The woman muttered to herself as she worked, but whatever she was saying was inaudible, even to her own ears. Her petulant, complaining voice was drowned in the groans and squeals of trussed and hobbled calves, lambs and geese awaiting slaughter next morning in the passage outside, and the roar of the fires under the ovens behind her in the bakehouse. The air was sharp with the smell of the terrified creatures’ excrement and the equally powerful aroma of the swelling loaves stacked on iron shelves in the baking ovens.
Not that anyone would have overheard her if she had spoken into perfect silence. She worked alone. The builders who had been working on the inner walls had long since dropped their tools and departed for a nearby inn, and the rest of the kitchen and scullery staff had finally stumbled away to their sleeping quarters to eat and drink themselves into brief, but welcome, oblivion. And they would not have paid any heed to her words had they been there to hear them, as it was the common opinion of them all that she was three parts mad.
If this were true, and she had lost a portion of her intellect, it was in no way evident from the skilful way she went about preparing the food for de Quintz’s meal. She tackled the task of carving the splayed and steaming carcass in front of her on a roasting dish with quick, neat precision. Mad as she might be, she was obviously mistress of her craft. She had to bend forward as she worked, because her belly, swollen in the seventh month of pregnancy, distanced her from the object of her attention, but the knife and two-pronged fork in her darting fingers tweaked the tender meat from bone to the dish at her elbow with a practised confidence, that seemed to require no concentration. In fact, she was hardly aware of the complex actions she performed; her mind was all on other things.
If the kitchen, late at night, was a dark, damp, steamy, stinking place, it could stand as a paradigm of the mind of this solitary woman, the tenor of whose thoughts could fancifully, but adequately, be described by the above four adjectives. Events in her recent past had set a black and doleful cast upon her mind, and upon her countenance. From the evidence of her features, an observer, should it occur to him for whatever reason to guess at her age, would deduce her to be a good deal older than she was. The previous three years had transformed a girl of nineteen into a worn and troubled woman, and this over-rapid maturation had soured her face and temper. Whatever beauty she had possessed three seasons previously was now almost all gone. It is an old tale that creaks with age at the telling, but it was her quondam good looks (of course) that had precipitated her downfall. And it was the knowledge that her beauty had vanished, had been stolen away, along with all else precious to her, that had turned her mind and left her, if not quite insane, then tottering on the brink of madness.
The wayward words she uttered were an expression of the chaos of her thoughts; an outlet for the turmoil of her emotions. The latter were a mix of resentment, indignation, outraged powerlessness, and others equally negative; all kept active by a constant, sharp, mind-biting anxiety that drove off any prospect of peace or even hope of rest. She was doing what she had been driven to do by forces and circumstances over which she had no control. Dimly, dumbly, she was asserting herself in the only way she could, and making a gesture that she hoped would hurt the man who had casually destroyed her. But in this she was mistaken. Her faculties were impaired and her judgement wrong. It was not he who was to suffer as a result of her actions that night.
De Quintz, along with a handful of cronies, had arrived at Haddon Hall one bright morning three springs previously. He was a stocky, clump-handed, swaggering man with a loud, high voice and pale blue eyes the colour of frozen milk. His face had been cut in some recent skirmish, and the wounds had not yet become scars. He had also taken the prick of a halberd through the right hip, a wound that had not been well attended. As a result, he leaned slightly forward and to that side as he walked, and his features were set in a constant grimace of pain. He was the cousin of Sir George, then Lord of Haddon who, though he had welcomed De Quintz hospitably enough, was not often seen in his company. It was said by persons close to Sir George that there was some coolness between the two distant relatives; more than would, perhaps, naturally devolve from the great gap in their age and temperament, and the remoteness of their consanguinity. Indeed, it was the opinion of some that the Master was markedly fearful of De Quintz who, in turn, showed little respect for his once notoriously vigorous, but now ancient and enfeebled relation. The Knight installed himself in the finest quarter of the Hall almost like a conqueror, and soon made himself the most hated person not only in the building, but in the countryside around for many miles. He was plainly a man of rapacious habits with no inclination to change his ways to those of mild domesticity. He was, in short, an ogre. There was even some foolish gossip, originating among the few members of the household staff who had survived the rigours of sixteenth century life long enough to enter the state of superannuated octogenarianism, that there was something unholy about him, something against nature. These old ones, who had been in service at the Hall all their lives, were half convinced he had visited the house before, when they and their Master had been young. De Quintz, then, had not appeared much different to the way he looked now, nor much younger, or so they claimed. If their memories were correct, the old folk said (and smiled uneasily and shook their heads) – which, of course, they could not have been. The younger, and perhaps less superstitious, of the servants spoke of family resemblance, and averred that any such visitor who may have been entertained at the Hall sixty or more years earlier had very likely been an ancestor of their present guest, which surely must have been the case.
De Quintz, once installed in the house, took what he wanted of what he saw around him. One of the first things that caught his eye was a girl who worked in the kitchens. He came upon her when she was collecting herbs in the garden and was as struck by her beauty as she was by his ugliness. He was without a female companion at that time, so he took her to his rooms. He kept her shut up in his apartments for eight weeks. The mother of the imprisoned girl begged him repeatedly to return her, and tried to press Sir George to intercede with his cousin on her behalf, without success. At last, she made the mistake of sending her other daughter, a girl some years younger than her sister, to De Quintz’s quarters to plead for the older girl’s release. The child obtained her sister’s freedom, but at the cost of her own liberty.
The older girl never spoke of her experiences during her incarceration with the Knight, but it was obvious she had been mistreated. When at last she recovered her bodily health, she discovered she was pregnant. She disposed of the baby in her fifth month, only to find herself with child again not long after. The fact that De Quintz had taken her sister to his bed did not mean he had lost interest in the older girl altogether, and he continued to force himself on her whenever he would, and against her wishes. The two girls were not the only ones to be treated thus by the Knight, who spread his attentions far and wide in the neighbourhood. Once, a group of husbands whose wives he had outraged plotted his assassination. He somehow found them out before they could act against him, forced them to confess, and supervised their executions. The men, before they died, swore to the last that he must have used some Black Art against them, since none of them had betrayed the others. They said De Quintz could only have learned of their plans from Satan himself, whose presence they had sought to invoke, in the hope that he would assist their cause and bring down their enemy.
The younger sister must have taken De Quintz’s fancy. He kept her imprisoned in his quarters without break. In time, she too became pregnant, and he permitted her to bear the child, from some freak of warped affection, it was assumed. When the tot could walk, it got in his way, and he would not have it about him. It was, therefore, often left to wander where it chose, stumbling along Haddon’s dark passages, and in and out of the Hall’s bare, inhospitable rooms. On these peregrinations without destination it would drag behind it, by the arm, a horrid little human-like figure its father had fashioned for it out of wood
and rags. This doll was its only true companion ever.
The child was a pitiful sight. Because of its father’s raging temper and thoughtless cruelty, the infant, a puny, nervous, curly-headed girl, developed from the start an aversion to the company of men. Women she would cling to if they let her, but all males she avoided like the Pest. However, even the most motherly female members of the household staff rejected and avoided her if they could, because she was the daughter of the man who had darkened all their lives, and was anyway an unappealing, mewling mite, with none of the common charms of infancy. She was in every sense a misfortuned child.
To the elder sister, who, after her brief concubinage, was sent back to her work in the kitchen, the toddler became an object of hatred. The child never ventured into the kitchen, but haunted those rooms that were occupied by those few female servants who were single women. Here, the woman came across the infant repeatedly, and loathed it, not least because it had its father’s chilling pale blue eyes and sharp, thin nose, rather than her sister’s finer features. And it cut her to the quick to think that she was herself related to the solitary, unwanted, ugly child, a creature neglected even by its own mother, who, though she did what she could to protect her offspring, would not risk earning the displeasure of De Quintz by being seen to care for it more than him.
Yet the woman, though she was the poor child’s aunt, did not fully understand the girl’s position in the house. The Knight had refused to recognize the paternity of any of the other couple of dozen or more children he had sired on various women of the Hall and the district surrounding it, but, by tolerating the birth of her sister’s baby in his quarters, he had demonstrated, or so she thought, that he had been proud to father the wretched infant, and that he must therefore, in some sense, love it. Perhaps, she assumed, he cared for the toddler because of its strong resemblance to himself, though this could only have been, of course, a post-natal consideration. However, she was sure he did love, or at least feel some strong attachment to, the child.
But she was quite wrong. He had let his mistress keep her baby because it had amused him to do so. Since that time, he had quickly grown tired of the child, and would soon discard its mother. That was the pattern of his life; he kept no one near him long. He was set in his ways, and had been for a very long time. The occupants of the Hall, with the possible exception of Sir George himself, would have been surprised, and even alarmed, to know for just how long.
The woman working in the kitchen was talking to herself about the child. Her thoughts were chaotic. Panic lurked behind them, and, behind the panic, horror; horror at what she had become and done.
“It was fate that threw her in my path,” the woman whined. Her tone was of one trying to justify herself to an invisible accuser. “Her fate or mine? I couldn’t say. But there she was, in front of me at a moment when my hatred was hottest. The Knight returned starving, and me, of all, they ask to warm his meat! Be pleased to I said; I’ll make him a meal to fill his belly to bursting, as he’s filled mine, over and again.” She pushed the remains of the carcass away across the table, and gazed down at the steaming heap of sliced meat in front of her. “I smiled when I saw the pitiful, foolish child, so lost and alone, and she misread my smile and thought I would be her friend. She dragged her wretched doll towards me and caught hold of my dress and wouldn’t let go. I tried to make her, but she would not. Well, I had work to do, so we came, the three of us, down here; me hauling her and she the doll, in a train.” She tugged at her hair and held it bunched tight in both sticky hands behind her neck, moaned, then continued: “The ovens were so hot, and I was tired from the day’s work. Perhaps I fell in a swoon, or perhaps I slept, and acted in my sleep; I’ve no recollection of what passed.” She released her hair, stretched up, and seemed to draw in strength and resolution with her breath. She shook her head, and said in a louder, firmer voice, “Well; no matter! It’s done. Well and truly done.”
She lifted the salver bearing the meat, carried it to the door, and woke two of the boys who lay curled up asleep next to the doomed animals in the passage beyond. They took the flesh, and dishes of vegetables she had also prepared, to the dining hall where the Knight and his companions, now hungrier than ever, were waiting. As she watched them go the woman said, “Well, here we are now, Sir De Quintz; your meat is ready. Your little goose is well and truly cooked, so eat your fill.”
She ambled back into the kitchen and dragged an ancient wooden cupboard used to store food close to where she had been working. She pushed the cupboard over on its back, opened its slim door wide, and tipped the remains of the carcass she had been carving into it. She stuffed some tiny scraps of clothing in among the bones, and finally, with a flourish, flung a doll on top of all.
She shut the cupboard and hid it deep in a hole in the wall, that was due to be filled in by the builders first thing in the morning. Then she went to her room to rest.
In the early afternoon of the following day De Quintz’s mistress began to fear that her child was lost. Every man and woman in Haddon Hall was set to search for her, but no one found her. She had last been seen wandering along a passage on the ground floor very late the previous evening. Whatever accident could have befallen her, or where she could have gone, remained a mystery. She’d vanished.
It was, people said, as if she had been swallowed up by the night!
2
Dolls.
Possibly such figures were given to female children as talismans or charms, a symbolization of what was hoped for when they grew up; and possibly, a child’s nature being what it is, talisman or charm was converted into a well-loved plaything.
– Geoffrey Grigson, The Book of Things
“Can you get down right away, Mrs Cooper? The lads have turned up something interesting. Some kind of box, I think, stashed away in the wall.”
Myra perched on the edge of her desk and wondered at the foreman’s vagueness. Part of his head was always in the clouds, but the men were pleased to work for him, and he got things done.
“Which lads, and where, Ron?”
“Sorry. The team in the kitchen, working on the outer wall.”
“The sixteenth century alterations?”
“Right. Part of the wall’s collapsed.
“Is anyone hurt?”
“Just a bit shook up. And excited. They think they may have found treasure.”
Myra smiled into the phone and said, “Keep an eye on them until I get there, Ron. Don’t let them touch anything.”
“I’m calling from home, Mrs Cooper. They phoned me here. It’s my day off.”
“I’d forgotten. I’d better get down right away. I’ll call you later.”
She slid off the desk, grabbed her bag and folder of architectural drawings, and almost ran out of her temporary office down to the Great Hall beyond. There were coach loads of children all over Haddon Hall that day. The rooms and corridors were full of them. Twenty or more were standing close-packed outside her door. They were listening to their teacher, a tall woman with a face like a startled El Greco saint, who was jollying-up history for them at the top of her voice with an enthusiasm close to hysteria. She saw Myra and made way for her through the class with a grand gesture, like God parting the Red Sea for Moses, without interrupting her discourse. Entering the Great Hall Myra stepped out into an even more complex disorder of infants who were streaming towards her. Wading in against this powerful current, she was almost turned about by a group of older girls who came at her in a bunch at the door, just as she tried to exit through it. She involuntarily glanced behind her as she was spun half backwards, and saw, at the far end of the Hall, someone who appeared to be in the same predicament as herself. A man, stooping with age, or perhaps in a short-sighted effort to focus on the children milling around him, was also trying to reach the door. His movements were wild and clumsy, violent even, and Myra though she heard yelps of protest, or perhaps pain, from some of the children nearest to him, but the Great Hall was full of shrill chatter an
d raised voices calling to distant friends, so she could not be sure. Anyway, there were plenty of teachers about, keeping watch over their flocks, so she was certain no harm could come to any of the assembled young people. But, as she turned away, the man seemed to raise a fist, and he looked up towards her for a second. She glimpsed thin red lips drawn back from clenched teeth and two blank, duck-egg-blue eyes set in a grey face mottled with purple stripes, like war paint. The man stuck his chin out then, and blinked and stared at her. He jerked his whole body forward, as though suddenly even more anxious to make progress, and brought his fist down hard. A child screamed as the log-jam of bodies in front of Myra broke and the pressure of people behind her pushed her sideways through the door like a cork out of a bottle.
Finding herself on the corridor, and comparatively free to move, she hurried towards her destination, feeling somewhat distressed by what she had seen in the Great Hall. Surely the man himself could not have been a teacher attempting to impose discipline over his charges? He looked much too old and, well, downright uncouth, to be active in the profession, and, anyway, such aggressive methods of correction had been outlawed years ago! She shook her head to dismiss the incident from her mind, but remained uneasy. The close proximity of so many children had in itself unnerved her. Since the death of her daughter and husband in an accident two years earlier, the company of children oppressed her, and she avoided them when she could. It was a relief when she reached the barriers around the area of the kitchens, where the renovation work was taking place. The waist-high strips of yellow tape were there to keep children, and the public in general, out. She felt more secure with the barriers behind her, and more confident. She was on her own ground.
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