I think he sensed it as well as I did. For form’s sake, however, he performed a belated introduction, as though I was merely the daughter of people with whom he was staying. I forced a smile and tipped the brim of my bonnet against the sun, while Bram went on to explain in sepulchral tones the tragedy we had just witnessed on the beach.
‘Most unfortunate, really, as Miss Sterne offered to be my guide today, and – well, it’s been upsetting for her. So I’m escorting her back to Whitby.’
He did it very well, making me sound like the sheltered child of doting parents, but I fear Mrs du Maurier was too much a woman of the world to be convinced. By the time they were ready to move on, having agreed to explore Bay’s tiny squares and footpaths before taking luncheon at the hotel, I was rigid with tension. As Bram raised his hat in farewell, I could see the band of sweat around his forehead. I wanted to clutch him, hang on to his arm, have him circle my waist in a declaration of unity, but instead we had to turn uphill and walk on, keeping a foot or more apart.
‘Would you credit it,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘meeting those two again? Do you think they believed a word?’
I shook my head, unable to speak for a sudden fit of hysteria which insisted on breaking out every time I met his glance, or thought of the ordeal we had just been through. Not that it was funny in the least – indeed, the laughter felt very close to tears. It was cured, however, by another shock. As bad luck would have it, Bram was just buying our tickets for the train back to Whitby when I noticed a tall, white-haired gentleman in grey crossing the station forecourt.
Old Uncle Thaddeus.
With a frantic signal to Bram, I dived for the barrier. Fortunately, the ticket collector let me through on to the platform, where Bram, looking mystified, joined me a moment later. Just in time I was able to explain and issue hasty instructions. As Old Uncle Thaddeus appeared, I slipped into the ladies’ waiting room until I heard the train chugging up the incline from Scarborough. I peered out, judging the moment when he would be too occupied in finding a free compartment to notice me boarding at the far end in Third Class. I dared not join Bram for fear of being spotted.
On disembarking at West Cliff station, again I hung back, wanting to be sure that Old Uncle was well on his way into Whitby before I headed along the road in the opposite direction. Bram was waiting for me on a public bench about a hundred yards away, considerably more cheerful than when we’d parted. He was delighted to have met the head of the family at last, and travelled with him on the train. Not only had he travelled in the same compartment, he had even engaged Old Uncle in conversation about his book on local history and folklore.
‘He reminds me of Tennyson with that beard and those features,’ he said warmly, ‘and a little of the American poet Walt Whitman – although with those eyes, I swear he looks fiercer than either.’
‘He should be wearing a horned helmet,’ I said tersely, ‘never mind a top hat.’
Bram laughed at the picture, which made me smile too and went some way towards curing the alarms we’d both experienced. On the way back to Newholm we even congratulated ourselves on our handling of one difficult situation – Old Uncle Thaddeus – and told each other that with regard to Mrs du Maurier there was absolutely no reason why she should doubt Bram’s story, or the impression he had been at pains to put across. I don’t suppose we were convinced by that, but we said it anyway. There seemed little more to be said about the body on the beach.
Twenty-four
That night it seemed we had to take the path to Ruswarp, crossing the river to Cock Mill Woods. They were as eerie as ever, with sudden cracks and sighs in the darkness all around us. I clung to Bram’s side, almost pushing him along; but even as I sighed with relief at leaving the woods behind, he insisted on taking a detour up to the abbey. I begged him not to go, yet somehow we fetched up by Tate Hill, where a funeral procession was gathering.
Dozens of fishermen in their woollen ganseys and great leather seaboots were awaiting the arrival of the coffin. When it came it was more like a stretcher, carried by four closely shrouded figures. I was confused, but when I looked, I saw that the body was that of Magnus Firth, slumped exactly as we had seen him on the slipway that morning. A blubbery, bloodless corpse, with those indelible lines on his face. And Bram was saying to me: ‘Is it the blood? The blood that makes the life? Davy Jones has taken his...’
He kept on and on repeating those words. And all the while I was begging him to hush as we followed the procession up the Church Stairs, pausing, as the bearers paused, at every long flat coffin rest.
‘Rest – rest? He’ll never rest,’ Bram whispered in my ear. ‘They’ll have to stake him down...’
The church was dark, not a glimmer to guide or speed the departing soul. By moonlight the procession ringed the ancient building, then moved out along the cliff, to the very edge of the graveyard, where the vastness of the open sea beyond seemed endless and eternal. As we stood gazing, a great black hole appeared at our feet; the shrouded figures took hold of the body, swung it three times, and dropped it into the grave with a sickening thud.
At once there came an ominous rumbling, a shaking of the ground like an earthquake. It seemed the whole cliff was collapsing, but from the shadow of the ruins careered a massive old coach drawn by six black horses, plumes tossing in the moonlight, mouths flecked with foam, hooves pounding through the graveyard. They came to a snorting, rearing halt, leaving a path down which came several figures in dripping oilskins. I smelt the dank smell of the sea as they circled the open grave. As the dead man arose to join them, they returned to the coach. Moments later, the horses were off again and that sinister conveyance was thundering and rattling all the way down Church Stairs, to turn at the bottom along Haggerlythe. As we peered down from the graveyard, it plunged on, beyond the end of the street and over the cliff, to be lost in the foam below...
I felt myself falling with it, screamed out loud and awoke with shock. Those fearful images leapt at me from the darkness, so large and real and vivid I could not believe they were just a dream. Bram reached out to hold me and I fought him off; then all at once I was clinging to him like a child, trembling and whimpering in his arms.
‘Tell me,’ he whispered, ‘tell me what it was...’
With returning sense I did, and in the telling recognised events from the day before, mixed with fear and anxiety and Old Uncle’s folk-tales. Aware of nothing more until late morning, I woke feeling thick-headed and confused. Then the dream came back to me like a thump in the chest, and at once I remembered Magnus Firth and his fall from the cliffs.
‘You mean his murder,’ Bram responded tersely when I said as much. Having woken him, my nightmare had kept him from sleeping again. He was edgy and there were shadows beneath his eyes. A crumpled pile of notepaper gave evidence of several restless hours spent working; but again, when I dared to mention it, I was wrong.
‘Letters,’ he said. ‘I spent most of the night trying to write letters, and thinking of what I ought to do for the best.’
‘What you ought to do?’ I repeated in alarm, envisaging gaols and judges, Bella on trial for her life.
‘Yes. I can’t just sit here, like a rabbit in a trap, waiting for something to happen. Florence, at least, deserves an explanation.’
Weak with relief, I sank into the nearest chair and tried to stop a tremulous smile from broadening too far.
~~~
By the time I went down to the studio, news of the discovery of Magnus Firth’s body was all over Whitby. Jack had heard about it and was full of speculation. It took a vast effort of will to appear surprised, while I dreaded what might come next. I’d not been there long, however, when Isa Firth walked in, and it was a measure of my anxiety that I was more fearful than annoyed by her presence. Under normal circumstances I would have been gratified to see Isa looking grim and a little red about the eyes, but this was different. Obviously, she had been called home from Middlesbrough.
I made a fuss
of finding my knives and brushes, lighting the gas ring and mixing the glue, while steeling myself to offer condolences. As far as I knew, Magnus Firth’s death was still a mystery, so it was safe to ask questions.
‘Well, how can anyone know?’ Jack said. ‘He went out Monday night and was found Tuesday morning at Bay – drowned. He may have been caught in that sudden storm – anything could have happened.’
Very true, I thought, keeping my face turned away. ‘I suppose he was out fishing?’
There was a pause, and when I dared to look at Bella’s twin she was frowning and twisting her fingers into knots. ‘No, the lads were out in the boat. He was on foot. On his way to, er, Saltwick, I think, to meet a friend.’
‘Not a smuggling friend, by any chance?’
‘For God’s sake,’ Jack hissed, glancing at the open window as though coastguards were lurking outside, ‘it’s no joking matter!’
‘And I didn’t mean it to be. Don’t forget,’ I hissed, ‘that I lived under his roof. I know his habits, his comings and goings, just as well as Isa.’ I turned back to her and forced the next question to my lips. ‘Was he on his own?’
Again, she glanced down at her fingers. ‘Yes.’
She knows Bella was with him, I thought; or, if she doesn’t, she’s guessed. Suddenly, the fact that Bella was not alone, that someone else shared my knowledge – even her sister Isa – lifted a tremendous burden. Isa might be sly and vindictive, but she was still Bella’s twin, still a Firth, and she knew better than most what the family had suffered under her father’s hand.
‘Well, then,’ I said softly, ‘I dare say anything could have happened along those cliffs in the dark. Especially in that storm.’
‘Aye, that’s what I keep thinking.’ As her voice cracked, her eyes reddened even more. Embarrassed, she turned away. ‘Well, I’d better be going – Mam’s on her own and she’s upset. Thanks, Mr Louvain, for your help.’
‘That’s all right, Isa. Call in any time.’
‘What about Bella?’ I asked, my voice sharper than I intended. ‘How’s she? And the others?’
Isa shrugged. ‘Lost without him,’ she said with bitter irony, and for the first time I sympathised, knowing what she meant. They’d all hated their father, I knew that; but with him gone their lives had no direction.
Twenty-five
Bram’s moods were often unpredictable, but with the posting of his letters home, he became edgier than ever. One morning a couple of days after the storm, I took the opportunity of his absence to go through his desk. I felt ashamed of myself, but my curiosity was intolerable. He’d written to both Florence and his mother, I knew that, and I felt there might be copies, or even odd pages left from those I’d seen stuffed into the kitchen fire.
In his hasty writing were several loose sheets and my hopes were raised at first, only to be dashed as I realised they were notes on local folklore, or the beginnings of stories. One, with a first-person narrative, seemed quite extensive, and it caught my attention. I started reading, but for some reason it had been cut up. My frustration was intensified by the abrupt termination of each page and the lack of continuity between them. Nothing made sense. Crossly, I searched for more, until, on the point of giving up, I had the wit to connect a pot of paste at the back of the drawer with the odd pieces of manuscript. At once I examined a stack of books on the window ledge, and there, between novels and those volumes he’d borrowed from Whitby library, was a bound notebook with marbled covers, its pages bulging with the missing pieces of the story.
I thought it a most peculiar method of putting anything together but, surprisingly, it seemed to work. The story concerned a trio of friends, two men and a woman, travelling abroad on the Continent. To me, the narrator was Bram and, in spite of some obvious differences, I was able to recognise in the other two characters elements of Irving and Ellen Terry, and also the general circumstances of the tale, which seemed to take place in a fortified town in Germany. Nuremburg, I guessed, from the way he had described it to me previously. But in all the anecdotes, I recalled no mention of any grisly accidents in the torture chamber, although he had certainly described his visit there, together with the hideous items of persuasion ranged about the walls.
These were described in detail in the story – racks and boots, spiked chairs and beds to break the bones – but the worst item of all was the crudely shaped Iron Virgin, in whose embrace lay certain death. With eye-slits and grinning mouth, this massive, bell-shaped figure had a hinged door, which could only be hauled open by ropes and pulleys. On the inside were long metal spikes, two to penetrate the eyes, and two beneath to pierce the heart and vitals.
At the time of describing it to me, Bram had told how poor Ellen Terry, suddenly overcome by the horror of the thing, had gone to sit down, then with a shriek of alarm jumped up again, jabbed by the rusty spikes of a torture chair. Only her dress was damaged, but even so she had been upset and eager to leave. Irving, Bram said, had laughed about it; and then, oblivious as ever, he’d insisted on a minute examination of every instrument on show.
From all Bram had told me, I could imagine the man being exactly like the character in the story, brushing off all attempts to dissuade him, all concerns for his well-being, in his determination to find out what it felt like to stand in the shoes of a victim. And he would laugh – I could almost hear it – at the ropes and pulleys required to hold open the door, at the encrusted stains on those iron spikes within.
It made me shudder, but if the story was too realistic for comfort the ending was gruesome. It left me feeling shaken, even alarmed by the darker recesses of Bram’s imagination. I felt he’d used the story to illustrate some of the worst aspects of Irving’s character: inflated pride and self-importance, and the heedless cruelty that can conceive of no possible retribution. I didn’t know what Irving had done to Bram, but it seemed to me that he’d made him pay for his sins in the harshest possible way. In fact there were such strong elements of revenge in the tale that I found myself hoping I never had cause to disappoint him.
Disturbed, I pushed the noteback back into place. But in my haste I disturbed the volume on Wallachia and Moldavia, and slips of paper, covered in Bram’s notes, fell out as I tried to arrange things more neatly.
I glanced at the names of those medieval princes, bloodthirsty rulers of a violent region, to whom instruments of torture would have been no more than playthings in the struggle for power. One who seemed to have written his name in blood was a Wallachian ruler who favoured impalement as a method of disposing of his enemies. It was said he was seeking revenge for the deaths of his father and elder brother. I saw that Bram had underlined the word revenge.
‘Dracula,’ he had scribbled beneath, ‘means Son of the Devil...’
~~~
That evening, Jack told me an inquest into Magnus Firth’s death was to be held the next afternoon in Baytown. The news produced a strange effect on me; although I dreaded its conclusions, I felt compelled to be there. Most of all I dreaded seeing Bella, coming face to face with her, having to meet her eyes. I felt sure she would know what I knew, that in some strange way it would damage us both.
In the end Bram and I decided to travel down separately, and to attend the inquest in similar fashion. I could go as a friend and relative, while Bram as a summer visitor was entitled to have a natural curiosity, having been there when the body was brought ashore.
In Whitby, inquests on the drowned were generally held in the nearest and most convenient public house. In Bay, where so many bodies were washed ashore, there was a special place on the hillside at the edge of town, a low stone building that did double duty as a mortuary chapel and Coroner’s Room. It was known as the Dead House.
Although familiar with the place, I approached it now with trepidation, all the while keeping a lookout for Bram and Old Uncle Thaddeus. As a distant relative and pillar of the local community, he was bound to attend.
I was wearing one of my old summer dresses and a large plea
ted cotton bonnet of local style which had the advantage of hiding all my hair and most of my face. I did not want to advertise my presence, or find myself in awkward conversation with any member of the family. Judging the time with care, I waited until I saw Bella and Isa and the two older boys go in with Cousin Martha, and then joined a small group of older women sitting on public benches at the rear of the hall.
Douglas and Ronnie sat with bowed heads as though in church, while Isa was looking round surreptitiously, but I could see Bella staring stonily ahead. She was wearing a severe black dress and matching cotton bonnet which lent her an air of rectitude. She was not looking at the coffin, and I didn’t want to look either, but found I couldn’t help myself. With the cry of seabirds overhead, I kept seeing that great herring gull, pecking at the dead man’s eyes.
Jumbled impressions of anger and darkness and the approaching storm invaded my head as I sat there waiting in the silence. Perhaps, after reading that short story and those notes of Bram’s, I had vengeful motives on my mind, but I could not forget Bella’s curses, nor that furious threat to kill her father.
I breathed in deeply, fending off the memory. An accident, I told myself; it had to have been an accident.
A shadow loomed in the open doorway; I glanced up and saw Bram removing his soft-brimmed hat as he sat at the end of a row halfway down the hall. A moment later Old Uncle Thaddeus came in, attracting all eyes. He nodded to Bram and took a seat nearby. Someone coughed. A stray waft of air brought in the scent of new-mown hay from outside, and just as I wondered how much longer we would have to wait, a gentleman in a black frock coat entered briskly, set down his top hat and his papers on the table, and opened the proceedings without further ado.
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