The Whispering Knights (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  Next morning, with everybody out on the forecourt waiting for the allocation of seats in the cars, the last two members of the party arrived. They were two nuns, a tall, impressive, stately one who appeared to be about sixty years old and whose hair showed iron-grey where it appeared at the front of her headdress, and a young, pretty one, grey-eyed, fair-haired, shy, and deferential to her companion. They were brought by another nun who did not stay to be introduced, but, having helped them retrieve their luggage from the boot, said farewell to them and drove back to the convent from which, they explained, they had come away after Mass. They hoped they had not kept the party waiting.

  Owen introduced them as Sister Pascal and Sister Veronica. They wore dark grey cappas over their blue habits, black shoes, and, as both were fully professed, black veils. Owen had their modest suitcases put into his own car and gave them the back seat in it while he and his cousin Catherine sat in front. Capella had been allotted a back seat in Lionel’s car, Clarissa sat beside him in the front, and the fourth seat was taken by Stewart. Dame Beatrice and Laura Gavin brought up the tail of the procession in Dame Beatrice’s own car, and the cavalcade took the motor road which ran northward from Exeter.

  Under cover of the conversation which was being carried on between the two on the front seat, Stewart said to Capella, “What do I call you? Miss Babbacombe-Starr sounds a bit off-putting.”

  “Why does it?”

  “Too long, too toffee-nosed, and too unfriendly.

  “Capella, then.”

  “Right. Stewart here, as you know. I say, which of us has the old lady got her eye on?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “La Grande Dame must have been tipped off that one of us is reputed to have a tile loose.”

  “I still don’t understand you.”

  “Oh, come, now! You recognised her, didn’t you?”

  “Well, I’ve never actually met her until now, but she came to Oxford once and spoke in the Union debate.”

  “Well, then?”

  “I don’t suppose she is keeping an eye on anybody. Why should she?”

  “Well, she certainly hasn’t come along for the ride, like me, or the pleasure of my company, like you. Least of all has she come to look at, measure, align, and speculate upon standing stones and chambered tombs. That means she’s here professionally, and I think it very cagey and unfriendly in our leader not to have warned us. You obviously weren’t warned, and neither was I, and, judging by the expression on the other faces when she and her henchwoman were introduced, neither was anybody else. When I get to know what Mrs. Gavin has termed 'the ship’s company’ a little better, I will propose a small wager as to which one of us she’s been told to watch out for. Are you on?”

  “I don’t bet. Can’t afford it. Anyway, I’m sure you’re talking nonsense. Why shouldn’t she and Mrs. Gavin take an interest in standing stones like anybody else?”

  “I’ve told you why. Besides, if that had been the case we should all have been told she was coming along, but we weren’t. QED, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t. It’s just your imagination.”

  “Don’t possess any.”

  “Your lack of it, then.”

  “Don’t you like me?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I sulk when people don’t like me.”

  “Sulk away.”

  It was an agreeable conversation, Capella thought. Her holiday was getting off to a good start. Stewart was going to be companionable and amusing. Besides, he had given her something to think about. Perhaps it was a little strange that, although he had given the names of some of the others who were to join the party, Owen’s letter had made no mention of Dame Beatrice, that eminent psychologist, and psychiatric adviser and consultant to the Home Office. Surely the thought of travelling in such august company might well have been put forward as an added attraction to the tour, thought Capella. She turned the matter over in her mind and then, since this was unprofitable, she changed the subject.

  “Where do the nuns come from?” she asked.

  “From somewhere in the Midlands, I expect. There are lots of convents up there.”

  “Then why didn’t we pick them up in the Midlands? Why did they have to come to Exeter? Anyway, what could be their interest in a tour of this sort?”

  “No idea. You had better ask them.”

  After a lunch at one of the motorway cafés, the travellers took the M6 to Penrith, where they were to spend the night. The whole of the next day was to be passed in examining the two stone circles near Little Salkeld and Keswick and another night spent at Penrith before crossing the Border. Then the party would travel to Ardrossan and take the car ferry over to Arran to examine the circles on Machrie Moor.

  That first evening most of the others retired early, leaving Stewart and Capella in the lounge to watch television. They saw the late programme through and then Stewart asked her whether she would join him in an early-morning walk.

  “You know, before breakfast,” he said. “They don’t serve it until eight, and it’s a pity to miss the dawn in these parts.”

  Capella was dubious about waking up in time to take a dawn walk, but promised to meet him at six if she could force herself to get up. She did wake in the early hours and at just after six she found him waiting for her in the hotel vestibule. He had pulled back the bolts on the outside door and they stepped out into the fresh morning air. To her surprise she found that they were going for a drive instead of a walk.

  “Well, some of it will be a walk,” he said. “We’re going to have a look at Long Meg on our own.”

  “But what’s the point? We are all going to see the stones, anyway, after breakfast.”

  “I don’t want to go with the crowd. Much more fun just you and me. I conned Lionel into lending me his car keys and I know the way. We go through Langwathby, turn off for Little Salkeld, and the stones are about a mile further on. We can leave the car at the station or somewhere and walk the last bit. Then, while the others are looking at the stones later on in the morning, we can nip away on our own again and have lunch together.”

  When they were in the car and heading north-east out of the town, she asked him again what he had meant by saying that Dame Beatrice had joined the party for reasons connected with her profession.

  “I told you yesterday,” he said. “Obviously Owen thinks one of us has a screw loose and this excursion makes a good excuse for having an eminent psychiatrist go along and vet the company for signs of non compos mentis. He must suspect one of us.”

  “Perhaps he has heard about me and my purple past,” said Capella, laughing.

  “You? You don’t look old enough to have a past, purple or otherwise, so don’t boast. It doesn’t become a young woman.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that kind of past. I mean that when we were children—well, adolescents, I suppose—either my sister or I raised a poltergeist in the house.”

  “A poltergeist? Are there really such things?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed, but whether it was Vega or I who brought it into the family circle I don’t suppose we shall ever know. It couldn’t have been either of the boys, because Arc was up at Oxford at the time and Den was away at school. When they were at home for the holidays the silly old polt didn’t materialise, so it must have fancied either one or other of us girls and got scared when the boys were in the house.”

  “But this is sensational! Do tell me. Did you see anything?”

  “We didn’t see the thing itself. I don’t believe anybody ever does; but it was up to all the usual antics, I assure you.”

  “Things hovering in the air and then crashing floorwards? Things getting hidden and then reappearing in unexpected places? Messages written on walls? Furniture travelling around and falling over without anybody being in the room? I’ve read about such things, but have always believed there was a human agency at work.”

  “Well, I suppose, in a sense, there must be. I mean, there seems no do
ubt that a young person, usually a young girl, acts as a medium for whatever it is that comes and haunts the place. I was thirteen at the time and Vega was seventeen, so I think it is more likely that I was the one. Of course, at the time I had no idea of what caused all the upheaval. I remember that my mother said she had been flung out of bed twice and an old cupboard we had in the attic certainly walked itself down two flights of stairs and knocked over the long-case clock in the hall. It was after that had happened that Mother got nervous and begged Father to move house.”

  “Good Lord! I should think she did! Did you move house?”

  “He wouldn’t hear of it. He said that it was all very interesting and that he was getting a lot of copy out of it. He was making a study of poltergeists at the time. He writes about paranormal happenings and astrology and things from outer space and the measurement of time, and all that sort of thing, you see, and had finished with time and gone on to poltergeists.”

  “So your poltergeist was literally meat and drink to him, of course. Besides, according to what I’ve read—Borley Rectory, the Wesley family, Hinton Ampner, that extraordinary business of the upended and displaced coffins in the sealed vault of the Chase family on Barbados, and lots of others—it wouldn’t have been any good if you had moved. The nuisance would have gone with you until whoever was its medium had lost the power to give it a home.”

  “Well, our little visitor stayed with us for nearly a year, but only on and off. I don’t believe my mother could have stood it if it had been with us without a break.”

  “So your father made money out of it and your mother was alarmed by it. How did you and your sister react?”

  “I think Vega was a bit scared, especially when we heard doors that we knew were locked being slammed and there were some loud knockings on the walls at night. Vega tried to reassure herself by saying that we must be in an area that had earth tremors, and that accounted for the noises and the furniture moving and my mother being thrown out of bed, but I don’t think she really believed it.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m afraid I thought it was all rather fun and certainly very exciting. The only things I didn’t much like were the bells. That only happened twice, with two or three months in between. We woke up in the night to hear what sounded like at least half-a-dozen bells of the kind they used to have in big houses with lots of servants. They were jangling away quite madly.”

  “Wouldn’t your sister’s theory about earth tremors have covered that?”

  “It might have done, except that there wasn’t a single bell of that sort in the house.”

  “Except for the poltergeist, you haven’t had any other supernatural experiences, I suppose?”

  “No, thank goodness, only peculiar dreams. The strange thing is that I should be horribly scared if the poltergeist were to renew its visits now, although, as a child, only the bells disturbed me, so far as I remember.”

  “You know, Capella, I’m not sure you ought to be coming on this tour. These stone circles were temples, and the old gods were jealous gods.”

  They drove on in silence until Stewart pulled up. They left the car and walked along a narrow road which bent away to where Long Meg, the outlier, presided over the circle of stones which were referred to as her daughters, or, as another legend has it, her lovers.

  “No,” said Stewart, referring to the legends, “neither of those is the story I heard. This is a coven of witches turned into stone by a saint who couldn’t abide their goings-on. It’s the most likely bit of folklore, as a matter of fact, because there would have been magic practised in these stone circles, with ritual dances and, no doubt, fertility rites. Let’s walk in by those stones which mark the entrance and go straight across the circle and take a look at Long Meg herself. They say, you know, that most of these circles were erected near water because the stones need to drink. You saw that we had to cross the river back there, so this circle seems to conform.”

  Long Meg’s Daughters formed a flattened circle of very considerable size. Stewart, pacing it, deduced that it was at least one hundred feet across at its widest, and something under ninety at the flattened sides of the oval. Long Meg herself, set outside the circle, which had been built on a slope up from the river, had two surprises for Capella. Because the builders had decided that the outlier must be the tallest of the stones, it was geologically unlike the others. The rest, some standing, some toppled, were boulders of a type of granite, the immediately local stone. Many of them weighed several tons, but none of them had been tall enough to satisfy the builders, so Meg was a pointed pillar of red sandstone and could be seen from a point at which, owing to the slope of the ground, the rest of the stones, even the tallest uprights, were not visible.

  “Whatever you do, don’t break a piece off her,” said Stewart, as they walked round Long Meg. “If you do, she will bleed, or so the story goes.”

  “Somebody at some time has marked her, anyway. Are those magic symbols?” asked Capella. There were three sets of maze-like circles cut on the great pillar. She traced them with her forefinger.

  “Probably evidence of sun worship,” replied Stewart. “There are lots of stones in the Britain Isles with cup and ring markings, mostly on passage graves, and there are chevron markings which pre-date the Norman churches and castles by about three thousand or more years. I’ve seen some marvellous prehistoric sculptures—well, bas-reliefs, I suppose—in Scotland, and there are some in Ireland I want to see.”

  “I didn’t know you had a serious interest in this sort of thing. You said you only came for the ride.”

  “Oh, I’m doing a thesis, you know. That’s why—well, it’s one reason—I wanted to visit Long Meg on our own, without the others all milling and clacking around. Tell me some more about your poltergeist.”

  “There isn’t any more to tell. You tell me more about Dame Beatrice. Which of us do you think she has been asked to study?—not that I believe a word of it.”

  “Honestly, I haven’t a clue. She’s an expert criminologist as well as a psychiatrist, you know. Solves mysterious murders and all that sort of thing.”

  “She sounds absolutely terrifying.”

  “Oh, I think she is. Those sharp black eyes see everything. That beaky little mouth tells nothing. Yes, she’s terrifying all right, so if you’re thinking of murdering Clarissa or the beautiful stone-goddess Catherine, as you probably will be before this trip is over, forget it.”

  “Please don’t call her a stone-goddess! Not here, in front of Long Meg! You said that Dame Beatrice is a criminologist, but murder is only one crime among many.”

  “It happens to be her speciality, that’s all.” He took a small notebook and a pencil from his pocket and made a careful sketch of Long Meg and her markings. Then he dotted in the circle of stones, sketched one or two of them, annotated the drawings, put away notebook and pencil, and looked at his watch. “Time to be shifting,” he said, “or they will all have finished breakfast before we get back.”

  When they had left the circle by passing again between the double stones which marked the entrance, Capella looked back.

  “Better not do that,” said Stewart. “You might be turned into a pillar of salt or, rather, a pillar of granite. Except for Long Meg, the Stones are igneous rocks.”

  “I don’t like your jokes,” she said.

  He laughed and said, as they walked on: “I am hoping it would be salt, and neither sandstone nor granite.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Salt dissolves,” he said, looking straight in front of him. It was her turn to laugh.

  “Sorry, but I’m not in melting mood,” she said. This time she halted, turned completely round, and took a long look at the stones. They stood menacing and dark against the early-morning sky, stark, grim guardians of a once-hallowed place, with Long Meg, the outlier, conspicuous because of her greater height and what Capella thought of as her loneliness. As they walked towards the car, she was reminded of that other outlier, the misshapen,
disappointed king unable to see Long Compton because of an intervening mound. Plotted against by five traitorous knights huddled together on the other side of a field of barley, he seemed indeed a lonely figure.

  “A penny for them,” said Stewart. “Where have you gone?”

  “To the Oxford-Worcester border,” she replied. “I’ll race you to the car.”

  As they were driving back to the hotel, she said:

  “I shall go to Long Meg again with the others after breakfast.”

  “Shall you? But why? We’ve seen what there is to be seen. You won’t like it half as much next time. Catherine will look superior and talk about The Golden Bough and Clarissa will photograph every single stone and give it some fancy name out of Beatrix Potter or a folk song.” He put on a falsetto voice. “Oh, do look! Isn’t this one exactly like the frog who would a-wooing go? I shall call him Anthony Rowley. Now we must find him a Mistress Mouse and an Uncle Rat.” He resumed his normal tones. “They’ll drive you mad, my dear. Far better to give them a miss and come to Keswick with me.”

  “If they drive me mad, then Dame Beatrice will not have joined the party in vain,” said Capella composedly. “It’s anti-social to duck out of their activities.”

  CHAPTER 3

  CASTLERIGG

  “It required the careful and charitable hands of these times to restore it to its primitive integrity.”

  Sir Thomas Browne

  “Are you really going off to Keswick on your own?” asked Capella, joining Stewart on the steps of the hotel when breakfast was over.

  “Are you really going to waste your morning going to see Long Meg with the others instead of coming with me to Keswick?” he enquired. “I did say I’d give you lunch, you know.”