The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales (24 page)

*
Neil MacGregor,
Shakespeare’s Restless World
(Penguin, 2012)

THE YELLOW SCARF

Minster Lovell Hall, Oxfordshire
October 1975

The Yellow Scarf

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies

from ‘Church Going’
PHILIP LARKIN

Once she was sure nothing was going on, Sophia pushed open the door and went inside. A pleasing smell of must and antiquity – parchment and stone, candles with the wicks burnt low. The air infused with the scent of incense long gone.

The chapel was empty. She slipped into the pew closest to the door, feeling the hard press of the wood through her thin summer coat, and exhaled. Five minutes to herself.

Sophia was accompanying her aunt on a coach tour of minor stately homes. A week’s holiday from work, all expenses paid. For the most part, she was enjoying herself. A small independent company, designed for ‘the more mature’ traveller, they were visiting the less well-known, less celebrated houses – none of the Blenheims or Chatsworths or Burghleys. The brochure promised four counties in seven days: Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, the so-called ‘Cradle of England’. Sophia’s aunt was sharp as a pin and self-sufficient – and the other retired ladies and two gentlemen in the party were lovely – but Sophia was finding it a little tiring to be always in company. Also, since most of her aunt’s friends were a little hard of hearing, the constant leaning forward in her seat and shouting over the thrumming of the engine as the coach made its way through Oxfordshire, had given Sophia a headache. Since most of the party had opted to take a look at the famous Charterville Allotments in the village of Minster Lovell, it was a chance to have some time to herself. There were two more visits scheduled for the afternoon – then an illustrated talk
with slides
(this picked out in italics in the itinerary) over dinner in Oxford that night – it was likely to be her only chance today for a little peace and quiet.

She’d been particularly looking forward to this visit to the ruins of a medieval manor house on the outskirts of the village. There was rumoured to be some distant family link with the place. Like all such stories, it came from the coincidence of their shared surname, rather than anything based in history or fact, but Sophia liked the idea of a connection all the same.

She placed her hands in her lap, shut her eyes and let the timeless calm wash over her. She took deep breaths, feeling her shoulders rise and fall, clearing her mind of schedules and tea shops and ‘comfort breaks’. Gradually, the band of pain behind her eyes loosened its grip. Sophia could hear the song of the River Windrush outside, chasing over stone and branch and bank. And in her mind’s eye, too, half-caught sounds echoing back through the centuries.

There wasn’t much in her guidebook about Minster Lovell Hall. Owned by the Lovell family in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the estate had changed hands after the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. The House of Lancaster defeating the House of York, the fall of the Plantagenet dynasty and the ascendancy of the Tudors, the Lovell family had refused to put their faith in Henry, then Duke of Richmond. Their lands were forfeit to the Crown, passing into the hands of the Coke family, then fallen into disrepair centuries later.

Sophia didn’t remember mention of a separate family chapel – since St Kenelm’s Church and graveyard were so close, she couldn’t see there would have been much need for a place of worship set away from the house. But as she sat now, in the small chapel, she found it easy to imagine flickering candles and a servant going ahead to light the way in the dark to this tiny stone building.

More intriguing was the folklore that a young bride – married to a nobleman called Lovell – was said to have disappeared here on her wedding night. In one version of the story, she had simply vanished during the feast and never been seen again. In another, a skeleton still dressed in bridal clothes was discovered in a hidden space between the walls of the ruined house by workmen in the eighteenth century: a murder or accident, no one knew. A fragment of history, or legend? No one seemed to know. Even so, in the peaceful silence of the chapel, it piqued Sophia’s interest in her surroundings.

Five minutes turned to ten. Feeling a pleasant drowsiness, a prickling at the base of her neck, and knowing she couldn’t allow herself to drop off, Sophia reluctantly opened her eyes. She only had an hour and a half before the coach came back to pick them up and she wanted to explore the grounds and ruins themselves too.

She looked at her watch. Tapped the glass with her fingernail. The minute hand had been sticking for days, but usually she could jolt it back into life. She tapped again, but this time nothing happened. It had stopped. It was a nuisance – their days were organised to the minute – but Sophia didn’t think she’d been in the chapel very long. Promising herself to find a jeweller’s in Oxford later to replace the battery, Sophia undid the strap, put the watch in her coat pocket and then stood to have a quick look around the chapel.

There was nothing of particular merit. Four plaques with the coat of arms of the Lovell family, a hound in flight, and a wooden bas-relief in the chancel – Sophia picked out a swan and a dove, an animal that might have been a hart or a stag, and a female figure in long, ornate robes. Sophia peered closely. Here was evidence linking the story of the vanished bride to Minster Lovell Hall. Long ribbons threaded through her hair, a beaded dress, slippers on her feet. In her hands, a wedding wreath of winter holly and mistletoe.

Sophia held the young bride’s gaze for a little longer, then moved on. Two brass candlesticks stood on the modest altar with a wooden lectern standing beside. A standard King James Bible, which suggested the chapel was still in use long after the Lovell family had renounced their claims to the estate.

Sophia gave a final glance, then turned and retraced her steps. At the door she paused, noticing an inscription carved on the wooden frame.

Our brief partings on earth will appear one day as nothing
beside the joy of eternity together

Then she noticed a few words had been added underneath in black paint, almost rubbed away in places:

Lost but not forgotten

A piece of historic graffiti, if the ragged and inconsistent size of the letters were anything to go by. Sophia smiled, carried back to a summer long ago. Herself at seven years old – smocked dress, white ankle socks, the feel of cold metal in her hand – carving her name and the date on the bark of a tree with her brother’s penknife: S
OPHIA
P L
OVELL
1955. Her mother had smacked her, yet it had seemed worth it. That all too human desire to stand out, to stamp one’s mark on a place. The fifteenth century, the twentieth, some things never changed. That fierce need in all of us to be remembered.

She peered closer, hoping for a date or name, but there was nothing to reveal who had added the words or for whom.

The sky had clouded over while she’d been inside and there was now an unseasonable chill in the air. Everything looked dull and grey. Sophia shivered. As she walked back through the avenue of trees, the world seemed bleached of colour. No sun burnishing the leaves of the beeches that stood at the furthest edges of the lawns, no birdsong. And the path between them seemed longer than before, the twisting branches that had provided a green canopy now oddly bare.

Sophia stopped. She wasn’t sure how it could have happened, but she had somehow lost her bearings. She wasn’t quite sure where she was. She thought back. The coach had left them on Manor Road, leaving Sophia and her three companions to make their own way past St Kenelm’s church to the ruins of Minster Lovell Hall. She’d excused herself and struck out on her own, following a path through the graveyard towards the river before noticing the chapel and going there instead. Since there was only one door and the path led directly to it, there was no choice but to go in and come out the same way. It was nigh on impossible to have got lost. And yet Sophia had the distinct impression of being in a different place. Or, rather, the same place which no longer looked quite the same.

She looked at her wrist, forgetting her watch was broken and in her pocket, wondering if it was possible the others had left the grounds and taken a short cut through the graveyard of St Kenelm’s. Rubbed the bare skin on her arm. Not that it mattered, she supposed, provided she was waiting at the right place for the coach at the appointed time. She didn’t think it could be anywhere close to twelve yet and, besides, she’d hear the church bells chime.

With the river at her back, she orientated towards the north, fixing the jagged outline and pointed stone gables of Minster Lovell Hall clearly in her sights. With a pinch of relief, Sophia walked towards the ruins. The less tended lawns closer to the river bank gave way to geometric ornamental gardens and the remains of neat foundation walls of Cotswold stone. The variegated shades of autumn, burgundy and gold, had given way to bare trunks and a few defiant firs. Sophia looked again for sight of her companions, keen to be back in company again, but there was no sign of them.

With a shrug, she determined to make the most of the time she had left. Told herself not to let her imagination run away with her. According to her guidebook, the house itself had taken shape over generations around three sides of a courtyard, with a high blind wall on the river side. When she reached the remains of a wide, circular well, and looked down into the narrow space, it crossed her mind that it was all less dilapidated than she’d expected. And as Sophia moved further into the body of the house, she found her sense of it growing stronger.

She walked through a stone arch set into a wall and along a vaulted corridor to the main hall. The roof was gone, so the high arched windows seemed to hang adrift, like flags, at the very top of the walls. Stone turned green by age and ivy, the beauty of the fifteenth-century outline silhouetted against the October sky. The remains of stairs leading up to the family’s private rooms.

Sophia turned and stepped back over one of the foundation walls, but stumbled and nearly lost her balance. She glanced down, then frowned. She could have sworn the outline of the wall had been little more than a mark on the ground. Now, it was several bricks high.

She shivered. It wasn’t like her to be clumsy or out-of-sorts. Her thin summer coat no longer seemed adequate. She tightened the belt and tucked her shiny yellow square scarf under her collar to keep warmer, but she still felt cold. She put her hand to her forehead, wondering if she was coming down with something, but she didn’t have a temperature. She didn’t feel ill, just chilly and rather odd. As if she was somehow watching everything from behind a sheet of glass. Both part of things and separate from them.

Increasingly uneasy, Sophia carried on. She refused to allow nerves to get the better of her. Resolutely, she followed a cobbled pathway which led to the north wing and through a sequence of smaller rooms, with the hint of a small fireplace set into the north wall. On to the east wing, now breathing the scents of the stables and working places of the house. Leather and straw and guttering set into the ground, the scratch of the hot iron and the hiss of metal in the stone water tanks.

As Sophia walked, the colours and shadows seemed to deepen and take a more profound shape. The elegant ruined outlines of Minster Lovell Hall were coming back to life, or so it seemed: the leaping flames in the great stone fireplaces in the hall, the walls soaring high above, the beauty of the arched windows. The tapestries and wall hangings, long tables with candles and dishes laid for a banquet, sweet melody trickling down from the minstrels’ dais. She could almost hear the song of lute and viol, citole and recorder, the mournful single beat of a drum.