Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall

  Countess Lucy

  And

  The Curse Of Coberley Hall

  Guy Sheppard

  Lucy Countesse of Downe was buried the 8th day of Aprill 1656.

  She fasted from eating or drinking before her death ten dayes.

  Coberley Parish records in Gloucestershire.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Copyright

  1

  This time of year the fog is certainly to be expected – it comes drifting and slithering very low across the fields quite late in the morning. Nothing that inanimate should be able to bind the house in clammy white sheets right up to the chimneys, but it will, it’ll envelope me for days.

  I can detect the raw touch of its chilling vapour, but few of the things it chills.

  I stand here so long in order to peer in the general direction of church and graveyard that I forget I’m not already blinded. Rebecca takes me by surprise, tells me that I’ll catch my death if I press my face to the glass any harder. She, not mist, should have my rapt attention, it seems. Why take chances when I have felt so much better recently? The ancient green-tinted panes are draughtier than they appear.

  Her advice, of course, I ignore. She would have me confine my hopes to mere tricks of winter.

  When a man’s cortex begins to peel away from his retina, his first thought will be that there is something wrong with his eyes. Whatever apparition strays across the watery, jelly-like substance that befogs each lens, he expects some medical definition for the spectral, black-edged form that suddenly floats into sight. Because the jelly normally stays so firmly attached to the retina, any separation of one from the other stimulates the light sensitive membrane until his brain begins to interpret signals as flashes in his peripheral vision.

  Suddenly something darkens in the filmy fog or swirl of air: the posterior vitreous detachment, in all the bloody spots and cobwebs of my eyes, assumes the shape of someone approaching.

  No one, it’s no one , I think, but I hope I’m wrong.

  How many years has it been? Two? Three? With my sight has gone the time.

  *

  April 8th, 2014 will forever be fixed in my mind. Like winning the Lottery, people said. On that day my wife passed away after breathing her last in my presence.

  Given the circumstances, not to mention any misconstrued intentions on my part, her body was subjected to a coroner’s inquest where a post-mortem testified that her demise was due to perfectly explicable causes. Clearly, in no sense was I to blame. Having a matter-of-fact view of death himself, the pathologist was quick to dismiss the slightest doubt in my mind, which was a great help to me for a while.

  He and I had worked closely together for many years and that probably made a difference.

  Because Lizzie had stood absolutely no chance of survival, any cold shiver of concern on my part should not have led me to disbelieve the obvious. She died. I saw it happen. Since then there has been so much else I ought to testify, since who can judge me now if I reveal things about this house that once lay hidden? Will anyone listen? Nor can I actually turn to the authorities. No police investigator will understand. I should know, I was one.

  Back then, sceptics dismissed me as unprofessional, or blasphemous, or worse. There will be those who will, for a certainty, still call me deranged. Better my critics do as I do now, then, and watch who walks with the mist on the lawn. There’s only so long that anyone can defy doubt with denial. They are the blind ones, not me.

  They should come here and see for themselves.

  2

  On a very wet New Year’s Eve I quit London in an awful hurry. Even then, I was less concerned with the inheritance than with the condition on which I inherited it.

  That day was foggy, too. It took me a moment after I woke up and howled to realise that I was literally no longer moving. Then, in a panic, I banged my hand on my window and gave it a rub.

  Pretty frantically.

  Beyond my misted porthole a red farm tractor busily scratched stony hieroglyphs across the surface of a nearby field with a row of rattling rotary discs of steel. Between me and my scribe, naked white spears of shorn blackthorn stood slashed and broken where some monstrous blade had done battle with all the hedges. Nobody else showed up so high on the hills. No one much for miles was likely to recognize me despite the ugly gash on my brow that was not yet quite healed.

  ‘What the devil?’ I asked and left the view to cloud back over.

  At my side, a startled nun goggled at me through her designer glasses. She scowled while I gasped for air in the recycled, soporific atmosphere of our National Express coach.

  ‘Such a vulgar young man!’

  I had no idea what other indiscretions, if any, I had just cried out. Looking red in the face, my fashionable grimalkin glared at me over her bag of shopping from Harrods.

  Not so holily.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Bad dream.’

  *

  Once a man decided to dispose of a body then there had to be nothing left to love or hate. If there was nothing left to love or hate he should not have had something to bury or scatter apart from her ashes. Either way he could take heart that she was irrefutably at peace if only he could find somewhere decent to secrete her remains without any nasty after-effects.

  On my knees balanced my small black leather case that weighed so little.

  ‘Well, off you get, then.’

  It was the coach driver. Eyeing me severely in her mirror, she it was who had already traumatised everyone on board by forbidding us to talk on our smartphones.

  ‘Can you, you know, give me a minute?’ I replied.

  ‘This is the right place, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure I know.’

  First I had to climb over the nun between me and the gangway in my big brogues.

  ‘Do look where you’re going, you clumsy oaf.’

  ‘Don’t mind me, Sister, I’m sure,’ I said, disengaging my foot from her robes.

  ‘I do believe you reek of whiskey.’

  ‘That’s not massively helpful.’

  Stumbling from seat to seat, I reeled to the exit, but not before I stopped by the driver to give her what I owed.

  ‘Think me a bloody taxi, do you?’ she muttered and drummed her garish pink fingernails hard on the steering-wheel. ‘The 444 never calls here. No driver ever would.’

  I dealt a second fiver from my wallet.

  ‘I won’t tell if you don’t.’

  The remotely opened door hissed out and back to set me down. Gingerly I lowered one leg at a time into a world grown bitter.

  ‘You all right, sir
?’

  ‘Oh no, I’m good, yeah. I’m fine. Definitely.’

  ‘For someone who made such a fuss you don’t look too thrilled to be here.’

  ‘It’s strictly business.’

  ‘Grin and bear it, sir, that’s what I say. Everyone loves a smile, usually.’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  ‘Just step away from the coach, will you?’

  Too late, the door hissed shut in my face. After the rain, the sinking sun tinted my blue eyes crimson. Two flickering coronas of fire ringed my sunken sockets while my hollow cheeks somehow stayed pale. A red tear trickled down one side of my slightly crooked nose. Not my tear. I was looking at wet reflections only. We’re all ghosts next to glass.

  I had arrived at my phantom stop.

  *

  Just to be clear, this was not simply about my total distrust of all things rural. When a far off buzzard screamed ‘seeioo’, ‘seeioo’, ‘seeioo’ at me, I could be forgiven for thinking it somewhat ghoulish? I watched dark wings cross the sun’s blind iris, noticed expansive feathers flex my way like fingers. This was about me breaking into a cold sweat because I was still nauseous after so much time spent on that oh-so-slow coach from Victoria.

  For a moment I had to wrench free the top three buttons on my coat and snake a hand inside my classic tweed jacket. The shop assistant, a child half my age, called it a single-breasted country essential, impeccably tailored with classy herring-boned lining. Frankly, I didn’t give a damn what it was when it was the best I could find at such short notice. What else did a renegade wear to the sticks, anyway?

  After the respite, the reckoning. I hadn’t nearly begun to realise how icy it would be. Shivering, I raised my cord collar and buttoned the cuffs on my gloves.

  Had hell frozen over it would have felt like the Cotswolds.

  A moment later, my phone pinged in my pocket.

  ‘Colin, WHERE are you? Maria and I are going out tonight for a meal to celebrate our engagement. You simply must come.’

  It was a text message from DS Jan Shriver, my best detective sergeant in the Flying Squad back at New Scotland Yard. After three other texts, two Snapchats and a voicemail she was doing her upmost to breach my radio silence.

  Against my better judgement I rang her back.

  ‘Can’t talk right now, I’m standing in a puddle up to my ankles at the side of some God forsaken road or other.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean you can miss our meal, does it?’

  ‘Okay, it’s just that I’m not in London any more.’

  ‘I have to say you’re an absolute asshole, Colin.’

  ‘The nun thinks so, too.’

  ‘You with a nun?’

  ‘I can’t exactly explain this minute.’

  Instead I stood choking on the coach’s excruciating exhaust fumes even as my erstwhile fellow passenger flicked two fingers at me in dignified slow motion upon departure. How long did it take, I wondered, to forgive a man whose glottis had wheezed in your ear for three hours like an old kettle? I waved back, as if in glad receipt of her munificent blessing. How long was it before you forgot a stranger in his grey woollen scarf and black coat all alone at the kerbside? More to the point, how much time had to pass before you forgot to miss someone at all?

  The voice buzzed again in my ear.

  ‘That all you got for me, Colin? A nun and wet feet?’

  ‘No, I’m looking at two griffins.’

  ‘You off your head?’

  ‘Actually they remind me of the boundary dragons that guard London’s Square Mile. Never have I stared so closely into the faces of something quite so horrid, not even in Holborn.’

  ‘You’re not exactly making a lot of sense.’

  ‘No, but who does?’

  ‘You drunk, or something?’

  I referred hastily to my map. According to its strange hieroglyphic squiggles, the grassy entrance and lost driveway should lead to a place called Coberley Hall.

  ‘I never knew the countryside could be so messy.’

  ‘Never mind that, Colin, what the hell are these griffins?’

  ‘Oh, just a couple of big birds.’

  Better suited to a city necropolis, they rose level with my head and were topped with great crowns of untidy ivy. Rusty metal spikes jutted from cracked Cotswold stone blocks on which large metal gates had once opened and closed. I gave one wreath of shiny green leaves a tweak or two only to discover myself nose to beak with a cross looking eagle. The other pillar was the same.

  ‘Really, Colin? And there’s me afraid that you were back in hospital. So what are you in a field for, anyway?’

  I consulted the birds. Demoted to a bus stop, each funebrial sentry squinted yearningly back down the main road, as did I.

  ‘Legend has it that griffins once followed their instinct to find gold.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘Er, I’m following mine.’

  ‘Yeah, I mean, should I be worried?’

  As I crossed the field I gave a kittenish squeal. Quite frankly, no man worth his salt should have to suffer such awful cowpat on his heels.

  ‘Most definitely you should be worried. I’m ruining my shoes.’

  ‘So tell me, where precisely are you again, Colin?’

  I blocked her, then glanced at my fake Rolex. I had to hurry. At this rate, by quarter past four it would be virtually dark.

  *

  Frigid, white-topped hills wore wrinkled quilts of snow which were not unbeautiful, I supposed, given that it was that afterwards time of year when most life lay fallow. I sneezed and pulled a handkerchief from my pocket. With it came a letter. Embossed at its top was something bafflingly heraldic. That was silly Gothic birds, too.

  The thick, single page could have been vellum and began politely enough: ‘Dear Mr Walker, with regard to your sudden, extraordinary good fortune I feel I must warn you….’, but the rest I already knew by heart.

  3

  Somehow I had managed to evade all attempts at encouragement and understanding at the office. Undoubtedly those good Samaritans had been gearing up to help me out over New Year, feel or express sympathy to my face, force-feed me with forgiveness or, God forbid, squeeze my hand, but I had decided before then to be gone.

  So what if I was drinking so much that I daren’t drive my own car, it was for the good of my soul.

  My rank in the police had been Detective Inspector. It still was. Technically. Right up to Christmas I had been sitting at my desk struggling to make the best of crime statistics and flowcharts. I had been allotted the unenviable task of trying to explain why brazenly cocky drug barons and inept jewellery thieves had enjoyed such a good year. I’d tried to be exactingly optimistic in the face of increasingly severe government cutbacks in money and personnel, but even I’d had to admit that some tasks were beyond even God.

  I had been allotted the job for my own peace of mind.

  Some very self-important people had decided that my behaviour ever since my wife’s passing had been beyond the pale. A danger to myself, no less. When his whole world quaked but a man tried to cling to it in the aftershock, he should not have to wear a sign round his neck saying that he was being heroically stoic and not slightly insane.

  I scratched my head in earnest. The thickest fell of snow-white hair was bound to feel that bit thinner after such an upheaval. People remarked on it. They noted so disapprovingly that I had not taken a single day off work since my bereavement. To these alarmists my stiff upper lip was more obstinacy than fortitude and therefore suspicious. Then, by walking out of hospital, I had done my level best to disregard their sidelong looks and sad estimations of what they privately refused to dismiss as my ‘car accident’. To say of a man that he was suicidal due to guilt should never be sufficient.

  Such moments were becoming all too frequent. My mind could paint vivid pictures of what happened, yet explain few of the things pictured.

  In the mean time there were the midges. Thousands of them, off
an ancient fishpond, apparently. ‘How many of the insatiable, fluttering things can a man survive?’ I wondered aloud as I stumbled over a bridge.

  If only I had not left my hat behind, if only everything had not been so last minute.

  The devil take those who said I would bring ruin upon myself.

  Honestly, this was no time for a change of heart.

  *

  I scraped muck off my shoes and straightened my hair now grown horribly damp. The building before me resembled a small fortress. There was no doorbell. Instead a large wrought iron ring invited me to give it a bang.

  Now that I had come this far it was to be hoped that I could abstain from any further, awful exertion. Since I was still the subject of such intolerable press inquiries, let the hacks think I was still in town.

  So it was that I soon became aware of eyes fixed upon me. Mounted on the gatehouse wall was the ugliest head I had ever seen. Bulging pupils had brows of lichen. So ancient and weatherworn was the face that it literally appeared to grow out of the stonework. More streaks of yellow parasitic growth had taken root on run-offs of rainwater and so formed two long waterfalls of dirty blond hair or mane. My first thought was a beast. But because the sculptor had so carefully incised neat, parallel lines into the skull’s stony scalp and chin, tight wiggly curls were more suggestive of both hair and beard. Large ears, too, had been artfully chiselled into something surprisingly, recognisably, human.

  Really I could not be entirely sure because the upper lip had been blown away by blasts of weather or even gunfire.

  Not that any human cranium I knew of was so big and square. This anthropoid smiled obscenely from ear to ear, it challenged me to its silly grimacing-match. Lips parted to reveal two rows of very regular, small and sharp teeth like a bat’s. So unconventional was the smile that at first I thought the face would make me laugh. So it did, but its own was either greatly amused or indulgently sceptical.

  That’s not to say that I did not detect a certain baleful intelligence. Mirthful or devilish, the expression suggested that I was standing below some sort of maniacal bugaboo. Like a Cheshire cat, it smiled at me constantly.

  I gave a maniacal grin, too.