Collected Ghost Stories (58 page)

‘Oh! well, I happened to hear of an old saying about something that walks in Betton Wood. And I wondered if that had anything to do with its being cleared away: that’s all.’

‘Well, you was in the right, Master Reginald, however you come to hear of it, and I believe I can tell you the rights of it better than anyone in this parish, let alone old Ellis. You see it came about this way: that the shortest road to Allen’s Farm laid through the Wood, and when we was little my poor mother she used to go so many times in the week to the farm to fetch a quart of milk, because Mr. Allen what had the farm then under your father, he was a good man, and anyone
that had a young family to bring up, he was willing to allow ’em so much in the week. But never you mind about that now. And my poor mother she never liked to go through the Wood, because there was a lot of talk in the place, and sayings like what you spoke about just now. But every now and again, when she happened to be late with her work, she’d have to take the short road through the Wood, and as sure as ever she did, she’d come home in a rare state. I remember her and my father talking about it, and he’d say, “Well, but it can’t do you no harm, Emma,” and she’d say, “Oh! but you haven’t an idear of it, George. Why, it went right through my head,” she says, “and I came over all bewildered-like, and as if I didn’t know where I was. You see, George,” she says, “it ain’t as if you was about there in the dusk. You always goes there in the daytime, now don’t you?” and he says: “Why, to be sure I do; do you take me for a fool?” And so they’d go on. And time passed by, and I think it wore her out, because, you understand, it warn’t no use to go for the milk not till the afternoon, and she wouldn’t never send none of us children instead, for fear we should get a fright. Nor she wouldn’t tell us about it herself. “No,” she says, “it’s bad enough for me. I don’t want no one else to go through it, nor yet hear talk about it.” But one time I recollect she says, “Well, first it’s a rustling-like all along in the bushes, coming very quick, either towards me or after me according to the time, and then there comes this scream as appears to pierce right through from the one ear to the other, and the later I am coming through, the more like I am to hear it twice over; but thanks be, I never yet heard it the three times.” And then I asked her, and I says: “Why, that seems like someone walking to and fro all the time, don’t it?” and she says, “Yes, it do, and whatever it is she wants, I can’t think”: and I says, “Is it a woman, mother?” and she says, “Yes, I’ve heard it is a woman.”

‘Anyway, the end of it was my father he spoke to your father, and told him the Wood was a bad wood. “There’s never a bit of game in it, and there’s never a bird’s nest there,” he says, “and it ain’t no manner of use to you.” And after a lot of talk, your father he come and see my mother about it, and he see she warn’t one of these silly women as gets nervish about nothink at all, and he made up his mind there was somethink in it, and after that he asked about in the neighbourhood, and I believe he made out somethink, and wrote it down in a paper what very like you’ve got up at the Court, Master Reginald. And then
he gave the order, and the Wood was stubbed up. They done all the work in the daytime, I recollect, and was never there after three o’clock.’

‘Didn’t they find anything to explain it, Mitchell? No bones or anything of that kind?’

‘Nothink at all, Master Reginald, only the mark of a hedge and ditch along the middle, much about where the quickset hedge run now; and with all the work they done, if there had been anyone put away there, they was bound to find ’em. But I don’t know whether it done much good, after all. People here don’t seem to like the place no better than they did afore.’

‘That’s about what I got out of Mitchell,’ said Philipson, ‘and as far as any explanation goes, it leaves us very much where we were. I must see if I can’t find that paper.’

‘Why didn’t your father ever tell you about the business?’ I said.

‘He died before I went to school, you know, and I imagine he didn’t want to frighten us children by any such story. I can remember being shaken and slapped by my nurse for running up that lane towards the Wood when we were coming back rather late one winter afternoon: but in the daytime no one interfered with our going into the Wood if we wanted to—only we never did want.’

‘Hm!’ I said, and then, ‘Do you think you’ll be able to find that paper that your father wrote?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do. I expect it’s no farther away than that cupboard behind you. There’s a bundle or two of things specially put aside, most of which I’ve looked through at various times, and I know there’s one envelope labelled Betton Wood: but as there was no Betton Wood any more, I never thought it would be worth while to open it, and I never have. We’ll do it now, though.’

‘Before you do,’ I said (I was still reluctant, but I thought this was perhaps the moment for my disclosure), ‘I’d better tell you I think Mitchell was right when he doubted if clearing away the Wood had put things straight.’ And I gave the account you have heard already: I need not say Philipson was interested. ‘Still there?’ he said. ‘It’s amazing. Look here, will you come out there with me now, and see what happens?’

‘I will do no such thing,’ I said, ‘and if you knew the feeling, you’d be glad to walk ten miles in the opposite direction. Don’t talk of it. Open your envelope, and let’s hear what your father made out.’

He did so, and read me the three or four pages of jottings which it contained. At the top was written a motto from
Scott’s
Glenfinlas
,
* which seemed to me well-chosen:

‘Where walks, they say, the shrieking ghost.’

Then there were notes of his talk with Mitchell’s mother, from which I extract only this much. ‘I asked her if she never thought she saw anything to account for the sounds she heard. She told me, no more than once, on the darkest evening she ever came through the Wood; and then she seemed forced to look behind her as the rustling came in the bushes, and she thought she saw something all in tatters with the two arms held out in front of it coming on very fast, and at that she ran for the stile, and tore her gown all to flinders getting over it.’

Then he had gone to two other people whom he found very shy of talking. They seemed to think, among other things, that it reflected discredit on the parish. However, one, Mrs. Emma Frost, was prevailed upon to repeat what her mother had told her. ‘They say it was a lady of title that married twice over, and her first husband went by the name of Brown, or it might have been Bryan (‘Yes, there were Bryans at the Court before it came into our family,’ Philipson put in), and she removed her neighbour’s landmark: leastways she took in a fair piece of the best pasture in Betton parish what belonged by rights to two children as hadn’t no one to speak for them, and they say years after she went from bad to worse, and made out false papers to gain thousands of pounds up in London, and at last they was proved in law to be false, and she would have been tried and put to death very like, only she escaped away for the time. But no one can’t avoid the curse that’s laid on them that removes the landmark, and so we take it she can’t leave Betton before someone take and put it right again.’

At the end of the paper there was a note to this effect. ‘I regret that I cannot find any clue to previous owners of the fields adjoining the Wood. I do not hesitate to say that if I could discover their representatives, I should do my best to indemnify them for the wrong done to them in years now long past: for it is undeniable that the Wood is very curiously disturbed in the manner described by the people of the place. In my present ignorance alike of the extent of the land wrongly appropriated, and of the rightful owners, I am reduced to keeping a separate note of the profits derived from this part of the estate, and
my custom has been to apply the sum that would represent the annual yield of about five acres to the common benefit of the parish and to charitable uses: and I hope that those who succeed me may see fit to continue this practice.’

So much for the elder Mr. Philipson’s paper. To those who, like myself, are readers of the State Trials it will have gone far to illuminate the situation. They will remember how between the years 1678 and 1684 the
Lady Ivy, formerly Theodosia Bryan,
* was alternately Plaintiff and Defendant in a series of trials in which she was trying to establish a claim against the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s for a considerable and very valuable tract of land in
Shadwell:
* how in the last of those trials, presided over by L.C.J. Jeffreys, it was proved up to the hilt that the deeds upon which she based her claim were forgeries executed under her orders: and how, after an information for perjury and forgery was issued against her, she disappeared completely—so completely, indeed, that no expert has ever been able to tell me what became of her.

Does not the story I have told suggest that she may still be heard of on the scene of one of her earlier and more successful exploits?

*        *        *        *        *

‘That,’ said my friend, as he folded up his papers, ‘is a very faithful record of my one extraordinary experience. And now——’

But I had so many questions to ask him, as for instance, whether his friend had found the proper owner of the land, whether he had done anything about the hedge, whether the sounds were ever heard now, what was the exact title and date of his pamphlet, etc., etc., that bed-time came and passed, without his having an opportunity to revert to the Literary Supplement of
The Times
.

————

[Thanks to the researches of Sir John Fox, in his book on
The Lady Ivie’s Trial
(Oxford, 1929), we now know that my heroine died in her bed in 1695, having—heaven knows how—been acquitted of the forgery, for which she had undoubtedly been responsible.]

H
OW
pleasant it can be, alone in a first-class railway carriage, on the first day of a holiday that is to be fairly long, to dawdle through a bit of English country that is unfamiliar, stopping at every station. You have a map open on your knee, and you pick out the villages that lie to right and left by their church towers. You marvel at the complete stillness that attends your stoppage at the stations, broken only by a footstep crunching the gravel. Yet perhaps that is best experienced after sundown, and the traveller I have in mind was making his leisurely progress on a sunny afternoon in the latter half of June.

He was in the depths of the country. I need not particularize further than to say that if you divided the map of England into four quarters, he would have been found
in the south-western of them.
*

He was a man of academic pursuits, and his term was just over. He was on his way to meet a new friend, older than himself. The two of them had met first on an official inquiry in town, had found that they had many tastes and habits in common, liked each other, and the result was an invitation from Squire Richards to Mr. Fanshawe which was now taking effect.

The journey ended about five o’clock. Fanshawe was told by a cheerful country porter that the car from the Hall had been up to the station and left a message that something had to be fetched from half a mile farther on, and would the gentleman please to wait a few minutes till it came back? ‘But I see,’ continued the porter, ‘as you’ve got your bysticle, and very like you’d find it pleasanter to ride up to the ’All yourself. Straight up the road ’ere, and then first turn to the left—it ain’t above two mile—and I’ll see as your things is put in the car for you. You’ll excuse me mentioning it, only I thought it were a nice evening for a ride. Yes, sir, very seasonable weather for the haymakers: let me see, I have your bike ticket. Thank you, sir; much obliged: you can’t miss your road, etc., etc.’

The two miles to the Hall were just what was needed, after the day in the train, to dispel somnolence and impart a wish for tea. The Hall,
when sighted, also promised just what was needed in the way of a quiet resting-place after days of sitting on committees and college-meetings. It was neither excitingly old nor depressingly new. Plastered walls, sash-windows, old trees, smooth lawns, were the features which Fanshawe noticed as he came up the drive. Squire Richards, a burly man of sixty odd, was awaiting him in the porch with evident pleasure.

‘Tea first,’ he said, ‘or would you like a longer drink? No? All right, tea’s ready in the garden. Come along, they’ll put your machine away. I always have tea under the lime-tree by the stream on a day like this.’

Nor could you ask for a better place. Midsummer afternoon, shade and scent of a vast lime-tree, cool, swirling water within five yards. It was long before either of them suggested a move. But about six, Mr. Richards sat up, knocked out his pipe, and said: ‘Look here, it’s cool enough now to think of a stroll, if you’re inclined? All right: then what I suggest is that we walk up the park and get on to the hill-side, where we can look over the country. We’ll have a map, and I’ll show you where things are; and you can go off on your machine, or we can take the car, according as you want exercise or not. If you’re ready, we can start now and be back well before eight, taking it very easy.’