‘Yes, sir – here and round the lake. It was her liking the lake that first struck his lordship, you see. But it was mostly here she used to come. She’d bring her work to near this ruined cottage, and sit with it all day long. And so she will still. It’s one of the things I dread about probably having to leave Vailes, sir – that it will upset Martha so. She can do very fair plain sewing, Martha can; and it’s here she does it. Mr Hartsilver – who dined at the house last night – encourages her at that. He says her work is just right for some of them in Africa.’
‘I’m sure it is.’ My own gaze in turn had now strayed to the ruin. The stone walls of the cottage nowhere rose more than a couple of feet above the foundations, and for the most part hemlock and nettle and thistle obscured what remained. There was nothing romantic about it. And such feeling as it might evoke – the pathos inherent in any memorial of humble life long passed away – seemed of a kind to be experienced in maturity rather than by a child. Had it been the mouldering mass of a mediaeval castle that confronted us, I could better have understood Martha Uff’s haunting the place. ‘Do you know anything about this ruin?’ I asked.
‘No, sir. But it looks to have been like that for a very long time.’
‘I agree – perhaps for a hundred years or more. It must be on the Vailes estate?’
‘Indeed, it must be. It’s still Senderhill land here, these many miles around. A keeper’s cottage, this might have been. Or it might be a water-bailiff’s.’ The altitude of Mrs Uff’s domestic service seemed to come through in her familiarity with a term like this. ‘But I never heard tell any stories about it.’
‘Mrs Uff, would you call your daughter a secretive child?’
‘As the grave.’
‘I think there are things she is afraid to tell.’ I had been startled by the sudden vehemence of Mrs Uff’s speech, and my professional instinct to speak in a measured way was aroused. ‘All in good time, it might be desirable to win her confidence, and hear about them. Do you think Lord Lucius first became greatly interested in her because of something she told him?’
‘No, sir, I don’t. It was just her loving to walk round the lake, and gaze at it.’
‘And to come and sit in this clearing, beside this ruin?’
‘Not that, sir. I don’t think his lordship got to know about that. You see, it was the lake that he had what you might call a thing about. Or so I thought.’
‘I happen to know that you are quite right, Mrs Uff. Lord Lucius hoped your daughter might see something on the lake that—well, that not many people would see.’
To my considerable surprise, Mrs Uff crossed herself. And she must have noticed my remarking the fact, since she offered an explanation at once.
‘Yes, sir – I was brought up in the old faith, and I remained with it when married. But in my way of service, if you can’t be with the Catholic gentry, it’s convenient not to mind taking up with the local thing.’ Mrs Uff paused, but not through any consciousness of having smartly characterised the Anglican communion. ‘We knew, of course, all of us at Vailes, that his lordship had his interest in matters that, like enough, are not meant for man to know. But quite harmless, it seemed to be. Nothing to do with witches or black magic or the like – which is what some in rural parts get mixed up with. It went into books for the learned, did the manner of enquiring into such things that his lordship had. Or so Mr Hartsilver has told me. That would be right, sir?’
‘Oh, most decidedly. But tell me, Mrs Uff.’ I had resolved to put one question boldly. ‘Is it your belief that Martha has indeed—well, seen things?’
‘Now, sir, that’s not easy to answer.’ Mrs Uff had given me a wary look. ‘But I’m sure she hasn’t seen what his lordship wanted her to see.’
Since it would have been awkward to trot beside Mrs Uff on her bicycle, and not too easy to sustain a conversation had we proceeded together on foot, I returned to Vailes on the side of the lake by which I had come. Like Mrs Uff, I kept an eye open for the errant Martha, but to no effect. I went over in my mind my very brief conversation with the child on the afternoon of my arrival, and endeavoured to compare it with what her mother had told me. The implication of Mrs Uff’s final speech had been that Martha, although she had proved unavailing for Senderhill’s purpose, was to be suspected of having had some positive uncanny experience of her own – which, however, being secret ‘as the grave’, she had determinedly kept to herself. What I myself had received from Martha had borne the appearance of a comprehensive denial of having ‘seen’ anything at all – as also, indeed, of having ‘done’ anything. But she might have been telling the truth about herself vis-a-vis Senderhill while being less than candid about some other matter. She had been alarmed, and had talked about the police. There had also been about her – I now recalled – an indefinable air of guarding or protecting I didn’t at all know what.
But what might a country girl ‘see’ that would make her apprehensive of the local constable? A crime or deed of violence was one answer; had Martha been the witness to such a thing and failed to speak up about it, she might soon come to feel that her silence constituted implication. Or might the unlawfulness consist not in the thing seen but in the seeing? There came into my head as I asked myself this the memory that a rural community is insatiably inquisitive. Glancing through windows, peering over hedges, lurking to look or listen: the rustic world described by Thomas Hardy, for example, is prolific in such behaviour, which is regarded as common form. In a village school one learns that certain enterprises of this sort are rude, and that the village policeman may have something to say to children who thus peep at unsuitable activities. Could something in this general area be operative in Martha Uff’s mind?
Perhaps I should add that I didn’t carry my speculation far. For one thing, it somehow failed to answer to my sense of this particular girl. Mentally Martha was on the half-witted side; and she was lumpish and sullen and awkward and slatternly. But lurking in her I had felt the potentiality for some sort of response to experience that would not be despicable. There had been a quality in her voice, I remembered, distinguishable beneath her uncouth accent, that had said something of the sort to me. I couldn’t see her as engaged, at least, in the baser sort of peeping.
Outside the house, I encountered Holroyd. He had the appearance of having been minded to come and look for me – and also of severity, as if he judged that I had been neglecting my duties. He had himself, I knew, been up in what was called the muniment room – where I had specifically obtained permission to make what researches I pleased, but which I should have thought to be a little outside my friend’s concern. This last was a persuasion in which I was to prove strikingly mistaken.
‘I’ve had a very enjoyable walk,’ I said blandly. ‘I wish I’d been able to persuade you to accompany me.’
‘You’ll stop wishing anything of the kind, when you hear what I have been doing. Ho-ho, ho-ho!’
‘Well?’ I demanded – for I realised that it was a triumphant man who stood before me.
‘That shipwreck, my dear fellow. I’ve found it. It was in 1832. The barque Gloriana out of Plymouth. Lost with all hands.’
5
‘1832, and no survivors?’ We faced each other in the library – to which Holroyd, a hand on my elbow, had impulsively led me. The Gothicising of Vailes had been carried into few of its interior features, but this was one of them. The room gave the effect of a chunk of Scott’s Abbotsford (or, I suppose, Beckford’s Fonthill) lurking like a foreign body in an alien organism. The books were less shelved than entombed, and there was nothing to sit on that looked more comfortable than a choir-stall. Senderhill’s working quarters had been elsewhere – in a study combining modern convenience with Georgian elegance, but in that we had for some reason refrained from ensconcing ourselves.
‘All hands, and all passengers too. In the Bay of Biscay.’
‘Then that disposes of one idea that has passed through my mind.’ I sat down gingerly on a settle of the k
ind on which lovers gaze into one another’s eyes in Pre-Raphaelite canvases. ‘It occurred to me that Lucius Senderhill might once have been in a shipwreck himself.’
‘Ho-ho! An interesting conjecture! We should then have a staggering example of eidetic imagery.’
‘What the devil is that?’
‘The reviving of a past optical impression with hallucinatory clearness. But it won’t wash.’
‘Evidently not. My other conjecture has taken me definitely into the realm of the supernatural. Some ancestor of Senderhill’s had perished at sea.’
‘Ah, now you’re in the target area. But I don’t know what you mean by the supernatural. It has never seemed to me a very helpful term.’
‘Then I promise not to use it again.’ I couldn’t help laughing at the largeness of Holroyd’s dismissal of one of the master interests of his species. ‘I know how sublimely a rationalist you are. Don’t you even manage to take your friend O’Rourke and his prescient dice in your scientific stride? But tell me about the Gloriana, and how you’ve come on her.’
‘Extremely simply. I’ve spent the morning with the printed memorials of the Senderhills. Naturally, there are family histories and biographies and memoirs enough. But a very brief rummage happened to turn up Bertrand Senderhill. Only a sentence or two, because he wasn’t at all important. But something at least to the point. He was drowned at sea.’
‘But is not an ancestor of our late friend?’
‘Definitely not. He was a young unmarried man of no more than nineteen.’
‘Was he brought up here at Vailes?’
‘Yes, he was. His father – who was an Otho, which is a regular family name – was only the second son of the first Marquess. But he married a considerable heiress from the City, and for some reason he kept up, and lived at, Vailes, throughout the minority of the second Marquess. Bertrand was Lord Otho’s eldest child, and he was sent to Eton and then to Christ Church. But it seems he soon decided he’d had enough of Oxford, and he told his father that he was clearing out. He said he wanted to travel. So he was packed off on the Grand Tour.’
‘Was it still called that in 1832?’
‘You’re a most pedantic chap. Whatever it was called, off Bertrand went.’
‘With a private tutor in the traditional style?’
‘Apparently not. He said he was going to join Lord Somebody-or-other in Italy – a college friend who was already equipped in that way. Do you think that he was perhaps pulling a fast one on Mum and Dad? Ho-ho! You may be right.’
‘But it was no laughing matter, since he was incontinently drowned?’
‘Just that. The Gloriana went down.’
‘I see.’ I got up from the settle – which had been designed, I imagine, by William Morris, and creaked badly. ‘And that’s all?’
‘It’s all I know.’ Holroyd, who had been prowling the library, came to a halt before a chimney-piece much encumbered with heraldic devices. ‘The question is, did Lucius Senderhill know the story?’
‘Surely he must. After his vision, or whatever it’s to be called, he must have searched the family papers for records of shipwreck.’
‘One would suppose so. Indeed, he might well have known of the young man’s drowning already. But perhaps he never got round to it. What Tommy Hartsilver told us the other evening doesn’t suggest that he did.’
‘He must have – if you want a tolerably rational explanation of his experience.’ I paused to work this out. ‘Say that the story of Bertrand’s drowning had come to him as a child, and enormously impressed him. Then he forgot about it – even repressed it, as I believe the expression is, because it was so terrifying. Then – after his calamitous love affair and when he was in low spirits – it suddenly miraged up on him. He took a look at his blessed lake in moonlight, and suddenly he saw something.’
‘It sounds like that.’ Holroyd was staring at me doubtfully. ‘I can’t quite make it out, all the same. A hallucination of such a kind – suddenly a whole actual scene blotted out, and what you might call a first-class spectacular taking its place: well, it needs some uncommonly potent psychic charge somewhere. You understand me? Some link between that drowned youth and our Lucius Senderhill – himself still a young Senderhill, remember. A congruity of circumstances – something like that.’
‘You beckon me into deep waters. I suggest we discover what Mrs Uff is providing for lunch, and then take thought about the possibility of discovering anything else.’
‘There must be something else.’ Holroyd spoke with a sudden vehemence which surprised me. ‘We go on rummaging until we find it.’
I have admitted that it was curiosity which really took me to Vailes. But my expectations had been those of an amateur historian; it had appeared to me possible that, while allaying Lord Melchester’s unnecessary anxieties, I might take a look at some of the older papers preserved in the place for anything of interest they might contain; I certainly had no notion of being drawn into Holroyd’s kind of thing. And I believe it was at this point – and when, to be precise, my friend again used that word ‘rummage’ – that I was conscious in myself of a reluctance to pursue at Vailes any further enquiry into the affairs, whether natural or preternatural, of the Senderhill family. I believe I even had an impulse to pack my bag and send for a cab.
That I was actually under the influence of what is called a presentiment is something I would be inclined to deny, although my mind is without conviction on the point as I now write. I had never been subject to anything of the kind, and I should have received with complete scepticism the suggestion that either that or any other uncanny experience would ever visit me. There must be a streak of superstition in me, all the same. The oppressive emptiness of the mansion – which we had touched on during our dinner with Hartsilver – was coming to bear on me more heavily, and I had taken something very near a dislike to that harmless, and indeed quietly beautiful, lake.
I also felt an uneasiness in the presence of Martha Uff (who had turned up to serve us, after a fashion, at lunch), and I am glad to recall now that this was at least not mingled with any sense of hostility. Nor was I antagonised by the impatience with which Holroyd marched me off to the muniment room after the meal. His pertinacity still amused and even attracted me. Nevertheless I was some way from regretting my own conviction that no more light was going to be vouchsafed us on Lucius Senderhill’s long-past hallucination. It was almost as if I had begun to share Mrs Uff’s primitive conviction that there are matters not meant for man to know. The dangerousness of trafficking with the supernatural is an immemorial persuasion, and probably a healthy one. The ghost of Hamlet’s father might indeed have been a goblin damn’d, and tempted him towards the flood as Horatio feared. Although I had never much considered the matter, I was at least aware of the traditional notion that such apparitions may do us injury.
But that we may injure them was something that had never come within the scope of my imagining.
PART TWO
1
A muniment room, in the strict sense, was precisely what the gloomy chamber – deep in dust, trailing cobweb across hand or face as one moved, yielding tokens of the habitation of bats – was not. Title-deeds and the like had been removed long ago, and what remained was family lumber. But this family, of course, had for some centuries accumulated property and administered estates on a substantial scale; and it was in the main a mass of written evidences of the fact, no longer of interest to anyone, that was quietly mouldering here. In chests and cupboards and on open shelves were the letter-books, accounts, and inventories of stewards and agents, bailiffs and attorneys, head-keepers, huntsmen, chaplains, and other confidential personages. The records of forgotten law suits, the pleadings of tenants, the cellar-books of butlers, the reports of governesses and tutors had been thrust here and there in careless heaps. And, with only a little less consideration, the letters and diaries and commonplace books even of numerous Senderhills themselves had been tied in bundles and stacked wherever t
here was space. It was an entirely dismal and uninspiring spectacle.
‘There may,’ I said to Holroyd as we surveyed it, ‘be matter at least of antiquarian, if not historical, interest buried in all that silt of paper and parchment. But I declare myself as abandoning any notion of hunting for it. No doubt it has been like this since the time of the third Marquess, who departed to greater grandeurs without giving a damn. But I’m surprised that nobody since has ordered any sort of tidy-up – Lucius in particular, who was something of a scholar.’
‘It’s a little daunting, I agree. In fact, the place is uncommonly mucky. I had a go yesterday, and I know.’
‘Do you notice the scattering of feathers all over the floor? I believe that a whole race of owls has lived and died here.’
‘I don’t think so. Haven’t you looked through that open door at the far end? There’s real solid junk there, including a mass of abandoned bedding and pillows. The feathers are drifting through from them all the time. Which shows that there’s at least a current of air. And that has kept things from mouldering too badly.’
‘They can’t moulder away too quickly for me.’ I was surprised, as I spoke, by the completeness of this volte-face in myself. ‘And going after anything by or about poor young Bertrand Senderhill is like looking for a needle in a haystack – or a pile of feather-beds.’
‘I intend to have a shot at it, all the same. Of course, my dear fellow, if you prefer a quiet afternoon in the library, I’ll join you for tea. You’ll find a pile of not-too-old journals – The Field, I think, and Country Life – down there somewhere.’
‘Very well, Holroyd.’ I repressed my irritation. ‘Let us rummage. But systematically, if rummaging is susceptible of that.’
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