Groaning Spinney

by Gladys Mitchell

‘Good for the kitten!’ said Jonathan. ‘Look here, Deb, it’s barely three o’clock, and Aunt Adela says she had lunch on the train. We’ve time to go out and see a bit of the park.’

  ‘Indeed you have not!’ protested his wife at once. ‘Aunt Adela is going up to her room, and then, when she’s ready for it, I’m going to ring for tea, and by the time we’ve had tea it will be dark, and in any case you’ve got to go into Cirencester for those parcels. You had better go now and we’ll have tea as soon as you get back. It won’t take you long. I thought you were in a desperate hurry to put the car away!’

  ‘Don’t nag,’ said Jonathan, kissing her.

  ‘Do you like the house?’ asked Deborah, when tea was over and Mrs. Bradley had been taken upon a conducted tour of the oak-beamed, gloomy, friendly, surprising old place.

  ‘Immensely,’ Mrs. Bradley replied with the utmost sincerity.

  ‘Yes, so do I. I’m glad I’m going to have the baby here. He’s twins and I’m going to call him Mary Crispin.’

  ‘Indeed?’ said Mrs. Bradley, studying her niece-by-marriage with interest. ‘This is glad news.’

  ‘You’ll be godmother, won’t you? I do so much want you to be.’

  ‘I shall be delighted. When do we first greet your heirs?’

  ‘Not until May, I’m afraid. Can you bear to wait until then? I don’t honestly think I can.’

  ‘I shall count the days, and mark them off on my calendar.’

  ‘You’re nice,’ said Deborah contentedly. ‘I’m very, very glad you could come. Please will you come at the time? I shall feel safe with you in the house.’

  Mrs. Bradley lay that night in an oak-beamed, mullion-windowed room with a view to the west and an ash-tree outside the window. She thought of Provost M. R. James’ story, but slept none the worse for that, and after breakfast she, her nephew and his wife went out for the promised expedition.

  The weather was cold but not bitter, and the sky was still lowering and grey. They took a short cut from the house by way of a door in a wall, a path between centuries-old yew hedges, black, close-leaved and cleanly silent, and an iron fence over which Jonathan climbed and then lifted Deborah, and over which Mrs. Bradley hopped like a robin.

  This fence divided what might be called the garden proper from a paddock which climbed rapidly and (said Deborah, hanging on to Jonathan’s arm) unnecessarily uphill to the woods.

  Here a broad walk among beeches dropped downwards to the two lodges. Skirting these, the party continued through the woods, came out for a bit on to rough pasture from which a magnificent view across the valley showed the huge, rather ugly modern house (which was now a college) backed by a grove of trees, and then, keeping the little church and some of the stone-built houses of the village to his left, Jonathan led the way towards a narrow spinney, a mere straggle of trees where the woods petered out on top of the windy rise.

  At the end of the spinney was a gate. Jonathan stood still and pointed.

  ‘That’s where our ghost hangs out,’ he said. ‘I think it must be genuine. Anyhow, everybody round here believes in it. It’s supposed to be the local parson of about eighteen-fifty. He’s to be seen hanging over the gate, a most realistic-looking corpse, on moonlight nights at between twelve and one, although some people claim to have seen him during the afternoon.’

  ‘What is the story?’ Mrs. Bradley enquired, going forward to inspect the gate, which was of the ordinary country pattern, and which opened on to some rough ground pitted with rabbit holes.

  ‘Nobody seems to know exactly. One story is that he was set on by robbers when he was coming back from visiting a dying parishioner, and another is that he had been celebrating rather too enthusiastically and just collapsed and died on the way home. He was found hanging over the gate and has haunted the place ever since. One can understand it if he was set upon, robbed and murdered, but if the other story is correct it’s not very easy to see why he can’t leave us alone. Dash it, he can’t want the village to know that their parson was tight!’

  ‘I expect he wanted to tell somebody something,’ suggested Deborah. ‘Which way are we going from here?’

  ‘Oh, across old Daventry’s fields, out on to the road, and as far as Tiny’s and Bill’s place. I rather want to see Tiny, and Aunt Adela may as well make his acquaintance, and Bill’s, too. They’ll be with us on Boxing Day, so she may as well meet them straight away.’

  ‘Tiny’s the agent,’ explained Deborah. ‘He agents for us and for the College. He’s a most useful person, because he knows all the people round here and has introduced us to most of them. But Bill, his cousin, is nicer.’

  ‘Yes, Bill’s a good chap,’ said Jonathan, ‘but I think you’ll like them both. Tiny’s right up your street, as a matter of fact. He used to be in the Indian police. You ought to have plenty to talk about. He’s got some amazing yarns.’

  Tiny’s and Bill’s house proved to be a modern bungalow with a wonderful outlook over a deep valley. Tiny and Bill both were out when the party arrived, but the housekeeper was certain that they would soon return. She put out whisky and sherry, turned a red setter, two Manx cats and a bull-terrier out of the armchairs, repeated that Mr. Fullalove and his cousin would be back at any moment, added that old Mrs. Yates’ roof did not really leak and never had, but that the Irish were like that, and left the company to themselves.

  ‘Yes, Tiny and Bill are bachelors, lucky chaps,’ said Jonathan, smiling at Deborah who was looking adorably beautiful that day. ‘They’ve got a treasure in Mrs. Dalby Whittier, their housekeeper. Oh, yes, she has to be given her full name. It’s her only idiosyncrasy. She’s a real find, though. Tiny says he doesn’t know what they did before she came. She popped up out of nowhere and asked for the job. Just came up to the door two years ago and said she’d heard in the village that they had a vacancy for a cook-housekeeper. They’ve kept her ever since. It’s a lonely spot up here, but she never minds being by herself. Bill is a bit of a naturalist, so he says, and is often out at night badger-watching and all that sort of thing, and Tiny sometimes goes up to Town, but she never turns a hair. Queer, in a way, because she’d lived all her life in London until she came here, or so she told them.’

  ‘What made her leave London, I wonder?’ Mrs. Bradley remarked. Her nephew had no time to answer, for at that moment both dogs began to bark, one cat jumped on to the window sill and the other on to the table. Jonathan went to the window and opened it, and an alert man of about fifty with a face almost as dark as an Indian’s and small light-green eyes, climbed over the sill, shut the window, glanced down at his leggings, and then, with a cat on each shoulder and a dog’s muzzle glued firmly to each knee, advanced to greet the guests.

  ‘Get off, Mick. Get off, Deemster,’ said he to the cats. ‘Chuck it, Lassie. Go away, Cripes,’ he added to the dogs. ‘Hullo, Bradley. Good morning, Mrs. Bradley.’

  ‘This is Tiny Fullalove, Aunt Adela,’ said Deborah. ‘Tiny, this is Jon’s aunt, Mrs. Lestrange Bradley.’

  ‘I am always taken aback when it is recalled that Deborah is also Mrs. Bradley,’ observed the reptilian, favouring Mr. Fullalove with a leer. He responded with a gallantly meaningless remark, and began to dispense sherry.

  Mrs. Bradley, to her discomfort, was aware that she had conceived an instinctive dislike of her host. It was a feeling with which she was seldom troubled. Her dislikes were comparatively few, for she had a well-trained mind and a philosophical temperament, and a long succession of loathsomely egocentric patients had encouraged in her, in self-defence, a good-humoured tolerance of most of her fellow-creatures. But, in the present case, some female corpuscles, as it were, rose in revolt against something which they recognized in Tiny Fullalove. She had experienced the feeling once or twice before, and, in such cases, instinct had invariably proved reliable. There was a wife-poisoner, she remembered … a charming man in the opinion of everybody but Mrs. Bradley. Even his unfortunate wife had adored him. He had poisoned her for her money….

  �
��What do you think of Tiny?’ Deborah demanded on the way back. She and Mrs. Bradley had gone on ahead, leaving Jonathan to wait for Bill whom they had seen crossing the fields.

  ‘What do you?’ enquired Mrs. Bradley.

  ‘Oh, that’s not fair! I asked you first.’

  ‘It isn’t fair to ask me what I think of a person I’ve met for the first time, is it?’

  ‘I’m so glad,’ said Deborah inconsequently.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I know now that you don’t like him a bit. And I don’t, either.’

  ‘Any reason?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Deborah, setting her jaw. ‘I have a very good reason. But it’s a reason I daren’t tell Jon. Anyhow, it only happened once, and it certainly won’t happen again. I’ve settled that. I detest men who can’t behave themselves at his age.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mrs. Bradley, nodding. ‘I’m glad you haven’t told Jon.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ enquired Deborah, struck by something in Mrs. Bradley’s tone.

  ‘I shouldn’t like my favourite nephew to be had up for causing grievous bodily harm. Jonathan is a quick-tempered man and very strong.’

  ‘It’s very odd that men can like men, and women can like women, whom the other sex can’t stand,’ pursued Deborah. Mrs. Bradley agreed. She pointed out, however, that men could like women and women men whom their own sex could see through at the very first meeting, and that that was an odd thing, too.

  ‘What about the cousin Bill?’ she enquired. Deborah was again prepared to champion Bill.

  ‘Like all Bills, he’s nice,’ she stated. ‘I told him I didn’t care much about his cousin’s ways, and he said he’d take care that he behaved himself in future. I told him he need not trouble because I thought I had settled Tiny’s hash, but I think there were words. Bill is an ex-Naval officer, and speaks his mind. Besides, Tiny had a black eye when Jon met him next day. He said he fell over one of the dogs, but I have my own views about that. Here comes Jon. Let’s wait for him to catch us up.’

  Mrs. Bradley interpreted this last remark as a hint to drop the subject of Tiny Fullalove. Jonathan, who had sprinted after them, dropped into a walk beside his wife, and the conversation turned on the Fullalove cousins again, but upon a different aspect of them.

  ‘I’ve had to ask both the Fullaloves for Christmas Day as well as Boxing Day, Deb,’ said Jonathan. ‘Sorry. I know you don’t like Tiny, but I couldn’t leave him out.’

  ‘Who said I didn’t like Tiny?’ demanded Deborah. ‘I’ve never mentioned such a thing!’

  ‘Your face will never be your fortune, sweetheart. It gives too much away!’ retorted her husband. ‘Anyway, they’ve both accepted for both days, so you’ll have to put up with them for lunch and probably for supper on Christmas Day, and tea and dinner on Boxing Day. And another sickening thing. They want us to put up a couple of pals of theirs. I’m awfully sorry. But they’ve very little room in that bungalow. Hullo! What’s the matter with Worry?’

  ‘I think he’s seen your ghost,’ said Mrs. Bradley, closely scrutinizing a small lively dog which had come into view. ‘That’s the same gate again, isn’t it? Who, by the way, is Worry’s owner?’

  ‘He’s Will North’s dog. The gamekeeper, you know,’ said Deborah. ‘Will must be somewhere about. Something has upset Worry! I wonder whether he’s run a thorn in?’

  She hurried down the slope. The terrier was standing about ten yards from the gate, yelping hideously, and all Deborah’s cajolings could not persuade him to go any nearer. At this moment, Will North, the gamekeeper, came up and spoke to the dog. It nuzzled him, and, in a whining tone, began to explain its fears.

  ‘Hallo, Will,’ said Jonathan. ‘Meet my aunt, Mrs. Lestrange Bradley. She’s a dead shot and a straight rider.’

  ‘I’ve heard of you, ma’am,’ said the tall man. ‘You wrote a book I’ve got. Psychoneurosis in the history of the Sixteenth Century. I’m sorry about Worry. He isn’t a silly chap really.’

  ‘He’s seen the ghost,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Oh, yes, he certainly seems to have seen the ghost,’ said Mrs. Bradley. The gamekeeper capped them politely and walked on up the hill. The dog followed quietly at his heels, no longer afraid of the gate, and passed through it with him.

  ‘The ghost has gone,’ said Jonathan. ‘I wonder why?’

  Mrs. Bradley watched the man and his dog until they were silhouetted against the sky at the top of the rise. Then she followed Jonathan and Deborah, who, by that time, were some way ahead.

  When she looked back she had a sudden although transitory shock. A man was leaning over the haunted gate, and that man was certainly not the gamekeeper. Whoever he was, he straightened himself immediately he saw her looking back, and, turning, strode in the direction of the bungalow.

  2. The Shape of Things to Come

  *

  ‘… and if the night

  Have gathered aught of evil, or concealed,

  Disperse it, as new light dispels the dark.’

  John Milton

  * * *

  THE WEATHER TURNED colder, and Deborah preferred the fire, so Mrs. Bradley and Jonathan spent the daylight hours of Christmas Eve in tramping over the hills. She was astonished to discover the distances which could be covered without going outside the estate.

  ‘Of course, a good bit of this is not mine,’ Jonathan explained. ‘It belongs to the College now. But the two parts have only been separated since this last sale, and I’ve permission to tramp where I like. Pretty good, all of it, isn’t it? A chap named Daventry farms that bit down there. I’ve met him. He seems all right. His wife breeds Boxers.’

  ‘Breeds what?—Oh, a type of bulldog.’

  ‘Yes. I’m giving Deb a puppy for Christmas. She doesn’t know yet. I hope she’ll like it. They’re a sensible, clean-looking breed, very companionable, I believe, and good guards, too. I’ve bought the puppy very young because I want him to grow up on good terms with Rhu, my Irish wolf-hound, but he’s still to be weaned. Sally’s looking after Rhu at present, but I’m fetching him in the car after tea. It’s only fifteen miles. We’re hoping to have her over for a weekend in the New Year. She’s greatly looking forward to seeing you again.’

  ‘What shall you call the puppy?’ Mrs. Bradley enquired, without making any promises which involved the New Year.

  ‘Oh, Deb will name him. I shall suggest Bob Fitzsimmons, but I don’t suppose it will pass! ‘Morning, Ed!’

  A carter was driving a heavy wagon along the rutted track. A jay alighted, with a noisy yell, about three yards in front of the wagon. It walked comically sideways, screeched hideously at the carter, and then flew up and almost tumbled on to the man’s knee. There, balancing, it clapped its wings at him.

  ‘Oh, there you are, then, you old boy, you,’ said the carter. The bird scolded him roundly.

  ‘Queer,’ said Jonathan. ‘Birds just come to that bloke. His name’s Ed Brown. He carts for Daventry. The old women in the village swear he’s a changeling, and, by the look of him, he could be, couldn’t he? He reminds me of a satyr, or perhaps Puck, except that he behaves himself. There’s only one person he doesn’t take to, if rumour can be believed—and as it’s pub rumour it probably can!—and that’s our agent, Tiny Fullalove. It seems that Ed met Tiny out in India during the war and didn’t like his ways with Army mules.’

  ‘Odd that they should have met in India if, as I suppose, Ed Brown merely went there during the war,’ Mrs. Bradley remarked, ‘especially if Mr. Fullalove was in the police, and Brown a soldier.’

  ‘Quite right; it was a bit of a coincidence. Their meeting must have been just one of those things. The Fullaloves aren’t local people. It’s a Yorkshire name, I believe. Tiny knew the former owner of this place and when he heard there was a job going here he asked to have it. He got it, packed up India (where, presumably, he knew there was no future for him) and came along. He had only been agent here for a couple of years when the place was sold. Fellow’s
gone to live in the South of France or somewhere. Made it a condition of sale that the College and I kept Tiny on. Fair enough. He’s pretty good at his job. Miss Hughes, the College principal, doesn’t like him, though. Moreover, she ain’t tactful like Ed. She says it loud and clear, with Celtic oaths. Welsh as Llanfihangel. I love her.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a women’s college, is it? I hadn’t gathered that.’

  ‘Yes. You must get Miss Hughes to tell you about it. She’s coming over to Christmas dinner. Bit of a nuisance the Fullaloves have to come, too, but it can’t be helped. One has to be matey in the country, and the College holiday only lasts a week, so Miss Hughes doesn’t go down at all; just stays up getting ready for next term. It’s one of these Emergency places, you know. They reckon to train their people in thirteen months. It must be the hell of a life for the Staff, I should think. Let’s push in here and collect the pup for Deb.’

  The guests bequeathed by the Fullaloves turned up on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. They were men of Jonathan’s age, and, according to themselves, were respectively an archaeologist and a naturalist. The Bronze Age in Scandinavia and Denmark was Gregory Mansell’s object of worship; Miles Obury studied British mammals, particularly badgers. During the previous summer he and Bill Fullalove had been out at night in the woods to try to photograph these animals and had built a watcher’s platform in a tree. They took Mrs. Bradley to see it, and Obury informed her that, owing to the legend of the ghost, the wood was called Groaning Spinney.

  Obury and Mansell were agreeable and sociable persons, and the evening at the manor passed pleasantly. At just after half-past ten Deborah and Mrs. Bradley went to bed, and Obury announced his intention of going up to the wood again to see how his badgers were getting on. Mansell, laughing, said that he would go with him and see whether it was the ghost’s night to haunt at the top of the spinney. They took a nip of Jonathan’s Christmas bottle of Scotch and set off in high fettle for the small wood which mounted the hill in the direction of the Fullaloves’ bungalow. Mansell was particularly jovial. He was a complete sceptic with regard to ghosts and was not in the least afraid that he might see this one.