The Woman In Black (12 page)

That afternoon, left to my own devices again after an excellent luncheon – Mr Daily was
soon gone to visit one of his outlying farms – I took out the packet of Mrs Drablow’s papers which I had brought with me, for I was still curious about the story I had begun to piece together from my initial reading of the letters and I thought I would divert myself further by trying to complete it. The difficulty was, of course, that I did not know who the young woman – J for Jennet, who had
written the letters – was, whether she might have been a relative of Mrs Drablow, or her husband, or merely a friend. But it seemed most likely that only a blood relation would have given or, rather, been forced to give her illegitimate child for adoption to another woman, in the way the letters and legal documents revealed.

I felt sorry for J, as I read her short, emotional letters over again.
Her passionate love for her child and her isolation with it, her anger and the way she at first fought bitterly against and, finally, gave despairingly in to the course proposed to her, filled me with sadness and sympathy. A girl from the servant class, living in a closely bound community, might perhaps have fared better, sixty or so years before, than this daughter of genteel parentage, who had
been so coldly rejected and whose feelings were so totally left out of the count. Yet servant girls in Victorian England had, I knew, often been driven to murder or abandon their misconceived children. At least Jennet had known that her son was alive and had been given a good home.

And then I opened the other documents that were bound together with the letters. They were three death certificates.
The first was of the boy, Nathaniel Drablow, at the age of six years. The cause of death was given as drowning. After that, and bearing exactly the same date, was a similar certificate, stating that Rose Judd had also died by drowning.

I felt a terrible, cold, sickening sensation that began in the pit of my stomach and seemed to rise up through my chest into my throat, so that I was sure I would
either vomit or choke. But I did not, I only got up and paced in agitation and distress about the room, clutching the two sheets of creased paper in my hand.

After a while, I forced myself to look at the last document also. That too was a death certificate, but dated some twelve years after the other two.

It was for Jennet Eliza Humfrye, spinster, aged thirty-six years. The cause of death was
given simply as ‘heart failure’.

I sat down heavily in my chair. But I was too agitated to remain there for long and in the end I called to Spider and went out again into the November afternoon that was already closing in to an early twilight, and began to walk, away from Mr Daily’s house and garden, past the barns and stables and sheds and off across some stubble. I felt better for the exercise.
Around me there was only the countryside, ploughed brown in ridges, with low hedges and, here and there, two or three elm trees, their bare branches full of rooks’ nests, from which those ugly black birds flew up in a raucous, flapping flock, every now and then, to reel about, cawing, in the leaden sky. There was a chill wind blowing over the fields driving a spatter of hard rain before it. Spider
seemed pleased to be out.

As I walked, my thoughts were all concentrated upon the papers I had just read and the story they had told and which was now becoming clear and complete. I had found out, more or less by chance, the solution – or much of it – to the identity of the woman in black, as well as the answer to many other questions. But, although I now knew more, I was not satisfied by the
discovery, only upset and alarmed – and afraid too. I knew – and yet I did not know, I was bewildered and nothing had truly been explained. For how can such things be? I have already stated that I had no more believed in ghosts than does any healthy young man of sound education, reasonable intelligence and matter-of-fact inclinations. But ghosts I had seen. An event, and that a dreadful, tragic one,
of many years ago, which had taken place and been done with, was somehow taking place over and over again, repeating itself in some dimension other than the normal, present one. A pony trap, carrying a boy of six called Nathaniel, the adopted son of Mr and Mrs Drablow, and also his nursemaid, had somehow taken a wrong path in the sea mist and veered off the safety of the causeway and onto the
marshes, where it had been sucked into the quicksands and swallowed up by the mud and rising waters of the estuary. The child and the nursemaid had been drowned and so presumably had the pony and whoever had been
driving the trap. And now, out on those same marshes, the whole episode, or a ghost, a shadow, a memory of it, somehow happened again and again – how often I did not know. But nothing
could be seen now, only heard.

The only other things I knew were that the boy’s mother, Jennet Humfrye, had died of a wasting disease twelve years after her son, that they were both buried in the now disused and tumbledown graveyard beyond Eel Marsh House; that the child’s nursery had been preserved in that house as he had left it, with his bed, his clothes, his toys, all undisturbed, and that
his mother haunted the place. Moreover, that the intensity of her grief and distress together with her pent-up hatred and desire for revenge permeated the air all around.

And it was that which so troubled me, the force of those emotions, for those were what I believed had power to harm. But to harm who? Was not everyone connected with that sad story now dead? For presumably Mrs Drablow had been
the very last of them.

Eventually I began to be tired and turned back but although I could not find any solution to the business – or perhaps because it was all so inexplicable – I could not put it from my mind, I worried at it all the way home and brooded upon it as I sat in my quiet room, looking out into the evening darkness.

By the time the gong was sounded for dinner I had worked myself
up into such a fever of agitation that I determined to pour the whole story out to Mr Samuel Daily and to demand to hear anything whatever that he knew or had ever heard about the business.

The scene was as before, the study of Mr Daily’s house after dinner, with the two of us in the comfortable wing chairs, the decanter and glasses between us on the small table. I was feeling considerably better
after another good dinner.

I had just come to the end of my story. Mr Daily had sat, listening without interruption, his face turned away from me, as I had relived, though with surprising calm, all the events of my short stay at Eel Marsh House, leading up to the time when he had found me in a faint outside early that morning. And I had also told him of my conclusions, drawn from my perusal of
the packet of letters and the death certificates.

He did not speak for some minutes. The clock ticked. The fire burned evenly and sweetly in the grate. The dog Spider lay in front of it on the hearthrug. Telling the story had been like a purgation and now my head felt curiously light, my body in that limp state such as follows upon a fever or a fright. But I reflected that I could, from this
moment on,
only get better, because I could only move step by steady step away from those awful happenings, as surely as time went on.

‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘You have come a long way since the night I met you on the late train.’

‘It feels like a hundred years ago. I feel like another man.’

‘You’ve gone through some rough seas.’

‘Well, I’m in the calm after the storm now and there’s an end
of it.’

I saw that his face was troubled.

‘Come,’ I said bravely, ‘you don’t think any more harm can come of it surely? I never intend to go back there. Nothing would persuade me.’

‘No.’

‘Then all is well.’

He did not answer, but leaned forward and poured himself another small tot of whisky.

‘Though I do wonder what will happen to the house,’ I said. ‘I’m sure no one local is ever going
to want to live there and I can’t imagine anyone who might come from outside staying for long, once they get to know what the place is really like – and even if they manage not to hear any of the stories about it in advance. Besides, it’s a rambling inconvenient sort of spot. Whoever would want it?’

Samuel Daily shook his head.

‘Do you suppose,’ I asked, after a few moments in which we sat in
silence with our own thoughts, ‘that the poor old woman was haunted night and day by the ghost of her sister and that she had to endure those dreadful noises out there?’ – for Mr Daily had told me that the two had been sisters – ‘If such was the case, I wonder how she could have endured it without going out of her mind?’

‘Perhaps she did not.’

‘Perhaps.’

I was growing more and more sensible
of the fact that he was holding something back from me, some explanation or information about Eel Marsh House and the Drablow family and, because I knew that, I would not rest or be quite easy in my mind until I had found out everything there was to know. I decided to urge him strongly to tell it to me.

‘Was there something I still did not see? If I had stayed there any longer would I have encountered
yet more horrors?’

‘That I cannot tell.’

‘But you could tell me something.’

He sighed and shifted about uneasily in his chair avoiding my eye and looking into the fire, then stretching out his leg to rub at the dog’s belly with the toe of his boot.

‘Come, we’re a good way from the place and my
nerves are quite steady again. I must know. It can’t hurt me now.’

‘Not you,’ he said. ‘No, not
you maybe.’

‘For God’s sake, what is it you are holding back, man? What are you so afraid of telling me?’

‘You, Arthur,’ he said, ‘will be away from here tomorrow or the next day. You, if you are lucky, will neither hear nor see nor know of anything to do with that damned place again. The rest of us have to stay. We’ve to live with it.’

‘With
what
? Stories – rumours? With the sight of that
woman in black from time to time?
With what?
’

‘With whatever will surely follow. Sometime or other. Crythin Gifford has lived with that for fifty years. It’s changed people. They don’t speak of it, you found that out. Those who have suffered worst say least – Jerome, Keckwick.’

I felt my heart-beat increase, I put a hand to my collar to loosen it a little, drew my chair back from the fire. Now
that the moment had come, I did not know after all whether I wanted to hear what Daily had to say.

‘Jennet Humfrye gave up her child, the boy, to her sister, Alice Drablow, and Alice’s husband, because she’d no choice. At first she stayed away – hundreds of miles away – and the boy was brought up a Drablow and was never intended to know his mother. But, in
the end, the pain of being parted from
him, instead of easing, grew worse and she returned to Crythin. She was not welcome at her parents’ house and the man – the child’s father – had gone abroad for good. She got rooms in the town. She’d no money. She took in sewing, she acted as a companion to a lady. At first, apparently, Alice Drablow would not let her see the boy at all. But Jennet was so distressed that she threatened violence
and in the end the sister relented – just so far. Jennet could visit very occasionally, but never see the boy alone nor ever disclose who she was or that she had any relationship to him. No one ever foresaw that he’d turn out to look so like her, nor that the natural affinity between them would grow out. He became more and more attached to the woman who was, when all was said and done, his own mother,
more and more fond, and as he did so he began to be colder towards Alice Drablow. Jennet planned to take him away, that much I do know. Before she could do so, the accident happened, just as you heard. The boy … the nursemaid, the pony trap and its driver Keckwick …’

‘
Keckwick?
’

‘Yes. His father. And there was the boy’s little dog too. That’s a treacherous place, as you’ve found out to your
own cost. The sea fret sweeps over the marshes suddenly, the quicksands are hidden.’

‘So they all drowned.’

‘And Jennet watched. She was at the house, watching from an upper window, waiting for them to return.’

I caught my breath, horrified.

‘The bodies were recovered but they left the pony trap, it was held too fast by the mud. From that day Jennet Humfrye began to go mad.’

‘Was there any
wonder?’

‘No. Mad with grief and mad with anger and a desire for revenge. She blamed her sister who had let them go out that day, though it was no one’s fault, the mist comes without warning.’

‘Out of a clear sky.’

‘Whether because of her loss and her madness or what, she also contracted a disease which caused her to begin to waste away. The flesh shrank from her bones, the colour was drained
from her, she looked like a walking skeleton – a living spectre. When she went about the steets, people drew back. Children were terrified of her. She died eventually. She died in hatred and misery. And as soon as ever she died the hauntings began. And so they have gone on.’

‘What, all the time? Ever since?’

‘No. Now and again. Less, these past few years. But still she is seen and the sounds
are heard by someone chancing to be out on the marsh.’

‘And presumably by old Mrs Drablow?’

‘Who knows?’

‘Well, Mrs Drablow is dead. There, surely, the whole matter will rest.’

But Mr Daily had not finished. He was just coming to the climax of his story.

‘And whenever she has been seen,’ he said in a low voice, ‘in the graveyard, on the marsh, in the streets of the town, however briefly,
and whoever by, there has been one sure and certain result.’

‘Yes?’ I whispered.

‘In some violent or dreadful circumstance, a child has died.’

‘What – you mean by accident?’

‘Generally in an accident. But once or twice it has been after an illness, which has struck them down within a day or a night or less.’

‘You mean any child? A child of the town?’

‘Any child. Jerome’s child.’

I had a
sudden vision of that row of small, solemn faces, with hands all gripping the railings, that surrounded the school yard, on the day of Mrs Drablow’s funeral.