An Inquiry Into Love and Death (2 page)

I was leaving the familiar confines of Oxford behind, and the fear mixed deep in my stomach with sour, shamed excitement. I loved life at school—the quiet, the perfect alignment of the hours of each day. I was truly grieved by the death of my uncle. And yet, a small voice inside me admitted that I wanted to, as Caro had said,
do
something.

I stowed my valise and heavy books I’d carried, and took a deep breath. There was nothing for it, then, but to go. I removed my hat and tied on a scarf, as my earlobe-length hair tended to curl when given its way, and the wind would have a heyday with it. I pulled on a pair of driving gloves and looked at the groom again. To my surprise, he gave me a nod.

I got in the motorcar and drove away.

T
he roadster was sleek and picked up speed quickly. I had a long drive ahead.

The town of Rothewell wasn’t in my Baedeker’s, but the maps provided by Mr. Reed showed it somewhere on the north coast of Devonshire. I made my painstaking way past Bristol as the familiar countryside vanished, stopping every hour to recheck my way. This was nothing like sitting back in a train compartment, waiting to get off at your destination. In adverts, I’d seen drawings of drivers flying down the road, carefree and easy. Instead I gripped the wheel, my back aching, straining my eyes at rare road signs as I passed fields of grazing sheep and tidy hedgerows.

At first, other motorcars passed me or came the other way—men in overcoats and goggles, a smart-looking fellow and his pretty blond girlfriend, a few rowdy boys waving at me and shouting quips I couldn’t hear—but as I got closer to the seacoast and turned along its quiet roads, the other cars all but disappeared, leaving me the lanes to myself.

Somewhere in the fourth hour, along the coast toward Exmoor, it began to rain, a light sprinkling through the heavy, wet air of the sea, and I was glad I had pulled the roof up during one of my many stops. By then I would gladly have pulled over to wait out the weather, or even to spend the night, but I wanted to make Barnstaple if I could, and there was no hotel to be seen. I trundled on as the roads got wetter, trying my best to see through the roadster’s windscreen.

By dark my hands were shaking and my head throbbed with pain. I no longer felt adventurous. I longed for my familiar rooms at Oxford, but of course I couldn’t go back. I had reached Barnstaple at last, and in the morning it would be time to see the magistrate.

•   •   •

Barnstaple was pretty enough, though of course not as beautiful as Oxford to my eye. I found an old hotel near the River Taw (
EXCEPTIONAL ACCOMMODATION—MODERN CONS INSTALLED—REASONABLE RATES
), which seemed to house a small but eclectic mix of tourists, couples, and traveling businessmen. If I was an unusual sort of guest as a woman traveling alone, no one had the bad grace to remark on it, and I was too tired to care. I had gone straight to my room and slept fitfully despite my exhaustion, visions of the rainy road and memories of Toby flitting behind my closed eyes.

Now, in the bright, chilled sunshine of the following morning, I sat in the magistrate’s office on the second floor of a centuries-old building in the center of town, wearing my most formal skirt and jacket, itchy stockings, and high heels, trying not to twist my gloves to ruin in my damp hands.

“Rothewell, you see, is far too small to have a magistrate or a coroner in residence, so your uncle’s case was brought here,” said the magistrate, whose name was Mr. Hindhead. He was about fiftyish, sported thinning blond hair, and was ensconced from head to toe in soft, pillowy fat. “The coroner has examined the body. Do you understand?”

I nodded, for the second time in two days sitting before a man who sat behind a desk and attempted to explain the world to me. “Is there to be . . . an autopsy, then?”

He shook his head. “No, my dear, unless of course you request one. But even so . . .” He sighed, as if burdened. “The coroner has already ruled, you see.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, that is, he examined your uncle’s body. You just missed him—he was here last night. As the circumstances were a little unusual, the coroner has to rule one way or the other, and if he sees evidence of foul play, we call in the police and go from there.” Mr. Hindhead pulled a small tin from his desk drawer and extracted a mint from it, which he popped between his thin lips. “But the coroner’s already been, my dear, and he’s ruled it an accident.”

“An accident? You mean my uncle fell?”

“Yes, so it would seem. Though I assure you”—he waved a placating hand at me, as if I’d managed to move—“there was no evidence of drunkenness.”

The thought of my uncle Toby drunk was so jarring that it took me a moment to refocus. “I don’t understand. Are you saying I’m not needed here?”

“Yes, Miss Leigh, you are, but only for the formality of the identification. It’s just the last bit of paperwork, and then your family can put this tragedy behind you. In a way it’s good news, you see. No lingering. It’s bad enough for a girl alone. I’ve never seen such a thing. You haven’t a cousin, a brother-in-law, anyone who could have come? Well. You mustn’t worry about the rest of it, calling the undertaker’s man or such. Mr. Leigh’s solicitor will take care of all of that.”

I swallowed. I hadn’t thought about arranging the cremation. I would call Mr. Reed as soon as I could find a telephone. “I see. Well.” I swallowed again. “All right, then.”

Mr. Hindhead summoned a constable, and we left the office for a warren of hallways and stairs. I followed, numb, not noting where we were going, thinking of Toby slipping over a cliff’s edge. What had he been doing? Taking a walk, perhaps? Searching for something? Was it something to do with his profession? I pictured him going too far to the land’s edge, not noting how close he was, and that endless moment when his feet slipped from under him. . . .

The old building housing the magistrate’s office seemed to be connected via corridor to another, larger building. I realized we had come to a paneled hall in a basement. Mr. Hindhead stopped in front of a set of thick double doors. He set his hand on the knob of one and turned to me, his face serious.

“Miss Leigh. Are you ready?”

I managed to nod.

“Very well, then. Constable Jenkins, you are witness. We’ll do this quickly.”

He pushed open the door. I could see nothing within but a bare floor, a few shelves, the corner of a table. I didn’t realize I had not moved until I felt the constable touch my elbow. I glanced up into his ruddy face and he nodded at me, his eyes pitying me from over the large brush of his mustache.

I stepped forward. The table held a body under a thick canvas sheet. I forced my legs to take me closer, and Mr. Hindhead folded back the canvas.

I had been picturing Toby in my mind on that day at the beach, years ago. He’d been young then, and if never exactly handsome, he’d had the buoyancy of youth about him in the morning sunlight, a shy, fleeting smile, and eyes that lit on me with pleasure. Even the last time I’d seen him, some eight years ago, he’d been trim, clean-shaven, well-groomed, if weighed down by some sadness I didn’t understand. He’d barely looked at me then, and his visit had been brief, something I’d taken no note of, as I’d had no idea he would disappear from my life.

He looked older, now, than his forty-three years. His mouth was pulled into a grim line, his cheeks and brows slack as if with despair. Death, I realized, had aged him. Down the left side of his face was a swath of angry purple-red contusions, and his nose was set crookedly in his face. His brown hair was uncombed, matted with something dark. His shoulders, under the sheet, were bare. I had never seen my uncle in anything other than a shirt, collar, waistcoat, and tie.

Wrong. This is wrong.

“Miss Leigh,” said Mr. Hindhead. “Do you identify this man as your uncle, Tobias Leigh?”

“I do,” I said.

The magistrate nodded, and Constable Jenkins moved forward and pulled the sheet back over my uncle’s face. I lifted my eyes and saw Mr. Hindhead watching me from across the table.

“A girl alone,” he said, and shook his head. “Such a shame. I’ll order up some tea. It’s almost over, my dear. It’s almost over.”

•   •   •

By afternoon it began to rain again and I was driving through a landscape of thick woods, the leaves brittle on the trees in the long afternoon light, some of the branches beginning to lose their foliage altogether. As I stopped at a crossing and waited for a farmer to move his cow from the road—he was most apologetic, and the cow most reluctant—I heard a sharp pattering over my head. I leaned out the window and looked up to see rain dripping from the undersides of the canopy of leaves, woven over the road, the branches bowing under the lowered wet sky.

I hadn’t wept for Toby. I couldn’t. My eyes burned and my throat was choked closed, but nothing would come. Instead I had moved through the hours mechanically, somehow doing what needed doing—nodding when the magistrate spoke, placing the call through to the solicitor, checking out of the inn—as my brain gratefully surrendered to a thick fog. I barely remembered driving from Barnstaple and could not recall any of the scenery I’d passed since.

Now, as I looked up at the leafy canopy and felt cool rain on my face, I began to awaken. I realized I was lost. Most of the day had slipped away from me as I took wrong turn after wrong turn on the roads. I had not rechecked the maps. I had simply driven, the memory of Toby’s battered face the only thing I could see before my eyes.

But Rothewell was on the sea, and even in my blindness I had pointed the car in that direction. I could hear the sea now, a low roar complementing the light patter of rain. I could smell salt in the air. There is something about the smell of the sea that has an effect on every human living, and always will. My sluggish mind began to move.

I leaned into the passenger seat and pulled up the map, wondering how far off course I was. The map was nearly useless; how to know whether the narrow inked line on a piece of paper corresponded with the two-track lane of mud I was currently following? I turned it this way and that as the cow and its owner made their way off the road. I should try to keep the sea to my right, I thought. That was the best way to stay in the right direction. I was pleased with this thought until I realized, too late, that I could have asked the farmer for directions.

An hour later, the rain was coming down harder, and dusk fell. I was tired. I came to a crossroads and pulled over.

I got out of the Alvis, pulled up my coat collar, and looked around me. The road each way was deserted. It had been so long since I had seen another car, I might have been transported to fairyland, or backward in time. The air was purplish gray, the only sound the rush of raindrops in the trees overhead and the crunch of my shoes on the gravel. Somewhere far off, a lark called. I could no longer hear the sound of the sea over the rain.

I huddled deeper into my coat. Here, in this desolate spot, the thoughts I’d been pushing away began to overtake me. Toby had come this way. He hadn’t been researching a project, as I’d told Caroline, and he hadn’t been on holiday. It was time to admit to myself what Toby had done for a living, and that it frightened me.

Toby had hunted ghosts.

Your uncle was working on one of his unusual projects
.

Ghosts—the pursuit of them, the study of them—had been my uncle’s profession. He’d made a living being called upon by the haunted and the desperate. He’d traveled all over the country, chasing specters of the dead.
Toby’s foolishness
, my father had called it—for my father, the scientist, most certainly did not believe in the afterlife.
Have a little sympathy for your brother
, had been my mother’s words to my father.
After all, he truly believes he can see them.

Toby was dead himself now, where I had left him in that silent basement room. Again I felt the nagging tug that something was wrong. Perhaps it was the shock I’d sustained, or the violence I’d seen done to my uncle’s body, but I couldn’t shake my unease.

A drunk man would have slipped from a cliff, perhaps, or a man outside in a blinding storm. But Toby hadn’t been in Rothewell to take the air or to exercise himself with constitutionals. If he had been on Rothewell’s cliffs, I couldn’t help but think it had been for a purpose connected with his lifelong search for the dead.

What ghost had he followed to this place?

I closed my eyes, listened to the rain, felt my nose grow cold in the chill air. I hadn’t known much about Toby’s profession. I’d never asked him about it. I’d never really wanted to think about it, in truth. I saw now that all my life, I’d separated the gruesome idea of Toby’s ghost hunting from the kind man I knew, as if they were two different people. And now, in this horrible situation, I was following him to his final case.

I opened my eyes again, and my glance caught something by the side of the road. I approached it, pushing aside some underbrush with my damp, gloved fingers, and revealed a sign, long neglected and fallen over. I pulled it upright and cleared it off.

ROTHEWELL
, it said.

This was the way, then. I held the sign a moment longer, its dirt crumbling over my sleeve.

Something rustled in the tall brush behind me. I dropped the sign and whirled, peering into the gloom. The brambles and dead honeysuckle bobbed where something had brushed by, but no other sound came. It had been only a rabbit, perhaps, or a mole, running from a predator.

Still, my back prickled as I walked back to the motorcar, and as I drove off as quickly as I could, I imagined something silent watching me from far back in the trees.

R
othewell showed itself in drifting silence as I emerged from the woods. First came a worn track, the edges of which were overgrown with bushes and the dead heads of wild flowering shrubs. A few lonely cottages peered from within the greenery. Behind these cottages was only a shocking wall of white-gray sky, as if the structures were positioned on the edge of the earth. As I crawled the motorcar along the bumpy road, I saw that I was in fact on a high ridge. Far ahead, I could see that the road fell away and twisted, dotted with more houses as it made its complex way down toward the sea.

The water itself, here, was vast and beautiful. This was not the calm, clear blue water of a tropical paradise, but choppy and cold, with whitecaps frothing on the tops of the restless waves as they were driven toward a rocky beach. At the bottom of the hillside road were more buildings, set on a rise over the empty shore. Past these there was only the sea and the sky, blending with the soft touch of blurred chalk at the horizon.

Ahead of me, something came out of the rainy gloom. As it drew closer, I realized it was none other than an old-fashioned donkey cart, driven by a man hunched into his coat and cap. The donkey plodded, its tail flicking, unconcerned about the weather.

The driver reined in as he saw me, and I stopped as I pulled alongside him and leaned out the window. “Excuse me; I wonder if you could help me?”

The man leaned toward me, and I saw that he was thirtyish, with a reddish beard that likely indicated red hair under his cap. “I suppose I could do that,” he said amicably, his eyes lit with curiosity he was too polite to speak of. “What can I help you with?”

“I’m looking for a place called Barrow House. Perhaps you know it?”

Now his look was tempered with genuine surprise and a quick hint of wariness. “I do. You’re to do with the fellow who lived there, then?”

“I’m his niece, yes.”

“You do look a little like him. I’m very sorry for your loss.” He removed his cloth cap for a moment, indeed revealing a head of red hair, and replaced it again. “My name is Edward Bruton. I’m the deliveryman in these parts. If I can help, please let me know.”

He seemed in no hurry to answer my question, though it meant he had to sit in the rain. “Jillian Leigh,” I replied. “A deliveryman?” I could not help glancing at the donkey, which stood good-naturedly in its traces.

Edward Bruton smiled, glancing at my beautiful motor. “A bit old-fashioned, I suppose. But the fact is, she handles the climb better than any other animal or vehicle. It isn’t easy getting into Rothewell proper”—he nodded in the direction of the buildings at the bottom of the road, by the water—“so they use me. I’m postman, milkman, messenger boy—whatever is needed, I do it.”

“You must know everything, then. Which way is Barrow House?”

“Just down the track, take the bend to the left, and you’ll see it. Go all the way to the end of the road—it’s the farthest house by the woods.” He peered past me into the car. “But surely you’re not going there alone, are you?”

“I am.” I looked at his expression. “Is that a problem?”

“Well, no. No, of course not. We just don’t get many young ladies here alone, that’s all.”

“My uncle was alone.”

He nodded, but his eyes were thinking of something else. “So he was.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, holding my hand out to him. “I’ve got you standing in the rain. I won’t keep you any longer. Good night.”

He looked at my hand, then shook it with a wry look that said I’d just amused him. “Good night, miss. I’ll check on you in the morning and see if you need anything; how is that?”

I thanked him and drove on into the descending darkness, my wheels bumping over the road.

Barrow House was exactly where Edward Bruton had said it would be—at least, there was only one house there, far past all the others. It was dark and unlit. I pulled up next to the low wrought-iron gate and got out of the car.

It was a stone building, obviously old. A triangular gable rose from the first-story roof, on the left; and the second story, added to the main structure on some long-ago date, had a second triangular gable on the right. The effect was lopsided but somehow impressive. Behind the house was the tree line, an extension of the woods I had just come out of, and the lane here did a gentle curve, presumably toward more neighbors not in view.

I could strongly smell the sea; in fact, I could nearly taste it on the back of my tongue, the way one can taste thick fog when walking in it. The air was lowering and damp, the rain trickling down the glass panes of Barrow House and running off the edges of the gables. It was growing darker and colder by the moment; the house, as odd and lonely as it was, would at least be dry inside.

Far away, a man whistled for his dog. There was no other human sound.

I pulled my valise from the motorcar and took my pocketbook and the key ring with a single key the solicitor had given me from the front seat. I unlatched the gate and hurried up the front steps to the house, unlocking the door and setting everything down in the dark just inside. Then I trotted back to the car and took out my stack of schoolbooks, hurrying back so the books would not get too wet. There was still time for studying tonight.

I had been hoping against hope for a modern installation of electric light, but I was disappointed. I fumbled in the gloomy foyer and found an old oil lamp and a box of matches. I lit the lamp and opened the wick as far as I could, seeing only a dusty, cluttered hall, a door to the left, and a set of stairs before me. The place smelled just a little unused, as if the occupant had been gone only a little while. Toby had died three days ago.

A quick look through the main floor showed a few rooms full of mismatched furniture, a sign of a succession of renters over the years. I couldn’t see any belongings sitting on tables or draped over chairs. At the back of the house, in the bare kitchen, I found the first evidence that Toby had even been there—a single ceramic bowl stood on the washboard, cleaned out and left next to a single, equally clean spoon.

I sighed. A bachelor’s kitchen, and the long drive had made me hungry. Well, I’d been feeding myself for as long as I could remember; my mother could barely prepare toast. I’d have to make do.

But as I swung my lamp in the direction of the larder, something in the light caught my eye. I leaned closer.

In the middle of the wooden kitchen table—precisely in the middle—was a pocket watch. It gleamed dully, the lamplight reflecting from its glass face. I picked it up and turned it over, my fingers taking in the familiar surface. This was Toby’s pocket watch; I had played with it as a child. And suddenly, the weight of remembrance was on me again.

Toby had often visited during my childhood. He had been a plain-looking man whose face gave nothing away, a man one would never notice in a crowd: of average height, neither slender nor fat. He had short dark hair and his suits were never new, less from poverty—though there may have been that—than from simple bachelor carelessness. He spoke little and seemed particularly tongue-tied around children.

I suppose he was hardly the dashing, heroic type of uncle who told war stories at bedtime, or the kind of uncle whose visits delighted children, laughing and full of fun. Toby spent most of his visits reading and writing, talking with my parents about grown-up subjects, or pottering about our house and gardens, fixing things on his own. After my mother found he had unclogged a backed-up sink drain in the kitchen unasked, she declared him a gentleman and nearly kissed him; he blushed, shook his head, and said nothing.

And yet, in his unguarded moments, like that morning on the beach—moments very rare in a man of Toby’s shyness—he was the best sort of uncle, the attentive kind who never made a child feel foolish or unwanted.

I had a vivid memory of sitting on the floor of my father’s study, quietly reading my picture books, as Toby sat at the desk and worked. I had the same memory of reading chapter books next to him as I got older; we must have shared this ritual of quiet companionship for years. Most adults require something when in a room with a child: a peppered series of questions, usually, that seem like conversation to the adult but to the child are a test they cannot know the answers to. Toby had a gift for silence. He could simply sit with a child in peace and accept her companionship as something of value in itself.

We had never exchanged gifts, but the pocket watch was utterly familiar in my hands, dredged up from an old, half-forgotten memory. Perhaps he had let his little niece play with his watch, for in my mind the watch had been larger and heavier, my hands smaller.

None of this fit the idea of a ghost hunter. My parents had never hidden Toby’s occupation from me; I had no recollection now of how I learned of it, only that the idea made me so deeply uneasy I never spoke of it. Was it shame that had made me willfully pretend Toby’s profession didn’t exist? A little, yes. I wanted the girls at Somerville to think I was normal, to like me. My academic pedigree through my parents was something my fellow students understood.

But mostly, the reason was fear. I’d never been able to piece together the man I knew with the pursuit of the dead. I’d never seen a ghost myself, but Toby had believed in them. Either Toby had been a lifelong madman, or he’d truly seen spirits. I didn’t want to contemplate either possibility.

Sometime after I turned fourteen, Toby stopped coming, and he never visited again. At the mention of him, my mother’s lips grew tense, and a tired look came into my father’s eyes. I was never told why. I slid the watch into my pocket.

I took my valise up the narrow stairs to the second floor, abandoning the idea of food. I was too exhausted to do anything else tonight, and the morning’s gruesome appointment had left me depressed. The first bedroom I found was Toby’s. I couldn’t bear to go in, to sleep on his pillow, there among his sweaters and underthings. I found a second bedroom across the hall instead, furnished with only a bed and dresser.

I rummaged through a nearby closet for linens, which were vaguely musty-smelling, and made up the narrow bed. When I finished I peeked out the window past the yellowed lace curtains, wondering whether I’d see any other sign of life in Rothewell.

Nothing presented itself. There were no neighbors in this direction, only the back garden, surrounded by a stone wall, and beyond that, the darker ink of the line of trees. I was beginning to miss the familiar, if incessant, sounds of my small student flat: the shouts and laughter from the square outside, the chatter of other girls in the halls, the whistle of a teakettle in the communal kitchen. Someone was always awake, even late into the night after curfew, and one could always find the yellow under-door light of a midnight study session.

That night, as I slept, I had vague, uneasy dreams. I seemed to be awake, though I knew I was asleep; there was cold sweat on my neck, and my hair was damp. My neck hurt from the tight clench of my jaw, and my shoulders ached as I lay on my side on the hard bed. I wanted to move, but in the unbearable logic of dreams I could not, and lay frozen where I was, panting in panic.

I may have dozed uneasily again, but in the next dream something scratched at the window behind my turned back.
A tree branch
, I said to myself in the dream, and I tried again to move. I was still stuck, listening to the sound behind me—a long sound, inexorable, like something being dragged slowly across the glass from one side to the other. I ground my teeth and flinched in my frozen place, listening to it go on and on.

When dawn came, I awoke stiff and more exhausted than when I’d gone to bed. My nightgown was damp with sweat. I lay staring at the ceiling and felt the vivid details of the night wash over me. For a long time, the fear stayed with me, even in the morning sun. But as dreams do, it began to fade, and eventually I pulled myself out of bed.

The dream had seemed real, but as I stretched my shoulders and rubbed my aching neck, I knew it was all a fiction. For through the lace curtains, I could see that there was no tree outside the bedroom window. There was nothing there at all.