Deadly Pleasures

by Martin Edwards

  The song left too many vexing questions in my mind, and I felt the need for answers Obviously, I had to go back to Swainsdale, to Lyndgarth, and do some digging around.

  Some summers live forever in the memory, and for me it is 1916, the summer of my sixteenth birthday.

  Lord Bewlay came and went, much involved in military matters, though in what capacity I had no idea, as I never saw him wearing a uniform until later. As I was older now, I was allowed to wander further afield, and sometimes I even went as far as the village, especially when Harry Langthwaite, a school friend of mine, was at home.

  One day when Harry and I were playing cricket on the village green, I twisted my ankle. Harry helped me hobble to Dr Greaves’ surgery. The doctor was new to the village, and through various circumstances, I would like to think he became my friend. He was much younger than I would have expected a doctor to be, so there was naturally much speculation as to why he was not in France.

  Harry told me he had overheard his mother and father talking about that very subject, and it seemed that Dr Greaves had served at a field hospital and had been wounded. He was now unfit for active duty. He didn’t look unfit to me, but I have since learned that many of the wounds inflicted by war are invisible to the naked eye. With so many doctors and teachers away fighting, it was a godsend to the village to find him, and his credentials were quickly accepted. Luckily, my ankle was not seriously injured, and the application of an elastic bandage and a little less running around for the next few days proved the perfect cure.

  Tragedy struck that July. We got news that my father had been killed in the Battle of the Somme. I felt numb at first, unable to cry, unable to comfort my mother. I couldn’t believe that he was dead, that we would never again go fishing together, or that Mother and I would never again sit around the fire on a winter’s night and listen to him sing ‘The Trees they Grow so High’ or ‘The Banks of Green Willow’. It seemed so wrong, so unfair, and I remember feeling angry all the time.

  Until, that is, a week or two later, when Lady Isabella first asked me if I would do a small favour for her.

  My heart leapt into my throat. Grief-stricken as I still was over my father, a chance to be of service to Lady Isabella was all I had wished for these past two years, and now she was asking for my help. Perhaps she needed to be rescued, I thought, like the sad princess I had first imagined her to be.

  She put her finger to her lips, leaned forward and laid it against mine. An electric thrill rippled through me. I was in heaven. Perfect bliss. Her finger tasted of lavender water, and to feel its exquisite softness against the sensitive surface of my lips was almost more than I could bear. It was to be our secret, she said, when she handed me an envelope and asked if I would deliver it to Dr Greaves. I think I might have asked her if someone was ill, but all I really remember is her smile and her wave as I set off on my mission. I knew that Aunt Gwynneth had what my mother referred to as the ‘falling sickness’, and perhaps I thought that Lady Isabella was doing her a kindness in sending for the doctor. Whatever the reason, I ran and skipped all the way to Lyndgarth, feeling as if I were dancing on air.

  I found Dr Greaves alone in his surgery and handed him the note. He asked me to wait while he read it, wrote a hurried reply, gave me sixpence and asked me if I would mind delivering the letter to Lady Isabella. I thought it a little odd that he wasn’t dashing off to help Aunt Gwynneth right away, but I didn’t dwell on it for long. I ran back. Whatever I was doing, I was doing for Lady Isabella, and if it made her happy, then I was happy, too.

  It did. Her eyes sparkled as she read the note.

  And so it went. On at least two more occasions that summer, I delivered a note to Dr Greaves from Lady Isabella. He would give me a reply and a sixpence. Sometimes we would linger in his surgery, and he would show me his instruments and tell me what they were used for. He let me listen to my heart through his stethoscope. It was beating fast. He had a skeleton in the corner, I remember, and he used it for a hat stand, which I thought very funny. I told him about my father, and he rested his hand on my shoulder and told me how sorry he was, that the war had taken so many good men. I could tell that his sympathy for me was genuine. He said nothing about his own experiences in France, but the little muscles at the corners of his jaw tensed and twitched, as if he were struggling to hold back words and emotions.

  Then, one day in August, around the time Lord Bewlay turned up in his officer’s uniform, yet another disaster struck. There would be no more need for servants at Swainsdale Manor for some time, Lord Bewlay said. He had to leave for France the following morning. Much of the manor would be closed down until the war was over, and Lady Isabella would manage with only Peggy, her personal maid, in the few remaining rooms.

  I thought how terrible it would be for Isabella to be so isolated, so alone. She was such a vivacious creature that I worried she would wilt and fade without company. And, of course, I would have no reason to see her any more.

  And so, almost as abruptly as we had arrived, we were exiled from Eden.

  The journey to Lyndgarth was relaxing enough, despite my agitated state of mind. Again, the soothing clickety-clack of the train and the warmth of the day worked their magic on me; the landscape seemed bathed in honey, everything golden, so still and sweet and slow. But despite it all, I was aware of a certain tension in my chest. After all, I was going back to a place I had not visited in many years, and I was hoping to find out something about the roots of a folk song that mentioned the brutal deaths of people I had known and loved.

  I changed trains at York, and we headed west on an obscure branch line. Soon, we passed through Eastvale, on the far side of the river, the brownish water foaming like beer pulled from the cask as it fell over the terraced falls. I saw the steep walls of the ancient castle for the first time in over forty years and remembered how I used to play there with my father when I was a boy, scrambling up and down the ruined battlements with ease. It was a scene that hadn’t changed much in centuries past, and it probably wouldn’t change much in centuries to come.

  From there, we headed out into the Yorkshire countryside, the hills rising more steeply on each side, crisscrossed with drystone walls, humped with limestone outcrops, white dots of sheep grazing on the high slopes. It had been a wet spring in the north, and the greens of the meadows and hillsides were dark and rich, dotted here and there with clumps of wildflowers, white, yellow and purple. Finally, we came to Lyndgarth.

  I walked the short distance to the village green. Some local children were playing cricket with makeshift stumps, just as Harry and I had done on the day I twisted my ankle, and nearby, a young couple sat enjoying a picnic on a checked tablecloth, the way Mother and Aunt Gwynneth used to do at Swainsdale Manor. For a few moments, the illusion continued, and I thought that I had stepped back in time. I went straight to the Black Heifer, one of the two pubs that stood beside the green, separated by a general store and a post office.

  I had no idea whether Jack Metcalfe was still alive. I hadn’t known him at all, except by his name over the door. Even if he was no longer there, I thought, the odds were that I would find somebody who remembered the old days.

  Jack Metcalfe had died in 1942, I discovered, but his son Jimmy was now landlord of the Black Heifer, and he frowned with remembrance as he pulled me a pint. Jimmy said he was too young to remember so far back, as he had been born in 1920 and was only a child at the time. He did remember that his father had a passion for folk music, though, and that he had a bee in his bonnet about the Bewlays. Jack Metcalfe had been caught poaching once on Lord Bewlay’s land and had had to plead for forgiveness. That had rankled with his proud nature, and with his professed allegiance to the Russian Revolution, and he had borne a grudge ever since.

  Jimmy knew nothing of what had become of Lady Isabella or Dr Greaves; they were not a part of his childhood. The only other information he had for me was that Lord Bewlay had been living at Swainsdale Manor since the end of the Great War with his Fre
nch bride, but they kept themselves very much to themselves.

  He then pointed me in the direction of one of his regulars, Ted Sharp, who looked as if he had been sitting in the same chair over by the window since time immemorial. He had known Jack, and he would talk to anyone, Jimmy said, so long as the drinks kept coming. I thanked Jimmy, picked up my glass and walked over to introduce myself.

  Ted Sharp had a pipe clamped firmly between his teeth, and at first I thought he was going to ignore me completely when I asked if I might join him. Then I noticed his lips move around the pipe and distinctly heard the words, ‘Gin and tonic. Double. No fruit,’ which I took as my cue and duly returned with the required beverage. Ted took the pipe out of his mouth, sipped the gin, smacked his lips and fixed me with his ancient eyes. ‘Go on, then, lad,’ he said. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  Now that I was here, I didn’t really know how or where to begin. Somehow, it all seemed faintly ridiculous – an old folk song, a youthful love, the growing sense that things were not as they had seemed. It was a struggle to get out the words, but I managed to ask Ted if he had known the Bewlays up at the Manor.

  Ted snorted. ‘Now what would an old farmhand like me be doing hobnobbing with the gentry?’

  ‘But you must have seen them around?’

  ‘They didn’t mingle. Not with the likes of us.’

  ‘I understand that your friend Jack Metcalfe didn’t like them, that he wrote a song about them?’

  Ted gave what I assumed to be a low-pitched cackle. ‘Too much imagination, old Jack.’ He pointed the stem of his pipe to his head. ‘Too much imagination and not enough gumption.’

  ‘You mean he imagined things?’

  ‘Let me put it this way. If you sent old Jack out to buy a pot of striped paint, he’d go to t’shop and ask for one.’

  ‘So he was gullible?’

  ‘Aye. You could say that. He imagined he’d see some sort of ghost or monster coming out of the gates of Swainsdale Manor around the time they disappeared. I ask you!’

  ‘Disappeared? Who disappeared?’

  Ted knocked back the rest of his drink and banged the glass on the table. I got the message. ‘Same again?’

  ‘Since tha’s asking.’

  I came back with another double gin and tonic. ‘You mentioned a disappearance.’

  ‘Aye. Did a bunk with Lord Bewlay’s wife, didn’t he?’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘T’young doctor. Matthew Greaves.’

  So it was true, the terrible fear that had been growing in me. Even though I had begun to suspect as much ever since I first heard Jack Metcalfe’s song and started thinking about the past, it still hit me like a punch in the stomach.

  ‘What’s up lad, tha’s shaking like a newly shorn sheep?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘In t’war. Great War, like.’

  ‘They disappeared, just like that?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Was there a police investigation?’

  ‘Came around asking questions, didn’t they? But there was nothing for ’em to investigate.’

  ‘What was Jack Metcalfe doing out there?’

  ‘Ha! Poaching, like as not, knowing old Jack.’

  ‘And where was Lord Bewlay?’

  ‘Away at war, weren’t he? Everyone thought he was a goner.’

  ‘But he wasn’t?’

  ‘He came back.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘After it were all over. Nineteen or twenty. Thereabouts. Had a lovely French bride with him.’

  I tried to picture the Manor, Lady Isabella in her flowing dress, the handsome, distant Lord Bewlay, but the image shattered into fragments that blew away on the wind. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nowt. They went to live at t’Manor. Lord Bewlay had been wounded on the Somme, see, and he’d stayed in France to recover. I think he’d had a bit of surgery over there, too. Scars on his face. One of his eyes drooping. Sloppy French work.’

  ‘Are they still at the Manor?’

  ‘He is,’ said Ted. ‘She died a few years back, and he’s become a bit of a hermit. Not that he wasn’t before, like, but you never see him at all these days. Has all his groceries and whatnot delivered. There’s some as says he’s not much longer for this world, hisself.’

  Ted banged his empty glass on the table again, but I had enough information to be going on with. I thanked him for talking to me, ignored his grumbling as he counted out his small change on the table, and went up to my room.

  I cannot say that I slept at all well that night. Perhaps it was the unfamiliar bed, though I suspect it was more likely the disturbing tale I had heard from Ted Sharp. I was also restless because I couldn’t wait for the morning. After breakfast, at a decent hour, I intended to present myself at Swainsdale Manor and find out whether Lord Bewlay himself would talk to me. After all the bits and pieces I had picked up from Jack’s wild imaginings, and from Jimmy and Ted, I found I needed more than ever to know what had happened to Isabella and Matthew, where they had gone, what had become of them, and what role I had played. Lord Bewlay might just be willing to tell me.

  I rushed my breakfast and regretted it all the way along the winding lanes to the manor. It was another day of sunshine and blue skies, reminiscent of the summers I spent there as a young lad. I remembered dancing along that very same lane on my first mission to Dr Greaves for Lady Isabella, full to bursting with my absurd happiness, my foolish devotion. I was on another kind of mission now. A mission for the truth, no matter what pain it might bring.

  I slowed down in amazement as I approached the manor walls. They were overgrown with climbing plants, the stones cracked and crumbling. The rusted gates stood open, one of them hanging on a single hinge. Weeds grew between the paving stones of the path. The beautiful gardens resembled a jungle, some of the trees were clearly dead due to neglect, and the pond was covered over with scum and slime, the water stagnant, smelling like a blocked drain. The folly was in ruins.

  But the house itself was still intact, the Greek columns, portico, classical symmetry, though it, too, showed signs of neglect: missing slates, moth-eaten curtains in the upstairs windows, a front door badly in need of a fresh coat of paint.

  As I stood there trying to take it all in, the door creaked open, and a hunched figure stood there pointing a shotgun at me. I held out my hands and said, ‘Don’t! Please. I mean no harm. I’m George Lomax. My aunt worked here. I used to play here when I was a boy.’

  He paused and squinted at me. I could see what Ted Sharp meant about the scars and drooping eye.

  ‘Are you my Nemesis?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I answered. ‘I’ve just come to ask you some questions.’

  After staring at me for some moments, he grunted, cracked open the shotgun and rested it over the crook of his arm, beckoning me to follow him inside. We entered what I guessed had once been a grand receiving room, now almost bereft of furniture, its surfaces covered in dust, cobwebs in the ornate cornices of the ceiling threatening to invade the crystal chandelier. He fixed me with his good eye. ‘I remember you now,’ he said. ‘Weren’t you that young lad who made doe eyes at la belle dame?’

  I think I probably blushed. ‘La belle dame?’ I echoed weakly.

  ‘Don’t you know your poetry?’

  ‘I …’

  ‘Keats. La Belle Dame sans Merci. That’s what I called her. Isabella. “Alone and palely loitering.” That’s what you were doing. “I saw pale kings and princes, too, / Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; / They cried – La Belle Dame sans Merci / Thee hath in thrall!”.’

  By the sound of his laughter and the gleam in his eye, I thought he was mad, but he seemed to regain his composure, put down the shotgun and sat wearily in a deep armchair. I sat opposite him. ‘Are you all right, Lord Bewlay?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m tired and ill,’ he said, tapping his chest. ‘And empty. An old man. It’s a long time since I’ve spoken with anyone. A
long time since anyone’s called me by my name.’

  I explained to him about the odd chain of events that led to my coming here. He listened, nodding occasionally. ‘It was all so long ago,’ he said, after a deep sigh. ‘I didn’t deserve her.’

  ‘Isabella?’

  His lip curled. ‘Marianne.’ Then he said nothing for a while. A clock ticked in the silence. It told the wrong time, I noticed. ‘It’s true that I was wounded,’ he said finally. ‘Twice. Such irony. The second time, a French family found me in a ditch and took me in, even though it could have cost them their lives.’

  ‘They nursed you back to health?’

  ‘Yes. And that was when I fell in love. Fell in love for the very first time in my life.’

  I was stunned at this comment. Here was the man who had been married to Lady Isabella, with whom a life together would have been beyond my wildest dreams, and he was telling me that it meant nothing to him, that he had never truly loved her. ‘But why did you marry her if that’s what you felt?’ I cried.

  ‘Do you think it was my choice? We were a good match, or so everyone said. My parents. Her parents. That was before I knew she was an inconstant, cruel, heartless woman.’ His eyes gleamed dangerously again. ‘Isabella was the very devil incarnate. La Belle Dame sans Merci.’

  I could hardly bear to hear my old love spoken of in this way, but I knew that losing my temper would gain me nothing. I swallowed my anger and went on. ‘What happened to her?’

  He stared at me for a long time, then seemed to come to some sort of decision. ‘It’s a relief, in a way,’ he said. ‘To tell you. And yet another irony. I feel that I’ve come full circle.’

  ‘Where are Lady Isabella and Matthew Greaves?’

  ‘Oh, they’re dead,’ he said softly. ‘They’ve been dead for a long time. Since October, 1916, as a matter of fact. The first time I was wounded.’ He pointed to his drooping eye. ‘When I got this.’