House of Bells (20 page)

Tom took her up and down the rows and introduced her to his peas and beans in their pyramids of hazel, his raspberry-canes and strawberry beds, his solid swedes and turnips and his potatoes in their mounds. More and more, celery and salsify and: ‘This will be asparagus, it will, you'll see. Three years, we'll have our own asparagus.'

Three years, she wouldn't be here. She hoped to God she wouldn't be here. She didn't say so.

After the vegetables came the herb beds, and the same in squads of pots: cuttings of lavender and rosemary and thyme and tarragon, dozens and dozens of them, rank after rank. ‘We sell these too, at the weekly market. They're really popular.' And he was really proud.

Lastly his joy, all along the north wall, where it would catch all the sun that England gave it: ‘We call it the orangery, but it's not really, it's a peach house. Frank found the account books somewhere, so we know. There aren't any peaches yet, I just use it for a greenhouse and a potting shed, but all the pipework's still here for the steam heat, and Cookie's checked the boiler out; he says the system's sound. The stove's in that hut in the corner there, where I keep my tools. Next year, I'll plant peach trees . . .'

This year, he'd spent every moment he could spare in replacing broken panes and repainting the framework, so that the peach house was a gleaming white monument that ran all the length of the wall. It was hot in there under the sun's hammer, and she wasn't sure she liked it. She praised it for his sake, but was glad to leave.

Still glad when he took her at last out of his wonderland, through a gate of open ironwork on to a path that led up into the woods. Now she was working for Tony, going to find Frank.

A stream ran across the path, a narrow freshet with bare mud banks, too small to bridge and too steep-sided to allow stepping stones. Tom leaped across, barefoot and casual; then he turned back, held a hand out. ‘Can you jump?'

Obviously, jumping was what people did; the mud bore many proofs. If she tried it in these sandals, she'd lose them and probably slip backward down the bank and into the water, flailing for his helpless hand. On another day in other company, Grace would have done that regardless, gone with a shriek and risen up dripping, cackling with laughter like a child, deliberately childish to amuse the man she was with.

Here, today, she slipped off the sandals and hooked the fingers of one hand through the woven straps, tested the mud cautiously beneath her feet, tensed, and leaped.

And landed, cool damp mud absorbing the shock of it, oozing between her toes as they dug for grip. Tom's hand was there but she didn't take it, didn't need it. She found her own balance, lifted her face triumphantly, smiling, happy – and the phrase was there in her head already,
like a child
, and it turned itself unexpectedly into a question.

‘Why aren't there any children here, Tom?' There should have been small bare footprints among the adults', rocks and branches in the water from where muddy hands had tried to dam the flow. A rope swing hanging from a tree. There really should be a pack of giggling, chasing children, here and everywhere: all over the house, heedless and hungry and beloved, cared for by everyone indiscriminately. That was her notion of a hippy ideal, and she couldn't believe she was alone in that. Not here, of all places. She was just as glad not to have children about her, but she didn't understand it.

‘Cookie won't have them on the property. That's about the only rule he has.'

‘
Cookie
won't have them?'

‘That's right. He says this would be a bad house for children, and that's that.'

She wanted to ask why the janitor got to make the rules, but there was a smell of smoke in the air, sudden distraction. And the path turned, and here was a clearing, with more than a swirling smoke to surprise her. There was a great turfed mound leaking smoke here and there between the turfs, like a man leaking smoke between his teeth. The smoke rose white and thin, drawing her eyes up to where an old stone tower reached higher than the trees. It looked like a church tower in miniature, plain and strong, only that the church was in ruins now and only its tower was left to point like an accusing finger at an abandoning god.

Among the half-fallen walls and heaped rubble of its ruin, someone had built himself a home. It looked half like yesterday's bonfire before the flame: a shapeless structure of salvaged planks and doors, covered over in places with tarpaulin and in places with more turfs, a green and growing roof.

‘Hey, Frank! Are you in?'

‘And where else would I be?'

Tom's call produced first a sour response, a voice that seemed almost to rise from the earth itself, and then a figure that did the same. He emerged like something dark and dangerous from an unexpected hole between one door and the next, which startled her almost more than anything: if a man built his house with doors, surely one of them should open?

But these doors were walls, apparently, and this man was as mad as his house, or looked it. Grimy and wild-eyed, he wore a suit that Grace could recognize as Savile Row, though it was caked in mud; his feet beneath it were as bare as theirs, as bare as his chest where the jacket hung open because the buttons were long gone.

The trouser buttons too – the fly was gaping wide. She did try not to look.

‘Frank, this is Georgie. She's our new arrival.'

‘Oh, aye. The girl who can't hear bells, or else they make her bleed.'

Now she sounded mad, and she hadn't even said anything yet. She glowered at Tom for giving away her secrets, but he didn't get the message; he was most likely pleased with himself for being so thoughtful, bringing the problem to the source.

The source was looking at her almost hungrily; she couldn't meet his eyes. Instead, her gaze slid back to that sudden tower, and she said, almost without meaning to, ‘Is that where the bell is?'

‘That's right, aye. It's not the original, mind; that went when the chapel went, fire and fury. Story says the old bell's at the bottom of the lake.'

Heavy sonorous striking through the water, cutting and cutting. Making her bleed. She believed it immediately, and wanted to know the story without actually wanting to hear it, for fear that simple talk of bells might open up her hurts again.

Tom said, ‘Well, you're the man for stories, Frank. That's why I brought Georgie to meet you, so that you could tell her about the house.'

He thought it was a kindness, to both of them. She thought it a cruelty, each to each.

Frank said, ‘The house? I don't like to talk about the house. I won't go in there now, and nor should you. Nor should anyone. There are spirits abroad in that house. I have them bring my meals to me here. You should go home, young lady.'

‘I don't have a home to go to.' Grace tried to say that as a lie, as part of Georgie's story: only that it felt suddenly and immediately true. She had a flat to go to, nothing like a home.

Into the silence that followed, she added, ‘I want to stay here,' which was a lie pure and simple, just to remind her of her purpose.

Tom brightened abruptly, and she could have cursed herself, but apparently she didn't need to. Frank said, ‘That house is cursed,' and he might sound as mad as he looked but she thought he was right none the less. Except that he thought he could take shelter in the woods, and she remembered last night when she arrived and something – nothing – had been coming for her through the trees, and she thought he wasn't at all safe out here, on his own in his troglodyte life.

She said, ‘Cursed how?' and he shook his head.

It was Tom who had to answer her, saying, ‘Frank knows more than any of us about the house. More than Cookie, even. He vanished into the library as soon as he arrived, pretty much, and researched all its history. If there are ghosts anywhere, Frank knows where to find them.'

‘There are ghosts everywhere,' Frank said. ‘The house gives them shelter, but they don't belong there. People fetch them in.'

The sucking shape that was her own unborn child, dead before he came into the world, growing in the shadows, getting bigger, getting worse. He was right, she was sure.

A breeze stirred the smoke, wrapped a thin sheet of it around them, made her cough.

Frank stretched his nostrils and inhaled contentedly. ‘Aye,' he said. ‘That's a good burn.'

‘Is that . . . how you make charcoal?'

‘In a clamp, aye. Build the logs around a chimney, high and tidy; turf it over and drop lighted coals down the chimney to make a fire at the bottom, low and slow. Then the collier's task is to watch it, five days and nights. If the coat cracks, if air gets in, it'll burn up and all your work is wasted.' Even as he spoke he was stalking around the mound, slapping fresh damp earth from a bucket wherever he thought too much smoke was oozing out.

‘Five days and nights – and just you to watch it?'

‘Aye. It's a lonely life.' But he relished that, had set himself deliberately apart here. And people came out to talk to him, Tom had said so; he wasn't really that solitary.

But: ‘What about sleep, how do you manage?' No clocks, so he couldn't have an alarm to wake him up.

‘Oh, I don't. I daren't. Not during a burn. If a log shifts and tears the turf, it could all be gone in a flare. I'm always here, always watchful.'

‘We come out to keep you company, Frank.' Tom sounded almost indignant. ‘You know you could sleep while we watched . . .'

‘You kids? I'll not trust you. You'll get high, or get heavy with each other, and not notice when the whole clamp collapses and sets the wood ablaze. No, I've learned, it has to be me. You're welcome to sit with me, help me stay awake, I'm grateful for that – but I'll watch my own fires every time.'

Five days, five nights without sleep. Time and time again. No wonder he looked half mad. No wonder if he
was
half mad. She'd known people do that at weekend house-parties, never go to bed at all between Friday and Monday, but only with the help of pharmaceuticals, and they were mostly incoherent by the end.

She thought he was Tony's missing journalist, he must be; she just wasn't at all sure that he'd remember it.

Tentatively, she said, ‘So where are you from, Frank, what did you do before—?'

And wasn't at all surprised to be cut off, before she'd even found an end to her question: ‘You don't ask that, lass. Not ever, not of anyone. We're here now. Someone wants to tell you, fine, but you don't ever ask.'

It was like being in prison, then. She'd thought it might be. People might tell you, but you never asked what they'd done to put them there.

With her, of course, no one had ever had to ask. They all read the papers; they all knew already.

Frank was looking at her now with something more than speculation in his eyes. Something knowing. He might not remember his own past, but he might remember hers. Her face, her real name. A Fleet Street journalist, working for a red top – for Tony's red top, above all: what could be more likely? A rational man might tell himself that he was wrong, that there was no possibility of Grace Harley being here, but this man wasn't rational. There was nothing to stop him leaping to insane conclusions that did just happen to be true.

Hastily, she said, ‘What's that you were saying about the old chapel here burning down? And the bell in the lake?' It was the last story she wanted to hear, but the first thing she thought of, sitting high in her memory, right there, just as she sat here on the chapel's old stones right in the shadow of its tower, under the mouth of its dreadful bell.

He said, ‘Back in the day, in the seventeenth century, the master of the house had his private chapel out here, with a priest's house by. Why he didn't want him in D'Espérance itself – or why the man wouldn't go, more likely – I'm not clear. There is no record, though I do have my suspicions. I think he was a wise man, though he did a foolish thing. Anyway, here he was, in place and in authority; and the master of the house was murdered. By his wife, it may have been, or by his housekeeper; there are different tales told. By a woman, though. And that was petty treason either way, the murder of her lawful master by a subordinate, wife or servant as she was. A man would have been drawn and hanged; for a woman, she must be burned at the stake. And so she was, at the priest's order and at the hands of the house servants, by the waterside here, and her remains flung into the lake. There was no due process, no trial. The local Justice of the Peace was outraged. He sent his constables to arrest the priest, but the man was tipped off; he was long gone before they came for him. His house and the chapel burned that night, though it's not known who set the fire. As I said, the story has it that the chapel bell went into the water in chase of its mistress, and no priest has served here since.'

Her head was full of pictures, then and now: fire here, fire by the lakeside. A woman in the flames. A woman in flames. A hand reaching out of flame, to set another girl alight . . .

A bell in the water, endlessly tolling a death that had not quite happened yet. Endlessly sounding a warning, perhaps, like church bells in the war:
beware, beware! Fear! Fire! Foes!
Trying to tell a world that would not listen how she was not dead yet, how her spirit still lingered somewhere between the fire and the water, how she could still snatch out at the heedless.

Doing that good work, a word to the wise, to any who could hear – and still finding time to punish Grace, that relentless bell, to slash her stitches and cut her wrist to the bone. It should warn the world, maybe. Have her burned too. She didn't quite know what petty treason was, but killing your own baby had to count, surely? And dying in a fire, horrible, maybe that would finally be punishment enough.

Maybe she should have thrown herself into the flames last night, instead of the water. Tried to find the lady. If she'd known she was in a three-card monte – the woman in the flames, the bell beneath the water, her baby dead and everywhere and coming – she might have done just that. She knew she couldn't win.