Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall Read online

  Seconds later there came a loud knock on my door. I lifted its latch to find myself face to face with a young woman with red hair and very bad skin. In her hand steamed a large copper kettle. The dog left as she entered.

  Slightly built and wearing a thin blue dress, she flapped about in her cheap plastic sandals as she went to push past me. She did it as if I hardly existed, but not before I detected several bloody scratches under her right ear which she tried hard to keep from my view.

  ‘You hurt, at all?’ I said. ‘Let me see.’

  ‘Never mind me, Mr Walker.’

  ‘But how did it happen?’

  The open wound bubbled red where somebody or something had not so much scraped as clawed at her.

  ‘You Sara?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘That it? That’s my hot water?’

  She flashed her emerald green eyes at me.

  ‘Do you want to shave or don’t you?’

  Without asking, she filled a basin on the table. Then she folded her dress beneath her bony knees and used the shovel in the fireplace to rake ashes messily into a bucket.

  ‘You really ought to let me look at that wound,’ I said.

  When a hired help was brazen enough to give someone the look of the devil, he could be forgiven for suspecting that something else had gone wrong before his arrival.

  ‘Excuse me Mr Walker, but as I say, I’m only the skivvy to everyone round here. I have to get on.’

  ‘What about my chamber pot?’

  ‘You’ll find a privy at the end of the orchard.’

  ‘But I’m the new owner.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  *

  After my ablutions I began to ferry my slops downstairs when clocks chimed nine o’clock. I looked at my watch disbelievingly. The stupid thing was still stopped at the time of my arrival. Nor would my phone work. My inability to tell the hour except by the house’s mechanical monsters was a real hindrance, I felt I was in danger of deferring or delaying matters of urgency too long already.

  ‘Ah, James! Good morning. Not too late am I?’ I said, sauntering into the great hall. ‘I can’t nearly begin to tell you how badly I slept.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear it, sir.’

  It was hard to see in such a wizened, craggy face what he was really thinking. Yet he appeared relieved when I went where directed. Dressed head-to-toe in black with his lacy collars a fresh starchy white, he guided me to my place at the table on the dais. Slanting shafts of dusty light streamed down from the windows. A warm glow came from the log fire and sent a red stain up the walls where it tinged a row of ancient paintings of the Sibyls and the prophets.

  My mouth gaped, my eyes stared as a sweat turned me slightly cold. I stood where I was as if stricken. I had been more or less alone after my mother had passed on when many a long day was spent hiding above my step-father’s second-hand bookshop in Brighton. It had seen me read prodigious amounts of stuffy history. Through such neglected annals I had learnt to live and love past heroes. So when my favourite hero Aeneas sought the Abode of the Dead to learn his future, the Sibyl gave him a warning that I could still remember: ‘The descent to Avernus is easy. The gate of Pluto stands open night and day. But to retrace one’s steps and return to the upper air, that is the toil, that is the difficulty.’

  James pointed me towards a hideous, high-backed chair of ornately carved Portuguese mahogany at the head of the table, which suited me very well. Before me stood a small silver drinking cup, gently smoking. Its contents did not smell like tea or coffee.

  ‘This is what, exactly?’

  ‘A drink of posset and syllabub, sir. I thought you might need it after such a cold night.’

  ‘Looks serious.’

  I went to raise the rim of the cup to my lips but James coughed gently.

  ‘Suck not sip, sir.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘That’s easier.’

  On closer examination I discovered that protruding from each side of the strange silver vessel was a spout. By drawing liquid through one or other of the hollow handles I could drink it right down to the bottom. So creamy was it that it stuck to my thin upper lip. Hot milk had been curdled with ale and flavoured with spices to make a very peculiar, heady pick-me-up.

  ‘Nothing wrong, I hope, sir?’

  ‘Oh no, it’s fine. Yeah. It’s great. Definitely.’

  Except it was not in any way a meal fit for a king, more like the first of my prison rations.

  *

  ‘I also have eggs,’ announced James in his next breath.

  ‘The thing is,’ I objected, surveying the vast empty hall before me. ‘There appears to be an exceptionally bad smell in the little room adjoining my bedchamber.’

  ‘Bad smell, sir?’

  ‘Of something dead and rotting.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Yeah. No. I don’t know. Sara has tried to mask it with the smell of dried flowers.’

  James placed a sharp knife before me with his shaky fingers. Habitually on the look-out for something or someone, he observed the shadows with disconcerting thoroughness.

  ‘That’ll be a dead rat, sir.’

  ‘Did the greyhound catch it, do you think?’

  ‘Greyhound, sir?’

  ‘Yes. You know, the large one-eyed mutt that slept on my bed last night.’

  ‘We don’t have a dog, sir.’

  ‘So why, like, shut the dog-gate at the foot of the stairs?’

  ‘That gate is as old as the house, sir.’

  ‘Okay. H’m, I see, but I can assure you I’m not imagining things.’

  ‘A dog like that once belonged to his lordship’s brother, sir. It disappeared when he died two years ago.’

  ‘Okay, it’s just that it’s back now.’

  ‘Then it must have returned when you did, sir.’

  ‘Well, h’m, moving on. I’m not at all sure I like Sara. Her belligerent attitude is rather tiresome. Is she the best you can do?’

  James stopped dead suddenly. With his back to me he was about to go into a cool room to fetch a jug of milk, I presumed.

  ‘She’s Sullivan O’Leary’s daughter, sir. Her mother is dead and she lives with her father in one of the estate’s cottages.’

  ‘What is O’Leary to his lordship, in your opinion?’

  ‘He’s his former terrier man, sir. He used to dig out foxes every autumn when Lord Hart still went cubbing, but he was dismissed for poaching deer. Now he has too much time to snoop about if you ask me. You’ll have to keep an eye out for him in case he filches food from the kitchen.’

  ‘So how does he make a living?’

  ‘He occasionally does odd jobs around the estate.’

  ‘Lord Hart and O’Leary aren’t exactly on the best of terms, then?’

  ‘He’s a bully not to be trusted, sir.’

  ‘Got it.’

  James drew a deep audible breath expressive of sadness but also relief from some inner tension. Naturally, he was glad I had taken his side.

  ‘And James, please go easy on the poor dog. From now on, this will be its home.’

  ‘It always was, sir.’

  ‘That’s settled, then.’

  Not only did he vehemently dislike the greyhound, there was something distasteful about its return which genuinely repelled him.

  ‘Is there anything else I can help you with or will you be leaving us today, sir?’

  My butler-cum-waiter sashayed to and fro across the echoing floor.

  ‘It is imperative that I see his lordship right away. He does know that, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Lord Hart will receive you in the long gallery at eleven o’clock, sir.’

  ‘Is that the best he can do? Is everything okay?’

  My gloomy attendant gave a slight bow.

  ‘Rest assured, sir, it is all arranged.’

  ‘Because I heard loud voices in the garden last night.’

  I hadn’t travelle
d all that way to be palmed off with breakfast.

  ‘One egg or two, sir?’

  As for my host’s no-show I felt ever more annoyed, but short of exploring the house down every corridor, I could do very little. Whatever obscenities this morning might bring would have to wait on his beck and call.

  Fact was, I needed to explain myself pretty soon. Otherwise, how could I hope to see beyond tomorrow?

  *

  Buzzards circled high in the sky the moment I let myself out of the gatehouse. They mewed to each other like petulant sentinels ready to protest every departure. I scurried across the narrow lane to the stile where James had told me to look for a path across the fields. Each irritating bird spread its wings to wheel through the air in bold vulture-like fashion. In no way did their broad, rather stubby wings transform them into fast and fat little dragons. No, really, they did.

  But everything was fine because when I glanced at my wristwatch it had restarted where it had left off, as though a whole evening and night had simply vanished. The higher I climbed the grassy slope, the better my recalcitrant phone found its signal as well. Right now, though, I was in no mood to fire off any messages to friends.

  When someone was no longer impeded by place or people he could take a much needed deep breath and stride along with bigger paces, he could climb like a free man.

  Once at the top of the hill I turned to take a long look back across the valley.

  Shrouding everything, the thick ground mist clung to the gatehouse and crenelated walls that kept me a stranger to their secrets. Rather than solid courtyards, roofs and chimneys, my view conjured up a more fluid creation, it signalled new forms and shapes the longer I studied them. It could have been a picture still in the making. I would have delighted in it, except my back ached so much. Never should any man have endured a bed as bone-achingly hard as I had last night. I held my hand before my eye to focus between fingers and thumb like someone suddenly in dire need of dimensions.

  Then I saw it. From such a high vantage point my eyes fixed the glittering proportions of a ghostly, white-walled manor-house which had until a few hours ago existed for me in name only, Coberley Hall. At long last, I could feast them on what was now all mine. Of course, what I really needed was a telescope.

  8

  I was resolved, but truly my next step proved vague. Bounded by high thorny hedges, a five-bar gate was the only exit off the frightfully soggy hilltop which was so overgrown as to be almost impassable to someone of my stature.

  Where there had once been a directional finger-post the wooden digit had been torn off as if by some mighty hand. Worse, the gate had long ago been chained shut with an enormous rusty padlock that even the most hardened hiker might have found discouraging, but I was wrong. One person at least had recently vaulted the slippery bars to bulldoze a path through all the briers and dog roses, I discovered.

  When a civilised man took to the hills, however unconscionably, he should not have to tip-toe daintily through the wet grass like someone too afraid to step off the beaten track. I was soon following the solid, unhesitating footsteps of some bold pioneer. My alter ego and I were squelching along the edge of a field on the estate’s very margins while parallel with us a mischievously energetic river ran along a half hidden gully.

  With the chuckling water came the ghastly melody of some unkind and cruel tune for which there was no earthly song. No, really, it was just a stream. A few yards further – it felt more like miles – the footprints in which I trod were spaced left and right quite regularly which suggested a diagonal walk, not the parallel steps of a bound or gallop. Scored in the mud, they showed less structural resemblance to a man’s, being all split indentations and long toes. In some places the spoor was yet more slurred and irregular across the ground’s muddy surface. I was treading in the footsteps of some lonely forager as he dragged behind him a log or kill. Here one indent overlapped another like a deer. Then again, cloven hooves with claws would have been another way to describe them. Prints like that could play the devil with one’s eyes.

  Afterwards, I trod large white shells. Such popping, crunching molluscs were no ordinary scavenging gastropods but Roman snails. I stopped to pick up one shell but found it to be translucent and empty. Clearly my hungry epicurean had felt no qualms about sucking each one as clean as a whistle as he strode along.

  All this poking about disturbed the birds. Dozens of troublesome fieldfares, those ghostly migrants from faraway Russia who liked to squat for the winter in remote, quiet places, gazed on blood-red hawthorn berries in the hedges. Opening their dripping, crimson beaks at me, the pillagers denounced my passing with their frantic twittering as though I were some sort of revenant come to rob them of their spoils.

  Already I was thrilled, nervous and alert. The question of whether someone was living illegally off my land or whether it was some harmless, passing vagrant spurred me on.

  *

  ‘You lost at all?’

  Spinning round, I met a handsome woman who looked about sixty. Dressed in a pair of gaudy green trousers and jumper, she stood very stiff and upright at the front door of a Cotswold stone house that went by the unusual name of Slack’s Cottage. With rather fine gables, it was a miniature version of Coberley Hall but without the gruesome gargoyles and finials.

  A pretty hungry tabby cat, wild-eyed and filthy, gnawed the head off a rabbit at the foot of an oil tank in a nearby yard.

  ‘I’ve just come across the fields,’ I replied, fingering my sore eye. ‘Do you, like, have any eyewash by any chance? I’ve come off worst with some burdock.’

  My stern interlocutor dusted her long fingers on her white apron.

  ‘Doesn’t mean you can wander in here, does it? Can’t you read? It says No Cold Callers.’

  ‘Would you be Susan, at all? James gave me your name.’

  She looked hot from her kitchen, narrowed her grey eyes at me and screwed her fingers back into her apron’s pocket. From the house’s half open door came the warm smell of cakes fresh from the oven. Elsewhere a dog gave a howl.

  ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘I’m staying in Coberley Hall.’

  The cook became both confused and flustered. Hurriedly poking her very neat, short grey hair with her floury fingers, she had to fight to regain her composure.

  ‘You’re that wife killer. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Colin Walker.’

  ‘You’re Lizzie’s husband....’

  Okay, so bad news travelled far.

  ‘A man has the right to tell his side of the story, don’t you think?’ I replied sternly.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Never trust what you read in the press.’

  ‘Not that, the other thing.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘You don’t mean ‘Hall’, do you?’

  ‘Seems I do. How many Jacobean fortified manor-houses is it our misfortune to see survive so unaltered anywhere else in England?’

  My wide-eyed baker wavered slightly. When she did speak it was calmly but robotically.

  ‘You’ve …been…inside?’

  ‘It’s not a good thing. I mean the house is very cold and empty. This morning it’s a relief, in a way, to get out and talk to someone. Even you.’

  ‘Adrian and I never go further than the gatehouse. The thing is, Mr Walker, we don’t exactly welcome outsiders round here. I just want to say that I’d be careful if I were you, I wouldn’t go poking my nose into other people’s business. My husband and I have been ’ere over thirty-five years and not even we can explain everything that goes on after dark, that we can’t. Honestly, you wouldn’t want to get mistaken for some badger or deer one night, would you? You don’t want a poacher’s bullet in the head, I suppose?’

  ‘People do a lot of that kind of thing, do they?’

  ‘You often meet a man with his long gun.’

  Susan threw back her wide shoulders and thrust out her chest to stave off any more imp
ertinent questions. She stumped right up to me. She did it so resolutely that I became a little unnerved myself. Still she didn’t shake my hand, not slightly.

  ‘Aren’t poachers with guns a bit scary?’ I protested. ‘Not to say illegal.’

  ‘We all keep guns round here, Mr Walker, because you never know who might come calling.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Do you shoot, at all?’

  ‘Only criminals.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean you can’t aim straight, do it?’

  ‘I’m a little rusty.’

  ‘Best go to the Shooting School. Just follow them bangs you can hear in Chatcombe Wood. Peter Slater will put you right. We need all the firepower we can get, Mr Walker, that we do.’

  So saying, Susan patted the side of her nose and left a neat dab of flour-paste on one nostril.

  ‘If I could maybe speak to your husband?’ I pleaded, suffering my eye to weep to no avail.

  ‘You go right ahead, Mr Walker. Adrian’s in one of the barns behind you. But maybe the fact that his lordship now has some London lawman to help him says something? Finally, perhaps, he realises what it’s going to take to police this place or else why put himself through it all again? But if it’s more eggs you want, I can’t give you any cos someone got all the chickens last night.’

  *

  What followed was an oily path thick with smoke and sawdust to some waste ground at the back of a crew yard, I discovered. There somebody had set light to a stack of timbers so high that it looked like a funeral pyre.

  Kicking idly at a sizzling puddle, I picked up a hand-forged nail torn from some ancient beam. I squinted at the fire and the massively solid timbers did look as if they had once formed the labyrinthine eaves of some very old roof or other.

  At which point I detected a noise in the barn closest to me. The bleached wooden building was totally open on one side, Dutch-style, although at first I could see very little past its fitful shadows. I had a man’s name to go by but had no idea who that man might be.

  ‘You the farm manager? You Adrian?’

  ‘Who the devil wants him?’

  I followed the voice to a corner high up on a great pile of bales. Atop it all, a bony man in blue denim jeans and a checked brown and white shirt was sorting hay. His jeans sagged off his skinny buttocks most alarmingly. However, there was no denying how agreeably hard he was working. He kicked at the hay with his burnished steel-capped boot and paused only to mop his closely cropped hair with a swipe of his sleeve.