Black Heather (2 page)

I paused, trembling as I had not trembled since childhood and barely resisting the impulse to scream. What should I say to this half-seen creature who stared at me now, pausing as I did, mouth
open...?

And then, of course, I knew and was furious at my own stupidity. This was what came of imagining things about a harmless old house abandoned and forlorn. At the further end of the passage, hung against the side of the staircase, was a full-length looking glass, and the strange, floating creature was I, with damp clothes, wet hair, the natural healthy color of my face chilled to milky white with the cold. I laughed at my idiotic fears and had the pleasure of catching Timothy by that cheerful sound. He came racing down the passage as though he too had seen a ghost—a more durable one than my own. He scooted between my feet and then, thinking better of that spu
rn
ed haven, crawled back and pawed at my sodden skirts as a hint to be taken up.

Again, as I picked up the little cat, I heard the peculiar tap-tap somewhere over my head. Timothy did not help matters by so obligingly accepting and improving on each of my emotions. He was curled up in my arms, but his head with the sensitive pointed ears and the gray-green eyes tilted up, and like me he stared at the age-blackened timbers that formed the ceiling of this room.

“Just raindrops falling through a break in the roof, most likely,” I murmured to Timothy, but I don’t think he believed me any more than I did. He fretted and meowed very softly but made no attempt to escape from my arms. He was definitely disturbed by whatever was abovestairs.

Disgusted with my own absurd attack of nerves, which was so very unlike me, I walked deliberately down the ground-floor passage toward the tall looking glass and the staircase beyond it. If I did meet anyone who properly belonged at Hag’s Head, I wanted to make my excuses and explain my presence. It was amazing how much braver I felt, armed with my explanation and prepared to use it. The tapping sound died away as I approached the broad flight of stairs carved of a dark wood that had once been highly polished and beautiful but was now frightfully dingy, wasted in such a forsaken place.

I began to smell the disquieting odor of burned wood and cloth. It was very dark in this entrance passage, but the broken glass and shutters of a front window cast streaks of light upon the lower half of the staircase. The upper half was dark as a starless midnight. No matter how shadowy the passage, the upper staircase, and the taproom to my left with its rich taprail thick with dust, I could plainly see that no fire had touched this area. Why, then, should that acrid smell of smoke and burning leap to my senses in this area of the ancient public house?

Timothy’s small pink nose was troubled too. He wrinkled it several times and roused himself to get a better look at his surroundings, about which he obviously began to have as much curiosity as I. I lifted him higher so he might see better, and together we started up the stairs, all the while looking as closely as possible to see where the burned timbers were, or the blackened draperies, symbols of whatever disaster had fallen upon this strange place.

The sounds outside no longer intruded upon this part of the inn, which was locked in deep silence. Even in what I supposed were the ancient bedchambers above me on the first floor, the tap-tap had ceased. Perhaps my steps on the stairs had been heard and someone was afraid of us, the unknown intruders, as Timothy and I had been afraid of that tap-tapping sound a while ago.

As I moved up the stairs, the strong odor of burned wood and cloth seemed to fade. Wherever the fire had been, it did not appear to have damaged the upper floors. I remember how deadly silent it was there for a moment on the staircase just before a voice called to me from somewhere in the dark passage on the ground floor. It was a masculine voice that shook me by its unexpectedness, as well as its curt, crisp authority.

“What the devil are you doing in here?”

CHAPTER TWO

I had been c
aught halfway up the stairs when the
curious question reached me. Anyone but a fool would have known what I was doing here in this weather. Once I knew the voice was corporeal and not phantom, I put on anger as a salve to my secret embarrassment.

“I was looking for my kitten. He ran out in the rain. That is what I am doing here—sir!”

Looking down into the shadowy room below me, I made out a tall man with darkish, glowering features not entirely in keeping with his aristocratic voice.

“Well then,” said he, “you plainly have found the little beast; so now you may be on your way.” And as I hesitated, he added, “Or would you prefer wandering about in a house which is not your own?”

I hadn’t been treated with such adult contempt since I was twelve, and I resented it exceedingly.
But I hesitated no longer. I began to back downstairs until I realized how ridiculous he had made me appear, at which time I turned around and sedately descended the last two steps. Just as I felt I
was retreating with the honors of war, despite my drenched appearance, Timothy took a violent dislike either to all this shouting between the well-spoken ruffian and me or to the pervasive odor on the ground floor. He squirmed more than usual and leaped gracefully out of my arms, streaking down and behind the stairs, into the darkness somewhere below.

“Timmy, you rascal! Come back here!” I started after him, only to have one of my wrists firmly seized by the man in the darkness behind me.

“Never mind the beast—I’ll attend to it. And stay where you are or you may fall through the flooring hereabouts.”

Desperate to retrieve some measure of my normal, self-confidence, I thought on the spur of the moment of an excuse that would explain my presence here. This should place me on an equality with one of these avaricious country squires, or farmers, or whatever he might be. My handsome, scowling Yorkshireman might be any of these things, or even a vagabond and himself intruding! “Sir, if you will let me explain, I may buy this—”

“I can imagine! And how does a child your age plan to purchase? No matter. Come down now, like a good lass. You won’t like the cellar beneath either if you go through, I’ll warrant.”

I took this to mean that the building and the staircase were rotting away, which rather put a period to my planned excuse that I would purchase the inn, although I should dearly have loved to make just that gesture. Anything, in fact, to spite the detestable man!

“Timmy!”
I called again as I yielded with as much grace as I could muster before him. How right Mama had been when she told me never to cross a Yorkshireman! But truly, it was an unusual experience for me, for I was well used to having my way at home and among my Cornish relations. I found this an extraordinary sensation.

I began to make out more plainly the form and features of this Yorkshireman by the mauve light through the windows of the taproom. There was no mistaking his determined expression or that he had the strength to carry out his intentions. I might have stood firm to him and not have hesitated, had he been any of the Cornishmen of my acquaintance. But I was forced to admit that he might be so brutish as to strike me if I refused obedience, and beside all else, he clearly knew more of this house than I. Not to mention Timothy, my fellow criminal.

On the other hand, there was the fierce weather outside on the heath. Would he actually set me abroad upon that running sea of rain?

“What are you about now?” said the surly Yorkshireman.

“It is still raining
...
sir,” I said between my teeth.

He glanced over my head through the broken, twisted shutters where it was perfectly clear that the rain was pelting down exactly as I had said, but it didn’t seem to shake his determination in the least.

I was worried about poor Timothy, and but for him I would have been most happy to remove from this wretched house, where we were clearly unwanted. I said as much to our shadowy enemy, who, I was gradually coming to believe, was the master of the Hag’s Head Inn. I did not envy him the weird old place with its upper floors haunted by a tap-tapping sound and its taproom smelling of burned timber and cloth.

“No matter,” he said. “I see you are in the right. It is a trifle wet out. It will blow over in a few minutes. You had better go into the common room and wait. I’ll get your precious cat.”

He started into the dark behind the staircase, moving lightly and carefully. I heard no betraying creak or give in the wooden stairs as he moved. While I waited in the open taproom, watching him dissolve into the blackness of unknown regions, I realized that I preferred his company to his absence, detestable as that company might be. The old Hag’s Head held a fascination for me, but it also aroused a very real uneasiness that I laid partly to the sounds and smells I had noticed and partly to the curious reactions of both Timothy and the Yorkshireman, two males who, in their different ways, demonstrated only too clearly that something was not right about the Hag’s Head besides its age and disuse.

Outside, I heard the rain slacken to a dripping, pervasive wetness over the land
.
I looked out and saw again the lovely mauve patina that made the endless rills and becks and burns look soft as the green moss in dells I remembered from my childhood.

Just as I was beginning to think the queer old house had swallowed up the cross and arrogant Yorkshireman, not to mention my tawny adventurer, Timothy, the man appeared again. I was more than relieved to see that he had Timothy in one hand. He held out the kitten to me as though it were a ball of fur curled in one of his hands, and to my surprise, Timothy seemed perfectly comfortable, welcoming this treatment. Or was he merely anxious to get out of this place and therefore allowing inhospitable ruffian to handle him thus?

“Now that you’ve had your fill of the house, I trust you’ve also satisfied yourself on the matter of the reputed ghost—or is it ghosts?” the Yorkshireman said, showing some slight glint of humor for the first time.

“There’ll be no self-respecting ghost here. You’re not frightening me, sir,” I told him, taking Timothy against me and then feeling slightly hurt at the kitten’s instinctive rejection of my damp bosom.

The man took my elbow and almost forcibly walked me through the ground-floor passage along the way I had come. Through bars of heather-colored light and shadow I made out his features, handsome in a harsh, high-boned way, with a healthy olive pallor that accentuated deep-set dark eyes, black hair, and a strong mouth that was surprisingly sensuous in such an uncompromising face. To judge by his garments, from the topboots to the well-fitted jacket, he might be an aristocrat, but his abrupt manner was so ill natured that I set him down for a local sheep farmer grown above himself. But that he was rather more handsome in some ways, and less passionate in manner, I would have known him exactly for one of the “fierce Yorkshiremen” Mama had warned me about.

“Doubtless you’re an outlander from London or some such trumpery place,” he remarked, to my secret amusement. “Ever since the talk of haunts and guytrashes, they come from all quarters to lose themselves on the open moors. And that despite the warnings.” He looked at me with eyes as dark as the York sky had been a few minutes before. “You’ll likely have seen the posted warning as you stepped out onto the open moor; did you not?” Since I had been busy watching the ground and trying to follow Timothy’s tracks, I obviously hadn’t seen his precious signs.

“No, sir. That I did not,” I said, mincing no words in explanation.

He raised his eyebrows, taking leave to doubt me.

“Come, girl, you fancied an encounter with the ghosts at Hag’s Head, and there’s the truth of it.” Since he looked disagreeably sure of himself, I
was happy to remind him, “Well, then, if it’s not ghosts that make a tap-tapping sound in those chambers abovestairs, you have fooled Timothy and me.”

As I had expected, he dismissed this with casual contempt, but there was an attentiveness in his manner, a sudden stillness about him.

“Rubbishing business altogether. For more than ten years local busybodies have fancied candlelights and sounds and other marks of ghostly favor here, but I assure you, Hag’s Head has been combed from bedchambers to cellars. The only creatures who inhabit it are spiders and rodents.”

He still had not explained the curious tap-tapping, which was hardly the work of spiders, and all his scorn of ghostly phenomena merely reinforced my belief that it had not been my imagination—or Timothy’s. The oddness of this house was apparently well-known to the moorland people.

When we reached the parlor through which Timothy and I had made our unorthodox entrance, it was exactly like this impossible man to fix his attention on the broken glass rather than on our effort to escape from a bad drenching.

“I thought as much. You’re a trespasser beside all else. Do you know you could be remanded for this, my girl? I’ve a very good notion to take you in hand before the local magistrate.”

It was just the sort of odious thing the nasty creature would think of, and if that happened, not only would Mrs. Sedley be disgraced for having taken me in, but I should never be able to purchase anything remotely suitable to a girls’ school in this area after such a shocking black mark upon my character. With a tremendous effort, I managed to subdue my natural high temper and spirit of defiance.

“Sir, you would not, surely! We haven’t laid hands upon anyone’s property. In point of fact, sir, we are just leaving. Come, Timothy
...”

Clutching the kitten, though I could already feel its dissenting vote, I went to the broken window through which I had entered. I looked out cautiously, getting a mouthful of water from the eaves for my trouble. Behind me, I heard the footstep of the Yorkshireman, and Timothy was neatly wrested from my grasp.

“I’ll take the kitten to the village myself. There is no need in his suffering for your stubbornness. I would suggest we all leave by the scullery door, but I can see you prefer the window.”

Realizing that all his nastiness had been mere fustian and that he was teasing me with his own peculiar form of humor, I longed to keep on climbing out the window; for I was caught by this last remark of his just as I had one knee raised and, in a most unladylike way, was ready to climb out. I hesitated just long enough, debating, to find Timothy back in my arms and both of us in one damp bundle. Then I was lifted back from the window and onto my own two feet again.