An Inquiry Into Love and Death

by Simone St. James

  The water itself, here, was vast and beautiful. This was not the calm, clear blue water of a tropical paradise, but choppy and cold, with whitecaps frothing on the tops of the restless waves as they were driven toward a rocky beach. At the bottom of the hillside road were more buildings, set on a rise over the empty shore. Past these there was only the sea and the sky, blending with the soft touch of blurred chalk at the horizon.

  Ahead of me, something came out of the rainy gloom. As it drew closer, I realized it was none other than an old-fashioned donkey cart, driven by a man hunched into his coat and cap. The donkey plodded, its tail flicking, unconcerned about the weather.

  The driver reined in as he saw me, and I stopped as I pulled alongside him and leaned out the window. “Excuse me; I wonder if you could help me?”

  The man leaned toward me, and I saw that he was thirtyish, with a reddish beard that likely indicated red hair under his cap. “I suppose I could do that,” he said amicably, his eyes lit with curiosity he was too polite to speak of. “What can I help you with?”

  “I’m looking for a place called Barrow House. Perhaps you know it?”

  Now his look was tempered with genuine surprise and a quick hint of wariness. “I do. You’re to do with the fellow who lived there, then?”

  “I’m his niece, yes.”

  “You do look a little like him. I’m very sorry for your loss.” He removed his cloth cap for a moment, indeed revealing a head of red hair, and replaced it again. “My name is Edward Bruton. I’m the deliveryman in these parts. If I can help, please let me know.”

  He seemed in no hurry to answer my question, though it meant he had to sit in the rain. “Jillian Leigh,” I replied. “A deliveryman?” I could not help glancing at the donkey, which stood good-naturedly in its traces.

  Edward Bruton smiled, glancing at my beautiful motor. “A bit old-fashioned, I suppose. But the fact is, she handles the climb better than any other animal or vehicle. It isn’t easy getting into Rothewell proper”—he nodded in the direction of the buildings at the bottom of the road, by the water—“so they use me. I’m postman, milkman, messenger boy—whatever is needed, I do it.”

  “You must know everything, then. Which way is Barrow House?”

  “Just down the track, take the bend to the left, and you’ll see it. Go all the way to the end of the road—it’s the farthest house by the woods.” He peered past me into the car. “But surely you’re not going there alone, are you?”

  “I am.” I looked at his expression. “Is that a problem?”

  “Well, no. No, of course not. We just don’t get many young ladies here alone, that’s all.”

  “My uncle was alone.”

  He nodded, but his eyes were thinking of something else. “So he was.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, holding my hand out to him. “I’ve got you standing in the rain. I won’t keep you any longer. Good night.”

  He looked at my hand, then shook it with a wry look that said I’d just amused him. “Good night, miss. I’ll check on you in the morning and see if you need anything; how is that?”

  I thanked him and drove on into the descending darkness, my wheels bumping over the road.

  Barrow House was exactly where Edward Bruton had said it would be—at least, there was only one house there, far past all the others. It was dark and unlit. I pulled up next to the low wrought-iron gate and got out of the car.

  It was a stone building, obviously old. A triangular gable rose from the first-story roof, on the left; and the second story, added to the main structure on some long-ago date, had a second triangular gable on the right. The effect was lopsided but somehow impressive. Behind the house was the tree line, an extension of the woods I had just come out of, and the lane here did a gentle curve, presumably toward more neighbors not in view.

  I could strongly smell the sea; in fact, I could nearly taste it on the back of my tongue, the way one can taste thick fog when walking in it. The air was lowering and damp, the rain trickling down the glass panes of Barrow House and running off the edges of the gables. It was growing darker and colder by the moment; the house, as odd and lonely as it was, would at least be dry inside.

  Far away, a man whistled for his dog. There was no other human sound.

  I pulled my valise from the motorcar and took my pocketbook and the key ring with a single key the solicitor had given me from the front seat. I unlatched the gate and hurried up the front steps to the house, unlocking the door and setting everything down in the dark just inside. Then I trotted back to the car and took out my stack of schoolbooks, hurrying back so the books would not get too wet. There was still time for studying tonight.

  I had been hoping against hope for a modern installation of electric light, but I was disappointed. I fumbled in the gloomy foyer and found an old oil lamp and a box of matches. I lit the lamp and opened the wick as far as I could, seeing only a dusty, cluttered hall, a door to the left, and a set of stairs before me. The place smelled just a little unused, as if the occupant had been gone only a little while. Toby had died three days ago.

  A quick look through the main floor showed a few rooms full of mismatched furniture, a sign of a succession of renters over the years. I couldn’t see any belongings sitting on tables or draped over chairs. At the back of the house, in the bare kitchen, I found the first evidence that Toby had even been there—a single ceramic bowl stood on the washboard, cleaned out and left next to a single, equally clean spoon.

  I sighed. A bachelor’s kitchen, and the long drive had made me hungry. Well, I’d been feeding myself for as long as I could remember; my mother could barely prepare toast. I’d have to make do.

  But as I swung my lamp in the direction of the larder, something in the light caught my eye. I leaned closer.

  In the middle of the wooden kitchen table—precisely in the middle—was a pocket watch. It gleamed dully, the lamplight reflecting from its glass face. I picked it up and turned it over, my fingers taking in the familiar surface. This was Toby’s pocket watch; I had played with it as a child. And suddenly, the weight of remembrance was on me again.

  Toby had often visited during my childhood. He had been a plain-looking man whose face gave nothing away, a man one would never notice in a crowd: of average height, neither slender nor fat. He had short dark hair and his suits were never new, less from poverty—though there may have been that—than from simple bachelor carelessness. He spoke little and seemed particularly tongue-tied around children.

  I suppose he was hardly the dashing, heroic type of uncle who told war stories at bedtime, or the kind of uncle whose visits delighted children, laughing and full of fun. Toby spent most of his visits reading and writing, talking with my parents about grown-up subjects, or pottering about our house and gardens, fixing things on his own. After my mother found he had unclogged a backed-up sink drain in the kitchen unasked, she declared him a gentleman and nearly kissed him; he blushed, shook his head, and said nothing.

  And yet, in his unguarded moments, like that morning on the beach—moments very rare in a man of Toby’s shyness—he was the best sort of uncle, the attentive kind who never made a child feel foolish or unwanted.

  I had a vivid memory of sitting on the floor of my father’s study, quietly reading my picture books, as Toby sat at the desk and worked. I had the same memory of reading chapter books next to him as I got older; we must have shared this ritual of quiet companionship for years. Most adults require something when in a room with a child: a peppered series of questions, usually, that seem like conversation to the adult but to the child are a test they cannot know the answers to. Toby had a gift for silence. He could simply sit with a child in peace and accept her companionship as something of value in itself.

  We had never exchanged gifts, but the pocket watch was utterly familiar in my hands, dredged up from an old, half-forgotten memory. Perhaps he had let his lit
tle niece play with his watch, for in my mind the watch had been larger and heavier, my hands smaller.

  None of this fit the idea of a ghost hunter. My parents had never hidden Toby’s occupation from me; I had no recollection now of how I learned of it, only that the idea made me so deeply uneasy I never spoke of it. Was it shame that had made me willfully pretend Toby’s profession didn’t exist? A little, yes. I wanted the girls at Somerville to think I was normal, to like me. My academic pedigree through my parents was something my fellow students understood.

  But mostly, the reason was fear. I’d never been able to piece together the man I knew with the pursuit of the dead. I’d never seen a ghost myself, but Toby had believed in them. Either Toby had been a lifelong madman, or he’d truly seen spirits. I didn’t want to contemplate either possibility.

  Sometime after I turned fourteen, Toby stopped coming, and he never visited again. At the mention of him, my mother’s lips grew tense, and a tired look came into my father’s eyes. I was never told why. I slid the watch into my pocket.

  I took my valise up the narrow stairs to the second floor, abandoning the idea of food. I was too exhausted to do anything else tonight, and the morning’s gruesome appointment had left me depressed. The first bedroom I found was Toby’s. I couldn’t bear to go in, to sleep on his pillow, there among his sweaters and underthings. I found a second bedroom across the hall instead, furnished with only a bed and dresser.

  I rummaged through a nearby closet for linens, which were vaguely musty-smelling, and made up the narrow bed. When I finished I peeked out the window past the yellowed lace curtains, wondering whether I’d see any other sign of life in Rothewell.

  Nothing presented itself. There were no neighbors in this direction, only the back garden, surrounded by a stone wall, and beyond that, the darker ink of the line of trees. I was beginning to miss the familiar, if incessant, sounds of my small student flat: the shouts and laughter from the square outside, the chatter of other girls in the halls, the whistle of a teakettle in the communal kitchen. Someone was always awake, even late into the night after curfew, and one could always find the yellow under-door light of a midnight study session.

  That night, as I slept, I had vague, uneasy dreams. I seemed to be awake, though I knew I was asleep; there was cold sweat on my neck, and my hair was damp. My neck hurt from the tight clench of my jaw, and my shoulders ached as I lay on my side on the hard bed. I wanted to move, but in the unbearable logic of dreams I could not, and lay frozen where I was, panting in panic.

  I may have dozed uneasily again, but in the next dream something scratched at the window behind my turned back. A tree branch, I said to myself in the dream, and I tried again to move. I was still stuck, listening to the sound behind me—a long sound, inexorable, like something being dragged slowly across the glass from one side to the other. I ground my teeth and flinched in my frozen place, listening to it go on and on.

  When dawn came, I awoke stiff and more exhausted than when I’d gone to bed. My nightgown was damp with sweat. I lay staring at the ceiling and felt the vivid details of the night wash over me. For a long time, the fear stayed with me, even in the morning sun. But as dreams do, it began to fade, and eventually I pulled myself out of bed.

  The dream had seemed real, but as I stretched my shoulders and rubbed my aching neck, I knew it was all a fiction. For through the lace curtains, I could see that there was no tree outside the bedroom window. There was nothing there at all.

  Four

  I washed and dressed, scrubbing away the sweat and grogginess of the night, the floors cold and dusty beneath my feet. From my valise I pulled a comfortable shirtwaist dress and an old dark brown cashmere cardigan, a favorite garment I’d bought at a men’s shop. It fell to midthigh, and the cuffs were rolled. After a moment’s consideration, I left off stockings and shoes. This was the outfit I usually chose for studying; it was unfashionable and a little scandalous, but most of the girls in my boardinghouse had something similar they wore when hard at work, with no chance of one’s mother or any member of the male sex laying eyes on it.

  I hurried down to the kitchen to light the stove. I was relieved to see that Toby had laid by a good stock of wood, if he had not bothered with much else; I could at least make tea and warm a few rooms in the house. We’d had few servants as I grew up, just a daily cook and a weekly washerwoman and maid, though we could have well afforded more—one of my parents’ many eccentricities. It meant I could lay a fire as quickly and neatly as any girl I knew.

  I pulled open the stove door and stared.

  Lying squarely in the cold stove, carefully placed in its grimy, unlit darkness, was a book. It lay open to a place in the middle, its pages flat and unruffled. It was thick, its binding of brown leather.

  I stared at it for a long moment. It seemed to mock me, lying there. There was no reason for it—and yet, there it was.

  I reached in and slid it out, careful not to flip the pages. A glance at the title page revealed A History of Incurable Visitations, by someone named Charles Vizier. I read the page where the book had been left open.

  . . . A second translation of De Spirituum Apparitione, produced in Cologne in 1747, terms the most disturbing manifestations as grappione, or nearly demoniac in nature, though the specific demonic influence has not been classified. Certainly such accounts have been disputed over the years, though there is little doubt that the Abbey of Sénanque experienced one such visitation, consisting of thrown crockery, overturned rain barrels, and even ghostly slaps and pinches assaulting nighttime guests—which persisted over the course of several decades.

  I stood reading, my body paralyzed by a strange sort of fear. It was only a book. I forced myself to read on.

  Though possibly demonic, the account of the grappione at Sénanque also bears resemblance to the traditional Scottish haunt called a boggart, or sometimes bogey, a mischievous—sometimes vicious—manifestation tied to a single place, and often terrifying the inhabitants of any area in which it takes up residence. . . .

  I closed the book and placed it on the table. I took out the watch from last night, which I had put in the pocket of my sweater, and looked at it. A watch on the table. A book in the stove.

  I put the watch next to the book and strode out the kitchen door to the back garden. The sun was up now, the sky turning a crisp autumn blue. The cobblestones were cold and rough on my bare feet. I turned and looked up at my bedroom window. Just as I’d seen this morning, there was nothing there, nothing that could have scratched the glass. I stepped closer, peered into the remains of the dead garden that bordered the house. There were no footprints or telltale points of a ladder. I swept my gaze farther, into the dried weeds and nettles, looking for trampled spaces. There was nothing.

  You could have dreamed it, I told myself. You must have dreamed it. You must have. Still, I backed farther into the garden, away from the house, stepping around a heavy ceramic vase full of soil and dead flowers, and directed my gaze upward. Could someone have climbed down from the roof? Somehow scaled the other gable to get to my window? An animal, perhaps? I shaded my eyes against the sun and squinted. Had it all been in my mind?

  “Excuse me!”

  I jumped and turned, nearly overbalancing. Standing beyond the stone wall of the garden were two women, an older and a younger. Though they were dressed differently, their faces marked them as mother and daughter. The mother gave me an apologetic wave. “I’m so sorry to have startled you. We were passing on our morning walk and couldn’t resist stopping to say hello.”

  I let out a breath. The fence wall was nearly shoulder-high, which made conversation awkward, so I walked to the gate and unlatched it. “Of course,” I managed. “Do come in. I’m Jillian Leigh.”

  “Diana Kates,” the woman said as she approached and held out her hand. “And this is my daughter, Julia.”

  Both women were dressed for walking; and indeed, w
ith the gate open, I noticed a path behind the property that skirted the woods. Mrs. Kates was perhaps thirty-five, her hair cropped very short and fashionably marcelled. Over this she had placed a cloche with a wide ribbon, under the brim of which only the well-placed ends of her hair could be seen. She wore a dress of faded blue silk, decorated with beads along the neckline, under a coat with a worn fur collar. The daughter, a step behind her, was no more than sixteen, in large shoes and a tweed coat that went to her knees. She had elected to wear her long hair in a braid down her back, from which wisps of frizz escaped.

  As I greeted them, I realized I must look a perfect fright. My hair was wild, my man’s sweater was wrapped around me, and my legs and feet were bare. I’d never thought anyone would see my studying outfit. “I’m sorry,” I said, looking down at myself and up again. “I was just out here a moment—I didn’t realize—”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Kates, smiling. “We’ve intruded. But I couldn’t help but introduce myself. I’m the landlady here, you see.”

  “Oh.” I looked back at Barrow House, then turned to her again. “I’m Toby Leigh’s niece. I’m here to clean out his things.”

  “Yes, I had a letter from the solicitor. I’m so sorry about what happened to your uncle. Such a kind man.”

  This was said with such cheer I could only stare for a second. “Yes, well, thank you.”

  “Though he was rather a hermit,” she went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I barely saw him. He prepaid the rent for the month, so you mustn’t worry about that, truly. Though I did have to write the solicitors when I sent them the key, to mention that he is paid only to the end of the month. I must admit, when they wrote me that his niece was coming, I pictured a married woman. Are you alone?”