The Dead of Winter

by Chris Priestley

  ‘Michael?’

  Jerwood was talking to me. Groggily I turned to face him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You look pale.’

  ‘I … I am …’ I could not find the words to finish the sentence.

  ‘You are fatigued after the journey,’ Jerwood said.

  ‘And hungry too, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Hodges added. ‘Dinner will be served directly.’

  The warmth and light and bustle of activity provided at least a welcome change from the cold and dark of the courtyard. But this contrast only served to remind me once again of the cruel fate of the woman on the road and the seeming heartlessness of those around me. Anger and frustration eventually seeped back in to wash away the sense of dread.

  Mr Jerwood was clearly well known at the house. It was almost as if there was feeling of relief that he had come, as though he was a doctor rather than a lawyer. Not that I felt in any way that I was the beneficiary of any reflected affection. The servants, when they looked at me at all, did so with stolen, surreptitious glances.

  ‘Sir Stephen and Miss Charlotte will be along presently,’ said Hodges. ‘Come into the kitchen, sirs, and warm yourselves.’

  The kitchen was an enormous vaulted room, shining with copper pans and utensils of every kind, the walls heaving with plate racks. There was a huge cooking range at one end and an open fire alongside it. Hodges asked Jerwood if he would like a drink.

  ‘I’ll take a glass of brandy if you’ll join me,’ he replied.

  ‘Aye, sir,’ said Hodges. ‘Let’s sit by the fire a while.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘But I need the … I need to …’

  I was unsure of the correct term to be used in such a grand house, but Hodges took my meaning.

  ‘There’s a water closet across the hall, sir,’ he said, pointing to the door through which we’d entered the kitchen. ‘Just to the left of the staircase. Take a lamp with you.’

  I left the two men alone. Hodges was setting down a bottle of brandy and two glasses on a table by the fire. I walked out into the vast entrance hall, struck by how dark it was in comparison to the kitchen. What illumination there was was provided entirely by candlelight and oil lamps that gave little light, and seemed only to increase the blackness of the shadows. I took it that the modern convenience of gas had not yet arrived at Hawton Mere.

  A mighty soot-blackened fireplace stood on one side of the hall, its mantelpiece supported by two straining Amazonian females. On the other side, a great staircase rose up.

  The floor was made of different shades of inlaid marble, set into a mosaic pattern that gave the unsettling illusion of being constructed of dozens of solid cubes. The effect was so convincing that I found myself wanting to hop from one to another, though the floor was quite flat.

  To my surprise, the water closet contained a very modern flush lavatory, with a richly decorated bowl covered all over with a pattern of irises. It seemed so remarkably out of keeping with the ancient house and its dreary interior decorations.

  But when I pulled the chain, the ancient plumbing groaned and vibrated and sounded as though it might explode at any moment. I could feel the tremors beneath my feet as I walked back towards the kitchen. Then something moved behind me.

  I turned and, though I could see nothing there at all, I was sure that something was hidden in the shadow of the staircase. I went back to investigate.

  There was a huge mirror there, with a gold frame. The frame gilt was missing here and there and the mirror pockmarked about the outer edges. It was rather like gazing into a frozen pool.

  ‘I was terrified of that mirror as a child,’ said a voice behind me.

  I turned to see a tall, thin man. He was dressed all in black and was silhouetted against the candlelight. The effect was so strange that I stepped back, more than a little afraid. A huge wolfhound edged forward, head down, growling.

  ‘Clarence,’ said the man, as though to a child. ‘Is that any way to greet a visitor?’

  But, alarming though the wolfhound was, I saw very quickly that it was not me he was growling at, but the mirror behind me.

  ‘I am your guardian, Michael,’ said the man, holding out a hand. ‘Sir Stephen Clarendon. I am very pleased to meet you.’

  As he said these words he stepped into the light and I had my first glimpse of the man I had heard so much about and in whose hands my fate now rested.

  He was pale and gaunt; his eyes were deep-set and peered out, twinkling dimly from beshadowed sockets. Long white hair was swept back from his high forehead and dripped into coils at his collar. He held out one of his long, pale hands for me to shake and I did not prolong the greeting: his hand was as cold as it looked. If there was a spider at the heart of this house, then surely it was he.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ I replied without conviction.

  ‘I was very sorry to hear about your mother,’ said Sir Stephen.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘You have your father’s looks,’ he said with a half-smile. ‘Have you your father’s courage, I wonder?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ I answered.

  ‘Time will tell, eh?’ he said. ‘Time will no doubt tell. Your father was a good man and a very brave man, my boy. As you know, without him I would not be standing here today.’

  I made no response and I think my expression betrayed my feelings that this seemed a poor trade. Sir Stephen narrowed his eyes a little and his smile flickered and died.

  ‘This is my sister, Charlotte,’ he said after a pause.

  It was as if he had lit a lantern. As dark and gloomy as he was, so the woman that now stepped forward was like a bright flame.

  ‘Michael,’ she said, her dress swishing over the floor, and she embraced me as though I were a long-lost and dearly loved relative. ‘I am very pleased to meet you.’ Her voice was clear and pure.

  Her skin, I distinctly remember, was like silk it was so smooth. She was pale too, but in her the paleness was like marble, finely carved, and framed by tumbling black ringlets. She was quite the most beautiful woman I had ever seen until that moment or since, and though her face was a little cool in its beauty, it changed its climate entirely when she smiled, as she did then.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, ma’am,’ I replied.

  ‘Charlotte,’ she corrected. ‘We shall be friends, shall we not, Michael?’

  ‘Ah, Sir Stephen,’ said Jerwood, coming from the kitchen with Hodges. ‘Good to see you again, sir. And Charlotte, you are looking as lovely as ever. You have met your ward, I see.’

  ‘Tristan,’ said Charlotte, ‘you must tell me all the news from London over dinner. Perhaps you could show Michael to his room, Hodges?’

  ‘Come along then, sir,’ said Hodges, turning to me. ‘I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.’

  Chapter Five

  Hodges fetched my bag from the hall and, picking up a lamp in the other hand, set off, with me in pursuit.

  We climbed a wide staircase with carved wooden posts and a sweeping handrail smoothed by centuries of use. The walls of the stairwell were lined with a dark wallpaper covered all over with stylised foliage, so that every inch of wall space seemed to coil and sprout in a way that was quite dizzying to my eyes.

  The light from the lantern created a bubble of relative brightness, like a white bloom shining in the midst of the dingy forest of foliage crowding in on us, and I clung to its glow with the dogged determination of a moth.

  Grim portraits of Sir Stephen’s ancestors stared out at me as I passed, their faces perched atop white lace ruffs like heads on dishes, looking at me with expressions that seemed to declare their disapproval of my presence in their house.

  At the top of the stairs was a huge and rather sinister grandfather clock, bristling with carved pinnacles and curlicues, as ornate as a medieval bell tower and with a tick so deep and resonant that I could almost feel the teeth in my skull vibrate as I walked by.

  I followed Hodges down a maze
of corridors, hurrying to keep step with the servant, for I was all too aware of the darkness that moved like a great beast behind us. I had an unnerving sensation that it concealed something terrible, something I had a horror that I might see were I ever to turn my head. My heart had been fluttering ever since I arrived. I felt faint by the time we reached the door to my room.

  I stepped in quickly after Hodges and he used his lamp to light another in the room. A fire was dying to red embers in the hearth, giving the place a welcome warmth of temperature and colour. But the effect was short-lived.

  Just as a face betrays the life of the owner, so too a room carries a trace of the lives lived within its walls. This room positively ached with sadness. It was not just that the room was dark – and it was dark in furnishings and in its greedy accumulation of shadows – it was the very air that seemed tainted with misery.

  I looked about me. A large bed with a carved wooden headboard came out from one wall and a washstand stood nearby. An ugly wardrobe with an oval mirror loomed in the shadows at the lamplight’s edge. When Hodges spoke, I gasped, startled, having forgotten he was there.

  ‘There is a flushing lavatory at the end of the hall to the right,’ said Hodges with a grimace. ‘Miss Charlotte had them installed last year. But they are frightfully noisy devices, sir, as you may already have discovered. I would ask you to use the pot under your bed if you need to relieve yourself in the night.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Mr Hodges.’

  ‘Just Hodges, sir,’ he said with a smile. ‘Just call me Hodges.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Will that be all, sir?’

  ‘Yes, I think so, Mr – sorry – Hodges.’

  ‘Dinner will be served at eight, sir.’ Hodges bowed a shallow bow and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  I was thoroughly exhausted and I lost no time in getting changed while there was some remaining warmth from the fire. As I did so, I was startled to see a boy standing at the far side of the room.

  I quickly realised that it was an illusion, however. It was a painting – a full-length portrait of a boy about my age, though of a much more slender build and very pale. It was the paleness and fine features of the face that put me in mind of Charlotte, and thence to Sir Stephen. I felt sure that I was looking at a portrait of my guardian as a boy, a theory that was confirmed by a label on the frame. There was a knock at the door and I turned to see Jerwood.

  ‘Ah good, you are getting changed for dinner. I am just next door. When you are ready we can walk down together.’

  ‘As you wish, sir,’ I said. I confess I felt somewhat relieved.

  Dinner was a rather strained affair. The dining room was large and the only illumination came from candlesticks on the tables, whose light barely reached the walls.

  Sir Stephen sat at one end of the long table, Jerwood and myself on one side and Charlotte on the other. Charlotte did most of the talking, quizzing Jerwood continually about London society and the latest fashions, and it was clear that Jerwood knew or cared little about either.

  When she had exhausted Jerwood’s meagre knowledge of bonnets and dance steps, Charlotte turned her attentions to me and bombarded me with questions.

  ‘Tell us about yourself, Michael,’ she said. ‘We know so little about you. What sort of interests do you have?’

  ‘I … I don’t know what to tell you,’ I said.

  ‘Well, let me see. Are you a boy who likes sport?’ she asked. ‘Are you a runner? You have the look of a runner about you, doesn’t he, Stephen?’

  I was too slow to reply and so Charlotte continued.

  ‘Cricket, perhaps? All boys love cricket, I am told.’

  ‘I like it well enough,’ I replied.

  When she saw there would be no further elaboration, she tapped her fingernails together with an audible patter and pursed her lips.

  ‘Are you a scholar then?’ she asked after a pause. ‘Would you rather be in the library than on the sports field?’

  I cast a quick glance at Jerwood, who I knew from our conversation in the cemetery had received a not very glowing account of my school life.

  ‘I do enjoy reading,’ I ventured.

  ‘You do?’ said Charlotte brightly. ‘What sort of books do you like to read? History books? Myths and legends? Tales of adventure? Novels?’

  She said this last word with a sour expression that betrayed her opinion of such works. I opened my mouth to reply, but Jerwood interrupted with what I firmly believe to be a wholly invented piece of gossip about a politician I had never heard of and so saved me from further inquisition.

  Sir Stephen seemed content for others to dominate the conversation and said very little. My view of him was partially obscured by the flickering flame of a candle, but I just knew that he was studying me intently and I found this unseen gaze very discomfiting.

  Then I became aware of Charlotte tapping her glass with her long fingernails as she listened to Jerwood. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. But the noise began to change – to become a banging which seeped slowly into the fabric of the room. I lifted my head to try to determine the source, but it was clearly distant, even though the sound seemed to pulse through the walls. I watched as the water in my glass rippled in concentric rings. No one else appeared to take any notice.

  Sir Stephen suddenly let out a groan and pushed himself away from the table.

  ‘I rather think I may retire,’ he said, getting to his feet and glancing at me with a look of wonder on his face.

  ‘I’ll come with you, Stephen,’ said Charlotte, rising from her chair and exchanging a concerned look with Jerwood. Jerwood and I stood up too.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, ‘if you will excuse us.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jerwood.

  When they had left, Jerwood sighed and stared at the wine glass he cradled in his hand. I opened my mouth to speak, but he interrupted.

  ‘Michael,’ he said, ‘Sir Stephen is suffering from a kind of nervous exhaustion. It grows ever more serious. I fear for his life, I really do. Every time I see him he seems so much frailer than before.’

  I did not know what to say and so I said nothing.

  ‘Come. We are all tired,’ said Jerwood, getting to his feet. ‘I think perhaps it would be best if we turned in.’

  I followed Jerwood out of the dining room and up the stairs but we spoke not one word further until we bade each other goodnight in the passageway outside Jerwood’s room.

  It was not until I was undressed and my head rested on the pillow that my thoughts returned to the woman on the road. I wondered where she was at that moment, picturing the terrible darkness that surrounded Hawton Mere.

  The thought of that poor creature alone and unloved quickly mingled with my own sense of being friendless and trapped in this awful place, and this together with my sense of injustice at being disbelieved and disregarded soon brought tears. Alone in my room, I pulled my blankets round me, buried my face in the pillow and began to cry.

  I tried to stifle the sound of my weeping, knowing that Jerwood was next door, but for a while despair overcame me completely and I curled myself up into a tight ball. So lost was I in my grief that it was some time before I registered that there was a strange echo to my sobs.

  At first it seemed merely that they were amplified somehow and I thought this to be a product of the stillness and the disorientating blackness. But then I could hear that the sobbing was not quite in register with mine, as if two singers had begun to drift apart mid song. This effect was so odd that it gradually brought my sobbing to an end; but the echo continued. Someone else was crying – I was convinced of it.

  In an instant I sobered up from the intoxication of my misery. Fear flooded in and my senses jumped to attention. The sobbing was still there, although it was becoming fainter as I listened intently.

  I was about to get up from the bed – though I have to confess that the room was so dark I couldn’t have been certain of which direction to
walk in. But in any case, the sobbing had now ceased. The house was as silent as a monk.

  I strained my ears to hear, but there was nothing save the panting breath issuing from my own dry lips. The glow from the fire seemed to expand as my eyes adjusted to the gloom and I became, by degrees, more sure that I was alone.

  Then I remembered what Hodges had said about the water closet and recalled the extraordinary sound the plumbing had produced. I smiled to myself and eagerly embraced the notion that the noises I had heard were the hissing of water pipes.

  All the same, the sound was so uncanny that I still felt the need to pull the blankets over my head so as to drown it out should it return, cursing whoever it was who had felt the need to use the lavatory.

  Chapter Six

  The following morning I rose from my sleep a little uncertain as to where I was. The events of the previous day had become confused and dreamlike in my recollection. I struggled to make sense of what I had heard and seen. Above all, I was aware of feeling tense and apprehensive almost the instant I awoke.

  I stood up dazedly and made my way to the window, pulling aside the heavy curtains. I hadn’t looked out of the window before falling asleep and so had no idea whether my room faced the inner courtyard or, as I now realised it did, afforded a view across the wide expanse of fenland that surrounded this ancient house.

  My window was somewhere near the gateway we had passed through in the night, and I could see now that the bridge that spanned the moat had two great stone creatures on either side – dragons or griffons or some such heraldic beast – whose twins also graced the balustrades on the stone steps up to the main door of the house.

  Dank, impenetrable night had been replaced by a dazzlingly bright and ice-clear daylight, the sky almost white above. The light scattering of snow that had fallen in the night had frozen where it lay and the whole frosted land glinted as though dusted with sugar.