The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  Which was a little hard on Mrs. Saul who, though she bustled her husband about often enough, was by no means a nagger. Perhaps the unjust accusation was the reason she could not put the liripipe incident, trifling though it was, quite out of her mind.

  And when, the following Easter, there was “that funny thing at the castle” when they went to Warwick the liripipe affair came back to her all the more insistently.

  The trip to Warwick was their Easter jaunt and it seemed to be going very successfully. They had done the historic houses of the town, medieval, Tudor, seventeenth century, and Georgian, and had visited each of the two remaining town gates as well as the shire-hall and had recovered from all that exertion with a splendid lunch at a nice old pub—lamb with mint sauce and peas and plenty of really crisp roast potatoes—and were going to devote the whole of the afternoon to the castle. And all still seemed to be going well then. Although the climb up was stiff, after all that lunch, Mr. Saul made, as usual, no protests and once looking out at the lazily turning River Avon below he agreed comfortably that it was “a picture, a real picture.” Then they began to explore the building itself with the aid of a small guide-book, though guides and maps generally seemed rather to fox Mrs. Saul who never could grasp that North need not always be at the top of the page. And here what she afterwards thought of as “that funny thing at the castle” occurred.

  It was nothing very much.

  “Now we’ll go to Guy’s Tower,” she said, peering at the guide’s sketch-plan. “That’s this way.”

  “No,” said Mr. Saul, who had been standing patiently a yard or two away. “Guy’s Tower’s over here.”

  And he turned in precisely the opposite direction and walked off.

  A little surprised, because really she had never before known him to take the initiative on any of their expeditions, and a little nettled too, because after all he hadn’t seen the guide and he’d never been to Warwick before, Mrs. Saul, after a moment standing where she was, not quite dumb-struck but decidedly put out, hurried off after him to put him right.

  Only to find, when she caught him up, that outside the part of the building beside which he was standing was a large plain notice saying “Guy’s Tower.”

  “Well,” she said, “who’s the clever one then? Fancy you knowing which tower was which when I’d got the guide wrong way up as per usual.”

  But once more Mr. Saul did not seem pleased by the flattery. In fact he seemed quite put out by the whole incident and, for almost the first time in Mrs. Saul’s experience, omitted to utter even a word of appreciation when she drew a vivid verbal picture of defenders on the tower roof pouring hot pitch on to attackers below.

  So this again was something she remembered.

  Then came the really quite unpleasant scene with the visiting author.

  That was early in the following autumn. The Townswomen’s Guild speaker that month was Mrs. Saul’s own recommendation, a novelist who had written a book about the underside of Victorian London, a work she had greatly admired for its unsparing picture of the seamy depths of the great metropolis. She had even volunteered, since the lecturer lived in the country, to put him up for the night afterwards. The unpleasant scene occurred the next morning.

  The author, a bristly bearded fellow so well pleased with himself that he vigorously elaborated on the misdoings of the Victorians even at the breakfast table, was busy regaling his host and hostess with a minutely particularized account of a visit by a roué to a house of ill-fame.

  “Then the fellow said to the girl: ‘My dear, I shan’t let you go from this room until you have taken off your chemise.’ That’s the sole undergarment girls of that sort wore in those days, you know. It was a sort of shoulder-length petticoat.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  Mr. Saul, always bleary at breakfast, had hardly spoken before, other than to wish their distinguished guest a muffled good-morning. But now he had looked up from his bacon and egg and spoken to some purpose.

  “I—I beg your pardon,” said the author, a little more sharply than was strictly polite, but he was a touchy chap.

  “A chemise,” Mr. Saul said. “It isn’t that. It’s something that goes round a book, a prayer-book, ladies carry them in their bags. You have to have a chemise to protect something as precious as a book.”

  “If you’ll excuse me,” the author replied, “I can assure you what you’ve said is totally wrong. A chemise was an undergarment, I’m telling you, an undergarment.”

  “It went round a book,” Mr. Saul almost bellowed back.

  And then, as if he had been sleep-walking and had been woken by the loud sound of his own voice, he jerked his head up, looked at the author as if he couldn’t understand what he was doing there and, muttering what might have been an apology, bolted from the room.

  Mrs. Saul had quite a time smoothing down her distinguished guest. And afterwards—Mr. Saul had gone off to work without another word—she was so upset by it all, and especially by her husband’s tone of absolute certainty, that she went specially down to the borough library and, rather daringly, sought the help of the young man in the reference room. Luckily he turned out to be most helpful and, consulting all sorts of big volumes together, they discovered that both sides of the quarrel had been in the right. Yes, a chemise was “a woman’s loose-fitting undergarment formerly called a shift” but in medieval times the same word had apparently meant both a containing wall used in fortification and “an embroidered cover for a book of devotions.”

  It puzzled Gwennie Saul immensely. How could her hubby, who never even opened so much as a crime story, have known this obscure fact? But she could find no answer. And, after her snubs at Warwick and when she had asked him how he had known what a liripipe was—they had looked that up, too, and Mr. Saul again had been quite correct—she did not dare tackle him now. It would be quite enough, she guessed, to send him into one of his moods. And these were, she came to see now, quite a new thing with him. He had never until the autumn after their West Country tour been moody, quite the contrary. But nowadays she would frequently find him sitting, for instance, staring at the TV with no picture at all on the screen. And the time he spent in the loo at weekends …

  It was all rather worrying. But not, really, so upsetting as to make it worthwhile to do anything about it. Just one of life’s little miseries.

  And before very much longer she got her explanation. About a fortnight before Christmas Mr. Saul came home one night looking rotten, and at once she knew that he had got the flu which had been raging at the works for weeks.

  Got it he had too, as badly as any illness he had had in all their married life. He had developed complications, the doctor said, and within forty-eight hours he was delirious.

  That was when she discovered his secret.

  Because the stout sweating man who lay in their familiar bed moaning, tossing, and turning and talking in long wild gabbled bursts was not the man she had married at all. For almost all the time quite plainly he was someone else. He spoke with quite a different accent, a West Country one, she could tell. But that was not all. He used words she had never heard and he spoke about customs she hardly knew of, and when she did recognize any of them she realized that they all dated from long, long ago. Parts of lectures she had been to at the Townswomen’s Guild came back to her, including the one on clothes through the ages, and memories of books she had read, the historical romances which Mr. Saul would never so much as glance at. And eventually she was convinced that the life which the man on the bed, who looked just like her husband only more ill than she had ever seen him, was babbling about had been lived in the West Country, somewhere near Tewkesbury for the most part, and in the time of the Wars of the Roses.

  She even learnt the man’s Christian name. It was Bennet.

  And she learnt now, too, why Mr. Saul had known his way about Warwick Castle. It was because Bennet had been there. Bit by bit it came tumbling out, and bit by bit she pieced it together, sitting half-awake
in the armchair in the bedroom while the sick man in the bed dozed and groaned. Bennet had lived a quiet life working on the land, she gathered, and had had a wife, Alison—she felt an odd stir of jealousy when she worked that out—and two children, a boy and a girl, whom he had loved.

  Again here Gwennie Saul felt a pang of desolation. But children they had not had, and that was all there was to it.

  Bennet, though, had had his children and his wife. But he had fallen in love with another woman. A beautiful one, too, if the meandering voice of the man in the bed was to be believed. A red-haired creature above his station. And an outcomer. Some sort of foreigner. And because of her, whether to separate himself from her or to follow her Mrs. Saul was not clear, Bennet had turned soldier. He had become one of the Earl of Warwick’s men and had gone each day to Holme Castle, the earl’s house near Tewkesbury, and there with his fellow men-at-arms he had been allowed as much meat as he could carry away on his dagger.

  Her hubby spearing up meat on a dagger. Her hubby a man crazed with love.

  Then, the night before the antibiotic the doctor had prescribed brought Mr. Saul’s temperature down at last, his wife found out how Bennet had died.

  It was at the Battle of Tewkesbury, the very battle whose site they had happily visited some fifteen months before. Where she had enthusiastically described to him how the King’s forces must have come this way and the rebels supporting Queen Margaret and the already dead Earl of Warwick must have come that way.

  He had been one of those rebels. No wonder her poor contented hubby had been struck down in that extraordinary way when they had stood at the very spot. No wonder at all.

  And the battle as he had seen it—as Bennet had seen it—had been a very different affair from that depicted in the Boy Scouts’ panorama and remembered, more or less, by her. It had not been at all a clear event, with the Duke of Somerset’s men advancing in a neat formation here and being attacked from the flank by two hundred lances in a neat formation there. The battle, for Bennet, had been hours of waiting in the chill of that night of May 3 and the slow dawn of the next day, and then there had been the distant solitary boom of cannon and a few heavy cannonballs falling lazily on to the shallow entrenchments not far to his left and leaving men mangled there. And soon after volleys of arrows had come whining down at them, thudding into the earth, and into his fellow soldiers. Flight arrows, Bennet had called them, and only afterwards down at the library did she find out that there had been flight arrows, which could kill at two hundred yards and more, and sheaf arrows, shorter and heavier-headed, which were used sometimes at point-blank range. And at last there had been armed men running towards Bennet and his fellows, unrecognizable as foe or friend without any standard carried above them, and they had not known whether to fight them or to welcome them.

  So even when Bennet had seen a long bill coming straight at him, its point glinting in the fresh morning sun and its hook moving from side to side as the charging man holding it swayed as he ran, he had done nothing to parry the blow. “I seen her glister by my face,” said that West Country voice, “and then ’twas dark.”

  Mrs. Saul had not liked, while her husband was still weak, to say anything about what he had babbled out in his delirium. But eventually, choosing her time carefully, she told him everything, only not being able to bring herself somehow to mention his wife, Alison, and, much less, the red-haired beauty whom he had called Ghislaine as far as she could tell. She had looked up names that sounded like what he had shouted out, in something called A Book of Names in the library and this was what had seemed to fit best.

  And Mr. Saul had admitted, getting rather hot under the collar, that what she had pieced together was, despite everything, true. He had, ever since their fateful chance visit to the Field of Tewkesbury, been increasingly aware that inside his everyday comfortable body another person also lived. Bennet. The Wars of the Roses follower of the Earl of Warwick. But it was plain that he much disliked having to speak about it all. He hated the interruption of this distant different person into his contented state of existence.

  So Mrs. Saul never mentioned the subject again. And she thought, as New Year came and went and as her hubby at last threw off the consequences of his bad bout and went back to work, that his fits of moodiness were little by little getting fewer and fewer and lasting a shorter time.

  Perhaps, she said to herself—because she dared tell no one of the extraordinary thing that had happened to Mr. Saul—perhaps Bennet, finding himself not welcome, was gradually taking his departure.

  And so it might have been, except for Mrs. Carfax up the other end of the road.

  Mrs. Saul had never much liked Mrs. Carfax, “stuck up thing,” and now she was to have cause to like her a great deal less. Yet Mrs. Carfax was really a totally innocent party in the whole business. All she did was to acquire an au pair, the first lady in the road to be so bold. And as she had two small children and her husband was in a good job she could almost be excused such an uppity move. But the au pair—she was French—had long and beautiful red hair and her name, it turned out, was Ghislaine.

  The Sauls chanced to meet her only several weeks after her arrival. It was a chill night towards the end of February and Mrs. Saul had asked her husband to come with her to the Townswomen’s Guild—the lecture subject was “The Edwardians” and so was perfectly safe—and it turned out that Mrs. Carfax had decided to go too and had taken with her the au pair. “I thought it would be nice for her to have some social life while she’s here. Her name’s Ghislaine, you know, so aristocratic.”

  Mrs. Saul had felt that as a knock-down blow. She tried to tell herself in a panic of hope that her husband, who certainly had been looking sleepily content as usual, had not heard. But when she shot an anxious glance at him she knew that she had not had that immense piece of luck.

  Mr. Saul was almost as white-faced as he had been that time at Tewkesbury.

  He said nothing however. And neither did Mrs. Saul, then or later. She was certainly not going to risk stirring anything up by telling him she knew how mad for love of another Ghislaine had once been Bennet, that medieval man.

  But she could not have missed the way her husband after that evening took to stepping out into the front garden at all likely and unlikely times of day. And seeing how when he was there he kept peering into the distance up the road, and flushed red with guilt if she came out and spoke to him. Nor could she have missed the way he stopped altogether going round to the pub. And she could not have missed either his loss of appetite, the husband who had hardly once failed to clear meat plate and pudding plate at any meal during their whole life together.

  But within two months of the night of that “Edwardians” meeting Mr. Saul had grown thin.

  Once, about the middle of April, when she had chanced to come home from a visit to her sister earlier than she had expected, as she turned into the road on her way from the Tube station she caught him actually hiding in the shadow of a big hydrangea in the Carfaxes’ garden. She had been on the point of marching in at the gate and accusing him—she felt such bitter and unaccustomed anger—but in the dying evening light she glimpsed his face then, and the expression on it was so drawn, so despairing, that in an instant her own scathing jealousy was submerged in a welling-up of pure pity.

  She waited there, as dusk thickened, standing just where she was and thinking and thinking what she could do to help him, and knowing there was nothing, until with a shattering crude roar of sound a young man on a motorbike drew up outside the house and went to the door and rang the bell. And then the red-haired au pair came out, got on the back of the machine, and went roaring off, her arms round the rider. And Mrs. Saul watched her husband come creeping out of the Carfaxes’ gate then and drag himself towards their house, and all she could do when she got back in her turn was to pretend she thought he was happy watching TV when all along she knew he was crouching there in the front room without the light on even, like an animal gnawed at by a pain it cannot
understand.

  “There’s no way out, there’s no way out,” she kept murmuring to herself as she stood at the sink in the kitchen with the tears trickling unstoppably down her face.

  But there was a way out.

  In the days after that incident Mr. Saul grew evidently worse. He hardly spoke in the house at all, only answering a direct question and that only if it was almost shouted at him. And he became terribly, appallingly restless. He never sat in one chair for more than two or three minutes, and when he was up he prowled about the place like a lion constricted in a stale-smelling cage. And then he took to going out in the car, without the least explanation. The first time he did so Mrs. Saul actually went sneaking along the road to the Carfaxes to see if he had gone there taking the car as a way of deceiving her. But he had not. The family was at home, she could see through the as yet uncurtained windows, and presumably Ghislaine was out with the boy with the motorbike. So she had had to go trailing back home and wait in misery. And Mr. Saul had not come back till two-thirty in the morning.

  Soon this became a regular thing. And there was still nothing Mrs. Saul could do about it, only go to bed at much the usual time in case he came back then, and lie there worrying and clutching the sheet and waiting and waiting.

  And on the night of May the third, or the morning of May the fourth by a punctilious count, Mr. Saul did not come back.

  The car had crashed, they told her later. He had been alone in it. No other vehicle was involved. But the smash had reduced the car to a mass of tangled metal.

  As it happened, their own doctor had been the one called to the scene.

  “He would have gone instantly, you know,” he said to Mrs. Saul with clumsy tact when they broke the news to her. “A piece of metal must have pierced right to the brain. Don’t know what. Something long and pointed. Wasn’t anywhere to be seen when I got to him. But it would have meant he knew nothing, you know. Everything would have just gone suddenly dark for him. Suddenly dark.”