Property of a Lady (15 page)

As this last thought formed, Nell became aware that something was disturbing the lonely serenity of the church and its surroundings – a sound so fragile it could barely be heard by human ears.

Dead souls sobbing, wolves whispering . . .

She stood very still, listening intently. The sounds came and went, like a bad radio or TV signal. She was about to call out or make a dash for the lychgate when something moved on the edge of her vision, something that was not quite substantial enough to be a figure but that was more than the curtain of rain. A figure moving between the trees, was it? For pity’s sake, this was turning into every classic ghost scenario ever written! But there
had
been something, she was sure of it.

The sounds were forming a definite pattern – forming words, a faint rhythm.

‘At the midnight hour, beneath the gallows tree . . .

Hand in hand the Murderers stand . . .

By one, by two, by three . . .

Open lock to the dead man’s knock . . .’

Horror closed around Nell’s throat. It was the rhyme – the rhyme Alice had heard that night, the rhyme Beth talked about and Ellie had known. She waited, but the eerie chanting had stopped and she could only hear the rain pattering on the leaves and against the walls of the church. And then footsteps, blessedly ordinary footsteps, came towards her, and there was the bright colour of an umbrella and Michael’s voice calling that he was sorry to have been so long, but he had dropped the car keys and they had rolled into the ditch and nearly been washed down a roadside grid, and he was covered in mud from retrieving the wretched things. This small, ordinary thing was somehow so reassuring that Nell smiled. Because, of course, those sounds had been simply the rain and the dripping trees mixed up with her own nervous tension. Anyone would be jumpy and a bit over-imaginative in a deserted old graveyard, for goodness’ sake.

But some perversity made her say to Michael, ‘Did you see anyone on your way back?’

‘No. Why?’

‘I thought Inspector Brent said something about sending his forensic people in to see if Beth had been taken inside the church.’

‘I shouldn’t think they’d come here in all this rain,’ said Michael. ‘Are you alright to look at the grave? I mean, it isn’t going to upset you?’

‘I’m tougher than that. Let’s do it before one of us gets pneumonia.’

‘Well, stay under the umbrella.’

They went as quickly as possible towards the old gravestones. The umbrella was a large golfing one, but it was still necessary to huddle quite close together. It brought back the rainy afternoons when Nell and Brad used to take long walks on the heath, their arms round one another under an umbrella, and how they would come back to the tall, old house where Brad would wrap her in a huge bath towel and make love to her in front of the fire while her hair was still wet . . .

The headstone Michael indicated was very weathered. Moss and lichen covered parts of it, but most of the lettering was legible. Michael read it out: ‘“Elizabeth Lee, wife of William Lee. Tragically taken from the world in October 1888.”’

‘William Lee,’ said Nell, staring down at it. ‘Charect House again. That’s a curious coincidence.’

‘Yes.’ Michael knelt down, heedless of the sodden bracken piled around the grave, and began to scrape the moss from the lower part of the stone. ‘Look,’ he said, and something in his voice sent Nell’s nerve-endings shivering again. Brushing off the moss had uncovered the rest of the lettering. Beneath the wording about Elizabeth Lee, wife of William, was another line.

Dearly loved mother of Elvira.

Elvira.

Michael sat back on his heels, staring at the carved words. ‘Elvira,’ he said softly, and the name seemed to hiss through the trees.

Elvira . . .

Nell found she was gripping the umbrella handle so tightly that it was scoring marks into her palms. Elvira, the name that had haunted Ellie Harper’s nightmares. Elvira, for whom Beth believed the eyeless man searched.

Michael stood up, brushing the wet bracken from his cords. Half to himself, he said, ‘So she existed. And she must have lived at Charect House – grown up there. That’s extraordinary. D’you know, I didn’t believe in her until now.’

Nell had not believed in Elvira either. She had thought Elvira was a nightmare figure, a phantom of a child’s imagination. But she was real, she had been the daughter of William Lee, the man who, according to Alice Wilson’s journal, was said to be still seen in Marston Lacy, seventy years after his death.

‘I suppose,’ said Michael slowly, ‘it would be possible to trace Elvira. Probably, it would be fairly easy, in fact.’

‘I’m not sure if I want to trace her.’

‘I’m not sure if I want to, either.’

They looked at one another. ‘But,’ said Nell, at last, ‘we must. It might lay the ghost for Beth and Ellie.’

‘Yes.’ He looked back at the headstone. ‘Does anything strike you about this grave?’

‘I don’t think so— Oh,’ said Nell. ‘Oh yes, it does. In those days, they’d have buried husband and wife together, wouldn’t they? Or at the very least side by side in adjoining graves.’

‘Exactly. And there’s plenty of room in this part of the churchyard. But William isn’t here.’

‘No. So where,’ said Nell, ‘is his grave?’

‘There might be any number of quite ordinary explanations,’ said Michael as they drove away.

‘He might have left the area after Elizabeth died,’ said Nell. ‘He could have gone to live anywhere in the world, couldn’t he? Or he might simply have been travelling and died abroad. Or been killed in the Great War – no, he’d have been a bit too old, wouldn’t he?’

‘There were other wars,’ said Michael. ‘But somehow I don’t see him as a soldier, do you?’

‘No. And there’s the legend that he’s still sometimes seen in Marston Lacy,’ said Nell. ‘That doesn’t quite square with a peaceful death in Biarritz or a heroic one in the Dardanelles, does it?’

‘No.’ Michael turned the car into the main street and drew up outside Nell’s shop. The rain was stopping at last, and a thin shaft of sunlight was breaking through the greyness. Nell thought it was nice that Beth would be coming home in sunshine.

‘Let me know about Beth,’ said Michael.

‘Of course I will.’ Nell thought: do I ask him to call at the flat later? She glanced at him and saw he had the hesitant look again, as if he, too, was not sure what to say. Before she could think too much about it, she said, ‘If you want to bring the laptop back later, we could check if there’s another email from Jack Harper.’

He looked pleased. ‘We ought to do that, oughtn’t we?’ he said at once. ‘This afternoon I’ll go out to Charect House to see how the work’s getting on. It’d be ironic if I’ve told Jack it won’t be ready for Christmas, then find the roof’s fallen in or something. Would around five be a good time?’

‘You can have a cup of tea and tell Beth some more about Wilberforce,’ said Nell.

TWELVE

C
harect House, when Michael got there, did not look very habitable; in fact, it did not look as if it was likely to be habitable for another ten years. Window frames were hanging off their moorings like teeth torn from the roots, and it looked as if there was a gaping hole in part of the roof. But the skip parked on the lawn on his last visit seemed to have vanished, which presumably was progress.

He went cautiously inside. The skip had not vanished at all; it, or a smaller version of it, was blocking most of the hall. Michael stepped carefully round it and went into the long drawing-room. This was a daunting sight, but probably it would not take very long to sort out the bare electricity wires spilling riotously out of the wall. He went across the hall to the room Liz had designated as a dining room – ‘Although we’ll mostly eat in the kitchen,’ Jack had said, sending Liz’s enthusiastic sketches for the kitchen’s comprehensive refurbishment. ‘Except when we have classy Oxford dons to stay . . .’

The dining room was not much better than the drawing room. Michael sat on a low window-sill and saw he had told nothing but the truth to Jack and Liz about the house not being habitable in time for Christmas. But as he had booked them into the Black Boar, they might still decide to come, just for a short stay. The idea of asking Nell and Beth to join them there for Christmas dinner flickered in his mind, but probably Nell would be spending Christmas with her own family or her husband’s. Still, they might all meet for a drink.

The rotund builder he had met last time came trundling down the stairs and hailed Michael with cheerful recognition. ‘Taking another look round, Dr Flint?’ he said.

‘Yes. You’ve made a lot of progress,’ said Michael, hoping this was the right thing to say and trying not to look too fixedly at the cascading electric wires.

‘We’ve done a lot of the basic work,’ said the builder. ‘Plumbing and treating the rot. Those things don’t show. The electricians are in this afternoon to finish off most of the wiring,’ he added, clearly seeing Michael’s doubtful look at the tangle of cables. ‘And high time too, for I’m surprised the whole place didn’t go up in smoke years ago. Matter of fact, we’re about to make a start on opening up the attics – smashing down that dividing wall for the playroom Dr Harper wanted.’

‘That sounds quite a major job.’

‘No, we’ll have it down in a trice. No sooner the word than the deed. Come and watch, why don’t you?’

‘Well, I don’t think—’ began Michael, but the builder was already going upstairs.

‘I like seeing a wall come down,’ he said, over his shoulder. ‘Very satisfying it is. You see something happening for your efforts. There’s always a lot of dust, though.’

Michael, who had spent ten minutes trying to brush the bracken of St Paul’s Churchyard from his cords, supposed one more layer of dirt would not make much difference, and he followed the builder, grateful that the secondary stair, where he had seen the intruder that first day, was brightly lit by battery-powered lamps.

Access to the attic was by a low door, which the men had propped open. There was a slanting ceiling, and beneath the miasma of builders’ rubble was a warm, powdery scent of age. Michael thought if you were here by yourself there would be a sense of having crossed from one world to another – of having come through a semi-magical portal. Wardrobes and railway stations, he thought, smiling inwardly.

Two tiny windows let in a small amount of light, softened by the thick dust on the panes, but when Michael walked across to the nearer one he saw there were views of Shropshire countryside stretching for miles. In one direction was a faint blue-grey smudge that might be the start of Welsh mountains. He looked down into the gardens directly below, and the memory of the photographs he had taken that first day came back to him – that faint but unmistakable figure of a dark-haired female pressed against an attic window, one hand raised in greeting or entreaty . . .

‘These floors are pretty sound as far as we can tell,’ said the builder, walking experimentally along the sides of the room. ‘But we’ll lay new boards where we think they’re needed. Probably strengthen the roof joists as well, before we create a false ceiling.’ He reached up to tap the rafters overhead and a shower of dust cascaded down. ‘Clean dust though,’ he said, happily, wiping his palms down the sides of his overalls. ‘No bat droppings. Makes a difference, not finding bats in a house.’

‘Protected species?’ said Michael, eyeing the rafters with misgiving.

‘Too true. Once you’ve got bats you can’t do much to get them out. Personally, I’d poison the evil little bastards as soon as look at them, never mind if twenty Preservation Groups or fifty Dracula Societies marched round the place waving banners. Still, whatever else might live here, there’s no bats.’

Michael, ignoring the oblique reference in this last sentence, said he was very glad to hear there was no evidence of bats and he thought his friends would agree. ‘They’re wondering about moving in for Christmas,’ he said tentatively. ‘Would the work be finished by then?’

‘Bit tight,’ said the builder. ‘New Year, more like.’ He walked along the wall due to be demolished, while two men, armed with fearsome-looking sledgehammers and pickaxes and wearing yellow site-helmets, awaited his verdict. When he tapped the wall, the sound, in the small space, was shockingly loud, and Michael jumped because it was exactly the sound he had heard on his first visit.

The builder produced a stub of pencil and drew esoteric-looking symbols on the far wall. ‘All yours,’ he said to the two men. Then, to Michael, ‘Stand well clear, squire. In fact, you’d better stand on the stair outside.’

In the muted light from the two small windows the massive sledgehammer swished through the air and, with a boom of sound, landed squarely on the pencil marks. The whole of the wall shivered, and a myriad of spider-cracks appeared in its surface, as if a giant hand had crumpled a sheet of paper. The sledgehammer whirled a second time, and at the second blow, the thin cracks deepened and spread, and plaster dust showered everywhere. As the dust clouds billowed upwards, a small room, shut away for countless years, gradually became visible. At first look it did not seem as if it would add much to Ellie’s playroom – it was barely six by eight – but at least it made the attics lighter, because a tiny window had been behind the wall, a small oblong of glass, framed by crumbling wood. The window was cracked and thick with the dirt of decades, but if you stood on tiptoe and leaned forward you would be able to see down into the gardens below. That’s what she did, thought Michael. One day, a long, long time ago, she stood there, that dark-haired woman, and in some way I can’t begin to understand, years later, the image came out on the photo I took.