The Haunted Season (8 page)

With views to the lake and to deep forest on all sides, Totleigh was less than a castle, more than a hall, and it appeared somehow enchanted, dozing as it did under the weight of centuries.

In long-ago manorial times, a manor house was often the center around which a village grew—that or the village church or village green. Even now, with the manorial system far in the past, Totleigh Hall drew sightseers who added to the economic prosperity of the village by popping into the shops to buy souvenirs or into one of the inns for a brew and a bed for the night.

The hall was built on land once owned by the monks of the nearby abbey, and its former name was Nunshead. That might explain its reputation for bad luck, as it became vaguely tied into the legends swirling around the mysterious Nunswood, which brooded on a crest overlooking the river Pudmill.

The manor house had replaced an earlier country house, a sprawling, quirky Tudor edifice that had fallen into disrepair and had, in any event, been not nearly grand enough to showcase the ambitions of the family as it took firm root in the area. Later generations wanted increasingly to sweep away any history that suggested humble or tawdry beginnings, and so over the old hall's footprint they erected a much-admired stately home. Private bedrooms and reception rooms replaced the communal areas, where once the lord of the manor and his family had been lulled to sleep by the sound of snoring servants (more about those later). Gilded rooms were made larger and more golden, and glittering windows replaced the defensive stone of old.

Although Totleigh Hall was not a vast, gloomy, chain-rattler of a house in the accepted tradition, it was said to be haunted by the ghost of a woman from the time of King George III, the wife of the then lord. This nobleman had inconveniently found himself to be enamored of a servant girl, despite continuing to father children with the lady of the house, and despite all the social prohibitions surrounding such an attraction, and despite the reputation of his wife for having an evil temper. On the same day each year—legends varied as to which day, but most held the fifth of May to be the day—a woman's voice could be heard, wailing down the corridors of the house. There was disagreement as to whether this voice belonged to the lady or to the servant girl, but what was indisputable fact was that both women had disappeared one night, and as it was unlikely they had run away together, the rumor of course started that they had both been murdered. The lake was deep enough to accommodate both bodies—a thousand bodies. The lord's reputation, never very good, was reduced to tatters, and it was some centuries before his numerous heirs could claw their way back to their places in high society.

Max Tudor himself knew of the legend only from reading the chapter entitled “The Ladies in the Lake” in
Wherefore Nether Monkslip,
an unreliable source if ever one there were, a best-seller written by local worthy Frank Cuthbert. Still, Frank's opinion on what had happened at the manor house had quickly solidified into fact. He'd even given the servant girl a name (Jamaica), although her real name had been lost to history.

Max reflected on all this as he walked to Totleigh Hall on an evening soon after the latest Bowls for Souls gathering. He was going to meet with the lord of the manor, Viscount Bayer Baaden-Boomethistle, and hoped to catch him in a good and generous mood. He wondered idly if the lord were superstitious—if living in a great rambling house of echoing hallways would cause one to believe in ghosts.

It was just after Evening Prayer, and although the sun was still lighting his way, Max took a shortcut to the manor house, where lowering trees shaded his path. The days were beginning to gather in on themselves, and the end of daylight saving time soon would cast the region into gloom each afternoon. By nightfall, the path would be in darkness save for crescent moonlight to guide him back home, where Awena would have dinner waiting for him in a cottage softly aglow with lamp- and firelight.

The family at Totleigh Hall was rarely in residence nowadays, and even when they were, their attendance at St. Edwold's Church could not be said to be regular. They would sometimes attend Sunday services, taking the front pew as if by right, although the tradition of pew rent had long been abandoned. They would stumble through the service, flipping aimlessly about their prayer books and singing from the wrong page in the hymnal. On occasion, Lord Baaden-Boomethistle, in an unusual concession, could be induced to read the Epistle. He would strut importantly up the aisle and make his way to the lectern, where he would massage the passages in his great orator's voice, thundering out denunciations and condemning to damnation whatever group of sinners needed denouncing that week. On first hearing him, Max had thought the man had missed a career on the stage, but then, the idea of career for such as Lord Baaden-Boomethistle was anathema. He simply
was,
as his people had long
been,
and grubbing after money in the common way would be considered, well, common by his peers. Much better to breed horses, ride to hounds, shoot whatever moved, and potter about the conservatory than to be seen engaging in anything resembling a trade. If the rumors were true, the lord had in the past also been something of a roué, but age and his present marriage had calmed him down.

The grand family living among the rolling grounds of Totleigh Hall recognized what was required of them, and had a few years ago entertained carol singers at Christmas, an occasion that was still much talked about. Ancestors of the current residents had provided many amenities for the village, such as the Village Hall and reading rooms for the men, stocked with newspapers and periodicals. A more recent ancestor had provided the railway spur and train that steamed its way to and from the Nether Monkslip station. It was difficult to say what the current lord contributed to the village, apart from a bit of comic relief as he and his horse cantered down the High, but his appearance with his lady was still an occasion for excitement and hushed speculation. They were Royalty, after all, if very minor, and whatever they were, they belonged to the villagers. That the Very Minor Royalty greeted the villagers as they might greet tattooed and barely clad Maori was something most chose to ignore.

Had the St. Edwold's organ not been in dire need of restoration, Max would have excused himself from the entire duck race imbroglio, passing the responsibility to his new curate. Max felt he had learned enough on the esoteric subject of organ repair in the past few months to write a thesis. He was told by the experts that the St. Edwold's organ had speech irregularities and needed its pipes removed and, in some cases, replaced. There were, he gathered, pouches inside the organ that were becoming porous, thus creating dead notes; pipes that were collapsing; and reed stops that would require revoicing. Needless to say, this was not the sort of job that could be left to just anyone with a hammer and screwdriver, but one that required the attentions of the most expert specialist, and it hardly needed to be added that the cost for this specialized and intensive care was astronomic.

The church was flush with cash to keep the roof in good repair, thanks to a surprise bequest, but it had been stipulated those funds could be used for the roof and only for the roof. It was better, as the sexton liked to say, than a stick in the eye, but it did leave Max in constant fund-raising mode to keep the rest of the fabric of the church intact. Thus the need to keep the duck race, as it were, afloat.

And so Max made his way, hat in hand, to see if he could make the lord agree to allow the villagers to trample his beautiful lawns in the charitable cause of revoiced reed stops. The duck race was popular enough that the goal for organ repair was sure to be met.

While Max yearned for the good old days, the organizers had started using plastic windup ducks some years ago when the many and countless problems attendant on using live ducks became apparent. At least this meant that Max could promise Lord Baaden-Boomethistle a reduced level of chaos from the waterfowl kingdom. But the organizer's hope was to establish the finish line for the race at the foot of the Totleigh Hall grounds, and it was the ensuing celebrations that were problematic.

As Max walked, he came upon a paunchy vision in purple shorts and a gray T-shirt bearing the logo of Oxford University. The figure was jogging on a forest path near the house. Max thought this must be the seldom-seen son of the house. The large-eared figure—sunlight filtered through his ears, turning them red as a hare's—lumbered past him unseeing, practically staggering; the sweat flew off of him like a lawn sprinkler. As Max emerged from the trees, the runner's heavy legs carried him teetering around the side of the manor house in the direction of the stables at the back. Max, a jogger himself, thought there might be a tipping point where running oneself to exhaustion was counterproductive.

Max reached the wide stone steps of Totleigh Hall. In answer to his knock, a uniformed butler or valet appeared and offered to take his jacket. Max demurred, not only because he felt he would need his jacket—the house was cavernous and probably impossible to keep heated—but because he pictured his jacket vanishing down one of the endless corridors of the house, never to be seen again. It wasn't as if the place were designed for the ordinary hall cupboard under the stairs. No, Totleigh Hall must have an entire room at the butler's disposal for the temporary storage of furs and cloaks, particularly when the family was hosting one of its glittery parties.

The tall, gray-haired man, having informed Max that “his lordship is presently at work in his study,” led him down one of the vast corridors. The passage was lined with various deep alcoves where chairs designed for either a coronation or an electrocution flanked little tables or glass-fronted mahogany chests full of eye-catching treasures.

Eventually a door was flung open into a sort of antechamber. Max was asked to wait, and presently the man returned to announce that Lord Baaden-Boomethistle would see him now. The butler then drifted out of the room, stopping only to straighten a candlestick that was a millimeter out of true on a side table.

Lord Baaden-Boomethistle sat behind such a vast desk, Max nearly whistled with envy. A dark, shiny slab of mahogany surrounded by three walls of bookshelves, it offered acres of space for books and notebooks and computers, compared with the small, cramped desk at the vicarage where Max composed his sermons and wrestled with invoices. And yet Lord Baaden-Boomethistle seemed to content himself with a laptop computer and a single notepad at his side, from which he appeared to be transcribing notes. The rest of the empty surface gleamed with unfulfilled promise. At one side of the room stood a gun rack; behind the desk, French windows opened to a patio and the parklands that surrounded the house. Wisely, Max felt, the lord had turned his back on the distracting beauty of the trees and flowers outside. At the vicarage, Max was often pulled from his work by the view, but it was the villagers going about their business that distracted him. He told himself the position of the desk helped him keep his finger on the pulse of village life.

The lord, talking into a mobile phone, held up a thumb to indicate he would be with Max in a moment. Apparently listening to a rather lengthy monologue on the other end, he finally said, “I'll get Petherthwaite on it.” A few moments later, he rang off.

Since Max had been announced by the butler, he felt it was a bit much to have to sit through the end of this conversation. But at no time in his dealings with the lord of Totleigh Hall did Max feel his collar would entitle him to special treatment. As the vicar of the local church, he was to be accorded some respect, but in a manner finely calibrated to let him know that he was providing a service to the family; as he was not even the younger son of gentry, he should not entertain any ideas above his station.

The lord at last rose to greet him, extending a hand across the shiny wooden plain that separated the two men.

“Good to see you, Vicar,” he said. “A rare pleasure.”

“The pleasure is mine,” Max replied politely.

What Max knew of the family was rumor and idle gossip—“Lord Baaden-Boomethistle was a bit of a scoundrel in his day. The type who might be cast as the playboy spy in a seventies comedy” (Suzanna Winship); “This new wife isn't all she should be” (Miss Pitchford); “The apple didn't fall far from the tree; father and son are like peas in a pod” (Mrs. Hooser)—which Max did his best to cleanse from his thoughts. He didn't want to meet the family, particularly on a mission to ask favors of it, with a mind full of preconceived negative notions. What Max had seen of the father wasn't enough to establish character, and apart from the glimpse just now, he had seen the son only at a distance in the village, speeding past the vicarage on his bicycle. Likewise, Max had met Lady Baaden-Boomethistle too briefly to form any opinion, except that she was an attractive woman and vastly younger than her husband. She was said to be from Cherhill, famous for its hill figure of a white horse.

Max took Lord Bayer Baaden-Boomethistle's hand, taking his measure as he did so. He saw a man very tall, polished, and deceptively youthful in appearance, money having sanded away the lines of care and worry normal to a man of his age. It looked as if his hair might have been dark once, although now it was white and thinning and compensated for by bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows.

“What can I do for you, Vicar? And how shall I address you?” His manner was courteous, but Max thought it might mask a trace of annoyance at the interruption to his day. Before Max could answer, the lord added, “I knew your predecessor. Sound man, if a bit lacking in imagination. A Cambridge man. One of the lesser Bokelers of the West Riding, I believe.”

It was an episcopal version of the dowager's conversation at Bowls for Souls, that litany of the blue bloods of the nation. But the lord smiled and waited now for Max's reply. It was a smile that managed to suggest the recipient was briefly in his lordship's good graces but shouldn't expect to bask in the sunlight for long.