The Silence of Ghosts (26 page)

Then the dancing men grew smaller and smaller and faded, and when I came to Rose was kneeling beside me, holding my hand and whispering softly in my ear. Dr Raverat was there.

‘I think we’ve got to get you back home,’ he said. ‘The rest of us can manage here. Oliver will drive you back.’

I shook my head.

‘I won’t go back till I’ve seen what’s up here. It was just too much morphia. It has happened before, Rose can tell you. I’ll be fine.’

Raverat seemed sceptical, but he looked at my eyes with the help of a tiny torch he always carried.

‘Very well, but please be careful. If there are any shocks, tell Rose or one of us to get you down and outside.’

Rose helped me round, and I soon gained strength. The top floor was as I remembered it from my earlier stays. Bedrooms ready for occupation, a large bathroom and toilet, some cupboards, five electric heaters. The bedrooms contained beds that were all in serious need of an airing. There were photographs on the bedside tables, and oil lamps, and paintings on the wall showing the first signs of damp.

Without the drawings, we should have been forced to tear down most of the walls in order to find a way into the attic space, but they showed very clearly where the attics had been. We focused on a broad expanse of wall next to the master bedroom. If the drawing was right, this would be where the stairs had been. Very old wallpaper in a pattern of Chinese birds ran across this entire section. We scraped it off and found planking underneath. It was simply a matter of using the crowbars and
hammers to pull back the planks. With two or three out of the way, I was able to put a torch into the space. Right behind it lay a short flight of wooden steps, exactly as we had anticipated. We forced the other planks from the horizontal struts on to which they had been nailed. The struts themselves came away easily. It had fallen completely silent. I could hear nothing but the sound of my own breathing. I realized I was sweating in spite of the cold. With one hand I loosened my scarf. Then I shone my torch onto the steep stairwell. Oliver and Dr Raverat switched on their torches as well. All along and above the stairs was a wash of cobwebs, but there were few spiders among them. The space had been shut off for a very long time, and I could not think how spiders might have survived there without prey to feed on.

Rose had found a witch’s broom downstairs and used it now to clear the stairway. We went up slowly, one stair at a time, and in a very short time I found myself face to face with a wooden door. It was grimy. In front of me was a handwritten inscription bearing a single word. I read it out letter by letter while Cecil wrote it down. I guessed it was Portuguese. The word was
Aleijadinhos
.

‘I came across this in several letters from Sir William,’ Cecil said. ‘Literally, it means “little cripples”, but somehow it became a sort of slang for lepers. The formal word would be
leprosos
nowadays, but
aleijadinho
was current in William’s day.’

A crowbar took care of the lock, which swung away from us. We stepped inside, one at a time. As I came through the door, I felt lightheaded again. But I knew I was at the heart of this thing. I took a step forward and let the beam of my torch go all the way to the other end of the attic. I heard a tapping, like the feet of tap dancers or Irish dancers. But this was more staccato. It would break off for long moments, then resume, then stop again. As my torch travelled round the long room, I saw
something. I halted the torch and looked more closely, and my heart almost gave out. I heard Rose gasp with horror, then the doctor, then Oliver and Cecil.

Everywhere I looked was a tumble of coffins and corpses, some mummified, some skeletons, many clothed in mouldering habits, the treasure trove of one man’s obsession with the dreams of the dead, the febrile nightmares of the departed. They filled the attic. Some corpses sat on chairs, wisps of hair on their bald pates, their jaws fallen, others lay half in, half out of their coffins, yet others had been wrapped in burlap and tied up with string.

I noticed an array of four mummified bodies dressed in eighteenth-century clothes, and in the same moment I realized they were no bigger than children. I looked more closely and saw that one was dressed in the grave clothes that had appeared in Rose’s photograph of Clara. Three had long hair, the fourth was almost bald, and only one wore boy’s clothes. Four dolls with black faces lay next to them. Rose squeezed my hand so hard her nails dug into my palm.

I had expected to see the children themselves, or other figures raised by the ghost talkers out of their own sleep, but none appeared. I was horrified by the possibility that Octavia’s spirit could be here, condemned to lie in this long room with the other lepers. The children perhaps.

Just as I thought we should turn and board this charnel-house up again, something moved at the far end. I strained to see, and slowly a figure came into view, a phantom illuminated by the light of my torch.

It was a man in eighteenth-century clothes. He wore a black justaucorps, a gilet, also black, a lawn cravat in the Steenkerk fashion, a bourse wig tied back with a black ribbon, a small black tricorne hat and black shoes with low heels and silver buckles. The very height of fashion, or so it seemed to me. He carried
a thin-bladed sword at his waist and a silver-topped cane in his right hand. I could have recognized him anywhere.

He looked at me appraisingly, standing cocksure and arrogant in front of me.

‘You must be Sir Dominic,’ he said. ‘I am Sir William Lancaster, your many times grandfather. Have you found what you were looking for here, or is this all a disappointment? Do tell me. I’d love to have a short conversation. I fear you’ve grown disillusioned with me. You think this was evil. You believe I am to be reprimanded on account of what has happened here. But these are mere mortal remains. You will find the like in any country churchyard or in the crypt of any large church or cathedral. No one pays them heed. No one gives them gratuitous attention. Yet some are murderers, some have been brought to the hangman’s noose, others to the executioner’s sword, some innocent yet put to death, others steeped in sin and properly hanged and quartered. You say nothing of those, yet here you protest that something evil has been done. Fie on you for a mawkish, condoling buffoon.’

I said nothing. What can one say to the dead? He was the picture of elegance, a doyen of wit, and clearly my father’s predecessor, yet underneath he was but a rotting carcass, and beneath that he had a heart as black and unfeeling as any you might hope to find with Adolf Hitler and his circle of the damned. I had always boasted that I did not believe in hell, but now I hoped for it, hoped that William Lancaster and his associates might tumble into its deepest pit. And then I guessed that they might be in hell already. I could almost smell the faggots burning.

I called to the others, and I could see they were as eager as I was to get out of there. They joined me, and we locked the door, shutting the attic away from sight. We hurried back down the stairway, bunched together. I told them what I wanted to do
and, though reluctant, they helped me nail the boards back in place. They went back firmly, and when we had finished it was hard to see any difference from the way the wall was now and how it was when we arrived. All it needed was some wallpaper to turn it back to what was there before.

It was silent behind the wall and door. A perfect silence had fallen on the house, a silence of ghosts quiet as the corpses in their graves, as quiet as the bones in the attic. The silence of ghosts. With each other they never talk, they never sing. With the living, they whisper in our ears and scream in our heads.

We left and the cold air licked at our wounds. There was nothing more I could do. I no longer had the strength, my thoughts could take no more of it. I needed to think of Rose and the life I would live with her.

Saturday, 10 May

There have been large air raids on Barrow for several days now. The German planes pass over the lakes, and the booming of their engines puts fear into all our hearts. There’s a special service in the church tomorrow, to pray for our neighbours over there and to remember the many who have died. We dare not show a light now, for fear an over-hasty German bomber gets it into his head and presses the button to send a torrent of Sprengbrand C50 incendiaries on top of Pooley Bridge. It will soon be time to leave Ullswater and return to London.

Rose and I were married last Sunday, on a gloriously sunny day. We had guests from Pooley Bridge, Howtown and beyond, and there was barely enough room in the church for everyone. Oliver Braithwaite married us, as we had asked him to, and
Hugh Raverat gave Rose away. Jeanie sat in the front pew and cried her eyes out, as is only natural. That same day, Jeanie went off on a holiday, to stay with relatives in Keswick, who took her there in their car.

She left us her cottage to stay in for our honeymoon, and we’ve barely set foot outside. The baker leaves a loaf of bread, the dairy farmer bottles of milk, and the grocer everything else we need. We just leave our ration books on the doorstep, and a basket for the groceries. We are in perfect heaven.

And when we’re in bed and I run my hands along her naked back, I feel nothing but her skin. The fear has gone.

We have done what we can down at Hallinhag House. Oliver Braithwaite said prayers for all those who had died, nameless and faceless, before being left in that attic of horrors. I have done with the house now and will leave it to return to the silence I found it in.

Octavia’s tombstone was made of local granite and inscribed by a stonemason from Penrith. She sleeps in silence now, like those other dead. I no longer dream of dancing men and I do not hear the stamping of children’s feet as they dance the
maculelé
. Hallinhag House sits where it has been for centuries, its rooms empty, its windows unpolished, shunned by young and old. The people of Howtown know only that it has a bad reputation. But some of us know better.

So, it falls to me to have the last word. What sort of inheritance will I leave to my children? A truncated history of their ancestors and their doings? Images of our family’s graves, a rattling of Lancaster bones shaken by our living hands in their sealed sarcophagi or little ossuaries. Shall I leave them a house that is haunted, shall I bring them into the company of ghosts, remind them that the dead can speak, the dead can scream, the dead can kill?

Little William is five, his sister Octavia is twice his age, somewhere around the age Dominic’s sister had reached when she died. He had told me her name and that she had been profoundly deaf and that she had died young. To me, my children are immortal. I talked to Jess about it yesterday. She agrees. We both know that our children will die one day, but we are confident that neither of us will still be alive when that moment comes. Of course, we may be wrong. There are accidents, diseases, unlawful killings, attacks by wild animals, drownings, fire and all the many incidents to which we humans are always exposed. We pray not, and every night we watch over them.

I met Octavia again three weeks ago, when I went to Hallinhag. For the last time, perhaps.

‘Do you know who I am?’ I asked, and I was trembling because I knew all too well who she was and what she was.

She nodded. ‘You must be my brother’s grandson. You are one of us. One of the family.’

‘Dominic and Rose were my grandparents. Rose died a few years ago, and Dominic after her.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen them here. They look quite young again.’

‘Really? That must be nice for them, after all these years.’

She shook her head slowly, side to side. ‘I don’t think they like it here,’ she said, not like a child speaking at all. ‘They never liked this house. Too many bodies, too many voices.’

‘But you can hear now? And speak!’

She nodded and her face lit up. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’m a ghost talker now, you see. I have my friends. I taught them English and they taught me Portuguese. Have you come to tear Hallinhag House down? If you do, we’ll all have to leave.’

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I would never do that. I have too many plans. I will take some of the gardens away, that’s all. Perhaps you can point out which is which. I want to bring my own dead here, and you and your friends can ask them questions and tell me what they say. Will you be content with that?’

‘Why don’t you come inside and speak with the other children?’

And she smiled and opened the door for me and led me inside.

Her body is in the churchyard and the daffodils that were planted long ago on her grave are blooming. I am sure her soul is at rest. For the moment.

The vicar at Martindale is the grandson of Dominic’s Oliver Braithwaite. Oliver found his wife in the end, without going out into the missionary field. I gave him the diaries to read, and when he finished them he agreed something had to be done. With the help of his two sextons, we transferred the bones, all the contents of the coffins, from the attic to a large plot at the
back of the graveyard. The Reverend Braithwaite and I shook hands. And I got in touch with a local firm of builders. They finished work last week, and the house is inhabitable again.

Sir William remains. He seems happy with what I have suggested. The four children will remain too, as ghost talkers. And Octavia. They will be jewels in our midst, the keys to ten thousand secrets.

I wrote and posted a letter yesterday

My Lord
,
the Earl Dunlop

I believe your ancestor
,
Earl Howard
,
was well acquainted with my own ancestor
,
Sir William Lancaster. If you would care to meet me
,
I can relate what I know about the connection they forged. I have in my possession a number of letters sent to and from Earl Howard and my ancestor
,
and I suspect that
,
if you have an archive
,
you will find letters there also. I will bring with me a proposal that I believe will prove to be of mutual benefit
.