The Ghost Writer (30 page)

It was a small pavilion, quite delightful in its proportions: a simple wooden structure, octagonal in shape, painted in soft blue and cream, with a dark green steeply pointed roof. A wooden rail ran around the sides at waist height, with latticework below that; above the rail it was open except for the posts which supported the roof. The ground where it stood was quite steep, so that the entrance at the back was almost level with the grass. As she came closer she saw that there was another entrance at the front, with steps going down from it. Below the rail on both sides, a sort of window-seat, heaped with cushions, ran right around; the floor was polished wood, and so were the sides of the window-seat boxes. It was all very new and bright; so much so that she could still catch the faint scents of fresh paint and polish. Strange that Caroline had not suggested they come here, and that her parents had never spoken of it. But perhaps she had wandered into the grounds of the neighbouring estate; even so, she knew that the Frederick's were kindly and hospitable people, and would not mind her stopping for a while in such a pleasant place.

Rosalind took off her shoes and settled herself along the window-seat at the left so that she was looking out across the slope and the hilltops. Now that the sun had come out, the afternoon was quite warm, and a gentle breeze began to play about her. She really ought to concentrate her mind upon the problem before her, but somehow it was impossible to be anxious here; she felt completely at home, and the cushions were wonderfully soft and comfortable. The pavilion was like ... well, it was like that sunny dome in "Kubla Khan", though there were certainly no caves of ice hereabouts; and if she had a dulcimer she could play upon it, and perhaps catch a glimpse of the poet with his flashing eyes and floating hair, which reminded her that she too had once fed on honeydew, and drunk the milk of Paradise, so that she sighed deeply, and stretched out more comfortably and allowed her eyes to close, the better to hear the mingled songs of birds and feel the slight movement of air over her forehead, until after an indefinite time she became aware that the soft breeze was, in fact, a hand, gently stroking her hair. Its touch was so reassuring that she opened her eyes quite without anxiety; her first thought was that Caroline had followed her after all.

But though the resemblance to Caroline was plain, this woman who sat beside her was older, and thinner, and her face was drawn and pale and marked by illness. She wore, Rosalind noticed, an elaborate formal gown, in a fashion she remembered from her childhood. Despite the aura of frailty and ill health, the woman smiled down at Rosalind with maternal tenderness, and indicated that Rosalind should lay her head in her lap, which she did quite willingly, as if she had indeed become a child again. Somehow Rosalind did not feel the need to say anything, and the woman did not speak either, but continued for a little while longer to smile and caress her temples until, as if reaching a decision, she took something off the seat beside her with her other hand. It was a small volume, bound in brown and gold, and plainly new, for Rosalind caught the warm crisp scent of the paper drifting down to her. Still with that maternal smile, the woman opened the book at the title page, holding it so that Rosalind could read, without moving her head:

B
LACKWALL
P
ARK
by
Rosalind Margrave

Rosalind knew exactly what these words signified, yet she felt no surprise and no anxiety, only curiosity as to what would follow as the woman turned the book away from her gaze, leafed forward a few pages and began to read aloud to her. But this was quite unlike being read to in the usual way, for the scenes formed themselves before her eyes, and the characters—principally herself, her mother, and Denton Margrave—moved and spoke as in life. Rosalind—the sensation was precise, though not easy to describe—was at first both within and outside herself as an actress in the drama, speaking the words and feeling the sensations, and yet also aware that she was safe in the pavilion, on a sunlit afternoon, with her head in the woman's lap, listening to a tale which, it appeared, she herself had written under her married name.

It began with her return to the house in Bayswater two days hence, quite determined to reject Mr Margrave. But she had reckoned without the extremity of her mother's response. When every other means of persuasion had been exhausted, Cecily Forster declared her intention of ending her life with laudanum that very night, rather than live another day with a daughter so heartless and unfeeling, so selfishly unwilling to surrender her foolish notions of love (which, unlike property and social position, could be guaranteed not to last), and to learn to like what she must otherwise learn to bear for the sake of her mothers and (did she but know it) her own future happiness.

There was an ominous quietness about this threat which awakened in Rosalind a sick apprehension of defeat, for she knew she could not live in the knowledge that she had, in effect, murdered her mother. In the strange double vision with which the tale unfolded, she witnessed her own capitulation, from her acceptance of her horribly elated suitor, through her vain attempts to suppress the repulsion that any physical contact with him inspired, to the wedding itself. There it became clear that Denton Margrave possessed neither friends nor family, for his side of the church was entirely deserted, whereas Rosalind's was packed with guests, many of them strangers to her, but all pale and mute. He had not even a best man; when the time came he produced a ring from his own pocket. The service somehow took place in dead silence; even the clergyman seemed appalled at the spectacle, and when Mr Margrave kissed her with his red, glistening lips, her senses were once again assailed by that charnel odour, whilst Caroline, as bridesmaid, wept soundlessly at her back.

There was no banquet. Mr Margrave led her out of the silent church, past the empty pews on one side and the thronged guests, still and white as statues, on the other, out to a small black carriage which was waiting at the door. This, he explained with an insinuating smile, would carry her to Blackwall Park for the honeymoon; he meanwhile had urgent business to attend to, but would be with her at nightfall. He handed her in; the door slammed; the coachman whipped up the horses and bore her away. So far as she could tell, the door had not been locked, but it did not occur to her to try to jump out; all volition seemed to have left her, and she sat devoid of thought or feeling through the hours it took the carriage to make its way out of London and down through the countryside. She looked out of the window, and saw what a traveller might expect to see, but the sights meant nothing to her, and the carriage never once paused in its journey until, after negotiating a long, deserted stretch of road through a series of empty fields, it turned in at a gate in a high wall and pulled up on an expanse of gravel by the front door of a large stone house.

Rosalind heard the coachman descend and come round to open the door; she alighted like an automaton; without a word, the coachman folded the step, slammed the door, leapt back onto his box and whipped up the horses, who clattered back across the gravel and out through the gateway. There they pulled up sharply; the coachman sprang down again, and swung the two high wooden gates closed from the outside, so that they came together with a thud and a clash of metal fastenings. The muffled sound of hooves and wheels resumed, receded, and died away to nothing, leaving her alone in the silent courtyard.

S
ENSATION FLOODED BACK TO HER LIKE COLD WATER
flung upon a sleeper. All consciousness of the pavilion was gone; she was here and nowhere else, the wife of Mr Margrave, and clad, she realised for the first time, in a wedding dress which was no longer white but a drab, rusty black. Perhaps it had always been black; she could not recall. The horror of her position grew upon her until she feared she would faint. She had been mad to surrender to her mothers threat—better to have swallowed the laudanum herself than come here. She looked frantically about the courtyard, but the smooth, high wall enclosed her on three sides, the front of the house on the other. There were no handholds anywhere along the wall, and nothing that she could use to help her climb. The house loomed over her, three storeys high, its pale yellowish blocks of stone too smooth and the mortared joints too flush to offer any purchase for hands or feet. At any moment they would be coming to take her inside; at any moment Mr Margrave himself might be here. Under a lowering sky, the day was fading fast.

Then she noticed that the shutters were closed on every window of every floor, and that the front door stood slightly ajar. Still nobody came out; there was not the slightest sound from within; the house looked and felt deserted. To enter was more than she dared; she would surely die of terror; but, as another survey of the courtyard indicated all too clearly, there was no hiding place here, and no way over the wall. Could she stand pressed against the wall near the gates until Mr Margraves carriage entered, and escape while they were open? No; the coachman would surely see her, and then Mr Margrave would hunt her down. Trembling, she made her way across the gravel as quietly as she could, onto the porch and up to the heavy wooden door, and pushed without giving herself time to think.

The door opened upon darkness; the hinges creaked horribly. The house smelt of mould and damp. Rosalind's head swam with fear. In the dim light from the courtyard she could see the beginning of a passageway. Fighting off thoughts of being cornered and pounced upon, she gathered up her skirts and ran blindly through the darkness until she bumped against something flat and soft which moved away from her—a swinging door, she realised in time to bite back the cry that rose in her throat—and on towards a thin line of light which turned out to be, as she had prayed, another door, also ajar, that let her out into what seemed to be a kitchen garden, also walled, this time in crumbling red brick with jagged shards of glass embedded in the top. But this wall was lower, and it was possible she might get over, and anyway there must surely be a gate or door in it somewhere? The area, perhaps ten yards by thirty, was rank and overgrown with weeds: all except a plot away to the right below the rear wall. All of this she took in at a single glance, whilst trying to slow the terrible pounding of her heart which so confused her hearing.

Yes, there was indeed a door in the outer wall, in that far corner on her right, barely visible in the gathering gloom. She hastened along a weed-strewn path, feeling the hated gown catch and tear upon something as she approached the cleared area. But those were not garden beds between her and the door: they were graves, all quite new, and at the head of each mound stood a low tombstone. Even in the fading light the names upon the first six stones were plain: all women's names, and all the surnames his. The seventh grave was open, newly dug, with the soil heaped beside it and the stone already in place, and the name incised upon it was her own.

The smell of damp earth rose up from the pit; that, and another odour that drew her appalled gaze from her tombstone to the path behind her—to Denton Margrave standing not ten paces away. He was all in black, with what looked like a great travelling cloak draped over his shoulders, yet she could see the earth upon his clothes, for his face was lit from within by a pale blue light that shimmered and crackled in the air around him, glowing in the sockets of his eyes and in that terrible, insinuating smile. She began to back away; he did not instantly follow, but spread out what she thought were arms before the great black cloak revealed itself as wings, unfurling hooked and leathery as he launched himself upon her with a shriek that rose in pitch and volume until it tore at her throat and went echoing out across the hillside where she found herself in the pavilion, alone.

R
OSALIND WAS AT FIRST TOO MUCH OVERCOME BY HOR
ror and relief to notice any change in her surroundings. But as her heart began to slow, and the fearful immediacy of the dream—as surely it must have been?—to recede, she became aware that the surface she was lying upon was very hard, and that the rail above her was weathered and cracked, like the posts supporting the roof, which was likewise no longer a lustrous dark green but drab and flaking and festooned with cobwebs. And something was crawling over her foot ... She sat up abruptly, brushing various insects from her dress, and saw that the cushions had rotted away to shreds and tatters of brown fabric. The floorboards had warped and buckled, and grass was growing between them; lichen was spreading across the faded timbers of the window-seats. And the light was much dimmer, for the trees around the pavilion had grown, and new saplings had sprung up, and the lawn had vanished into a wild, overgrown tangle of long grass and nettles.

Bewildered, she looked around for her shoes, and was relieved to see that they, at least, were unchanged, for she was beginning to feel like one of those heroines in a fairy tale who wakes to find that she has slept for a hundred years. Where had the dream begun? She had only closed her eyes for a short while before the woman had appeared beside her ... and before that she could distinctly remember emerging from the wood and seeing the pavilion new and shining on the sunlit slope ... no, that had
not
been a dream, it was not possible, she had walked all the way from Caroline's room without stopping ... and she was certainly awake now. Rosalind stood up and looked about her. Weeds and long grass and nettles encircled the crumbling pavilion in an unbroken ring there was no path, and no sign of footsteps or trampling. She herself could not have got here without leaving a considerable trail; yet here she was.

Fear crept upon her, and a growing sense of loss and desolation; she had felt the woman's tenderness so strongly, in her touch, her smile; yet that gentle presence had forced her to confront the nightmare vision of Margrave, and left her alone with the ruin of what had been so beautiful. Rosalind looked up through the treetops overhead and saw that the sky was once again overcast; she realised that she was shivering not only from fear, but from the chill upon what was now late afternoon air. There was a fallen branch a little way off which would provide a makeshift staff to help her through the nettles. She knew she could not brave the forest path, even assuming she could find it again; not with that malignant apparition still hovering at the back of her mind. But how, then, was she to find her way back to the house? Her attention was drawn by a faint sound below, at the foot of the slope, which might be running water; if that were a stream, it might prove to be a tributary of the river along whose banks she and Caroline had so often strolled, and so lead her around the edge of the wooded hill to safety. Of course she might be led fatally astray, but she could think of no alternative, save waiting for darkness to overtake her.