Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall

by Guy Sheppard

  ‘What if I told you that Countess Lucy can bring back Lizzie?’

  ‘You convinced? It isn’t a fact. Is it? It’s you picturing her to yourself, just like your monster.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ I replied angrily. ‘I am not such a dreamer as to desire to give things a life they can never have.’

  ‘So why try?’

  ‘Fuck you, Jan.’

  ‘That it? You think you can simply ignore what you have already resurrected? And this… this countess, how can you be sure she will do what you ask?’

  ‘Because I have something she doesn’t.’

  *

  Singing erupted again in the nave. That is, people’s voices rose in a song of praise in a harmonious union of body and soul.

  Seconds later I felt able to focus again.

  ‘So tell me, did you have any luck in London?’

  By way of reply Jan felt in her bag and brought out her camera.

  ‘Okay, his sister does live at 33 Jessica Road as you said, but he is hiding out in a derelict coach-house at the end of the garden. You’re right, though, he’s shit-scared of someone.’

  ‘If you won’t believe in my bogy man then at least tell me about his.’

  Jan narrowed her eyes. It was as though my friend, sensing I was at the limits of reason, surrendered temporarily to the demands of my strange obsession. So saying, Paul Mitchell’s wizened features sprang to life on the bright, colourful screen as she pressed play on her phone. Frightened little eyes stared straight ahead while his lips struggled to work against a spasmodic tic of his facial muscles.

  Yet deranged was he not and most definitely did he not refuse to speak on camera.

  *

  ‘It all dates back to Gerald Turner, Miss Shriver. He had been spraying fields with DDT when his wife Louise arrived with some sandwiches. The wind must have changed course because she was soaked with insecticide. When she died from cancer some years later he couldn’t cope. He blamed himself. Which was why Esti and Viktor Dryzek’s arrival in 1979 seemed like a gift from heaven. That’s how it started, Miss Shriver, he paid them in cash out of his own pocket to help him run Upper Coberley Farm.’

  ‘For cash, you say?’

  ‘On account of the fact that they were illegal immigrants. There wasn’t a thing that the youngsters wouldn’t tackle, all except the Tamworths in the piggery down the lane which were deemed too unpredictable. Mr Turner never fed his animals well enough and hunger made them very bad tempered. Regularly he would beat them with a rod of iron. Not that it matters now.

  ‘In Gerald Turner’s eyes, he was doing the destitute teenagers a big favour by letting them live in a stable. They washed in the yard and ate scraps off his table.

  ‘Then, one day, I was loading hay in a barn when I heard a shout. Leaving my tractor’s engine idling, I ran up the side of the stables to the backyard of the farmhouse to find Esti with her back pressed hard up against the wall. She was stark naked. Mr Turner stood over her with perspiration pouring hot beads down his cheeks. In his hand was a towel.

  ‘ “Best let her alone, Mr Turner,” I said.

  ‘ “Stay out of this, Mitchell. It’s simply a misunderstanding.”

  ‘He might have said that, Miss Shriver, but Esti shivered and wriggled between the old man’s hands. He was pressing with all his weight against the wall either side of her head – I could see the whites of his knuckles.

  ‘That afternoon I overheard him and Viktor argue.

  ‘ “Touch my little sister again and I will kill you.”

  ‘Suddenly Mr Turner stormed off.

  ‘ “Esti’s no fool, she’ll soon see that a farmer’s wife might suit her very well.”

  ‘As things turned out, his words proved prophetic. But not for him, Miss Shriver, not for him.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘For that year and the next Viktor guarded his sister like a child. No longer would she cook their meals in the big house by herself, he would always accompany her. Nor were there any more hot baths. But Esti grew restless. No girl likes living in squalor for ever. Several times I came across them deep in conversation and it was always the same: she it was who was prepared to be more pragmatic.

  ‘ “Don’t you see, Viktor, if we’re a bit nicer to him, he might let us live with him in the big house.”

  ‘ “If you’re nice to him, you mean.”

  ‘ “How many times must I say it, Viktor? Nothing happened, he was just trying to give me a towel.”

  ‘ “We can’t trust him.”

  ‘ “A smile now and then wouldn’t hurt.”

  ‘ “It’s a smile that got you into trouble.”

  ‘ “Spoken like a man.”

  ‘Once Viktor came up to me in the yard, fretting and fuming. He made me his unwilling confidant.

  ‘ “Has he told you? He’s promised her a car.”

  ‘It was true, Mr Turner was teaching Esti to drive a tractor, but then both she and Viktor had been raised on a farm. She had great plans. I think, on a good day, if the old man wasn’t being too overbearing, she could imagine herself back home with her father in Poland. Every other day I saw Viktor berating her about something in the corner of a field or alongside the stables and always Esti shook her head as if to deny any wrongdoing. Always it was because she had chatted to Mr Turner or accepted some minor gift from him. Several times he drove her into town and bought her new clothes. He was trying to say sorry, I suppose. Not that it matters now.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he succeeded?’

  ‘The odd thing is, Miss Shriver, the day it happened I’d only just stopped at the piggery to unload a bale of straw from a trailer. It wasn’t feeding time, but as I said, sometimes Esti would stop by in secret to give the Tamworths a carrot or two and they’d get very excited. Then again I would hear them squealing when Mr Turner beat them. But this wasn’t that either, this was like nothing I had ever heard before. It never occurred to me that they were doing something so extraordinary. A moment later I looked round and saw Viktor and Esti emerge from a shed furiously bickering.

  ‘ “Don’t you see, Esti, the police will come and will want to question everybody. They’ll discover that we have no papers.”

  ‘ “But, Viktor, if we run away now they’ll blame us anyway.”

  ‘ “I’m going, even if you’re not.”

  ‘ “Where will you go?”

  ‘ “Anywhere but here. Maybe I’ll return to Europe. Please, Esti, this is your last chance.”

  ‘ “No.”

  ‘ “Then what will you do?”

  ‘ “I’ll hide in the woods, or somewhere.”

  ‘ “Are you crazy?”

  ‘ “Not as crazy as you. Why the hell did you have to push him so hard?”

  ‘How exactly the old man had come to collapse, Miss Shriver, I didn’t know. He might have had a stroke or heart attack because his father had died that way in his fifties. Glancing down, I noticed that a man’s cap lay in the mud at my feet. That’s when a terrible fear gripped me. My heart still pounds when I think of it. Of course, I knew then. As I said, Tamworths can be very aggressive. Seizing a broom, I climbed into the sty to drive them back but they threatened to turn on me in a frenzy. Cartilage tore off in great strips of gristle and one of Mr Turner’s eyes popped right out of its socket. Almost before I knew it, the pig at his neck opened his throat in a great fountain of blood. I heard him choke and bubble as the life poured out of him. Each rosy snout snuffled and gobbled. They say a cat will always eat the head off a rabbit first. It might have been my imagination, Miss Shriver, but I thought those pigs took their revenge on their mean master. Seconds later he was dead.

  ‘Viktor cornered me in the yard. He made me promise not to ruin Esti’s life for the sake of a bully. Naturally I went ahead and called the police straightaway, but by the time they arrived Gerald Turner was as good as eaten. I kept quiet about Viktor and Esti, decided not to point the finger now that there was no incriminating wound left to dis
play any evidence. I didn’t want her to suffer for the sake of a stupid quarrel I might have misheard. I’ve stayed silent all this time but now I feel implicated all over again. What if Viktor’s blow did precipitate Mr Turner’s fall into the sty? The uncertainty of it has turned into a curse. Now I’m haunted by my own cowardice, by a truth about to resurface long afterwards.

  ‘In the event, Joseph Jones made other arrangements to farm the land and Upper Coberley farmhouse was let out as a private dwelling. A couple of years ago it was sold to Laura Simmons.’

  ‘Which should have been the end to it.’

  ‘Except Viktor decided to return. He didn’t leave England after all, he took to roaming the countryside as a tramp. For weeks he had been back on the Coberley Estate and living like a wild man in sheds and caves. Several times I caught him poaching game, setting traps or stealing things from the crewyard. He had always been a bit of a thief anyway. He told me that he was going to take Esti away with him and I had to help him, but I told him that he was too late. Esti was living with Joseph Jones in his new house called ‘The Firs’ on Wistley Hill…’

  *

  ‘That it?’ I said. ‘Did Paul Mitchell have nothing else to say? What about the bogy man?’

  Jan rose to her feet.

  ‘Sorry, my camera battery went dead. But he and I did talk some more. He explained that, while living rough, Viktor had sold things he had stolen from Coberley Hall to acquire forged passports. He wanted Esti to start a new life with him in London. Either that, or he was going to join the army.’

  With no great thanks I paced the chapel, harboured too many questions to explain exactly the quandary that gripped me. It was a feeling of ineffable frustration – I thought myself incapable of rationalizing the irrational.

  ‘So what happened next?’

  ‘That’s just it, Colin, Paul Mitchell never saw Viktor Dryzek again, not until a few days ago. He simply turned up, in search of news, at his caravan. Years ago the army had discharged him after some sort of accident.’

  I swore.

  ‘Viktor was here?’

  ‘He’d heard that you, too, were asking questions about Esti.’

  I swore again. Of my own folly I was in no doubt. Yet, convinced was I not and most determinedly did I not believe everything.

  *

  Having given Jan a curt goodbye I was in time to endure the bumpy bus ride back to Coberley. I stepped down at the bus stop in some discomfort, dusting dirt off my coat, when I looked across the road. How reassuring it was to see that, in my absence, the ever industrious Adrian was choosing to drive his tractor in tedious lines up and down the field. Without thinking to consult me, my stalwart friend was taking it upon himself to make all those boring measurements necessary to calculate how much nutrient we would need to add to the soil hectare by hectare, in the spring.

  ‘When a man feels part of the natural cycle of planting and growing things, he can be at one with Nature,’ I told myself confidently. ‘By binding himself to life and death in a larger world he need never feel like a bough wrenched from a tree again, he need never be all on his own. A man not alone need not suffer a broken heart, need not break down like a hollow trunk that has rotted irrevocably from the inside.’

  I let myself into Coberley Hall’s gatehouse and moodily kicked stones down the path that led to the church. As I unhooked the creaking metal gate, a jackdaw patrolled the stone wall that once led to a dovecote at the corner of the graveyard. At first I did my best to ignore the gentlemanly creature as it folded and refolded its wings like a cloak.

  Suddenly my watchful guide dropped down to a pile of pointed slabs which stood propped like blank Gothic windows against the base of the wall, not far from the closest burials. It was not exactly a communicative bird, yet I could not heed its look but a certain communicativeness directed my attention. At my approach, it squawked and took wing again.

  I was seized by a definite desire to discover something and turned the first slab over. There was writing on it. Already I could see and move the second stone underneath. It was similar. If the slabs had been abandoned, they had not been defaced or destroyed except by wind and rain. I came to a third, traced its faded lettering with my hand and started to read:

  HERE LYETH LUCY POPE DAVGHTER VNTO JOHN

  DUTTON OF SHERBOURNE IN Y COTIE OF GLOSTER ESQVIRE.

  MARYED VNTO THOMAS POPE ONE OF THE SONNES OF

  WILLIAM POPE AND HAD ISSVE BY THE SAIDE LUCY ONE DAVGHTER ELIZABETH.

  LUCY POPE BURIED THE VIII APRIL ANNO DN 1656.

  Like the other headstones, Lady Lucy’s had long been set aside to be forgotten.

  *

  ‘You lost something, old chap?’

  I snapped out of my dream. Advancing towards me in his wheelchair, Lord Hart bade his nurse do a detour across the grassy graves.

  ‘So, please, can you tell me who discarded these slabs like so much rubble?’ I demanded.

  He leaned forward from his blanket and peered at me from under his Panama. Suddenly he raised his dragon cane. In response, Rebecca shot me a sour smile and narrowed her sea-green eyes beneath her fringe of auburn hair. Still she uttered not a word to me or master. Instead she manoeuvred his wheelchair to a halt at my toes.

  ‘Headstones come and go in every graveyard, Colin, the devil they do,’ declared Lord Hart. ‘There’s only so much room in the ground for us all.’

  ‘You mean after centuries we must pick and choose whom to remember?’

  ‘The old dead must make way for the new.’

  From a gargoyle at the top of the church tower came an angry shriek. It was our presiding jackdaw once more. His lordship’s face paled. So did Rebecca’s, but she was first to recover. When a woman felt ignored she could feel contemptible. When she was contemptible she had to stand up for herself, she had to remind everyone of her presence occasionally.

  ‘Come along, George, it’s too cold out here. You mustn’t linger any longer.’

  ‘Answer my question,’ I said. ‘How did Lady Lucy’s headstone come to be taken from her grave?’

  ‘My stepfather excavated every inch of the grounds of Coberley Hall. He wanted to unearth artefacts left behind by the English Civil War. Musket balls and an officer’s rusty carbine still reside in a drawer. His obsession knew no bounds, the devil it didn’t. He exhumed the countess with a shovel to see what he could salvage.’

  My heart skipped a beat.

  ‘So did he, like, discover anything very much, to your knowledge?’

  ‘A blue enamelled ring still rested on her bony finger.’

  Again Rebecca went to hurry Lord Hart’s wheelchair towards the house.

  ‘Wait,’ I cried and stayed her hand. ‘Who took Lady Lucy’s place in her grave?’

  Lord Hart held his hand high and rigid, not blinking except with cruel intent.

  ‘My stepfather left strict instructions in his will – he wanted to lie with her for all eternity.’

  ‘Honestly? Like man and wife? Why?’

  ‘To make amends.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Never you mind, Colin.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I know what a man’s obsession with the countess does to him, the devil I do. I’ve seen how mad that man can suddenly become until he’s driven wild. Joseph Jones came to rue the day that he dug her up, the devil he did, but not before my brother and I had to scrape his blood and brains off his bedroom wall.’

  ‘So what did become of her remains?’ I asked.

  He shook his cane at me quite violently.

  ‘Relax, old chap, they’re just bones.’

  ‘And the ring? What of that?’

  ‘Esti Dryzek took it for her own.’

  *

  That night Countess Lucy’s receipt book lay open for me at a new page on my bed. Tucked inside was a folded frontispiece torn from Henry Lyte’s ‘Niewe Herball or Historie of Plantes’ on the back of which was the draft of a letter:

  ‘Hon
oured sir, my comfort is that you are gone from here, lest my husbande should take you too, but I do sorely miss you. Deare Captaine Digby, come to me, though you be turned highwayman or pirate or otherwise long gone to the Americas, as I desire to do. The thought of you doth, like seede of basil thyme, cureth my infirmities of the hart, taketh away sorrowfulness, from which cometh malancholie, and maketh me merry and glad. Yet with all malice doth my husbande use my own cures in mighty violence against me. He would revenge all that I have done upon him, soe that I shall feare to live lest he call me witch in publick. To them I saye:

  ‘Come feareful bogle in forme of divel. Pore grete greife on this damnable house daie and night ever afterwards.’

  In short, I am poorly used and not yet set at liberty since I am still suspect, for is not Love our greatest Loss? I am with childe. And soe I hereby with longing am enforced to lye in my bed without you, which is no small greife to me. I do eat potage of goosegrass which when drunken doth cause lankness and kepe me from fatnesse, since in my stomach all food with great inconvenience makes hard shift to dwell in. I feare I am forgot of you, but by my bodily labour and endevours when I am able and in health do yearne to meet you again very soone. Whether this or som othere letter reach you or no this month or next, I will have you send word to me from whatever place ye be or elce to come before me to the gatehouse at Coberley som night by 12 of the Clocke to answere my call.’

  *

  I took heed. I also took hope from it. Forsaken myself, I refused to forsake. For while my very own Lady Lucy wept for her dead dragoon, we both knew that she could do better than to settle for the phantasm of a living person when I was flesh and blood and the other heartless.

  31

  The following day I kept indoors, watching a remarkable and unsettling haze descend upon Coberley Hall. The next day I did the same. Everywhere the miasmal vapours smeared the leaded panes of its darkened windows with sticky, crimson fingerprints. Never before had it occurred to me that I inhabited so dismal a world. Something inauspicious seemed to come with the bloody veil.