by Toby Litt
I swore, using a word reserved for very special occasions.
Peter repeated the word.
There really wasn’t much else you could say, even if you weren’t ill-bred like what we were.
The water was quite chilly. Peter pulled his hands out. The sleeves of his shirt were damp at the cuffs. We stared one another in the face. I was glad he was so familiar, even though he looked so completely freaked out.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘A spring,’ I said. ‘Or an underground river, perhaps.’
‘It’s not Jack’s bathwater,’ said Peter, ‘that’s for sure.’
Jack’s bathwater, whilst it had started sparkling had ended up the colour of very weak tea. Bless him.
Peter cupped his hand under the flow then sipped up a tentative mouthful.
‘That’s delicious,’ he said. ‘Better than tap.’
Not wanting to seem a scaredy cat, I tried some too. It was delicious – very refreshing and diamond pure. The flow of it was icy around my fingers.
‘This is a very weird house,’ I said.
‘I think we already knew that,’ Peter replied. ‘Weird and sometimes wonderful.’
Dirt in one room and some kind of antiseptic drain in another.
Peter left the whirlpool room open whilst moving on to the next door.
This door, the East, had a very different kind of lock. It wasn’t old-looking at all – just a modern Yale, and quite shiny.
Peter found the key for it almost straight away, on Mrs. Forster’s bunch.
‘Hang on,’ I said, and put my ear to the door.
Peter did the same.
‘Hear anything?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said.
I stepped back. All my instincts demanded that we find out what new oddity was hidden away behind this door. But I also didn’t feel like taking everything too quickly. Peter, though, had already turned the key twice, anticlockwise, and was pulling the door wide open.
Behind the East door was another door.
This one looked much older. Underneath all the cobwebs, it was painted a dull black.
I felt a chill as I looked at it. The water room had been quite funny, but this one, for some reason, I didn’t like at all.
‘Be careful,’ I said, instinctively. It was something I said dozens of times a day to Jack. I was worried that ‘Be careful’ would turn out to be Mary’s first words.
Peter started to try the bigger keys one by one. This lock was very large. It looked to me as if none of them would fit, but the third one on Mrs. Forsters’ key-chain did.
At first, it wouldn’t turn at all. Peter had to put another key into the oval eyehole bit and use that as a lever to add some force to his twist.
‘Don’t break it,’ I said.
‘It’s shifting,’ he grunted. With another moment’s strain, the key began to turn. At least we could be fairly certain that no one had been in here for a long while. Peter turned the thing as far as it would go, then stepped back and pulled at the door.
Slowly, with a very corny creak, it opened to reveal – yet another door.
This one was covered in pale papery leather.
‘Let’s leave it,’ I said.
‘What? After we’ve opened the other two doors?’
‘I think something horrible is behind it,’ I said, and I really did.
Peter put his ear to it.
‘No monster,’ he said. ‘Not that I can hear.’
‘Don’t joke,’ I said.
He was already trying the remaining keys. But one after the other they failed to fit into the lock. The hole of this one was very squarish, and it looked as though the key to open it would be square rather than round.
‘No,’ said Peter, after he’d gone through all three bunches. ‘How frustrating is that?’
He knew I was more relieved than anything.
‘Let’s shut up the other ones and go,’ I said.
‘Wait a minute,’ he said, and put his ear once again to the door.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Just thought I heard something.’
‘If you’re trying to scare me, it’s working.’
‘No, I did. I thought I heard…’
‘What?’ I said. ‘What?!’
‘Something moving,’ he said.
‘Like an animal? A rat?’ I gave an involuntary shudder.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It was more like something slipping down. Maybe it was cobwebs falling off the door.’
Peter locked up the black door and the first door. I immediately felt better.
‘Still,’ he said, ‘we opened one of them. And we’ve still got this one to try.’
‘Oh, come on, Peter,’ I said. I wanted to check on Jack and Mary. As if our opening the doors had put them in danger. But Peter was determined to have a go. It didn’t take him long to realize it was pointless – the keys didn’t even go into the keyhole. ‘Hold up,’ he said, going down on his knees and peering into the hole. ‘This lock’s been filled with something. Might be plaster or cement.’
‘Good,’ I said, taking what he said on trust. ‘Come upstairs, now, or I will lock you in here for the night.’
The very thought made me shiver. And it seemed to work on hurrying Peter up. Perhaps he really believed me.
Upstairs again, in the kitchen, Peter made us both a cup of tea.
‘What do we make of that, then?’ he said.
‘The water?’ I replied. ‘I think it’s something Michael Francis put in. To make sure the damp didn’t get into the floorboards. It’s an underground river.’
‘I wonder if he ever went in there.’
‘It’s not the sort of place you take your bath,’ I said. ‘Too chilly.’
‘I might try it,’ Peter said.
‘You will not,’ I said. ‘You might drown. Get sucked in. Who knows where that hole in the floor goes to, or how big it is.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘Promise me you won’t go exploring down there on your own.’
‘I’m not Jack,’ he said.
‘Promise,’ I said.
He promised.
Chapter 15.
You can’t keep Peter away from technology for long. He was soon in the living room, trying to get the TV working.
I went to check on the children. Mary was fine, although she had a very wet nappy, and needed to be changed. She must have been like that for a while because it had gone cold. Her wee was very pale, hardly any colour at all – though it was only later that I took any notice of this. Before I left her, I turned the radiator in our bedroom up. It gave a couple of gurgling glugs and I assumed it was about to start warming up.
Jack, strangely, seemed to be too hot. There was perspiration on his forehead and his pyjamas were damp under the arms. I opened the diamond-paned window by a crack. All the windows upstairs had funny metal catches that seemed to be as old as the building. It worried me that Jack might be able to push through and fall out. But he’d never sleepwalked before.
Just to be sure, I took the shoelaces off a pair of my old running shoes and tied them across the gap. Peter would have to sort out something more permanent in the next few days. Another job to be done.
‘There’s no coaxial socket,’ said Peter. He seemed annoyed by this.
‘That’s for the telly, is it?’ I asked.
‘It looks like they’ve never had a TV here before. We’ll have to put an aerial up on the roof. Until we get cable. I think that’s the simplest thing. It’ll sort the computer, too.’
‘And until then I suppose we’ll just have to talk to each other.’
‘I’ll phone an electrician tomorrow, about the aerial. Jack can watch DVDs till we get something set up. I feel sort of cut off. There might be important emails waiting for me.’
‘I don’t miss it at all,’ I said. ‘I wish they’d never been invented.’
‘Don’t you want to know what’s on the news?’
; ‘Not really. It’s never going to make you happy, is it?’
‘The football results,’ he said. ‘Sometimes.’
‘I thought they weren’t playing at the moment.’
‘They’re not.’
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I think there may be other, more serious issues about this house – such as stones falling from the roof.’
‘You know, I think he probably found a bucket of them somewhere. Old marbles. He didn’t want us to be angry with him for spilling them.’
‘What about the dirt in the pantry?’
‘That I can’t explain. Unless you were dreaming. That would be an explanation.’
‘I was awake,’ I said, although I was no longer certain.
‘Well, the tenants have moved into our house. If you want us to leave, we’ll have to go to a hotel.’
‘I don’t want to leave. I just want to know what’s going on.’
‘I’m sure we’ll find out,’ he said, infuriatingly straightforward. ‘It’s probably just your common or garden poltergeist.’
‘You just told me you thought there was a rational explanation for everything.’
‘There is,’ said Peter.
I told him about the architecture guide and what it said about the house being destroyed. But I didn’t mention Elizabeth’s death in mysterious circumstances.
‘I’m going to the library,’ I said. ‘I want to find out more.’
‘There were some history books in the study,’ he said. ‘You might want to start there, instead.’
Because I was annoyed with Peter, I stuck to the library – to begin with, at least. I found a couple of books about the Tudors, and one about Elizabeth I, but Elizabeth Jonson wasn’t mentioned in any of the indexes.
After about half an hour, I gave up. As I went through the hall, I saw that Peter was now in the kitchen. He was clearing space for the fridge-freezer. I snuck past, so he wouldn’t see me.
There were two whole shelves in Michael Francis’ bookcase dedicated to Catholicism, and another one and a half to the North Pole. This was obviously where he kept the books on the things that were dearest to him. Down at the bottom, I found half a dozen volumes on local history.
They were in very good condition even though, when I checked, I saw that some had been printed in the mid-seventies. One in particular caught my eye. Called A Kindly Place, it was all about the history of the village.
There was no index. But an entire chapter was devoted to our house, with the titled ‘A Dwelling Unlike Any Other’. Andrew Gatward, the author of the book, has very kindly given me permission to quote from it.
The part that caught my eye was about Elizabeth’s father.
‘William Jonson was a most remarkable man, whether considered in his time or out of it. With the building of what was known as ‘The Great House’, he, for a while at least, brought considerable prosperity to the village. What had, before, been a cultural backwater, was now opened to the full flood of contemporary European thought, both religious and scientific. The local farmers were astonished to see the number of books being brought to the house. For a short time, it was jokingly referred to as ‘the University’. (We are lucky that William’s diary is still in existence, to recall a few of these details.) It is clear, however, that from the first there was considerable hostility towards the new family. Particularly, it seems, when rumours started to go round that they were of a Catholic disposition. This news, I would speculate, did not take very long to percolate through the community. The fact that William did not attend Sunday service at St Edith’s would have been noticed within a month, if not a week.
‘On first being completed, the house was more extensive than it is in the present day. A vast hall stood at the rear of the property, covering the area now occupied by the knot garden. This was burnt to the ground, along with the whole of the original house, in 1580. William’s diary is strangely silent on the cause of the conflagration. The most likely explanation is that there was an accident in the kitchen, or that one of the many chimneys caught fire. However, more colourful local legend has it that William was engaging in necromancy, and that, at the height of the blaze, the devil himself was seen dancing with delight along the guttering.
Whatever the truth might be, it is certain that the villagers always regarded William with great suspicion if not outright loathing. This is hardly surprising. They had none of them met a man of his calibre before. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, William had for four years been present in the court of Mary I, first as a page and later as a courtier. He took part in several important ambassadorial expeditions, mainly to the Low Countries, and was rumoured to have been present, as a young man, at the marriage of Mary I to Philip of Spain, later Philip II. William’s reasons for retiring to the country around 1560 are not definitively known, although it seems unlikely that he was as comfortable with the new Queen as with the old. His deep devotion to Rome was almost certainly a prime motivation for his removing himself from court. One of the rooms in William’s rebuilt abode – known thereafter as the New House – contains a priest hole that I myself, in my boyhood, was once permitted to inspect, inside and out. I shall not reveal its exact location, although it seems highly unlikely it will ever be seriously required again.
In 1562, the first of William’s three surviving children was born – although there had been a stillborn son, not named, the previous year. Christened Elizabeth, she turned out to be one of the most remarkable products of her age – quite worthy of comparison with her royal namesake. Her name seems to have been chosen in tribute to the young queen, perhaps as an attempt to appear loyal. Her younger brothers, Emanuell (1564-1579), a well-liked young man who died whilst out hunting, and Peter (1567-1641), a devoted gardener who eventually inherited the house, were no match for the brilliant Elizabeth.
Privately tutored from an early age, Lilian, as the family knew her, spoke Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian and High Church German. Among her other accomplishments were dancing, playing the lute, writing sonnets (all unfortunately lost), and, most remarkably of all, sword-fighting. Besides his religion, William had very advanced ideas, for his time, and believed young women equally as capable of achievement as young men. However, Elizabeth’s principle love was not for the arts but the sciences. The New House was the first in West Sussex to possess a telescope. It is easy to imagine the delight with which this amazing young woman, standing upon the midnight lawn, examined the moon, planets and stars. The universe was beginning to reveal its mysteries to her.
Another pursuit of William’s was chemistry. He had a room of the house, believed to be the cellar, dedicated to experiments of this sort. Perhaps Elizabeth showed a desire to join her father at an early age. Where were all those curious smells coming from? What had made that extremely loud bang? Children hate to be excluded from anything that seems exciting. It is to William’s credit that he did not exclude his enthusiastic young daughter from his arcane pursuits.
‘More books arrived at the New House. And, no doubt, Elizabeth read all of them for soon William was recording that she had outstripped him “in al materes chymicall and beyond”. This entry of his diary continues: “She if a wonder, and beftowed upon myfelf by God to mitigate solitude”. How a man with a wife and two other children could complain of solitude might, at first, be hard to understand. But of his wife the best that can be said is that she was companionable, when not suffering from one ailment or another. Margerye Jonson had been known as a great beauty. It must have been for this that William married her, for she was to provide him with no intellectual stimulation.
Between 1582 and 1584, Elizabeth is believed to have travelled widely on the continent. Cities we know her to have visited include Paris, Cologne, Madrid, and of course Rome. It should be noted that her father, after coming down from Elizabeth’s court, never left the country or, so far as we know, the county again.
Upon her return, Elizabeth resumed her usual life in the New House. There seems to have been no pre
ssure put upon her to attend court, or to find herself a suitable husband. By this time, her younger brother Peter was attending the court of Queen Elizabeth, in its fullest imperial pomp. A few of his letters survive. Unfortunately, they are remarkably dull. Peter’s main concern was for the health of his four horses, about which we knew a great deal more than we need. The only mention of Elizabeth is the cryptic sentence “Bid my fifter to ftop her night-speeking; none good will come of it.” Although it is possible that this reading is wrong, and that the crucial word is “night-seeking”.’
After this there were a couple of pages about Peter’s progress through the Elizabethan civil service. He sounded a bit of a creep, and I was sure that Andrew Gatward didn’t like him at all. Finally, he got back to Elizabeth, who I think he was totally in love with. I certainly was.
‘Sadly, we know very little more of the life of sweet Lilian. After 1590, no record exists of her at all. Her father died the following year, of causes not recorded. His grave can be seen in the churchyard of St Edith’s, backing on to the nave midway along the side nearest the main road. Emanuell and Margerye are interred there, too. Peter’s grave, which is separate, is located in the far corner, beneath the oak trees. There is no record of Elizabeth’s death or burial.
‘Rumours explaining her disappearance are legion. Some of them are extremely wild and unreliable. The charge of necromancy returns, along with the suggestion that the devil came one night in a thunderstorm and stole her away. One legend has it that she blew herself up whilst trying to create gunpowder. Another, more gruesome yet, that she deliberately threw herself upon one of the large open fires in the house. It is just possible that she committed suicide, perhaps in some less grotesque manner, and was therefore not allowed to be buried on hallowed ground. In this case, a private internment within the grounds of the house would seem likely.