Black Heather (9 page)

I found myself, ridiculously enough, lost in a passage between the pantries adjoining the kitchen, and the common room through which I had entered yesterday. I watched to see which way Timothy would go, but he darted back into the pantry to lick the stone floor where—heaven knows how long ago!—someone had spilled sugared tea. I found I must pass through a china closet to reach the front of the house. It was interesting and touching to note there were still the china and the cutlery and the old mugs and wine glasses on the shelves just as they had been when the tragedy occurred twelve years before. There was even something upon one of the plates. I assumed it must be food left at the time of the murder, and remarkably well preserved. Almost astoundingly so.

Once more, as during my first visit, I heard the creak of floors or walls upstairs, along with the familiar, yet no less unnerving, tap-tapping sound. It was comforting to recall how Sir Nicholas had dismissed such sounds as products of my overactive imagination.

But I could not stop to examine this or other mementos of the life that had existed here years before. I rushed through the little passageway of the china closet, which joined the hall at the front of the house, and found myself again in that passage which had led to the great pier glass hanging against the side of the staircase. At least, in this part of the house, I knew my way. The sight of my figure running toward its reflection was absurd today, when compared with the frightening thing it
h
ad seemed to be yesterday, before I knew what it was.

It was extraordinarily difficult to get the front door opened, and even when I succeeded, I had managed to wrench off the lock before I had it swinging wide inside. I was trying to help the stranger stumble into the main passage at the foot of the stairs to the upper floor, to greater comfort on the rush-covered floor, sheltered from the wind and weather, when I not only heard the odd sounds overhead, but saw that the sick man heard them as well. His eyes tried vainly to focus upon the ceiling, and in the bad light his sallow color seemed to have gone gray with fear.

“This ain’t Owl of York.” His fingers fastened on my skirts, and he tried to shake me but was much too ill to do more than startle me. “What’ve ye done, wicked creature! ‘Twas here I got it in the head.”

I shook myself free of his fingers, as much shocked by his sudden madness as by his words. He tried to raise himself, but I made him remain seated. There were bloodstains on the lobe of his ear and his collar, and I knew he must not move. I had seen seamen before who had got their skulls cracked open. They nearly always died.

“Please be still, sir. Do not move. I’ll bring you something to calm and warm you while I get help.”

“No! Don’t be goin’, love. I was only giving a bit of a
...
tease
...”
I bent over him, for
he seemed ready to whisper something. I thought perhaps I should gain a knowledge of his identity if I could know a little more about his work and about what he had been doing here at the Hag’s Head. “Lass,” he whispered. “Look up ’em stairs
...
”

I looked. Beyond being excessively dusty and dark, they held nothing more sinister than silence.

“Aye, but it was ... on that stair, I saw the—haunt
..
.”

I realized with a thrill of horror that it was this word he had spoken out on the heath and I had not understood. But it was all his sick fancy. I could not heed him. If I did so, he would very likely die even sooner.

I rushed into the taproom a few feet away from him, but there were only half a dozen bottles, and it maddened me to discover that all the contents had either dried up in some way or drained out owing to bad corkage. And not another thing could I find to preserve the poor man’s swimming senses.

There were the cellars, of course, but I preferred not to venture into that place of dreadful memories unless it became absolutely necessary. I tried the kitchen and the stillroom, but not a bottle was left. Glancing outside, I could not find a well or spring anywhere within sight. I did locate a candlestick with a fat half-burned candle, and behind it, almost too conveniently, was a firemaker.

With the lighted candle I hurried back to the sick man, followed by the swift, darting Timothy.
Nothing about the man moved except his eyes. In attending him I had to turn my back to that staircase at which he stared so fixedly above my head. The little cat waited for me also, his gray-green eyes likewise fixed upon the staircase. It made me more than a little nervous. I could not resist glancing over my shoulder. I cannot imagine what I expected to see, and I saw nothing but shadows.

“Tell—Jassy
...
” It was the first thing he had said in several minutes, and I realized that his condition was rapidly worsening.

I took up the candlestick, telling him I would be back immediately, and with the sturdy little candle lighting the way, I made swift work of the trip back behind the staircase that led to the upper floor. It was in this direction that Timothy had darted the day before, when he must have snagged his collar on the bit of lace from the cellar debris. Therefore, I assumed the most direct steps to the cellar must be back here. Behind the upper staircase I did indeed find the flight of stone steps pitching downward into the cold, musty darkness where, long ago, Megan Kelleher had died. I descended with great care, rather sardonically observing the caution with which Timothy stayed behind me.

The candle revealed an entire wall of bottles and barrels. Some of the latter were obviously empty, the bung holes open, and here and there among the cobwebbed bottles there were a surprising number of empty spaces. I began to suspect
that it had been visited by various wine-loving moorland citizens along with the stray gypsies who often made this region a landfall in their endless journeying. Tongues of the long-ago fire had licked at the wooden structure of the wine racks, but it appeared that this fire had come through the burned door from the other cellars, for the walls between the cellars were of stone and impregnable to those flames.

I had no time for sightseeing and gazed just once into the next cellar, one of the centers of the fire, which was not as black as I had expected, because of the many cracks in the wall of the west, or entrance, side of the building at a level with the ground. Inside this burned cellar and the one beyond it, there was so much blackened debris that I assumed most of it was the contents of a cold storage stillroom, which had, of course, been destroyed in the fire and produced that haunting, acrid odor which permeated the house above.

Actually, Mrs. Sedley had been right. From what I could see of the cellars and the ground floor above, the building was still solidly constructed and very likely a bargain. I turned back after taking up a bottle that felt heavy and seemed to gurgle a little. I was just moving up the steep steps, having called
Timmy
away from his exploration of the burned area, when we heard a piercing shriek near the taproom above us that made Timmy arch his back, sitting, and gave me such chills that I found it even more difficult to run the rest of the way. I, at least, knew that that shriek of mortal terror came from the wounded stranger, and I could not imagine anything so awful as to produce such a sound.

At the top of the steps a sudden gust of wind from the open front door blew out my candle, but I was in too much of a hurry to reach the sick man to pay attention to that. There was light enough in the open doorway so that the stranger would not be in the fearsome darkness. I was deeply concerned to note that he had moved away from the protection of the door and was crawling, with irrational, crablike movements, toward the forsaken taproom. He had crawled only a few feet when I reached him. I did not dare cry out to him to stop this deadly motion, for fear the sharp command itself might act as a cruel prod to his movements.

As quietly as possible, I went and knelt before him, trying to ease him against my arm, but he was too heavy. I had to drop the dusty wine bottle and use all my strength to hold him partially upright. I spoke to him soothingly, as I had once seen Father speak to an Irish lobsterman who had cracked his skull when he had got off course in his small black corragh. His glazed eyes stared past me, over my arm, at the dusky shadows high on the staircase behind me. Had I not been so busy trying to make him reasonably comfortable so I could go for help, this attention to things at my back would have made me more than a trifle uneasy.

When I had him at least protected from falling, with the wall of the taproom behind him, I tried to uncork the dusty bottle but found it impossible. I got up, went into the taproom as far from him as possible, and broke off the bottle at the neck. My hands smelled to heaven of soured wine, but that was hardly important. Watching the bottle carefully, I carried it back to the stranger, and since I could not put the broken bottle to his lips and didn’t have time to fetch a cup, I wiped my left hand carefully on my petticoat, then poured as much wine into my palm as it would hold and held it to his lips.

He reacted like the good drinking man he must have been, moving his lips and moistening his tongue with the tart, vinegary wine. This action must have been instinctive, however, for his eyes remained fixed upon that illusive and dusky area at the top of the staircase.

It was about a minute later, just as I thought he was showing some signs of a return to conscious awareness, that the pupils of his eyes dilated, becoming even in size. He made a convulsive effort to rise, and raised his arm, pointing it straight out and upward over my shoulder. I was astonished at the sudden power he demonstrated and was almost ready to speak to him rationally, when he opened his mouth and uttered the same ear-splitting scream I had heard in the wine cellar. It was so shocking, I reeled back and nearly fell.

“The haunt—the haunt!” he cried hoarsely, and fell forward against me like a block of wood, crashing lifeless across my body.

With an enormous effort I managed to twist around without removing him and look at the staircase. It was quite true that in the brown dark, among what must be endless cobwebbed space, untouched in a dozen years, there was a peculiar aura very like a pallid mask of a face.

While
I
stared at this eerie thing, so like
a
weird old hag, Timothy leaped up from where he had crouched by the door of the inn and sped out into the desolate garden. Whatever this was at the head of the stairs, Timothy had sensed it too.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I stared upward i
n a paralysis of terror, half-
c
onvinced by the actions of a cat and the fancy of a dying man that there really was a ghostly presence at the head of the stairs watching me.

Some slight sound outside shook me out of this dreadful stupor. I blinked, then felt vainly for the pulse of the man whose life had been snuffed out by that peculiar hallucination. My hands shook so much that I found it difficult to command myself, but when I looked up the staircase again over the stranger’s dead body, whatever grouping of light and shadow had joined to form the stranger’s “haunt” was now dissolved into nothingness. I felt myself alone, terribly, painfully alone. I had no more hope for the dead man; and for myself, I felt a frantic anxiety to get some human being besides myself into this place, to scour it from top to bottom, conclusively destroying all dust, cobwebs, fire debris, and anything else that might be mistaken for ghosts or haunts.

When I was absolutely sure the man was dead,
I got up painfully, tried to lay him out on the floor where he had fallen, and went out of the Hag’s Head. I began to descend the slope upon which
the inn stood. In a few minutes I was running. It did not surprise me when Timothy darted along beside me, staying close, never scampering off to himself as he had the day before.

How long it was before we reached a well-traveled little carriage road I do not know, but when we had walked for several minutes along the wagon ruts through dying heather, a horse came trotting along behind us, dragging a gig which rattled and shook as though the wheels might roll off at any minute.

Seated in it were Patrick Kelleher and a beautiful red-haired woman who looked vaguely familiar.

What a rogue he is with the women,
I thought.
First, the unfortunate Megan Sedley; then Megan's niece, the celebrated beauty Elspeth; then his easy, smooth flattery in my direction, and all the time this obvious understanding with the
red-haired
woman
.

“Jassy,” he said to her briskly, with an indifference that seemed to me insulting, “make place for the pretty Kate.”

“Jassy?” I repeated with the sickened realization that this woman’s name had been on the lips of that poor Yorkshireman whose body lay now, untended, on the floor of the Hag’s Head.

I remembered at last where I had seen the woman before and heard her name. It had been in the taproom of the Owl of York, into whose steaming confines Patrick had wheedled me this mo
rn
ing. When I repeated her name and, after picking up Timmy, hesitated to climb into the gig, crowding its occupants, she looked a trifle surprised.

“Yes? You know my name?”

“It was a man who spoke the name,” I explained, then paused, wondering how much of a shock his death would be.

Patrick began to look uneasy. He peered off in the direction I had taken across the heath and furze bushes.

“Is Macrae looking for her? Did he seem out of sorts?”

“Drunk, I’ll wager!” said Jassy in disgust, not very much interested.

I wondered suddenly if these two could have had anything to do with that dreadful blow on the back of Macrae’s head or the frightening of him and me at the Hag’s Head. I said, “You must have just missed him. Have you been on the road long?”

Patrick was surprised at what he conceived to be my change of subject.

“I caught up with Jassy Macrae some minutes ago as she was crossing the heath.”

“Looking for Macrae, so I was!” she said angrily. “And much good it’s done. Half a day’s custom at the Owl lost. He’s drunk over in Heatherton, like as not.”

“No, I’m afraid he isn’t,” I said, trying to be as calm as she was angry. “I suspect it was Mr. Macrae I watched die of a broken skull in the Hag’s Head today. I was just going for help.”

“God in heaven!” cried his wife, and clapped her hand over her mouth. Her ripe beauty seemed to crumble behind the latticework of her fingers, and I saw that she was as old as Patrick or Sir Nicholas, but so beautifully “boned” that one would suspect her to be a woman in her early twenties. Whether she had loved her husband or hated him, one couldn’t tell, but she was not indifferent. I began to suspect that any relationship between her and Patrick was very likely his doing.

At any rate, he moved rapidly now to take my hand and help me into the gig with Timmy in my other arm.

“There’s a quicker path a little to the north,” he said.

I objected. “Would it not be better to go to the village first, to bring
...
whatever is needed?”

“Is he dead?”

“Oh, yes! I’m sure of it.”

“Well, then?”

I had no argument against such nonchalance. I myself was still as badly shaken as was little Timothy, whom I held against my bosom, a warm, soft, confused little bundle. But of course we had seen Macrae die in that dreadful way; and perhaps even more intensely disturbing, we had witnessed the peculiar phenomenon in the dusty shadows on the landing above the stairs. I knew, of course, now that I had the chance to consider it at a safe distance, that the pale, bodiless face Macrae had mistaken for a “haunt” was merely one of those
oddities formed by light and shadow; yet I still could not explain why the face had disappeared as I watched it.

Despite the nonchalance of Patrick Kelleher, I was relieved to have run upon him and Jassy Macrae; for even though I had been positive the man was dead, I would much prefer that other human beings should make an effort, however futile, to revive him. Whatever the seriousness of Macrae’s head injury, I was convinced that the thing that had precipitated his death was the sight of the pallid, imaginary face staring down at him from the stairs. Imaginary it was, but deadly, too.
I felt that if I could persuade someone to examine the inn from attics to cellars with me, we would exorcize those legends and make nonsense of such phantom faces; but I confess that after Macrae’s cries of “the haunt!” I lacked the courage to explore the Hag’s Head alone.

“How did Macrae break his skull?” asked Patrick as he guided the horse and the rackety, over
-
crowded gig off into a road that was hardly wider than a sheep track. I glanced at Mrs. Macrae, but she was holding tight to the side of the gig, biting her lips and gazing silently into the vast moorland distances.

“I think he fell down the stairs at Hag’s Head,”
I said. “When I met him out on the heath, he murmured that he had fallen and asked if I would get him to the inn. Since we were within sight of the Hag’s Head, I thought—”

Patrick shook his head.

“I’m afraid he meant his own and Jassy’s place, the Owl of York.”

Yes. I knew that now. And I knew too that if I could somehow have got the poor man back to the village, or even left him in a sheltered place on the heath, his life might have been saved. But death had been upon him from the moment he entered the Hag’s Head. Thinking aloud, I repeated this truth and became belatedly aware of how it disturbed my companions.

“You’ll not be telling us he saw the Hag?” Patrick asked, looking less amused. His hands tightened upon the reins in a fashion that, to me,
betrayed some strong emotion, perhaps apprehension or even fear.

“Pat!” said Jassy in a low, disturbed voice. “Don’t conjure! Don’t conjure!”

I knew what she meant. Until I said it aloud, I did not guess that these two reasonably intelligent village people shared poor Macrae’s fear of “the Hag.”

“I saw it myself,” I said, hoping for some sort of reasonable explanation.

“Aye!” said the woman bitterly. “She’s done for him at last, the evil one—the Hag!”

“What did it look like to you, Kate, this thing you say you saw?” Patrick asked me, without any of the teasing, laughing quality that normally made his voice light and pleasant to hear.

“Very like an old crone’s face,” I said, seeing
that ghastly “haunt” more vividly in my mind’s eye than it had seemed to me at the deserted inn. I don’t believe I had quite comprehended the enormity of the happening at that time.

Patrick pursued this phantom picture. “Almost mask-like in its pallor, with a kind of oddness, as though you’d be thinking it’s that thin, you could see through it.”

“Just so,” I agreed, feeling a chill at the thought, despite the warmth of my coat.

“Do not, ma’am. I beg you!” Mrs. Macrae cut in sharply in an anguished voice. “It sounds that real I can see its very face.”

So could I, and since we felt this common reluctance to discuss the ghostly face, it was Patrick who had to probe for explanations.

“I daresay it’s how the place got its name. The old dragon, Megan’s mother, bought it at a good price, partly because of the legends and partly because she’s a sharp one. Megan claimed to have seen the Hag’s face once. But the business of the flickering lights and the ghosts that are forever being seen by visitors to the moor
...
Well and all, that’s since our time.”

Ever since Mrs. Sedley had condemned the Irishman out of hand for his part in the death of his wife, I had wondered what his side of the story was. I was quite sure his version would differ notably from that of the justice of the peace, Sir Nicholas Everett. As the gig bumped over stray roots and blackened heather, I saw that we were starting up the incline to the Hag’s Head and its outbuildings. My own nerves were none too good, but I could not help noticing how stiff and tight Jassy Macrae sat beside me. I felt that she either cared more for her husband than anyone suspected, or she was in mortal terror of something. I could well appreciate either of her emotions.

Before the gig had rattled to a stop, Jassy Macrae swung over the side and leaped to the ground. She ran across the desolate garden, her petticoats fluttering and her hair flying in bright red streamers behind her. I hoped this panic was bo
rn
of concern for the poor dead man, but I had one of those odd feminine intuitions that told me she was concerned with something other than the loss of her husband. What that concern might be I could not imagine. But when Patrick lifted me down and we followed her across the threshold of the Hag’s Head, I saw with feelings of revulsion that I had been right.

We found her kneeling beside the bundle of mud and wine-stained rags that was Macrae just as I had laid him out in the taproom half an hour earlier. But she was neither praying nor pillowing his battered head nor examining him for wounds. She was certainly examining him, however. She ran her hands over and through each of his garments, appearing more and more dissatisfied as her skillful long fingers came away without having found whatever it was she searched for.

“You’re a cool one, Jassy,” Patrick commended her with what I hoped was deep irony. He looked
around, studying various parts of the ground floor, reliving old memories, as I thought, memories of the life he had lived here with Megan Sedley. I wondered, did he think of the way he had left her here to die? Or perhaps he had been away from the inn when it happened. Was it Mrs. Sedley or Sir Nicholas who had suggested to me that Patrick was off awaiting another woman when he allowed his wife to die? In that case, perhaps someone had wished Megan Kelleher to die.

Watching him and speculating on his part in her tragic death, or perhaps his lack of part in any attempt at her rescue, I remembered that he and Jassy had been out on the moors separately today by their own admission. Jassy’s reactions had been so strong, though not for humanitarian reasons, that I eliminated her from my rising suspicions. She had certainly been surprised at her husband’s death. But Patrick had been in this region also at the very moment Macrae and little Timmy and I were being terrorized in this house. Separately or together, Patrick and Jassy Macrae must also have been in the region when Macrae was injured. From Macrae’s first words to me on the heath, I supposed his fall down the stairs had happened because he was startled by the strange apparition of the “Hag,” the phenomenon of light and shadow and cobwebs that later caused his death. But was it possible that some human agency had caused that hag’s face to appear?

“What do you think of the place, Kate? Is it worth your purchase?”

I ignored his familiar use of my childhood name, on the theory that he very probably would address Queen Charlotte by the name “Charley” if he were admitted to Her Majesty’s presence. I was about to make some equivocal reply when Jassy Macrae rose from her husband’s body, extremely conscious of Patrick’s question.

“You’re making purchase, ma’am? When is it to be?”

I had the word “never” upon my tongue, when I bethought myself of those earlier suspicions and looked around the taproom and the lower floor before replying calmly, “I’ve not decided quite when. But soon, I should think. An excellent bargain; don’t you agree, Mr. Kelleher?”

Patrick walked over to Macrae’s body and made an attempt to lift the man but was forcibly stopped by Jassy Macrae, who launched a tirade that staggered me by its vehemence.