This House is Haunted (6 page)

Again, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I look back now and I think of that moment, I think of Alex and Madge Toxley
standing there on the platform at Thorpe Station and I want to scream at them, I want to run and shake them, I want to look them squarely in their faces and say, you knew, you knew even then. Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you speak?

Why didn’t you warn me?

Chapter Five

I
CLIMBED INTO THE
back of Heckling’s carriage, my suitcase placed securely in the rear, and with a great roar that seemed to build from somewhere deep inside his being, the Gaudlin man urged the horse, Winnie, forward. I felt a strong desire to glance behind once again at the Toxleys—their curious behaviour, coupled with my near accident on the platform, had unsettled me greatly—but resolved to remain calm and resilient. Whatever nerves were attacking me could, I felt, be put down to the fact that I was in an unfamiliar county away from the only city I had ever known, and that it would take time for me to feel comfortable in these new surroundings. I could not allow my mind to play tricks with me. This was the start of a new life; I determined to be optimistic.

“Is the mist always this thick?” I asked, leaning forward in the carriage in an attempt to make conversation with Heckling, who showed no sign of wanting to make conversation with me. The fog, which had dissipated slightly on the platform during my conversation with the Toxleys, had grown dense again as we began our journey and I wondered how he could see well enough to navigate accurately the roads that would eventually
lead us to our destination, a few miles to the west of the Norfolk Broads. “Mr. Heckling?” I said, when he showed no sign of offering a response, and this time I was sure I could make out a certain stiffening in his shoulders. “I asked whether the mist is always this heavy.”

He turned his head slightly and rotated his jaw in a rather unpleasant fashion, as if he was chewing on something, before shrugging and turning back to the road.

“Always been this thick, I s’pose,” he offered. “Long as I can remember anyway. Summertime, it’s not so bad. But now, aye.” He considered this and nodded his head. “We make do.”

“You’re Norfolk born and bred, I expect?” I asked.

“Aye.”

“You must like it here then.”

“Must I?” he muttered, his voice deep and filled with a mixture of boredom and irritation. “Aye, I expect I must. If you say so, that is.”

I sighed and sat back in the seat, unwilling to engage with him if he was going to be so cantankerous. Father, in addition to his dislike of Americans, the French and the Italians, had not cared greatly for the people of Norfolk and I knew that Heckling, who was certainly no Barkis and was proving himself entirely unwilling, would have irritated him greatly. During his time at the Norwich museum he had found them suspicious and discourteous, although it was possible that they simply did not care for the idea of a young Londoner arriving in their town to do something that a local boy could perhaps have done just as well. It was a coincidence that we should both spend time working in this county and I wondered whether I might have a chance to visit the museum that he and Mr. Kirby had established together, little more than fifty miles away.

Sitting back now, I watched as the scenery, what little I could see of it anyway, passed by. The carriage was rather comfortable and I was glad of that. A thick blanket had been left on the seat and I laid it across my lap, settling my hands atop and feeling quite contented. As the roads over which we passed were rather bumpy it would have been a much more difficult journey had not the seating been so exquisite, which gave me every reason to believe that my employer was a man of substantial means. I fell to thinking about H. Bennet and the life that I was going towards. I prayed that the home would be a happy one, that the Bennets would be a loving couple and that their children, however many there might be, would be kind and welcoming. I had no home of my own now, after all, and assuming that the employment worked out and they took to me as I hoped to take to them, then Gaudlin Hall might be where I resided for many years to come.

In my mind, I pictured a large house with many rooms, something rather palatial, with a spiralling driveway and lawns that went on as far as the eye could see. I think I based this entirely on the fact that my host’s name was Bennet and I associated this with the young lady at the heart of
Pride and Prejudice
. Her story had resolved itself in an extraordinary mansion, Mr. Darcy’s home at Pemberley. Perhaps these Bennets would have earned similar good fortune? Although of course Elizabeth and her sisters were part of a fiction and this, the house that I was travelling towards, was not. Still, as I reached out and ran my hand against the thick fabric of the carriage seat, it did pass through my mind that they must be moneyed at least, and that should mean that Gaudlin was something special.

“Mr. Bennet,” I said, leaning forward again and wiping my face, for a thin drizzle of rain had begun to fall. “He is in business, I suppose?”

“Who?” asked Heckling, holding fast to his reins, keeping a close eye on the dark road ahead.

“Mr. Bennet,” I repeated. “My new employer. I wondered what he does for a living. Is he in business perhaps? Or …” I struggled to think of an alternative. (I barely even knew what “in business” meant, other than the fact that a great many men seemed to describe themselves thus and seemed unwilling or unable to define the term in more intelligible ways.) “Is he the local Member perhaps? I understand that a great many wealthy families offer the head of the household to Parliament.”

Heckling deigned to turn now and he fixed me with an irritated expression. Truthfully, he looked at me as if I was a dog, scampering about his feet, desperate for attention, yapping and pawing at him when all he wanted was to be left alone with his thoughts. Another in my position might have looked away but I held his glance; he would not intimidate me. I was to be governess, after all, and he was merely the Gaudlin man.

“Who be he?” he asked finally in a contemptuous fashion.

“Who be who?” I replied, then shook my head, annoyed by how quickly I was adopting his Norfolk style. “What do you mean by
who be he
?” I asked.

“You said Mr. Bennet. I don’t know any Mr. Bennet.”

I laughed. Was this a trick of some sort? A game that he and the other servants had invented to make the new governess feel ill at ease? If it was, it was cruel and malicious and I wanted no part of it. I knew from teaching my small girls that if one showed the slightest sign of vulnerability at the start then one was lost for ever. I was made of stronger stuff than that and was determined to show it.

“Really, Mr. Heckling,” I said, laughing a little, trying to keep my tone light. “Of course you do. He sent you to collect me, after all.”

“I were sent to collect you,” agreed Heckling. “But not by no Mr. Bennet.”

A sudden rush of wind forced me back in my seat as the rain started to fall in heavier drops and I wished that Heckling had brought the covered carriage rather than the open one. (Foolish girl! I was still adrift in my notions of Pemberley. In my mind there was an entire fleet of carriages waiting at Gaudlin Hall for me, one for every day of the week.)

“Did the housekeeper send you then?” I asked.

“Mr. Raisin sent me,” he replied. “Well, Mr. Raisin and Miss Bennet anyway. Between them, I s’pose.”

“And who, pray tell,” I asked, “is Mr. Raisin?”

Heckling stroked his chin and, with the approach of evening, I could see the manner in which his dark whiskers were turning to grey in the moonlight. “Lawyer fellow, i’nt he,” he said.

“A lawyer?” I asked.

“Aye.”

I considered this. “But whose lawyer?”

“Gaudlin lawyer.”

I said nothing, simply placed these facts together in my mind and considered them for a moment. “Mr. Raisin is the family solicitor,” I said, more for my own benefit than his. “And he instructed you to collect me from the station. Well, who is this Miss Bennet then? She is the master’s sister perhaps?”

“What master?” asked Heckling and, really, I had had quite enough by now.

“The master of Gaudlin,” I said with a sigh.

Heckling laughed, then seemed to think better of it. “Ain’t no master of Gaudlin,” he said finally. “Not no more. Missus took care of that, di’nt she?”

“No master?” I asked, wondering what ridiculous game he was playing with me. “But of course there’s a master. There must be. Who is this Miss Bennet if not some relative of the master? Why, she is the one who employed me, after all. I assumed she was head of the household but according to you she holds no such position.”

“Miss Bennet were now’t more than a governess,” he said. “Just like you. Now’t more, now’t less.”

“But that’s ridiculous. Why would the governess advertise for a new governess? It’s quite beyond her responsibilities.”

“She were leaving, weren’t she?” explained Heckling. “But she wouldn’t go till she found someone new. I took her in carriage to t’station, she got out, told me to wait, said you’d be along shortly and here you are. To take her place. Winnie here din’t have more than ten minutes to rest.”

I sat back, open-mouthed, uncertain what to make of this. It sounded ridiculous. According to this man, this driver, Gaudlin Hall had no master, my position had been advertised by the previous incumbent, who, upon knowing that I had arrived in the county, saw fit to leave it immediately. What sense could such a thing make? I decided the man must be mad or drunk or both and resolved not to discuss this with him any further and simply sit back, keep my own counsel, and wait until I arrived at our destination, at which point matters would surely be explained.

And then I remembered.
HB
. The woman who had collided with me after I disembarked the London train. It must have
been her. H. Bennet. She had looked at me and seemed to know me. She must have been watching for a young woman who fitted my description, satisfied herself that I was she, and then made her escape. But why would she do such a thing? It was extraordinary behaviour. Quite incomprehensible.

Chapter Six

I
MUST HAVE DOZED
off shortly after this for I was soon in a fitful, uncomfortable sleep. I dreamed that I was back in my school, or rather something resembling St. Elizabeth’s but not entirely the same, and Mrs. Farnsworth was there, speaking to my small girls, while Father was seated in the back row engaged in conversation with someone I identified as Miss Bennet, although she did not bear the same physical characteristics as the woman on the platform. Where she had been stocky and red-haired, the woman in my dream was dark and beautiful with Mediterranean features. No one would speak to me—it was as if they did not see me at all—and from there things grew rather more hazy and descended into a blend of strangeness and mystery, in the way that dreams will, but I fancy that I was asleep for some time for when I woke it was even darker than before, night-time now, and we were turning on to a narrow laneway that opened out finally to present a view of two extraordinary iron gates.

“Gaudlin Hall up yonder,” said Heckling, pausing the horse for a moment and indicating some place in the distance, although it was impossible to see it clearly through the darkness
of the night. I sat up in my seat, adjusting my skirt beneath the blanket, aware of a stale, dry taste in my mouth and the heaviness of my eyes. My clothes were rather wet now and I regretted the fact that I would be meeting my new employers—whoever they were—for the first time in such a bedraggled state. I had never been an attractive woman but worked on my appearance to present the best possible aspect; such refinements were lost to me now. I hoped that they would excuse me quickly to my room after my arrival so that I could make some basic repairs.

My idea of a long driveway was not inaccurate and it took a few minutes for the house to come fully into sight. It was no Pemberley, that was for sure, but it was a grand country house nevertheless. Tall and imposing, the exterior bore a certain Baroque splendour with two wings jutting out from an impressive front portico, and I suspected that it was seventeenth century in origin, one of those houses whose design was influenced by the European fashions after the Restoration. I wondered how many bedrooms there might be inside—at least a dozen, I imagined—and whether or not the ballroom, for there was sure to be one in a house of this size, was still in use. Of course, I was in no way accustomed to this style of living and it rather excited me to imagine myself residing in such a place. And yet there was something frightening about it too, some darkness that I assumed would be washed away by the coming morning. But as I stared at my new home, I felt a curious urge to ask Heckling to turn the carriage around and drive me back to Norwich, where I might sit on a bench at Thorpe Station until the sun came up and then return to London, a job badly done.

“Now, Winnie,” said Heckling as we pulled up at the front door and he descended, his boots crunching in the gravel as he moved to the back of the carriage to remove my suitcase.
Realizing that the man did not have the manners to open the door for me, I reached down to the handle to twist it. To my surprise, it would not budge. I frowned, recalling how lightly it had given way when I boarded the carriage in the first place, but now it appeared to be sealed fast.

“Staying in there, are you?” asked Heckling, ignorant fellow, standing on the opposite side of the carriage and making no move whatsoever to come to my aid.

“I can’t get out, Mr. Heckling,” I replied. “The door appears to be jammed.”

“Now’t wrong wi’ it,” he said, coughing some horrendous mess up from the base of his throat and spitting it on the driveway. “Turn it, that’s all.”

I sighed and reached down once again for the handle—where were the man’s manners, after all?—and as I tried to twist it, I had a sudden reminiscence about one of my small girls, Jane Hebley, who had taken against school one day for some silly reason and refused to emerge from the girls’ bathroom. When I attempted to open it from the outside she held it tightly and, resilient in her determination, managed to stay in there for several minutes before I was able to wrench it open. That was how this felt now. It was a ridiculous notion, of course, but it felt as if the harder I tried to twist the handle, the tighter some unseen force held it shut from the outside. Had I not been outdoors, and had Heckling not been the only other soul in sight, I would have sworn that someone was playing tricks with me.