The Dead of Winter (8 page)

Eventually I made my way towards the dining room for lunch, hurrying past the door that led to Sir Stephen’s tower. As I did so, it occurred to me that, since the tower had loomed above it, I must be near the room that led on to the stone balcony from which I had seen something fall the day before.

Sure enough there was a doorway not far from where I stood, which must, I reasoned, be the one, but when I tried the door I found it locked. I
gave up and carried on my way.

At the top of the stairs that took me down to the hall, I paused to look at the curious grandfather clock with its image of a smiling sun above the left side of the face, and of a sad-looking moon and stars on the right. The moon reminded me a little of Hodges and I smiled to myself at the thought.

I was standing admiring it when I heard a noise below and walked down the stairs thinking I might find Clarence the wolfhound. But when I got there, I could see nothing but my reflection in the big old mirror that lived in the perpetual shade of the staircase. I was about to walk on when I saw a shape move in the glass behind me.

I turned but there was no one there. I stepped round the staircase to check the hall, but it was deserted. I went back to the mirror and looked at it once more. To my amazement, the shadowy figure was there again. It was clearer now, although still dark and still stretching and twisting. Distorted or not, as I approached the glass I could tell the shape was that of a boy, though utterly malevolent and pent up with a kind of poorly suppressed rage that almost bent his body in two and turned his hands to claws.

One moment it appeared as no more than a
shadowy boy, the next it was barely human. No matter how hard I tried to focus on its features, the shadowed reflection was forever blurred and indistinct, as if it were liquid constantly on the verge of dissolving into the blackness around it.

Suddenly the reflected boy-creature lurched forward and my heart skipped a beat. The glass bent and bubbled, flexed and juddered, as though it could not bear the task of mirroring that thing, and before I could step away, with a great crack it shattered as if struck by a hammer.

The noise brought Hodges running from the courtyard and Charlotte from the morning room. They found me, arms raised in front my face, standing stunned in the aftermath of the mirror’s destruction, shards of glass still tinkling at my feet.

‘What on earth has happened here?’ said Charlotte, looking at the mirror and then at me. ‘What have you done, Michael?’

‘Me?’ I said, lowering my arms. ‘I’ve done nothing, I promise you.’

‘Did the glass break itself then?’ she said. ‘Really. Is this how you repay Sir Stephen’s kindness? That frightful nonsense yesterday and now this. I am surprised at you, Michael.’

‘I didn’t break the glass,’ I said.

‘Then who did?’ she asked.

I looked at Charlotte and back to the glass strewn at my feet. I did not know what to say. I wasn’t sure what I had seen. The anxiety induced by the reflection was still with me.

‘There was something in the mirror,’ I said. ‘A boy.’

‘A boy? A boy?’ said Charlotte angrily. ‘What silliness is this? The only boy in this house is you.’

‘I did see him,’ was all I could say.

‘He’s hurt, miss,’ said Hodges, stepping forward.

It was then I noticed that blood was trickling down my face. One of the pieces of glass must have hit me when the mirror smashed.

‘Why in heaven’s name would you do such a thing, Michael?’ said Charlotte, grabbing my arm tightly. ‘I simply do not understand it. What am I to say to Sir Stephen?’

‘Master Michael is hurt,’ said Hodges more forcefully, pulling me away until she loosened her grip and stood looking dazed. ‘I’ll take him to the kitchen.’

Charlotte seemed to calm herself at Hodges’ intervention.

‘Very well,’ she consented. ‘Very well. See to him, Hodges.’ Then, addressing me again, she said,
‘Sir Stephen will be very disappointed.’ With a slight quiver in her voice, she added, ‘
I
am very disappointed.’

With these words Charlotte straightened the folds of her dress, before turning on the spot and drifting off. Blood trickled into my eye, making her blur and shudder as she disappeared.

Hodges took me to the kitchen and Mrs Guston clapped her hands against her bosom, producing a cloud of flour behind which she all but disappeared.

‘Lord above,’ she gasped, coming towards us. ‘Whatever has happened now? I heard such a terrible crash.’

‘The mirror in the hall has smashed,’ said Hodges matter-of-factly. ‘Master Michael has a cut to his face. It is nothing serious, Mrs Guston. I know it isn’t your area, but could I ask you to organise the tidying up of the glass while I see to Master Michael?’

‘Of course,’ she said, waving her hands in the air to reveal two large white handprints on her chest. ‘Of course. Edith! Edith!’

With that, Mrs Guston took off to marshal the servants. Hodges soaked a piece of muslin in something from a brown bottle and held it to my forehead, making me wince.

‘I should have mentioned that might sting, sir,’ he said with a smile.

I smiled back.

‘It’s only a scratch,’ he said. ‘You’ll be fine, sir. Hold that tight till it stops leaking.’

I sat by the fire and took hold of the swab of muslin and did as I was bidden. Hodges came and sat next to me. He poked at the coals for a few moments.

‘What happened with the mirror, Master Michael?’ Hodges asked. ‘I know you didn’t break it. What did you mean when you said there was a boy?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. Sure as I was of what I had seen, I knew how implausible it sounded.

Hodges looked at the floor and interlaced his fingers.

‘Come now, Master Michael,’ he said in a whisper. ‘There’s something happening here. I don’t claim to know what it is, but there is certainly something. Jerwood told me that you heard banging behind the panelling of the priest hole. Is that why you went back there yesterday?’

‘Yes,’ I said, frowning. ‘Not that anyone would believe me.’

Hodges gave me a long hard look.

‘Sir Stephen hears banging,’ he said. ‘It’s part of
his condition, the doctor says.’ He leaned a little more towards me. ‘But how can that be if you can hear it too?’

I didn’t know how to respond to that.

Hodges shook his head.

‘Why don’t you tell me exactly what you saw in that mirror?’

I had been reluctant to agree at first, knowing how unbelievable it sounded. I had trouble believing it myself. But I now knew I was not alone in my experiences, and besides, there was relief to be had from sharing this burden, so I took it.

‘I thought I saw a boy, but the mirror seemed to be twisting the reflection.’ I frowned, trying to remember. ‘No – only that part of it was twisted. There was a boy and then it was something else, something like a creature …’

‘A creature?’ said Hodges. ‘What sort of creature?’

‘I can’t say. Some strange thing,’ I said. ‘I … I don’t know what it was. It … It climbed the wall like a great spider.’

Hodges looked as troubled by this account as though he had seen it with his own eyes.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ he muttered.

‘So you believe me, Hodges?’ I said.

‘I don’t know what to believe, Master Michael,’
he replied, grimacing. ‘But I think I know a person’s character well enough and I don’t see you as a liar or a fool. And I know – we all do – that something is not right in this house.’

‘Mr Jerwood said the priest hole had a special significance to Sir Stephen,’ I said. ‘What did he mean?’

I saw Hodges take a furtive glance towards Mrs Guston, who had just walked within earshot of our conversation. I saw too that she nodded in reply to his unspoken question.

‘It’s not right to speak ill of the dead, but Sir Stephen’s father was a cruel man,’ said Hodges. ‘He was hard and brutal. He felt that his wife treated Miss Charlotte and Sir Stephen – and particularly Sir Stephen – with too much tenderness. He was obsessed with instilling some kind of toughness in him.

‘But rather than making Sir Stephen tougher, he broke something in him: something that has never ever truly repaired itself.’

Hodges was lost in his memories for a moment.

‘Tell the boy about what happened that Christmas,’ said Mrs Guston, walking towards us.

‘I was getting to that in my way, thank you, Mrs Guston,’ said Hodges. ‘And is that meant to be burning?’

Mrs Guston let out a shriek when she saw smoke drifting up from the oven and Hodges allowed himself a not unfriendly grin.

‘As I was about to say, Michael,’ said Hodges, ‘it all came to a head one Christmas. Sir Stephen would have been your age. He’d been having a terrible time from his father. He used to lie in his room, sobbing, poor thing.

‘I wasn’t much older than him myself and I felt awfully sorry for him. My father was a good man, and kind. I couldn’t understand how a father could treat his own son so badly.

‘Then, that Christmas, it must have all become too much for him, because Sir Stephen’s father walked into his study to find the whole place in a terrible state. Old Sir Stephen had been working on a history of his family and all his notes were strewn about the place and ripped into pieces. His books had been torn and spoiled.

‘The young master made no attempt to hide the fact that he had done it and, for the first time anyone could remember, he stood up to his father and showed some courage.

‘His father was furious. He dragged little Stephen kicking and screaming to the priest hole and threw him inside while his mother cried and
begged her husband to be merciful.’

Hodges paused here and shook his head at the memory. When he looked back at me I was surprised to see tears in his eyes.

‘Everyone at Hawton Mere knows the story of the priest hole, but it was only a little before this time that Sir Stephen’s father had unearthed it while researching his book. The priest hole had been sealed and painted over and forgotten about for centuries. It would have been a mercy for everyone if it had stayed that way.

‘It turned out that a Jesuit priest had hidden there when this house had been a Catholic stronghold. Queen Elizabeth’s soldiers had come and taken the family into custody, but though they searched the house, they never did find the priest hole or the priest.

‘No one knows why the priest didn’t leave his hiding place. Maybe he was too scared. Maybe his mind had become unhinged. Whatever the reason, it was not until the family returned over a month later that the priest’s body was found. They say his face was frozen in a look of terror, his fingernails broken as he had tried to claw his way free.

‘In any event, Old Sir Stephen locked the young master in the priest hole and forbade anyone to go
near the place. It was in the late afternoon and he did not allow his wife to release him until the following morning. Young Stephen hammered on those panels all night, poor little fellow.

‘When his mother opened the priest hole, he came rushing out like a wild animal. She tried to comfort him and he attacked her. He scratched her face and knocked her to the floor. It took my father and two other servants to hold him still. And all the time he stared back towards the priest hole.’

I remembered my terror at being in that place – and that without knowing the terrible history of it – and had no difficulty understanding how Sir Stephen must have felt. I couldn’t help but have some sympathy for him.

‘Sir Stephen was never the same boy as he was before going in,’ said Hodges. ‘He has never been the same since. Father and son hardly exchanged a word after that and Sir Stephen took himself off into the army as soon as he could. He only came back for his father’s funeral.’

Hodges swallowed as though tasting something particularly unpleasant.

‘What kind of a man would do that to his own son? I remember it like it was yesterday, Master Michael. A thing like that etches itself on to your brain.’

He sighed and looked away towards the kitchen door.

‘I think the evil of it has etched into the very stones of this house.

So it was with a heavy heart and with a goodly amount of trepidation that I made my way to the dining room that evening. But when I arrived I was relieved to find there was no sign of Sir Stephen, and at the end of the long table in that cavernous room was only one place setting, illuminated by a single candelabrum placed nearby.

The rest of the room was so shadowy I could barely perceive the extent of it, save for vague and ghostly glimpses of painted portraits looking out from the deep-red walls. A log fire burned in a huge hearth. An ornate, but faded, tapestry curtain hung across the wall opposite me.

Charlotte appeared through another door and told me that Sir Stephen was sadly still too unwell to meet me and would be eating in his room. I was to dine alone as she would be attending her brother and would eat later. With that, and her usual smile, she left.

When I looked out of my bedroom on my return from dining I could not make out the moat below me any more, never mind the marsh beyond. It was like a solid mass – as if a high black wall had been constructed only inches from my window. The only thing I could see was my own troubled face reflected in the glass.

For all the friendly overtures of Hodges and Mrs Guston and Edith, still I was heartily sick of this house. I was forced to re-read the letter Bentley had given me from my mother entreating me to accept whatever help that Sir Stephen was willing to
provide. Without it, I think I should have set off from that accursed place to take my chances on the open road.

Tiredness crept up on me, placing a heavy burden upon my shoulders, and my legs almost buckled under its weight. I washed and undressed and climbed into bed, happy to have the warmth of the bedclothes wrapped round me and eager for the oblivion of sleep.

Sleep came swiftly enough, but its hold over me was broken. I could not say what time it was I first heard the noise but, though I had cocooned myself in the bedclothes, not even the combined forces of pillows and blankets could block it out.

It had begun with a low moaning. Or at least that was when I first became aware of it. When I woke, my skin was already clammy with sweat and my heart racing. The moaning sounded both far off and close by: it was muffled as though through distance and yet it seemed to emanate from the very fabric of the walls. It resonated and vibrated through the stonework, moving by degrees from moan to plaintive wail to a terrible despairing screech. I should have said it was more like an animal, but I don’t think an animal could ever produce a sound so pained and distraught.