Stephany set to work on her eggs, bacon, fried bread and tomatoes, beans and toast—one of Mrs. Mortimor’s lighter breakfasts. “Well, darling, are you up to facing Grandmama this morning?”
“She’s ready to see me?”
Stephany nodded, her mouth full, then swallowed and said, “Mrs. Archer caught me as I was leaving my room. Grandmama has thought it all over and wants to talk to you.”
I emptied the coffeepot and saw Stephany off with her sketch pad and box of paints before I climbed the stairs to Mrs. Trevor-Finch’s suite. Mrs. Archer opened the door to my timid knock.
“She’s just having her tea on the sun porch, sir. But I feel as if I ought to warn you: she had a difficult night and is not quite herself this morning.”
I thought that could only be an improvement, so I said, “Lead the way. I’ll take my chances.”
Mrs. Trevor-Finch, looking not a day over several centuries, was waiting for me in her wheelchair on a bright, glass-enclosed porch. Though it was airless and warm, the old woman was wrapped in blankets and shawl; her bright eyes stabbed me as I crossed the threshold.
“Well, young man? And what is it you think we have to say to one another?”
I sat down across from her; Mrs. Archer brought another cup and poured my tea. ‘‘I suppose you’ve heard,” I said, “that Parson Tompkins was killed in an automobile accident the night before last.”
“I’m not sure—be off about your business, Archer, and allow Dr. Fairchild and myself to discuss these matters in private—I’m not sure why I should find the death of that foolish, prying clergyman a matter of particular concern.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “because it’s the third death in the past several weeks, all somehow connected with my work on the Westchurch manuscripts. I may be the next to go. If I had any sense, I’d catch the next flight back to the States.”
“You mustn’t do that,” she said quickly. “Please—don’t give up your work now.”
‘‘And why shouldn’t I? How can my work matter to you, or to your son? It’s time you leveled with me. I want to know everything you can tell me about the ghost which haunts Abbotswold, and about this village cult the parson was investigating, and how they’re both related to my work on the Westchurch manuscripts.”
My direct approach had succeeded in surprising the old girl, at any rate. Her knotty fingers moved nervously in her lap and her bright eyes darted momentarily about her glass cage. “It seems to me as if you’ve already discovered quite a bit on your own. The parson told you about the cult, but who’s been talking to you of our ghost?”
“No one had to talk to me about her,” I said. “I’ve seen her for myself, the first night I was here. I’ve been waiting for a return engagement, but there hasn’t been one. However, I think your son has seen her.’’
“Kenneth has seen it too?”
“I think so, though he won’t admit it. And there’s something else I ought to mention. Your servants, the Mortimors, are clearly implicated in at least two murders. The old man is running a witch’s supermarket at the woodcutter’s cottage, and both he and his son are members of the cult. Eventually all this will have to come before the police, and I’d like to do what I can for all of you before that happens. I can’t help you if you won’t help me.”
The old woman thought it over. “I am a good judge of character. You are an opportunist. You are selfish, conceited, totally unprincipled—and yet you seem to be the one who has been sent for our deliverance. Tell me, do you love my granddaughter?”
The question took me by surprise. “I’m very fond of Stephany.”
“You’re lying,” the old woman said. “She means nothing to you. What, then, do you hope to get out of all this for yourself? There must be something. Do you mean to blackmail us?”
“Of course not,” I said, genuinely appalled at the extent of her suspicions. “My intentions are perfectly honorable. I simply want to do the work I came to England to do—and to know the truth.”
“The truth!” she said. “The truth is seldom relished by those who mean to use it for personal gain. Yet, if you have a heart in your breast, and if you have learned to care for my granddaughter at all . . .”
She closed her eyes for a moment, and pressed her withered fingertips to her temples, where I saw blue veins like the tendrils of death beneath her papery skin. Then, with a deep breath, she began her story:
“My husband was a man of spirit and character. When he inherited this house a few months after our marriage, from an uncle who had died childless, he told me about the legends which had come down through the generations in his family. It had long been said, you see, that no good could come to those who dwelt in this house, and that Abbotswold was haunted by a malevolent spirit. Of those previous owners whose stories were known to us, two had gone mad, one had committed suicide, and one had resigned his inheritance after only a few months in the house.”
“Yet you were not afraid to live here?” I asked.
“We were enlightened young people of an age which did not believe in ghosts. We thought of our new life in this old house as a glorious adventure, and we were determined to purge our legacy of its morbid associations by uncovering the ancient source of these legends. My husband commissioned the College of Heralds to re-search his genealogy and undertook a study of his own in the county archives. He also obtained permission to begin certain excavations at Creypool Abbey, which was said to harbor an evil spirit of its own—for we had guessed that the legends might have a common origin.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “This would have been about . . . ?”
“We came here in 1910. I was not yet thirty, my husband somewhat older. He had spent his youth in the idle fashion of young gentlemen of his day and had been waiting for some great goal to seize his imagination. The solution of these ancient mysteries became his goal, and so it became mine. We threw ourselves into the project with youthful enthusiasm. There were weeks, months, when we seldom thought or talked of anything else. We were happy then. We were very innocent and foolish. My husband expended a considerable portion of his fortune in the effort to reconstruct the past.”
“And what did you find out?” I asked.
“Our search took us back to the very beginning of the family line, to a certain Philip of Trevorre, who was given the land called Abbotswold (after the existing monastery at Creypool) as a fiefdom under William the Conqueror. For several generations the Trevorre barons were among the most powerful and independent of the Norman war lords and a frequent source of irritation to the crown. Finally, in order to undermine their independence and forestall future rebellions, Henry II arranged a marriage between a high-ranking lady of the court—a cousin of Queen Eleanor—and the reigning lord of Abbotswold, Michael Trevorre.
“The marriage was not a success. The lady was a child of Aquitaine and its courts of love; she longed for the chivalrous customs and amorous license of her home-land—at least, so we reconstructed her unseemly behavior. She so outraged her proud and jealous husband that he imprisoned her in the tower and allowed her leave only to visit the abbey, where the monks were instructed to soften her resistance to her husband’s will. This was the situation in the year 1175, when England was visited with plague and famine. The suffering was particularly acute in this part of the realm, and the people believed that the pestilence had been visited upon them because of a renegade priest and sorcerer who had been given refuge at the abbey in defiance of both prelates and king. This sorcerer’s name, as I’m sure you’ve already deduced, was Geoffrey Gervaise.”
“Of course,” I said. “Gervaise must have come here in 1171, shortly after the murder of his great patron, Thomas à Becket. But was he a sorcerer?”
“The common people believed he was. According to the legend, he was betrayed by one of the monks and lured from the abbey for an assignation with a peasant girl. He was captured by the villagers, summarily tried and burned at the stake. The judge who condemned him to death was Michael
Trevorre. Upon hearing of the execution, the Lady Trevorre took her own life in the tower.”
“Then she and Gervaise ...”
“Were lovers. We could only conclude that she had known Gervaise at court and had been his mistress before her marriage, and that she had been using her ‘devotions’ at the abbey to continue their affair. It was not simply for witchcraft that Gervaise was executed, but for offending the jealous pride of the Trevorres.”
“Then he may not have been a devil-worshipper.”
“I am not so sure of that. There was evidence against him . . . But you may be interested to learn what we discovered during our excavation of the abbey. A crew of men had been hired from the village. My husband and I rolled up our sleeves and joined in the work. For months we dug away at the ancient foundations with little to show for our labor, and then one day I arrived on the site to find my husband in a state of great excitement. He led me to the foundation of what had once been a small structure outside the abbey walls, an ancient observatory—’’
“I know the place,” I said. “Go on.”
“—and showed me a rust-eaten iron box he’d just uncovered beneath the paving stones. We opened the box together. It contained an astrolabe—a device for measuring the heights and charting the positions of the stars and planets. There was also a set of chessmen carved from ivory and ebony, clearly of medieval origin, and a curious iron grate or grille, about two feet square, the purpose of which we could never guess. The grille contained sixty-four individual squares, the number of spaces on a chess-board. There was also evidence that the box had once contained a number of sheets of parchment or vellum, but these had crumbled to dust.”
“And are these things still in your possession?”
“Unfortunately, they were stolen shortly after they were found. We suspected that one of the workmen from the village made off with them, but of course we had no proof. Soon after their disappearance, my husband found it impossible to get anyone from the village to continue the work. We were obliged to import laborers from Norwich—but then, when one of the men was killed in an accident, and strange stories began to circulate in the village—’’
“What kind of stories?”
“We never knew, exactly—although of course we knew that the abbey had been the site of Satanic rituals in ages past, and that a ghostly monk was said to haunt the ruins. The village parson begged us to discontinue our work, saying that his parishioners had become terribly agitated and that he feared another outbreak of the mania which had afflicted the village at various times in the past.”
“And so you abandoned the project?”
“We did more than that. Shortly thereafter, we left Abbotswold, intending never to return. Our life here had begun to have an adverse effect upon our marriage. My husband had become subject to sudden fits of depression; he had terrible nightmares and was frequently afraid of a ‘presence’ he felt in the house. He fell into long periods of anxiety and morbid watchfulness. Our . . . marital relations were suspended. I was a young and passionate woman and I loved my husband deeply, yet as his depression increased, my own desires seemed to become all the more acute. For months I struggled with unprecedented temptations. I seemed to become another person altogether, as if some alien being had taken possession of my soul. It was a horrid time, a time of suspicions and hostility, of accusations and countercharges, and finally . . . finally, there was a disgusting interlude with one of our stablehands. Excuse me—’’
She broke off and I saw her shoulders shake as she hid her face behind skeletal hands. When she removed her hands, her eyes were clear and proud once more, two droplets of glistening black oil. “I need not burden you with our domestic crisis. It will suffice to say that we lived for several years abroad, where the symptoms of our mysterious affliction seemed to abate. Kenneth was born. We recovered confidence in ourselves and faith in one another. Had we sold Abbotswold, as we intended, and remained abroad, we might have escaped altogether the insidious influence of this accursed house. But the war forced us to return to England, and it was on the ship from Venice that we met Sir Percy Wickham George.”
“Sir Percy—the Cambridge ghost hunter!” I said, thinking how amazing it was that I kept running across that old diehard’s trail.
“Sir Percy was returning from some expedition to the Orient which had received considerable attention in the papers. My husband thought that if he heard our story, he might offer his assistance, and so he did. Sir Percy persuaded us—much against my own better judgment, I might add—to return to Abbotswold so that he could conduct certain experiments.”
“And what were these experiments?” I asked.
The old woman then told me how Sir Percy and his colleagues from the Society for Psychical Research spent several nights at Abbotswold and at the abbey, endeavoring to make contact with the supernatural agency or agencies which had persecuted the family for centuries. It was at last determined that a séance should be held, and Sir Percy produced a famous medium—a certain Madame Sokoleyev, who had contacted the spirits of many a great family and whose reputation for honesty was unimpeachable. Sir Percy took great pains to ensure the veracity of the experiment. The ritual was carefully followed. A party of seven, including Mrs. Trevor-Finch and her husband, gathered in the great hall. The medium fell into her trance and began to moan and to utter strange primitive cries. A cold wind seemed to blow down from the tower; the candles were extinguished, but an eerie luminosity enveloped the medium.
“Who are you,” Sir Percy asked, “and why do you haunt this place?” Many times he repeated these questions, and then, in a voice not her own, the medium cried out: “Annjenette—I am Annjenette DeLorreaux.”
“And who,” I asked, “was Annjenette DeLorreaux?”
“The wife of Michael Trevorre—the lady from Aquitaine and the mistress of the sorcerer Gervaise. We knew her name and her story; we had often wondered if she might be the ghost of Abbotswold. To hear her voice addressing us from the world beyond the grave—it was an experience I shall never forget. Even now my flesh crawls as I remember it”
“And did the spirit tell you anything else?”
The old woman nodded; she closed her eyes and frowned in the effort to recall the precise words. A web of shadow from the budding branches of a tree near the porch moved over her shrunken figure with the play of an unfelt breeze, and for a moment it seemed as if she herself were the medium by which I heard the words of the dead.
When asked again why she haunted Abbotswold and persecuted the family, Annjenette replied, “I wish you no harm. It is the Father of Evil who has placed me here to share my lover’s torment. I must abide with you until the spell be broken and my lover freed from Satan’s bondage.” And then she began to cry out in a most pitiful voice, “Release me! Release me!” And at last the old medium fell into a swoon and the presence departed.
There were subsequent attempts to reach the spirit of Annjenette’s imprisoned lover. Gervaise himself never answered the call, but Annjenette returned on two occasions. On the first, Sir Percy asked her what Gervaise had done to become the devil’s slave, and why the family had to suffer along with two such unhappy spirits. Anjenette replied, “It was you who unjustly accused him, and you who put him to the stake. It was you—villain, brute, murderer—who drove me to my death. The game was not yet done, the wager not yet lost, when you lit the fires which still consume us. You have made our punishment your own and are condemned to suffer with us until you repent your sins and set us free.”
“Game?” I asked the old woman. “What was she speaking of?”
“We could only conjecture that Gervaise had wagered his soul in some contest with the devil, and that it was my husband’s ancestor who cut the game short by ordering his execution. When she accused my poor husband of causing their deaths, she was of course speaking to him as a descendant of Michael Trevorre.”
“So the sins of the father have returned to haunt his line. And the sins of the mother . . . ?�
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“Have come down to us as well. Annjenette has been, in a way, mother to all the women in this accursed family—if not by blood, then by the influence of her ghostly presence. I am convinced that when I betrayed my husband it was her adulterous and defiant spirit which possessed me.”
“But how,” I asked, “could you be expected to free them? If Gervaise risked his soul in a wager with the devil, he would seem to have damned himself. He ought to be beyond anyone’s help—unless . . .”
It was a tantalizing thought, and the old woman saw at once that it was her own. “Yes—unless the game might still be won. Which is precisely why your work is so important to us. If there is a way to free Gervaise, it will likewise free all those who have been condemned to suffer with him. And this is what I have wanted all along to ask you, yet could not until I had told you our story. This poem you attribute to Gervaise—does it concern a game?”
“Of course,” I said. “The game of chess! The answer to the riddle, the way to free Gervaise, is hidden somewhere in that poem. Which is why certain people are so determined that I shan’t get any further with my work. And why Gervaise and Annjenette—at least, so I construe it—have been trying to help me. They want us to win the game for them. But did Annjenette ever tell you any more about all this?”
“On her third and last visit she said that a rose, both red and white, would provide the key to her lover’s freedom. ‘Look for the rose,’ she said. ‘My lover’s words conceal the prize. It is Satan’s guile to have placed it where none shall ever find it.’ ”
“None but a competent medievalist, perhaps,” I said, with a nearly dizzying sense of what I might have the power to do. For Annjenette had brought a rose to my attention, as well, and now I knew that the devil himself couldn’t keep me from getting back to that poem.
But Mrs. Trevor-Finch had not quite finished her story. Madame Sokoleyev, she told me, died that year of a stroke and subsequent mediums proved unable to raise Annjenette’s spirit. However, in the spring of 1923, Sir Percy returned to Abbotswold in great excitement. He said he had lately uncovered new information on Gervaise in the library of Duke’s College, and he was anxious to conduct one final experiment at the abbey, where he believed the ghost of Gervaise himself might be raised.
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