As he was assisted into his evening dress by his valet for another one of these dreary mock-festive occasions, he found his mind drifting back to summer parties when he had still been in school, when he had spent one week after another making the rounds of week-long visits to estates in the country and had not considered those simpler pleasures beneath his dignity. Then he and the others had gone to the church fêtes, and bought useless embroidered cushions and tatted antimacassars and eaten ices and listened to village musicians and actually enjoyed themselves…
And with a curse, he flung himself into his carriage for another evening of pretense and empty smiles.
But, he reminded himself, this was the life of an adult. It was more than time to put away childish notions, to settle into the serious business of life. Life was not church fêtes and ices. Life was doing things one did not want to do with the goal of getting things, great things, accomplished.
Besides, Lady Cordelia had assured him that eventually he would come to take some sardonic amusement in these occasions, as he watched the façades strut about pretending to be substance.
But in the back of his mind he couldn’t help feeing this was all very inferior to honest laughter and the taste of a lemon ice beneath the stars of a country night.
***
With the excitement of the play over, a languor settled over the children for the next couple of days or so. There was, alas, no further sign of Robin Goodfellow either, though Nan looked in vain for him everywhere she went. It was Mem’sab who roused them all out of it by proposing a contest.
“We have gone over a great deal of the history of this house,” she said over breakfast, three days after the play. “But there is a great deal more here that can be discovered. I want each of you to find out all you can about the history of some particular place or object in this house, and link that to the greater history of England. The one with the story that is best will be allowed to come with me to select a school pony at the Horse Fair.”
Now, since the mere existence of a “school pony” had been the subject of much rumor for two days—originating with Tommy who had sworn he had overheard a conversation between two grooms suggesting that some unknown benefactor was going to field the money for such a thing—the news caused a sensation. Every single girl knew exactly what she wanted—a gentle, fat white pony with a soft nose and big eyes, who would willingly be hitched to a cart for rides all over the estate. And every single boy knew what he wanted—a lively black pony with white socks and a blaze, and an eye full of mischief, who would willingly run at breakneck speed beneath his rider, and take fences even a tall hunter would balk at. Never mind that no more than two of the girls knew how to drive, and of the three boys who had been taught how to ride, none of them had been on a member of the living equine species in more than a year. The lines were drawn, the camps set up, and a grim rivalry ensued.
Now Nan, who was still in charge of helping the ayahs with the littlest children, was at a distinct disadvantage on two counts. One, that she had to wait until her chores were over that morning before she could go in search of her research subject. And two, that while she enjoyed history, her knowledge of it was extremely patchy.
So by the time she got to looking over the grounds and manor house, all the obvious choices had been spoken for. Sarah graciously offered to give up her own choice—the set of African tribal weapons she found in the gun room—but Nan was determined to find her own mystery to unravel.
But it seemed that every time she went to Mem’sab with a choice, it was only to discover that either she had misremembered and they had already learned about it as a group, or that someone else had already spoken for it. She didn’t want to try and ferret out anything like the stories behind portraits or bits of furniture or books, Mem’sab had ruled out things that were clearly nothing more than hunting trophies, like the chandelier of stag horns or the heads of dead animals in the gun room, and the boys had all straightaway bagged things like suits of armor and heirloom swords.
It was with a sense of frustration that Nan began poking around the building, looking now for anything that gave her the least little stirring of interest. There was nothing inside in the areas that they were allowed to explore, and not even for the privilege of going to a Horse Fair was she going to dare the wrath of the housekeeper to venture into forbidden zones. Some of the other girls could get away with that, but it seemed that the housekeeper had dire expectations of Nan’s ability to stay out of trouble, and kept Nan’s leash extremely short.
The knot garden and the tiny maze (so small even the toddlers could find their way in and out of it) had already been taken. The other gardens were “too general” according to Mem’sab, “Unless you can find a specific plant that is unusual or clearly imported.” The folly had been taken. The false ruins were spoken for.
At this point it was late afternoon, and there didn’t seem to be anything that was going to be interesting to look into, which meant things that were difficult, dull, or both. At that point, Nan was kicking a round stone along the path in front of her in frustration when the stone smacked into the side of the dry well. She made her usual aversive detour—and then stopped.
Surely, if she felt a sensation that was that strong, there must be something there worth looking into…
She went to Mem’sab, who raised an eyebrow at her. “It is old enough, surely. If that is what you want—”
“I’m about run out of things, Mem’sab,” Nan confessed. “Dunno what else to do now.”
Mem’sab rubbed the back of her right hand as if troubled. “There is something I do not like about that well,” she said slowly. “I do not know that it is dangerous, but the place troubles me profoundly. I would prefer that if you really want to pursue this, you do it without spending too much time at the well itself. There is something not quite right there.”
“Unhappy memories, mebbe?” Nan ventured shrewdly.
“It could well be. Well, if this is what you want, then by all means, use it as your project.” Mem’sab looked down at her own hands for a moment. “But Nan, be careful about that place. It might be that there is nothing there, but it might very well be that we both sense something dormant there; something asleep. Don’t wake it up.”
Nan had figured that the best place to begin in her hunt for information was with the groundskeeper, but to her surprise he neither knew nor cared about something that was not only useless, but a nuisance, since occasionally things got dropped down it that he had to fetch back up again.
Not by accident, of course. No, it was generally deliberate, at least as far as Nan could make out from the man’s grumbling. He didn’t like the well. No one liked the well. But Master wouldn’t brick it over because there was something historical about it.
Excited now, Nan tried to pursue the question further but the old man refused to talk about it anymore.
Frustrated, she began canvassing the rest of the servants, but most of them had no idea what she was talking about, except that few of them cared to go near the well. Most of them simply said that the well was ugly and there was no reason to spend any time around it. Three of them, however, said that the well made them uneasy and wouldn’t even discuss it.
Dejected, she flopped into a chair at dinner between Sarah and Tommy and spent most of the meal interjecting heavy sighs between their excited comments. Sarah began looking at her curiously, and finally even Tommy noticed that she was being glum.
“No luck with your project, then?” he said, sympathetically. “Come on, Nan, tell us what it is, and maybe we can help.”
“Even if we can’t help, we can try and make you feel better,” Sarah offered.
With another heavy sigh, Nan explained her idea, and that she had come up dry. Sarah shook her head—she was doing the history of a Cavalierera portrait, and having no difficulty, for the artist was quite a famous one, and there were lots of books even in the manor library that talked about it. “I don’t think I’ve seen anything in the
library about the well,” she said doubtfully.
But Tommy looked thoughtful.
“Maybe Gaffer Geordie can help,” he said.
Nan blinked at him. “Who’s that?” she asked
“He lives down in the pensioners’ cottages,” Tommy explained.
“He used to work in the stable, oh, a long time ago! Before the last of the old family died and the cousins inherited.”
Well, that sounded promising. But if he was that old—
“He ain’t dotty, is ‘e?” Nan asked dubiously.
Tommy shook his head vigorously. “Not a bit! Whenever there’s something wrong with a horse or a dog, they go to Gaffer before they call in the farrier or the horse doctor. Most times, he sets it right. And when they do call the horse doctor, he won’t do a thing unless Gaffer is right there.”
That sounded even more promising. But it didn’t answer the question of why Tommy thought this Gaffer could help. Before she could say anything though, Tommy answered that question.
“Gaffer Geordie knows everything that’s ever happened here right back to his grandfather’s day,” he explained. “So if there’s anything about the well going back that far, he’ll know.”
The next day, armed with the information that Gaffer lived in the cottage “with all the dogs,” Nan and Neville trudged down to the row of cottages that had been built to house Highleigh servants too old to work who had been pensioned off. And very shortly, Nan realized that the seemingly vague directions were not vague at all, for it was obvious which cottage was the Gaffer’s.
Dogs—all of them old, maimed, or both—lay in the sun along the wall of the cottage on either side of the door, sat quietly watching the street, or attended to doggish business around the grounds. There were probably thirty of them; most were foxhounds, though there was a three-legged wolfhound, and a cluster of pretty little spaniels with various imperfections. The Gaffer himself, like a king enthroned among his subjects, sat on a stool beside his doorway, smoking a pipe, and watching the world pass by.
He was an astonishing sight in Nan’s eyes; she had no idea just how old he was, but his hair and beard were snow-white, and two bushy white eyebrows overshadowed a face that was a mass of wrinkles, in which his eyes appeared like two shiny black currants. He certainly looked a lot older than her gran ever did, and gran had been the oldest person Nan had ever known. He wore a linen smock and buff trousers, a pair of old, worn boots, and a floppy hat.
He gave Nan a friendly nod as she approached, and grinned at Neville. She half expected to hear some sort of country dialect she’d only half understand when he opened his mouth, but instead, out came, “So, raven lass, come to see old Gaffer Geordie, have you?”
Nan nodded, distracted by the dogs, which came up to sniff and inspect her. Neville eyed them with disdain, even contempt. It was pretty clear that Gaffer Geordie saved the dogs no one else wanted. Even the spaniels at his feet, while pretty and charming, were not perfect specimens.
“So what can old Geordie do for you?” the old man continued, eyeing her with curiosity. “I don’t know much but dogs and horses, lass. If there’s aught wrong with your bird, I probably can’t help you.”
Neville quorked, and shook himself. “Neville’s right as rain, sir,” Nan said, as politely as possible. “I heard you knew a lot about Highleigh Park, an’ I wanted to ask you ‘bout something. That dry well by the kitchen garden—”
“Oh, now, that’s an uncanny spot that is,” Gaffer Geordie said instantly, and shook his head. “Had a bad reputation. Some said it was a cursed place, and some said it was a curse on the master of Highleigh. Very uncanny, and no surprise, seeing them bones as was pulled out of it.”
There could not have been anything more likely to spark Nan’s interest than that sentence. “Bones?” she repeated, as Neville bobbed his head.
“Oh, aye, bones. A full skellington, it was, and chains, leg chains and arm chains.” Geordie nodded wisely. “Summun dropped that feller down and clamped the lid on the top, leavin’ him to die. Master of Highleigh that was, back when I was no more bigger than you, reckoned to clean out the well, maybe use it for summat, but after the bones was found, he gave up on the notion of usin’ it for anything. Vicar took charge of them, gave the poor fellow a proper Christian burial. Spot’s been a bit quieter since then.” He scratched his head. “Used to be, there was noise in that well, of a night, now and again.”
“Moaning?” Nan asked, shivering.
But the old man shook his head. “Curses.”
That was all he could tell her, but it was more than she had until that point. The next person to approach seemed to be the local vicar who was, in any case, coming to take tea with Mem’sab. Unfortunately, he could not shed light on the matter either. “That was long before my time, dear child,” he said, shaking his head. And that seemed to be that.
Until, however, someone unexpectedly approached Nan the next day, rather than the other way around.
Called out of the nursery by one of the ayahs, she found the estate manager waiting in the hallway with an enormous ledger under his arm. She knew he was the estate manager only because she had seen him consulting with Mem’sab over some matter and had been told who the lean, slightly stooped, middle-aged man was. He was smiling slightly and pushed his glasses farther up his nose with one finger.
“You would be Miss Nan, investigating the mystery of the dry well?” he asked, making it sound far more intriguing than it had been up until that moment.
She nodded, and he handed the large and heavy book to her, bound in brown calfskin. “The Lord of Highleigh of those days was an amateur antiquarian and archaeologist, although they would not have put it that way back then. In his own writing, he referred to himself as a Student of Natural Sciences. He took notes on everything he found and did in and around the estate, so if there is any record of anything to do with the well, it will surely be in this book.”
Flabbergasted, as well as astonished, Nan took it from him. “Thankee!” she exclaimed. “Thankee kindly!”
He waved her thanks off, peering at her benignly from behind his spectacles. “On the whole, having you children here has been no great work or inconvenience and has been quite amusing. This project of your schoolmistress’ is teaching you all valuable lessons in conducting research, and I am happy to be able to assist.”
With that, he went on his way, leaving her clutching the oversized volume to her chest.
After luncheon, she, Sarah, and Tommy—who, having completed his own history of the suit of armor in the library, was eaten up with curiosity about Nan’s project—took it to the dining room, opened the book on the big table, and began looking through it. The three of them knelt side-by-side on dining room chairs so they could all get a good view. The neat, copperplate handwriting was surprisingly easy to read, and the three of them, with the birds looking on from Nan and Sarah’s shoulders, perused the pages with interest.
This self-professed “Student of Natural History” was more of a dabbler in anything and everything, it seemed to Nan. There were notes on chemical experiments, on stellar observations, weather observations, but what clearly intrigued him most was the far past. It was when he was digging the foundations of the folly that he first encountered some Roman artifacts, and the discovery of the few coins, the bits of pottery, and the old dagger changed his life.
While he did not go wholesale into digging up his estate, he used every new construction project as a reason to excavate. When he was not digging, he was finding other places where he could indulge his hobby.
And that brought him around to exploring the past through the records of his own family, and trying to link what he found to the papers and diaries in the family archives.
He wasn’t often all that successful, and some of his notes seemed to be stretching the facts even to Nan. How on earth could he determine that a coin was Roman, for instance, when it was so worn that there wasn’t anything to show it even was a coin except that it was
round and bronze?
Eventually, though, he had built all that a reasonable man could, and he turned his attention to other places he might go looking for bits of the past.
That was when he hit on the idea of clearing out the old well.
The children leaned over the book intently as they realized that they had struck gold at last. The first few entries, mostly the general dates Lord Mathew had uncovered telling him who had ordered the well built and why it had gone dry, interspersed with observations about the weather and the implications for the harvest, were rather boring. One very small man had to be lowered down to the bottom on a rope, and dug the debris out, shovelful by small shovelful, dumping it into buckets to be sent up for examination and disposal. Then it all got sifted once it arrived at the top of the well, and anything not dirt, rocks, and plant life were set aside for Lord Mathew to look at in detail. It had been difficult finding someone willing to go down into the well; it had a bad reputation, and according to Lord Mathew’s notes, the servants claimed that on certain nights one could hear moaning and vile curses coming from the bottom.
Then the digger found the skull and nothing would persuade anyone on the estate to go down into the well. Lord Mathew, now afire with excitement, stripped to his shirtsleeves and had himself lowered down into the hole. With the aid of a lantern held over his head, he meticulously excavated until he uncovered the entire body.
Whoever it was, there had been manacles about his wrists and ankles, with chains on them. Clothing had not survived, but there had been silver buttons on his coat and trousers, and he had worn fine leather boots with silver buckles. Another buckle might have been an ornament on a hat. Lord Mathew tentatively dated these objects to the time of Charles the First. Since this was the time of the Civil War, and many records were lost then when the manor was invaded by Roundheads and many things stolen or burned, Lord Mathew despaired of finding any answer.
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