by John Harwood
I was prepared for a tirade, but not for the icy contempt with which Mama dismissed my abject apologies. "You are doing your best to destroy your sister's happiness," she declared, "and as for these headaches, you inflict them upon us out of wickedness and spite. It is moral insanity; Dr. Stevenson has said so, brought on by jealousy of your sister. There are surgeons who know how to cure wilful, hysterical girls like you; and if that should fail, you will have be confined to an asylum."
"I am dreadfully sorry, Mama," I said, "but truly I do not do it on purpose. No one would want to endure such pain—"
"The pain is nothing to what you have caused your sister. And how dare you contradict me, after such a display at the very instant Mrs. Carstairs and her daughters were expected?"
"Were they very put out?" I asked humbly.
"As you set out to ruin their visit, I fail to see that it is any of your business. Now listen to me: if it were not for Sophie, I should have you sent to a surgeon at once. But if the Carstairs suspect any taint of insanity in our family, Arthur may cry off. If he does, I shall have you locked away forever, though that would be no consolation to poor Sophie. I shall give you one last chance: mend your ways, or have the wickedness cut out of you."
My mother was apt, when enraged, to hurl the most extravagant threats, but the words had been uttered with cold, biting restraint; and whilst I had no idea what a surgeon might do to an hysterical girl, the final phrase had set my skin crawling with fear. I was of age; but I had read too many novels in which innocent heroines were confined to asylums to doubt my mother's power in that regard, and perhaps the same power could compel me to submit to the surgeon's knife. I had no money of my own, and no way of earning my living. I did not even know the terms of my father's will, save that the income from his estate, according to Mama's repeated laments, was barely enough to keep us.
And at any moment, another visitation might come upon me, even more ruinously timed than the last. If the young man had appeared to me ten minutes later, I might now be on my way to the surgeon—or the madhouse. He had looked so meek, so harmless, until the instant of his dissolution; but was it mere coincidence that he had appeared just as the Carstairs were arriving ...? The prospect was too appalling to confront alone. I retreated to my room and began a long letter to Ada, and did not pause until I had finished and sealed it and consigned it to the post.
At dinner that night, Sophie informed me, very coldly, that she and Mama had managed to conceal their agitation from the Carstairs and pretend that I had suffered a relapse of concussion from the fall. But that was all; for the remainder of the meal, Sophie and Mama exchanged pointedly trivial remarks, and I left the table as soon as politeness allowed, feeling that I was already condemned. And so it came as an immense relief when Ada replied by return, pressing me to visit as soon as possible.
It took all of my courage to ask leave of my mother who, thankfully, made no objection. "Perhaps it will be best," she declared with the utmost coldness, "if you keep away from us until Sophia is safely married; I shall write to see whether you can be trusted to attend the wedding when the time comes." Throughout my preparations, I was sick with terror that my freedom would be snatched away by another visitation; I kept, as far as possible, to my room until my trunk was safely aboard the hansom. The cloud of dread accompanied me all the way through the squalor of Spitalfields and Bethnal Green to Shoreditch Station, and was only really dispelled by the sight of George Woodward on the platform at Chalford. Even in a crowd, he would have been impossible to miss, because of the shock of coarse orange hair (no other word could do justice to the colour) which always made him look as if he had just come in out of a strong wind. He and Ada had met in London, and married, after the briefest of courtships, when the living at Chalford was unexpectedly offered him.
Chalford rectory—a large, dilapidated house of grey stone with a walled garden (or "yerd," in the idiom of the parish)—seemed to me the most charming place I had ever stayed in. "You would not think so," said Ada, "if you came to us in January, with an east wind howling about the house and snow heaped against the walls; I used to think London winters cold, until I came here." But in mild June weather, with everything in leaf and flower, Chalford was paradise enough. The rectory stood close by the churchyard, surrounded by fields and patches of woodland, and away from the village itself: Old Chalford had been stricken by the Black Death, its cottages burned to kill the plague, and a new settlement built a quarter of a mile off. The population of the village had been reduced by enclosures to little more than a hundred souls, mostly farming people whose great-grandfathers had tilled the same acres in much the same fashion. To the north and west of the parish were farmlands; to the east grazing, with gorse and marshland as you drew nearer the sea.
Within the space of a week, my colour had returned, and I was sleeping so soundly that I was scarcely aware of my dreams. Ada and I walked miles each day, and I began to see the country with new eyes. Every field, every path, even every hedgerow in the village had its own name and its own history, from Gravel Pit Walk on the western boundary to Roman Kiln Field by the river on the eastern edge. On our very first excursion I found a hag-stone—a flint with a hole through it, much prized by the farming people as an omen of good luck—and placed it beneath my pillow, as an amulet against further visitations.
Though there was no question of Ada's repenting at leisure, as my mother had unkindly prophesied, I could see how isolated her life had become. She longed very much for a child, but after a year of marriage she had still not conceived, and had begun to fear that she might be barren. And George, she confided, was increasingly troubled by doubts about his vocation. "I can listen, and question, and follow, I think, much of what he tells me, but he misses the society of thinking men like himself. He has read Lyell, and Renan, and the Vestiges, as well as Darwin, and has begun to wonder what, if anything, can be saved for belief. He prefers not to speak of it, but it troubles his conscience that he is living upon the tithes of people who expect and assume—especially in a country parish such as this—that he accepts the literal truth of Scripture. But he believes in goodness, kindness, and tolerance, and practices what he preaches, which is more than can be said for many churchmen who call themselves devout."
I had been in Chalford a fortnight when George proposed an expedition to see the old Norman keep at Orford, a small coastal settlement about four miles away. George himself had been there only once, but seemed perfectly sure of the way as we set out on a still, overcast afternoon. We had walked perhaps a mile before he admitted that this was not the road he had taken before. "Still," he said confidently, "we are heading more or less southeast, so we shouldn't go too far wrong."
Even I had to concede that there was something desolate about the prospect, once we had left the farmland behind. There seemed to be no one abroad, and no sign of habitation; only sheep wandering through the gorse, and occasional glimpses of a leaden grey sea. After another half-hour the path began to climb, with the ground falling away on both sides. Dense green bushes encircled the lower slopes, but the crown of the hill, as we approached it, was almost bare, cropped close by the sheep, and bunched like a counterpane—the image that came to me—into curious folds and mounds, which did not look at all natural, as if some huge burrowing creature had been tunnelling just below the surface. I was about to ask what had made them when we reached the top of the rise, and a dark expanse of woodland loomed before us.
"That can only be Monks' Wood," said George. "We are much farther south than I supposed. It is by far the oldest—and largest—forest in this part of the country."
"Is there a monastery within?" I asked. From where we stood, the dense green canopy seemed quite unbroken, stretching away to the south as far as the eye could follow.
" There was once, yes," said George, "but it was sacked by Henry the Eighth's men."
"And after that?"
" The land went to the Wraxford family for services to the Crown, and has been in t
he family ever since. Wraxford Hall was built on the foundations of the monastery; it is now almost a ruin, I believe; I have not seen it."
"Does anyone live there now?"
"No; not since ... that is to say, it has been empty for some time."
"And how far is the Hall from here?" I persisted.
"I don't know," said George repressively. "The Wood is private; it belongs to the estate."
"But if there is no one living there ...? I should so love to see it."
"We should be trespassing. And the Wood has a bad reputation hereabouts; even poachers avoid it at night."
"Do you mean it is haunted?"
"Supposedly. There are tales—"
He was silenced by an anxious glance from Ada.
" Truly," I said, "I do not mind talk of ghosts. I do not even think of my—my visitants as ghosts, and besides I am quite recovered. I want to hear all about the Hall; it sounds most romantic. And look, there is a path leading down to the forest—"
"No," said George firmly, "we must be getting on to Orford."
" Then if you will not take us there," I said, "I insist that you tell me all about it."
"There is very little to tell," said George as we set off again. "According to local superstition, the Wood is haunted by the ghost of a monk, who appears whenever a Wraxford is about to die; it is said that anyone who sees the apparition will die within the month. I shouldn't be surprised if the Wraxfords started the rumour themselves to keep people away. The family have played no part in local affairs for as long as anyone can remember, but there is nothing unusual in that. No; the only genuine oddity is that the last two owners have disappeared."
"What do you mean, disappeared?"
"Exactly that; no more, no less. Mind you, the two incidents happened nearly fifty years apart. The first was a Thomas Wraxford, a widower; he had great plans for the Hall when he inherited it, somewhere in the 1780s, I think, but then his only son died in an accident, and his wife returned to her family. He lived alone at the Hall for many years, until he was quite an old man; then one evening he went to bed as usual, and when his valet came to wake him the next morning, he wasn't there. There had been a heavy downpour, with thunder and lightning, not long after he retired, but then it cleared to a fine moonlit night. His bed hadn't been slept in, and there was no sign of a struggle; so it was generally assumed that he'd wandered off into the forest—disoriented by the storm, perhaps—and fallen into a pit or something of the sort. The Wood is very much overgrown, you see, and there are various old workings—it was mined for tin centuries ago—a very easy place to come to grief in."
"And—the other?" I asked with a slight shiver. The path had descended again, and now ran parallel to the edge of the forest, which looked very dense indeed, so choked with creeper and fallen branches that you could see only a few yards within.
"Cornelius Wraxford—Thomas's nephew, the nearest surviving male relative—petitioned the Court of Chancery to find that Thomas was legally deceased. He—Cornelius—was a fellow at some obscure Cambridge college, but he resigned as soon as judgement was given—and took possession of the Hall. Where he remained for another forty-five years, living the life of a complete recluse, until the spring of this year, when the same thing happened; he retired as usual—again, by a strange coincidence, on the night of a violent electrical storm—and was never seen again."
"But—what do you think became of him?"
"No one knows. Of course it caused a good deal of talk; the general opinion at the Ship was that both of them had been carried off by the Devil. I wonder myself if Thomas Wraxford's fate could have played upon his nephew's mind until his wits finally gave way, and, under the influence of the storm—he felt compelled to follow his uncle's example."
"Like King Lear on the heath," said Ada. "I remember that storm very well; he must have been mad indeed if he went out in it."
"And what will become of the Hall now?" I asked.
"I believe that the heir—a Magnus Wraxford; I know nothing of him—has applied for a judgement of decease. It may raise a few eyebrows on the bench, but I don't suppose he'll have much trouble getting it; Cornelius must have been at least eighty years old."
"And now," said Ada, "it is high time we spoke of something more cheerful."
I did not press the topic any further, but the image of an old man stumbling through a dark forest remained vivid in my mind, long after Monks' Wood had vanished from sight.
An hour or so later, we came within sight of Orford Keep, a massive, turreted edifice of jagged brown brick and greyish mortar. It stood on a high earthen mound, with a few scattered cottages beyond, though the settlement seemed quite deserted. As we came nearer, I noticed an easel standing a little way from the keep. It bore a stretched canvas, but there was no sign of the artist, who had presumably retired to one of the cottages. I could not resist the impulse to examine the picture.
It was, as I expected, a study of the keep, but in oils, not water-colour, and it reminded me of a place I knew but could not immediately identify. The artist had caught the bulk and mass of the tower, the way it seemed to lean over you, but there was more, something ominous, a sense of impending menace. The closely paired windows below the battlements made you think of eyes ... that was it, it was like the house of my dream, alert, alive, listening...
"That's—er—very striking," said George, coming up beside me.
"Very sinister," said Ada in turn.
"I think it is wonderful," I said.
"I'm delighted you think so," said a voice seemingly from the earth behind me. I spun round as a figure rose from the long grass a few feet away. A man—a young man—slender, not especially tall, wearing tweed trousers and a collarless shirt, rather the worse for paint.
"I am sorry to have startled you," he said, brushing grass seeds from his clothes. "I was asleep, and your voices got into my dream. Edward Ravenscroft, at your service."
As with the picture, I was reminded of someone I had seen before, but I could not think who or where, and I had never heard the name before. He was certainly handsome, with dark brown hair falling across his forehead, fair skin, a little roughened and reddened by the sun; dark, heavy-lidded eyes; a long, prominent nose, straight as a blade, and a most engaging smile.
"It is we who should apologise," I said, as soon as George had made the introductions, "for intruding upon your picture—and your dream."
"Not at all—a delightful awakening," he replied, still smiling at me. "It strikes you as finished, then?"
"Oh yes, it is perfect; it reminds me of a dream I used to have—a nightmare, I must confess."
"Very gratifying—though I shouldn't want to trouble your sleep. Knowing when to stop is the hardest part; I cleaned my palette an hour ago, for fear I might spoil it."
We stood for a while in conversation, during which it emerged that he was on a walking tour of the county, sketching and painting as he went; that he was an artist by profession, subsisting for the time being upon small commissions, mostly pictures of country houses; and that he was a bachelor, with a widowed father in Cumbria. He had been staying for the past few days at an inn near Aldeburgh, making forays up and down the coast.
I already knew that I wanted to see more of Edward Ravenscroft, and began singing the praises of Chalford, in the hope that he might pay us a visit. And indeed he liked the sound of Chalford so much that he asked if he might accompany us back there, and put up at the Ship while he explored the countryside around. George had by now recognised the road by which we ought to have come, and so the journey homeward took us nowhere near Monks' Wood. It needed only an exchange of speaking looks with Ada for Edward to be invited, long before Roman Kiln Field came into sight, to stay for a few days as a guest at the rectory.
Edward's few days became a week, which we spent—or so it seems in memory—entirely in each other's company, walking for hours each day or talking in the "yerd." Beyond his talent for painting, he was not especially learned, or w
ell read; he had no great interest in religion or philosophy; but he was beautiful—the word that came to me from the first, rather than "handsome"—and had a gift of enjoyment which brought the world alive for me, and I loved him. On the fourth day he kissed me, and declared his love for me—or perhaps it was the other way round, I cannot recall—and from that moment onward—I shall write it, immodest or worse as it will sound—I desired him to make love to me, without even knowing exactly what it meant, beyond his kissing me and drawing me closer until I felt I should dissolve in bliss.
I would happily have married Edward that same week, but he told me from the first he could not afford to marry—he subsisted upon a small allowance from his father, a retired schoolmaster—until he had made his name. "Until I saw you," he told me, "I lived only for my painting" (I was not entirely convinced of this; the assurance with which he embraced me suggested that I was not the first woman he had ever made love to, but I was too happy to care)—"now I think only of the day when we can be wholly together, and the sooner I produce a masterpiece, the sooner that will be."
Ada and George were naturally uneasy about the speed of our courtship, and also about keeping the news of our betrothal—as I thought of it—from my mother. Ada had ceased to chaperone us after the first few days, not without misgivings, privately expressed to me, about what Mama would say if ever she found out.