Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall Read online

  Pretty much.

  Dressed in a gown of greenish-gold silk, my tall, thin-waisted observer adopted a very upright and dignified pose. As I swung the door slightly away from her, her robe’s delicately woven fabric gave off a certain lustre while an edge of worsted petticoat showed it to be lined and faced with gimp lace twisted into braid. She wore roses on her green velvet shoes that showed off her ankles. This was no stiff gown whose skirt was spread over a cone-shaped framework of any farthingale but fell full and flowing from a high bust-line. There was no ruff. Instead, soft scalloped bobbin lace edged her soft collar. Since wearing gold and silver lace, cuffs, gartering and fancy shoes had all been a crime immediately after the English Civil War, she had to be wearing clothes from about 1640.

  Her ladyship rested her right hand on a fold of red curtain that draped the pillar of a lakeside loggia, I noted. The trees behind her suggested a substantial country estate where sleek thoroughbreds grazed in green paddocks. The painter had set out to portray someone of means, had captured her in exquisitely dressed but urgent pose in her garden.

  My boldness only emboldened her. I switched on my otherwise useless phone to shine its light about her neck, breasts and dress. At once her black pupils regarded me with outrage. As her face half turned to me, so that she stared at this world over one smooth, partly bare shoulder, she struck me as distinctly at odds with her years of neglect in her varnished prison. Really, she wanted to jump on her horse and go for a gallop.

  ‘This someone’s unloved heirloom?’ I asked. ‘Or was she bought in a job lot, too, to complete some bizarre Gothic theme park?’

  My agitated guide averted his gaze. He refused to look at the woman in the picture in the same way a man might seek to protect his eyes from glare or dust. Instead he ticked his head from side to side like a pendulum.

  ‘She came with the house, sir.’

  Which was probably why I had the urge to do something, if only tilt my head in mock chivalric response to the faintest wink of her left eyelid.

  I turned to my gloomy usher.

  ‘I’m sorry, who did you say she is?’

  ‘Best you come away now, sir.’

  *

  After that, my fingers went instinctively in search for a switch on the wall. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I was sure that I had failed to see some great electric chandelier or other that could shed real light on the way ahead.

  ‘Don’t any damned bulbs work anywhere?’ I complained.

  My guide shot me another puzzled stare.

  ‘You’ll find nothing like that in this house, sir.’

  ‘You a victim of the flooding, too? It’s busy knocking out power supplies across half the country.’

  ‘Surely his lordship told you about that in his letter?’

  ‘H’m, well, yes. Not exactly.’

  *

  At long last we entered a musty smelling, sparsely furnished room that contained a cupboard, a table and a settle, the latter placed beneath a three-light window. A painted frieze of ribbon scrolls ran across the top of one wall above its panelling to set off the plaster barrel ceiling. On either side of me, however, the panelling incorporated thick oak posts whose mortise-holes showed where a tie-beam had once been braced in a way that suggested a somewhat clumsy rebuild. I was probably standing in a former solar room where the old house met the new.

  ‘I really could do, you know, with a wash,’ I said with alarm.

  ‘I’ll have Sara bring you an ewer of hot water from the kitchen, sir.’

  ‘There’s not, like, a bathroom anywhere?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Jug it is, then.’

  ‘That’s easier.’

  ‘What about when, h’m, I have to…?’

  ‘You’ll find a chamber pot under the bed, sir. Leave it on the landing in the morning. The maid will see to it.’

  ‘So, please, as far as you can tell, when can I eat something?’

  ‘Supper will be served at six in the great hall. Will there be anything else, sir?’

  ‘A cup of tea would be nice. That wretched coach really left me parched.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can only offer you hot chocolate.’

  ‘Honestly? No tea?’ I asked, disappointed.

  ‘No such thing has ever been drunk in this house that I know of, sir.’

  Since he appeared to refute something not advanced by me, it left me wondering what I should have asked. He did not simply refuse to admit that he possessed any tea, he looked at me with sheer incredulity. He behaved as if tea had not yet been invented.

  ‘Then let it be chocolate,’ I replied. ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘James, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, James, for being so considerate.’

  He bowed his head with exemplary indifference. In that moment I detected a flash of dislike in his otherwise pale, emotionless face, a stab of feeling born perhaps of the disappointments that constantly dogged his daily life? Working in such a cold, inhospitable house could not have been easy for a man like him, not with the first signs of a disease such as Parkinson’s. He rolled his head and shoulder in perpetual motion as he promised to return with bread on a platter.

  ‘Will that be all, sir?’

  The question, I surmised, was purely rhetorical, but something still preyed on my mind.

  ‘Wait. Over the fireplace in the great hall there hangs a portrait.’

  ‘That’ll be Joseph Jones, sir. He was Lord Hart’s step-father. Thanks to him the estate was saved from ruin in the 1950’s.’

  My restless attendant rolled his head but it was hardly affirmative, so I tried again.

  ‘What about the missing picture?’

  ‘Missing picture, sir?’

  ‘Yes, next to Mr Jones there is a matching recess cut into the stone chimney breast ready to take another frame of the same size. That would suggest that someone else should hang next to him.’

  ‘No picture ever hangs there, sir. Will you require a warming-pan to heat your bed when you retire for the night?’

  At that point I had the sense that he was hiding something from me, but could sense nothing of the thing hidden.

  ‘Warming-pan? Really?’

  ‘I think it best, sir. The countess’s room can be very cold.’

  6

  Not usually one to believe that a musty old bedroom could have its own special atmosphere, I did sense something of its past life as soon as I entered. A hideous four-poster with its elaborately gilded tester still stood in situ, I feared. Just to turn my face to the canopy’s rich red velvets was enough to make me sniff and snuffle when the slightest brush against the curtains shook so much dust from the tassels. Real age receded as soon as I put out my hand to touch and explore the cleverly carved pillars. The instant I withdrew my fingers the sense returned. When I extended them again, it faded. It really did stink of the 1600’s, though.

  ‘Already I feel as if I have been in this house for ages,’ I thought, ‘but I can’t have been here half an hour. My sock is still wet.’ All over the flooded southern and western parts of England people were having to slum it as though in the Middle Ages, they were having to do their ablutions in buckets due to the power cuts and lack of piped water in their houses. It was because the Thames had broken its banks that my coach had been diverted.

  I hugged myself to keep warm. ‘I can do nothing until supper, so I might as well try to light a fire,’ I told myself. Paper and sticks placed ready in the rusty dog grates lit with reluctance in a flame from my cigarette lighter. Quickly I became aware of how white my fingers were, how bloodless. Their paleness was not exactly unexpected but grew steadily more anaemic. I withdrew my hands from the flames and the colour returned. When I again tried to warm them they paled.

  ‘What the hell!’ I said, unamused and went back to walking in circles.

  Judging by my clouds of white breath the temperature literally was already on the point of freezing.

  I
t could have been more unbearably inhospitable. No, actually, it couldn’t.

  After that, I pinched my nostrils between finger and thumb and plucked up the courage to deposit my chamber pot outside my door. Which was when I became steadily more aware of a terrible ache in my head, almost a migraine at first but gradually less and less like real pain. I sat on the bed and listened as I pressed and squeezed my skull like a vice. It was the awful weight of silence. The less I listened the more I heard. I put it down to being in the remote countryside.

  The rest of the world could have died.

  Yet the house was not entirely as still as the grave. I clamped my hands to my ears and the clamour was one great meaningless storm like surf on a seashore. Remove my fingers and the roar divided into many distinct, individual noises each of equal significance and succinctness. I might never have noticed them in the bustle of my previous life – not before had I felt compelled to pay such attention.

  The patter of a rat was different from the claws of a bird.

  *

  That night, either my travel sickness returned or the wine I had drunk at supper agreed with me too well. From the candle-lit garden below my window came voices.

  ‘Don’t worry, your lordship, he’ll be gone again tomorrow.’

  ‘He’s a fool if he isn’t.’

  *

  The last thing I saw before I climbed into bed was the podgy, bug-eyed cherubs that grinned at me from the ceiling.

  Overcome by an unexpected discomfort, I felt the need to close my eyes on my pillow.

  Then I dreamed.

  Day 10. March 30. 2014.

  Where is she? Desk marked enquiries: no one there. Various auxiliaries pushing tea trollies.

  DON’T ASK THEM.

  Doctor, or someone who exudes air of importance is in a backroom talking earnestly to a nurse. I think they’re talking about me.

  DON’T ASK THEM, EITHER.

  Too many bays sub-divide the ward. All faces look the same, ill in bed.

  Now I realise (on my second visit) that a chart on the wall in the corridor details who’s lying where.

  It’s all a waste of time because Lizzie is sleeping.

  ‘You the husband?’

  Thanks to the grey-haired old lady in the next bed I have someone to talk to.

  ‘Yes, I’m Colin.’

  ‘They had to sedate your wife because she was raving, poor dear. Ripped her drip out of her hand. Kept shouting that someone was coming to get her.’

  ‘Did she mention my name, at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure? Did she say anything about me to the doctors?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve seen it all before. It’s the painkillers, they can make you see cats run across ceilings. Poor dear! She kept screaming it: Don’t let anyone in! Don’t let anyone in! Her eyes were rolling. She was so terrified she was choking. What’s wrong with her? Is it fatal?’

  I sit on a hard plastic chair to gaze at Lizzie’s shut eyes, wondering how someone’s face can be so white and yet still alive.

  7

  After such a poor night the day so dazed me that I could shake off neither the dizziness in my head nor confusion of feelings. I knew only that I woke in a great dark house far away from whichever street or city I used to inhabit. Of course my insobriety didn’t help, but it was more than that. A hangover was not a tragedy, nor did any man succumb long to it.

  Parting my embroidered bed curtains, I observed dirty cobwebs dangle and dance on the ceiling, but drapes alone could not account for the dreadful draught.

  ‘Damn it! Where can it be coming from?’ I wondered.

  I slid out of bed and wrapped myself in my itchy counterpane.

  The room was as cold as the grave.

  At which point my eye settled on a long red arras that hung on the wall not far from where I was standing. What I had taken to be mere decoration the previous evening fluttered on its rail this morning. I trod the icy floorboards and hooked aside the mosaic of birds and flowers sewn into the curtain’s rich fabric. A perfume called to mind sweet violets. I could have been back in the days when petals were strewn on bedchamber floors every day to mask the smell of damp and sickness. Each time I breathed in, the scent was very apparent then lost again, which I put down to a trick of the iodine.

  Because of the cold I was shaking. I was astonished and intrigued, not simply by the other chamber’s existence but by the eagerness with which something appeared in it. It was a dog.

  To my astonishment, a three-legged, white greyhound with a slender grey muzzle and wall-eye took up position beside me. Where the flea-bitten creature had come from I had no idea. Possibly, it had followed me upstairs from the great hall last night?

  With its head inclined to one side, it gave me a quizzical look. Muddy and in need of a good brushing, it would become closely acquainted with all my aims and desires, evidently. Or it couldn’t understand where I had come from, either.

  ‘Well, look at you,’ I said. ‘How did you learn to walk on three legs?’

  Its white eye blanked its socket as well as its secret. Clearly the glory days of coursing hares were long gone. Indeed, my companion soon slunk off to the other little room where it lay with its head on its paws to shiver and slaver.

  All that drool was fine. No, absolutely, it was not.

  *

  I fully expected to feel trapped by such looming walls, because although very high the room was also very narrow. I had a sudden stab of misgiving, but that was entirely separate from my morbid dread of closed spaces. The dog gave me confidence. I made the disciplined effort to inhale and exhale very calmly. I steadily replenished my lungs, the emptiness of which took me totally by surprise since I had not been aware that I had ever stopped breathing.

  If it had been slightly outrageous of me to sleep in a lady’s bedchamber, then it had to be uncivil and rude to invade this other, equally intimate space once called her closet. That’s because somebody had sat here on her stool and read her favourite books or penned letters at the desk still littered with ink and quills. Such a woman of rank had owned nothing, not even the dress on her back. She had been forced to rely for everything from her husband who led his own very separate existence. Back then, her duty had been to look after the house as its chatelaine but stay away from the kitchens and outbuildings. Only here, in the tiniest yet richest of places had she been able to relax and be her true self, not merely someone’s beautiful appendage.

  I drew my counterpane tighter across my chest as I nosed about among a few books on mathematics when my hand alighted on a very old multiplying glass. Except, when I drew the flame-stitch curtain at the window in order to put the primitive looking telescope to the test, I suffered a flash in my eye – a sharp stab, unbearable in intensity at first, then becoming much more like simple agony. I lowered the lens and the pain eased immediately – lifted it again and it blinded.

  ‘What the…?’ I asked myself, irritably and stared again out the window with my naked eye.

  The dog at my feet let out a whine.

  There was a bright spot or secondary image in the telescope’s field of vision due to a defect in the curvature of its glass, I decided reassuringly. Not for nothing did astronomers call such defects ghosts.

  Whoever had stood here studying the stars had been as interested in their significance as they were in their movements and positions. The stargazer had clearly considered astronomy synonymous with astrology, I realised. Beside a marble fireplace stood a globe depicting the heavens. From these could be judged the stars’ occult influence upon the affairs of humans.

  I let drop the hangings to block out the window, did it to shield the fragile embroidery and me. I could entertain the notion of second sight but not of blindness. In doing so, I noticed that, scratched on the open wrought iron ventilation panel in the otherwise fixed leaded panes, there was a very bad rhyme:

  It is part of Virtue never to abstaine

  From what we love tho it sh
all prove our bane.

  *

  As I shut out the appalling draught I was drawn to a very small painting that hung over a desk on a new shiny nail. The moment I peered at the oils I felt the claustral room tighten around me, or I shrank in proportion to it. Conversely, my eye enlarged to absorb a whole other world – an intense reversal, scarcely credible at first, but redrawing me to scale. I looked closer and saw my body was gone – withdrew, and it returned.

  But bemused was I not, neither did I fail to imagine that I was now the same size as the elegant young lady perched on her red silky cushion. Beside her, a gentlewoman helped fasten to her earlobe an earring from which swung the lock of someone’s hair like a keepsake or love token. In addition, gloves and pots of frangipane stood arranged on her desk. She appeared to be asking for an opinion on what jewellery would go best with her full-length green and white gown. Nearby rested her multiplying glass and astrological globe.

  If I could peer in, she could peer back telescopically.

  I put my eye right up to her strong, lean profile. A set of short chains was attached to her belt from which dangled a large bunch of keys, I noted. Hundreds of years after the event, I had the privilege of treading in the footsteps of the room’s noble occupant. My misty breath fogged her mirror.

  I was that close.

  On her walls were familiar floor-to-floor, fiery red, yellow and blue hangings.

  ‘Well I never!’ I exclaimed.

  I withdrew my hand and blinked. Around me, my bedchamber expanded back to full size. Obversely, its counterpart in the painting imaged mine in correct dimensions proportional to the actual one. Replicated in both were seven pretty lunettes that depicted the cardinal virtues. I saw how a flint-eyed Patience crushed her flower-press to her naked breast to show how determined she was to endure her heartache. I was staring at a depiction of the very same room in which I was standing.