The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (50 page)

“I don’t know when they’re to be, but I know she’s very busy rehearsing for them. Whenever she sends me to fetch something during the night, and she’s always asking me to fetch some book or something special from the stillroom – not that she ever scorns to use the things when I bring them – well, as I come back, all the way down that long passage, I hear her fairly screaming out her part. Wonderful actress she must be! You wouldn’t really think it could be her own voice; no, you wouldn’t think such a sweet young lady could produce so horrid a voice. It simply raises my hair – that acting voice of hers does. And, as I was saying, I really can’t think it can be good for anyone whose nerves are disturbed to be studying so violent a part.”

“Thank you, Nurse. I’ll speak about it.”

That afternoon I called on Margaret. After some casual talk I said, “I hear you sleep with your window shut. And, you know, you are looking extremely pale. To insist on keeping the window open all the year round may be a foolish fetish, but in this sort of weather, it really is essential.”

“If the nurse makes a fuss about that, I won’t keep her,” Margaret burst out. “How can I leave the window open when it’s from there that I feel that awful pressing in – that pressing and pushing away? How can I? Though, heaven knows, it’s foolish enough to think it’s any use to shut things. If stone walls cannot a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, still less can they make a fortress.” Suddenly she seemed to remember herself. “But these are but ‘wild and whirring words’,” she said, smiling. “I’m so sorry. Please don’t pay any attention to them. My disease of quoting grows worse and worse. It’s because I have no opinions of my own.”

She looked disquietingly excited and my own head swam. “That awful pressing in!” What did she . . . what could she . . . mean? A sense of dreadful menace almost stifled me, and I felt utterly estranged; but something had to be said.

“When are your theatricals to be?” I asked. “I didn’t know you were acting.”

“Acting?” she repeated. “What do you mean?”

“The nurse tells me she often hears you rehearsing in the night.”

She blushed crimson. “Oh, that!” she said. “Oh, yes! You see, I have a silly habit of reciting poetry aloud to myself, and it made me feel self-conscious to know she had overheard me, so I said I was rehearsing for some theatricals.”

“I see,” I said; but my heart sank at hearing her lie.

Then we spoke of other things, but we were both hopelessly preoccupied, and there was no life in our talk. It was almost forced, and I noted that nearly everything that Margaret said was in inverted commas. Scarcely anything passed her lips that was not a quotation. I had already observed that the more tired, strained or preoccupied she seemed, the more this was the case. When her vitality was lowered it was, to use her own words, as though she had “no opinion, emotion or impulse” of her own, but was merely a thoroughfare for the thoughts of others – as though nothing remained to hold the fort except memory.

I think it was three days later that the nurse, of her own accord, came to report to me again, and told me she considered her patient increasingly nervous and depressed. To my enquiry as to how Miss Clewer was sleeping, she answered: “Very little now.” Adding ominously, “And if you ask me, sir, I don’t think she wants to go to sleep.”

“She’s given up the theatricals anyhow, hasn’t she?” I asked, in as casual a voice as I could command.

“Given them up, sir? No, I wish to goodness’ sake she would. I really can scarcely bear to hear it; the way she screams out her part has thoroughly got on my nerves. As often as I come back along that passage, she’s going through it. I know some of her part by heart myself. I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to forget the queer words.”

“What are the words you overhear her saying?” I asked, as indifferently as I could.

“Saying? You wouldn’t call it saying if you’d heard her, sir, it’s more like yelling. As I was saying the other day, you’d never think such a gentle lady could produce such a terrifying voice. The words that she most often repeats are: ‘Let me in! Give way! What can I do without a body? What use are you making of your body? I want it! You clear out! I must be lodged! I must be lodged! I must be lodged!’ And the third time she repeats ‘I must be lodged’, her voice rises to a screech. But whatever’s the matter, sir? You’ve come over as white as a sheet!”

Murmuring that I felt faint and must get some brandy, I told her I would see her in the evening, and left the room.

My legs almost gave way as I went upstairs, and directly I reached my bedroom I turned the key in the lock, though what it was I thought might thus be debarred, God only knows.

With shaking hands, I opened the book I had been reading in bed the night before.

It was a bound copybook, filled with the faded brown of a spidery sixteenth-century writing. Margaret had long given me the freedom of her library, and on a high shelf I had found a manuscript book – a sort of irregular journal kept by an ancestress of hers, also a Margaret Clewer. I had read it far into the night. It was all interesting, and by the final heart-broken entry I had been most vividly and painfully impressed.

Were certain words really as, with horror, I remembered them, or was my memory deceiving my disturbed nerves?

Trembling, I turned the leaves until I came to the words:

So she is dead! Elspeth, our shame, lyes dead. That I should live to thank God that my own child be laid in the church-yarde! A sennight yesterday since they carryed her home after her falle from her horse. A sennight of torment unimagined to us all. The passing of her eville spirit has been a horror past beliefe. The drawing nigh of Death had no softening effect on her violent, eville greedy spirit. Her hold on lyfe was terrible. Breath by breath it was torne from her shattered bodye. So her fierce spirit clung to her beautiful broken bodye, God helpe us all! Could any Death be deep enough to make me to forget how with her last breaths she cryde out: “I won’t dye! I won’t dye! There is still so much to do! Some way I’ll get back! I must get back! My spirit is so unquenched! I must find another bodye. I must be lodged! I must be lodged! I must be lodged!”

The long-dead woman’s manuscript slipped from my hand and I struggled to think. Even last night the words of the dying changeling daughter had made me shiver. Now, after what the nurse had quoted, they seared my mind. Elspeth Clewer! I remembered the grey, uncommunicative grave beneath the yew tree. Its bleak reticence had impressed my imagination on my first visit to the churchyard, and now, to my mind’s eye, it was forever associated with Margaret’s prostrate, writhing body.

God grante that she lye stille! God grante that she lye stille! I snatched at a faint, fluttering hope. Perhaps Margaret was familiar with the journal I had found. If so, its grim contents would be very likely to haunt her. Might not what the nurse mistook for rehearsing have been her quoting it in disturbed sleep?

That evening I found her pale and wild-eyed. I told her of my discovery of the diary and asked if she had ever read it. She disclaimed all knowledge, and this time I knew she spoke the truth. I said it gave a strange account of an ancestress of hers, an Elspeth Clewer. Was it my fancy, or did she draw in her breath at the name?

“Oh! Does it?” she said. “Yes, I’ve heard of her. Though she died before she was twenty-three, she’s the only celebrated member of the Clewer family, for she crowded her short life with every imaginable vice and crime. I believe she was an absolute mythical monster of violence and cruelty: but, as I have often told you, I really don’t take the faintest interest in my ancestors.”

Two days later, as I sat at breakfast, the front-door bell was so violently pulled that I went to the door myself. The faithful Rebecca stood there, her face mottled with agitation. “Oh, sir! She’s been and gone and bolted!”

“Miss Clewer?” I gasped.

“No, sir,” she gabbled breathlessly. “That yere nurse, been and gone and offed it – left my poor lamb with no word to no one. Yes, when I comes along this mornin’ I finds my lady deep asleep, and, if you please, on the floor there’s a tray with broken pieces of cup and saucer and Benger’s food slopped all over the carpet. Just dropped out of Nurse’s hand, it must have been. And she couldn’t be found nowhere; clean gone she was – run off and left all her things behind her. The garden boy, he tells me he seen her tearing round the garden like as though the devil were after her. I looks in at the station, and they said she’d been there a full hour before the first train went, and looked that queer without no hat nor nothing. And my lady – she looks to go to your heart this morning – she says she calls to mind asking Nurse to fetch her a cup of Benger’s – and then she thinks she must have fallen asleep, since she doesn’t remember no more.”

Incensed with the nurse, I rang up the London association from which she came and instructed them to telephone directly she arrived. Full of foreboding I hurried to the Manor House. I found Margaret walking up and down in the garden, her face drawn and set.

“I’m sorry I’ve frightened your nurse away,” she said bitterly.

“Frightened her? You!” I tried to laugh.

“So it seems. A well-trained nurse who drops her tray and flies from the house must surely be a little upset.”

“She must have taken leave of her senses,” I said dryly. “Fortunately I know of an admirable one who happens to be free now.”

“No, thank you. No more nurses for me! I can’t say I’ve found the last one very reassuring. No, I’ve just telegraphed to lots of my friends to come down. I’ve been too unsociable lately.” She spoke defiantly, and I knew it would be no use to argue.

That afternoon I was rung up by the matron of the Nursing Association. Nurse Newson had never turned up, but on enquiry it was found she had gone to her mother, whose telephone number I was given.

“Mrs Newson speaking,” answered a painstakingly genteel voice.

I explained who I was, stating that I wished to speak to her daughter, whose amazing behaviour demanded explanation.

The voice let itself go, and unmistakable relish in a crisis was plain through its agitation.

“Oh, sir! I’m afraid you can’t speak to my daughter. She’s bad in bed, and doctor says she’s suffering from shock and mustn’t be disturbed. Oh, sir! Whatever did happen to make her take on so, such a sensible, steady girl as she is? She’s in ever such a state! I never did see anyone so upset before, and I can’t get from her what it is she’s so scared on – at least nothing that you would call coherent. And, please sir, she says she’s terribly sorry to have let you down, but she couldn’t have stayed on – not for any consideration.”

Feeling no sympathy, I snapped out: “I never heard of such behaviour. A nurse abandoning a case in the middle of the night? She must be hopelessly hysterical. What possible excuse can she have? Her patient is the most charming young lady.”

“Yes, she says the young lady she was engaged for was ever so sweet, but Doctor – I don’t understand – she talks so wild – and when I question her, begs me not to ask, but wasn’t there
another
young lady?”

Exasperated, I banged the receiver down.

It was necessary to go to the Manor House to give the address to which the nurse’s luggage was to be sent. I would have gone in, but two cars were just unloading their freight of visitors. Loud voices echoed in the courtyard, and aggressively young people, brandishing tennis rackets, bounded up the steps towards their hostess, who stood in the doorway, her face resolutely gay.

With a forlorn sense of being cut off from her, and with apprehension heavy on my heart, I stole away. As I looked back at the house, gilded by the setting sun, I almost hated it for its unconcerned beauty.

Two days later I received a note in her strangely variable, but always recognizable, writing. It had no beginning:

I am going away . . . I must leave at once. When you get this I shall be in the train. I could not stay here another night. Please never ask me to explain. Something unthinkably dreadful happened last night. I could never dare risk having anyone to stay here again. Not possibly.

Neither can I live here by myself.

I don’t understand; but, believe me, it’s fearful, and I must go. Oh, God! There are more things in heaven and earth!

I’ll write.

Margaret Clewer