Too Near the Dead

by Helen Grant

  What is it that first tells me something is wrong? Not a movement, a non movement. Behind the sink there is a huge mirror that takes up most of the wall; we put it there on purpose to make the small windowless room feel bigger and lighter. I am not looking at the mirror, I am looking down, at my cupped hands positioned carefully under the running water. At the edge of my vision I am aware of my reflection, and as I stoop, my hands moving rapidly to bring the water to my lips, I am aware of an absence, a stillness where there should be movement. I remain for a moment in that pose, bowing low over the porcelain basin, the water running over my fingers. Then I look up.

  It’s not me in the mirror, it’s her. Euphemia.

  I take her in in a heartstopping instant: the lavender silk dress, tight-fitting in the high-necked bodice and sleeves, voluminous in the skirts; the white face, in which the eyes blaze with furious intensity. Her mouth is a hard line, the lips leaden.

  I cannot breathe. I stare at her and she stares back at me, and the only sound is the water splattering into the sink.

  Then she is gone. I blink, and there is only me and my own reflection in the glass, two Fens in matching thin nightdresses, our hair dishevelled, shuddering with cold and shock.

  I reach out and turn off the tap. There is a drip and then silence. For half a minute, a minute, I stare into the mirror, daring it to show me something other than my own self, but nothing untoward happens. Then I back out of the room. I leave the light on inside.

  I creep up the stairs, into the bedroom where James is sleeping. His breathing is soft and even. The curtains are not quite closed and with the moonlight coming in, I don’t need to turn on a light. I can see and feel well enough to lock the door from the inside and remove the key. I put it in my jewellery box and close the lid. Then I get into bed.

  It is a long time before I can get back to sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Craig Loughty has blocked me. I check I’ve entered his name correctly in the search box. I have. His account profile just isn’t there any more.

  I sit back in my chair and stare at the screen. All sorts of unflattering epithets for the owner of Craig Loughty Building Services flit through my head, but there’s no-one to fling them at. He’s gone, with no way to know why. Perhaps he’s simply one of those people who instinctively avoids anything that might be vaguely troublesome. Or perhaps he knows very well what I want to ask him about. Either way, he doesn’t want to talk.

  Then I try Sue Gardener. She’s gone too. I can’t help it; I give a squawk of frustration. I’m pretty sure she is (or was) Susan Loughty – why block me otherwise? Why not just drop me a line to say, I’m not the Sue you’re after?

  I put my head in my hands. Whatever don’t ask means, whether they’ve split or not, those two really don’t want to be reached.

  What about you, Fen? If the house went back on the market, would you tell people?

  I think about that for a long time. In the end, all I can really decide is that I wish I could speak to the Loughtys. I want to know whether other people living here have been troubled.

  Then it occurs to me that even if the living won’t speak to me, perhaps the dead will. The Loughtys were the first to live on this plot since the old house was demolished, but someone might have lived here after Euphemia Alexander died.

  My work is waiting for me. The file thumbnail is lurking at the bottom of the screen like an ominous prophecy of clichés to come. Instead, I click back onto the search engine and look for that database of historical sites.

  It doesn’t take long to find the entry for Barr Buidhe, as it is listed. There is the engraving of the house, with the sundial and the tiny figures of a man and woman in front of it. Another click brings me to the notes on the site. There is not much to read. There are some details of the design of the house for the Alexander family by an Edinburgh architect whose name I don’t recognise. I scroll down a little and there is a dry summary of alterations made in the early 1800s. At the end of the entry, I read: Demolished in 1890.

  That’s it. No other details. But that means the house stood for eighteen years after Euphemia died.

  Lavender lady, lavender lady...

  Fragments of song unfurl in my head. Something must have happened in those eighteen years for the superstitions to have started. But how do I find out what?

  Twenty minutes later, I’m in the car, driving east. James didn’t want to come; he’s at some critical point in his book. So it’s just me, with nothing but my phone for company. Once or twice it has chirruped, indicating that an email has come in. I ignore it. I don’t need reminding that I ought to be working.

  It’s a miserably dark day, the sky a mass of dense low cloud. As the days shorten and the solstice approaches, it sometimes seems as though it barely gets light at all. I never noticed this when I lived in London; there were lights everywhere, even if I came home after midnight. Here, the darkness has a suffocating weight. If we drive between Barr Dubh and the town after dark, or between other villages, we can go miles without seeing any lights other than our own headlights, miserable grey beams that hardly penetrate the blackness before dissolving into it. Overhanging trees loom up, briefly bleached by our lights, then subsiding into the gloom. Once, we saw an owl flit across in front of us. It is no wonder that strange stories abound in a place where the night still closes in much as it did in the days when there were only candles to keep it away.

  I drive into the city centre and park outside the library I visited before, the day I dropped James at the station. As I walk through the lobby, I mute my phone and then I go upstairs to the reference section.

  The middle-aged woman I spoke to last time isn’t anywhere in sight. Instead, there’s a man about my age manning the information desk. I explain what I want to him. He listens carefully, without any signs of surprise.

  “So you want to know who lived in your house in the years following 1872?”

  “Not our house. There was one that stood on the same site, up until 1890.”

  “Well, it may still be possible to identify it. There will be census records for 1871 – is that too early?”

  “I know who lived there then,” I tell him.

  “1881 then. There’s also the census of 1891.”

  “It was demolished before then.”

  “So there’s probably only one set of census records for the period you’re interested in. You could also look at valuation rolls. Those were done annually. But those will only tell you who owned the property, and the main occupant or tenant. It won’t list everyone who lived in the house.”

  “But the census will?”

  “The census will tell you the names of everyone who was in the property when the census was done. So if someone was away from home, they won’t be in it, and if someone was visiting the house, they will.”

  “Can I look at both?”

  “Of course you can.” He smiles at me. “They’re on microfilm. Have you used a microfilm reader before? No? No problem, I’ll show you.”

  He goes off to find the microfilm and as he goes, he glances back at me. The expression on his face is – puzzled? Amused? I suspect I look tense – oddly tense for someone who is researching old property records.

  They may not tell me anything, I remind myself. Maybe some tenant farmer lived there quite happily for the whole eighteen years and never noticed anything odd at all. And finding names is only the start. Once I have those, I have to hope that there’s other information available about them and I have no idea how to go about doing that.

  The man is back. “This is the one,” he says, flourishing a little reel of film. He leads me to a desk with a computer and a film reader. It takes a couple of minutes for him to thread the film into the machine and to show me how to go backwards and forwards through the records.

  “It could take a while,” he says. “The pages you want a
re near the end.” Then he leaves me to it. An elderly couple have approached the desk and are looking in our direction with grim reproachfulness. He goes off to see to them and I start going through the census records.

  It takes a long time to search. I have to keep zooming in to read the handwritten entries. I find some properties in the tiny hamlet which is our nearest neighbour, but nothing under either Barr Dubh or Barr Buidhe. I backtrack, then I forward the film again. Nothing.

  The old couple take up a lot of time with the man on the desk, because they do not seem able to get to grips with computerised records at all, but finally they are finished. I stand up and go over to him.

  “I can’t find anything at all.”

  He glances at his watch. “It’s sort of lunchtime but–”

  “I’m sorry–”

  “No, don’t worry. Let’s have a look.”

  But he can’t find anything either. He sits back, grimacing. “You’re sure it was in that parish?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s possible the place wasn’t inhabited in 1881. We could look at the previous census, the 1871 one. If you know who lived there at that time, and we can find the entry, we’ll know we were looking in the right place.”

  “Thank you–”

  But he’s already on his feet, off to find the other reel of film: a man on a mission.

  Once the new reel is loaded, I start the weary task of scanning through it – forwarding, pausing, zooming in, zooming out again. Just as I start to think I’m not going to find anything again, or else that I’ve got too tired and missed the entry, I see it. It’s written in a neat cursive handwriting: Barr Buidhe House.

  Found you, I think, with a cold frisson. It shouldn’t bother me, since I know perfectly well who was living in the house in 1871, but I still feel uneasy looking at that name carefully written out: Miss Euphemia Alexander. She is listed as the head of family, and as unmarried.

  Underneath that are some other names, listed as “domestic servant” or in one case, “gardener.” The servants include Jane Dinnie, aged 47, and Catherine Stalker, aged 19. I think of Euphemia Alexander sitting dead in her chair and the two women holding a silver-backed mirror to her lips to look for breath. The memory of it is very vivid. I find myself breathing hard, as though I am still struggling to move, to scream.

  The man at the desk is looking at me again, a quizzical expression on his face. I do my best to smile at him, but I can feel how stiff and unnatural it is.

  I look back at the entry on the screen. I rewind a little way and then forward a little way. I remember seeing some of the same properties listed in the 1881 census. Barr Buidhe wasn’t among them. So in 1881 there wasn’t anyone living there. The census records can’t tell me anything else, so I rewind carefully to the beginning of the reel, then go over to the desk and ask to see the valuation rolls.

  For those, I have to go into the archive. There are several people already working in there – a man with a beard, a severe-looking older woman. Pencils (the only writing implements allowed) whisper over paper, and the woman sighs at my intrusion. I sit at the table, in front of the volumes the archivist lays out for me.

  This time, I think I’ll start with Euphemia’s time in the house. I leaf through the volume marked 1871 in gold letters on the spine. It doesn’t take me long to find Barr Buidhe. The proprietor is listed as Miss Euphemia Alexander and the tenant as Said Miss Euphemia Alexander. The yearly rent or value is given as £٨٠ ٠٠ ٠٠, which I take to mean eighty pounds, zero shillings and zero pence – probably a lot back then.

  I close the book and open the one marked 1873. Barr Buidhe is again listed, but under “proprietor” it says Heirs of Miss Euphemia Alexander. I don’t know who that would be, given that she was supposedly the last of her family. Under “tenant” it says only unlet.

  There are a lot of other volumes. It’s possible, I suppose, that every single entry for Barr Buidhe will read unlet, right up until 1890 when the house was demolished. Still, I might as well plough through a few more.

  I open the volume for 1874. I feel I’m getting the hang of it now; it doesn’t take me as long to leaf through the book to the right district. I run my finger down the page and there it is again: Barr Buidhe.

  The proprietor and occupier are the same person: Mr. Charles Robertson, of Fortingal.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The man with the beard looks up at the odd little strangled noise I make. I drop my gaze to the page again.

  Yes; it’s there in black and white. Mr. Charles Robertson, of Fortingal. I look at the spine of the book again. 1874. Then I go back to the title page, leafing through with trembling fingers, because I think I must have got this wrong somehow, but that says 1874 too.

  Charles Robertson was dead in 1874. He’d been dead for the greater part of three decades. I remember reading about his death in Strathearn Folk, a little blue volume that is probably sitting out there on the shelf in the main reference library at this very moment.

  I leave my stuff spread out on the table in the archive and go out into the library. It doesn’t take long to find the book – I guess people aren’t falling over themselves to lay hands on Strathearn Folk, published in 1872.

  “Shortly before the wedding was to have taken place, her intended husband was numbered amongst the victims of the Garside locomotive fire,” it says, and then: “Miss Alexander at first entirely refused to credit the news. Her incredulity was supported by the grisly circumstance of the victims’ bodies being so badly burned and otherwise mutilated as to render identification impossible in many cases. She persisted in her hope that her betrothed would one day return...”

  And I guess he did, I say to myself. I read the lines again, but that’s all there is. Eventually I slide the book back into its place on the shelf and go back to the archive. For a while I just sit and look at the entry in the valuation rolls. Is there any way this could be someone else? I don’t think so. Even if Charles were the same age as Euphemia, he would have been around sixty by 1874. So this probably isn’t his father. His son? That doesn’t seem very likely either. He died unmarried, after all – assuming he did die.

  I stare and stare at the page, but the fact is, I can’t know what happened without more information than either the census or the valuation rolls can give me. I take a quick snap of the page and then I shut the book.

  Back at the information desk, the long suffering librarian is back in residence – or else he still hasn’t had his lunch. He looks up at me cheerfully.

  “Did you find what you needed?”

  “Sort of,” I tell him. “I found something I wasn’t really expecting.” I hesitate for a moment. “The house passed into the hands of... well, it wasn’t the person I thought it would be.”

  “Intriguing.”

  I laugh, a little uneasily. “I guess so. What I’m wondering is... how can I find out about this person?”

  “Well, you could try Births, Death and Marriages – but you’ll have to go to the Registrar for that. Or you can get them online.”

  “You don’t have them here?”

  “No. You could also look at the estate papers, if there are any. What was the name of the property?”

  “Barr Buidhe.” I spell it for him. “It came to be called Barr Dubh later on.”

  His fingers rattle across the keyboard. “Buidhe, you said?”

  “Yes.”

  He shakes his head. “Nope. What was the family name?”

  “Alexander, up until 1872. And then Robertson.”

  “Hmmm. Nothing.” He thinks about it, and then tries something else. “There’s something in Strathearn Folk–”

  “I’ve read that. It’s about a year too early.”

  “Well, you could try the local newspapers, I suppose, if you know when you’d be looking. We’ve got all of those here, on microfilm
.” He glances at me and I suppose he can see the look on my face at the prospect of going through pages and pages of microfilm, because he adds, “Your nearest library has physical copies, if you’d rather.”

  “Thanks,” I tell him. “You’ve been really helpful.”

  I walk downstairs and out to my car, where I sit behind the wheel for some time wondering what happened all those years ago. Euphemia died by her own hand, either accidentally or deliberately. And then seemingly Charles came back. None of it makes any sense. Maybe Charles didn’t die in the railway disaster; that seems the most logical conclusion. But if he didn’t, why did she spend all those years yearning for him?

  I start the car and drive slowly back through the outskirts of the city and the lonely miles of open countryside, thinking. My unfinished copyedit is waiting for me, back at Barr Dubh House. I ought to go back and get on with that. It’s going to pay the bills, after all, and furthermore, I don’t want another of those emails enquiring how it’s going. I know all of this and yet when I get to the town I don’t turn onto the road leading to Barr Dubh. Instead, I take the one that leads to the library.

  This isn’t a big, old-fashioned library. It’s a modern one, shared with the high school. There are computers, most of which seem to be occupied by teenagers in school uniform, and a coffee corner with a hot drinks machine. It doesn’t feel like the sort of place you’d go to ask about the key events of 1874. I’m about to turn around and walk out again but then I think about the archive and its grisly microfilm machine. It has to be worth asking whether there’s anything better here.

  It turns out that there is. Right at the back of the room, behind the racks of crime thrillers and the tables crowded with schoolkids, there is a local history section. All the local newspapers, dating back as far as they go, are collected in hardbacked volumes so big that they can’t be put onto normal shelves; instead they are laid out in stacks. Some of them, the ones nobody has looked at for years, are wrapped in paper with the dates scrawled on the spines. The earliest ones seem to be from the 1850s.