Someone in the House (20 page)

“It’s all new to me. The book was written before World War One. According to the author, this is one of the few surviving examples of a fortified manor house. Once it was walled, with a moat and portcullis and all the rest; but those portions were torn down or allowed to fall into ruin during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”

“No need for them,” I said.

“What?” Roger stared at me.

“I meant…” I had spoken without thinking, but it did make sense. “No more civil wars or threats of invasion by that time.”

“There was Napoleon,” Roger said. “And Hitler.”

“But they didn’t make it.”

“What the hell are we talking about?” Roger demanded. “You’re distracting me. Go on, Bea.”

“The wing containing the Great Hall and the chapel, with certain chambers over them, dates to the fifteenth century,” Bea continued. “The other wings were extensively remodeled, some in Elizabethan times, others—”

“Never mind the later stuff,” Roger interrupted. “Is there anything earlier than the fifteenth century?”

His voice was oddly urgent. Bea looked at him in surprise.

“What do you want for your nickel? That’s pretty old.”

“I just wondered.”

“Clever man. You are right.” She read from the book. “‘The most remarkable feature of Grayhaven Manor is the remainder of certain sections of stonework that seem to date from an earlier structure on the site. One portion of the crypt, with its typically massive stone columns and flat Romanesque arches, is suggestive of Norman architecture. The curious carvings on the pillars…’” Here she interrupted herself to comment, “I didn’t see any carvings, did you?”

“I didn’t look,” Roger muttered. “Go on, go on.”

“‘…are reminiscent of the doorway jambs of the church porch at Kilpeck, Herefordshire, which date from the year 1134. Even more remarkable is one stretch of stone foundation, exposed by reconstruction then in progress, which suggests Saxon masonry. Unfortunately it was impossible to trace these foundations, since such an effort would have necessitated removing the upper courses, at considerable risk to the stability of the structure—an effort which the present owners quite understandably refuse to consider. One is driven to suspect, however, that the present manor house is the latest of several dwellings that once occupied this spot, the earliest of which may precede the Conquest.”

“Wow,” I said, impressed in spite of myself. “No wonder Karnovsky fell for this place. It is really old.”

“It’s a good thing he moved it when he did,” Roger said.

“What do you mean?” Bea asked.

“Didn’t you tell me that the original site was in Warwickshire, near Coventry? Remember what happened to that area in World War Two?”

I have never been able to understand the morbid interest some people have in that war, but even I had heard of Coventry. Something stirred, deep down in the dim recesses of my brain; but before I could encourage it to show its strange little head Roger stood up and transferred Tabitha to his vacated chair.

“I’m going to work,” he announced. “Don’t want Kevin to catch me in the basement; I’d have a hard time inventing an explanation for being down there this time of night.”

Gathering up his cameras, he went out. After a moment Bea gave me a half-smile and a little shrug, and followed. I had no inclination to join them, and I wondered why the place affected me so much more unpleasantly than it did the others. Maybe I was more susceptible to conventional horror stuff—crypts and bones and tombs. Though there wouldn’t be bones left by now, not after four hundred years. Unless…

Once—I forget when and where—I had run across some articles describing the disinterment of various ancient British kings, when repairs were being made on the tombs at Westminster Abbey. I don’t know why I read the damned things, unless it was morbid fascination. Some of the details kept turning up in my nightmares for years afterward. And wasn’t it Pepys, that seventeenth-century bon vivant and diarist, who had boasted of having kissed a queen, and held the upper part of her body in his hands? The queen was Catherine, wife of Henry the Fifth, who died in 1437, two and a half centuries before Pepys had pressed his lips to her dried, mummified face. He had described the body as still covered with flesh, like tanned leather. Ghoulish, perverse—but they were more practical about death in Pepys’ time. They saw so much of it. The moldering heads of executed traitors grinned down on them as they passed under Temple Bar, and public executions provided outings for the whole family. Peddlers sold snacks to be nibbled while the condemned man dangled, twitching, and spectators fought to buy pieces of the hangman’s rope.

In 1744 they had opened the tomb of Edward the First, who died in 1307. The king’s body wore royal robes, a crimson-and-gold tunic, and a mantle of red velvet. He had been six feet two inches tall, and all of those inches were intact four hundred years after he died.

And in the late sixteen hundreds a workman found a hole in the tomb of Edward the Confessor, king and saint, who passed on to his presumed reward in 1066. Through the aperture the workman saw the saint’s head, solid and entire, the upper and lower jaws full of teeth.

Six hundred years, and still all those teeth.

I wrenched my mind from the subject. Roger was right; I was scaring myself. The room seemed very quiet. I wished I had asked him to close the windows. They stood open to the night, tall rectangles of darkness. Something close at hand let out a sharp rasping breath. I missed a couple of inhalations until I realized it was only Belle, snorting in her sleep. I had a crazy, cowardly fear of getting out of my chair, with its protective high back and arms.

What was taking them so long? All they had to do was set up a few cameras. Roger’s notion of threads strung around the room, to trip a ghost, was perfectly ludicrous. Everybody knows ghosts are immaterial. If they can pass through doors and walls, they are not likely to disturb a thread.

Suddenly I knew I had to find out whether Ethelfleda was really there, under the brass slab. Maybe it didn’t really matter. Many of the ghost stories I had read implied that spirits tend to hang around the place where the body is buried. That gentle scholar, M. R. James, who wrote some of the most gruesome ghost stories in the English language, had one about a couple of children who had been murdered by a nasty old man for purposes of black magic. He had hidden their bodies in a disused wine cellar, but their vengeful spirits murdered him by the same method he had used on them—tearing the heart out of his living body.

If the lights had gone out just then, I would have had a stroke. Once again I got a grip on my unwholesome imagination. The point about such stories was that they suggested that where there was a ghost, there must be a body. However, that was fiction. I was not familiar with the body of “true” supernatural literature, if there is such a thing. All the same, I thought I would feel better if I was sure Ethelfleda’s remains, whatever their condition (better not think about that) had not been shoved into a packing crate and moved to Pennsylvania. I had an insane image of myself in the cellar, laboring with pickax and chisel to lift the tombstone. Which was ridiculous. Even if I had the strength and the inclination for such a ghastly job, I couldn’t attempt it without Kevin’s knowledge.

All at once I sprang out of the chair, forgetting morbid fancies. There was an easier way of learning what I wanted to know. It had been less than sixty years since the house had been moved from England to America. The job couldn’t have been done without satisfying a complex web of legal requirements. There must have been a mass of papers pertaining to the transaction—packing and shipping bills, lists of contents—“one coffin, containing miscellaneous bones and teeth, scratched, broken, stained….” How much to ship Ethelfleda’s ashes across the Atlantic? If she wasn’t on the list, I could safely assume she had not made the trip. Rudolf Karnovsky might have been an eccentric, but he was also a businessman, and businessmen love lists, receipts, and permits.

Where would such papers be? There was a chance they might be somewhere in the house, in the library or one of the attics. I decided I would look—tomorrow. In daylight.

I didn’t mention my idea to Bea and Roger. Maybe I was becoming overly sensitive to Roger’s poorly concealed amusement. I concluded I would try it out on Bea the next day, or on Father Stephen. He might think I was weird or heretical, but he wouldn’t laugh at me.

I was getting ready for bed when I realized there was another possibility of locating the papers I wanted. Miss Marion had been the last descendant and heir of old Rupert. Personal papers, which would surely include those dealing with the house, would have gone to her. And her conservator and guardian had been Father Stephen.

9

BEA ALMOST GOTout of the house without me next morning. I happened to catch her in the hall, when I came yawning down in search of coffee, and when I saw her neat pink suit and white gloves I knew she was on her way to pay the promised visit to Father Stephen. So I said, “Hey, wait for me,” and it was not until she gave me a queer, considering look that I remembered I had not been invited.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I assumed…Stupid of me.”

“You’re welcome to come, of course. I thought you weren’t interested.”

“Not interested?”

“In my ideas. They sound foolish, I suppose, to someone who doesn’t…well…”

There was a brief embarrassed silence. Maybe it was her formal clothes; I don’t know. For the first time I felt ill at ease with her, the way I did when my Aunt Betty came for a visit, the one who’s the social queen of Hagerstown, Maryland, and who looks at me as if I had just crawled out of a hole in the ground.

Then Bea laughed. “It’s all Roger’s fault. He’s got me on the defensive. Please come. I’d appreciate your company.”

I went to the driver’s side of the car. Even after those short weeks I knew many of Bea’s habits and foibles. She really didn’t enjoy driving and was happy to let someone else do it. I’m no hot-rod type, but it was a pleasure to drive that car. I had never handled a Mercedes before, and I didn’t expect to again.

As we glided smoothly down the drive, I caught her looking at me out of the corner of her eye with that same speculative gaze. Self-consciously I tried to mash down my frizzled locks.

“I’d have made myself more beautiful if I had known you wanted to leave so early,” I said.

“Youare beautiful,” Bea said. “But—I hope you don’t mind—there I go, apologizing again.”

“Spit it out,” I said. “I look like a slob, don’t I?”

“I wouldn’t use that word; but you don’t look as pretty as you could. I suppose it matters more to my generation than it does to yours, and I’d be the last to claim that appearance matters a hoot.”

“It does matter, some. I really don’t enjoy looking like Little Orphan Annie.” I laughed, to show how little the matter concerned me. Bea did not echo my laughter.

“You have beautiful hair,” she said seriously. “That copper-gold shade is very rare, and unlike many redheads, you don’t freckle or turn a nasty shade of rare roast beef in the sun. All you need is to have your hair styled properly, instead of whacking it off when it gets in your eyes.”

If my Aunt Betty had made that suggestion, I would have shot back a flippant reply and gotten my revenge by driving too fast. But Aunt Betty wouldn’t have larded the suggestion with big gobs of flattery, or spoken as if she really cared about my feelings, instead of what her friends would think of me.

“I don’t have the time to fool with it,” I said.

“Would you let me see what I can do? I’m no professional, but—”

“But you couldn’t make it look any worse.”

“I’ve been dying to get my hands on you since I first met you,” Bea confessed. “You’d be a really striking-looking woman with a proper haircut and glasses that suit the shape of your face and—er—”

“Some halfway decent clothes.” I glanced down at my faded jeans—there was a hole in the right knee—and my clean but worn T-shirt, with its emphatic slogan: “Women belong in the House—and in the Senate.”

“I guess it wouldn’t be a betrayal of the feminist movement to wear a skirt occasionally,” I said.

Actually, the idea fascinated me. I was so absorbed in visualizing the new, beautiful me, that I almost drove through the village. Bea nudged me in time. I made a swooping turn into the driveway of the parsonage.

I don’t know whether Father Stephen expected me. He greeted me with the same warmth he showed Bea and ushered us into his study. It was a strictly masculine room, with deep leather chairs and animal prints on the walls, but it was painfully neat. We had scarcely taken our seats when an elderly woman wearing a starched white apron entered, carrying a tray with coffee and hot rolls. I gathered from the way she looked at me that she had seen my type before and was resigned, but not enthusiastic.