by John Harwood
There was no banquet. Mr Margrave led her out of the silent church, past the empty pews on one side and the thronged guests, still and white as statues, on the other, out to a small black carriage which was waiting at the door. This, he explained with an insinuating smile, would carry her to Blackwall Park for the honeymoon; he meanwhile had urgent business to attend to, but would be with her at nightfall. He handed her in; the door slammed; the coachman whipped up the horses and bore her away. So far as she could tell, the door had not been locked, but it did not occur to her to try to jump out; all volition seemed to have left her, and she sat devoid of thought or feeling through the hours it took the carriage to make its way out of London and down through the countryside. She looked out of the window, and saw what a traveller might expect to see, but the sights meant nothing to her, and the carriage never once paused in its journey until, after negotiating a long, deserted stretch of road through a series of empty fields, it turned in at a gate in a high wall and pulled up on an expanse of gravel by the front door of a large stone house.
Rosalind heard the coachman descend and come round to open the door; she alighted like an automaton; without a word, the coachman folded the step, slammed the door, leapt back onto his box and whipped up the horses, who clattered back across the gravel and out through the gateway. There they pulled up sharply; the coachman sprang down again, and swung the two high wooden gates closed from the outside, so that they came together with a thud and a clash of metal fastenings. The muffled sound of hooves and wheels resumed, receded, and died away to nothing, leaving her alone in the silent courtyard.
SENSATION FLOODED BACK TO HER LIKE COLD WATER flung upon a sleeper. All consciousness of the pavilion was gone; she was here and nowhere else, the wife of Mr Margrave, and clad, she realised for the first time, in a wedding dress which was no longer white but a drab, rusty black. Perhaps it had always been black; she could not recall. The horror of her position grew upon her until she feared she would faint. She had been mad to surrender to her mothers threat-better to have swallowed the laudanum herself than come here. She looked frantically about the courtyard, but the smooth, high wall enclosed her on three sides, the front of the house on the other. There were no handholds anywhere along the wall, and nothing that she could use to help her climb. The house loomed over her, three storeys high, its pale yellowish blocks of stone too smooth and the mortared joints too flush to offer any purchase for hands or feet. At any moment they would be coming to take her inside; at any moment Mr Margrave himself might be here. Under a lowering sky, the day was fading fast.
Then she noticed that the shutters were closed on every window of every floor, and that the front door stood slightly ajar. Still nobody came out; there was not the slightest sound from within; the house looked and felt deserted. To enter was more than she dared; she would surely die of terror; but, as another survey of the courtyard indicated all too clearly, there was no hiding place here, and no way over the wall. Could she stand pressed against the wall near the gates until Mr Margraves carriage entered, and escape while they were open? No; the coachman would surely see her, and then Mr Margrave would hunt her down. Trembling, she made her way across the gravel as quietly as she could, onto the porch and up to the heavy wooden door, and pushed without giving herself time to think.
The door opened upon darkness; the hinges creaked horribly. The house smelt of mould and damp. Rosalind's head swam with fear. In the dim light from the courtyard she could see the beginning of a passageway. Fighting off thoughts of being cornered and pounced upon, she gathered up her skirts and ran blindly through the darkness until she bumped against something flat and soft which moved away from her-a swinging door, she realised in time to bite back the cry that rose in her throat-and on towards a thin line of light which turned out to be, as she had prayed, another door, also ajar, that let her out into what seemed to be a kitchen garden, also walled, this time in crumbling red brick with jagged shards of glass embedded in the top. But this wall was lower, and it was possible she might get over, and anyway there must surely be a gate or door in it somewhere? The area, perhaps ten yards by thirty, was rank and overgrown with weeds: all except a plot away to the right below the rear wall. All of this she took in at a single glance, whilst trying to slow the terrible pounding of her heart which so confused her hearing.
Yes, there was indeed a door in the outer wall, in that far corner on her right, barely visible in the gathering gloom. She hastened along a weed-strewn path, feeling the hated gown catch and tear upon something as she approached the cleared area. But those were not garden beds between her and the door: they were graves, all quite new, and at the head of each mound stood a low tombstone. Even in the fading light the names upon the first six stones were plain: all women's names, and all the surnames his. The seventh grave was open, newly dug, with the soil heaped beside it and the stone already in place, and the name incised upon it was her own.
The smell of damp earth rose up from the pit; that, and another odour that drew her appalled gaze from her tombstone to the path behind her-to Denton Margrave standing not ten paces away. He was all in black, with what looked like a great travelling cloak draped over his shoulders, yet she could see the earth upon his clothes, for his face was lit from within by a pale blue light that shimmered and crackled in the air around him, glowing in the sockets of his eyes and in that terrible, insinuating smile. She began to back away; he did not instantly follow, but spread out what she thought were arms before the great black cloak revealed itself as wings, unfurling hooked and leathery as he launched himself upon her with a shriek that rose in pitch and volume until it tore at her throat and went echoing out across the hillside where she found herself in the pavilion, alone.
ROSALIND WAS AT FIRST TOO MUCH OVERCOME BY HORror and relief to notice any change in her surroundings. But as her heart began to slow, and the fearful immediacy of the dream-as surely it must have been?-to recede, she became aware that the surface she was lying upon was very hard, and that the rail above her was weathered and cracked, like the posts supporting the roof, which was likewise no longer a lustrous dark green but drab and flaking and festooned with cobwebs. And something was crawling over her foot… She sat up abruptly, brushing various insects from her dress, and saw that the cushions had rotted away to shreds and tatters of brown fabric. The floorboards had warped and buckled, and grass was growing between them; lichen was spreading across the faded timbers of the window-seats. And the light was much dimmer, for the trees around the pavilion had grown, and new saplings had sprung up, and the lawn had vanished into a wild, overgrown tangle of long grass and nettles.
Bewildered, she looked around for her shoes, and was relieved to see that they, at least, were unchanged, for she was beginning to feel like one of those heroines in a fairy tale who wakes to find that she has slept for a hundred years. Where had the dream begun? She had only closed her eyes for a short while before the woman had appeared beside her… and before that she could distinctly remember emerging from the wood and seeing the pavilion new and shining on the sunlit slope… no, that had not been a dream, it was not possible, she had walked all the way from Caroline's room without stopping… and she was certainly awake now. Rosalind stood up and looked about her. Weeds and long grass and nettles encircled the crumbling pavilion in an unbroken ring there was no path, and no sign of footsteps or trampling. She herself could not have got here without leaving a considerable trail; yet here she was.
Fear crept upon her, and a growing sense of loss and desolation; she had felt the woman's tenderness so strongly, in her touch, her smile; yet that gentle presence had forced her to confront the nightmare vision of Margrave, and left her alone with the ruin of what had been so beautiful. Rosalind looked up through the treetops overhead and saw that the sky was once again overcast; she realised that she was shivering not only from fear, but from the chill upon what was now late afternoon air. There was a fallen branch a little way off which would provide a makeshift staff to help he
r through the nettles. She knew she could not brave the forest path, even assuming she could find it again; not with that malignant apparition still hovering at the back of her mind. But how, then, was she to find her way back to the house? Her attention was drawn by a faint sound below, at the foot of the slope, which might be running water; if that were a stream, it might prove to be a tributary of the river along whose banks she and Caroline had so often strolled, and so lead her around the edge of the wooded hill to safety. Of course she might be led fatally astray, but she could think of no alternative, save waiting for darkness to overtake her.
AS IT TURNED OUT, THERE WAS INDEED A STREAM AT the foot of the hillside, marking the boundary between forest and fields, into which she emerged a good deal scratched, with her dress covered in burrs and grass seeds. And though it was a long way round, by following the direction of the water she did, eventually, reach a familiar point on the riverbank, and from there proceeded mechanically homeward. But the sense of desolation at finding the pavilion so despoiled would not leave her; she felt almost as if she were to blame for its decay; yet how could that be? Trying to recall exactly where the dream had begun was like unpicking a piece of work in search of a nonexistent join; there had been nothing insubstantial about the pavilion as she had first seen it, new and brightly painted on the sunlit slope. She cast her mind back along the forest path, to the field in which she had remembered the angel; but found to her great distress that she could not now think of him without recalling the hideous bat-like figure with its loathsome smile; it was like watching black ink being spilt upon that pure white plumage, and feeling both responsible and powerless to prevent it. At least she knew for certain that she could never marry Mr Margrave… but then she recalled, with horrible clarity, her mothers threat of destroying herself, and the sick feeling that had grown in her; and the name upon the volume had been Rosalind Margrave: did that mean she was foredoomed to marry him? Yet the woman had seemed so kind, and smiled upon her so tenderly; and so her thoughts circled round and round until she arrived back at the house, very late, footsore and plainly distressed, to find Caroline, now recovered, anxiously awaiting her.
Rosalind had imagined herself falling into her friends arms and telling her everything, but found that she could not. It had always been understood between them that Rosalind's mother was "difficult", but loyalty, and perhaps pride, had constrained Rosalind's confidences on this score. Nor had she felt able to disclose to Caroline the full extent or immediacy of the financial calamity hanging over the house in Bayswater, for fear of seeming to appeal to the Temples' charity on her mother's behalf. The beginning of her dream-wherever that might have been-seemed too strange, and the end too horrible, to relate. And so, beyond the comfort of her friend's embrace, Rosalind confined herself to saying that she had definitely resolved to reject Mr Margrave but was a little uneasy about how her mother might receive this news, and had consequently taken a wrong turning and wandered further than she had meant. To which she found herself adding, at the dinner table, that she thought she had seen a small pavilion on the far side of the wooded hill over there, without being specific about where she had seen it from, or how close.
"How very odd," said Mrs Temple. "You must have walked a very great distance, Rosalind; and besides, when I last walked that way, the forest had quite swallowed it up-what remained of it."
"There was a little wind in the trees," Rosalind ventured, hoping her hands were not perceptibly trembling.
"Fancy-I had not thought of it for years. Dear Walter was always so distressed, I had got out of the habit of mentioning it for his sake… it was built for his elder sister Christina-before you were born, Caroline. Christina married very young, and most unwisely"-Rosalind thought she detected a glance in her direction-"and her husband treated her cruelly. He made her-that is to say, she became ill-and came home to her family here. Grandfather Charles had the pavilion built for her there because she so loved the prospect from that hillside-it was quite open then-and she would walk there every day to sit when the weather was fine enough, until she became too weak. Walter was so devoted to her, and so distressed by the manner of her-by her death, he could not bear to speak of it, or be reminded of her-grief takes some people that way, men especially-and when Grandfather Charles died, not very long after Christina, the pavilion fell into disuse, though I should rather have kept it up myself, but poor dear Walter…"
"Rosy, you are very pale," said Caroline.
The thread was effectively broken, but Rosalind went upstairs more troubled than before. Caroline, plainly sensing that more was wrong than her friend was prepared to acknowledge, did her best to coax Rosalind into further confidences, but in vain. Despite her exhaustion, Rosalind lay awake for what seemed hours, and when eventually she did fall asleep, it was to find herself back in the walled graveyard, staring into a newly dug pit from whose depths something that shimmered with a bluish phosphorescence was rising towards her, so that she woke with a cry of terror and lay trembling until a soft light came into the room. For a moment Rosalind imagined that her angel had come back to comfort her, until she saw that the white-robed figure was only Caroline bearing a candle, but her friend stayed with her, and she was comforted, and repented of the "only".
TWO DAYS LATER, CAROLINE AND MRS TEMPLE SAW Rosalind onto the stopping train to London; or so they assumed. In fact Rosalind had arrived at a desperate, not to say foolhardy resolution: to visit Blackwall Park privately and determine whether it was indeed the place of her nightmare. She knew that the house was currently closed up and deserted, for Mr Margrave was currently embarked upon a long stay in town (the better, she feared, to lay siege to her affections) and did not keep two sets of servants. She was well aware of the dangers, but the compulsion had grown upon her until she could no longer resist it. Her recollection of the dream remained as vivid as when she had woken in the ruin of the pavilion; she felt as if a dark doorway had opened in her mind, letting in a freezing draught from the nether world, and that she would never know peace until she had found a way to force it shut again.
The previous afternoon, she and Caroline had set out to find the pavilion. Rosalind had proposed they retrace her walk across the fields, without saying exactly what she expected to find: the wicket gate was, on close inspection, still there in the corner of the field, but quite overgrown and decayed, and there was no path leading into the forest on the other side, only a huge bank of nettles. Then they had made their way around the foot of the hill, back across the river and along by the side of the stream Rosalind had followed the evening before, but without success. She had neglected to mark the point at which she had emerged, and either the grass had sprung back up around her footprints, or… but Mrs Temple had said there was, or had been, a real pavilion; she could not have imagined waking in the ruin of it. Yet no matter how far they went, the wooded hillside presented a dense, unbroken aspect. Rosalind could feel her friends anxiety on her behalf, and longed to unburden herself, but still the inhibition remained. She told herself she feared that even Caroline might doubt her sanity; in truth, the doubt belonged to Rosalind herself. No matter how often she cast her mind back over the dream-and she seemed to be able to enter and leave the memory of it at any point-the same bewildered confusion overcame her as to what had been real and what dream, or delusion, or apparition-a word she did not like to follow too far, for she could still feel the softness of the cushions in the brightly painted pavilion, inhale the fresh smell of new varnish, feel the weight of her head in the woman's-Christina's-lap; and if Christina could feel so palpably human and yet be a phantom, then why should the dark vision of Blackwall Park be any less real to Rosalind's perhaps disordered sight?
That was the question that most troubled Rosalind, and the one she felt she must resolve before she returned to London. She did not believe that she would find a row of tombstones; at least she was almost certain she did not. Yet, strangely, she half hoped that there would be some correspondence between the actual Blackwall P
ark and the place of her dream; some tangible sign, a thread to guide her through what was bound to be a painful and difficult confrontation with her mother. Rosalind knew, instinctively, that the slightest shrinking on her part might provoke the sort of display that had overpowered her in the dream; she did not, on reflection, believe that her mother would actually do away with herself, but was by no means confident of her own ability to withstand the threat. These thoughts preoccupied her throughout the journey to Bramley station in Hampshire, which passed without incident. The stationmaster at Bramley seemed puzzled, as well he might, by the young lady's assuring him that she was to meet her aunt and uncle at Blackwall Park, but nevertheless secured for her a dog-cart driven by a taciturn, grey-headed man who conducted her on the final stage of her journey-no more than a mile-in complete silence.
The day was overcast, as in the dream, but milder. Though the road was not the same, there was something about its atmosphere that reminded her of thè dream: it was flat, and for the most part straight, and ran through a series of fields which appeared, from the glimpses through the hedges, to be quite deserted; but perhaps it was only the drivers silence that made her feel that she had passed this way before. All the while Rosalind was watching for a high wall of yellowish stone, so that when the driver turned down a short avenue of elms and she realised this was Blackwall Park, her first reaction was a curious mixture of relief and disappointment. There was no wall; the house was built of grey stone, not yellowish; the windows were shuttered, but it had two storeys, not three. They pulled up on gravel, but brown gravel was common, surely, as was a front door framed by a porch with stone pillars: it was not the same front door, and it was certainly not ajar; yet she was suddenly very apprehensive. What if Mr Margrave had come down after all? She had placed herself in the most compromising position; it would look as if she had secretly sought him out… how could she not have thought of this? She had been mad to come here; and with that thought the memory of the dream pressed so closely upon her that the smell of damp and mould seemed to rise from the gravel onto which she found herself alighting, telling the driver to wait for her.