When her father’s and, years later, her mother’s deaths left Isabella to face middle-age alone, she was neither idle nor lonely. She lived on in the small dower house with a devoted maid. Her life was filled with good works, gardening, and the interests of her large band of nephews and nieces and, later, their children (her drawing-room was so thick with family photographs that there was hardly room to put down a cup of tea). She made one or two trips to Switzerland and the Italian lakes with a friend, another maiden lady, enjoyed herself, admired and sketched the scenery, but was glad to get back to Maiden Worthy where everyone spoke English.
Every Sunday, wet or fine, her neat little black-clad figure, growing more bent as the years went on, could be seen trotting, umbrella in hand, up the avenue of Maryiot Cells, for it was an understood thing that she always took tea on Sunday afternoons with her cousin Arthur and his wife.
When she died in her sleep in her late seventies, she was sincerely mourned, by her relations and regretted by the village people. During her lifetime some of the more recalcitrant parishioners, habitual drunkards, faithless wives, unmarried mothers and the like, had resented her gentle but persistent interference in their affairs (she had a supply of text cards, decorated with lilies, violets and other devout-looking flowers which, in her opinion at least, were effective weapons against every form of spiritual wickedness that might flourish in the parish). But when she was gone, these irritations were forgotten in appreciation of her many acts of benevolence.
A placid colourless life, one would say, and a placid colourless personality. True, yet Isabella Skelton’s reaction to the one extraordinary and alarming thing that happened to her, indicates that her conventional, timid nature possessed reserves of self-control that would have stood her in good stead in grimmer times.
It happened in 1873, and at a time when Maryiot Cells had so many people packed under its roof that not a single bed, far less bedroom, was unoccupied. The occasion was the marriage of Sir Wilfrid’s and Lady Skelton’s eldest daughter Blanche. The bridegroom was a young Irishman, William Allen of Castle Allen and his widowed mother, and his numerous sisters and younger brothers had been invited to stay at Maryiot Cells for the ceremony, only Mr William Allen himself being obliged, by a curious convention that supposed that the most temperate bridegroom’s desires would prove too much for him on the wedding eve, to put up at a neighbouring country house.
Consequently even the rabbit warren of attics at Maryiot Cells was occupied by a bevy of young and giggling Miss Skeltons and Miss Allens, and by schoolboy cousins who tormented the young ladies by making them apple-pie beds,3 or, invading their maiden privacy in whooping gangs, tying them together by their stay-laces.
The young men of the party were accommodated in the rooms over the stables where the under-footmen, grooms and pantry boys usually slept. Where these underlings had been banished it would be as well perhaps not to enquire.
The match was a most propitious one. Blanche was a good and beautiful girl, while William Allen did not appear any less amiable or personable for being one of the largest landowners in the North of Ireland. Even Aunt Lizzie could find no sourer criticism to offer than to remark that she doubted if ‘poor William would make old bones’.
The atmosphere of the house-party was redolent of goodwill, coy, innocuous little jokes about matrimony, and vicarious excitement. The tenants of Maryiot Cells presented the young couple with an illuminated address4 and a Sheffield plate dinner service which included a venison dish suggestive in shape and size of a baby’s bath.
Judging from the family album of this date, a heavy leather volume with brass clasps, the photographer of the local town must have reaped a rich harvest from this notable family gathering. It seems likely that he was summoned, camera, black velvet cloth and all, to Maryiot Cells, for it is hardly probable that the Skelton (to say nothing of the Allen) clan – from the Dowager Lady Skelton, a frail wistful figure with her lace cap, white corkscrew curls and black and white striped dress, to little Arthur Skelton (who in default of a direct male heir was to succeed to his uncle Wilfrid’s title and estates) in his muslin dress with tartan shoulder knots and sash – could have undertaken the trip into the county town.
At any rate, thanks to the photographer’s labours, it is possible to have a clear idea of the family party, collectively as well as individually.
There is, of course, the group of groups, taken on the wedding day. There are what the French unkindly describe as ‘déplorables groupes de famille’, seated on the terrace steps or clustered round the front door – Father in shepherd’s plaid trousers and dark jacket, Mother in a bustled, beruffled walking-dress, their offspring in braided clothes, striped stockings and buttoned boots. All of them wearing hats that appear to modern eyes to be too small for their heads. There are the bachelor groups – young men wearing foulard cravats and a mildly rakish air, seated with their arms on the backs of chairs. Mother and child groups, with younger matrons propping up limp-looking infants in décolleté frocks. There are schoolboys whose pugnacious expressions are set off rather than disguised by their turned-down collars and somewhat long hair. There are small consequential girls with long ringlets and tiny pork-pie hats…
To identify them all would be tedious and difficult, perhaps – at this date – impossible, for, with a touching belief in the permanency of their memories and of the golden security of family and class which enwrapped them, no names have been written beneath the photographs. But the resolutely good-looking young man in hunting kit, with side-whiskers and an impeccable profile, is almost certainly Desmond Allen, younger brother of the bridegroom who, if family tradition is to be credited, won more than a small part of Isabella’s heart (he died three years later of consumption).
There is Isabella herself. She is wearing a dark dress with ruffles at the throat and wrist, and is seated at a table gazing down pensively at a very artificial-looking rose which she holds in her hand. She has a round, childishly earnest face and smooth, demurely parted hair. Thus she must have looked, only with the addition, no doubt, of a little round hat or small bonnet and a jacket, when she set off for that evening stroll which was to bring her so shocking an experience.
It was the eve of her sister’s wedding day. All that day, and for many days previously, Isabella had been assisting with the multifarious preparations which a wedding entails – answering letters for Mama, unpacking and making lists of wedding presents, helping to amuse the children of the party, attending to the comfort of the older ladies, training the village choir in the nuptial hymns, making white satin favours for the gentlemen, helping fellow bridesmaids to try on wreaths, cutting out frills for the candlesticks, walking down to the garden with a message to the gardener about the white chrysanthemums. Whenever anything needed doing, a cry went up of ‘Where is Isabella?’, and Isabella, whom one of her aunts truly described as ‘a bright, active girl’, never failed to respond.
But at last it seemed to her that her duties were at an end, or at any rate the more pressing of them. She decided with a gentle spurt of rebellion not to think of the others, and to indulge herself in an hour’s rest and relaxation. This was unobtainable in the crowded, bustling house, and so, putting on her outdoor clothes, she slipped out of a side door and across the lawn.
The evening was fine. The light of the setting sun was tangled low in the trees. Where the sunlight did not catch them, their trunks and branches had a smoky hue. The ground was powdered with the dull gold of fallen leaves. She paused for a few moments on the bridge, resting her small gloved hand on the stone parapet, and gazed down at the lustrous, smoothly gliding waters. It fascinated her now, as it had fascinated her since childhood, to see how the water for ever changing was yet for ever constant, forming itself even as it flowed away into the same pattern of ripples, swirls and eddies, ceaseless movement thus creating perfect immutability. Isabella’s mind, devout by nature and training, tried to find some religious significance in this, but she was a little fatigued
by the fuss and excitement of the last week, and had to leave the river’s symbolic meaning to look after itself.
Its secretive, singing voice soothed her, and glancing back across the lawn at the familiar outlines of Maryiot Cells, its clustered chimneys, obelisks, and turrets sombre against the water-pale sky, its many windows bright with gleams from the sinking sun, she felt a rush of affection for her home. She felt too a sentimental pang for Blanche at having to leave these dear accustomed scenes, though from all accounts Castle Allen was a beautiful place, and dear William was such a fine, good fellow. She was sure that she would weep tomorrow when she saw her beloved eldest sister being married; it would be the first break in the family circle. There was something just a little sad, Isabella thought, about weddings, but it was a pleasant, really rather beautiful sadness, and the tears which everyone (at least all the near female relations) shed at them were as agreeable and mild as dew.
When she had crossed the bridge, Isabella did not enter one of the yew glades. They were uninvitingly dark and damp under foot at this season, and Isabella was sure that Mama would not approve of her risking a chill by walking there on this autumn evening.
Instead she turned to the right, and followed the path which ran parallel to the river. It was one of her favourite walks. The sound and sight of the river gave her a feeling of companionship. The trees which grew there formed a canopy of branches over the path; in some parts dipping down to the water’s edge, as though intent, Isabella thought, on imparting to it some secret. At intervals along the river were three pools, whose quaint names, The Abbot’s Pool, Purgatory and Hell, were reminiscent of the days when Maryiot Cells was a monastic foundation. Here, where the river lay in topaz-brown repose before cascading on again over the flat stones, the trout lay basking. In the old days the monks had evidently enlarged these natural pools into fishponds, for there were still traces of low stone walls, long since fallen into decay, on the river banks.
It was in a pensive, quiet, cheerful mood – in this lull, as it were, in the swirl of the wedding preparations, not unlike the quietness of the pools in the swirl of the river – that Isabella Skelton strolled by the river on this fine autumn evening. It is necessary here, even though it means a digression, to emphasise that there was no apprehension nor nervousness in her mind. It would be ridiculous to deny that Isabella knew that her home was not as other people’s homes; that there was a queer atmosphere about it, an abnormal and sinister tradition that made it an object of morbid interest to visitors and to the locality. In plain words, that it was ‘haunted’.
It is impossible to say at what age, exactly, she became aware of this. That she should become aware, however, was inevitable, in spite of Nanny Callaghan’s unceasing vigilance. There had been a period, in fact, in her childhood, when she was about eight years old, when the obscure forces that lurked in the background of her home had obtruded themselves most unceremoniously upon her childish consciousness.
It is said by those who occupy themselves with psychical research that these supernormal phenomena occur, if not in regular cycles, at least in periods of varying intensity. Dormant for a number of years, they become suddenly active, for no ascertainable reason.
Something of this kind must have happened at Maryiot Cells at this time. The details, as far as they can be gathered from family diaries and recollections, are blurred, but it appears that several guests curtailed their visits abruptly; there was a rapid succession of kitchenmaids (then as now highly impressionable creatures); pet dogs behaved in a hysterical manner; a carpenter was summoned to find out why doors opened that should have remained shut, and what combination of loose boards, wind or rats could cause a sound resembling ‘six quick young footsteps’ (the phrase is from Sir Wilfrid’s journal), rappings, something stirring and rustling, uncouth whisperings and mutterings.
It was about this time too that a window in one of the turrets was blocked up. The room which it illuminated was only used for storing trunks. Even so, its deliberate darkening might have seemed a senseless action – what more aggravating than to stumble and rummage about among trunks and portmanteaux with a candle? The fact was that a good deal of silly talk was being spread around in the village about the light that shone out mysteriously from that window near the midnight hour.
Sir Wilfrid himself, muffled in an ulster,5 and accompanied by the butler carrying a gun (rather an unnecessary precaution in the circumstances, one would have supposed) had waited for several hours one night between the entrance court and the beech avenue, and the light had been clearly visible to both master and man. The ‘nasty, unaccountable thing about it’, as the butler had confided to the housekeeper next day, was that the light had wavered and moved, for all the world as though whoever bore it had passed several times before the window. And this though the trunk-room door was locked beyond all doubt, and the key lying in Sir Wilfrid’s vest pocket.
The nurseries at Maryiot Cells were situated in the more modern, that is to say late eighteenth century, wing of the house, which may explain why Isabella, naturally knowing nothing of these singular disturbances which were perplexing her elders, was not made aware of them till a measles epidemic caused a temporary change in the family’s sleeping arrangements. Blanche, Charlotte, Florence and little Lucy caught the infection and were nursed by Nanny Callaghan in the nursery or (as it was now called in honour of the older girls’ status) the schoolroom wing. The fourteen-year-old Alice and Isabella were accommodated as a precaution in the chintz room, at the end of the passage from their parents’ bedroom.
It may have been the change of bed and the excitement of sharing a room with big sister Alice (it was certainly not the onset of fever, for neither of the girls caught the measles) which made Isabella sleep so uneasily during the first few nights in her new bedroom.
Whatever the reason, Isabella – a child who slept like a dormouse as a rule, and whose digestion was excellent – was troubled by curious and disagreeable dreams. For such, her elders assured her, were the experiences that she related to them in the morning. And as such Isabella, a biddable child who seldom disputed the sacred conclusions of grownups, accepted them, secretly qualifying the acceptance however by calling them her ‘wake-up dreams’, for it certainly seemed to her that she had been wide awake at the time.
The first night she had been woken, she thought, by the sound of music. A queer, tinkling music, brittle as pieces of glass – something like dear Mama’s pianoforte, and yet again most unlike. The music was insistent, dulcet and alluring, but the startled, listening child did not like it. She liked it so little that after a few moments she cried out, ‘Alice! Alice!’
A grunt from Alice’s bed was blessedly reassuring, but when Alice asked, ‘What’s the matter?’ and dismissed Isabella’s, ‘I hear music’ with a good-natured, ‘Silly! Go to sleep,’ Isabella had to admit the justice of the rebuke, for the music had ceased – swallowed up in the profound nocturnal silence of the big house.
The next night Isabella was not aware that she had fallen asleep, though of course she must have dozed off as Mama and Nanny said so. She had only been in bed some ten minutes, it seemed to her, when her attention was caught by a swishing sound, as of a silken skirt, coming from the direction of the turret staircase at the end of the passage. This might have been Mama (there were no lady visitors staying at that time in the house), but the footsteps moved in a stealthy way that brought no comforting sense of recognition to the scared child. Her skin tingled with fear as she heard a rustling or scrabbling noise outside her door. There was no sound of the door opening, but the room had grown noticeably colder. All of a sudden she felt an icy pressure on her forehead. The sensation lasted for only a few seconds, passing as swiftly as it had come. Isabella lay stiff with terror, then she broke into loud screams. Before long, she was being hugged to Nanny’s capacious bosom, was sobbing out her incoherent alarm.
The next night the two girls were given a night-light. As things turned out it might have been more ag
reeable for Isabella if the room had been in total darkness, for when she woke up with a violent start, feeling chilled in spite of her warm coverings, she was able to perceive by the little lamp’s dim but steady light, that a figure stood at the foot of her bed. It was not Mama, nor Papa, nor Alice, nor Nanny, nor any of the maids, but utterly unlike them or anyone else that Isabella had seen in her short life.
‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
Bless the bed that I lie on.’
Something told Isabella unmistakably that this dreadful, unknown visitor was not one of the kind apostles, nor the guardian angel who, Nanny assured her, watched over good little girls’ slumbers.
Isabella yelped like a terrified puppy and dived under the bedclothes. Again Alice woke to find the room in its normal condition, though this time she had to get out of bed to soothe her frightened little sister.
But if Lady Skelton and Alice, following her mother’s lead, were kindly complacent about ‘Silly little Goosie’s dreams’, they were to experience a rude awakening.
The following night, whatever invisible influence was disturbing that part of the house was extraordinarily active. It was Isabella this time who slept through the most violent of the manifestations, though fitfully, her sleep shot through with nightmare images and sounds. When she woke up suddenly she saw by the glow of the night-light that Alice’s bed was empty, the bedclothes tossed back, her bedroom slippers still by the bed, the door of the room open.
Impelled by an unreasoning terror, Isabella scrambled out of bed and fled down the passage towards her mother’s room. Here she came upon Mama – a shawl thrown over her nightgown, her long hair in two plaits, a candle in one hand, the other thrown round the clinging Alice. Both her mother’s and sister’s faces were sharpened with an expression of fear that made them look quite unlike themselves.
Alice whispered, ‘Oh Mama dear, what can all this noise be? Isn’t it terrible?’ To which Lady Skelton replied, in the same scared, breathless tones, ‘Oh dear, oh dear. I can’t think what it is. I am sure it will disturb Papa.’
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton Page 5