Elizabeth Mansfield (13 page)

With the good-byes said, Loesby climbed up on the driver’s box. Kittridge helped his bride up the steps of their heavily loaded carriage and jumped in after her. There was a great deal of handwaving as the bridal carriage (a magnificent new equipage in shiny blue with the Kittridge coat of arms emblazoned on the doors—a gift from his lordship’s new father-in-law) rolled off down the street. The little group stood huddled together gazing glumly after it. The mood that had clouded the wedding ceremony seemed to have returned in full force.

At that moment, a thin ray of sunshine broke through an opening in the clouds and shone wanly down on them. “Oh, praise be!” Miss Penicuick exclaimed in relief, sniffing into an already wet handkerchief. “The sun! That means the bride will be happy!”

“I hope, ma’am,” Eunice said coldly, “that the superstition includes the groom, also.”

“Of course it does,” Sandy insisted with his determined optimism. “We all wish for them both to have a happy life together.”

“Yes,” the dowager muttered, “but it isn’t very likely.”

Nobody contradicted her.

Chapter Fifteen

The newlywed couple had spent only two nights in the manor house at Highlands before winter set in, in earnest and a month too soon. The temperature dropped so sharply that no one in Lincolnshire ventured out of doors unless through dire necessity. Then, after three days of freezing cold, the temperature abated just enough to usher in a snowfall of at least a foot. Kittridge, who’d planned to traverse all the grounds of the estate with Mr. Griswold, his land agent, as soon as the weather warmed, had to postpone everything. Cassie, who’d accepted the responsibility for hiring a household staff, was unable to interview any of the village lasses, for it was impossible for them to come up to the manor house. The couple had to make do with only the Whitlocks, the elderly man and wife who’d maintained the house during the years when it had been unoccupied, and Loesby, who acted as butler, valet and general factotum.

Kittridge spent a good part of each day in a small room near the library which he designated as his study, going over estate maps, blueprints and accounts. Cassie, meanwhile, tried to make habitable the few rooms they needed for daily living. With Loesby’s help, she looked into all the unused rooms and made notes of which drapes, pictures, carpets and pieces of furniture were in good condition or which she particularly liked. Then she went to Kittridge’s study to ask his permission to move things about. When she got to his door, however, her usual timidity took hold of her, and she knocked so shyly that he didn’t at first hear her. When she was finally admitted, she told him what she’d been doing and hesitantly made her request, fully expecting a reprimand.

He looked at her in surprise. “You don’t have to ask, my dear,” he pointed out. “This is your house as much as mine. More, if you remember that it was your ‘dowry’ that made it possible for us to live here.”

“That’s not how I feel about it,” she responded, forgetting her shyness in her determination to make him understand fully the liberties she intended to take with the furnishings. “These are things that have been in your family for generations. There is a tradition about these things, you know. In some families, the placement of a portrait or the arrangement of the Chinese vases on a mantelpiece is sacrosanct. So you see, Robert, I’d certainly understand if you’d prefer not making changes. I wouldn’t wish to upset tradition.”

He smiled up at her, noting that this was the first speech she’d made to him that didn’t seem painfully shy. “I’m not sentimental about furnishings, Cassie. To be honest, I don’t think I ever notice them. Please do as you like, and don’t give tradition another thought.”

Thus, happily free to rearrange the household as she wished, Cassie promptly set to work to make their rooms comfortable. With the help of Loesby and the Whitlocks, she removed and replaced the drapes in the smallest sitting room, brought in a pair of wing chairs from the drawing room, and rearranged the furniture so that all the seating would be close to the fireplace. The arrangement was especially designed so that it would be a room in which they could be cozy in the cold evenings.

That completed, they cleaned the two bedrooms from top to bottom, replaced worn carpets and
hangings with better ones from other rooms, and hung various paintings—still life studies and florals, mostly, that Cassie discovered in unused rooms—on walls that had been unadorned or hung with drab, dismal portraits. Soon the bedrooms were comfortable and cheery. And although no guests were expected in this dreadful weather, they readied a guest bedroom, too, just as a precaution against the unexpected.

It was dusty, strenuous, tiring work, but Cassie enjoyed it. Not only did the work keep her feeling useful, but the resulting improvement in the appearance of their surroundings pleased her. When Robert remarked, one evening after dinner, about the cheeriness of the sitting room, she was quite overcome. The kind word from him was the reward she’d wished for.

Thus encouraged, Cassie started redecorating the Great Hall, a high, vaulted entryway large enough to accommodate the stairway which bifurcated at the second floor and descended in two sweeping arches to the first. She and her willing assistants polished the marble floors, scrubbed and whitewashed the smoke-blackened walls, replaced the shabby carpet with a gold and blue gem of a rug she discovered in a third-floor bedroom, installed a claw-footed chaise against the south wall opposite the doorway beneath the curve made by the two stairways and removed the large, forbidding portrait of the first viscount that hung over it. Cassie confided to Loesby that she found the man’s face frightening and felt the portrait gave a gloomy greeting to anyone coming in the door for the first time. She replaced the portrait with a wonderful landscape she’d found in an unused sitting room in the building’s west wing. It was an early work of John Constable, the landscape painter who was creating a great stir in London these days. Cassie believed the painting to be a real treasure—a country scene with a pond and a hay wagon that was a joy to look at. She and Loesby agreed that it was a great improvement over the gloomy portrait as the first thing to greet the eye of new arrivals. “Makes the ’ole ’ouse look ’appy an’ new,” Mrs. Whitlock exclaimed when she saw the transformed hall. “Y’re a wonder, m’lady, an’ that’s a fact!”

“She is a wonder,” Loesby said to his captain that night, relating the day’s events as he helped Kittridge remove his boots. “Seems t’ me y’re luckier in yer bride than ye ’ad any right t’ expect.”

But Kittridge, still unsure of Cassie’s true nature, only grunted.

His lordship went to bed feeling irritable. The wind had shifted to the west and was whistling ominously outside his windows. The sound, so cold and barren, exacerbated his feeling of loneliness. It seemed to him that the already prolonged cold snap that had kept him housebound since his arrival would continue on forever. The weather, like his life, showed no promise or hope of change. Very sorry for himself, his last thought before he drifted off was to wonder disconsolately if there would ever be a spring for him.

Later that night, his lordship was awakened from a fitful sleep by a high-pitched, trilling sound that seemed like an inhuman, eerie shriek.
It’s only the wind
, he told himself as he tried to burrow deeper in his bedclothes and catch at the skirt of sleep before it flitted away from him altogether. But he soon realized that the sound was not the wind. A whiny sound accompanied the blowing but was more intermittent, and its pitch was much higher. What on earth was it? It was just such sounds, he thought, that made people believe in ghosts.

Knowing that he would get no more sleep as long as that eerie wail continued, he threw off his comforter and, after lighting his bedside candle, put on a robe and slippers. With the candle held out before him, he opened his door and came face-to-face with another candle. It took a moment before he could make out that it was being carried by his wife. “Good God, Cassie,” he exclaimed, “you startled me. Did that unearthly shrieking rouse you, too?”

“Yes. Isn’t it awful? Mrs. Whitlock tells me it’s the Rossiter ghost. She sounded rather proud of
him, actually. Says he makes Highlands a real castle. She warned me that he comes calling when the wind blows from the west.”

“Then, if it’s a ghost, why aren’t you hiding under your bedclothes, as any properly frightened female would do?”

She grinned at him over the smoky flame of the candle. “I suppose I would, if I really thought it was a ghost. But I don’t believe in such things, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t believe in them?” he mocked. “What sort of unnatural female are you?”

“Unnatural enough to have grave doubts about the existence of supernatural phenomena. I suppose you must think me dreadfully prosy.”

“On the contrary, ma’am. I begin to think you are unusually sensible. But if you don’t believe it’s a ghost, why didn’t you simply turn over, cover your ears and go back to sleep?”

“Well, you see, the noise is so loud, I feared it would disturb you and everyone else in the household. So I decided to try to track it down.”

“All by yourself?” He lifted his candle higher and looked closely at her face. Her eyes glowed with the flame’s reflection, and he was struck by the charm of her nighttime appearance. Her unruly hair had been crammed into a large, ruffled nightcap that was tied tightly under her pointed chin, but little rebellious tendrils had escaped from the sides and back and made her look like an adorably blowsy, if elfin, scrubwoman.

“Is this the shy Cassie speaking?” he demanded. “How can you pretend to be so timid and selfeffacing in society and still be brave enough to go searching all alone through a large, dark house for a nonexistent ghost?”

Flustered by the sudden turn of the conversation to her own personality, Cassie colored to her ears. But she managed to answer without stammering. “People and society make me timid, my lord, not empty houses.”

“Nevertheless, ma’am, it was a foolhardy intention. You are not yet familiar with the byways and passages of this enormous, cavernous edifice. What if you’d fallen down a stair or tripped on a carpet and fainted? We might not have found you for days!”

“Are you saying, my lord, that I may not go?” she asked, her voice plainly revealing her disappointment.

The wind rose at that moment, and the eerie scream so intensified in volume that it became decidedly unpleasant. “Well, we can’t let that horrid wail go on forever, I suppose. Come. We’ll
both
search out this ghostly shrieker.”

He took her hand in his and, with a long, purposeful stride, led her down the hall. She had to scurry on her tiny, slippered feet to keep up with him, her full-skirted nightgown flapping behind her in the draughty corridor. The wail grew louder as they turned the corner to the west wing. “It seems to be coming from the corner room at the end of the corridor,” he said.

He was right. When they came up to the door, they could tell at once that the sound was emanating from within the closed room. “You wait here,” he ordered. “Don’t move from this doorway until I come back.”

“Oh, no, Robert,” she cried, unwilling to be prevented from partaking in the solution of this mystery and even more unwilling to let go of his hand. “I want to go with you!”

“Very well, ma’am,” he said with mock foreboding, “but if you’re snatched away by evil spirits, never to be seen again, don’t blame me.”

The wind and the wail rose again, so loudly that she shivered. “If I’m snatched away,” she rejoined, laughing nervously, “I shall return, most appropriately, in spectral form, and then you and Mrs. Whitlock
can boast that Highlands has
two
shrieking ghosts in residence.”

He laughed, too, but he opened the door with gingerly care and held his candle aloft for a good look within before setting foot in the room. It was one of the unused bedrooms, a large, square, corner room with windows on two walls. It was icy cold. They both drew their robes closer about them as they stepped over the threshold. Robert looked round in distaste. The room was full of cobwebs, and the air of ghostliness was emphatically underlined by the pale dustcovers that were draped over the furniture. “Ugh!” Robert grunted. “One has to admit this is the perfect place for the Rossiter ghost to haunt. Are you sure, my dear, that you still believe the ghost to be nonexistent?”

A shriek echoed shrilly through the room. “Yes,” Cassie retorted bravely, “but I’ll l-leave it to you to look under the b-bed.”

“Thank you,” he said dryly. “I suppose you wish me to look under all the Holland covers, too.”

“No,” she said, suddenly alert. “I think the sound is coming from here. This window … on the west wall.”

He listened. “I think you’re right. Stand back, girl, for I’m about to throw open the drapes. If a transparent figure with black eyeholes is standing behind them, flee for your life, for that’s exactly what I intend to do.”

He flung the drapes open, releasing a cloud of dust into the air that caused them both to cough. But there was nothing behind the drapes but a large, multipaned window with a white, moon-washed landscape beyond. “Dash it all,” Robert muttered, “the damnable fellow’s eluded us again.”

As if in response, the wail came up loud and clear. It seemed to mock them for a moment, and then it died down again. There was no doubt that the sound came from the window. Robert lifted his candle and peered at one pane after another. Suddenly the candleflame flickered and went out. “A draught,” he said triumphantly. “Right—” He leaned toward the pane he was examining and ran his fingers round the frame. “—here!”

“I don’t understand,” Cassie said, puzzled. “What has a draught to do with it? Surely a little draught can’t make such a sound.”

“Wait until it shrieks again. I’ll show you.”

Of course, because they were waiting for it, the sound did not come for several minutes. But as soon as it rose up again, Robert put a hand flat against the pane, as if to hold it steady. The shriek stopped at once.

“It was a slight rattle in the pane,” Robert explained. “The putty holding this pane in place has dried and fallen off, so there’s a small space between the frame and the glass. When the wind blows strongly enough, it sets the pane vibrating so quickly that it makes a whine.”