He sniffed and blinked several times. Was he capable of tears? ‘I wanted…I asked her to go back to India, but she refused.’
‘Why?’
He brushed the back of his hand against his nose. ‘I think I became what she never had – a son. Also, to my shame, she saw her own parents’ situation mirrored in my relationship with Beatrice. Two lovers thwarted by tradition and honour. We had that to bind us. She understood my regret.’
We sat so close to each other, I heard him breathing, softy, steadily. ‘You do regret what you did?’ I said slowly.
Whatever the nature of the functioning anatomy he possessed, he still had the ability to sigh, gasp and exclaim, which he did with a swift, ‘Miriam, please.’ He turned towards me and greeted me with another dazzling display of translucent discs. ‘Absolutely. I was heartless. Bea died in a workhouse. Those places back then were appalling. She should have been a maid, safe and sheltered. She begged me,’ his voice broke, ‘I ignored her plea to be rescued. That last letter. Her father had every right to curse me. Although, in the end, he came too late to save her.’
‘The fire, you don’t remember it?’
‘I was grieving that day. I do recall the guilt sinking in and consuming me. I loved her, I’m sure I did. My father said ending our relationship was the only option. My beloved but weak minded mother offered no comfort and my brother hid in his bedroom. Then came Bea’s father, crying out in anger at me.’
‘I can’t imagine what it was like for you. Years of haunting.’
‘Not haunting. Existing.’ He stood up. ‘Could you wait for me? I want to fetch something from my cabin.’
I nodded. While he was gone, I made a much needed cup of coffee and forced down a slice of bread. I paced restlessly, trying to make sense of his life, his death and his curse.
If he loved another, he’d be free: the essence of his release from ghostly captivity, except as he pointed out, he wasn’t a ghost. His heart beat, his breath warmed the air – he existed as a time-trapped being. However, he’d shied away from making eye contact with me when he spoke about love. I swallowed a mouthful of coffee and continued to patrol the hallway, hugging the mug to my chest. Was it possible for him to be in love with me? Did that explain why he’d told me the truth? He’d provided subtle, almost illusive signals, ones I had witnessed. Those little nuances he displayed whenever he came into my presence: the soft smiles, the warm greetings and when I danced with him. I sighed, recollecting his embrace.
Had I reciprocated? I groaned a slight sound of realisation, because I’d known the answer to that question for some time, perhaps since he’d clambered across the roof and I’d feared for his safety.
I stared out of the window of the sitting room. The ruts of Tony’s tractor in the driveway showed his arrival and departure. No man, barring Charles, was on the property. Charles reappeared, carrying a book. Side by side we sat on the purple sofa, maintaining a discrete gap.
‘This is my account of life at Heachley.’ Charles handed me the journal, which was bound in leather.
‘You want me to read it now?’
He nodded. ‘Felicity suggested I write down what I remember, like a story, from the time I first became aware until, well I took heart, and I’ve added to it.’ He paused and sneaked an appreciative glance in my direction. ‘I plan to tell more about her life, but it isn’t easy to write of her. Not yet. I’ll have time to finish those missing years when I’m ready. Read it. I’m not gifted with the pen, but writing comes easier than speech for a man like me.’
I turned the page, noting the date – 1966 – the year after Felicity returned from India. The opening sentences were bleak, transporting me back in time to when he first reappeared and ran out into the woods to hide. Those trees had kept him company for over a hundred years. I read on.
PART TWO
The Journal
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
The Marsters Family (1873–1914)
July 13th, 1966
My father acquired Heachley Hall in 1850 and proudly aspired to be the most respected businessman in the area. By 1873 that dream was shattered by fire. My revival from its ashes threw me forward in time to a new century, to 1903, and the first of my many apparitions. The house, inhabited by strange women, brought me no comfort and only solitude; my home was no longer mine. The closet and cellar where I reappeared with increasing frequency became my prison, recalling me without warning, almost upon a whim. Both oppressive dark places. For the many times this happened, I struggled to understand where or who I was. It became easier and gradually I spent less time frozen to the spot, and more time attempting to understand my predicament.
I’d no notion of my ghostly behaviour. I learnt to escape my confines, whether to tiptoe downstairs or to guess the path across the dark cellar, and thence I headed out into the sanctuary of the woods. It was when I noticed my fingernails had stopped growing and I had no need to shave or trim my hair, that I deduced my body had frozen in time. Whatever power had put me in this position, I could not begin to fathom. My studies had not included the sciences and I turned my back on the religious teachings of schoolmasters and the clergy. I’d aspired to be a businessman, as my father had been.
I love to read and in my efforts to understand my dilemma, I borrowed books from the shelves in the library and filched the old newspapers left aside to burn. I discovered a journal belonging to Olivia Marsters in a bedroom drawer. From these pages, I elucidated what had transpired during my absence. I’m not proud of my spying, but I could not tolerate the vacuum created by my lack of knowledge.
I’d learnt much about the Marsters during those early awakenings. The master of Heachley Hall, Rupert Marsters, was an officer in the army. While Rupert furthered his military career, his brother, James, sustained the family business, travelling back and forth between England and India. James survived the ravishes of tropical diseases, but on a visit to cold Norfolk, he succumbed to pneumonia, leaving his wife, Georgina, a widow. She resided, in part, at Heachley for the remainder of her short life, and left her son, Frederick, in India to run the company with his uncle. I never met Georgina. When in 1903 Rupert travelled abroad with his wife Olivia and his young daughters to fight the Boers in South Africa, Georgina spent those years seeking a new husband in London. Only the housekeeper and two maids remained behind to keep the house in order.
They’d covered most of the furniture in dustsheets, removed the paintings from the walls to protect them from the light and kept their chores to little more than cleaning. The housekeeper and one maid slept in the attic rooms overnight. I established the arrival of any man ended my visitation. Whenever a male caller crossed the threshold of the gates, whether to sell them goods, to deliver coal or to dally in the company of the pretty maid, whom I suspected had a lover, I lost my corporeal state. This I could only deduce by my singular inability to meet with a man or boy.
During my wanderings, having given up all hope of escaping the boundaries of the estate, I discovered the cabin in the corner of the woods. Sheltered by the outer wall and quite forgotten, I took up residence. The shack provided me somewhere to rest, read and contemplate, and allow me to be myself.
Sleep, you might ask, do I? Do I dream like a living person? No, I have no dreams and if I sleep, I am comforted by the fact I wake to find myself lying on the makeshift mattress and not had my body mysteriously propelled through space to the closet or the cellar.
My clothing, which always travels with me through time, was not appropriate to the period. Unfortunately, the fabric wears out in the way my body never does. I stole from the wardrobes the shirts and trousers of Rupert and what must have belonged to his brother, James, who’d died during my long absence. The change of attire inspired my adventurous nature, boosted my confidence and I decided to call at the house to determine if the occupants would welcome me.
I knocked at the back door,
ensuring my status was that of a lowly servant and not a gentleman caller. I had no proof of my identity, no documents or portraits to compare my likeness. My name, Christopher Isaacks, I kept secret, instead I plucked one from a newspaper – Charles Donaldson. As I mumbled my introductions, Mrs Hyde, the housekeeper, treated me with caution, while I gaped in amazement that she had no fear of my presence; perhaps, I was not a ghost but a magician?
‘Yes, what do you want?’ she snapped.
I’d little forethought with regard to my plans. If I continued to exist in this bizarre in-between realm where I remained neither alive nor dead, then why not seek an occupation, a purpose? ‘I’m here to offer my services as a gardener.’ I blurted, surprising myself – I’d never spent any time in a garden other than to drink tea with my mother under the shade of a tree.
Naturally, my inability to reference a previous employer supported her suspicions that perhaps I’d fallen on hard times and had once been of a higher status. However, she made little suggestion of this at the time, although later, she confessed this to be her conclusion. In hindsight, I believe she simply took pity on me, treating me as a labourer made homeless by the lack of farm work.
Mrs Hyde turned out to be a blessed woman, whose stern exterior hid a gentler nature. She offered me employment and I begged, not for money, but items that I might put to use in my humble abode. I acquired, through my labours an oil lamp, bedding and more clothes. I believe because I worked hard she turned a blind eye to my circumstances. She might have guessed where I slept, knowing the estate well, but she never mentioned my squatting.
There I was, a gentleman who’d once expected to inherit Heachley Hall and his father’s thriving business, forced through the nature of my peculiar situation to prune hedges, cut back the grass and lop the dead branches off trees.
For all my hard work, I develop no appetite, suffer no fatigue, the cold sweeps past me and my indifference to the heat repels the effects of the sun. Nothing, no habits of living are necessary for my existence. My skin never ages nor wrinkles, my teeth remain clean and my hearing sharp.
As for my scars, if I understood back then why they covered my arms, I had no memory of their origin. The events of that day were lost to me.
Then, one day, in the middle of tying back a splaying bush, the numbness, the unbearable sense of suffocation hit me. Plucked out of my fragile existence, it was sometime before I returned.
The Great War and beyond (1914–1934)
July 17th, 1966
Newly liberated from my spiritual captivity, I needed little time to adapt as I understood the reason for my re-emergence and the anticipated passage of time. I quickly established the house was yet again in a state of upheaval.
Rupert Marsters had gone first to London, then across the sea. A major war was being fought in France, driving the young men to don uniforms and join the army. Left behind at Heachley were Rupert’s three daughters. They came and went in a manner of their choosing, each trying to ensure the house remained in good order. Frederick had a son, Hubert, but James’s widow, Georgina, had passed away having never visited her son or grandson in India. The males of Heachley continued to be no more than portraits in frames, since I never met them, only hearing of their tales from the women folk.
Mrs Hyde had retired and in her place had been hired a new housekeeper.
My occupation as gardener was re-established with little difficulty. My excuse for avoiding conscription was explained by my scars – I claimed, falsely, that I had not the health to endure a war. Little did the occupants of the house know how often I escaped death. If I cut myself, no blood drips out and any pain seems momentary, as if a memory of it has been relived for a second, then mislaid. Any wounds will close swiftly without need of cleansing or bandages. If I fall from a height, which I once did while repairing the roof of the stables, I pick myself up, unharmed and continue.
Another oddity is the white dust, which forms during my absence and coats my clothing and hair. I often shake it loose during my dash up the cellar steps. This prevalent dusting caused the maids to complain and accuse each other of purposefully scattering the ashes from the fireplace. Then, as opposed to now, I knew not from whence it came, only that the dust seemed to dissipate whenever I walked about the house. The more frequently I appeared, the more the maids complained.
As an employee of the estate I took payment in cash, but managed to convince one of the maids to buy me clothes, proposing some preposterous idea that I could not venture into town for fear of being recognised by my debtors. She accepted my excuse because she’d taken quite a fancy to me. I had not encouraged her flirting, but my continuing youthfulness and affable nature aroused her attention.
I did not return her admiration, quite the contrary, I was incapable. She chose to express her feelings one day and in that instance, as she puckered her lips upwards and fluttered her long eyelashes, I remembered my lover, who’d also worked as a maid. I buckled over, as if an invisible hand had punched me in the stomach and ran out of the scullery – where she’d cornered me – and into the woods. The mist swooped in to collect me into its arms, but upon that occasion the embrace gave me no comfort, no sense of protection.
The words of Beatrice’s grief-stricken father echoed in my ears.
‘I curse you to drift, to exist betwixt life and death in neither one nor the other. If you choose to repent of your cold disposition, your meanness and lack of care, then you’ll fear your affections will harm another and dare not show them. For if you love another woman and she loves you back with all her heart, with her whole body, giving herself to you with passion and desire, then the consummation of that love will cause you, the selfish man, to shrivel away and never come back. Consequently, you will fear to love, to consummate it, because to do so will bring despair and torture to your sweetheart. After your destruction she will be saddened to the point of despondency, and she will be unable to dispatch you from her memory. If instead you choose to spoil another’s love, abandon her unwanted and rejected, just as you did with my beloved child and grandchild, you will harbour the regret and consequences for all eternity, while trapped in this meaningless existence.’
These words haunt me always, as I haunt Heachley.
Day after day, I deliberately neglected my duties and avoided the pretty maid with her plump lips. Eventually, she realised I’d scorned her, she gave up and refused to speak to me. It was a time when I came and went in short bursts, sometimes vanishing to my nothingness for weeks on end. This haphazardness was due to the house constantly changing in the nature of its occupancy. The daughters had husbands and sons, who stayed when on leave from the army. Other callers interrupted me mid-task, sending me spiralling into my abyss. Tradesmen called frequently including the vicar, who offered up prayers for one daughter’s deceased husband. I saw nothing of these men, and only through careful eavesdropping did I establish the events that had transpired during my absences.
So the pattern of my bizarre existence continued. Rapid developments heralded the arrival of the motor vehicle, household electricity, the aeroplane, cinema with talking pictures, the wireless radio and the telephone. Each new invention necessitated a modicum of acquaintance with its advantages that I obtained mainly through careful discourse or books. Nevertheless, many of these new fangled devices I never experienced in person due to my inability to leave Heachley.
Rupert returned after the war and I slipped away. For many years I remained unaware and unseen until I stumbled out of the cellar, blinking in the bright light to find a house much changed. Music was blasting out, strange rhythmic pieces with combinations of trumpets, pianos and rasping vocals. Jazz – I later discovered when caught staring wide-eyed at the wireless.
·•●•·
I paused in my reading, lowered the journal onto my lap and contemplated. I had so many questions to ask. Beside me Charles waited patiently. He’d closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the sofa. He seemed relaxed, except his hands were t
ight fists, clasped together on his pointed knees.
I cleared my throat and he opened his eyes – beautiful eyes with their light irises. ‘The letters – how did they end up in the cellar? Shouldn’t they have gone with the Isaacks?’ When I’d confronted him about stealing the letters, he claimed to have found them – how was that possible given the time lapse?
‘There were many things down there which I recognised as belonging to my family. Postcards, the housekeepers’ ledgers, maps of the estate, many trivial things. I can only guess they were left in the chaos that followed the fire. I don’t think my father wanted to spend another minute in Heachley, what with the damage and my demise, so he abandoned many things and they ended up in boxes in the cellar. Gradually, subsequent occupants cleared them away, but I did retrieve the letters.’
‘The letter from Beatrice to you, begging you to rescue her, surely that would have been in your possession and destroyed in the fire. It was your bedroom that burned down?’
‘The letters from me which she had in her possession were returned after her death by the workhouse Master, but that particular letter had been intercepted by my father. I never saw it until I found it in the cellar. I supposed if they had been in his desk in the library, they would have survived the fire.’
‘It must have been a shock to read it.’
‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘If I had seen it, I wonder if it might have been the spur I needed to rebel against Father. But, by then… read on. You’ll see.’
I picked up the journal and turned the page.
The First Tenants (1934–1946)
July 20th, 1966
The Women of Heachley Hall Page 27