The Haunting of Maddy Clare (21 page)

As the fire dwindled, the doctor the neighbor girl had phoned for arrived. He was thickset, in his sixties, his breath wheezing from the haste with which he’d traveled. There was still no sign of any police—I heard several people say there was no bobby in Waringstoke, and someone had had to make a call to a nearby village.
I wondered if the poor, faraway bobby had a motorcar, or if he would have to ride a bicycle all the way here.

The doctor saw to Mrs. Clare first. She was lying on the grass by the path to the house, in a near swoon, Mrs. Macready tending to her. The doctor examined her, then rounded up a few of the tallest, strongest gawkers to help carry her into the house. With that in motion, he came to us. He took one look at us and bade a few more villagers to help Matthew carry Alistair into the house as well. I followed on shaky legs that would barely obey me.

He had Alistair installed in one of the upstairs rooms, and bade Matthew and me wait in the parlor as he examined his patient. Matthew and I sat in silence for only a few minutes before Matthew excused himself and left the room without another word.

The doctor came down twenty minutes later, as Matthew returned. “Well,” the doctor sighed as he sat heavily on one of Mrs. Clare’s fussy flowered sofas, his stout bulk making the wooden frame creak. “He seems healthy enough, in body anyway. I can’t say exactly what’s wrong with him.” He looked from Matthew to me. “It’s possible he’s had some sort of shock to the mind.”

“What should we do?” I asked him.

“I gave him a mild sedative to help him sleep,” said the doctor. “Leave him be for now. He’s comfortable enough, I daresay. I’ll check on him later to see if he’s improved. Maybe a rest will do him some good.” He lowered his gaze on me. “How are you, young lady? Were you hurt?”

I shook my head, but the doctor heaved himself out of his seat and came to me anyway, checking my pulse and pulling up my eyelids to look at my pupils. “Mild shock,” he declared a moment later. He stood straight, pressed his hands into the small of his
back. “I’d worry about you, dear, but you’re strong as a horse next to your companion here.” To my surprise, he turned to Matthew. “Are you injured, young man?”

Matthew’s face was ashen, his features slack. “No,” he said, his voice, normally hoarse, made more so by the smoke he had inhaled in the barn.

“No burns? No shortness of breath? They say you went into the barn to bring out Mrs. Clare.”

“I’m fine,” said Matthew.

“Oh, I’m sure you are,” said the doctor, shrugging his shoulders. “And yet, unless I’m much mistaken, you’ve just spent the past half hour throwing up in the privy.”

Matthew turned an angry glare on the man, but the doctor seemed unfazed. “It’s battle fatigue, son,” he said with rough gentleness. “I can always tell. You may as well have a sign about your neck. I’ve been treating it for years. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

I watched, surprised. Matthew did look stricken, like a man who has been dealt a serious blow. And yet his eyes were defiant, as if he were fighting it with everything he had. He glared steadily at the doctor, his gaze never wavering, though he was canted to the side, gripping the edge of his chair with one hand as if he was about to fall over. Had the fire brought back memories of when he had been so badly burned? I remembered him looking up into the rafters of the barn, his expression unreadable.
I fucking hate barns,
he had said, and Alistair had gone quiet.

The doctor sighed. “There’s nothing more I can do here, and I have other patients to see. I’ll check back this afternoon, as I said. I have no idea what’s gone on here, and Mrs. Clare refuses to say anything. I don’t suppose either of you would like to fill me in?”

We said nothing.

The doctor grunted. “I thought so. Well, it’s no matter to me—I’ll let the police sort it out when they show up. Dear,” he said to me, not unkindly, “make sure you get some rest. Don’t strain yourself. And eat something—you’ll need it, though you won’t feel like eating. As for you”—he turned to Matthew again—“I have my hypodermics in my bag. I can give you an injection if you like.”

“Fuck off,” rasped Matthew.

The doctor turned to me again. “Soldiers are the worst to treat,” he confided, as if Matthew were not sitting three feet away. “Surly and usually ungrateful, but I can’t bring myself to blame them. It’s a right mess we put them in, if you ask me.” He snapped his bag shut, picked it up, and headed for the door.

After he left, Matthew and I sat in a long moment of silence. My head was spinning, my stomach still nauseated. The house was quiet around us, but for the murmurs of voices from outside, down the path to the barn. I pressed my palms together, then squeezed my hands between my knees, trying to regain my composure. I watched Matthew run a shaking hand through his hair.

“You’re not all right,” I said, worried.

I thought perhaps he would swear at me, but he didn’t. He only stood and paced to the window. “What a bloody mess this is,” he said hoarsely. “A bloody mess. I need to think. I didn’t know it would hit me like that. It’s been five years. I didn’t know it would—” He trailed off, pressed his palms to his eyes.

I waited. It was none of my business, I knew, and yet I couldn’t pull away. I couldn’t give him privacy. I sat there with my hands between my knees and watched him.

“All right,” he said after a moment. He dropped his hands and looked out the window at nothing. “All right. Listen. We were in
France. We had dug in. I was positioned near the back of the line. I’d had six weeks at the front and they were giving me a breather before sending me forward again.”

I listened, my breath stilled.

“There was a sniper nest,” Matthew went on. “Somehow they’d got into position. They were picking us off. The air strikes kept missing them; we could hardly show our heads. We knew well enough where they were, but they had too much cover. I was sent in a detachment with three other men to reconnoiter and, if possible, to take care of the problem.”

The voices outside had died down. I wondered if the crowd had dispersed. I prayed no one would come in the room before I had heard the end of this. I did not think Matthew would ever tell me this again.

“We hiked all day,” he said, “and found them. We took care of it, like we’d been ordered, and started back. But night was falling, and one of the men had a fever. We found an abandoned barn and bunked down to sleep for a few hours.

“I woke up to an explosion. Fire everywhere. We’d been bombed; or the barn had, though no one knew we were in it. God knows why. Target practice, maybe, or a pilot letting off the last of his shot. We had just enough time to hear it coming—ten seconds, maybe less. I flew four feet when it hit. The place was on fire and all of the others were dead. I ran out of there and kept running.

“I was twenty feet into the woods before I realized the back of my uniform was on fire. I dropped, tried to put it out. I couldn’t get the flames out. I lucked into some mud, still wet, only about an inch or two deep. Still, I rolled in it. That’s the last thing I remember.”

He turned and looked at me. I was thinking of him, running
back into the burning barn to get Mrs. Clare. What that had taken of him.

His gaze darkened. “Don’t feel sorry for me, Sarah,” he said. “Don’t. I don’t feel one bit bad about it. I was in the hospital for six months, and every time I felt sorry for myself, I remembered that not three hours before it happened, I blew out a German sniper’s brains as he looked me in the eyes and begged me for mercy.”

“That isn’t fair,” I cried. “It was war. What were you supposed to do?”

He crossed his arms. “I don’t know if you’re naive, or just hopelessly foolish. There is no
fair
, Sarah.”

“There is,” I insisted, dashing the tears from my eyes. “Everyone just lost sight of it. We all lost sight of it for years. But the doctor was right—we put everyone in that situation. It was impossible. The sniper was killing people, too. He was doing it because he was under orders; so were you. You can’t blame yourself when every aspect of it was madness. And now you’re so angry with me, just because I saw your scars! As if they’re shameful. I don’t give a—a
damn
about them.”

I broke off, too embarrassed to go on. Perhaps he was right, and I was just a fool. It wouldn’t do me any good to confess how I felt about him, how badly I wanted him, that he seemed a hero to me. Matthew didn’t believe in heroes, and he wouldn’t want a naive girl who saw something in him he didn’t believe existed.

But he was frowning, as if I’d said something to confuse him. “I’m not angry at you,” he said.

“You’re furious with me,” I answered. I knew as I said it that it was the truth. “You can hardly stand to look at me. You think I’m naive, that I have a
soft shell
—yes, I heard you say it.” I ignored his look of shock as he realized I’d overheard him say that about me
to Alistair. “You hardly spare me a glance and then at night you come to my room and—and—”

He looked stricken. “Sarah…”

“No.” I jumped to my feet. Perhaps with the shock I was a little hysterical, but the words tumbled out of me nonetheless. “If you say you’re sorry, I’ll never forgive you.
Never.
I’m not sorry. If you have regrets, please just keep them to yourself and don’t insult me with them. I’d rather be deluded and think that you spent at least a few moments with me without wishing you were somewhere else. That’s all I want. I don’t care if it makes me stupid. And now I don’t want to talk about this anymore. We need to talk about Alistair—and Maddy.”

Matthew looked at the floor for a long moment. His arms were still crossed. He was still, thinking, as impenetrable as ever. “You’re right,” he said at last. “We need to be rational. Because it seems we have a very large problem.”

“You certainly do,” said a voice from the doorway. A tall man with a drooping mustache stood there, one hand on the frame. He wore a dark wool uniform. The police had finally arrived.

“I
t’s a downright mess.” The big policeman moved into the room, his hat under his arm, and looked at us from his deep-set eyes. “And I’m puzzled over it, I don’t mind saying. But you two look relatively sane. Perhaps you can help me make heads or tails of this.”

My heart tripped in my chest. What were we to tell the police? We had a story about ghosts of maidservants attacking the living from beyond the grave. We’d sound like madmen. Matthew and I had been so busy arguing we’d had no time to discuss it. And now time had run out.

I shot a glance at Matthew, but he was not looking at me. He was standing unmoved, his arms still crossed. He looked the policeman steadily in the eye. “
Sane
is a relative term, sir,” he said in his voice of deep gravel. “But we’ll help you if we can.”

The policeman chuckled and held out his hand to Matthew. “Constable Moores, sir. A bit tardy, as I had to come from Spires-church.”

Matthew shook his hand blandly. “Matthew Ryder.”

“Ah, yes.” Constable Moores turned to me. “You must be Miss Piper, then.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, wondering how he knew my name.

The big man’s eyes twinkled, though the keen intelligence there could not be missed. He did not look dusty, so I guessed my surmise about the bicycle had been incorrect. “According to Mrs. Clare, you’re the ghost hunters, then.”

At that, Matthew and I did trade a glance—his inscrutable, mine undoubtedly nervous. So we did not have to explain ourselves to him, but how must the situation sound to a policeman’s ears?

The constable eased himself onto one of the fussy flowered chairs and set down his hat. “Now, then. Please start from the beginning. And please, I beg you—make some sense.”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say, but Matthew covered the gap. He put his hands in his pockets and looked down at the constable. “All right, then. You know that Mrs. Clare charged us with getting rid of her ghost.”

Moores nodded. “She said as much. The less said about that, the better.”

Matthew reddened. “We are not charlatans, sir. We don’t take any pay. And Falmouth House does indeed have a ghost.”

“Yes, I know of it.” Moores looked uneasy. “I knew Mr. Clare when he was alive. He was the magistrate in these parts. I remember he wrote me, asking if I had any girls gone missing. Said one of them had turned up on his doorstep, unable to speak. Described her.” He shrugged. “I had no answers for him. Then the girl died, and Mrs. Clare thinks she haunts the place.”

“She does,” I said.

Constable Moores blinked at me, as if he had forgotten my existence. Then he waved a hand. “Go on, then. Tell me about the barn. It’s the fire I’m concerned about.”

“We were in the barn,” Matthew said smoothly, “attempting to make contact with the manifestation. Mrs. Clare came into the barn while we were there. She was very upset, agitated. She said she’d had enough, she wanted the ghost to be gone. Then she broke an oil lamp and set the barn on fire.”

“Hmm,” said the constable. “Well, she said as much to me. Admitted she burned her own barn down. Right convenient for you, I daresay.”

“Is she in trouble?” I asked.