ride over to the foot of Roughtor. That’s the most haunted part of the whole damn moor.’
As they rode towards Roughtor, one of Cornwall’s highest points, Jack told Eloise the terrible tale of Charlotte Dymond. Charlotte was a flirtatious maid who worked at a local farm. On Easter Sunday 1844, she was murdered at the foot of Roughtor. Her throat was cut, not once, but twice.
‘Dad’s got a book about it,’ Jack explained. ‘It was a massive drama at the time. In all the London papers and everything.’
He told Eloise that Charlotte’s body had lain undiscovered for nine whole days before someone stumbled on it. ‘You can imagine what a state it was in after all that time – flies and maggots and everything.’
Eloise gagged.
‘Want me to go on?’
She nodded. ‘Yes. I’m all right, honestly.’
Suspicion had fallen at once on Charlotte’s suitor, an illiterate farm worker, lame in one leg and barely in his twenties. Charlotte was said to have refused him.
The upshot was that the man was tried at Bodmin Assizes, convicted, and, four months after the murder, hanged – in public. The crowds, Jack said, were enormous.
‘But here’s the thing, Ellie – turns out the poor guy was innocent all along. I can’t remember the details but soon after they strung him up the case against him started to fall apart. Too late for the poor bloke by then, of course. He was six feet under in the prison yard. He never should have been executed.
‘Now Charlotte Dymond is said to haunt the moors around Roughtor. They say her spirit can’t ever rest because her killer was never brought to justice and an innocent man died, kind of because of her … ’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Eloise indignantly. ‘It wasn’t her fault, but I think if I were her her ghost I would feel the same! I can’t stand injustice. Who’s seen her?’
Jack said the most reliable sighting had come from The Cornwall Rifle Volunteers, who in the early 1900s had been on night exercise
s near Roughtor and had seen Charlotte walking on the very spot where her body had been found, and where a memorial stone now stood. They’d been so terrified they had abandoned the patrol and fled home. A few years earlier men from the nearby Stannon clayworks had reported multiple sightings.
Interestingly, women never saw Charlotte Dymond’s ghost. Only men.
Of course there was nothing to see when the pair of them reached Roughtor, only swirling mist and the stone memorial to poor Charlotte, erected after public subscription the year after she was butchered at the lonely spot.
Eloise tried to hide her disappointment. She really had been half-expecting to be met by a weeping apparition of the murdered girl.
‘Come on,’ said Jack. ‘I know a place you can’t fail to be seriously scared by. It’s much, much older than anything I’ve shown you so far. And it is so spooky, Eloise. I’m going to show you the Stone Quoit of Trevethyan.’
At last they reached Jack’s intended destination. The stone chamber loomed above them. From Jack’s description, she had imagined it to be like the witch’s cottage in an old fairy tale, but the reality was vast, terrifying. This astonishing monument, so tall and uncompromising, so elemental in its ageless defiance of time, inspired horror in Eloise’s soul.
‘What’s it for, Jack?’ she whispered.
He looked proud to know. ‘It’s a burial chamber. They laid down the bones of Kings and Princes here. Do you know how old it is, Ellie?’
She shook her head.
‘Five and a half thousand years. There were people here, people like us, all that time ago. And they built this. Come inside.’
She didn’t want to. All those dead bones, all those centuries of haunted memories. She shook her head.
He laughed, took her hand. ‘Are you frightened?’
She acknowledged it, looked at him and said she wanted to go back home.
Jack looked grave. ‘Ellie, I promise you there is nothing to be scared of. I’ve been up here so much, even at night, and I’ve never seen a ghost. Although,’ he paused, unable completely to let go of his supernatural hold over her, ‘I have seen lights. Dim, purple and green. And I’ve heard things.’
Eloise Page 10
