Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall Read online

  I shook my head and the vertigo faded. I rushed to sit down. Suddenly the agitated greyhound left its place by the fire and ran past my legs to the wall where it nuzzled frantically at the base of the thick oak panelling.

  Clearly, it had detected a rat or mouse.

  Instead it whined as if for someone.

  It was not Lord Hart. I could hear him banging about in his wheelchair in the room next door.

  I shooed the stupid animal away. Still it would sniff at the almost indiscernible crack in the wainscot. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said that the silly thing would have me believe that someone had just passed by on the other side.

  11

  So lonely and peaceful seemed the house suddenly, so empty of my fellow human beings, so stale, sad and uncared-for the rooms, that I found myself coming to appreciate it like some strange afterthought.

  I picked my way over fresh birds’ droppings to arrive at the three-clawed, hermaphrodite sea-gods that guarded the door jambs in front of me. Back in the second-hand bookshop in Brighton, I had read alone in dark corners both enduringly and secretly. That way, I had tried to stay in my stepfather’s good books by becoming invisible, but in his opinion it hardly mattered whether I lost myself in this world or the next because the death of my mother had left him both unwilling and unable to cope with the living.

  It had been so long since I had breathed the rich smell of old leather and paper that I felt both nauseated and ecstatic.

  ‘What the hell,’ I cried and marched in as far as a silvered mirror above the fireplace.

  Even a house that had been left as high and dry as this one by the current of events still had a heart or soul of sorts, I fancied. Framing Gothic alcoves and arches, lancets and trefoils were patterned by crisp pale marquetry that glowed like threads of gold. Here lay the legacy of personal choices and the result was both social and monastic. You could tell how much somebody had loved the world by what they left behind on their sagging shelves.

  Otherwise things didn’t look too promising. Heaped high on the table were disgusting piles of letters, bills and receipts that had begun to moulder. I could contend with my disgust at the dead flies but not all the muddle.

  Had there to be some selfish reason why Lizzie had refused to tell me about Coberley Hall sooner? If so, in here I could perhaps unravel the mystery?

  Frankly, the wretched room was less library than store or Evidence Room, that all-important depository for vital maps and papers that detailed the history of an English manor house. No one sat here reading books for pleasure. On the contrary, the totally inadequate fireplace had always been designed to discourage anyone from lingering.

  Pretty much.

  There was nothing like an inheritance to spur on a man in his inglorious intentions. Next minute the frisson of fear on my skin grew doubly prickly and chilly, I felt it freeze my fingers as I touched upon such delights as maps of the pasturage at Pinswell, the two farms at the nearby village of Upper Coberley, the Rectory in Coberley itself, its mill and land at Ullenwood.

  I unfurled the document with exceptional distaste, then with curiosity. At the bottom of its very long greasy page that was every bit of three feet wide, several blobs of ugly red wax represented different seals, I noted. An odd shakiness spread through my body. Whereas, at its top, one red-edged page began THIS INDENTURE in elaborate script, another was headed LAND, being that portion consisting of Coberley Hall and farms ‘brought to the 2nd Earl of Downe by way of his marriage’.

  I felt sure I could count on the documents’ veracity. After sorting rolls randomly by eye for a time, I estimated that I had before me papers relating to every signatory to the estate since the earl had sold up in 1657 to go travelling in Europe.

  Which was all very well but every subsequent purchaser, whether they were the families of Castelman, Elwes or Phelps had had their names stabbed and blotted from the proofs of ownership. That was only part of it. When I held up the deeds’ thick waxy papers to the mullioned window the winter light pierced sweeping cuts made with knife or fingernails. In places, someone had slashed paper like flesh off bone.

  Frankly, the alterations looked like an attempt to abate someone’s furious temper.

  My hand travelled hurriedly back to the Boundary Book. There I traced the limits of fields, woods and tracks that had once been so much more extensive until I could see how someone might hanker after things they still considered to be theirs from long ago. In the pursuit of this adulteration, in the obliteration of successive ownership, Joseph Jones’s name had been scratched through as well.

  Whoever the perpetrator, they had altered things back to the way they had been in November 1638 when John Dutton of Sherbourne had first given Coberley Hall as a dowry to his daughter Lucy.

  *

  I was still asking myself why anyone would want to reverse three hundred and seventy-odd years of history when James came in with my tray of hot chocolate and biscuits.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, clearing a space among the papers with a careless swipe of my knuckles. ‘Do us both good to see this room a bit tidier. Definitely.’

  ‘His lordship’s father was the last to use this library, sir. He did a lot of research into the 1640’s.’

  ‘You know who vandalised these papers?’

  James’s response was to resume his errands with a shake of his skull.

  ‘Perhaps you should get rid of that greyhound, sir?’

  ‘Perhaps I should.’

  *

  The stimulating effect of the chocolate served to heighten my dream-like senses, I seemed to float with the strange, heady aroma of what I was drinking.

  Whereas most of the library was a wreck, its shelves were exceptionally tidy and orderly. Protruding from many of the books, pieces of paper marked places like flags, I realised. When somebody recorded their search for something that methodically they did more than mark their progress from volume to volume, they left a trail that could be followed.

  I pulled a book at random from the closest shelf and it proved to be a gruesome Jacobean revenge tragedy entitled ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ by John Webster. But the moment I read beyond its title-page a seething, living mass erupted in my hands – a plague of worms, no less, invisible to the naked eye at first, but scuttling and scurrying through my fingers, I fancied. I shut the book and they were gone – reopened it and they grew still livelier.

  ‘The rottenness of it all!’ I thought and put the play back on the shelf.

  With my cordial I came to my senses. In its peculiar aftertaste of grated chocolate, vanilla and spices I detected an aromatized and sweetened cordial designed to stimulate the heart and mind like a medicine. I was drinking a concoction that had been grated and whisked with eggs in the way people had mixed hot chocolate after it was first shipped via Spain to England from Mexico. I was savouring the same bitter-sweet tang that this Hall’s inhabitants had in the 1650’s.

  In my relief, my eyes settled this time on an album lying by itself on a chest of drawers. Inside it were carefully penned references to ancient newspapers whose stories were copied from contemporary accounts of the English Civil War. Our history sleuth had pasted together in a big scrapbook the reminiscences from various Parliamentarian commanders. One such account was a Copy of another Letter from Lieutenant-Collonell Massey’s Leaguer, London. 1644:

  ‘Here, in three hours’ space, this Battel was extreme hot, where with furze faggots we were forced to set fire to a Gatehouse before we could get betwixt the court and the house, and then our men stormed and entered the breach and came to the hall porch and plied the windows so hard with culverins, that the enemy durst not appear except in the high rooms. But while they were thus busied, Captaine Digby and divers men did still make hot at us with great resolution from the Gatehouse where they were very profuse of their powder, until our grenadiers with scaling ladders did endeavour to fire the upper story, but without any touch of it they were forced to breach open the door with iron bars. Then
assailing with their pistols they did do their utmost to vanquish the papists that were within, who although they knew they could not subsist, shot from out of all the doors and windows, but after all their bravadoes came meanly off. Captaine Digby did behave himself very gallantly, and was shot in the mouth, had one or two shot more, and had his legs shot under him.

  ‘But Countess Lucy then crying shame that our soldiers were without mercy and complaining that she were betrayed, came to me that she might bind Captaine Digby’s wounds lest he die forthwith, but I bid her leave us upon pain of death, that we would take the captaine with us in to Gloucester. But still she came after us with great treaty that he have his life spared. So little did she fear what the enemy could do against her that her love or grief cannot but work remorse and regret, and she cried out “God damne you” while we did drag the dead and wounded away when in heat one soldier did cut her greyhound’s eye out and some other, the countess herself very narrowly escaping.’

  No one spent hours sifting through the first ever printed newspapers to reassemble the gruesome horrors of war without some very good reason. They had to believe that what had gone before had some bearing on the hereafter.

  *

  That evening I sat at the high table in the cold, cavernous great hall while the painted Cavalier eyed me attentively from his lonely portrait. Having drawn his rat-coloured cloak tighter at his silver lace collar, he shot me sidelong glances that verged on the knowing. I had to fight off the feeling that simply by keeping him company I was inviting the occurrence of some awful personal injury or general disaster.

  Inscribed on a plate at the base of the picture were a few words, I noticed:

  As we are so shall ye be.

  Now I had always been drawn to those macabre, if absurdly decorated, medieval chapels on top of whose tombs lay the perfect effigies of gilt metal knights complete with their scabbards and armour. Better still, below them were carved their other parallel selves but naked and nibbled by rats and worms, all lovingly chiselled.

  With only my torch and books for relief, I had, hiding out as a boy in the bookshop in Brighton, found hope in hallucination and meditation brought on by hunger. I had swung from suffocation to ecstasy with the aid of my magnificent pictures of gaudy Gothic vaults and graves. Not until someone learnt to suspend one life could he look to another.

  I pricked up my ears but the Cavalier’s lips no longer spoke to me through their paint and varnish. In fact, the words penned on the plate below him came from a Medieval folktale whose riddle I had read long ago and whose story was entirely explicable: one day three rich lords travelling along a lonely road met three dead men who were their futures. No, really, it didn’t explain a thing.

  *

  Afterwards, my disobedient greyhound followed me up to my bedroom, though I would have said for certain that I had closed the dog-gate at the foot of the stairs behind me.

  From the end of my bed the wily sight-hound spied on me as I prepared for another cold, sleepless night ahead. My brazen stalker was not the slightest bit bothered by my reluctance to sleep lest I dreamt myself back to my wife’s deathbed.

  Day 9. March 31. 2014.

  Looking very sick. Pain particularly bad today. In and out of consciousness. The poison continues to work at snail’s pace.

  I can barely make out what Lizzie says because she is as good as delirious.

  Or dreaming.

  ‘Hers is a sad face.’

  ‘Why sad?’ I ask.

  ‘I can’t say. It just is.’

  No longer in a room with her own TV she is now back on the ward: Red Bay. Bed 8.

  Stomach very swollen but it goes down immediately with more drugs administered while I am present.

  Lucid, suddenly.

  ‘Don’t look now, Colin, but that woman in the bed opposite is 92.’

  That’s when I ask her again.

  ‘Whose is the sad face you keep dreaming?’

  ‘That’ll be my friend.’

  ‘According to the nurses, it’s a recurring nightmare.’

  ‘Long ago she had a daughter like me called Elizabeth.’

  ‘Shush, Lizzie. Get some rest.’

  ‘But she says she doesn’t like to see me suffering.’

  ‘Don’t worry, none of it’s real.’

  ‘Then why does she want me to go with her?’

  Hospital still a maze to me. Try taking the lift. Get lost. Is it left or right? Two nurses tell me left. Get there and it’s right. Laughter all round since they actually work there.

  I’ll go out another, quicker way next time by the stairs.

  That CT scan will almost certainly reveal the truth I’m dreading.

  *

  I woke up gasping for breath, to find that my canine attendant had crept much closer up my chest. Now he was peering into my face, watching and whining. His single iris burned as blue as brimstone. Meanwhile his other mysterious, stone eye remained totally unfathomable like a section of blank wall or canvas.

  Never did like pets, particularly. But Lizzie did. Once she adopted a stray dog and placed food for it on our front doorstep in Clapham.

  That might have been a greyhound, too.

  I walked to the window and looked down on the formal front gardens. James was busy extinguishing the candles that lit little pointed stone niches set into the walls. He did it with frequent looks over his shoulder. I very much wondered whether, in removing all the attempts at some sort of vigil, he intended to forestall the perturbing consequences of someone else’s actual rendezvous? I truly did not yet know, I literally didn’t.

  Therein lay another riddle. I could puzzle over things seen, yet see no end to my puzzlement. For what dire purpose would someone dare to keep doubt at bay but hope alive in their own sad heart, anyway? What lies? Who met at night with whom?

  It wouldn’t be until tomorrow that I had the slightest inkling.

  12

  At first light, with no definite belief that I was yet fully awake but with a sound in my ears that I couldn’t positively identify, I jumped out of bed in a hurry to listen.

  Doors slammed elsewhere in the house, the air growing smokier and sootier.

  But that told me little. I blinked my leaden eyelids and clinched both fists to banish what I was convinced was still a dream. Instead, from room to room a dreadful cacophony of springs, weights and wheels burst into motion. All the house’s roundhead and drop-case clocks began to strike with a clangorous disharmony of ghastly dings and dongs. I clamped my hands to my ears but the clanging left all my internal organs jangled.

  That scream again.

  Hurrying to my window, I scraped at the ice that had, overnight, fogged its panes. Still was I left in something of a quandary. When a man chose to throw his own household into total chaos then he had to be so inconsiderate as to constitute a real nuisance. Someone stood in the snowy courtyard directly below me, I realised.

  Suddenly he fell as if hit, with a moan. It was Lord Hart.

  ‘Look here, James! Footprints! Did that fool Walker leave the gatehouse open last night?’

  Of my own shout he made nothing.

  A sallow-faced James gathered up a Panama from the ground.

  ‘You told me not to give him any keys, m’lord.’

  ‘Someone did. Somebody let them in.’

  ‘If his lordship will only go back inside?’

  ‘Fetch Walker! This minute!’

  When someone was that hell-bent on waking another with his ludicrous yells, when he half scared me to death by straining his larynx to breaking point in such cold air, it was a bit much to hear him try to place the blame on me.

  *

  ‘So what does he, like, expect me to do, then?’ I demanded.

  James and I met at the dog-gate at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘This way, please, Mr Walker. His lordship wants you urgently.’

  ‘Is there a fire or something?’

  ‘Not a fire, sir. There has been an incident.�
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  ‘What incident?’

  ‘You’ll soon see, sir.’

  7 a.m. stopped its appalling ding-dong. That was the marvellous thing about Coberley Hall: the chimes of its clockwork monsters all came together in one great crescendo and echo afterwards.

  *

  Nothing could have prepared me for the unexpected outburst of emotion with which Lord Hart greeted me in the entrance hall.

  ‘Colin, thank God. Has James told you? We have a prowler, the devil we have.’

  ‘So how do you know? They steal something?’

  ‘On the contrary, old chap, they’ve left us something.’

  ‘Where?’

  He broke into a fresh litany of complaint, waving his dragon cane at the porch in furious pantomime.

  I paid no real attention, nor did I believe him.

  ‘Or maybe the fact that we will all freeze to death with the door wide open should tell us something?’

  ‘Go see for yourself, Walker. Believe me, it’s not pretty.’

  ‘That bad, eh?’

  Pinching the collar of my coat at my chin, I marched through the door’s ancient archway. Lying on the doorstep was a severed head, I discovered. Obnoxious pink and red pieces of tough fibrous tissue that had once united muscle to bone were now ripped apart, since the neck had been so crudely detached from the body. One eye was a raw, ruptured socket and a large fleshy tongue dangled by a thread out the side of its mouth. Whoever or whatever had hurled the bloody remains at the door had done so with considerable venom. The eye bled all the way down the door.

  It was the head off a stag. I gave the branched, horny antlers a desultory tap with my toe.

  ‘This someone’s idea of a sick joke?’

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ replied Lord Hart. ‘It’s more sacrilege than sacrifice.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean we should lose our own heads over it.’