The windows in the raftered room were small and heavily curtained. A large trestle table, lit by a shaded ceiling lamp, rested on sheets of plywood laid over the scuffed pine floor. I circled the room slowly, my back to the wall, unable to tear my gaze from the table.
“Your neighbors haven’t noticed?” I murmured skepti cally.
He tightened his grip on the metal cane. “ The houses across the lane are used only on weekends, and the Buntings have never had cause to complain.” A note of desperation entered his voice. “If word gets out, I’ll be ridiculed, shamed in front of the entire village. Is that what you want?”
A shrill scream rent the air once more as the diminutive locomotive entered a tunnel at the base of the plaster mountain. It emerged a moment later, chugged past the dairy farm and through the Victorian village, crossed the iron bridge above the silvery trout stream, changed tracks, and began the slow ascent that would take it to the ski resort on the mountain’s upper reaches. The miniature landscape was a world unto itself and filled the entire trestle table.
“I don’t know why you want to keep it secret,” I said, bending low to get a better view of the tiny chairlift and the geranium-filled window planters in the Swiss-style chalet. “People would pay to see what you have here.”
Mr. Wetherhead fingered an engine-driver’s cap hanging from a peg just inside the doorway. “You don’t find it . . . ridiculous? For a grown man, I mean.”
“Ridiculous?” I clapped my hands with delight as a guardrail descended to block the tracks. “It’s spectacular . . . brilliant. . . .”
Mr. Wetherhead peered at me anxiously. “Do you really think so?”
I put my hand over my heart and looked him straight in the eye. “I really think so.”
The small man hobbled over to fiddle with the control panel. “I suppose I could answer a few of your questions. What does Mrs. Bunting want to know?”
“She’s collecting material for her chapter on contemporary Finch.” I consulted the red notebook. “She hired me to do some research—find out a little about all of Finch’s residents—backgrounds, feelings about the village, funny sights any of you may have seen . . .”
Mr. Wetherhead’s hand jerked and the guardrail lifted. The train rounded a curve, chugged smoothly into the village, and came to a halt at the station platform. Mr. Wetherhead flipped a switch on the locomotive, and the chugging stopped. “Cup of tea?” he asked.
“Yes, please.” I stood back to give him room to limp ahead of me.
Walking through Mr. Wetherhead’s house was like touring a railway museum. Station signs covered the faded wallpaper, signal lanterns hung from the ceiling, and the floor was a maze of boxes containing extra track, bits of scenery, and a seemingly endless variety of model trains.
“It must’ve taken forever to glue all of those fir trees onto the mountain,” I said, pausing to admire a shiny black steam engine.
Mr. Wetherhead shrugged diffidently. “I’ve had a great deal of time on my hands since I left my job.”
“Did you work for the railways?” I asked.
“I was a track inspector on the Southwestern Line. They pensioned me off after my accident.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Will you mind taking tea in the kitchen?”
“ That’ll be fine,” I said. There wasn’t enough room to lift a teacup anywhere else.
The kitchen wasn’t spacious, but it was large enough to accommodate a Formica-topped table and a pair of folding chairs. Mr. Wetherhead filled the teakettle, motioned for me to take a seat, then began to search through his cupboards.
“I know I have biscuits here somewhere,” he murmured, a frown puckering his forehead.
“Will these do?” I put the bag of lemon bars on the table. “I brought them as a way of thanking you for your help with the parish history. I hope you’ll accept them as an apology, as well, for intruding on your privacy.”
“I pulled you into the cottage,” Mr. Wetherhead reminded me, coloring slightly at his own audacity. “I had to shut the door before the train whistle sounded. My mother was very strict about disturbing people with my bells and whistles.”
I pretended to take notes while Mr. Wetherhead gave me the potted version of his life. We all have them, I mused, gazing at the meagerly stocked cupboards. Our minds are filled with prepackaged anecdotes as handy as instant soup. Just add an audience, and they spill out. Not all of them, however, were as sad as Mr. Wetherhead’s.
Mrs. Wetherhead hadn’t much cared for anything her son loved. She ridiculed his passion for trains and belittled his decision to work for the railways. When a fall from a moving freight car shattered his pelvis and ended his career, she told him it was high time he grew up and stopped mucking about with choo-choos.
“I’m afraid I disappointed her yet again.” Mr. Wetherhead placed the teapot on the table and lowered himself laboriously into the other chair. “An uncle left this house to me when he died. I came here as soon as I was ambulatory and brought with me my collection of choo-choos.”
“It’s a shame that Finch doesn’t have a train station,” I observed.
“Is it?” Mr. Wetherhead filled my cup with fragrant chamomile tea. “My mother never learned to drive, you see, so it was difficult for her to visit me here. She was entirely dependent on the railways.” He picked up a lemon bar and regarded it thoughtfully. “She died last year, God rest her soul.”
Mr. Wetherhead, I thought, might act like a frightened rabbit, but he’d inherited something of his mother’s iron will. It had taken no small amount of courage for a man of his mild temperament to escape the clutches of a carping old crone, but he’d done so, in the end. I regarded him with respect and admiration—gratitude, as well, for reminding me of the power a mother exerted, for good and evil, over the lives of her children.
My growing admiration shot sky-high when he praised my lemon bars.
“ They’re on a par with Mrs. Bunting’s,” he said. “Have you considered entering them in the Harvest Festival?”
I ducked my head modestly. “The thought never crossed my mind.”
“I’d consider it, if I were you,” he advised. “You might find yourself with a blue ribbon.” He passed the plate of lemon bars to me, apparently unaware of the difficulties surrounding the festival.
“Have you been to Kitchen’s Emporium lately?” I asked.
“I never go to the Emporium,” he replied. “Mrs. Kitchen reminds me too much of my mother. I use the Naunton post office when I sell my trains.”
“Sell your trains?” I said, frowning. “Why would you sell your trains?”
Mr. Wetherhead looked pointedly at the red notebook. “Will my response be off the record?”
I laid my pen on the table.
“The changes in the National Health have made it difficult for me to live on my pension alone,” he confessed, “so I occasionally sell one of my trains through the post. There’s a good market out there among model railroad hobbyists.” He refilled my cup. “But you didn’t hear it from me.”
I twiddled my thumbs for a moment, dissatisfied with the state of a world in which a man had to sell parts of his dream in order to pay his medical bills. “Have you ever thought of turning your house into a museum?” I asked.
Mr. Wetherhead looked so startled that I could almost hear his mother’s voice, nagging away inside his head. “No one would come,” he protested.
“I think they would,” I told him. “I wasn’t joking when I said that people would pay to see your collection. Why don’t you try it out during the Harvest Festival? You could charge a nominal fee and—”
“Mrs. Kitchen is running the festival, isn’t she?” Mr. Wetherhead began stirring his tea with nervous, jerky swipes of the spoon. “I couldn’t possibly bring myself to work with her. I’ve a quiet, peaceful life, and I don’t want Mrs. Kitchen interfering in it.”
I saw his point much too clearly to object, so I let the subject drop and asked instead if I might bring Will and Rob aro
und to see the mountain layout.
“Anytime you please,” he said, with a bashful smile. “I’ve enjoyed talking with you,” he added. “Have I given you the kind of information Mrs. Bunting wanted?”
“Mrs. Bunting?” I’d become so caught up in our conversation that I’d lost sight of my cover story. “Er, yes,” I said hastily. “She’ll be delighted.”
“Hardly that.” Mr. Wetherhead turned his teacup slowly in his hands. “I’m probably the dullest person you’ve interviewed. I’ll wager my house has a more interesting history than I do.” He glanced up from the teacup. “You said something about legends, didn’t you?”
“Certainly.” I’d entirely forgotten the whopper I’d told as I was worming my way into Mr. Wetherhead’s house. It would have made things easier if he’d forgotten it, too. Legends had been conspicuously absent from Lilian Bunting’s notes.
“Will you tell me about them?” he prompted.
I flipped open the red notebook and scanned its pages, hunting for information on the schoolmaster’s house. “Your uncle’s house was built just over a hundred years ago,” I informed him, “to house the master of the village school.”
Mr. Wetherhead waited politely, clearly hoping for something a little less prosaic.
Hadn’t Lilian told me something about the schoolmaster’s house? “ The last master to live in here was a . . . a bit of a lad,” I said, echoing Lilian’s words. “It seems he was a bachelor, but that minor technicality didn’t stop him from fathering a classroomful of little scholars. I guess he wanted to keep those seats filled. Fascinating, huh?”
The expression on Mr. Wetherhead’s face made it plain that he considered scurrilous gossip a poor substitute for the promised legends. I was ashamed of myself for leading him on. He’d overcome considerable shyness for my sake—surely I could invent a legend or two for his. I put down my pen and closed the notebook, fairly certain that I could rely upon my own firsthand experience to satisfy Mr. Wetherhead’s craving for myth and magic.
“And then, of course,” I added in a confidential murmur, “there’s the ghost.”
Mr. Wetherhead’s palm smacked the table. “I knew it!” he cried. “But it isn’t my ghost. Brother Florin belongs to the vicarage!”
13.
“Excuse me?” I said faintly. “Did you say Brother Florin?”
Mr. Wetherhead flushed scarlet. “That’s what Mrs. Morrow calls him. Does Mrs. Bunting call him by another name?”
“N-no,” I said, my brain in a whirl. “In fact, Lilian doesn’t know very much about him at all. She was hoping you might—”
“Yes, of course. I’ll tell you everything I know. It isn’t much. I’ve only seen him once.” Mr. Wetherhead sat back in his chair and mopped his brow with a bright-red handkerchief. “It’s such a relief to know that Mrs. Bunting is aware of Brother Florin. I was afraid to tell anyone I’d seen a ghost, apart from Mrs. Morrow, and I only consulted her because she’s an expert on the subject.”
“Is she?” I squeaked.
“Mrs. Morrow’s a professional,” Mr. Wetherhead assured me. “She knew all about Brother Florin. She told me I was lucky to see him so clearly. There was a full moon on Sunday night, you know.”
“Sunday night?” I said, blinking. “You saw him on Sunday night?”
Mr. Wetherhead demurred. “ Technically speaking, it was Monday morning. I saw him at precisely eight minutes past midnight.”
Mr. Wetherhead’s eyes were dancing. He was smiling broadly and twisting his handkerchief into knots, hardly able to contain his excitement. Brother Florin was probably the most thrilling thing that had ever happened to him. How could I demote his spine-tingling specter to common criminal? I opened the red notebook and decided, for the time being, to go with the flow.
“Brother Florin always appears after midnight,” I stated firmly. I picked up my pen. “Where were you when you saw him?”
“In the room next to this one,” said Mr. Wetherhead. “It’s my bedroom. I was having trouble sleeping because of the heat, so I got up to open the window and I saw him. He rose out of the mist and went round the vicarage twice.” Mr. Wetherhead moved his hands through the air to illustrate Brother Florin’s queer perambulations. “He glided about, shifting this way and that, with his arms folded across his stomach and his hands tucked into the sleeves of his robe.”
“He was wearing a robe?” I said.
“The hooded robe of his order,” Mr. Wetherhead explained. “ That’s why I couldn’t see his face. But he was shaped a bit like Paddington Bear.”
I scribbled Paddington Bear in a cowl in the notebook. “What happened after he circled the vicarage?”
“He vanished.” The little man’s eyes twinkled. “One moment he was moving about, and the next he was gone. Just like that. That’s when I knew he was not of this earth.” Mr. Wetherhead smiled sheepishly. “I thought at first that he might be a burglar.”
“But you don’t think that anymore?” I said.
“No, I don’t.” Mr. Wetherhead chuckled. “If the vicarage had been burgled on Monday morning, the police would have visited by now, and I would’ve known about it, living next door as I do.”
I began to feel a headache coming on.
“I stayed at my bedroom window for two hours that night,” Mr. Wetherhead continued, “and I’ve watched for him every night since, but he hasn’t rematerialized. Is that the usual thing?”
“Absolutely,” I replied smoothly. “Sometimes Brother Florin goes for years between appearances. Mrs. Morrow was right when she said you were lucky to see him. She lives on the other side of the vicarage, doesn’t she?” I intended to have a word with Finch’s so-called ghost expert.
The small man didn’t answer directly. He began to turn his teacup in circles again as he informed me, hesitantly, “Mrs. Morrow’s business depends on her ability to keep confidences.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” I assured him.
“You know how people are,” he went on. “I wouldn’t want my name bandied about at Kitchen’s Emporium or the pub.”
“I understand,” I said, with feeling. “And I give you my solemn oath that I won’t breathe a word about Brother Florin at Kitchen’s Emporium or the pub.”
I kept my promise to Mr. Wetherhead. I didn’t breathe a word about Brother Florin at Peacock’s pub or Peggy’s shop, but while Bill and Francesca put the twins down for their naps after lunch, I exhaled half a dictionary to Dimity.
“Is it true?” I asked, huddled over the blue journal, with the door safely shut. “Is there really a Brother Florin?”
I don’t think so. Let me see. . . . There’s a Brother Glorin at Pricknash Abbey, near Gloucester, but no one knows about him yet—he’s still keeping his vow of silence. And there’s Brother Florian at Craswall Priory in the Marches—a lonely outpost for such a gregarious soul. It’s a pity the two can’t trade places. Perhaps I’ll suggest it to—
“Brother Florin, Dimity?” I prodded gently.
No, I can’t say that I know of a Brother Florin. I can assure you, however, that the Buntings have the vicarage entirely to themselves.
“So Mrs. Morrow is telling fibs about ghosts,” I said thoughtfully.
She wouldn’t be the first to do so. The long casualty lists of the 1914-1918 war created a market for mediums. I grew up in a world in which spiritualism was all the rage. It’s come back in vogue lately, hasn’t it?
I shrugged. “A lot of people are searching for answers in unconventional places these days.”
They conducted the same search when I was young. Séances, crystals, planchettes, palmistry . . . As the vicar will gladly tell you, there’s nothing new under the sun.
“Does any of it work?” I asked, curious.
I’ve no idea. I would never respond to anyone who accepted money to contact me, but there are others who feel differently. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on the subject.
I laughed. “Well, if you’re not, then Mrs. Morrow
certainly isn’t. Thanks, Dimity. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
I closed the journal, put it back on the shelf, and trotted up to the nursery. I hadn’t yet told my husband about Brother Florin. We hadn’t had the chance to talk in the car because Bill had bicycled home, and Francesca had been with us during lunch. I hoped to catch him before he went back to the office.
“Francesca?” I said as I entered the nursery. “Has Bill left yet?”
“Ten minutes ago.” Francesca was sitting in the rocker near Rob’s crib, knitting a blue bootie that made the products of my own clicking needles look more than ever like abstract art. “He told me to tell you that he’d catch up with you later.”
The nursery was scented with the irresistible perfume of baby shampoo and talcum powder. The boys, freshly bathed, were sleeping on their tummies in their cribs, their heads turned in the same direction, their fists curled in identical positions before their rosy faces. I walked over to stroke Will’s back. I wasn’t worried about waking him. The twins had inherited their father’s gift for sleeping soundly.
“Do you know Mrs. Morrow?” I asked Francesca.
Francesca looked up from the bootie. “Tall woman, lives next to the vicarage?”
“ That’s the one,” I said.
“I don’t know much about her,” Francesca admitted. “She loves cats, lives in London, hired Briar Cottage six months ago. Word has it that she’s writing a book. She’s no wedding ring, so there’s some who say the Mrs. is just for show. Doesn’t go to my church or Saint George’s—keeps herself to herself, by and large. Some say she’s got weird wiring.”
I straightened slowly and turned to face the rocker. “Pardon me?”
“She had the wiring in Briar Cottage redone when she moved in,” Francesca explained. “Had extra phone lines put in. But as I say, I don’t know much about her.” Francesca uttered the preposterous disclaimer without a trace of irony. I wondered, somewhat nervously, what she’d say if asked to describe her new employers.
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