Black Heather (12 page)

He dropped me upon the worn but lovely old silk covering of the sofa, and before I could catch my breath and thank him after the pain of my shaken foot subsided, he was out in the gallery giving orders to a woman whom I took to be the housekeeper.

I sat up, rubbing my foot and wondering how I should ever make myself presentable to do justice to such an elegant household. Nothing the housekeeper could do for me would substitute clean, white stockings for my muddy, tattered ones or new shoes for my low travel shoes. And here was my best coat, which looked as though its hem had been dipped in the mud—as, in fact, it had. Upon giving some dispirited attention to my general appearance, I was surprised that the noble Sir Nicholas hadn’t thrown me back onto the muddy heath, rather than risk soiling his own fine hunting jacket by carrying me.

I ached in every bone and felt sure Sir Nicholas did likewise, but when I leaned back dizzily against the sofa, there was my green bonnet dangling halfway down my back and my hair falling in long witchlocks around my shoulders. I was too tired to care.

In this disheveled appearance, my second in as many days, I felt even less comfortable when I beheld the woman in the doorway, a middle-aged person in black, so uncompromisingly stuffed into her dress-uniform that she put me in mind of a sausage on two flat, serviceable feet.

“You be the young person Sir Nicholas mentioned, mum?”

I was so nervous that I nearly answered “Aye!”
which would have shocked Father and Mama no end; for they had seen to it that I was reared up to proper English like the gentry, Father having done well in the merchant line after beginning as a clerk and supercargo on the coastal packets to Ireland. But except for Mrs. Hardwicke’s language, which had the twang of the lower orders, she affected me almost as did Sir Nicholas upon first sight. Her graying hair was braided and wound around her broad, not ignoble head, and her bosom was like a great shelf carefully encased. The rest of her too was in every way the perfect representative for a great house. I longed for her good opinion of me and started to explain my accident.

“Aye, ’tis the way of it, mum. Sir Nicholas has obligingly explained. Come along of me, leanin’ so—upon my arm.”

Thus challenged, I felt that I must put my weight on that foot, whether I could or no, and set my feet upon the floor and hopped over to her with gritted teeth. The hopping movement made me quite giddy with pain, and Mrs. Hardwicke, watching me, seemed to be weighing me in some curious way.

“Enough, lass; enough.”

Gladly, I stopped and clung to the pretty spinet near the door.

“I see ye’re right enough.”

I looked so astonished that her face broke into a grim smile.

“It’s been tried afore, Miss. Usually the ankle, I believe. I was that surprised Sir Nicholas fell in with your little scheme.” I was bristling indignantly when she added, “Many’s the Heatherton miss that has a fancy to play Lady Everett and we’ve had such a blooming of turned ankles as would give pause to a passel of surgeons. I’m Mrs. Hardwicke, lass. Sit ye down. Here. Let me see that foot.”

“I’m sorry I’m so muddy. I did not wish to stain the lovely sofa, and all.”

She was busy looking over my stockinged foot. “Nonsense. They’ll clean. I have an efficacious remedy. Hmm. A good stiff soak in boiling water with a bit of powder and a brisk rubbing afterward will put this foot in much better case ... So you’re the lass that means to make purchase of the Hag’s Head.”

Confused by this change of subject, I murmured, “It’s hard to say. I haven’t really seen it yet. Only the ground floor and the wine cellar.”

“Not a bad bit of business, that.”

I did not know whether she meant the strained muscles of my foot or the purchase of the Hag’s Head, and I hesitated to reply to this equivocal remark. She seemed to have forgotten it as she went on her efficient way, testing my toes and my ankle.

“You were lucky, lass. You might have broke a bone and limped the rest of your life like Hardwicke does. I had an aunt who did so, and from a simple turned foot, just as you did.” Cheerful
thoughts, both of them, but she went on as though such were everyday problems. “So you haven’t been abovestairs at the Hag’s Head.”

“Not yet.”

“Hmph. Be advised and do not.”

I began to be suspicious of her interest in the old haunted place. Was she pleading her employer’s case by warning me away from its purchase? I thought it rather shabby and unworthy of Sir Nicholas.

“I haven’t decided yet,” I explained quite truthfully.

“Just so. Just so.” She paused and looked up at me. “It would be best if you do not bespeak its purchase in this house, or even make mention of the inn itself.”

“Really?” I asked with an edge of scorn. “I am not afraid of His Lordship’s disapproval.”

She looked at me several seconds without replying. It made me singularly nervous.

“I see His Ludship’s not told you the whole of it. The Hag’s Head was the property of my husband’s people since it was built, and that’ll be nigh two hundred years agone. And while Hardwicke—my husband, that is—was off fighting the Frenchies in Egypt and getting his leg stiffened, his father sold out the Hag’s Head to Mistress Sedley and came for to drink up the profits of the sale.”

“I’m so sorry,” I murmured, not seeing how I was to blame.

“Aye. ’Tis a sore matter to Hardwicke. I thought he’d as lief do murder to Miss Megan and the other when he come home from the wars against Boney-pat, dragging a leg-like, and that cross to find his father’d left him naught but liquor debts. But we’ve a fair good life in Sir Nicholas’s service. Mayhap he’ll be forgetting, one day.” She rose from her knees with a satisfied air ill befitting the bitter story she related.

“Now, Miss, ye’ll be right as right, once ye’ve had a proper soaking of that foot.”

“You are very kind.” Then I added what concerned me more at the moment in this palatial manor house, which was so unknown and awe-inspiring to me, and in which I felt I could get lost and not be found for a fortnight. “Perhaps it would be better if your husband does not learn about my interest in the Hag’s Head. After all, I may not purchase. I do not know for sure, not having seen it all.”

“May be,” she said skeptically. “But Ezra has sharp ears, and he’s not above listening at keyholes.”

“And what, my love, am I not above listening to at keyholes—or even doorways?” asked an oily male voice in the open doorway behind us.

CHAPTER TEN

I started guiltily, w
ondering how dangerous Ezra Hardwicke could be if he heard such news in its worst possible aspect, by eavesdropping. Mrs. Hardwicke made me flinch with her brisk , indifference to the feelings of this dangerously embittered person.

“Get on with you, man. We are talking female talk. The lass was by way of being rescued out on heath by His Ludship.”

“Dear me, dear me,” murmured the man in the doorway, chuckling with such an evil sound as fairly curdled my blood. “Another of the little lambs, is it?” He came limping into the room dragging his right leg noticeably, for it appeared to be stiffened throughout the knee and calf region.

Everything his wife had suggested about Ezra Hardwicke seemed to be true, but in a curiously reverse manner. I had expected a huge, burly man, beetle-browed and ham-handed. This man, on the contrary, was a lean, cadaverous individual with lined face, curved back, and as malign a smile upon his bloodless lips as ever I saw. He looked as though the very marrow had been sipped from his bones and what remained was the mere dry
carcass. Yet there was that smile, revealing small, gleaming white teeth.

His wife said briskly, “It’s a different ewe lamb from the others, Ezra. And one that deserves some respect, I’m thinking. Miss—what was your name, lass?”

“But my dear Sophy, what would it be except ‘Bodmun’? This is that very ewe lamb that’s come to hunt down and exorcize the ghost at the Hag’s Head.”

Mrs. Hardwicke looked vexed, and I was downright worried. He made a stiff little bow whose grotesque elegance even his black homespun stockings and his cobbler’s apron could not destroy. Once upon a time, I thought, his family had been gentry, and something of genteel old manners showed through the dry and mocking exterior. Though I felt a repulsion toward him based upon Mrs. Hardwicke’s unwifely warning, I felt sorry for him too, in an odd sort of way based partly upon a respect for what he had once been.

“I am Kathleen Bodmun, but it is not very imposing—or even a name of any genteel importance, sir, and I am surprised you know it so well,” I said. Then I added, as a sop to their good nature, “I’m very sorry to have put you to this trouble, but a pair of Sir Nicholas’s dogs chased me across the moor, and I turned my foot on a stone when I was crossing through a kind of wooded bottom.”

The Hardwickes exchanged glances. For the first time I wondered if each was deceiving me about the other. Perhaps her warning to me had been deliberate, for strange reasons each of them understood about the other.

“But surely, Miss,” said Ezra Hardwicke, his gray eyebrows raised, “You’re never saying you found dogs of this locality in Seven Spinney?”

“Is it possible you think I am lying about such a trivial thing?”

“A lie is easy,” said Hardwicke, inclining his head as one who has often taken such refuge, “but when you speak of Seven Spinney as a trivial thing, well
...
that is quite another matter and worthy of comment throughout the length and breadth of the West Riding, We, all of us, know that Seven Spinney is a place shunned by our hunting dogs.” His voice was so full of scorn that even the oily surface did not cover it. I remembered suddenly that Sir Nicholas and his loader had behaved in the same way when I suggested that their dogs had first caught sight of me in the cope that they called Seven Spinney.

I said hastily, “I saw the dog, across the little stream, what you call in these parts a beck. At least
...
” The first, preposterous idea of what I had seen there came back to me now. I hesitated to mention it, knowing how they would scoff at the idea. “At least, I thought it must be a dog, because it could not be what it looked to be.”

Mrs. Hardwicke and her husband spoke at the same time, she to interrupt, and he to ask with surprising excitement, “And what did this—thing—look to be?”

“The Hag,” said I.

Mrs. Hardwicke dropped my foot with a suddenness that made me wince, but her husband either did not have as much interest in the haunted old inn as she had thought or was a superb actor. He said with his rodent’s amiable and toothy look, “But what nonsense is this, Miss Bodmun? I must confess I am familiar with the peculiar attitude of the local hunting hounds over Seven Spinney. It is not that anything of great moment occurred there. A nest for lovers—”

“Ezra!” his wife interrupted, for all the world like my old governess, Miss Higsby.

His smile widened, and he shrugged. “Well, then, it is only that you are not the first to see the Hag. It was a legend among all the Hardwickes. And with the—the woman, Megan Kelleher, murdered at the inn, well, what have you? Who would possibly wish to dwell where such things take place? Everything in the vicinity is haunted, merely by suggestion.”

I tried to laugh, for I was sure he told me this in an attempt to frighten me, because of his vindictive hatred for anyone who expressed an interest in the Hag’s Head.

We heard Sir Nicholas’s steps in the gallery then, and I noticed the tension that gripped us all, including myself, as he looked in at us. “What,
Sophy? Haven’t you got that lass into bed yet? At this rate of speed, she will not be awake for dinner.”

“I don’t mean to stay for dinner,” I put in calmly, very grown-up. “I shall be on my way as soon as I have soaked my foot for a few minutes. I do not intend to be a burden upon anyone.”

He looked at me quizzically. “I have ordered a syllabub and all manner of pretty desserts. That should sweeten your disposition. And you may imagine in what case I shall be with Cook if you refuse it now. What do you say, child?”

The sound of “syllabub and other sweets” was exceedingly good to hear, but for my pride I had to remind him, “If I were a child, as you seem to think, sir, that should set all aright. As it is, I am much more concerned about the peculiar thing that pursued Timothy and me out of Seven Spinney today.”

The Hardwickes were plainly upset by my persistence, but Sir Nicholas laughed.

“Sophy, do get the child to bed before she fancies ghosts in this house.” He gestured around him at the immensity of Everett Hall. “You would have quite a run if you fancied the Hag amid these walls!”

I did not like to confess, and would never have confessed to Sir Nicholas, that these hallowed and stately halls were enough to send anyone into the vapors, even a ghost like the Hag, and if I had never heard of such a creature, I should still imagine her or something very like her in such a distinguished house. She would roam those halls to make me feel my place, if for no other reason. In short, I did not feel at home here, any more than I should have in the Prince Regent’s apartments!

But by the time I would have found a suitable setdown for my host, he was gone, and Sophia Hardwicke put out her substantial black-clad arm.

“Lean upon this, mum. His Ludship’s right as right. We’ve no call keeping you from your rest. Else the porker is to be burnt to a cinder and the household does not sup this night.”

“Dear me,” added Ezra Hardwicke in his suave way, suggesting to me all sorts of sly deviltry, “we must not, in any circumstances, let young Miss go hungry, or without rest. She will need all her strength if she means to challenge the Hag.”

“That’ll do, man!” said his wife as I shivered, and she and I moved in a gingerly way across the room and out into the gallery. I had hopped along during most of our progress, so when we started up the great curving staircase, I put my weight upon my toes and we managed very well.

I was almost too tired to pay much attention to my surroundings as we crossed the corridor on the floor above, but I knew how Mama would like a description of all this luxury, so I tried to make out some detail in my surroundings. But I was so tired that I made out only that it was decorated in the very height of elegance, although a trifle behind the latest fashion and, to judge by the little carved hall table we passed, in need of a good housewifely dusting.

The room into which I was ushered had much the quality of that part of Everett Hall which I had already glimpsed—elegantly furnished but disused. I suspected that the used sections of the hall were those masculine quarters I had not yet seen, for this bedchamber was entirely feminine, like the summer room, and while flawlessly decorated, with windows opening wide upon the moor and sky, had the look of a room unchanged since before the turn of our nineteenth century.

I wondered that Sir Nicholas was not lonely here in this great house, which he must often have dreamed of sharing with the woman he had loved, Megan Sedley Kelleher. How he must hate Patrick for this wrecking of his life! And as for Mrs. Sedley, whose snobbery and ambition had brought about the tragedy, I no longer wondered at his dislike of her but only marveled that his feeling was not stronger.

Mrs. Hardwicke would have removed my clothing almost bodily, but I was used to doing for myself and only accepted gratefully a lavender
-
scented dressing sack from a lovely old carved chest at the foot of the four-poster bed. By the time she had established me on a flowered chaise, Ezra Hardwicke brought in a ewer of steaming hot water and set it beside my foot. I was relieved when they left me alone, though I could not deny their kindness. But beneath that kindness I could not help feeling undercurrents of watchful waiting. I remembered always that the Hag’s Head, which they thought I intended to purchase, might go back to them, its original owners, if no one else saw fit to buy it in the near future. They might even assume that any money they had laid away would purchase, just so long as I did not snatch it from them first. Certainly, the tales of the ghostly visitant lowered the asking price of the inn. I suspected that was Mrs. Sedley’s chief concern in selling so cheaply.

There were moments during this time when the two Hardwickes were fussing about me that I was ashamed of my thoughts. But then came such a remark as was made at their departure, to set me thinking again. I had been so busy observing the grand life of the nobility and wondering how they solved such practical matters as keeping foods hot though all these endless galleries, that I quite banished my worries about that ghostly Hag’s Head. Immediately after, as Mrs. Hardwicke was closing the door and nudging her husband out of the room, she stuck her head back in and said cheerfully, “Indeed, lass, you’ll find nothing to fret you in these halls. The Hag must get through those grounds out beneath that set of windows at your elbow, afore ever you’ll meet her within.”

“Has anyone ever met the Hag within these walls?” I asked ironically.

“But Miss,” put in Ezra Hardwicke softly, “how came Miss Elspeth to take Everett Hall so very
much in dislike, eh? Something that followed in her very path, her very footsteps, all the way from the Hag’s Head! Still and all, Miss Elspeth is very likely given to strong imaginings; isn’t it so, Wife?”

“Come away!” said his wife severely.

I heard Ezra Hardwicke chuckle as the door closed, leaving me with no very pleasant thoughts.

Was any of this true, I asked myself, or was it a sort of backhand slap at me, to frighten me off the purchase? The more they tried by such scurvy means to alarm me, the more determined I became to have the Hag’s Head as my property. Putting my foot into the hot water, then jerking it out painfully, for the water was scalding, I considered what I would do if I ever did own the old inn. First of all, of course, I would have it cleaned in every corner, every cupboard, from eaves to basements. Then I would see that air and strong light reached into all shadowy corners. I had never yet encountered a legend about ghosts that did not consign them to shadows and unclean places.

Yes, but what if there was something—some odd phenomenon that did exist in fact, not in fancy? I had the evidence of my own eyes and the dying gaze of Macrae. And perhaps even more chilling, there was the strange imagined face in Seven Spinney that had so frightened Timothy and me. I relied very strongly upon the evidence of the little cat
’
s senses. Were not cats supposed to be, somehow, more aware of such apparitions?

Even Sir Nicholas and Jacob, his loader, insisted that no dogs were ever to be found in Seven Spinney. That was odd, but all of a piece with what had happened to me since the moment Timmy and I set foot inside the common room of the Hag’s Head Inn.

The water in the ewer now seemed a trifle less apt to scald the flesh off me, so I dipped my foot in, toe by toe as it were, and felt the ache gradually leave my foot until it seemed nearly normal. I spent these minutes looking around with great admiration at the furnishings of the room, as well as the room itself, all in the last style of elegance, its beautifully paneled light walls, its dainty bed with ruffle trim, and the curtains, similarly ruffled, which did not cut the light from the windows but rather expanded it.

This brought my thoughts to the weather outside and the fabulous view from my post on this comforta
b
le chaise. I could see far across the rolling moor, and I fancied I could make out the chimney tops of the Hag’s Head and, somewhat nearer, the dark declivity in the moors where a little stream trickled along, eternally shadowed by a tangle of trees, the whole of it called Seven Spinney. How curious that I had seen that odd imaginary thing within the glade which my thoughts had twisted and shaped into the face of an old crone! I wondered now what it had really been. Probably similar to the fancies Elspeth Sedley had had when she paid her visit here, which produced in her such a dislike of Everett Hall.

It must be very dark in Seven Spinney at this hour of the late afternoon, with the whole moorland world lying under the uniformly gray skies, which dripped a mizzling rain. The colorless sky had an odd effect upon the world outside these windows, seeming to bring out the deep green of the copse called Seven Spinney, the mauve and dun color of the dying heather, and the enormous sea of green that was the moor itself, swarming with so much unseen animal and insect life, yet strangely still to the sight.