by Guy Sheppard
*
Back at Coberley Hall’s gatehouse, I found the one-eyed greyhound digging at its door. The fretful animal was sniffing and whining at the base of the thick steel plate that completely blocked access to rooms over the archway.
Yet, stupid it was not and very determinedly did it attempt to tunnel.
‘Please don’t concern yourself, sir,’ said James, clutching a hammer and a plastic bag of blue grain in his hands. ‘It’s only rats. They’re moving in now that the pheasant shooting has ended.’
‘H’m, yeah, I know. I keep hearing them behind the walls of my bedroom.’
If the rats had dug a hole in the cement it had to be because they had discovered something to interest them upstairs. But not long enough was I permitted to linger.
‘Leave it to me, sir, I have enough poison here to kill them all.’
*
That night I sat in my coat and boots and glanced restlessly at the ever attentive cherubs that grinned at me from the ceiling while I wrote up my journal. Twice I heard the solid thud of something metal and with it a squeal, but it was all right, it was just James patrolling the landings with his hammer and poison.
Afterwards I could not help but doze off to dream the most vivid dreams of Lizzie. When a man’s wife died he ought to have been able to mourn. When he mourned there ought to have been memories to cherish. With cherished memories there should have come some sort of consolation. With consolation there should have been some happiness. Once he felt happy he could be truly glad she was dead and gone forever.
*
I woke with a start and rushed to relight my candle. Whispering in the ear of my snoring sight-hound, I whistled him to go with me but the stubborn animal lay on the bed and refused to move. Not that the creaky old floor unnerved me in the slightest. As for the unsettling portraits that hung along the gallery wall, I shut my ears to their sad sighs entirely.
Outside, the smog clothed the courtyard in its gritty mantle. I had to find my way almost by touch alone, had to use my fingertips to follow walls and duck through the porte-cochere in the quiet hope that the fog would hide my nefarious progress. The frozen ground proved quite treacherous but even so I broke into a run.
Thanks to Lord Hart, I knew precisely where to go with my spade in the graveyard.
32
‘You dug her up?’ cried Lord Hart, slicing his mallet hard into the crisp white lawn. ‘Are you insane? What the devil did you do that for?’
Thanks to me he failed to croquet his opponent’s ball. I had to hop like a rabbit to save my toes.
‘Not her, him.’
Naturally, I acknowledged that I had done something wrong, but he looked at me in order to reproach me from what moral high ground I could not know, would not tolerate. Besides his thick grey woollen scarf, he wore his familiar combination of blue blazer and ridiculously inadequate shoes in the morning’s bitter cold.
He behaved with alarm but quickly rallied.
‘That’s even worse, in a way, to know.’
‘The thing is, somebody didn’t follow Joseph Jones’s instructions left in his will, did they? Someone didn’t bury him with Countess Lucy after all. Am I right, George?’
Straightening his back, he pushed his tinted glasses higher up his nose. He looked incredulous. If ever there was a cheap trick, this was it, given that he it was who had first implored me to believe that the dead could return.
‘I never took you for a fool, Colin.’
‘So, please, will you tell me what you have done with her?’
‘We did what we thought best. We did what she wanted.’
‘We?’
‘Philip and I.’
‘So what did she, like, want, in your judgement?’
‘I’d tell you but it won’t make any difference.’
*
All about us, sculpted birds and monsters eyed us from their vantage points high up on top of the yew hedges. Somebody had been clipping beaks, claws and wings back into regular shape in the garden, he or she had begun recreating the original seventeenth century topiarian ‘fancies’. Half bird and half dragon, their sun-lit heads all peered one way as if at any moment they expected another person to walk through a gap at the end of the vine-covered arbour.
I picked up a mallet. Challenged myself, I resolved to challenge.
‘What is it you won’t tell me, George?’
A stone bench stood at the side of the garden and on it sat a solid silver tray. A pot of hot chocolate steamed in the chilly air and an extra cup lay at his disposal. It wasn’t for me.
‘Stand back, old chap, or I won’t have the ghost of a chance.’
‘Who cares, if it’s only ghosts you’re playing?’
His next shot went wide, too.
I tapped a heavy wooden ball of my own, sent it trundling. Lord Hart’s blue eyes darted to and fro behind his tinted glasses, as much out of hope as nervousness, while gleams of winter sun lit bristling beads of perspiration on his knitted brow. Whereupon he produced from his pocket several scorecards and a pencil.
He smiled.
‘Come, finish the game with us.’
‘You need to work on your swing first.’
‘You prepared to do a deal with the Devil, after all, Colin?’
‘Sounds extreme. I haven’t exactly been in contact.’
‘Doesn’t mean you haven’t disturbed the dead for no good reason?’
From my coat I held out the thing that I had exhumed last night. I opened it for him in the palm of my trembling hand.
‘Look here. This ivory box lay among your stepfather’s remains. You spoke as though Esti Dryzek made off with the countess’s ring, but I think that you and Philip robbed it from the old man’s corpse after he asked you to bury it with him in the grave. One of you made a present of it to Esti. It was you, wasn’t it? Should there be something on the broken bones inside this box? I think so. This is Lady Lucy’s finger, isn’t it?’
The four separate but interlocking pieces of bone were so ancient that they had turned a disgusting, reddish brown colour against some very old cerecloth. Each segment of finger left a dirty red smear on my own.
Upon sight of the box’s contents Lord Hart lurched forward. Because I caught him off guard he momentarily looked cornered. Then he lifted his eyes again in horror. Next minute he gave a wobble. Rigidity took hold of his arms and legs. Even as he toppled over I saw him stare wildly at something beyond me. Such tomfoolery was too like catalepsy for me to approach too close, followed by violent, successive muscular contractions and relaxations. Each clonic fit made him double up like a foetus on the ground.
With his hand he gripped his heart to his soul.
‘George,’ I cried, too late to catch him. ‘Don’t be such a prima donna. I’m not deceived any more, I want answers.’
*
Almost at once Rebecca arrived in the garden to take charge of our little drama. I had to suffer the disgusting drivel from his lordship’s lips as I helped her haul him safely into his wheelchair. Avoiding our patient’s proclivity to vomit, I stood well back while she slipped a fresh hot water bottle beneath his blanket.
‘What nonsense is this, Mr Walker?’
‘He lied to me about Countess Lucy.’
‘Why mention that name when you can see how ill it makes him?’
‘H’m, well, yeah, I don’t know. I think he puts some of it on.’
Rebecca’s sea-green eyes glared at mine as she drove her charge fast at my shins. She threatened to push and batter me with the chair’s front step. With a toss of her wild auburn fringe she would have driven right over me simply because I wished to wring the truth out of someone for whom illness was a weapon.
‘He doesn’t have to listen to your stupid questions, Inspector. Are you even a bona fide policeman, any more? Could it be that it’s all over for you in the Met from now on?’
‘How long was I out?’ asked Lord Hart, suddenly sitting straight in his wheelchair.
&
nbsp; ‘Er, no more than two minutes I’d say,’ I growled and set his Panama back on his head.
He gaped like a man coming up for air.
‘What are you doing here, Colin?’
No sooner had he spoken than Rebecca interrupted us. His forgetfulness seemed genuine this time.
‘Did you take all your pills this morning?’
He nodded absolutely taciturnly and calmly.
‘Then we mustn’t let Mr Walker frighten you any more, must we?’
‘Frighten? What do you mean?’
‘Come, George, you know how stress exacerbates the symptoms. You know the hallucinations can be triggered at any moment.’
‘The visions are the least of the problem…’
Ignoring him, Rebecca concentrated on getting him to focus. While she did so she rubbed frantically at his left side in order to reduce its lingering muscle rigidity.
‘Remember what we said about relaxing the diaphragm,’ she said urgently.
‘Did I really scare you, George?’ I interrupted. ‘Or did you see someone pass by the gap in the yew hedge in the garden?’
Again Rebecca’s eyes met mine. In order to serve someone so imperious she had to act very calm. In order to act very calmly she had to be two different people. Since she knew how to dissemble to keep her master’s confidence, she could be as close and reticent as his secret agent.
‘You should leave us alone now, Mr Walker. I have to give his lordship his injection.’
Lord Hart frowned. He could admit the truth of what had just happened but none of the truth admissible. Instead his gaze fastened on the hideous frieze that ran round the top of the wall of the gloomy passage we had just entered. Naked Bacchanals danced in very bad taste in honour of their riotous gods in lavish Italian-style grotesques that were more at home in Roman catacombs and grottoes than the Cotswolds. However primitively painted they were, the sylvan nudes, tigers, lynxes and spotted panthers were definitely not Elizabethan. No, really, they were.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘See what I see, Colin? Do you see the monster?’
My eyes came to rest on a naked, bearded figure with goat’s horns and hooved feet.
‘I see one hell of a party.’
‘For years I told myself that he was a Herm of Pan, the devil I did. I took it to be a personification of Nature, of the pre-Christian or non-moral world who would frighten travellers as they passed through the woods. The name signifies ‘all’. He’s representative of the ancient gods and heathenism itself, but now I’m not so sure what to call him.’
‘Who else, if not Pan?’
I had to peer into the corridor’s darkest, cobwebby corner, had to stand in the shadows where I came nose to nose with the man-beast with a shudder.
‘Whenever I consider his presence in this house I wonder who put him there, Colin. Is he a celebration of desire or a warning?’
‘Okay, yeah, I don’t know. Doesn’t mean one of us is going to drop dead right now, does it?’
‘If only we could be sure what he wants to tell us, old chap? What hope do you and I have if we can’t speak his language?’
‘Us?’
‘Vae victis. Woe to the vanquished, what? Don’t say you don’t feel him looking at you, too, Colin? You and I are fighting the same battle. So please, take my advice. Forget Lady Lucy’s grave or any other, unless you want to pay the same price I have for the sake of my brother.’
‘What good is life without those for whom we lived, anyway? If you literally won’t tell me about Countess Lucy’s grave, then tell me something else. Was it you who had Esti Dryzek buried in Chatcombe Wood? It was, wasn’t it?’
‘Haven’t I said, Colin? Why damn yourself for someone long after they are dead?’
‘Perhaps it is the dead who want to know.’
*
I was impressed. For Lord Hart to put a name to Coberley Hall’s curse required a great theatrical belief in the enigmatic and mysterious. Why should I not place my trust in his farcical performances?
I appealed to Rebecca who at first parted her lips sweetly and seemed sympathetic. It lasted but a second, this delightful smile of understanding and empathy before it reverted to a mask. Already she had taken hold of her patient’s silky blue blanket and was drawing it higher up his legs to make him comfortable. She was his guardian angel, not mine.
But I was not one to be hoodwinked that easily.
‘At least tell me what happened to your brother – at the end?’
‘Exeunt omnes, Colin. We must all leave the stage eventually. It’s the ones who choose to return that should concern us. We must be fully prepared when they remind, blame or worst of all demand the show must go on.’
‘That it? Honestly? You won’t tell me about him, either?’
‘Philip slit his wrists, old chap. What else can I say?’
*
Alone in my bedchamber I frantically studied my face in the mirror. My hair was almost as long as that Wild Man in the grotesques. Seconds later, I set to work with my scissors and razor. I poured cold water from my ewer into my basin in order to wash off surplus bristles. Soon I ran my hand round my new goatee and along the line of my neatly trimmed moustache. No amount of beard shaping could return me to the once virtuous man of law to which I had aspired. At least now, though, I aimed to be more Cavalier than pagan.
*
After dinner, I took refuge in the smelly library where I set to work all afternoon on Coberley Hall’s fusty accounts. I sat at the table that was strewn with old invoices and receipts and combed through details of such awful things as tangible fixed assets. Screwed up letters had gone unanswered and bills remained unpaid which was, frankly, perverse because Lord Hart was not a poor man. For hours I sat making sense of unexciting facts and figures.
It was a poor soul who failed to find much consolation in his own newfound wealth. Clearly Lord Hart would have me believe that the dead were not to be trusted, but it was not always the dead who were the monsters. I saw through his little masquerade. After all, I was not the one who was mad or ill.
With that, I marched down to the kitchen in the futile hope that Sara might have done my washing.
*
It was tempting to feel that, in such an irredeemably dismal part of the house that I might meet its ghostly chatelaine. Certainly the kitchen held many an old porringer, flagon and copper kettle that dated from her day. Soot and smoke coated the gloomy cavern’s vaulted ceiling whose vast weight of stone bore down like a sepulchral monument placed squarely on top of me.
For the future state of my stomach, I felt obliged to investigate how anyone could cook any food in a place so frightfully antediluvian.
Like a slightly drunken celebrity chef, I began to issue imaginary orders to gentlemen waiters, slaughter-men and kitchen boys. I instructed girls to pluck the peewits, partridges and larks on the blood-soaked wooden tables. My eyes wept at the onion sauce that was to go with the rich aroma of a stew and I sniffed the March-pane and ginger for sweetmeats after dinner.
Already I could touch the cold flesh of a carp fresh from the fishpond as my knife slit open its stomach and I could hear the dull thud of my blade as I tore open the belly of a deer recently killed in the woods. I sniffed the herbal sauce I was making from the fragrant yellow-flowered fennel and tasted the salt in the veal. Most of all I could see the sudden light of the fires as the oven doors burst open and gave the copper pans and tureens on the walls back their brightly burnished glow.
Here I had the trappings of a lost world at my fingertips, had all the props necessary to stage its revival in my head. The past’s best role was to be its future?
‘You want something, Mr Walker?’
The belligerent, red-haired Sara sat by a barred metal gridiron on which a chicken slowly roasted. On her lap she gave a pewter candelabrum a few desultory rubs with her cloth soaked in vinegar.
‘Why has his lordship sealed the door to the rooms over the gatehouse?’ I
asked, looking straight into her hostile emerald eyes.
Sara let go her cloth and began to scratch the bad skin on her forehead. She poked spots and pimples with a broken fingernail.
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Mr Walker.’
‘Somebody burns a candle in the gatehouse window every night.’
Had I thought to surprise her by my directness, I was mistaken. Her eyes simply narrowed very severely.
‘Nobody but you could think anyone lives there, Mr Walker.’
‘Really? Not at all?’
‘Not since his lordship’s poor brother Philip.’
As it happened, I forgot to ask her for one of the dead man’s shirts to take back with me to my bedchamber.
*
That night Lizzie appeared to me in a series of pictures and events so vivid that they were more real than I had ever before dared dream them. In fact, the difference between what had gone before and what came afterwards was sufficiently blurred to be utterly irrelevant. How else could anyone share past words in a wordless future?
Day 2. April 7. 2014.
Very sore throat – can’t drink a lot – vomits and brings up acid which burns her from the inside out. The visiting nurse agrees that there is some thrush which can’t be helped.
I give her sips of water from syringe and beaker.
Even throat spray hurts her now. Can’t swallow.
Day 1. April 8. 2014.
Cold again. I have to pull her thin sheet right up to her chin and close the window.
‘Don’t forget to pay for the newspaper, Colin.’
Old routine from home?
Her top lip is wasted away. Pared back. Her face has altered so much in the past few days. Skin baggy and wrinkled.
The semi-silence is almost unbearable – death is a reality just when we’ve settled into this new routine.
‘I must make the effort to stay awake, Colin.’
Extraordinary attempt to be sociable in the face of onslaught of so many pills and potions. In constant pain – rubbing her stomach. Same when she becomes lucid for a few sentences to explain.