Ghosts of Mayfield Court

by Russell, Norman

  Doctor Morrison was a man who had fallen into flesh, and was comfortable with his condition. He smiled a lot, and his voice was cheery. The eyes behind the gold pince-nez were shrewd and calculating. He was thinking to himself: this is the Reverend Walter Hindle, a retired Congregational minister and missionary. He is hovering on the borders of senility, and men of his temper can be dangerous if not controlled. Sir Leopold had always been generous to a fault, and he, Morrison, owed him a debt of gratitude.

  The Reverend Walter Hindle acknowledged the doctor’s greeting with an old-fashioned half-bow. He returned smile with smile.

  ‘I am quite well, thank you, sir. I expect you were introduced to me just now, but I forget very quickly. Did you say that we are in Exeter? Lucas, I don’t quite understand—’

  ‘Exeter?’ cried the jolly doctor. ‘No, Mr Hindle, this is good old London! I’m sure you’ll be very happy here with us at St Gabriel’s House. It’s a home-from-home for gentlemen like yourself, with all your needs consulted, and all your ailments treated with care and sympathy. Nurse, will you show Mr Hindle to his quarters? Perhaps he’d like some tea? A church? Certainly. We’re only a stone’s throw away from St Botolph’s in Aldersgate Street. Or would you prefer a Protestant chapel? We’ll have a little talk about that later.’

  When the nurse had left the room into which they had been ushered, Dr Morrison’s smile disappeared as if by magic. He motioned to a chair, and Lucas sat down.

  ‘I gather that Mr Hindle has become a nuisance?’

  ‘He has, Doctor. And more than a nuisance: a danger. All the parties in this business have scruples about making away with a clergyman—’

  Doctor Morrison waved away with a pudgy hand the idea of ‘making away’ with anyone.

  ‘Come, now Lucas, let’s not have any talk of that nature. You’re too – too physical, you know. We’re not in the Middle Ages. These days, we need more subtle approaches to this kind of problem. I suppose he knew the Forshaws?’

  ‘He knows far too much about everything, sir. That’s the trouble. If there are any sleeping dogs around, Mr Hindle will be sure to waken them up. A bite from the kind of dog I’m thinking of could be fatal.’

  ‘Well…. He’s safe enough here. Don’t worry about St Botolph’s. He’ll never get further than the little walled garden at the back of the house. We … we have medications, you know, that inhibit memory. So tell Sir Leopold Carteret not to worry.’

  Lucas rose to go. He looked vaguely dissatisfied. He had once been a warder at Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, and in his book Walter Hindle was a dangerous lunatic. The trouble with aristocrats was that they were too scrupulous. Admittedly, Mr Hindle was Lady Carteret’s brother. But one silly old man wouldn’t be missed.

  ‘Doctor Morrison,’ he said, as he rose to take his leave, ‘is Dr Zhdanov still doing his sterling work at Chatham Court?’

  Doctor Morrison’s brow creased in a frown of annoyance. He rose from the desk where he had been sitting, and faced the beetle-browed man who stood opposite him. Morrison, to do him credit, feared nothing and no one.

  ‘Don’t ever mention that name in my presence, do you hear? I’ll not stand by and see Hindle marched down that particular road. You’re a good man, Lucas, but you’re becoming too familiar. Get back to Sir Leopold, and tell him his worries are over. Hindle will see his remaining days out here with us. And when he dies, it will be from old age and senility. Nothing more than that. No! No more. Be off with you!’

  The 5.35 afternoon train for Warwick drew out of the Great Western Railway’s terminus at Paddington exactly on time. Saul Jackson leaned back in his seat in a half-empty third class carriage and gave himself up to thought.

  With the aid of an interested and helpful clerk, he had unearthed the death certificates of Cecily Bancroft and her second husband, John Walsh. He had been described as ‘independent gentleman’, and she as ‘housewife’. Their deaths had occurred at their residence in Mallard Lane, Edgbaston, Cecily’s on the 18 August, 1863, and John Walsh’s on the 19 August. The certificates, duly signed by two physicians, attributed their deaths to acute food poisoning, ‘consequent upon the consumption of tainted lobster.’ More poison…. They had been married for only a year.

  Two months after the deaths of her father and stepmother, John Walsh’s young daughter, Helen, had been claimed by her aunt, Arabella Paget, and taken to live for one day at Mayfield Court. And there she had stayed, killed in childhood and concealed in the garden of that baleful, half-ruined grange.

  The woman stood in the darkened passage outside the candle-lit room, fearful to step over the threshold that would lead her to insanity. Was she awake or asleep? There were times, during the night, when she could no longer be certain. She had never liked that room, with its dark, oppressive Tudor panelling, and the high, intimidating Elizabethan bed. What vermin nested in those faded plumes atop the bedposts? What cobwebbed passages lay behind the panelled walls?

  Asleep or waking, whenever these terrors assailed her, she forgot who she was, knowing only that she was an outcast, an abomination.

  She had left the more cheerful part of the house behind her, venturing, candlestick in hand, further away from the present age and back into the dim and dangerous past. Was she awake? The floorboards creaked beneath her steps, and the slight internal breeze that blew constantly through this part of the house caressed her face. Why was she behaving like a silly girl? Press on, and enter the candle-lit room.

  There: she had hurried through the bedchamber without incident, and had passed through a door at its further end that led into the ancient library of the house, a long, dim room with a fireplace at either end. Neither she nor her husband – what was his name? – ever ventured there. It walls were lined with shelves, bearing thousands of old books, some bound in vellum, others in costly leather. They looked as though they were not meant to be read, and never had been read. The clock in the turret above her struck two.

  Fool! She was awake, and putting her health in peril by this nocturnal wandering. She looked across the room at the long window, its panes containing their family’s ancient armorial bearings in dim stained glass. Below the window was a long table, where something was hidden by a green baize cloth. She did not recall seeing that table before. She would look at it before retracing her steps to the sanctuary of her own bedroom in the other part of the house.

  She flung the green cloth aside, and saw, gleaming white in the moonlight, the perfect skeleton of a young child. Shuddering, she groped her way out of the hellish library and into the sombre bedroom with the high four-poster. The room was not empty. Beside the bed stood the figure of a young girl of ten or eleven, gazing earnestly at the pillow. Yes, it was her burden, the externalization of a guilt that would one day sear her mind and leave her a lunatic.

  How still she stood! She was wearing the dark olive-green dress with the lace at collar and cuffs, that she had worn that night…. Her hair fell down across her cheek, partly hiding her face. The woman began to tiptoe towards the door, hoping that the child would not see her. Her limbs trembled so much that she could scarcely walk. She glanced back almost involuntarily, and saw the child turn to look at her.

  Little Helen’s face was dark and cyanosed, her eyes protruding from their sockets. So had she looked when the woman had pulled the pillow away from her face to ascertain that she was dead. She was dead now, looking at the woman from her dead eyes, set in her dead face. Helen Paget, her accuser to Heaven.

  The woman uttered a shriek of fear, and jerked herself awake. She was in her bed, in her own familiar room, and the clock at her bedside told her that it was just after six o’clock. The welcome light of dawn shone at the window. A dream, then. Another cursed dream. It was over thirty years, and the dead child would not let her alone.

  And she was not the only ghost who came to haunt her, and to point her on the road to damnation. They were all there with her in the house, Cecily, and John, and the weak-willed Hector, and Gabriel, too. She would
come across them unexpectedly in different parts of the house, both by night and by day. All of them.

  She could not petition God for mercy, because He would not hear.

  The wicked shall be turned into Hell.

  9

  Catherine’s Narrative: a Will and a Letter

  Iburied my Uncle Maximilian on the 17 August – the Friday following his death. Doctor Whitney, the police surgeon, had told Michael the details of the post mortem, which had shown unequivocally that Uncle had died of poisoning by wolfsbane. An inquest was to be held on the twentieth, the earliest date that the coroner could make available, but in view of the hot summer weather, it had been deemed advisable that the body should be released to me before that date.

  Inspector Blade had come to see me briefly on the morning following Uncle Max’s death, and had told me that the inquest would be opened and then immediately adjourned until the police investigation was completed. I was able to give my whole attention to the arrangements for Uncle’s funeral.

  I had been advised to use Dowbiggin and Holland, the distinguished funeral furnishers, and they proved to be an excellent choice. They attended to every detail, and I must admit that I sighed with relief when the whole melancholy business was taken out of my hands.

  Do I sound hard and unfeeling? I deeply mourned my poor dear uncle and, as you will see later in my narrative, I had no intention of leaving his foul murder unavenged; but at twenty I was still little more than a girl, and my loss had somehow opened a door that had been hitherto closed – a door into an independent future, with Michael at my side.

  I had asked for a grave to be dug in Putney Vale Cemetery, and there I stood, with Michael and Marguerite, all three of us in full mourning, listening to the officiating minister consigning Uncle Maximilian to the earth. He spoke well, and they were beautiful words, but they gave no hint of the horror of poor Uncle’s passing:

  I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: Even so, saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labours.

  There was much that I had to do before some kind of normality could be established. I had no intention of leaving Saxony Square, and said as much to Milsom, much to her relief. She agreed with me that it would be prudent to retain our present cook, and that a second housemaid should be employed. The gardener, whom we shared with our next-door neighbour, the relict of a City underwriter, had always proved satisfactory, so no change was needed there.

  On Saturday, Marguerite arrived with a young man of unprepossessing appearance, declaring that he was one of the most powerful mediums that she had ever encountered. I knew that she was going to suggest a séance, but somehow the idea no longer appealed to me. Uncle Max, according to the officiating clergyman, was resting from his labours. I gave them both tea, and sent them away.

  On Sunday, I went to church as usual, forsaking the sober rituals of St John’s for the heady ceremonies of St Mary’s Bourne Street. I knew then that I was in danger of losing contact with my own personality. I was starting to drift into unknown and untried paths, relishing the novelty of my new independence at the expense of that latent self-knowledge that told me I was not a hard, unfeeling young woman at all, but someone desperately in need of reassurance.

  When Michael called in the evening, solicitous, kind, and unassuming, I found the new façade that I had erected around myself was crumbling, and for the first time since Uncle’s death, I dissolved into tears.

  I was myself again – the Catherine Paget of old – when, on Monday morning, the 20 August, I called upon my uncle’s solicitor. Mr Finbar was a man in his fifties, the son of the gentleman who had managed my uncle’s affairs for him since the 1860s. He occupied a small set of chambers in a sort of cul-de-sac of an alley halfway between Crutched Friars and Cooper’s Row.

  Uncle’s will, as I knew from the copy that he had left for me in his desk, and revised and dated 10 January 1893, was a very simple affair. After a bequest to Milsom of £200, everything came to me absolutely. This included the house in Saxony Square, a portfolio of shares in a number of railway companies, currently worth £6,500, and cash deposits in two London banks amounting to £12,000.

  ‘You see, Miss Paget,’ said Mr Finbar, leaning back in his chair and regarding me with a kind of detached interest, ‘your uncle, the late Mr Maximilian Paget, always fretted that he had not enough money to live as he would have wished. He was constantly planning and devising ways to unlock some hidden fortune or other that lay tantalizingly out of sight on the fringes of his acquaintance.’

  ‘And what, pray, do you mean by that?’ I asked. ‘“The fringes of his acquaintance”?’

  ‘He was very tenuously connected with a number of families who had once been very wealthy, and it would seem that nobody knew where this wealth had gone. My father knew far more about all this than I, but one of these families were the Forshaws, the naval shipbuilders at Sheerness. Your uncle spent many fruitless years delving into family trees and other similar matters in order to find where the money was, and to lay some claim to part of it – why, I don’t know, because he never confided in me. He told me what to do regarding his day-to-day affairs, and I did it.’

  Mr Finbar had clearly taken offence at my manner of speaking to him. That word ‘pray’ had rankled. I tried to look sufficiently contrite, and he gradually relaxed.

  ‘When all’s said and done, Miss Paget,’ he said, ‘your legacy is a very tidy one. Very tidy. Your house alone is worth three thousand, you know, and those shares and deposits amount to eighteen and a half thousand pounds. And that property in Warwickshire should fetch four hundred or so. Wisely invested, the whole sum will bring you in a very respectable annual income.’

  I was more than inclined to agree with him. Uncle’s constant talk of making economies had vaguely alarmed me, but now I saw that there had been no valid reason for his fears. Had he become a miser? No, because in anything respecting my well-being and happiness, he had always been generous. It was merely that he had become obsessed with the game of fortune-hunting.

  Mr Finbar rose from the table, and unlocked a drawer in a desk standing against the wall behind him. He came back to the table holding a letter, which he handed to me. My heart leapt with excitement when I saw that it was addressed to me in my uncle’s handwriting, and sealed heavily with three red wax wafers. This was the letter that Uncle Max had told me would be given to me after his death.

  ‘I will tell you at once, Miss Paget,’ said Mr Finbar, ‘that I have no idea what that envelope contains. I have had it for only a short time, and I was given strict instructions not to give it to you until after your uncle’s death. That moment has now arrived. I’m going through to confer with my clerks, and will leave you here in peace to read your uncle’s letter.’

  He suited his action to his words, and left the room, closing the door behind him. I broke the seals, opened the envelope, and spread the enclosed letter out on the table. It was written on our family’s headed notepaper, but was undated.

  Dearest Catherine

  For some time now, I have had a premonition that my days on earth are numbered. I have wandered where I should not have gone, and stirred old and dangerous memories in the minds of those whom I most fear. It is time that I told you about Mayfield Court.

  It was never a true dwelling place; it was rather a staging-point, a meeting place for the exchange of information in the quest for a lost fortune. People went there, and stayed there, in order to set various plans in motion. It had once belonged, I suppose, to some ancient family long extinct. I will return to the matter of Mayfield Court presently.

  There was once a rich family called Forshaw, which owned the great shipyards of John Forshaw & Sons, established at Sheerness since 1735. The owner of the company, a man called Edward Forshaw, closed down the firm in 1850, because he decided the time had come to live the life of a gentleman. In 1853 Edward Forshaw, who was then living in retirement with his wife at Waterloo
House, in the Warwickshire village of Upton Carteret, contracted tuberculosis, and died, aged 53, at his house on 15 October of the same year. He left a fortune of £750,000.

  His widow, Laura, died eight years later, in 1861 and, as there were no children, the fortune passed to Edward’s younger brother, Henry Forshaw. And then, in 1862, Henry was killed in a railway accident.

  It was then, dear Catherine, that my brother Hector and I began to feel the lure of the Forshaw wealth. Every heir seemed to be seized by death within a few years of inheriting it, and Hector and I were struggling to establish ourselves often literally by the sweat of our brows. In what way, you will ask, were we – the Pagets – related to the Forshaws?

  Henry Forshaw – he who perished in an accident in 1862 – had married a lady called Cecily Bancroft, and they had produced a son, Gabriel, born in 1841. When Henry was killed, his son Gabriel inherited the family fortune.

  Now, Cecily Bancroft had a much younger sister, Arabella, and it was this woman who married my brother Hector. She was a native of Newham Ford, near Bicester. I will tell you now, Catherine, that she was a very wicked, ruthless woman, and that I have been aware of her, and afraid of her, since those far-off days in the sixties. Wicked? Evil, I think, would be a more accurate description.

  Arabella had lived with her first husband at Newham Ford, but when my brother Hector married her, she was already living at Mayfield Court. I have never been able to find out whether she bought it or rented it, but there they lived, and there – God forgive me! – I connived at and condoned their wickedness. For my brother, morally weak and addicted to laudanum, did whatever his wife told him to do, so that in the end he was a moral imbecile – finding innocuous phrases to cover a multitude of atrocities.

  The first of these involved the young heir, Gabriel Forshaw. He was a very decent young man, educated at Rugby, and eager to serve in the Army. His fortune was put in trust, because he was to serve a military engagement in Africa for a number of years. When he returned, his fortune would be released to him. It was said that Gabriel Forshaw did indeed go out to Africa, to a place called Bonny, and died there of a tropical fever. That was in the August of 1865.