Patrick was all-a-mort; he clutched his neck as his face drained of colour, and Footman Martin had a startled air about him, and as he was prone to St Antony’s Fire, I feared the shock might cause an eruption. We did not want to see his face covered in throbbing red patches and clusters of yellowing pustules, as we had done a while back, for it was very distressing to witness.
‘Is it bad to look upon the creature?’ Patrick whispered. ‘Can it curse us?’
Mrs Rivers smiled at him, but I could see it was a struggle for her to do so. ‘Since the Lady keeps it hidden, you can take it as a sign that the matter is no concern of ours. If you remain within the regions of the house you are allotted to, and do not stray into other areas as Rose did, you will come to no harm.’
Martin stood up. ‘Harm? From the creature, you mean, Mrs Rivers?’
‘Or from any member of the household capable of harm,’ she replied evenly. ‘And why is it a creature in your eyes, Martin?’
‘Patrick and I call it such because there is an unnatural air about it.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I have stood in the shadows watching it two or three times, and when all comes to all I think it is an aberration of some type.’
‘Up on the third storey where you should not have been, Martin?’ Mrs Rivers asked.
‘On the back stairs, where indeed I should have been; it strays there sometimes, as if to exercise itself out of sight.’
‘Your imagination would have it as an aberration, Martin, as in this gloomy place it is tempting to find diversions with which to excite the brain,’ Gideon said.
‘So then if it is human, is it a man or a woman?’ Adelaide asked, twisting her rough hands together. ‘I for one would not be surprised, or blame Lady Mallet whatever she is, for keeping a man in those rooms when you consider . . .’
‘We know what Lady Mallet is,’ Rose Gifford said, ‘do not try to cast doubt upon that, Adelaide, and by the way, Mrs Rivers, it was Cook who asked me to clean the hall of broken plates, therefore I was obliged to do so.’
‘Then I will speak to her on your behalf, Rose, but we should all remember that how the Lord and Lady live their lives is not for us to question.’
I thought it was time to speak myself although I was nervous. ‘Everything in this house is so without restraint,’ I began, ‘that it is impossible not to witness things and be aghast at them, and then to fall to the temptation of talking about them.’ I felt my face turning hot, as even though I had been raised in my position in the household, I did not consider myself any different from Rose or Susan or Adelaide, and I had for a while now sensed Rose’s growing malice towards me.
‘And you, Miss Wilson, more than any of us, having become Lady Mallet’s close maid, will know about that intruder,’ Rose announced, staring boldly at me. ‘Have you spied it?’ I shook my head. ‘Yes, you have. I beg your pardon, but I can see it clearly in your face. You have gone almost as white as the lady likes to keep herself.’
‘Very well then,’ I said, ‘I think it is female. It has passed me from time to time. It has a step that is very light indeed and it does not smell like a man.’
‘Then it is perfumed with flowers?’
‘No,’ I said, realising that I felt great relief at being able to talk about it finally. ‘But it smells. It has several odours and each is distinctive. Sometimes it has the smell of vinegar and dead roses, and I think it might have rotten teeth as it is able to leave a heavy stench in the air behind it such as you might find in an alleyway where poverty and disease have dwelt.’
‘What alleyway?’ Martin asked. ‘There are no alleyways here, just gardens and trees and pastures, Miss Wilson.’
‘And sheep,’ Patrick added, ‘very many sheep, an uncountable number.’
Mrs Rivers laughed at them. ‘She means in a city such as London, don’t you Caroline, full of effluvia and filth and thieves?’
‘Yes. I was for a short time forced by circumstance to stay at London before coming here, and I would rather die than return.’
‘Why does the thought of returning there cause you concern, Miss Wilson?’ Rose asked, leaning forward to see me better in the dim light. ‘I would have thought you very comfortable in Hogsmoor House these days with your own room to sleep in at night and her for company in the day.’
‘I feel the weight of the responsibilities Lady Mallet has given me,’ I answered, keeping as calm as I could under what appeared to me to be interrogation.
‘Oh! Others of us feel the weight of dust and dirt and creeping insects, and heavy water pans, Miss Wilson, indeed we do!’
‘Never mind about water pans, bed pans is worse,’ someone added.
‘Moths,’ Patrick declared, ‘you forgot them, Rose, all fluttering and grey in the night. I hate them; I get some big ones out in the stables some nights, and when they come close to my candle I swear to you that their eyes turn red as rubies.’
I smiled at Patrick for I liked him, but Rose waved her hand to dismiss his contribution. ‘You are not thinking of leaving us, surely, Miss Wilson when you have such a puffed up position?’
‘Every time I awake, I am afraid I will do something foolish or clumsy around Lady Mallet that day and vex her so much that she expels me from Hogsmoor House and I am obliged to walk back into London again and find lodgings in some fetid . . .’ I drew breath and broke off; I did not wish to voice my thoughts further; I had been shocked to my very bones at my experience of London. There was soot everywhere, clouds of it, and every brick, every stone, every building seemed blackened with it, and in the wind the street signs swung and slapped about on their iron poles and were, I was sure, in danger of falling on the heads of people.
And, oh! There were multitudes of people, many of them drunken and lying about in the streets with bottles of what they were calling Madame Geneva. At the same time, there were amusers and other ruffians all going about their business in dark streets and crumbling alleyways full of offal and guts from butcher stalls, and excrement, both animal and human, visible and stinking and lying about. I had to avoid potholes in the roads where obnoxious concoctions fermented as if mixed there together by Satan himself. If those sights and smells were not bad enough, London was roaring with noise and it was never long before you came across a poors’ hole where coffins were stacked in hideous shambolic layers, and those holes not yet full were left open to add their particular putrid odour of human decay to the vile London air.
‘What are you thinking about, Miss Wilson?’ Patrick whispered. ‘Your chin is quivering and your eyes look very wild, like my horses when they are spooked.’
Mrs Rivers reached out her hand and clutched my arm tightly; I knew that Patrick was prone to sudden melancholia and was sometimes to be found crying amongst the horses and she was warning me to avoid depressing his imagination with gloomy or frightful thoughts.
‘I was thinking of horses, Patrick,’ I replied quickly.
‘What about them?’
‘Wet ones. Wet horses and how they smell,’ I said, ‘because there is something of the same nature in the stench that comes from the Thing.’
‘Yes I know that horse smell, and never before this day have I been able to say I am happy sleeping with the Hogsmoor horses,’ he said, gazing upwards at the ceiling as if he might glimpse the real subject of our discourse that way.
‘That is not the same as sleeping in a city hovel, boy,’ Mrs Rivers said, ‘so be thankful.’
‘I am still thinking of the creature in the house, never mind London!’ Patrick shouted at her. ‘It used to vex me mightily that I sleep in the stables and have not a room to go to in Hogsmoor House, but if the Thing roams the corridors here at night, I am glad to be away, and sorry indeed for all of you who must sleep under this roof.’
‘The Thing,’ Adelaide whispered, and reached out for the water vessel with a hand that I saw was shaking. ‘We can thank Jesus that it does not come below stairs.’
‘Do not be so very
sure of that,’ Martin whispered. ‘You do not know what it does in the dead of night.’
‘I have been told that it is a familiar,’ Susan Blagget announced, fingering her sleeve and looking at Rose for support.
‘I never did tell you that!’
‘Certainly you did, Rose Gifford. You said it was the Maggot’s familiar. You told me that very thing when we were chopping up the cabbage last week. Do not deny it and make me look the fool.’
For a second I felt my heart stop and then beat up more strongly than was comfortable. My family had known two witches who lived together in a bye-lane, and we feared them so much that we would always go the long way into the village, so as not to pass their blackened cottage with the old thatch should they be in there, looking out. I had heard of familiars taking on the shapes of household pets or unfortunate animals like toads or bats or hedge-pigs, or curious creatures such as house spiders or black pitty mice and of course, blowflies and wasps. Yet, I had never heard of one taking on human form, if in fact beneath the heavy cloth the Thing was human.
‘Apart from the smell it has, what else do you know about the creature, Miss Wilson?’ Martin asked.
I glanced at Mrs Rivers for permission to tell them, which she gave with the slightest of nods, and then I chose my words with utmost care trying to sooth their superstitious fears, although, in truth, I felt scarce protected from it myself even though my education was to my advantage. ‘Very well then,’ I said, ‘I shall give you what satisfaction is in my power concerning the matter.’
That was the first of many occasions on which I was to speak of the Thing, but it was also the only time I spoke of it without at least some element of exaggeration.
***
I do not intend to be coy in talking about the creature in the house; it is more that I am wondering what information should precede my revealing of the facts to you, as you have been commendably patient thus far. Although I have scarcely mentioned him, Lord Mallet is at the heart of the matter and so it is necessary, if loathsome, to bring him into the picture.
A couple of times when I was newly employed in the house, he came at me. I was still working in the scullery then and my hands were raw and throbbing from scouring pots, and my back ached mercilessly. Once, as I stood by the large pantry, he arrived silently and grabbed me from behind, and as he pressed me hard against his fatness, his fingers groped at my bodice as if they had eyes of their own—like a snail does on stalks—and so therefore knew perfectly the way. I wriggled and would have yelled out had his vast and clammy hand not slapped itself down on my face. The sound of someone coming down the steps towards us with an iron scuttle caused him to flee.
The least painful of my duties at that time was cleaning the room of Gideon Ashfield—you remember? Hog’s valet. He kept a book or two that I stole a look at when I should have been replacing his bed linen. Had I been hard at work I do not think it would have made a difference, because on the morning Hog walked in, he merely smiled to see me so comfortably arranged on Gideon’s bed reading—and his repulsive chins wobbled as if they were in a secret form of communication each with the other.
Some type of predatory intention was clearly writ on his face and although I was young and not worldly, instinct moved in me and I sprang from the bed, hoping he would shift aside so I could quit the room. Mrs Rivers had warned me well on my first meeting with her to look out for Hog, and the way she spoke of him made my skin turn to gooseflesh. ‘If he sees your hair, flaxen and shining like that, he will come for you,’ she said. ‘You should keep it well hidden.’
‘He will come for me?’ I repeated stupidly.
She studied my face for a moment. ‘He will want to touch it, you see.’
I shrugged. ‘I do not mind; sometimes my brother does that, and when he was tiny, he loved to brush my hair.’
‘Yes, Caroline Wilson, you do mind!’
I could not puzzle out her meaning for a pretty while. ‘You are saying I should mind?’ I said finally.
She nodded, and hearing a noise, walked to the parlour door and looked out. I saw her body relax, yet as she turned back I could see she was in a dilemma; her face looked troubled. ‘Lord Mallet is a real beau-nasty, a despicable, perverted and degenerate man,’ she whispered, ‘that is to say if you could call him a man at all rather than a monster.’
I should not have done so, but I laughed as if she had told me a joke. Partly it was through shock; I was all-a-gog that she could speak like that against her employer and with her face so wild with anger, and partly because I had never encountered a perverted and degenerate man before. ‘What might he do?’ I asked when I could see by her expression that my laughter was misguided.
‘He could ruin you,’ she replied. ‘Do you understand how he could do that?’ I nodded, yet I wasn’t completely confident that I did know. I suspected she was talking about sex, but I was not sure. ‘I do not think you can know, Caroline, at least at your age you certainly should not, but Hog will try to come up behind you and do something that will hurt you very much indeed in a particular place.’
Ah, then I was mistaken, it was not about sex. ‘Which place, Mrs Rivers, which room?’ I was hoping it was not one of those I was responsible for cleaning.
She frowned at me and ducked her head as if something greatly frustrated her. ‘Your duty is to stay away from him for your own safety,’ she whispered, ‘that is all, child.’
I could hear her words clearly in my head as Lord Mallet stared at me, and I, slipping off the bed to stand in front of him, clutched Gideon’s book hard to my chest as if it was a talisman that could save me.
It puts me to the blush to think of that conversation with Mrs Rivers again, for later I came to know what she meant about ‘a particular place.’ During one of my moments of liberty while I was still a scullery maid, I took a stroll outside and stumbled across Patrick and Martin huddled over something in the stable yard. I was pleased to see them, but how quickly their expressions changed when they spied me.
‘What have you there?’ I asked, ‘a pamphlet?’
They looked at each other solemnly. ‘Something that fell from Hog’s pocket as he mounted his horse this morning, Miss Caroline. It is nothing of interest.’
‘Oh! All things are interesting to me after a morning in the scullery. Will you not show me?’
Patrick’s eyes widened and he clutched the paper to his jacket and shook his head.
‘You may as well,’ Martin said, ‘see what she can make of it.’
‘But she’s a girl.’
‘It’s what Hog likes to do, Patrick, and she should know about it. It would be a kindness and a warning to her in the end.’
I looked from one to the other of them in wonderment and sensed that I was grinning like a fool. Patrick handed me the paper and went to turn away except that Martin caught him by the elbow and held him there.
It was a drawing of a man and woman playing a game on their hands and knees, only their clothes, what little they had of them, were all awry. I was expected to make a comment and said, with my voice faltering towards the end, ‘They look very foolish. She is pretending to be his donkey, and he has not yet mounted her back, but is in some manner cleaved fast to her . . . fundament.’
I looked up in the silence that followed my remark and found both boys frowning. ‘That is a game Hog will play any time he gets the chance, Miss Caroline,’ Martin explained.
I stared again at the drawing. What little I could see of the woman’s face told me nothing. ‘It does not look like much fun,’ I ventured, ‘he is huge and she quite small; must she take his weight in a moment or two as he clambers onto her?’
‘She takes more than that,’ Patrick murmured.
‘It does not seem fair to me, but perhaps she also will get her chance to be the rider,’ I said.
I did see Martin nudge Patrick, but men do that often, it is only one of the many secret signs they have between them when in the company of girls and women, and so it me
ant nothing to me.
‘In this situation, the man does not have to look at the woman’s face, and that is why for some it is the favourite game. Do you understand, Miss Caroline?’ Martin asked.
‘No, I do not. Is it that the woman is so repulsive to look upon that it would offend the man’s sensibilities should he see her?’
‘It is quite the opposite. The mind of the man is so repulsive that he dislikes seeing himself reflected in the eyes of the woman. So instead, he uses her like an animal.’
‘Does Hog really do this?’ I asked. ‘Mrs Rivers alluded to it, but gave me no detail.’
‘Hog will do it with any woman he can find, whether that woman is a bat or a prime article, and whether she is obliging or not,’ Martin explained with a look upon him of some agitation.
‘Or with any boy,’ Patrick whispered staring down at an earthworm that had found its way to the surface between the flagstones.
I felt the weight of our conversation at that moment, and looked all about to make sure we were not overheard as I was immensely interested in the discussion and did not want to have to break off. I sensed that I was on the verge of understanding something profound regarding human nature, you see? However, there were no watching figures behind the windows of the house that were in our view, and no one was outside within calling distance I was relieved to find.
‘I could not picture a woman obliging enough to want to play the part of the donkey,’ I said, gazing from one to the other of them, ‘it looks to me both silly and difficult. I mean to say, even if it is merely a prank, I would not like to take the subservient role and have a man ride on top of me. Indeed, I would not!’
Martin laughed. ‘You are so charming Miss Caroline.’
‘I thank you; you are very gracious, Martin.’
‘I would venture to say that because you are spirited and strong in mind, you will not be tricked into playing this game with a man, be he ever so charming and sincere on the surface of things.’
‘Rest assured, I will not, Martin. There are other far more interesting games; Cribbage is one that comes easily to mind.’
Seven Strange Stories Page 2