The Dead of Winter (15 page)

I turned away, unable to bear looking at her. She moved closer and her dress made a swish I now recognised as the whispering sound I heard behind me that day in the snow.

‘You pushed me into the moat!’

‘But Michael,’ said Charlotte with a smile, ‘you fell in the moat. It was an accident. Don’t you remember?’

‘I do remember,’ I said. ‘I remember that whispering sound and I remember feeling something on my back just before I slipped. And you changed your dress. You changed your dress because it was wet from the snow.’

Charlotte sighed.

‘Did you seriously think that I would stand idly by and watch you – you! – inherit Hawton Mere? I’ll die first!’

‘It’s not for you to say!’ I shouted. ‘Sir Stephen has –’

‘Pah!’ snorted Charlotte. ‘Stephen is a madman and there are a hundred witnesses to the fact.’

‘He was locked up in that terrible place by your father. It’s no wonder,’ I said.

Charlotte giggled. ‘Oh, you know about that, do you?’

She smiled coquettishly, twirling the scissors as if they were a fan. I glanced past her to the door across the room. It was still slightly open. Perhaps I might reach it if I could just get past Charlotte. But I would have to be fast.

‘Shall I tell you a secret?’ she whispered. I made no reply. ‘It wasn’t Stephen who did that to my father’s study …’ She edged a little closer. ‘It was me.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘So … So Sir Stephen owned up to save you from a thrashing?’

‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘The one and only time he had the nerve to stand up to Father and he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Even Father would have been impressed had he known. It was Stephen’s first and last act of bravery.’

I saw my chance and rushed at Charlotte, barging past her into the room and running to the door and pulling it open. To my horror, standing in the doorway was Sir Stephen, his dark glasses black against his ashen face, the jet buttons on his waistcoat twinkling like dying stars.

‘Maybe not my last, Charlotte,’ he said, looking past me to his sister.

‘Stephen,’ said Charlotte, with a sugary lightness in her voice that was as alarming as the malevolence that had preceded it. ‘How long have you been standing there?’

‘So you killed her, Charlotte?’ Sir Stephen said quietly, his face and voice devoid of expression. ‘You murdered Margaret?’

‘But Stephen, surely you didn’t believe that nonsense. I was just humouring Michael,’ she said, her tone switching to one of wounded innocence. ‘Do you really think me capable of murder?’

‘I believe you would do anything for this house,’ Sir Stephen replied.

Charlotte faltered a little in the face of Sir Stephen’s coldness, but she walked towards him, arms outstretched.

‘You are tired, brother …’ she began.

‘Enough!’ said Sir Stephen, pushing her away, and refusing to even look at her face. He walked instead towards me and clasped both hands round my shoulders, smiling sadly.

‘Michael,’ he said, ‘go and fetch Mr Jerwood. He is with –’

But before he could finish these words, he gasped, looked at me with an expression of bafflement, then dropped to my feet to reveal Charlotte standing behind him holding the scissors, crimson smears on their silver blades.

I fell to my haunches and tried to pick Sir Stephen up, but he made no sound. Blood was oozing from a wound in his back and, when I turned him over, more blood trickled from between his lips. I placed my ear beside his mouth
and there was no sound, no breath.

‘He’s dead!’ I said, looking at Charlotte and seeing the scissors whirl towards me in a wide arc. I managed to move just in time to save my eye as the blades flashed past my face.

I struck out wildly, but with enough force to knock the scissors from Charlotte’s hand and send them clattering across the floor. I scrambled backwards but Charlotte lurched with surprising speed and startling strength. She grasped me round the throat and began to choke me. I tried to prise away her arms but to no avail; she held me like a vice.

As we struggled round the room, my flailing arm caught a lamp on the table and sent it to the floor, where the oil spilled across the carpet, igniting as it did so and catching the edge of the great damask curtains.

The fire seemed to take hold in every surface of the room instantaneously. No sooner had it begun than it encircled us entirely. Charlotte did not appear to notice, so crazed was she now. With all my remaining strength I struck her in the face as hard as I could.

Charlotte let go of me and staggered back. The flames were alive, rearing up here and there like burning stallions, kicking out with fiery hooves.

But there was a path between the flames and I ran through, shielding my face against the heat, and managed to reach the door leading to the hallway beyond. Charlotte tried to follow me, but the waves of fire crashed back like the Red Sea over Pharaoh.

She screamed after me, more in fury than in fear. I turned to see her twisted, raging hate-filled face and thought that were there any justice, these flames would be only a taste of those yet to come.

I stepped out of the burning room and into the passageway, shocked to see that the fire was already escaping and moving with a supernatural energy, sizzling in the ceiling above my head and visible between the floorboards at my feet. The plaster-work was cracking and falling. Smoke was seeping through. I was about to run, when I was brought to a halt by what I saw ahead.

Standing some ten feet away, with his back to me and his head bowed, was a boy about my own age – though his clothes were somewhat old-fashioned.

I knew in an instant that this was the boy I had seen in the mirror. He was muttering to himself, clenching and unclenching his fists. Even from the back I could sense his rage. Then he turned to face me.

I had seen much at Hawton Mere to chill my
blood, but nothing – nothing! – had prepared me for the sight I now beheld. The boy turned to face me, but the face he showed had no eyes or nose or any feature at all save a mouth – a mouth that now opened like a vicious wound to let out a cry that seemed to shatter the very air about us. It was a cry that summoned up a world of anger and pain in one terrifying sound.

He ran towards me and I swear that my heart stopped there and then and only beat again when he raced past, uninterested in me. I turned to see his form shift this way and that: a cockroach-spiderlizard thing, galloping towards its prey on bristled legs. Through the shimmering heat haze I saw Charlotte.

The thing stood before her in the fire glow. It was a boy once again: the boy whose brooding, violent spirit was such a part of this house. And I saw that she, like me, could now clearly recognise him for who he was.

He was not a ghost at all. Or, at least, he was not the ghost of a deceased person. He was the ghost of a child whose life had been so damaged that the pain of it had manifested itself as this strange and terrifying entity. It was Sir Stephen as a boy.

When Charlotte saw the boy, her face changed to
one of terror. She recognised, as did I, the intensity of hatred and bitterness in that awful face. Her cruelty and obsession had spawned this creature the day she let her brother take the blame and saw him locked in the priest hole. Sir Stephen had been haunted by himself all those years. Now the demon that had tormented him had come for her.

Fiery snakes were hissing at my head and feet, slithering along the passageway and threatening to cut off my escape if I did not move quickly. But just as I began to run, a beam fell from the ceiling and blocked my way. The heat from the flames hurt my eyes.

I fumbled inside my pocket and blew the whistle. There was no sound to take comfort in, but still I hoped that somewhere it would be heard and help might come.

Smoke plumed up and stung my throat. The ceiling collapsed behind me. The air around me was becoming unbearably hot, and my breaths became shallower and shallower.

I could see very little now, and I must confess I thought that this might be where my story would end. But then Hodges and Jerwood came running towards me, Clarence barking at their heels.

Hodges cleared the burning timber away with
total disregard for his own safety.

‘Michael!’ shouted Jerwood as they reached me. ‘What has happened here? Where is Sir Stephen?’

‘He’s back there … in Lady Clarendon’s bedroom … So is Miss Charlotte,’ I began, coughing at the smoke that coiled about us.

Hodges leapt forward and began knocking aside the burning rafters with his bare hands, struggling against all reasonable odds to break through, despite his very clothes catching alight as he did so. The fire reared up and attacked him, burning his hair.

Jerwood tried to pull him back but Hodges turned in such a rage of passion that I thought he would strike Jerwood down, before shrugging the lawyer away and returning to his efforts. This was the loyalty that Sir Stephen had so admired in my father. But was another brave man to die out of loyalty to Sir Stephen?

‘Mr Hodges!’ I cried tearfully, grabbing hold of him and turning his face towards mine. ‘Don’t! Oh please don’t! He’s dead. Sir Stephen’s already dead! And you’ll die too if you go in there!’

‘But what about Miss Charlotte?’ he shouted.

‘It was she who killed Sir Stephen,’ I gasped. ‘And she murdered Lady Clarendon too.’ Hodges and
Jerwood exchanged astonished glances. ‘It’s true!’ Another part of the ceiling crashed down.

‘You’ll never reach her, Hodges!’ shouted Jerwood.

I had imbibed so much smoke during this speech that I could now barely breathe, choking as Hodges stood for a moment weighing my words. After a second or two, he nodded.

‘For God’s sake, let’s get out of here!’ shouted Jerwood, and this time Hodges made no resistance.

Part of the house seemed to collapse at our every footfall. The sound of the conflagration was deafening and behind it all there was that awful groaning, moaning, growling sound of despair shaking the house to its very foundations.

We staggered, coughing and choking, out into the courtyard, and we each helped the others to run across the bridge and out into the safety of the marsh. Hodges’ clothes were still smouldering in places, giving him a wild air as he stood and looked back towards the house.

Flames were leaping from the roof and from the window, and the yellow and red of its light flickered and danced upon the snow and the ice of the moat. I found myself irresistibly drawn to the balcony, and Hodges and Jerwood followed.

The light of day was fading and the eerie
glimmer of twilight washed the scene. Rose-red clouds billowed above us. We stood by the moat, looking up at the blazing room.

But Charlotte was not dead yet. She appeared at the balcony, screaming in terror. I could see something behind her, black in front of the tumult of flames. It was less boy now and more monkey, more demon or imp, and it hopped this way and that in triumph until Charlotte, in her desperation to escape it and the flames, climbed on to the parapet, ripping her burning dress from her body, and leapt into the frozen moat in nothing but her white shift.

To his great credit, Hodges jumped into the icy moat to try to save her, but it seemed to take her under and Hodges could not find her in the thick, murky water. Jerwood and I helped to pull him out and, as we ushered him away, Charlotte’s body floated up from the depths and rested, just as Lady Clarendon’s had, below the thick ice, the light of the fire washing over her frozen and distorted features.

I glanced back once, as we walked to the bridge, and saw the ghost of Lady Clarendon at the edge of the fire glow. She stood at the moat’s edge, staring down at Charlotte’s body. She turned to look at me
briefly and then, walking backwards, disappeared into the darkness, not merely to be hidden by it, but to be subsumed by it, engulfed in it. She simply became part of the blackness. She was gone now, I supposed, never to return.

The events I have described are all now long past, not that they have ever faded in their intensity. They are as potent in my mind now as they ever were. I wish to God I could have made them fade. I wish to God I could rid my dreams of their awful shapes.

Funerals and weddings tend to conjure up visions of other funerals and weddings, and Charlotte and Sir Stephen’s ceremony inevitably made me recollect that poorly attended and dismal funeral of my dear mother, though it seemed a lifetime ago and was a very different sort of affair.

We three – Jerwood, Hodges and I – had agreed that the best we could do in the circumstances was to say that it had been what it appeared to be: a terrible accident. We did not even tell Mrs Guston or Edith or the Bentleys. What good would it have done?

Sir Stephen’s rank ensured that the service at Ely cathedral was a grand and spectacular occasion. The massive and rather grotesque marble monument to Sir Stephen and Charlotte looms over visitors there to this day, a talking point for guides, who tell the tragic story of how brother and sister died together and lie together for all eternity. It is a very moving tale they say, when told well.

Sir Stephen’s neighbours turned out in abundance, expensively dressed in black like a flock of carrion crows. The womenfolk cried and swooned and sobbed behind handkerchiefs and fans, but I did not believe their grief. Those who had gossiped about Sir Stephen while he lived now hoped to profit by his death.

I stood apart with Jerwood and with Hodges, whose hands and face still bore the shiny pink scars of his wild efforts to reach Sir Stephen in the fire. We had forged a bond now. Any suspicion which might have fallen upon me as the inheritor
of Sir Stephen’s wealth was cleared by the presence of Jerwood, whose reputation as an honest man was second to none.

That said, the neighbours were very happy to speculate, of course, and I could see small groups whispering darkly whenever I turned round. But I could not have cared less, though I must confess I gained some pleasure from the fact that all their cries and wailing were for naught. Sir Stephen had chosen to remember none of them in his will.

Hawton Mere was reduced to a blackened, crumbling ruin by the fire and all the paintings and accumulated treasures of its ancient family were likewise destroyed.