In the lounge, she said to Abigail, ‘Ring your father and tell him not to fetch you. Stay the night.’
‘Oh gee, I can’t.’
‘I won’t hog all the blankets.’
‘But I gotta get Crackers out early to meet you at the stables.’
‘Oh yes.’ They were going to ride on the moor.
‘Another night, can I? I’d love to.’
‘Of course.’ But it was tonight that Rose didn’t want to be in her room alone.
Chapter Six
There had been no one in the scullery, Rose tried to tell herself. There had been no one behind Toby when Mrs Ardis tried to do her clairvoyant act, which was one of her fads this season, along with the non-existent poltergeist. She lay on her back with the sheet up under her chin, staring into the darkness and wishing Mr Vingo were back from wherever it was, so that he could tell her that ghosts didn’t wear glasses. He didn’t believe in ghosts anyway, not as most people thought of them. He knew that time didn’t have fixed limits of past, present and future, and that if you saw someone who wasn’t there now, it was because you and they happened to be together at a time when they were. Was that it? It was too difficult to puzzle out. Better go to sleep. But Rose’s eyes kept popping open, as if there were something to see in the darkness of her room, where the familiar furniture shapes and the hang of the curtains had become strangers, and a bright star and a small pale star stood in the rectangle of sky beyond the open window.
She wanted to get out of bed and turn on the passage light and leave the door ajar, as her mother had let her do in the house where they lived when she was small. But getting out of bed was more difficult than staying safely in it. Rose turned on the bedside lamp. She would have to go to sleep with the light on, and Mollie would think she had fallen asleep reading, when she came to wake her.
She shut her eyes tightly. ‘If looks could kill … ’ the spiteful voice whispered in her head. Supposing they could? Supposing the spectacles, too large for the childlike face, had been looking at her with hate? Shut up, Rose. There wasn’t a child’s face; there weren’t any spectacles. She leaned forward to make sure her jodhpurs were on the chair and her boots underneath. They looked back at her faithfully, and when she drew in a breath, they reached out to her with the pungent scent of old Moonlight.
He was at his best on the ride, old Moonlight was, trotting out quite springily on the turf of the moor with his head up, blowing out early morning snorts. Perhaps because Rose was so tired that she relaxed, and rode him better.
Ben came with them on the ride on Joyce’s large roan pony. He rode in a haphazard way, and wouldn’t do what Rose and Abigail told him.
‘Why shouldn’t I hold the reins like this? I’m having fun. Let’s canter again.’
The roan was off at once and so was Crackers. Rose kicked Moonlight, who was a bit slow on the uptake, and he cantered after them and caught them up as they slowed for a turn round a bank, and the three of them eased into a glorious sploshing gallop over a wet flat field into the sun, coming up over the hills.
When Mrs Kelly fetched Ben and Rose from the stables, she said, ‘Oh my goodness you’re all wet did you fall off into a stream and I suppose you didn’t bring another jersey Ben but it’s going to be a rapturous day we should have brought swimsuits but then what about my sinuses?’
Abigail rode Crackers back to Wood Briar and put him into the little paddock that Jim Fisher, who worked at the hotel, had fenced off behind the tool shed.
It was a warm, windy, glorious day. After Rose and Abigail had helped to clear lunches and had eaten their own, they dashed across the road like liberated prisoners to jump and slide over the little hills and hollows of the dunes and join Ben at the beach.
They all sprinted together for a short distance. Then Abigail wanted to look for specimens of marine life in the rock pools. Ben wanted to jog out to the end of the curve of Sandy Neck. Rose flopped down on the sand in the blissful drowsiness she had longed for last night, and went to sleep in the sun.
The speeding train. She was in the train again, with the dark countryside wheeling past, and the pale face looking back at her from the smeared window.
When she put up a hand to wipe the glass, it was a delicate hand with nails like pink shells, nothing like Rose’s blunt, hardworking fingers. There was a man next to her on the seat of the carriage, sitting quite close. When the whistle suddenly shrieked into the night and the train began to jar and shudder as the brakes went into their long scream of agony, she turned to him, and Rose saw beside her the slender, spectacled young man who had been the bridegroom at the wedding. His mouth was open. His eyes stared in terror. At the sickening impact, she was flung forward away from him, and Rose’s heart dropped miles through space, wailing, ‘Save them – sa-a-a-ave them!’
Feet ran, sand puffed up and was blown into Rose’s face by the wind from the sea. Ben bent down to her, frowning.
‘Don’t yell like that. What’s up?’
O, save them! Rose sat up on the sand, and saw the waves coming in, crested with surf. Plunging to the shore through the highest breaker was the Great Grey Horse, his nostrils wide, his chest flecked with foam as he charged towards her in the thunder and turmoil of the sea.
Rose ran to him and leaped, and they rose above the sea and the beach, above the tiny figures of Ben by the dunes and Abigail kneeling by the rocks, miles away in a moment.
Oh no! They had both been killed in the train crash. There were two coffins at the top of the church aisle.
‘Bride and bridegroom,’ the man sitting next to Rose muttered. ‘Doesn’t seem like five years ago we saw them married.’
Rose looked up at him. She was a girl who was crying into a handkerchief, and he was her father, his safe, amiable face struck now into sadness over the grey suit and black tie.
‘Don’t cry, Amy,’ he said, but Rose could feel Amy’s chest convulsed with sobs. Her head was bursting, her eyes ached with the weight of the tears, and her mouth pulled itself hard down and wanted to howl. He grasped her hand and pulled her out of the pew, and took her down the aisle with his arm round her, and out of the church.
Amy sat down on someone’s tomb and sobbed. She had never been to a funeral before. She was crying for herself, and for the young man and woman she hardly knew, and for their little orphan boy whom she did know, because he had been staying in her house since the terrible accident. The thought of Eric and his sneaky, irritating ways made her cry more, because he was so hard to love, and who was going to love him now?
The doors of the church opened, and there was a small commotion inside as they prepared to carry out the coffins. Six men hoisted each long box on to their shoulders, and came out with short shuffling steps under the carved stone archway, which was decorated in an ugly way with gargoyle heads, instead of saints and angels. One of them, half human, with bulging eyes, half a snake with open fanged mouth, looked as if it were striking down at the sad procession.
The coffins lurched and tilted as the men felt for the steps with their black shoes and boots. In the square church tower, the bell began to toll, slow mournful notes that sent the message out over the fields: done … done … done …
The clergyman came out, his hair and cassock caught by the wind, and rising. Behind him, a group of people with bowed heads, and one with her head up under a hard-brimmed hat, and a look – not quite a smile, but a grim, unmistakable look of triumph.
The same hat with the low square crown and the sharp brim. The same tense, unyielding posture. Rose hadn’t seen her face at the wedding, but she knew her without a doubt. The bride’s sister, who had wanted the bridegroom for herself.
If looks could kill. Well, she had done it.
‘Who’s that, Daddy?’ Although Amy was washed out with sobbing, she couldn’t help noticing her.
‘Miss Maddox, Eric’s aunt. She’s going to take him.’
‘Oh no! She doesn’t look—’
‘Who else? We’ve only had him
these few days because I’m the family lawyer.’
‘Where is he?’
‘In the church still, with your mother. She’ll bring him out.’
The bell tolled on relentlessly. Some people went out to the road and got into cars with canvas tops that looked to Rose like 1920s models, and there were several horses and carts. A small group of black-clad mourners followed the coffins round to the graveyard at the back of the church, where one wide hole and a pile of earth awaited them.
Rose wasn’t sure that she wanted to follow, but Amy went with her father, snuffling and coughing and tripping over her feet, so she had to.
Side by side, the coffins were lowered into the double grave between two narrow cypress trees, which leaned sideways, mournfully, in the wind that blew across the open fields and smelled to Rose as if it came from the moor. The clergyman intoned, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ his cassock blowing and bouncing merrily, in contrast to his voice. Eric’s aunt stood like a statue. One or two people stepped forward to throw small bunches of flowers into the grave, and then there was a thud as the first spadeful of earth went in, and Amy shrank back behind her father.
The aunt shook hands briskly with the clergyman, and walked away ahead of the group. In front of the church, Amy’s mother was standing with a little boy of about four who wore a dark suit with very short trousers, his bare legs thin and mottled.
Amy’s tender heart went out to him, but Rose’s heart, which was present too, although she could not be seen, jumped with fear. She had seen him before, yet not quite seen him. Only the suspicion of a flash of the glasses too large for the pinched white face, lurking behind Toby in the lounge, and again in the darkness of the scullery. It hadn’t been her imagination. He had been lurking in her mind’s eye – Eric, with whom she knew now she was bound up in this strange adventure.
Surely this pitiful child couldn’t be the messenger of the Lord of the Moor? He stood stiff and cold and alien, staring through Amy’s face at Rose.
Amy’s mother handed him over to Miss Maddox, Who didn’t bend down to him, as most grown-ups do to a four-year-old. She stood upright and looked down at him, with the best she could do for a smile, and he looked up at her, and put up a hand to be held, but she didn’t take it.
‘Come along, my dear,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘We’ll go home to tea.’
‘Yes, Aunt.’
Miss Maddox took him by the upper arm, not the hand, and steered him to the gate.
‘Oh dear.’ Amy’s mother came over and gave her a hug. She was soft and warm and smelled of violet soap. ‘Are you all right, duckie?’ Amy nodded, and her mother gave her a clean handkerchief. ‘Poor Eric.’ She sighed and blinked at an emerging tear. ‘I can’t bear to have to hand him over like a parcel.’
‘She has legal rights,’ Amy’s father said.
‘That doesn’t necessarily fit her to bring up a rather difficult and unhappy small child.’
‘She is a nurse, after all. Sister of Bellamy Ward, at the hospital. Quite high up in her profession, I understand.’
‘That’s not everything.’
Amy and her mother looked at each other, as they did when the father made legal, matter-of-fact statements.
‘I wish he could have stayed with us,’ Amy said doubtfully.
Her mother tilted her head to smile at her. ‘You didn’t like him, though.’
‘I know. He was an awful pest.’
They went through the gate on to the straight, unpaved road, where the wind blew down from what still felt to Rose like a moor, and got into a high two-seater car. Amy sat in the open dickey seat at the back, and her father drove away at a speed that seemed cautious to Rose, but made Amy gasp. She took off her hat, and the wind came round the sides of the hood and whipped her hair about, blinding her.
‘What are you staring at, funny old Rose?’ Ben asked.
Amy’s wind had become the wind from the sea, whipping Rose’s short hair about. When she woke into her own life, she was standing staring out to the wind-tossed sea where the horse had been, her bare feet in the foaming shallows.
‘Why did you jump up and run like that? Was it part of the nightmare? Is there a shark out there?’
Rose shook her head at Ben and came out of the water, wiping her face on her sleeve. She still felt as if she had been crying.
‘I mean, it seems that this poor little Eric was a bit of a stinker, but the aunt was worse.’
From the verandah where she was sweeping, Rose had seen the unmistakable shape of Mr Vingo far down the road, and run out to welcome him back, and unload on to him some of the excitement and emotion of her experience.
They walked slowly with their heads down, talking. Mr Vingo had his thick shoulders raised, and his hands deep in the pockets of the grey raincoat that made him the same shape as the sentinel rock on the moor.
‘Those are clues I’ve got so far. She wanted her sister’s husband for herself. She was furious at the wedding. They said, “If looks could kill … ” and hers did, in a way.’
‘She caused the train crash?’
‘Gosh, I don’t know.’ Rose hadn’t thought of that. ‘I think she just put a sort of hex on them – even the man she loved. If she couldn’t have him, no one could.’
‘The poor little boy.’ Mr Vingo looked as worried as Rose felt.
‘Was he in danger? If so, what can I do about it? I mean, it was years ago, and what’s done is done, so why does Favour show me all these harrowing things?’
‘Because it could lead up to some danger in the present.’ Mr Vingo stopped, and jabbed the end of his stick at a weed in a crack of the pavement. ‘You know that. Neither the horse nor his messengers can change the course of history. They can only understand it, and rescue the living from its effects.’
‘But who? Do you think it’s something about the hospital?’
‘Do you?’ That was what he always said, when she asked him a direct question.
Rose nodded. ‘First the clue about the radiator, and now the aunt being Sister of the same ward. I wouldn’t want to have been one of the children she looked after. She was bad news. Do you suppose she did something dreadful, and that’s why they closed Room 4?’
‘Got ya!’ Mr Vingo finally rooted out the weed, and flipped it into the road.
‘They never should have re-opened it.’ Even though he wouldn’t – or couldn’t – give her answers, he was useful to try out ideas on. ‘I got a horrible feeling, going into that room. And that girl I talked to in there, she hated it. Perhaps it’s haunted by the ghost of Aunt Maddox. In that hat.’
‘Worse.’ Mr Vingo had begun to wheeze from the effort of uprooting the weed. ‘In those days – about the nineteen twenties, you thought – a ward sister wore – she wore a high stiff cap on top of her – ah – ah – ah – opinionated head, like a frozen blancmange.’
Rose made a face. ‘I hope I don’t start getting glimmers of her in odd places. Eric’s glasses are bad enough.’
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ When Mr Vingo smiled, his eyebrows arched up like black caterpillars and his whole loose, broad face re-landscaped itself into new hills and valleys. ‘Mrs Ardis makes such a drama with her poltergeist, and pretending to see things that aren’t there, while all the time, you are really seeing them, and nobody knows.’
Rose giggled. ‘Wouldn’t she die?’
It had started to rain. Down the road, she saw Mrs Ardis, with a salmon pink plastic cape over her head, stagger across the verandah of Wood Briar with one of the big ferns from the hall and put it out on the top step for a drink and a shower. She straightened up and saw them.
‘Rose!’ She put her hands on her hips and shouted from under the tent of the pink cape in her drill sergeant’s voice. ‘I fell over your broom! Return at the double, and use it!’
‘Yes, sir!’ Mr Vingo swung his stick up over his shoulder like a rifle, and they marched smartly back to the hotel in step, except when Rose fell over her own feet, as tear-blinded
Amy had done in the churchyard.
Ben had to go back to school.
‘See you soon!’ His mother had bought three tickets for the Horse of the Year Show, and Rose and Abigail were going to go with Ben and stay with the Kellys in London.
Rose felt tired and flat, as she often did after a journey with the horse, and always did when Ben had gone. She was re-energized by the blue minibus skidding into the car park, and her theatre friends tumbling out of it.
Half way through supper, the lights were turned off and two identical cakes were brought in with one candle on each, because it was the Mumfords’ twin birthday. There wouldn’t have been room for all the candles of their age, even if Mollie had known it. Everyone in the dining-room clapped and cheered, and Toby and the others stood up and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in various harmonies.
Angela and Audrey Mumford, born within ten minutes of each other so long ago, sat and looked at the tablecloth and twitched their mouths a bit and jerked their heads, but you could see they were quite pleased. Rose helped them to cut a piece of cake for everyone in the dining-room and kitchen. They all made a wish, and Ilona, who had been singing softly ever since she came home, and right through the soup and toad-in-the-hole, broke into ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, shaking sparkly earrings that tinkled like a cluster of bells.
The salesmen who were staying in the hotel, and the visiting professor and the two French tourists passing through, thought it was wonderful, and Mollie cried, ‘This is how Wood Briar ought to be – let’s have concerts every Sunday evening!’
‘Without us?’ Toby asked wistfully. They would be moving on soon.
‘Of course not. Let’s have a concert right now, tonight, for the Miss Mumfords’ birthday.’
Angela and Audrey began to gather up their shawls and pill bottles and what was left of the cake in a napkin, to eat in their room, and said a hasty goodnight.
That didn’t spoil it. It made it better.
The double doors between the dining-room and back lounge were opened. Rose and Gloria brought coffee to the tables, and Frank, who was a born announcer rather than a performer, announced that it would be a talent show, with everybody doing something.
The Haunting of Bellamy 4 Page 6