Ghosts of Mayfield Court (2 page)

‘Confound it, Catherine,' he shouted, ‘I thought you'd forgotten that bout of silliness! We've been here for only a week, hardly time for us to make an inventory of what this wretched house contains, but already you've allowed yourself to be swayed by the gossip that that old peasant woman from the village retails, because she's nothing else to do to brighten her drab life. This wreck of a house lay virtually derelict for years, so the village folk peopled it with spooks and monstrosities. Forget it, do you hear me?'

‘But, Uncle, how can I forget something that really happened—?'

‘It didn't, damn it!' Uncle Max rose from the table, his work forgotten. For one chilling moment – chilling to me – he looked at me as though I were a stranger. I watched him in some trepidation as he crossed to the window which overlooked the desolate, overgrown gardens of Mayfield Court.

‘Yes, I thought you'd forgotten it,' he repeated in a low voice. ‘If you saw anything at all, it was because you'd nodded off, and had a daydream. No, don't contradict me, Catherine! If you persist in this silliness, I will take you to an alienist in Harley Street, and have your brain examined.'

I thought that it was only in novels that men stamped their foot with rage, but Uncle did it at that moment, and motes of dust rose from the floor.

‘It was the same in London – the sanest place on earth – where that silly friend of yours, Marguerite— What kind of a name is that for an English girl? What was I saying? That girl, that Marguerite, took you off to séances, where your head was filled with crazed notions….'

Uncle Max paused for breath. I was startled, and rather
frightened
,
to see how pale he'd gone. There was an expression in his eyes almost akin to fear. Fear? Fear of what?

‘I forbade you to visit spiritualists,' he continued, ‘and I'm glad to say that you did as you were told for your own good. But now you are
willing
yourself to see “ghosts”. There are no such things. Are you trying to frighten me? Well, I'll not be frightened, do you hear? My only fear, Catherine, is that you'll drive yourself insane with this unhealthy nonsense.'

Uncle Max stopped speaking, and his shoulders sagged as though he were suddenly aware of the imposition of some great burden. When he spoke again, I heard with alarm a kind of controlled desperation behind his words.

‘You and I – we have both been cast adrift in the courses of our lives. You were more or less an orphan from birth, and I lost my wife to consumption when you were only eighteen months old. We had only each other, I with no wife, you with no good aunt to advise and admonish. Yes, we were both set adrift. And that's why we must both strive to meet the realities of this world with practical common sense. I am not frightened of your fantasies, but I am frightened for your sanity – your sense of balance. Think over what I've said. I paid for you to receive a first-class education, and yet you choose to behave like an ignorant peasant girl.'

Uncle Max rose from the table and walked heavily out of the room.

To my surprise, I found that I was experiencing a rising resentment of my own. He was treating me as though I was a little girl, afraid of bogies. He had said my second psychic experience was a dream. But it was not a dream.

That unpleasant scene with my uncle occurred on Monday, 6 August. The afternoon of the previous day had been still and oppressive. Uncle had been engaged all that morning in sifting through correspondence, scarcely acknowledging my presence, so I decided to explore the first floor of the house. Mayfield Court,
being half-derelict, was in parts unsafe, but I had not lost the spirit of adventure that had made my childhood so full of dramatic incidents, some dangerous, others wildly funny.

When I was very young, Uncle Max had been less minatory, and very tolerant of my youthful antics. We lived in what is still my home, a fine old house in Saxony Square, a quiet secluded kind of place near Upper Berkeley Street, on the fringes of Mayfair. There was a large walled garden, where, as a child, I spent hours playing by myself. Uncle Max, then still practising law, had viewed my antics with amused tolerance. He had become a man darker in spirit, more withdrawn, but no less dear to me than he had been in the halcyon days of my childhood.

As I have said, Uncle had decided to spend Sunday engrossed with his musty papers, and I had thought to seek amusement by exploring the first floor of the house. Accordingly, I mounted the rickety stairs and pushed open the door of a bedroom where Mrs Doake had told me that the spirit-child sometimes appeared.

The room was bathed in quiet sunlight, but held no sinister atmosphere. It was simply a small room with a single window, a collapsed iron bedstead, a chair, and a tallboy from which the drawers had been removed and stacked up in a corner, near a number of planks standing upright against the wall.

I smiled to herself – what had I expected to see? – and turned to go back on to the landing. Uncle Max would think me mad, maybe not without reason! As I mentioned, I had fancied that I'd glimpsed the little girl a week earlier, soon after we had arrived at Mayfield. Little more than a shadow, it had flitted across the head of the first-floor landing, and had then been lost in the gloom. I blush even now when I recall that I had been too
frightened
to investigate further.

It was as I stepped out of the little bedroom and on to the landing that a change in the light behind me made me turn round. I stood transfixed on the threshold of the room, quite
unable to move. The somnolent rays of the afternoon sun lay across the chamber, revealing tiny motes of dust hovering in the air. Beside the iron bedstead I saw the figure of a young girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old. The child's face was pale and expressionless, though her dark eyes seemed to be fixed earnestly on mine.

The blood pounded in my ears, and I remained motionless and totally consumed by supernatural dread. The child was wearing an ankle-length frock of faded muslin, and her dark hair fell down over her shoulders. She made no sound of any kind.
You're supposed to speak first
, a little voice somewhere deep in my consciousness told me,
otherwise they can't speak
. My voice, when eventually I found it, sounded thin and reedy.

‘Who are you? What do you want?'

The figure of the girl pointed to the bed. Her lips moved, but no sound came to my ears. I kept my eyes riveted on the child's mouth, and fancied that she had said the word ‘Helen'. The figure pointed once more to the bed, and placed a finger to its lips.

I closed my eyes in dread, at the same time feeling for the frame of the door for support. Was this silent wraith really the spirit of the child who had once stayed in this house, long years ago? What had happened to her, that her spirit could not rest until some hidden truth were known? What was she trying to say, as she ventured for a while into this world from the world unseen? I opened my eyes again to find that the figure had gone.

On the Tuesday following, Uncle Max declared that he would spend the morning finishing his reading of the letters that he had inherited with the house.

‘Another couple of days, Catherine,' he said, ‘and we shall be able to leave this benighted place and return to London. We've been here too long already.'

He settled himself at the table in what had become our
common living room, and I decided that I would fetch a straw basket from the kitchen, and go out into the overgrown rear garden to pick some of the ripe raspberries that I knew were growing there.

There was a romantic stillness and peace about the gardens of Mayfield Court that appealed to me. Wild nature had taken up residence there, so that clumps of brilliant yellow poppies, and wild purple geranium sprang up defiantly from the sallow tangles of dock and bindweed covering what had once been the paths and beds of a kitchen garden. Behind some banks of dying
rhododendron
the stark roofless walls of an old washhouse had long ago yielded to the advance of the invincible ivy. I had never explored as far as the containing wall of the rear garden, but I could glimpse sections of it through the bushes.

I pushed my way through the tall weeds and made my way into that part of the garden where a number of raspberry bushes, covered in enticing fruit, were to be found. I spent some time picking raspberries, and placing them in the straw basket, at the same time enjoying the warm sun, and the sense of being apart from the mundane concerns of Mayfield Court.

Quite suddenly, a cloud obscured the sun and, at the same time, I was conscious of something moving near the ivy-clad ruin of the washhouse. I turned sharply to my right, and saw once again the child revenant who had mouthed the name ‘Helen' when I had asked her her name.

I found myself utterly deprived of the will to move. My fear was such that I scarcely noticed that the sun had come out from behind the cloud, so that the silent visitor was now bathed in light. She was wearing the same faded muslin frock, and her dark hair fell freely over her frail shoulders. I could see now that she was barefoot. Her little round face, devoid of expression, was turned to face me and, as our eyes met, she began to speak, but no sound issued from her lips.

What did she want? Why had she come back to haunt me?

The figure moved nearer to the ruin, and pointed to a
particular
spot close to the ground. The lips moved again, but no sound came. Then she placed her hands over her eyes for a moment, and seemed to move aside behind the bushes. I found that the spell had been broken, and that I no longer felt afraid. The little ghost had been trying to tell me something, but the words echoed in a world beyond this.

I picked up the basket in which the succulent raspberries reposed, and walked slowly towards the washhouse beyond the sprawling rhododendron bushes. With the disappearance of the apparition the garden had reassumed an air of encouraging normality. Even as I picked my way through the brambles one part of my mind was registering the fact that the fruits that I had just picked had come from the descendants of cultivated plants: they were too large and well-formed to be from wild stock.

When I came to the ruins I recalled the reappearance of the silent ghost-child. She had pointed to a spot in a partly-collapsed wall near where I was now standing. Had she come with a message? Had the spirit materialized to reveal some
long-concealed
crime or enormity?

I crouched down near the foot of the wall, and saw that there was a v-shaped fissure between the bricks, beyond which something white gleamed where a little beam of sunlight rested. I spread a handkerchief on the ground and knelt down, so that I could get a better view through the cleft in the bricks.

Delicate and beautiful, looking for all the world as though it had been sculpted from marble by a renowned artist, a skeletal hand and the bones of an arm were revealed to my appalled sight. I had no grounding in anatomy, but I knew at once that these were the bones of a child, and it was these pathetic remnants that the child-ghost had yearned to be revealed to the world.

I had experienced enough horrors for one day. I walked unsteadily back on to the tangled path, willing my legs to carry
me where I wished to go. I would soon be back in the safety of the house, and Uncle, or Mrs Doake, would rouse someone in this sleepy, deadly hamlet to send for a policeman.

I glanced back involuntarily towards the secret tomb, and saw once again the phantasm of the dead child, standing near a tree, and pointing with a kind of silent accusation at the spot where her mortal remains had been concealed. Would this haunting never end? It was then that I fainted, as though my mind willed my body to banish the denizens of another world from my consciousness.

‘My niece has always seen things, Doctor. Ever since she was a little girl. Things that no one else sees, I mean. It's due, I suppose, to a heightened imagination. She used to consort with mediums, lured into doing so by a giddy woman acquaintance of hers, someone who's years older than she is, and ought to know better than encourage a young girl of twenty. But I soon put a stop to that after I found out about it. And now, Doctor, she's frightened herself into a fainting-fit. It's too bad. I shall take her back to London immediately.'

I lay on the sofa in our living room, watching my uncle through half-closed lashes. How long had I been unconscious? Long enough for Uncle Max to send Mrs Doake for a doctor. He was a man in his fifties, with a kindly face and shrewd eyes. He still held my wrist, measuring the progress of my pulse, while listening to Uncle Max's dismissive words.

I was suddenly overcome with a surge of indignation – the beginning of a rebellion against my uncle's assumption that he could override anything that I said or thought as though I was a silly creature of no consequence. If I did not say something
now
in my defence, this doctor would prescribe a draught of some sort and leave the house. I opened my eyes, and fixed them earnestly on the doctor's face.

‘I saw a skeleton—' I began, but was interrupted immediately
by Uncle Max. I glanced almost despairingly in his direction, and was shocked to see how his face had been suddenly drained of all colour.

‘You see, Dr Tracy?' he cried. ‘She wilfully persists in these wild assertions. I shall take her to Harley Street. You foolish girl. You saw no skeleton'

‘Oh, but she did, Mr Paget,' said Dr Tracy. ‘When she fainted, the good woman who helps here – Mrs Doake, isn't it? – found her lying in the grass, and she, too, saw the skeletal remains, hidden in a ruined wall. She had the good sense to send a lad for me out at Thornton Heath, and when I came in the back way into your garden, I saw the skeleton too.'

At last! I was to be vindicated. Whoever this Dr Tracy was, my heart warmed to him. He turned then to address me directly.

‘There,' he said, ‘your colour is returning. You will be quite all right, now. Mr Paget, ask someone to bring your niece a cup of well-sweetened tea.'