Fiercombe Manor (23 page)

“It came at a bad time, too—when some of the bigger woollen mills hereabouts had just closed. There wasn't much money around, and the building of such a house in the county at such cost was felt to be rather vulgar. The rift could have been healed when Sir Edward's younger brother inherited the title and revived the manor house with his young family, but Sir Charles is a private man. He chose not to employ a large staff and has never encouraged tourists to wander the old paths. There were to be no more parties like those held in the days of Stanton House.”

There, feeling so safe in the sitting room, I asked the question I had been avoiding because of my strange experience.

“Have you been there? To where Stanton House was, to where the glasshouse still is?”

He caught the hesitancy in my voice and searched my face curiously.

“Yes, I have walked there on occasion. I had a dog until last year—my faithful old Sammy, who got a good innings before he went. He was an excellent excuse to take some decent exercise. We'd go down the bluebell paths, and I'd let him choose which way across the valley from there. He loved the Great Mead—the long grass is teeming with rabbits. We only went to the eastern end of the valley a few times.”

“Why was that?” I knew I sounded strained, but I kept on. “I would have thought you'd find that part of the estate the most interesting.”

He sipped his tea thoughtfully, and then picked up a piece of sugar-dusted shortbread before setting it down again.

“I didn't like it there, if truth be told, and nor did Sammy. He was a bit of a barker when he got excited, which was most of the time on a walk, but you wouldn't hear a peep out of him there. He kept close to me, ears up; there was even the odd growl. So while I've been there, and poked dutifully around in the nettles so I can hold my head up as the area's only historian after a fashion, I was glad to get back up here to Stanwick.”

He laughed ruefully and took an enormous bite of biscuit, chewing and swallowing it with gusto, and as though he hadn't already eaten most of the plate.

“I'm glad you felt that way,” I said, feeling a rush of relief. “I got a bit of a fright there myself the other day. I was half wondering if I hadn't just imagined the whole thing.”

He kept quiet, looking at me intently. I told the story in a jumble so I wouldn't stop for feeling silly, the sensations the experience had produced made raw again now that I was telling it for the first time since I'd burst in on Tom in the kitchen. I had written nothing but a single line in my diary about it: “strange weather.”

When I'd finished, he nodded, his eyes on the luxuriant grass of the green visible beyond the window. He looked as if he was going to say something, but when the silence stretched out, I let my head fall back against the seat. Just then, a tiny foot nudged at the glass I was resting on my stomach. I kneaded it, not quite believing I was touching the nub of a heel, already formed.

“I don't believe in ghosts,” I said after a time. “It's not that. It's nothing so . . . obvious. Besides, Nan has already told me about Margaret of Anjou stalking the hallways in her fur-trimmed gown.”

He smiled. “I wouldn't worry about her. The house has been completely reconfigured since those days, with corridors and rooms in different places.”

“Perhaps she just walks through the walls then?” I said. “Leaving a trail of floral perfume.”

He laughed and took another bite of his biscuit, apparently swallowing it whole.

“She certainly passed this way, and there is some evidence to show that she and her armies broke their journey here too, but her status as Fiercombe's resident ghost is no doubt one of Edward Stanton's inventions. He was nearly as good a raconteur as I in his time. In the early days of him taking over the estate, he was said to encourage guests to come up with colourful tales to tell around the fire in the dead of winter. I think he thought the house—his costly and painstakingly crafted Victorian pile—wouldn't be complete without a local ghost story or two.”

“Did you know him personally?”

“Not well, but yes, I knew him. I went to a few of his and Elizabeth's famous gatherings. He was a good deal older than me—perhaps twelve or thirteen years—and she must have been about my age, a few years older perhaps. I didn't live here then, but came with my friend whose family had a place over near Cheltenham.

“I remember the last one—not least because it was the last time Elizabeth was seen in public. There was quite a to-do about the occasion—there hadn't been anything so big and grand for a couple of years. She and Edward attended the social events they were required to, titled as they were, and held the odd dinner party, but it was all rather subdued. As a result, I don't think anyone passed up that last invitation. I know William and I were most intrigued to go. I think we'd been allocated a room to share, but we didn't get to bed at all. We left at first light, feeling rather the worse for wear.”

“Mrs. Jelphs told me something about it,” I said. “She said that she had found a special place to go and sit and watch it all from a distance.”

“Well, that party—like those before it—was quite something to behold. The last one was in particular, for me, and I thought I'd seen it all, having spent the previous few years living in London with a rich old aunt of mine, who'd rather let me run wild. It was near the beginning of that period that I met Edward Stanton, in fact, at some card game at his club, where William was also a member. Stanton had just got married and was utterly besotted with his new bride. And who could blame him? She was a wonderful creature.

“I only went to two or perhaps three of their parties in those early days, and then a long time seemed to go by before they threw the last one. Elizabeth was expecting her second child. I think it was late summer, it must have been; the garden was ripe, almost alive with it. You half expected the roses to start bobbing in time to the string quartet they'd got up from Bath for the night. No, wait, I'm quite wrong about the month—it was Midsummer's Eve, of course it was. But we'd had days of rain, and everything was washed clean and plump with rainwater. The valley looked as lush as a jungle.

“Elizabeth was huge with child. I can see her now quite clearly, sitting in an enormous bath chair heaped up with cushions that someone had dragged outside for her. She was glorious amongst all those insipid girls, younger than her and as pale as milk. Not to mention the bovine county matrons who'd come to gawp. None of the men could take their eyes off Elizabeth—she was luminous, with that great mass of dark hair coiled on top of her head. Someone was fanning her, and she was laughing, saying how decadent it was.”

His face had taken on the faraway look I'd come to associate with Mrs. Jelphs. Not wanting to break into his reverie, I looked back down at the book I'd propped up between the glass and my
stomach. Beneath the picture of Stanton House was a smaller photograph of Fiercombe. The caption read: “Fiercombe Manor, presumed to have been taken around 1900, Stanton House already demolished.”

Just as Mrs. Jelphs had told me it was then, the manor's facade was quite overwhelmed by the giant yew pylons, while the ivy that was now restricted to the kitchen garden's wall had been allowed to climb unchecked, choking the casement windows and creeping up over the roof to work loose a number of the tiles.

“We're lucky to have that photograph—people didn't generally go about taking photographs of tumbledown old buildings then, only the new ones they were proud of. But Fiercombe Manor is one of those houses people have always been fascinated by. There is something enchanting and mysterious about it, even in the sorry condition you see here. Perhaps that even added to the allure. You glimpse places like it sometimes, usually from a train window. Lonely houses tucked into the countryside, almost hidden in the folds of the hills. You wonder who lives in them, what's happened in their history.” He smiled. “Or at least I do.”

I nodded eagerly. “No, I know just what you mean, and you're right. If walls could talk, and all that.”

“Indeed, and wouldn't it be fascinating to know what Fiercombe's old stones would have to say? Stanton House's, too, if they still stood.”

He put his hand out for the book, turned over the page, and then handed it back to me. “Now, have a look at that, and you'll see what I mean about Elizabeth Stanton.”

It was a small family portrait. At the heart of it was a man in his middle thirties who undoubtedly had a look of Tom about him. He wasn't smiling, of course, but his face—despite being captured four decades earlier and reduced by the photograph to
an arrangement of light and dark—somehow radiated pride and a fierce sort of happiness. Next to him, so close that their hips touched, was a woman. Her figure was curvaceous compared to what I was used to in London, her waist impossibly narrow and no doubt whittled down by whalebone stays. Sure enough, just as Mr. Morton had said, her face was tantalisingly blurred; she had turned away at the last moment.

Around the couple was an assortment of ageing relatives and servants. They were grouped at the end of the formal garden farthest from the house, the shadows of the yews falling across their feet. Beneath it, in cursive ink and just legible, was written, “A picnic at the Old Manor, 1893.” I closed the book and let my head come to rest against the back of the chair, my mind full of pictures from the past.

“I think that was the summer I was first there,” said Mr. Morton. “If someone had told me then that I'd still be here, well into the next century, I'd never have believed them.”

Just then the grandfather clock roused itself to strike four, and I jumped at the intrusion, the book sliding to the floor. He stood before I could reach for it, but as he picked it up, I saw that it had fallen open at the gloomy picture of Stanton House. There were more questions I wanted to ask, but my host suddenly looked tired, the skin under his eyes so thin it looked blue.

Promising to return soon, I thanked him and made my way back across the green. I looked back before I turned off for the lane that would take me down into the valley. He was still at his door, one hand raised. He was some distance away and so I couldn't be sure, but I thought his expression looked a little grim.

F
rom her luxurious perch in the bath chair, Elizabeth felt like a queen. The champagne had served its purpose; she could almost feel the bubbles coursing through her bloodstream, the alcohol seeping into her bones and leaving her languorous and pleasantly empty-headed. The creeping doubts and twists of anxiety that had become such constant companions were now scattered, carried off by the soft breeze that stole through the valley. She smiled with the relief of it and tipped her head back to look at the stars being lit one by one, distant sparks in a sky deepening from east to west, from Prussian blue to the delicate green of her silk dress.

“People always think sunsets are pink and orange,” she said to no one in particular. She had not been left alone for a moment in the previous hour. An unending procession of guests had come to pay their respects, and not one of them had, like Mrs. Bell, mentioned her illness. Perhaps they'd heard what she said to the old busybody, and heeded it. Or perhaps the aura of calm contentment she felt miraculously radiating from her, the tantalising proximity she felt to simple happiness, had rendered them unable to hurt her.

“You're absolutely right, of course,” said an eager voice. Her eyes reluctantly moved away from the stars to see that it was Hugh Morton.

“I liked painting at school,” he continued, “and our art master said just what you have. ‘Use your eyes, boys. Look up and use your eyes. Painting a sunset is not just an excuse to get out the carmine.'” He chuckled at the memory, and she laughed with him.

“I'm Lady Stanton,” she said. “My name is Elizabeth.”

“Yes, I know,” he replied. “Everyone here knows who you are.”

A slight tremor passed through her, but she drank some more champagne, and the sensation steadied and dissolved.

“I suppose they ought to know me, if I am the one to have invited them here—along with my husband, of course.”

“Well, yes,” he said. “But I meant that you are famous for being so beautiful.”

He swallowed at his own nerve; she could hear it even over the chatter around them, and the lilting music floating over from the gazebo.

“You're kind to say so. I think everyone knows me because of my little brushes with madness.” She instructed herself to stop talking.

“I—I don't know anything of that. But if it were so, well, it's common enough, isn't it? An aunt of mine is said to be mad. She was always my favourite when we were children. She talked to us as though we were real people.”

She turned to look at him properly, this man—not much more than a boy—who was so kind. Her back muscles twinged with the movement, and she winced.

He jumped up from the chair next to hers. “Are you quite well, Lady Stanton? Is there anything I can fetch for you?”

She smiled to reassure him. “Do you know, I think I would love something to eat. I haven't touched a thing since lunch, and all this
champagne has gone to my head. I will tell you all my secrets if we are not careful.”

He grinned, straightened, and saluted her. “Right away, my lady.”

Before she could say another word, he had rushed away towards the marquee, now a shimmering ghost ship in the near-dark.

“Who was that you were talking to?” Edward had appeared out of the gloom, and she started in surprise.

“Oh, Edward, it's you. It was Hugh Morton, a friend of William . . . I can't remember his name.” She saw her husband's face as he sat down heavily. “Oh, darling, he's just a boy.”

“He's in love with you, of course. He'll go upstairs later and think of you while he's in my sheets.” The drink had loosened his tongue; it was rare for him not to dissemble when he was jealous.