The Little Stranger (64 page)

I am no nearer now to understanding just what happened at the Hall than I was three years ago. Once or twice I’ve spoken about it to Seeley. He has come down firmly in favour of his old, rational view that Hundreds was, in effect, defeated by history, destroyed by its own failure to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. In his opinion, the Ayreses, unable to advance with the times, simply opted for retreat—for suicide, and madness. Right across England, he says, other old gentry families are probably disappearing in exactly the same way.

The theory is convincing enough; and yet, sometimes I am troubled. I remember poor, good-tempered Gyp; I recall those mysterious black smudges on the walls and ceiling of Roderick’s room; I picture the three little drops of blood that I once saw springing to the surface of Mrs Ayres’s silk blouse. And I think of Caroline. I think of Caroline, in the moments before she died, advancing across that moonlit landing. I think of her crying out:
You!

I’ve never attempted to remind Seeley of his other, odder theory: that Hundreds was consumed by some dark germ, some ravenous shadow-creature, some ‘little stranger’, spawned from the troubled unconscious of someone connected with the house itself. But on my solitary visits, I find myself growing watchful. Every so often I’ll sense a presence, or catch a movement at the corner of my eye, and my heart will give a jolt of fear and expectation: I’ll imagine that the secret is about to be revealed to me at last; that I will see what Caroline saw, and recognise it, as she did.

If Hundreds Hall is haunted, however, its ghost doesn’t show itself to me. For I’ll turn, and am disappointed—realising that what I am looking at is only a cracked window-pane, and that the face gazing distortedly from it, baffled and longing, is my own.

T
hanks to all my supportive and generous early readers: Alison Oram, Sally
O-J
, Antony Topping, Hirāni Himona, Jennifer Vaughan, Terry Vaughan, and Ceri Williams. Thanks to my agent, Judith Murray; and to my editors in the U.K., the U.S., and Canada: Lennie Goodings, Megan Lynch, and Lara Hinchberger. Thanks to the staff at Greene & Heaton Ltd; Little, Brown; Riverhead; and McClelland & Stewart who read and commented on the manuscript. Thanks to Hilda Walsh for advice on muscles. Special thanks to Angela Hewins for her patient answers to my fumbling queries on Warwickshire life. Extra special thanks to Lucy Vaughan.

Part of
The Little Stranger
was written during an inspiring month at Hedgebrook women writers’ retreat on Whidbey Island, and I am hugely grateful both to the staff of Hedgebrook for facilitating that visit, and to the authors I met while I was there.

I am also indebted to various works of nonfiction. These include: Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore,
Phantasms of the Living
(London, 1886); Catherine Crowe,
The Night Side of Nature
(London, 1848); Harry Price,
Poltergeist Over England
(London, 1945); Hereward Carrington and Nandor Fodor,
Haunted People
(New York, 1951); Nandor Fodor,
On the Trail of the Poltergeist
(New York, 1958); A. R. G. Owen,
Can We Explain the Poltergeist?
(New York, 1964); Kenneth Lane,
Diary of a Medical Nobody
(London, 1982) and
West Country Doctor
(London, 1984); John Pemberton,
Will Pickles of Wensleydale
(London, 1970); Dawn Robertson,
A Country Doctor
(Kirkby Stephen, 1999); Geoffrey Barber,
Country Doctor
(Ipswich, 1974); Geoffrey Tyack,
Warwickshire Country Houses
(Chichester, 1994); George Hewins,
The Dillen
, edited by Angela Hewins (London, 1981); and Angela Hewins,
Mary, After the Queen
(Oxford, 1985).