Bismarck Herrings (Timothy Herring)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “N.B.G.,” he said, when they returned to the weedy courtyard. “I’ll have this court and the gardens put to right and something done about the pernicious ice-house they call the musicians’ gallery, and then up the place goes for auction.”

  “Would you be wanting me for anything further, sir?” enquired Jabez, meeting them. “If not, I ought to be gettin’ on down to the Hard.”

  “No, that’s all right,” said Timothy. “You cut along. I’ll just have a word with your mother.” Jabez touched his forehead and slouched off. Timothy and Parsons followed him as far as the gatehouse archway and knocked at the side door. “We’re off now, Mrs. Gee,” said Timothy. He looked at the flight of steps which led to the habitable floor. “What on earth makes you choose to live in this poky hole?” he asked. “There seem to be two quite convenient rooms up at the Hall which you could use.”

  “Which was the old gentleman’s only quarters, so I am give to understand, sir, and how he could abide to stop there all along of hisself I do not know. It’s all I can do to make meself keep the ’All clean and aired out and that, but stop there of a night, well, I really couldn’t bring myself.”

  “Well, I’ll admit it seems a bit draughty in places,” said Timothy, “but a few good fires would soon cure that, I should think.”

  “Which that perticlar bitter cold is the sort what no fires can’t cure, sir. The ’All is ’aunted, that’s what, and them as sees and ’ears no more than draughts, well, they’re the lucky ones, sir, in my opinion.”

  Timothy did not challenge it. He smiled, tipped her ready palm, and followed Parsons out to the car.

  “Haunted?” said Alison, when Timothy, back again in their hill-top Cotswold home, had given his wife an account of his visit. “Haunted by what?”

  “Goodness knows. Haunted or not haunted, the whole place gave me the willies. I’ve never known anything so depressing in all my life. Anyway, I’ve decided to put it up for auction as soon as I’ve had it tidied up.”

  “You won’t sell it before I’ve seen it, though, will you?”

  “You said you didn’t want to see it.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. You said there’s a creek near by. We could have a boat and then we could use the Hall as a country cottage when we felt like it, couldn’t we? When will you take me down there?”

  “This year, next year, sometime, never, I should think. I hate the beastly place. What about a swim? We’ve got an hour before dinner.”

  “I’ve only just had my hair done, and you won’t let me wear a bathing cap. When are you taking me to Herrings?”

  “Where’s Herrings, for goodness’ sake?”

  “Well, we’re not going to continue calling it Warlock Hall. I’ve a feeling that I’m going to love it, after all, but not with a name like that. Did you say it has a lake?”

  “Yes, a dirty (literally) great stretch of scum and duckweed. Wonderful for mosquitoes in the summer.”

  “We’ll turn it into a beautiful big swimming pool and then we can bathe indoors here and outdoors there.” As a wedding present to her, Timothy had built a Pompeian pool on the ground floor of the stone Cotswold house.

  “We shan’t bathe anywhere if you don’t come along. We daren’t face Mrs. Nealons if we let her dinner spoil,” he said.

  “You know,” said Alison, twenty minutes later, when, with one fluid movement, she had hoisted herself out of the translucent, pale green, warm water, “I’d like to spend Christmas at Herrings. We could have a house-warming and the waits could play in the great hall and the carol singers could have the musicians’ gallery and you could take people duck-shooting over the marshes and we could put at least two extra people in the gatehouse . . .”

  “The gatehouse is Mrs. Gee’s sanctum.”

  “Not when we’ve taken possession, darling. We shall have to get her a cottage. We must keep the gatehouse for ourselves. It will have a flat roof with a parapet, and from the top we shall be able to see for miles and miles across that flat green countryside and right out to sea, I shouldn’t wonder. Apart from that, we don’t necessarily have to keep her on, do we? Does she go with the house?”

  “No. According to the lawyers, she isn’t really a local woman. The caretaker job was advertised and she took it. Anyway, although I wouldn’t mind keeping her on if she’d be useful, I’m not having that fellow Jabez hanging about the place. I don’t like the cut of his jib. Do you want me to dry you?” He put a towel round her shoulders.

  “No, you scrub too hard, and I’m feeling fragile.”

  “Nonsense! Good for the epidermis. I love you, especially like this:

  ‘No beauty she doth miss

  When all her clothes are on,

  But Beauty’s self she is

  When all her clothes are gone.’ ”

  “All the same,” said Alison, standing up and abandoning herself to his ministrations, “I still don’t know why you married me. We’re not alike; we don’t even like the same things; you think I’m cussed; I thing you’re bossy and arrogant . . .”

  “Never look a gift husband in the face when you’re going fishing.”

  “I’m not fishing!”

  “Of course not. You don’t need to, do you? Always, inevitably, from me the well-turned compliments fall thick as autumn leaves in Vallombrosa.”

  “Less of the ‘autumn,’ if you don’t mind. Summer is icumen in. Anyway, I must listen more carefully, because you won’t think the same about me when I’ve borne you seven strapping sons. There won’t be any compliments on my nakedness then.”

  “Ah, yes, our seven sons. ‘A frieze on whitest marble drawn, and white feet making pallor in the sea.’ But not just yet, my love. I’m not going to share you with seven other men.”

  “Be that as it may, you haven’t given me a sensible answer to a sensible question.”

  “Which was?”

  “When are we going to Herrings? You’ve nothing to do except remind Mrs. Gee to get the four-poster bed aired and to put some provisions in the larder.”

  “Good lord, you’re not going to sleep in that house!”

  “Not if it’s haunted? Why, of course I am! I’ve never slept in a four-poster bed and I’ve never seen a ghost. How can you bear to deprive me of these riches? We’ll go tomorrow or the next day.”

  From the roof of the gatehouse, which was flat and had been used as a look-out in former times, an immense panorama was spread out. Timothy made no comment, but sat on the broad parapet while Alison took in the widespread, desolate scene. To the south-east of the Hall stretched the marshes, intersected by tiny streams half-hidden among reeds and rushes and nourishing cream or purple comfrey and the water forget-me-not, and inhabited by voles, eels, pike, and water-fowl.

  A narrow lane stopped abruptly at more marshes. In the opposite direction, north-west of the Hall, a far-off cluster of roofs was overlooked and guarded by the square Norman keep of a castle. There were other paths, some of them barely decipherable, leading to the banks of a considerable river. This developed into a narrow, winding creek and terminated in an estuary which, in an oddly-shaped loop, embraced a small, reed-circled island.

  A more depressing and uninteresting countryside could scarcely be imagined, thought Timothy, remembering his Cotswold home with its hilly sweeps of green and gold and brown, but to Alison, as she moved from one side of the gatehouse roof to another, the drowned and melancholy landscape, with its intermingling of water and sky, was a bourne of nostalgic enchantment like the country of a well-loved dream. She allowed her eyes to roam over marsh and fen, over ditches, drains, and the river, over the broader windings of the creek, and out to the sand-spits of the muddy estuary. She came over to Timothy at last, seated herself beside him, and said simply.

  “I think your great-uncle must have been happy here.”

  “I can’t imagine why you think so, or why you’re so gone on the place,” said Timothy. “Think of it in the winter! Howling winds, flooded lanes, every bit of that cranky
old house shrieking its head off, rain lashing the windows, all the doors banging open and shut all night . . .”

  “And the ghost roaming round in the shadows and wailing, ‘Woe, thrice woe,’ like Senna at Frankie Howerd in Up Pompeii,” said Alison, laughing. “But I’ve never suggested we should stay here in the winter, darling, have I?”

  “Who talked about Christmas, with waits and guests and carol singers? All right, as you insist on it, we’re going to spend tonight up at the Hall,” said Timothy, “but tomorrow morning you may have acquired a new outlook about staying here, even in the summer.”

  The Hall at night was undoubtedly eerie. Alison, lying beside Timothy in the four-poster, was glad she was not alone. Oddly disturbing creaks, tappings, and scufflings came from the panelling and from behind it, and occasionally there were sounds which might almost be interpreted as voices. They seemed to come from the newel stair from which the state bedroom opened.

  “ ‘The isle is full of noises,’ ” she murmured, ignoring the more sinister sounds which the house provided and only listening to the wind in the pine-trees. “I can imagine I hear the sea.”

  “Too far off,” said Timothy. “Do you want to talk, or are you sleepy?”

  “Talk for a bit, I think, please.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing. If—and it’s a very big “if” so far as I’m concerned—we do keep on this place instead of selling it, we’ll have electricity installed. Apart from the fact that all the cooking is by calor gas which Mrs. Nealons will never be persuaded to use, all this going to bed by candlelight would very soon drive me up the wall.”

  “You’re not interested in good deeds shining in a naughty world?”

  “What the—Oh, Portia, of course. Now, look, you don’t really like this ghastly, ghostly, unfriendly old pile, do you?”

  “I don’t like the house much, but I love the country around it. To me it’s all ‘eve and morning and yon twelve-winded sky.’ ”

  “Oh, lord! Not the Shropshire Lad at this time of night!”

  “Why not? But if you want to change the subject, let’s talk about the ghost. What form do you think it will take?”

  “It’s a vampire, and will suck your blood.”

  “Don’t be revolting. I mean, Mrs. Gee seemed positive this place is haunted, but she wasn’t very specific, was she? Didn’t she throw out any hint at all of what we might expect? I do think she might have prepared us.”

  “I don’t think she’s had any personal experience of the hauntings. I don’t think she’s ever actually slept in this house at all. I think she was far too scared, when she saw the size and the gloom of it, to do more than decide to earn her money by keeping it clean and aired, which, I must admit, she has done. But now, behold, the moon sleeps with Endymion, and I think we’d better do the same.”

  Far from sleeping, the moon swam restlessly in and out among the clouds. Then the wind dropped a little, so that the pines murmured on a gentler, soothing note. Further off, the waves creamed on to the pale, fine sands or washed suckingly about among the mud-flats. There was no sound at all from the river. It flowed as silently as death, but without death’s strange inertia. The panelling continued its complaints, and Alison stirred once or twice in Timothy’s arms. Automatically, each time, he tightened a reassuring embrace, but gradually this slackened off of itself as he drifted away into slumber.

  Alison was still asleep when he woke on the following morning. There was a promising patch of sunlight on the wall. Cautiously he removed his encircling arm and turned to slide out of bed. On the previous night he had used his cigarette lighter for the candles, having discovered that there were no matches beside the calor gas appliance downstairs, but now, as he turned from Alison towards his bedside table, he saw that in the centre of it there was a box of vestas which (he could have taken his oath on this) had not been there the night before.

  His movements had awakened Alison. She said:

  “Are you getting up, then? What’s the time?”

  “Six-thirty. Did you sleep well?”

  “Yes, on the whole. I don’t know whether it was a dream, though, or whether the ghost really came in here last night. I felt certain somebody did.”

  “It was a dream all right,” said Timothy, not to alarm her. “I slept regardless, and I’m sure I’d have woken up if the ghost, or anybody else, had paid us a visit.”

  “Well, you might, of course, although I think you sleep more heavily than I do. Anyway, it must have been my imagination, mustn’t it? Nobody could get in, because we locked all the doors, and as for ghosts, well, nobody can believe in them at this time in the morning.”

  “No—only at noonday,” said Timothy absently. He did not believe in ghosts, but somebody—and that meant a human being—had certainly managed to get into the room at some time during the night. The matches proved it.

  “Oh, I don’t agree. At noonday people don’t cast much of a shadow, and ghosts don’t cast a shadow at all, at any time,” said Alison cheerfully, “so noonday is hardly the time to look out for them, because they might simply be people.”

  “But that could mean we’re all ghosts at noonday, so I don’t think you can be right,” argued Timothy, determined to keep the conversation on a light and frivolous note.

  “We’re all ghosts to one another, anyway,” said Alison, suddenly disturbingly serious.

  “What an outrageous idea!” He laughed and kissed her.

  “It isn’t really, you know. In a way, I think it’s at the bottom of all good ghost stories.”

  “Ghost stories? Ah, my sister is the family artist in that direction. She has a splendidly blood-curdling collection, the choicest gems of which she trots out on Hallowe’en when the children have gone to bed,” said Timothy, his mind all the time on the disquieting affair of the mysterious box of matches. The outside doors had been securely fastened and the bedroom door, somewhat to his surprise, had a new spring lock on it and so could not be opened from the outside without a key. He supposed the Gees might have one, but he could not imagine either of them sneaking in at night to present him with a box of vestas.

  “Do you know the shortest ghost story in the world?” asked Alison, turning away from him to pull a pillow behind her back.

  “I know three,” said Timothy, quietly sneaking the box of matches underneath his own pillow.

  “Let’s swop, and see who wins,” suggested Alison, comfortably settling herself, “Loser gets up and makes the tea.”

  “All right. You take first knock.”

  “Well, a woman volunteered to spend a night in a haunted room. She searched it first, then locked the door to keep out practical jokers. As she got into bed a little voice said: ‘Now you’ve locked me in with you for the night!’ ”

  “Yes, that’s rather like one of my three, and I think I can match it, but in mine the woman, having searched and locked up, and so forth, just as you said, went to bed and went to sleep. Suddenly something woke her. Well, there was no electric light, same as in this benighted residence, so she stretched out her hand for the matches to light her candle but, before her fingers could fumble for them, the ghost put a box of matches into her hand.”

  He told this story deliberately. He wanted to find out whether Alison had noticed the poltergeist box of matches on his bedside table. Apparently he had been successful in concealing it in time, for she observed,

  “I think you win, because your ghost didn’t actually say anything. What’s your third story?”

  “Oh, a branch which used to tap on the window of a haunted room.”

  “You can’t call that a ghost story! Anyway, why didn’t they chop it off?”

  “They did. It didn’t make any sort of difference. A ghostly branch still used to tap in Morse code: Dead tomorrow. They say the haunted person always was!”

  “I don’t believe that’s an authentic ghost story. How would a ghost know the Morse code?”

  “That’s mere carping. What about cars? What abo
ut The Yellow Buick? And now, to change the subject, it’s going to take the devil of a time to heat enough water on Great-uncle’s calor gas contraption to fill even the most exiguous of baths, so shall we make do with a kettle of hot water, just enough for a lick and a promise?”

  “Who’s going to make the early tea?”

  “Oh, both of us,” said Timothy, disinclined to leave her alone, either upstairs or downstairs, in such a disquieting house, and equally determined, for the time being, to say nothing about the mysterious box of matches. “My lighter still functions, thank heaven.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Ghost-Hunter

  “Drive all hurtful Fiends us fro,

  By the Time the Cocks first crow.”

  The Old Wives’ Prayer

  “Damn!” said Timothy at breakfast in their Cotswold home on the following morning, when he had opened his correspondence. “They’ve changed the date of the midsummer meeting of the Phisbe committee. What a curse that is! I’d got it pencilled in for the fourteenth and now it’s to be the twenty-third.”

  “Oh, dear! That’s P.-B.’s middle day.”

  “Middle day of what?”

  “The end-of-term festivities, darling. I told you she was going to put the various items together this year and make a three-day do of it instead of spreading things out.” She handed one of her own letters across to him. “There are her final arrangements. Are there any special reasons for the Phisbe alteration?”

  “Yes. Coningsby says he couldn’t get a quorum for the fourteenth, so he’s had to shop around to find out when enough members can make it. People are always booked up—or pretend they are—when the June meeting comes along. Anyway, he writes to tell me that the twenty-third seems to be all right, that the president and the treasurer can come along, and that, if it suits me, too, he’ll confirm it with the other members. Which one of Sabrina’s functions shall I be missing? The Macbeth, I hope.”

  “Well, no—and there’s something more in her letter about that. You’ll see what it is when you’ve read it. She’s having the school Open Day, with the tennis tournament, on the twenty-second, the annual fair on the twenty-third, and the sports and Macbeth on the twenty-fourth, which happens to be a Saturday.”