This House is Haunted (25 page)

Standing there, I couldn’t help but recall my first morning teaching at St. Elizabeth’s School, that transition I made from schoolgirl to schoolteacher, and the terror I felt when my small girls appeared before me, some nervous, some close to tears, watching and waiting to see what type of instructor they would have for the following twelve months. Naturally, I was the youngest teacher at my school and most of those who were seated behind desks in the adjoining classrooms had taught me only a few years before, so I knew only too well how cruel they could be at times. I had been beaten many times by these same ladies who had welcomed me that morning as if I was an old friend, their hypocrisy not lost on me for a moment, and I still felt intimidated shaking their hands or entering the teachers’ private tea room, an area which had been always off limits to me as a student and had held the promise of nothing but terrifying times within.

I resolved that day never to frighten my small girls, never to intimidate or beat them; it was not necessary that they love me—in fact, it would be for the best if they did not—their respect was all that mattered and I would do my best to earn that. And during the three years of my employment at St. Elizabeth’s I grew in confidence to the point where I both thoroughly enjoyed my job and believed that I had some skill at its execution.
Certain that my future did not hold the possibility of a husband or a family of my own, I imagined that I would spend my life within the four walls of my classroom, the decades would pass and I would grow older and greyer just as the portrait of the Queen and Prince Albert would never fade, but the small girls, my small girls, would never change, would remain the same age for ever, replaced on an annual basis by a fresh intake, many of whom would be the younger sisters of girls who had already sat before me. There was a part of me that looked forward to the day when a child would appear on the first day of school whose mother had attended before her. Then I would know that I had succeeded in my position.

The sound of a bell ringing from inside the school shook me from my reverie and I walked through the gates as the doors opened and the boys began to pour out on to the playing fields or took their places beneath the sycamore trees as they opened the tin cans that contained their meagre lunches. Some were running around already, chasing each other, trying to work off their natural exuberance after three hours of being seated studiously behind their desks. Two were engaged in a dispute of some sort which quickly descended into fisticuffs. I wondered for a moment whether I should intervene but to my relief a teacher appeared from one of the side doors, a tough-looking man, and the boys took fright and scarpered. I looked away from the fracas and entered the school through the front doors, staring around at this unfamiliar building as I chose a corridor at random and made my way along it.

The boys were still emerging, dawdlers perhaps, mischief makers, those who had been kept behind for a few minutes to be chastised for some malfeasance, and I glanced through the open doorway of each classroom, certain that I would recognize my
prey when I discovered her. Most of the teachers were men, not unusual in a boys’ school I realized; I had been surprised to discover that the woman I sought was even employed here and reasoned that this must be a progressive institution. After all, all but one of the teachers at St. Elizabeth’s had been women; the only time this rule had been relaxed had been in the case of Arthur Covan and I did not imagine that a successor to him would be appointed any time soon. How nice it would have been, I daydreamed, if there had been more of a divide. It would have been agreeable to discuss classroom activities with a group of pleasant young men.

I reached the end of one corridor and was about to turn on my heel and return in the direction I had come from when I saw her. She was alone in a classroom, her back turned to me, using her eraser to clean the blackboard of the morning’s lessons. I watched her and felt a mixture of relief that I had found her and resentment that she could be living her life here quite so brazenly while mine had descended into such trauma and constant danger. I stepped inside and glanced around; there were no boys present, which satisfied me, and I reached for the door handle, closing it firmly behind me.

She jumped, startled, and spun round, a hand to her breast. She appeared quite shocked and I wondered whether she always frightened so easily. When she saw me, though, and realized her foolishness, she laughed a little.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was in a world of my own. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I take fright easily these days. It was not always so.”

“I didn’t mean to creep up on you,” I replied, although in truth that was exactly what I had meant to do. I had not written, after all, nor given her any notice of my intention to
come to London. I did not want her to put me off or refuse to see me.

“It’s quite all right,” she replied, narrowing her eyes and looking at me more carefully. “I know you, don’t I? It’s Mrs. Jakes, isn’t it? Cornelius’s mother?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I must be confusing you with someone. Did you need to see me or were you looking for someone else?”

“It’s you I’ve come to see,” I told her. “And if you have a few spare minutes, I would appreciate it.”

“Of course,” she said, sitting down behind her desk and offering me the seat opposite her. “I’m sorry,” she added, “I didn’t catch your name.”

I smiled at her. Was she pretending or entirely serious? Did she take me for a fool? (Or rather, did she
still
take me for a fool?) “You don’t recognize me?” I asked in a disbelieving tone.

She stared and looked a little uncomfortable, moving slightly in her seat. “If you could just tell me whose mother you are—”

“I am no one’s mother, Miss Bennet,” I replied in a steady voice. “And if you recognize me, it’s because we met once, a little over a month ago. You brushed past me on the platform at Thorpe Station in Norwich. Our cases collided and dropped. You looked directly at me that day and I would swear that you knew then exactly who I was. So it rather surprises me that you pretend not to recognize me now.”

I watched as the colour drained from her face and she swallowed, holding my gaze until she could look no longer and turned away. “Of course,” she said. “It’s Miss Caine, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“This is … unexpected,” she said.

“I can imagine.” I could hear the chill in my tone and was surprised by it. I had not realized that I felt such anger towards this woman until I was seated directly opposite her. And now, separated from her by only the length of my arms, I could feel my blood beginning to boil. My suffering was her fault, my sleepless nights her responsibility. She could not look me in the eye now and so directed her gaze a little lower, towards my hands, which I separated and placed on the desk between us, the scars from my burns still clearly visible. I saw her expression turn to a grimace and she looked away.

“As you can see, I bear the scars of Gaudlin Hall,” I told her. “But my damaged hands are the least of my concerns.”

She forced a sentence out. “You have not been … you have not been happy there then?”

I laughed. I could scarcely believe that she was playing this so innocently. “Miss Bennet,” I said. “Perhaps we might drop the charade? I need to talk to you about that place. I’ve travelled to London for no other reason than to discuss it with you and I don’t have a lot of time. I have a train to catch back there in the afternoon and you, no doubt, have a classroom full of small boys who will be rushing back in here when their lunch hour is over.”

“Rushing might be overstating the case a little,” she replied, smiling at me, and I laughed. At the very least, it broke the tension.

“Yes, well,” I said. “That’s as it may be.”

“I suppose I owe you an apology,” she said. “For deceiving you as I did.”

“It would have been kinder to be honest from the start. You might have met me, at the Hall for one thing. Not allowed me
to arrive there that first night with no idea of what was going on. The confusion of that evening only added to my troubles.”

“I couldn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t you understand, Miss Caine, I couldn’t stay another day! Another hour! But may I say this, with my hand on my heart, that I am very glad to see that you are well.”

I laughed again, although this time my laugh was tinged with a little more bitterness. “Well?” I asked. “I’m alive, if that’s what you mean. But I have been injured. Time and again. Threatened by a wild dog. Pushed from a window. My hands, as you can see, were nearly burned beyond recognition. And there have been other things. What I want to know, Miss Bennet, is quite simple. What happened to you while you were there? And how did you survive it?”

She stood up quickly and walked across to the window, looking out at the boys kicking a ball in the playground. “I know this isn’t what you want to hear, Miss Caine,” she said after a long hesitation, “but I really do not want to discuss it. I’m sorry. I appreciate that you came all this way but I simply cannot talk about that place. I still can’t sleep, can’t you understand that? I am constantly on edge. You saw that when you arrived here.”

“But you got away,” I said, raising my voice. “Which is more than can be said for Miss Tomlin. Or Miss Golding. Or Miss Williams. Or Miss Harkness. You survived Gaudlin Hall and none of your predecessors have been so lucky. And your successor might not either. So I ask again, what happened to you there? I believe you owe me an answer. An honest one. You can help me, don’t you see that?”

She turned round and her expression was one of utter torment. “If you think I survived, Miss Caine, then you do not understand the state of my mind at all. I’m alive, that’s true. I
breathe. I come to work. I eat. I go home. But I am in a state of nervous anxiety all the time. I worry constantly that … that …”

“That what, Miss Bennet?”

“That she will find me.”

I looked away, her phrase confirming for me at last that she too had felt the presence and been tormented by it.

“She,” I said after a protracted silence. “You use the feminine pronoun.”

“Don’t you think of it as a she?” she asked.

“Yes,” I admitted. “Of course I do. I think of it as being the late Mrs. Westerley.”

She nodded and sat down on one of the boys’ seats, picking up his slate in a distracted fashion and tapping it for a few moments before returning it to the desk. “I will say this much,” she replied finally. “I am not a woman who is easily intimidated. Growing up, my mother said that I had more strength and courage than either of my older brothers. When I arrived in the village of Gaudlin and learned the story of the Westerleys and the governesses who preceded me, I thought it little more than a terrible coincidence. An unfortunate series of events that had made a group of superstitious provincial gossips say the place was haunted, that no good would come to anyone who lived there.”

“Mr. Heckling is fine,” I pointed out. “Mrs. Livermore is fine. Neither have suffered any attacks.”

“But neither Mr. Heckling nor Mrs. Livermore have any responsibility for the children,” she said quietly. “Nor do they take any interest in them.”

I considered this. “That’s true,” I admitted. “But tell me, how long were you there before you felt something?” She shook her head and ran a hand across her eyes. “Please, Miss Bennet,” I insisted. “Please tell me.”

“A day,” she said with an indifferent shrug. “A little less than a day actually. I arrived in the morning, you of course arrived at night. And I felt something before the day was over. There had been nothing unusual about that day at all and when I went to bed I was extremely tired. I remember climbing beneath the covers and thinking that I would certainly get a deep sleep after my long journey. I closed my eyes. I don’t remember what I dreamed of, I never remember my dreams, or very rarely anyway, but I recall that it descended into some horrific sensation of being strangled. I could see a woman in my dream, a dark-skinned woman, with her hands around my throat, choking me. And I can recall … Miss Caine, have you ever found yourself in the middle of a dream and something inside you tells you that you need to wake up, that you need to escape it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’ve felt that sensation.”

“Well, that’s how I felt,” she continued. “I forced myself to wake, thinking I could shake the woman off if I released myself from the dream. But to my horror, when I opened my eyes, the feeling was still there. There really
were
hands on my throat, I really
was
being strangled. Immediately, of course, I lifted my own hands from beneath the sheets to pull these stranger’s hands away and, as I did so, I felt them, I felt the thin wrists and the strength of those fingers, but as my hands closed upon them, they dissipated and disappeared into nothingness. The choking ended, the presence evaporated. I leapt from the bed, fell into the corner of the room, choking and coughing, spitting on the floor. I didn’t know what was happening, whether it had been some terrible nightmare that had manifested a delusion of the mind, but there was no chance that I had simply imagined the attack, for my throat was horribly sore. Indeed, the first
thing that Isabella said to me the following morning was that I had a bruise on my neck.”

“I felt those hands too,” I said, looking her directly in the eyes. “On my first night in that bed.”

“She tried to strangle you then also?”

“No, she pulled at my ankles. I felt as if I was being dragged down. I’m not certain what her intention was but it would surely have been malevolent.”

“And did you think you were going mad?” she asked me.

“No,” I said. “No, I didn’t think that because I knew what I had felt. I can feel those hands still.”

“As can I,” said Miss Bennet. “Their memory still prevents me from sleeping through the night.”

“And what else?” I asked, leaning forward. “What else happened to you? Come now, Miss Bennet, you’ve told me this much. You may as well tell me the rest.”

“You’ve seen the condition of the roof?” she asked me and I shook my head.