A Woman of Consequence (3 page)

It was not until the third day after the accident – and rather late in the afternoon – that Dido was able to revisit the abbey ruins. The demands of sewing, damsons and jelly-making did not permit an earlier escape. But her determination to solve the mystery was, by that time, increased rather than diminished.

For, although Penelope was recovering more rapidly than they had dared to hope, and her periods of consciousness becoming longer, it seemed that Mr Paynter had been right to doubt her memory of the accident. Questions on the subject elicited no more than a gentle shake of the head. She remembered nothing after their leaving the nave to climb the stairs.

And meanwhile, Lucy Crockford had altogether too much to say upon the subject for Dido’s liking.

‘Oh my dear friend,’ she murmured when she visited the vicarage two days after the accident. ‘I blame myself! I blame myself entirely!
I
who
knew
what terrible forces haunted the ruins! I should
never
have taken my poor friend there. Indeed I should not.’ She put a hand to her brow and arranged herself upon the hard sofa of Margaret’s parlour with all the grace that her stout little form would allow.

‘I am sure you have nothing to reproach yourself for,’ said Dido briskly. ‘Penelope lost her footing …’

‘Oh Dido!’ exclaimed Lucy so slowly that there seemed to be an eternity of pity in the words. ‘You do not understand.’ And she sat for a moment sorrowfully shaking her head, too much overcome to continue.

She had a plump, freckled face which was, in truth, ill-suited to sensibility: the eyes were too small and sharp, and there were ill-natured little lines between her brows betraying the peevishness which broke out all too easily when her languishing sentiments passed unheeded. She wore her brown hair pushed back in a careless tumble of curls. Lucy professed to be indifferent to her appearance; but Harriet had once confided to Dido that the careless curls were sustained only by the constant use of papers – and the freckles received generous, but unavailing, applications of Gowland’s Lotion.

‘It is all so very awful,’ she continued in a slow, thrilled voice, ‘for, you know, there must be some kind of trouble coming to the family of Harman-Foote. The ghost would not otherwise have appeared. She only comes as a warning.’

‘I do not think,’ said Dido firmly, ‘that we need concern ourselves with imagined woes. We have trouble enough with poor Penelope lying sick …’

‘Oh! But it cannot have been Pen’s fall the ghost came to warn of. Because …’ she paused a moment to add weight to the announcement of her great insight, ‘
Penelope is not a part of the Madderstone family
.’

‘No, of course she is not, but …’

‘No, Dido,’ Lucy shook her head. ‘I am afraid it is
indisputable. There is some other disaster yet to come.’

‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Dido, tried beyond endurance. ‘We do not even know that Penelope saw a ghost!’

Lucy sat up sharply, her small mouth contracted, her brow furrowed. ‘I declare,’ she cried in a quick, peevish voice, ‘you are quite determined to find out that there is no ghost in the ruins, are you not?’

‘I am determined to come at the truth.’

‘But the truth is that there
is
a ghost. Everyone in the place has seen her now.’

‘Have they?’ cried Dido in amazement. Then, immediately suspecting the information, she asked, ‘And who, precisely is “everyone”?’

‘Oh, all the housemaids – well, I believe that two of them have. And Jones, who is Mrs Harman-Foote’s maid.’

‘They have seen the Grey Nun?’

‘Oh yes! Did you not know? – Well, they have not quite seen the nun herself. But they have seen a light – late at night, on the gallery –
moving about
. Which is as good as seeing the nun.’

‘Is it?’

‘So you see it is proved.’

‘I cannot at all agree that it is proved.’

‘You are determined to ignore the evidence.’

‘No, I am determined to consider
all
the evidence – not only that which supports my prejudice.’

‘And what, pray, is all this other evidence?’

‘Well … I do not yet quite know.’

Lucy smiled with insufferable satisfaction and resumed
her languid accents. ‘Oh! My dear friend!’ she said pityingly, ‘I fear you listen too much to your head and too little to your heart. If you would only allow yourself to
feel
a little more. You would instinctively know, as I do, that there is something dark and terrible in the ruins …’

Dido promised herself that, come what may, she would
prove
there was no ghost.

As she passed through the little side gate which led from the park into the gardens of Madderstone Abbey, Dido paused a moment to catch her breath and gaze across the muddy lawns and felled trees to the house. A pleasant, rather rambling building standing on slightly rising ground, it had been built and added to and embellished ever since the first Harman had bought the land at the time of the Dissolution. Every generation had made ‘improvements’ according to its own taste, so that now the old Tudor core was flanked by many-windowed wings from Queen Anne’s time, a grand ballroom built by the late Mr Harman and a conservatory and orangery of the present owner’s creation.

At a short distance from the house stood the broken outline of the once great religious foundation; its mass of tumbled, ivy-covered walls appeared rough and irregular in the fading light, the great broken arch of the east window loomed against flying, red-tinted clouds.
A likely home for a ghost
, thought Dido as she set off through the mud towards the ruins.

And there had been a ghost at the abbey for as long as anyone in Madderstone or Badleigh could remember. Everyone could tell a story of the Grey Nun – though, as
is generally the case with apparitions, she had usually been seen by a relative – or a friend – or the relative of a friend – rather than by the speaker himself. And Dido could not admire the originality of her story, for it was one which had probably been told of every ruined abbey since Henry VIII turned the nation to the Protestant faith.

In the ‘old days’ a rich young girl had fallen in love with a poor knight and had been parted from him by her cruel father – a baron (for barons are, by common consent, much more addicted to mistreating their daughters than any other class of men). The girl had refused the grand suitor her father would have forced upon her, become a nun and pined to death within the abbey walls. Her spirit had haunted the place ever since. Though why she should haunt the abbey, Dido did not know. She could not help but think that it would have been much more to the purpose to go off to the wicked baron’s castle and haunt
him
…

But by now she was approaching the ruins and, as she looked about at the red sky, the lengthening shadows, and the rising moon gleaming palely through an ivy-clad arch, she found that she was not quite above a superstitious shudder. Perhaps she should have deferred her visit to a more propitious time …

No, there was no rational reason why twilight should be feared more in a ruined abbey than in the parlour at home. She walked on resolutely, but a minute later there was a lurching of the heart. A dark figure was just visible among the great fallen stones of the nave, pacing towards the night stair – mounting towards the gallery above, and vanishing into the shadows.

She stopped and, before she could quite reason herself out of the notion that she had seen a ghost, another, smaller figure appeared, rounding a corner of the ruins and dawdling towards the house. Fortunately there was no mistaking this for a spectre. It was, very certainly, young Georgie, walking slowly: dragging and scuffing his good boots mercilessly. The injuring of shoe leather was a crime Dido never could regard with equanimity and, for a moment, she forgot all about ghosts.

‘Pick your feet up, Georgie!’ she cried indignantly. ‘You are spoiling your boots!’

‘Well, what if I am?’ He stopped in front of her, thrust out his plump chin and stared up defiantly, then put out one foot and scraped it slowly and deliberately against a stone that edged the path. A pale, ugly scuff mark appeared on the dirty, but costly, brown leather.

Dido withdrew her eyes from the distressing sight – and found herself looking more closely at the fat little face which was watching eagerly for her disapproval. There was a fresh red bruise upon his cheek.

‘Your face is hurt, Georgie,’ she said – glad of the distraction. ‘How did you do that?’

He quickly put his hand up to cover it. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘I just fell – on the path back there.’

‘You had better have some witch hazel put upon it immediately.’

He shrugged and began to walk away, saying something quietly which sounded remarkably like, ‘It’s none of your damned business.’

‘Georgie!’ she called after him angrily. ‘I do not think your mama would like to hear you using that word.’

‘But she can’t hear me, can she?’ he said and he was off – still scraping his boots with all his might.

She watched him swagger away along the path, greatly angered by his self-consequence. He looked so disgustingly easy and prosperous in his fashionably cut blue jacket and his pale pantaloons …

‘Ah!’ she cried aloud.

Her anger suddenly forgotten, she turned from contemplation of the retreating little gentleman and looked instead at the path along which he had come – a path which the traffic of ‘improvements’ had left almost an inch deep in mud … And she thought again about those pale,
clean
pantaloons …

No one could have fallen upon that path without staining his clothes. It was an impossibility …

So how had he come by such a bruise? And why had he lied about it?

She almost ran after him, but stopped herself and stood irresolute on the muddy path in the gathering dusk and encroaching shadows of the ruins. Her curiosity – that powerful motive of her character – was now pulling her in two directions: urging her to pursue the boy with a question or two, but also demanding that she discover who was in the gallery.

For someone
was
in the gallery; she had seen no one descend during her conversation with Georgie. And, since the boy had seemed to come from the shadows surrounding the nave, the person up there might well be the cause of the bruise. And besides, she would dearly love to know who else was taking an interest in the haunted ruins …

She hurried into the deeper, slightly damp gloom between the high walls and picked her way across the broken pavement of the nave, where fallen pillars and great blocks of fallen masonry lay about, choked with weeds and ivy and deep drifts of dead leaves. A bird clattered up from a twisted ash tree which grew in the sanctuary, making her start foolishly. But she continued up the night stair, clinging with one hand to the ivy on the wall, and came into the deeper dusk of the gallery, which smelt of moss and damp stone – and which seemed, at first, to be entirely deserted.

She stared along it, her eyes gradually accustoming themselves to the poor light. Parts of the roof had long since fallen away and the walls were dank and fringed with moss; tiny ferns grew in the gaps between stones. Beneath the holes in the roof, the floor was worn into hollows by rain which had fallen in upon it for centuries: in one particularly deep hollow water glinted darkly. On one side the arched front of the gallery gave a dizzying view down into the great nave of the old abbey church and the magnificent Gothic outline of the east window. And through the remains of the window’s stone tracery could be seen the muddy pool and the blazing red of the beeches and yellow of the chestnuts in the park.

There was a movement beside one of the pillars that supported the roof of the gallery. A dark shape stepped out – and resolved itself into the figure of Captain Laurence. His back was towards her and he did not see her immediately. He stood instead gazing out through the great window towards the drained pool and the park. He raised a hand, rubbed his chin thoughtfully then turned
back into the gallery with a look of great calculation on his face – and saw Dido watching him.

‘Miss Kent!’ he stepped forward and bowed with a very uncomfortable look. ‘What are you doing here in the gloom?’ he cried. And then, changing his expression to one of tender concern: ‘Are you too hoping to discover what it was that frightened poor Miss Lambe?’

She acknowledged that that was indeed her errand and he eyed her keenly. ‘And have you found out anything?’ he asked.

‘I have as yet had no opportunity to look about me,’ she said returning his keen gaze with interest. ‘I met young Georgie on the path just now. Has he too been searching for the ghost?’

No, he hastened to assure her, he had seen nothing of the boy. There was a momentary hint of alarm as he spoke, but whether that arose from the consciousness of lying, or the fear of having been overlooked, Dido could not quite determine.

She knew no positive harm of the captain, but she did not like him. He was a big, loosely made man of one or two and thirty, handsome in what she considered to be a rather coarse style, with a great deal of colour in his face, heavy brows and a lot of thick black hair. In Dido’s opinion, he was altogether more
masculine
than a man had any cause to be. Wherever he went there was likely to be jealousy among the other men – and folly among the ladies.

He was now looking about him and exclaiming that it was ‘a mighty strange business. I cannot account for it. Now, if we were on board ship, it would be a different
matter. Some men get overwrought when they have been a long time at sea, Miss Kent, and imagine that they see all manner of things. Why, I remember one occasion …’

‘But we are not at sea, Captain Laurence,’ interrupted Dido who was in no mood for naval talk. She began to walk along the uneven stones of the gallery. ‘What did Penelope see?’ she mused. ‘What did she mean when she said “I saw her”.’

‘There cannot have been anyone here in the gallery,’ said the captain as he followed her, ‘for you see there is no door here,’ he waved a hand at the blank walls. ‘And here,’ he continued as they reached the end, ‘is only this broken wall and a drop of twelve feet or more down into the nave. Even a sailor could not have climbed up – though on board ship, you know …’