The Silence of Ghosts Page 12

  Father Carbery shook his head.

  ‘You have never actually seen anything on the stairs, and I don’t believe there was necessarily anything there. We must focus our energies on those poor children, who have been only too visible.’

  He hesitated for a second, then got to his feet.

  ‘Since it has been a long way from Ambleside, I’d like to get this over with before it gets too late. Are you in agreement?’

  We looked at one another. I could see that Rose had misgivings, but she nodded.

  We sent Octavia to bed, but I think she guessed what we were up to. She took my hand tightly and wrote something on my palm that I could barely understand. ‘Don’t go inside’ and ‘Look after Rose’. Rose came up behind me and kissed her on the forehead. The car was waiting for us outside.

  Later

  Coming to Hallinhag House late at night and in the dark, we saw that a full moon lay nailed to a sky of stars, bright points of freezing light that held the silver disc in its orbit. The house faced us, lightless, like an enormous shadow that had come out of the end of things to be here, to entice us inside. Not one of us wanted to be there. I argued again with the priest, but he spoke to me calmly and with authority. He was the expert, and I could not deny him.

  Wrapped in blankets, the three of us stayed in the car. Rose’s mother had prepared hot flasks with soup and tea, and we drank to keep our spirits up. We’d been supplied with hot water bottles, and though Jeanie must have guessed something was up, she never once enquired. Father Carbery went inside alone. The door was still open, as I had left it. He closed it behind him, and the last thing we saw was the light of his torch. It is hard to know what he saw, if anything, as he entered. I cannot believe he was not frightened.

  ‘It’s such a lovely house, I’ve noticed it before. Dominic, your family is very fortunate to own a place like this,’ said the Reverend Braithwaite, ‘but, to be honest, I’m not unhappy we haven’t gone in. The very thought of phantoms makes me shake, it’s such an unnatural thing. I would hate to go in there and see or hear anything uncanny.’

  ‘There may be nothing tonight,’ I said.

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Octavia isn’t inside. All this started when she appeared. She was never in the house before, on account of her asthma. I can remember many happy years in the house, and there are no family stories that I know of that talk about strange appearances.’

  We talked like this for a while, then distracted ourselves with stories of the sea and the local parish. Rose remained quiet, even when we asked her for her nursing tales.

  I don’t know how much time passed. Half an hour? An hour? It felt more like two, and it was very cold. Our hot water bottles had long ago lost the least trace of heat. Fresh snow had started to come down and was drifting over the windscreen. An owl, shivering in its nest somewhere, cried out against the cold, and moments later I heard a robin call from a lakeside tree. It brought back memories of the night-birds who sang outside my window, the corncrake whose rasping calls kept us all awake into the early hours.

  Frustrated by such a passage of time and no activity that I could see, I made up my mind.

  ‘I’m going in,’ I said. ‘Something has happened, and I don’t think it’s something good.’

  Oliver Braithwaite turned in his seat and looked back at me.

  ‘I won’t let you go alone. This is my parish, you are my parishioner, and this is a spiritual matter.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Rose. If I touched her, I could feel her shiver from the cold. ‘You need someone to help you stay steady on those crutches.’

  ‘Then come to the door with me,’ I said, ‘but don’t come in. If I call, then join me inside. But I don’t think we should all pile in together.’

  Thinking it over after we got home, it seemed to me that Rose’s offer had made her love for me clearer than any number of declarations of simple attachment would have done. I know how much she loathed the very thought of returning to the house, yet there she was, defying her own fears to go in with me.

  When we reached the door, I noticed straight away that all was silent inside. Rose and Oliver Braithwaite protested again that I should not go inside without them, but they quickly saw that I was adamant in the matter.

  ‘The first sign of anything being wrong,’ I said, ‘and I’ll be out of here faster than you can guess.’

  ‘Darling, you’re hardly nimble on your feet. What if you trip and fall, what if you’re knocked out? We wouldn’t hear a thing. You’ve got five minutes to look round, then we’ll go in, regardless of what you say.’

  I weighed this up, then nodded. My brain was screaming to get far away, to get all of us out of there. But I pushed the door fully open and stepped into the hall. Oliver Braithwaite had made me a curious little device, using a band of elastic to hold my torch on my head, so that I could use both hands for my crutches. I was glad for the light, but the moment I entered I knew something was wrong, something I had not anticipated. As the beam of torchlight played across the stairs and walls, I had to think twice. It looked as though I had stepped into a different house. Everywhere, wallpaper had fallen away in strips and rotted. The carpet beneath my feet felt spongy, and when I looked down I could see that it too had rotted and had developed holes in places.

  Father Carbery had said he would head for the dining room, since that was where the children had been seen before. But when I went there, I could see no sign of him. I went to the living room, the kitchen and several other rooms on the ground floor. He was in none of them. My heart sank, realizing that he must have gone upstairs. It was the only possibility. But what else waited for me upstairs, if I went up there?

  I left my crutches against the wall at the bottom of the staircase. I could smell the rottenness, as if something had died. Using the banister to hold me upright, I slowly began to climb. I could hear nothing, but as I neared the top, I saw something flicker past my line of vision. Something silent. I thought about Octavia, and the idea that she focused the voices of the children and made them audible.

  I looked up and saw four children, standing on the landing above: Adam, Helen, Margaret and Clare. They held dolls in their hands, dolls with blackened faces holding sticks, and they moved the dolls to and they moved the dolls fro, and the dolls danced, and when they touched the sticks together the children laughed. The children, like lords of this house of the dead.

  ‘Father Carbery?’ I called. I ignored the children. The priest did not answer. I was deeply troubled, seriously worried about the old man. I should not have agreed to let him come here alone. We should have stood up to him and gone in with him, as I had originally planned.

  I reached the top of the stairs, fearing one of the treads might give way. But none did.

  ‘Father Carbery? It’s Dominic Lancaster. Are you up here?’

  There was no answer. Nor was there any other sound. But when I looked along the corridor that straddled the upper floor, my torch picked out something. One of the children was standing there, the boy, the pallor of his skin intensified by strips of moonlight that fell through a side window. Moments later, the other children appeared beside him.

  ‘Father Carbery?!’ I yelled. Then the children moved to one side and I saw him, prostrate and crumpled, like a man who has fallen from a great height.

  I went straight to him. Bending down was hard for me, but I managed it. I put my hand to his neck. He was freezing cold and there was no pulse.

  At that moment, two things happened. Rose’s voice called out for me from downstairs and a man’s voice said something I could not at first understand. Then I did understand it, he was telling me to take the priest and go, never to return, to leave the house and the children here where they belong, to lock the door and never come back.

  I shouted down to Rose and Oliver Braithwaite and told them to come up to help me take Father Carbery away, since it was not something I could do on my own.

  While they manhandled the p
riest’s body, I got down holding fast to the banister. At the bottom, I found my crutches. Above, I heard a sneering laugh, and when I looked up I saw him, a man in what looked to be the clothes of an eighteenth-century aristocrat.

  Then another man’s voice came from above. I looked up and saw, half-way along the staircase, a second man in eighteenth-century clothes.

  ‘You heard the man. You’re no longer welcome in my house. Leave now and don’t come back again.’

  How we got the priest through the door I hardly know. I had the key this time, and I locked the door, as though it would make any difference. We had to put the dead man sitting upright in the front seat. Oliver Braithwaite drove. He seemed very shaken by whatever he’d seen when he went up the stairs.

  ‘Where do we go with him?’ I asked. ‘Do we have to get to the hospital?’

  Rose said we should just drive to Dr Raverat’s and ask him to examine the body. After that, no one said a thing. The car hummed through the night. I could still smell that fetid odour, that rotting smell. As we got near Pooley Bridge, Rose turned to me.

  ‘What did the first man say?’ she asked. ‘Could either of you make out what he said?’

  I knew the answer. None of the others would have known.

  ‘ “Get out,” he said. “Never come back.” Something like that.’

  ‘But what language?’ she demanded. ‘It wasn’t English, I’m sure of it.’

  I nodded.

  ‘No, it wasn’t English,’ I said. ‘It was Portuguese.’

  Saturday, 28 December

  Raverat had turned a light Bedford van into an ambulance. It was still pretty much a van, and would not have been suitable for any badly injured patient, but it turned out to be perfect for transporting a dead body. He drove off at first light to take Father Carbery’s body down to the morgue at North Lonsdale in Barrow. That was this morning, and we don’t expect him back till tomorrow. They’ll perform a post-mortem, and he’ll report back to us when he returns. I’ve no idea what they’ll find, but I’m confident they’ll put it down to old age. Whether something frightened him to death, whether he’d taken himself out of his depth spiritually and mentally, we’ll never know. I doubt very much they’ll find anything of an overtly physical nature. The Reverend Braithwaite says he’ll give a heavily doctored account to Carbery’s bishop and hope no questions are asked. Braithwaite himself is badly shaken. He’s at home now.

  When we got back last night, Octavia was still waiting up for us, although Rose’s mother had gone to bed a couple of hours earlier. My little sister looked tired, but it was clear to me that she had been unable to sleep until she knew all was well. I had decided to tell her nothing about Father Carbery’s death. We persuaded her to go to bed, which she did reluctantly.

  Jeanie had left out a flask of hot milk, a small bottle of brandy and some honey. We made milk toddies in a pair of mugs adorned with drawings of cats, and we drank them without speaking. That made me feel a lot better, I can tell you.

  As I put my empty mug down, I smacked my lips and turned to Rose.

  ‘Rose, I’ve decided to marry your mother instead.’

  ‘That may be a good decision. And if I marry your father, I can become a lady of leisure. ’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Don’t even joke about it. You won’t like him and he won’t like you.’

  ‘I don’t have to like him. But if I marry him, I’ll be quite rich, and if you marry my mother, you’ll be well looked after. I warn you, though, that you’ll be better off with me in bed. I’ve never been in bed with a man before, but I’m a nurse and I know what’s what and what goes where. On the other hand, if you marry me, my mother comes as well, so you’ll get a double bargain, a mother-in-law to make you toddies and a wife to take you to bed.’

  We joked a little like this, using humour as a means of winding down. I could not get certain sounds and images out of my head.

  ‘What did you mean?’ asked Rose. ‘When you said he spoke in Portuguese? Surely that isn’t possible. There have never been any Portuguese here.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ I said. ‘Certainly, dozens of Portuguese businessmen and their wives visited Hallinhag House and toured the Lakes during the summers since this place was built.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘As far as I can remember, it went much like this. “Leve o padre a cabo, vai embora, e não volte nunca mais. Eu, Senhor Guilherne e os crianças ficaremos em casa. Pertencemos aqui. Em esta casa. Finalmente, feche a entrada a chave.” It means, “Take the priest and go away, and never come back. The children, Sir William and I will stay in the house. We belong here. In this house. Finally, lock the door behind you.” ’

  ‘You understand all that?’

  ‘Rose, my love, my family has been doing business in Portugal for about three hundred years. When I was growing up, my father brought in a succession of tutors to teach me Portuguese, and I used to get practice when we visited. I’m fairly fluent, though I really have little use for the language now.’

  ‘Perhaps you will again,’ she said, ‘when the war is over and you can go there. Your father will need someone to take over the business when he’s gone.’

  ‘He’d never let me. He’d as soon have an outsider as his own son.’

  She looked tenderly at me.

  ‘We shall see,’ she said.

  We did not go to bed, but sat in our chairs all night, for we were afraid, each of us, of being alone. ‘Leve o padre a cabo . . .’ went through my head while I lay awake, and when dreams came at last, I saw the dancers capering again. Before they had had no faces, now they had no heads, and they capered madly, their legs kicking high in the air and their arms flailing as if it were St Vitus’s Dance. Sometimes they would bend and pick up their heads and replace them on their necks, and the eyes would open, and look out glaring at the world.

  We were woken by Jeanie coming down about six o’clock. She said nothing about finding us there, and set about warming the little kitchen and making breakfast. Rose went up and fetched Octavia. She had not slept well either, and told me she had seen the children, that they had seemed ill, that their staring eyes had been eaten up with grief or mourning or suffering – she could not say which.

  ‘They are changing,’ she said. ‘Their eyes are not the same, their bodies are not the same, their clothes are not the same. They have scars on their faces, something is wrong with their skin.’

  And when I thought back to the night before, I had to agree that she was right. The children had changed in perceptible ways. And the skin on their cheeks seemed darker and thicker than previously.

  We sat down to a fine breakfast of bacon and eggs. Jeanie kept a couple of pigs in her back garden, in a little hut of corrugated iron, and when the inspectors came they knew better than to examine that part of her property. This was the countryside, and keeping pigs was common practice. Of course, she always feared the arrival of a new inspector come up from Liverpool or some other city, an inspector who would take the trouble to go outside, an inspector who would confiscate her precious pigs and fine her heavily.

  The Reverend Braithwaite arrived not long after we had finished. He looked very glum as he came in, but bucked up tremendously when he was offered a plate of bacon and eggs and the single sausage still lurking in the meat safe. These were the perks of vicarhood. He sat down and ate while we watched. At least he still had a good appetite, but he looked poorly. Talking of ghosts in the abstract, as he had done, was clearly one thing, but seeing them in reality, hearing the men’s voices at the end, finding dead a man who had been alive not so long ago – all this had taken it out of him.

  When Jeanie started on her chores, she asked Octavia to help. The two of them got on very well together, and I had hopes that they would see a lot of one another in coming years. Rose, the vicar and I retired to the living room.

  Braithwaite told us he had spent the night in prayer. He looked as though he had gone without sleep for hours.<
br />
  ‘I can’t deal with this,’ he said. ‘There was such a sense of evil in the house, and when I found Declan Carbery lying dead . . . I will have to go to my bishop in Carlisle, perhaps speak with the priest who handles exorcisms. I feel completely out of my depth.’ He stopped to compose himself, and after a moment continued, ‘Perhaps there’s some rational explanation for all this. I don’t mean the hauntings as such, but something historical. They are the ghosts of real children, perhaps children who once lived in the house.’

  ‘Of that I’m quite sure,’ I said. ‘There are the two men as well. One is Portuguese, but the other could well be an ancestor of mine, if he owns the house. That means he has a direct connection with my family, and the children too perhaps. If there’s something in the family records, maybe we can use it to get to the bottom of the thing. Perhaps there’s something they want and can’t do for themselves but want us to do for them. Do you think that’s possible?’

  ‘The children, yes,’ said Rose. ‘I think they’re quite innocent in this, but they seem to be trapped by something. And speaking of them, have you forgotten your promise to the evacuee children here? The trip on the lake? I thought you’d made arrangements.’

  I sat back. The trip had gone completely out of my mind.

  To be honest, I really wasn’t in the mood for an outing, but I didn’t like to break a promise to any child, especially these children. Their hosts were going to scrimp with their ration books to put together a picnic that would be just enough for seven healthy kids. After all that, I couldn’t very well back out.

  Afterwards, Rose and I both wished we had.

  Later

  The Kingfisher was a lovely boat, with twin sails and a leather-upholstered cabin down below. The deck had been polished to perfection, the sails were pure white with purple stripes, and the rails looked safe enough for the children.

  Adrian helped us pick them up one by one. Their pallid faces were shining with anticipation. I think they had never before gone anywhere or seen anything outside their own dark, narrow streets, where they would have been sitting targets for Hitler and his bombs if they hadn’t been evacuated. They had arrived in clothes too thin to keep the cold out, and I think they had suffered badly from this unusually freezing winter. I couldn’t have taken them on the water today if they’d still been dressed in their old clothes, but their hosts had been using their ingenuity. They’d heard that the WVS runs a Centre in Barrow, where they take in old things, fix them up, and sell them on to make money for the organization. There’s a woman called Nella Last who’s in charge of all this, and she and her helpers do incredible things with clothes. A couple of the host women had taken the bus there before Christmas and had come home with more pullovers and overcoats than they could manage. People had helped them on board the bus home, the conductor didn’t charge them a halfpenny more, and there were willing hands to get their purchases off the bus in Pooley Bridge.