The Seance (16 page)

Several weeks had passed in this uneasy state when Mama announced that Arthur Carstairs’ mother and sisters would shortly be coming to tea. On the afternoon in question, I came down to join the others and await our visitors’ arrival. As I entered the drawing-room, I saw a young man seated on the sofa opposite Sophie and Mama. I had never seen him before. He was just a slender, dark-haired young man, sombrely dressed in what looked like a suit of mourning and apparently absorbed in a study of the carpet at his feet. He seemed to be averting his gaze out of modesty, as if he did not want to be noticed, but otherwise appeared quite at his ease. I stood uncertainly in the doorway, waiting to be introduced, but neither of the others seemed to be paying him the slightest attention.

‘Do sit down, Eleanor,’ said my mother, pointing to the sofa. She seemed to be indicating the place immediately next to the young man.

‘But – will you not introduce me?’ I stammered.

‘To whom?’ replied my mother, staring.

‘To –’ I gestured helplessly towards the young man.

‘I do not know what you mean,’ Mama said sharply, ‘and I am in no mood for frivolity. Be seated, and let us have no more nonsense.’

Throughout this exchange, the young man continued to gaze quietly at the floor, still with that self-effacing air. I stood transfixed, aware that my mother and Sophie were both speaking to me but unable to take my eyes off the young man, who, as if suddenly conscious of my plight, rose from the sofa and began to walk towards me. I heard the rustle of his clothing, the sound of his tread upon the floor. He paused a couple of paces from me, still with his head bowed; automatically, I stepped away from the door to allow him to pass. But then – as if a painted figure had stepped from a canvas and, turning aside, revealed itself as a mere film of pigment floating upon the air – he seemed to shrink sideways into himself, until he was nothing but a jagged sliver of blackness, edged with greenish light. Then that too vanished and I was left dumbstruck, with the sound of the doorbell ringing in my ears.

I must not faint
, I told myself, and, summoning all my resolve, managed to gasp out some excuse and stumble away down the corridor until I reached the safety of the back parlour. There I collapsed on to a couch, with my head already beginning to throb. The pain soon became so excruciating that I lost all sense of time until someone, I could not tell who, brought me a sleeping-draught, and I sank at last into merciful oblivion.

Next morning, I was at first bewildered to find myself fully dressed upon the parlour sofa. Elspeth brought me a cup of tea, and Mama’s instruction to remain where I was until the doctor had called, but neither Sophie nor Mama came in to see me. When Dr Stevenson finally appeared, looking unwontedly stern, it was clear from the tenor of his questions that the others had seen nothing whatever unusual. All I could think to tell him was that I had been deceived by a trick of the light, and the sudden onset of a headache, into thinking I had seen someone sitting on the sofa, but really it was nothing, just a momentary confusion. He did not seem interested in the headache, and after he had left me, a long interval passed before I heard the front door close behind him.

I was prepared for a tirade, but not for the icy contempt with which
Mama dismissed my abject apologies. ‘You are doing your best to destroy your sister’s happiness,’ she declared, ‘and as for these headaches, you inflict them upon us out of wickedness and spite. It is moral insanity; Dr Stevenson has said so, brought on by jealousy of your sister. There are surgeons who know how to cure wilful hysterical girls like you; and if that should fail, you will have be confined to an asylum.’

‘I am dreadfully sorry, Mama,’ I said, ‘but truly I do not do it on purpose. No one would
want
to endure such pain—’

‘The pain is nothing to what you have caused your sister. And how dare you contradict me, after such a display at the very instant Mrs Carstairs and her daughters were expected?’

‘Were they very put out?’ I asked humbly.

‘As you set out to ruin their visit, I fail to see that it is any of your business. Now listen to me: if it were not for Sophie, I should have you sent to a surgeon at once. But if the Carstairs suspect any taint of insanity in our family, Arthur may cry off. If he does, I shall have you locked away for ever, though that would be no consolation to poor Sophie. I shall give you one last chance: mend your ways, or have the wickedness cut out of you.’

My mother was apt, when enraged, to hurl the most extravagant threats, but the words had been uttered with cold, biting restraint; and whilst I had no idea what a surgeon might do to an hysterical girl, the final phrase had set my skin crawling with fear. I was of age; but I had read too many novels in which innocent heroines were confined to asylums to doubt my mother’s power in that regard, and perhaps the same power could compel me to submit to the surgeon’s knife. I had no money of my own, and no way of earning my living. I did not even know the terms of my father’s will, save that the income from his estate, according to Mama’s repeated laments, was barely enough to keep us.

And at any moment another visitation might come upon me, even more ruinously timed than the last. If the young man had appeared to me ten minutes later, I might now be on my way to the surgeon – or
the madhouse. He had looked so meek, so harmless, until the instant of his dissolution; but
was
it mere coincidence that he had appeared just as the Carstairs were arriving . . .? The prospect was too appalling to confront alone. I retreated to my room and began a long letter to Ada, and did not pause until I had finished and sealed and consigned it to the post.

At dinner that night, Sophie informed me, very coldly, that she and Mama had managed to conceal their agitation from the Carstairs and pretend that I had suffered a relapse of concussion from the fall. But that was all; for the remainder of the meal, Sophie and Mama exchanged pointedly trivial remarks, and I left the table as soon as politeness allowed, feeling that I was already condemned. And so it came as an immense relief when Ada replied by return, pressing me to visit as soon as possible.

It took all of my courage to ask leave of my mother who, thankfully, made no objection. ‘Perhaps it will be best,’ she declared with the utmost coldness, ‘if you keep away from us until Sophie is safely married; I shall write to see whether you can be trusted to attend the ceremony when the time comes.’ Throughout my preparations, I was sick with terror that my freedom would be snatched away by another visitation; I kept, as far as possible, to my room until my trunk was safely aboard the hansom. The cloud of dread accompanied me all the way through the squalor of Spitalfields and Bethnal Green to Shoreditch Station, and was only really dispelled by the sight of George Woodward on the platform at Chalford. Even in a crowd, he would have been impossible to miss, because of the shock of coarse orange hair (no other word could do justice to the colour) which always made him look as if he had just come in out of a strong wind. He and Ada had met in London, and married, after the briefest of courtships, when the living at Chalford was unexpectedly offered him.

Chalford rectory – a large, dilapidated house of grey stone with a
walled garden (or ‘yerd’, in the idiom of the parish) – seemed to me the most charming place I had ever seen. ‘You would not think so,’ said Ada, ‘if you came to us in January, with an east wind howling about the house and snow heaped against the walls; I used to think London winters cold, until I came here.’ But in mild June weather, with everything in leaf and flower, Chalford was paradise enough. The rectory stood close by the churchyard, surrounded by fields and patches of woodland, and away from the village itself: Old Chalford had been stricken by the Black Death, its cottages burned to kill the plague, and a new settlement built a quarter of a mile off. The population of the village had been reduced by enclosures to little more than a hundred souls, mostly farming people whose great-grandfathers had tilled the same acres in much the same fashion. To the north and west of the parish were farmlands; to the east grazing, with gorse and marshland as you drew nearer the sea.

Within the space of a week, my colour had returned, and I was sleeping so soundly that I was scarcely aware of my dreams. Ada and I walked miles each day, and I began to see the country with new eyes. Every field, every path, even every hedgerow in the village had its own name and its own history, from Gravel Pit Walk on the western boundary to Roman Kiln Field by the river on the eastern edge. On our very first excursion I found a hag-stone – a flint with a hole through it, much prized by the farming people as an omen of good luck – and placed it beneath my pillow, as an amulet against further visitations.

Though there was no question of Ada’s repenting at leisure, as my mother had unkindly prophesied, I could see how isolated her life had become. She longed very much for a child, but after a year of marriage she had still not conceived, and had begun to fear that she might be barren. And George, she confided, was increasingly troubled by doubts about his vocation. ‘I can listen, and question, and follow, I think, much of what he tells me, but he misses the society of thinking men like himself. He has read Lyell, and Renan, and the
Vestiges
, as well as Darwin, and has begun
to wonder what, if anything, can be saved for belief. He prefers not to speak of it, but it troubles his conscience that he is living upon the tithes of people who expect and assume – especially in a country parish such as this – that he accepts the literal truth of scripture. But he believes in goodness, kindness and tolerance, and practises what he preaches, which is more than can be said for many churchmen who call themselves devout.’

I had been in Chalford a fortnight when George proposed an expedition to see the old Norman keep at Orford, a small coastal settlement about four miles away. George himself had been there only once, but seemed perfectly sure of the way as we set out on a still, overcast afternoon. We had walked perhaps a mile before he admitted that this was not the road he had taken before. ‘Still,’ he said confidently, ‘we are heading more or less south-east, so we shouldn’t go too far wrong.’

Even I had to concede that there was something desolate about the prospect, once we had left the farmland behind. There seemed to be no one abroad, and no sign of habitation; only sheep wandering through the gorse, and occasional glimpses of a leaden grey sea. After another half-hour the path began to climb, with the ground falling away on both sides. Dense green bushes encircled the lower slopes, but the crown of the hill, as we approached it, was almost bare, cropped close by the sheep, and bunched like a counterpane – the image that came to me – into curious folds and mounds, which did not look at all natural, as if some huge burrowing creature had been tunnelling just below the surface. I was about to ask what had made them when we reached the top of the rise, and a dark expanse of woodland loomed before us.

‘That can only be Monks Wood,’ said George. ‘We are much further south than I supposed. It is by far the oldest – and largest – forest in this part of the country.’

‘Is there a monastery within?’ I asked. From where we stood, the dense green canopy seemed quite unbroken, stretching away to the south as far as the eye could follow.

‘There was once, yes,’ said George, ‘but it was sacked by Henry VIII’s men.’

‘And after that?’

‘The land went to the Wraxford family for services to the Crown, and has been in the family ever since. Wraxford Hall was built on the foundations of the monastery; it is now almost a ruin, I believe; I have not seen it.’

‘Does anyone live there now?’

‘No; not since ... that is to say, it has been empty for some time.’

‘And how far is the Hall from here?’ I persisted.

‘I don’t know,’ said George repressively. ‘The Wood is private; it belongs to the estate.’

‘But if there is no one living there ...? I should so love to see it.’

‘We should be trespassing. And the Wood has a bad reputation hereabouts; even poachers avoid it at night.’

‘Do you mean it is haunted?’

‘Supposedly. There are tales ...’

He was silenced by an anxious glance from Ada.

‘Truly,’ I said, ‘I do not mind talk of ghosts. I do not even think of my – my visitants as ghosts, and besides I am quite recovered. I want to hear all about the Hall; it sounds most romantic. And look, there is a path leading down to the forest—’

‘No,’ said George firmly, ‘we must be getting on to Orford.’

‘Then if you will not take us there,’ I said, ‘I insist that you tell me all about it.’