Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (66 page)

Of course there was nothing to be seen: but I was convinced that, if I waited, the thing would pass me again on its aimless, endless beat, and I could not bear the notion of a third repetition.

I hurried back to the lane and down the hill. But when I came to the arch in the wall I stopped. Could I be sure of my way among those dank alleys, which would be danker and darker now! No, I confessed to myself that I was afraid: so jarred were all my nerves with the cry on the hill that I really felt I could not afford to be startled even by a little bird in a bush, or a rabbit.

I followed the road which followed the wall, and I was not sorry when I came to the gate and the lodge, and descried Philipson coming up toward it from the direction of the village.

“And where have you been?” said he.

“I took that lane that goes up the hill opposite the stone arch in the wall.”

“Oh! Did you? Then you’ve been very near where Betton Wood used to be: at least, if you followed it up to the top, and out into the field.”

And if the reader will believe it, that was the first time that I put two and two together.

Did I at once tell Philipson what had happened to me? I did not. I have not had other experiences of the kind which are called super-natural, or -normal, or -physical, but, though I knew very well I must speak of this one before long, I was not at all anxious to do so. And I think I have read that this is a common case.

So all I said was: “Did you see the old man you meant to?”

“Old Mitchell? Yes, I did. And got something of a story out of him. I’ll keep it till after dinner. It really is rather odd.”

So when we were settled after dinner he began to report, faithfully, as he said, the dialogue that had taken place.

Mitchell, not far off eighty years old, was in his elbow-chair. The married daughter with whom he lived was in and out preparing for tea.

After the usual salutations: “Mitchell, I want you to tell me something about the Wood.”

“What Wood’s that, Master Reginald?”

“Betton Wood. Do you remember it?”

Mitchell slowly raised his hand and pointed an accusing forefinger. “It were your father done away with Betton Wood, Master Reginald, I can tell you that much.”

“Well, I know it was, Mitchell. You needn’t look at me as if it were my fault.”

“Your fault? No, I says it were your father done it, before your time.”

“Yes, and I dare say if the truth was known, it was your father that advised him to do it, and I want to know why.”

Mitchell seemed a little amused. “Well,” he said, “my father were woodman to your father and your grandfather before him, and if he didn’t know what belonged to his business, he’d oughter done. And if he did give advice that way, I suppose he might have had his reasons, mightn’t he now?”

“Of course he might, and I want you to tell me what they were.”

“Well now, Master Reginald, whatever makes you think as I know what his reasons might ’a been I don’t know how many year ago?”

“Well, to be sure, it is a long time, and you might easily have forgotten, if ever you knew. I suppose the only thing is for me to go and ask old Ellis what he can recollect about it.”

That had the effect I hoped for.

“Old Ellis!” he growled. “First time ever I hear anyone say old Ellis were any use for any purpose. I should ’a thought you know’d better than that yourself, Master Reginald. What do you suppose old Ellis can tell you better’n what I can about Betton Wood, and what call have he got to be put afore me, I should like to know.

“His father warn’t woodman on the place: he were plowman—that’s what he was, and so anyone could tell you what knows. Anyone could tell you that, I says.”

“Just so, Mitchell, but if you know all about Betton Wood and won’t tell me, why, I must do the next best I can, and try and get it out of somebody else. And old Ellis has been on the place very nearly as long as you have.”

“That he ain’t, not by eighteen months! Who says I wouldn’t tell you nothing about the Wood? I ain’t no objection. Only it’s a funny kind of a tale, and ’taint right to my thinkin’ it should be all about the parish.

“You, Lizzie, do you keep in your kitchen a bit. Me and Master Reginald wants to have a word or two private.

“But one thing I’d like to know, Master Reginald, what come to put you upon asking about it today?”

“Oh! Well, I happened to hear of an old saying about something that walks in Betton Wood. And I wondered if that had anything to do with its being cleared away, that’s all.”

“Well, you was in the right, Master Reginald, however you come to hear of it, and I believe I can tell you the rights of it better than anyone in this parish, let alone old Ellis.

“You see it came about this way: that the shortest road to Allen’s Farm laid through the Wood, and when we was little my poor mother she used to go so many times in the week to the farm to fetch a quart of milk, because Mr. Allen what had the farm then under your father, he was a good man, and
anyone that had a young family to bring up, he was willing to allow ’em so much in the week.

“But never you mind about that now. And my poor mother she never liked to go through the Wood, because there was a lot of talk in the place, and sayings like what you spoke about just now.

“But every now and again, when she happened to be late with her work, she’d have to take the short road through the Wood, and as sure as ever she did, she’d come home in a rare state.

“I remember her and my father talking about it, and he’d say, ‘Well, but it can’t do you no harm, Emma,’ and she’d say, ‘Oh! But you haven’t an idear of it, George. Why, it went right through my head,’ she says, ‘and I came over all bewildered-like, and as if I didn’t know where I was.

“‘You see, George,’ she says, ‘it ain’t as if you was about there in the dusk. You always goes there in the daytime, now don’t you?’ and he says: ‘Why, to be sure I do: do you take me for a fool?’ And so they’d go on.

“And time passed by, and I think it wore her out, because, you understand, it warn’t no use to go for the milk not till the afternoon, and she wouldn’t never send none of us children instead, for fear we should get a fright. Nor she wouldn’t tell us about it herself. ‘No,’ she says, ‘it’s bad enough for me. I don’t want no one else to go through it, nor yet hear talk about it.’

“But one time I recollect she says, ‘Well, first it’s a rustling-like all along in the bushes, coming very quick, either toward me or after me according to the time, and then there comes this scream as appears to pierce right through from the one ear to the other, and the later I am coming through, the more like I am to hear it twice over. But thanks be, I never yet heard it the three times.’

“And then I asked her, and I says: ‘Why, that seems like someone walking to and fro all the time, don’t it?’ and she says, ‘Yes, it do, and whatever it is she wants, I can’t think.’ And I says, ‘Is it a woman, mother?’ and she says, ‘Yes, I’ve heard it is a woman.’

“Anyway, the end of it was my father he spoke to your father, and told him the Wood was a bad wood. ‘There’s never a bit of game in it, and there’s never a bird’s nest there,’ he says, ‘and it ain’t no manner of use to you.’

“And after a lot of talk, your father he come and see my mother about it, and he see she warn’t one of these silly women as gets nervish about nothink
at all, and he made up his mind there was somethink in it, and after that he asked about in the neighborhood, and I believe he made out somethink, and wrote it down in a paper what very like you’ve got up at the Court, Master Reginald.

“And then he gave the order, and the Wood was stubbed up. They done all the work in the daytime, I recollect, and was never there after three o’clock.”

“Didn’t they find anything to explain it, Mitchell? No bones or anything of that kind?”

“Nothink at all, Master Reginald, only the mark of a hedge and ditch along the middle, much about where the quickset hedge run now. And with all the work they done, if there had been anyone put away there, they was bound to find ’em.

“But I don’t know whether it done much good, after all. People here don’t seem to like the place no better than they did afore.”

“That’s about what I got out of Mitchell,” said Philipson, “and as far as any explanation goes, it leaves us very much where we were. I must see if I can’t find that paper.”

“Why didn’t your father ever tell you about the business?” I said.

“He died before I went to school, you know, and I imagine he didn’t want to frighten us children by any such story. I can remember being shaken and slapped by my nurse for running up that lane toward the Wood when we were coming back rather late one winter afternoon. But in the daytime no one interfered with our going into the Wood if we wanted to—only we never did want.”

“Hm!” I said, and then, “Do you think you’ll be able to find that paper that your father wrote?”

“Yes,” he said, “I do. I expect it’s no farther away than that cupboard behind you. There’s a bundle or two of things specially put aside, most of which I’ve looked through at various times, and I know there’s one envelope labeled ‘Betton Wood.’ But as there was no Betton Wood anymore, I never thought it would be worthwhile to open it, and I never have. We’ll do it now, though.”

“Before you do,” I said (I was still reluctant, but I thought this was perhaps the moment for my disclosure), “I’d better tell you I think Mitchell was right
when he doubted if clearing away the Wood had put things straight.”

And I gave the account you have heard already. I need not say Philipson was interested.

“Still there?” he said. “It’s amazing. Look here, will you come out there with me now, and see what happens?”

“I will do no such thing,” I said, “and if you knew the feeling, you’d be glad to walk ten miles in the opposite direction. Don’t talk of it. Open your envelope, and let’s hear what your father made out.”

He did so, and read me the three or four pages of jottings which it contained.

At the top was written a motto from Scott’s
Glenfinlas
, which seemed to me well-chosen:

Where walks, they say, the shrieking ghost.

Then there were notes of his talk with Mitchell’s mother, from which I extract only this much: “I asked her if she never thought she saw anything to account for the sounds she heard. She told me, no more than once, on the darkest evening she ever came through the Wood: and then she seemed forced to look behind her as the rustling came in the bushes, and she thought she saw something all in tatters with the two arms held out in front of it coming on very fast, and at that she ran for the stile, and tore her gown all to finders getting over it.”

Then he had gone to two other people whom he found very shy of talking. They seemed to think, among other things, that it reflected discredit on the parish.

However, one, Mrs. Emma Frost, was prevailed upon to repeat what her mother had told her. “They say it was a lady of title that married twice over, and her first husband went by the name of Brown, or it might have been Bryan (‘Yes, there were Bryans at the Court before it came into our family,’ Philipson put in), and she removed her neighbor’s landmark: leastways she took in a fair piece of the best pasture in Betton parish what belonged by rights to two children as hadn’t no one to speak for them, and they say years after she went from bad to worse, and made out false papers to gain thousands of pounds up in London, and at last they was proved in law to
be false, and she would have been tried and put to death very like, only she escaped away for the time.

“But no one can’t avoid the curse that’s laid on them that removes the landmark, and so we take it she can’t leave Betton before someone take and put it right again.”

At the end of the paper there was a note to this effect: “I regret that I cannot find any clue to previous owners of the fields adjoining the Wood. I do not hesitate to say that if I could discover their representatives, I should do my best to indemnify them for the wrong done to them in years now long past. For it is undeniable that the Wood is very curiously disturbed in the manner described by the people of the place.

“In my present ignorance alike of the extent of the land wrongly appropriated, and of the rightful owners, I am reduced to keeping a separate note of the profits derived from this part of the estate, and my custom has been to apply the sum that would represent the annual yield of about five acres to the common benefit of the parish and to charitable uses. And I hope that those who succeed me may see fit to continue this practice.”

So much for the elder Mr. Philipson’s paper. To those who, like myself, are readers of the State Trials it will have gone far to illuminate the situation.

They will remember how between the years 1678 and 1684 the Lady Ivy, formerly Theodosia Bryan, was alternately Plaintiff and Defendant in a series of trials in which she was trying to establish a claim against the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s for a considerable and very valuable tract of land in Shadwell.

How in the last of those trials, presided over by L.C.J. Jeffreys, it was proved up to the hilt that the deeds upon which she based her claim were forgeries executed under her orders. And how, after an information for perjury and forgery was issued against her, she disappeared completely—so completely, indeed, that no expert has ever been able to tell me what became of her.

Does not the story I have told suggest that she may still be heard of on the scene of one of her earlier and more successful exploits?

* * *

“That,” said my friend, as he folded up his papers, “is a very faithful record of my one extraordinary experience. And now—”

But I had so many questions to ask him, as for instance, whether his friend
had found the proper owner of the land, whether he had done anything about the hedge, whether the sounds were ever heard now, what was the exact title and date of his pamphlet, etc., etc., that bed-time came and passed, without his having an opportunity to revert to the
Literary Supplement
of
The Times
.

[Thanks to the researches of Sir John Fox, in his book on
The Lady Ivie’s Trial
(Oxford, 1929), we now know that my heroine died in her bed in 1695, having—heaven knows how—been acquitted of the forgery, for which she had undoubtedly been responsible.]