The Haunting of Maddy Clare (24 page)

Mr. Jarvis, the sexton, was not in the churchyard at Waringstoke when we returned to find him. He was not in the church either, but the vicar himself was there, dressed in shirtsleeves and tan trousers, quietly tidying the place after service. I realized with a start that it was Sunday.

It was Mr. Jarvis’ day off, but the vicar directed us to his house, just a short distance over the rise. Matthew and I set out at a walk through the cool spring sunshine.

We didn’t speak. Matthew was troubled, far away in his own dark thoughts. I felt much the same, though I would have liked to talk to someone. There was no time to try to open Matthew up, however, as in moments we were in view of a shabby little cottage that apparently housed Mr. Jarvis.

The man was home, though he seemed reluctant to let us in, and would gladly have left us standing there in the overgrown crabgrass and weeds. He reserved an especially hostile glare for me, and set it on me from his dark, deep-set eyes. He was dressed in shirtsleeves, like the vicar had been, over an undershirt that could be clearly seen. His trousers were held up with braces, and I was surprised to notice that, though over sixty, he possessed still-powerful shoulders and oxlike arms. Perhaps a man who dug graves for a living would be so strong, but I still found the physical verve of the man unexpected.

He turned his glare from me to Matthew. He greeted us with, “The ghost people.”

“Yes.” Matthew held his gaze for a long moment.

Finally Mr. Jarvis shrugged. “All right, then. For God’s sake. But don’t be long. It’s my day off.” He turned from the door.

We followed him into a small, dingy front room. An old floral sofa, sagging and shabby, sat against one wall, its matching chair in another corner. A radio took up much of the narrow end of the room, next to it a small table covered in dishes and empty bottles of beer. The fireplace was cold and unlit, and over it jutted a short mantel with an ornate, dusty, and intricately carved wooden clock, painted with inexpert tree branches and songbirds.

“I won’t offer you tea,” Mr. Jarvis said roughly. “Just get on with it. Like I said, I haven’t got all afternoon.”

I took a seat on the sofa. Matthew strolled directly to the radio and looked closely at it. “This is nice,” he said.

Mr. Jarvis, who stood in the doorway, dropped his fists into his trouser pockets and grunted.

“I know a bit about radios,” said Matthew. He bent, looked carefully at the radio, then straightened again.

“My Sunday shows come on in fifteen minutes,” said Mr. Jarvis pointedly. “I never miss them.”

“Right, right.” Matthew glanced at me, then turned his gaze back to Mr. Jarvis. “We’re here about the servant girl, Maddy Clare.”

Mr. Jarvis shrugged, but his eyes gleamed. “You convinced Mrs. Clare you been talking to ghosts—is that it? Sounds like a bunch of bunk to me.”

Matthew let this glide by. “Mr. Jarvis, I’ll get to the point. Is there any way that Maddy Clare is not buried in that coffin in the churchyard?”

Mr. Jarvis went still. “Is this your story, then? That you’re getting messages from the other side? Stirring things up, are you?” He looked from Matthew to me. “There’s no ghost, and we all know it. Who’s been talking to you, then?”

Matthew shrugged. “We’re just investigators, Mr. Jarvis.”

“You’re shams, the lot of you.” He turned to me. “Especially you.” I reddened, remembering Mrs. Barry’s theory that I was Alistair’s specially imported “ghost expert.” Apparently the rumor had made its way all over town.

“Are you married, Mr. Jarvis?” I asked.

That stopped him. He looked at me long and hard. It was a cheap blow, perhaps, but it made me feel a little better.

After a long pause, he said, “She’s long gone, missy. Took herself off in ’twelve, God knows where. I never heard from her again. Maybe she’s dead. I wouldn’t mind that.”

My stomach turned, but I nodded. I had guessed as much. A woman had furnished this room, once—the flowered furniture, the badly painted clock—but she had not been here in a long, long time. This was now a man’s room, in which he listened to the radio and drank beer and did not clean up his dishes.

“We’ve had a lead,” Matthew said, bringing our attention back to him. “I’m not disclosing the source. We’ve been told Maddy may not be buried where we think she is. We’re following up on it.”

His coolness was impressive. A lead! Not half an hour ago we had listened to that eerie recording, one that simply couldn’t exist. Now he was talking to Mr. Jarvis as if he’d heard someone mention at a cocktail party that Maddy Clare was not buried in her coffin but somewhere in a shallow grave in the woods, and he simply felt idle curiosity to wonder why.

Mr. Jarvis’ deep-set gaze took in Matthew, up and down, where he stood in front of the radio. “You play rugby?” he said.

Matthew shrugged, surprising me. “When I have time.”

Jarvis nodded. “I can tell. I played, myself. It’s in the shoulders, rugby is. You’d be a good player.”

“I’m not bad.” I recalled the feel of Matthew’s shoulders, the
muscles that bulged from his arms and back, and felt a small piece of my curiosity fall into place. “Your show starts in five minutes, Mr. Jarvis. Are you going to answer the question?”

Jarvis’ eyes narrowed. “You think you’re so smart, don’t you? Both of you. Well, fine, then, I’ll answer your bloody important question. That girl is in her grave in the churchyard, right where she belongs. I buried her myself. I vouch for it. You don’t believe me? You ask the constable, Moores. He cut her down that day, and he saw me lay her out. Or just try to get Mrs. Clare to agree to dig that coffin up, why don’t you? Fool that lady again, just like you’ve been doing. You’ll go through all of that just to find the girl’s dead body rotting in there, right where it should be. I buried Maddy Clare, Mr. Ghost Man. And now we’re done talking.”

There was a silence after this unexpected speech. I caught Matthew’s eye and saw my own thoughts reflected there. Constable Moores had never told us about cutting Maddy down in the barn.

“All right, then,” Matthew said as I stood. “You know where to find us.”

“Aye, I know you’re staying at the inn. Everyone in town knows it, Mr. Ghost Man. You and your blond-haired friend and your
special researcher
here.” He sneered at me. “You and your source are chasing the wrong game, you know. There’s no mystery about that servant girl. She’s just another girl who killed herself. She was no better than she should be.”

“You knew her?” I said, surprised.

He turned to me. “I didn’t have to,” he said. “I’ve known enough girls like her, missy.” His eyes glinted. “Girls a little like you, come to think of it.”

A chill of fear went down my spine. Suddenly Mr. Jarvis and
his bulky strength no longer seemed curious, or pitiful. If a man like this wanted to hurt me, I would have no chance; he knew it, and he watched as I realized it.

Matthew grabbed Mr. Jarvis by the shirtfront, slowly, almost gently, with one powerful hand, and flexed his arm to bring the man closer. “That’s it,” he said, his voice stony. “You’re finished now.”

Surprise flicked across the man’s face; then he covered it with a nasty laugh. “So that’s how it is, is it? I suspected as much.”

Matthew was silent. His fist tightened on the man’s shirt, his knuckles whitening; for one stark moment, I thought he would give in to the anger pulsing from him in waves.

Mr. Jarvis stared from Matthew to me and back again, beadily uncertain, until Matthew let him go. I let out a breath I had not realized I had been holding.

I followed Matthew from the house, cold sweat on my back. My heart beat in my throat. I felt Mr. Jarvis watch us go, though I knew without turning that we would not see him from any of the dark windows of his tiny house. He watched us, and he watched from the shadows.

Matthew waited until we were out of sight of the house, and then he stopped and took my shoulders. He turned me to face him, his eyes on mine. “Are you all right?”

I gave him a small smile as I felt the warmth of his hands. “Yes. A little shaken, perhaps. But yes.”

His hands released some of their tension, but they did not move from my shoulders. He looked troubled. “Alistair would have handled that better.”

I raised one of my hands and put it over his. “You did just fine, and I thank you.”

My hand touched the scarring on the back of his wrist, and he
pulled away. His gaze traveled over my shoulder, fixed on something there. “We should go.”

I turned and looked. Two large black crows sat in a nearby tree, perched on its lower branches, their beady eyes on us. As we watched, a third arrived and perched with them.

I suppressed a shudder and followed Matthew back into town.

B
y the time dark fell, I was sick and exhausted. It wasn’t a sickness of the body that afflicted me, though I was more tired than if I had been awake a week. It was a depression of the mind, a feeling of hopelessness, that dogged me to my bed that night.

The doctor had just been and gone again. Alistair had not improved. Indeed, far from improving, he had grown worse, unable to recognize the doctor, hardly able to respond. He had not eaten any of the food we’d had brought to him, nor taken any water. “That man,” the doctor declared, “needs to go home.”

Matthew had said little to this. But after the doctor left, Matthew slumped in his chair, his head in his hands, the sight of him confirming my own hopeless thoughts.

“He can’t go home, can he?” I said softly.

“No.” Matthew rubbed his forehead and did not look up. “He has no one there—no one but a skeleton staff of servants.”

And he will only get worse.
The words hung there, unspoken,
between us. There was no way to fool ourselves that Alistair would simply recover on his own. This was no ordinary illness, after all.

Alistair was already unable to care for himself; a few maids and a butler would be of no help. When the doctor found out that Alistair had no family—and he would, sooner or later—the only option would be commitment to a hospital.

I made a small sound as I followed this thought to its logical conclusion. “He’ll be locked away,” I said. “He’ll be—”

“Don’t say it,” said Matthew. “We had enough of hospitals in the war. I won’t see him go back to one, and a madhouse as well.”

“Perhaps we can delay things a little,” I said. “Doesn’t one need family authorization to be committed? He may have distant relatives we need to track down. Perhaps we could consult a lawyer. We could say we have to wait for—”

“Sarah, if he keeps refusing to eat, we won’t have any time. He either goes into a hospital or he dies of starvation.”

“We could hire him a private nurse,” I said.

“With what money?”

“Alistair has plenty of money.”

“If Alistair is mad, who will let us spend it? There’s no one, Sarah.”

I looked down at my hands. “I won’t let him go without a fight, any more than you will.”

“There is only one way out of this. Maddy has to let him go. And she has to do it soon, before he starts to starve to death.”

Maddy has to let him go.
I felt the frustration come over me as I climbed the steps to my room, the hopelessness of it. Someone in this town knew something—Mr. Jarvis, or Mrs. Barry, or Constable Moores, or the man who had trashed my room. Or the man I had seen watching us. Was it the same man each time, or a
different one? Was Mr. Jarvis the one who had searched my things? Did Mrs. Clare or Mrs. Macready know something they were not telling?

The answer was so close—I could feel it, sense it just from the corner of my eye, flickering into my consciousness and out again. Something small was missing. Something that would fall into place if only I could see it…or if only someone would tell the truth.

I changed into my voluminous white nightdress and sat on the edge of my bed. The maid had been through, and the bed’s white sheets were clean and starched, stretched and folded with military precision over the corners of the mattress. Though clean, the bed was cold, and I ran my hand over the knit wool comforter for warmth. A draft played its way along the floor and chilled my feet. I’d had no idea the nights were so cold this time of year, but I supposed a late-season frost was possible.

I rubbed the sole of one foot over the top of the other for warmth. Alistair had been unresponsive when we’d checked on him. He’d only stared at the wall, oblivious to everything we said. I hated to leave him, but I could hardly move. I felt as if a cold, heavy blanket had come down on me. Pulling the comforter over me, I swung my feet up from the floor and lay on the bed.

There was most definitely a draft. The end of my nose was cold. I snuggled all my extremities under the comforter and stared up at the gloom of the ceiling. As my drowsy gaze focused and unfocused, I imagined I saw movement in the shadows of the beams, like tendrils of smoke.

Outside in the hall, a door slammed.

That roused me for a moment. Matthew’s door was to the right of mine in the hallway, Alistair’s to the left. The sound had come
from the left. Who could be slamming a door? Not Alistair, certainly, and we were the inn’s only guests. A maid, perhaps? I had not seen one when I came upstairs, nor had I heard one, but perhaps one had come up a servants’ stair since I entered my room.