House of Echoes (10 page)

O
avid had leapt at the idea of a weekend in East Anglia before he sat down and thought out the consequences. Peering now through the windscreen of his eight-year-old Vauxhall at the ancient, creeper-covered façade of Belheddon Hall he felt a pang of something near terminal jealousy. Then his better nature asserted itself firmly. If anyone deserved the fairy tale romance which had handed her this pile on a plate, it was Joss. He thought again of the few rough notes he had scribbled down for her and he smiled to himself. The house was far far older even than the architecture visible from where he sat implied, and it had an enviably romantic history.

Climbing stiffly out of the car he straightened to stretch the exquisite agony of cramp out of his bones before diving head first back in to withdraw suitcase, box of goodies from Harrods food hall and briefcase.

‘See here.’ He tapped a page of notes with his finger as they sat an hour later at the lunch table. ‘The church was built in 1249. I don’t know for sure, but I would think the foundations of this house go back that far at least. I’m no expert of course, but that glorious room of yours with the gallery looks fifteenth century if not earlier. Why haven’t you contacted this local historian chappy yet?’

‘We haven’t had time.’ Joss whisked off Tom’s bib and wiped his face with it while David watched with horrified disgust. ‘Wait while I put this young man down for his rest, then we’ll talk some more. Put the coffee on, Luke.’ She hauled the child out of his high chair and straddled him across her hip. ‘You don’t know how glad I am to see you, David.’ She rested a hand lightly on his shoulder as she passed. ‘I need to know about the house.’

David frowned as she disappeared through the door. ‘Need to know is rather a strong term.’

‘It’s weird for her, living here.’ Luke filled the kettle and put it on the hot plate. ‘Imagine it. Generations of her ancestors and yet she knows almost nothing even about her mother.’ Sitting down he leaned forward and cut himself a generous lump of cheese. ‘She’s been having a lot of nightmares. Some tactless old biddy who lives locally told her that both her elder brothers died here in accidents. She’s got a bit obsessed by the thought.’

David raised an eyebrow. ‘I can hardly blame her for that.’ He shivered. ‘How dreadful. Well, the more distant past seems to have been more cheerful. A junior branch of the De Vere family lived here for a couple of hundred years. One of them got his head chopped off in the Tower.’

Luke laughed, reaching for the wine. ‘And you find that more cheerful?’

‘I’m a historian; it fills me with morbid delight.’ David chuckled contentedly. ‘History is a moving staircase. Characters step onto the bottom, rise slowly. They get to the top, they descend. Occasionally something goes wrong and they fall off or get a foot trapped. They face forwards, looking up at the heights or they face backwards, looking down.’ He smiled, pleased with his metaphor. ‘In the end it makes no difference. One disappears, one leaves no trace and already another queue of figures crowds behind one all rising and falling in just the same way.’

‘Chateau-bottled philosophy.’ Luke topped up Joss’s glass as she reappeared. She had combed her hair and removed from her cheek the imprint of Tom’s gravy-covered fingers. ‘This has been a house of substance for hundreds of years, my love. You should be very proud to be its chatelaine.’

‘I am.’ Switching on the baby alarm which stood on the dresser, Joss sat down contentedly. ‘I’ll take you over to the church later, David. It’s very beautiful. They were doing the Christmas decorations and flowers earlier.’ She smiled. ‘Janet said I would be let off helping this year, as we’ve only just arrived.’

‘Imagine!’ Luke shook his head in wonder. ‘Joss, do you remember the old joke about the flower ladies hanging in the porch? Another few weeks and you’ll be a pillar of the church.’

David was scrutinising Joss’s face. She had lost a lot of weight since he had seen her last; there were dark rings under her eyes and in spite of the laughter he sensed a tenseness about her which worried him. It was two hours before he had the chance to talk
to her alone, when she put Tom in his buggy and they pushed him across the drive and down the narrow overgrown path towards the churchyard gate.

‘That’s my father’s grave.’ She pointed down at the headstone.

‘Poor Joss.’ David pushed his hands deep into his pockets against the cold. ‘It must have been disappointing to find neither he nor your mother were still alive.’

‘To put it mildly.’ She pushed Tom on a few feet and stopped as the little boy pointed at a robin which had alighted on a headstone only a few feet from them. ‘Did you find out anything else about the name?’

‘Belheddon.’ He chewed his lip. ‘The name goes back a very long way. Multitudes of spellings, of course, like most old English place names, but basically the same in the Domesday Book. That takes you back to about 1087. How far did you want me to go?’ He grinned at her, blowing out a cloud of condensed air to make Tom laugh.

‘You mentioned Celtic. Iron Age? Bronze Age?’

‘That was guesswork, Joss, and I’m afraid I haven’t made any more progress on the definitions. There was a possibility of it coming from
belwe
which means bellow in middle English. Heddon does seem most likely to mean heather hill. Perhaps they grazed noisy cattle up here once! But we’re really talking archaeology here. There are recognised sites around here – I noticed in one of the county histories that there are several very close to the house – but who knows when it comes to names? I don’t know yet if there is anything Roman.’

‘Why would the devil live here, David?’

She had her back to him, watching the robin. He frowned. There was a strange tone to her voice – a forced jocularity.

‘I very much doubt if he does.’ She turned and he met her eye. ‘What is frightening you, Joss?’

She shrugged, fussing with Tom’s harness. The little boy had started to whine. ‘I don’t know. I’m usually quite sane. And I adore the house. It’s just that somehow, something is not right here.’

‘But not the devil.’ It was his most schoolmasterly tone, stern with just a hint of mocking reproach.

‘No. No, of course not.’ Comforting the child, she sounded far from sure.

‘Joss. If the devil chose anywhere to live on Earth, I doubt that, even as his country residence, he would choose Belheddon.’ He smiled, the corners of his eyes creasing deeply. ‘For one thing it’s far too cold.’

She laughed. ‘And I’m keeping you hanging around. Let’s go into the church.’

The iron latch was icy, even through her gloves. Turning the ring handle with an effort she humped the buggy through the doors and down into the shadowy aisle.

‘It’s a lovely old church.’ David stared round him.

She nodded. ‘I’ve even been to one or two services. I’ve always loved evensong.’ She led the way towards the far wall. ‘Look, there are several memorials and brass plaques to people from the Hall. None with the same names, though. It’s as if a dozen families have lived here. It’s so frustrating. I don’t know who, if any, are my relations.’ She stood staring up at a worn stone memorial by the pulpit. ‘Look. Sarah, beloved wife of William Percival, late of Belheddon Hall, died the 4th day of December, 1884. Then, much later, there was Lydia Manners, my grandmother, then my parents’ name was Duncan. All different families.’

‘Have you found the family Bible?’ He had wandered up into the chancel. ‘Ah, here are some De Veres. 1456 and 1453, both of Belheddon Hall. Perhaps they were your ancestors too.’

Joss pushed the buggy after him. ‘I hadn’t thought to look for a Bible. What a good idea!’

‘Well if there is one and it is sufficiently huge you ought to be able to find it quite easily. I’ll help you look when we get back to the house. But Joss –’ he put his arm round her gravely, ‘I very much doubt if you are descended from the devil!’

‘It would be an interesting thought, wouldn’t it.’ She stood in front of the altar rail and stared up at the stained-glass window. ‘I suspect if I was there would have been a smell of scorching by now, if not whirling winds and screaming demons flocking round my head.’

Katherine

The sound in the echoing chancel arch above her was no more than a whisper of the wind. Neither of them heard it.

David sat down in one of the pews. ‘Joss, about the writing. I gave your short story
Son of the Sword
, to my friend Robert Cassie at Hibberds. It intrigued me so much when I read it. That mystery
thriller angle set in the past: I thought it worked really well and I was always sad it was a short story. I thought it would make a good novel then, and I still do.’ He glanced up at her under his eyelashes. ‘Bob agreed with me. I don’t know if that particular idea appeals, but if you thought you could expand it into a full- length novel, he would be interested to hear your ideas on how to do it; perhaps write some character sketches, a few chapters, that sort of thing.’

She stood stock still, looking down at him. ‘Was he serious?’

David nodded. ‘I told you you could do it, Joss. He liked the characters; he loved the mystery – and of course, in the story, it’s never solved.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you know what happened at the end yourself?’

Joss laughed. ‘Of course I do.’

‘Well then. All you have to do is tell the story.’

They found the family Bible that evening. The huge, leather-covered tome was stored sideways in the bottom of the bookshelf behind her mother’s chair in the study. ‘Bookworm.’ David fingered the crumbling edges to the pages. ‘And probably mice. And there you are. Dozens of entries written on the end papers. Fascinating! Let’s take it through to the kitchen and we can put it on the table under the bright light.’

Luke was scrubbing oil off his hands at the sink when they carried in their find in triumph and laid it reverently down. ‘Now what have you found.’ He grinned at them tolerantly. ‘You are like a couple of school kids, you two. Such excitement!’

David opened the book with careful fingers. ‘Here we are. The first entry is dated 1694.’

‘And the last?’ Joss craned over his shoulder.

He turned the heavy handmade page. ‘Samuel John Duncan, born 10th September 1946.’

‘Sammy.’ Joss swallowed hard. Neither Georgie nor she, the rejected member of the Duncan family, were there.

David stood back from the table, half diffident, half reluctant to relinquish his treasure. ‘Go on, have a look.’

Joss sat down, leaning forward, her finger on the page. ‘There she is,’ she said, ‘the Sarah in the church. Sarah Rushbrook married William Percival 1st May 1861. Then Julia Mary born 10th April 1862, died 17th June 1862 – she only lived two months.’

‘It was a cruel time. Infant mortality was appalling, Joss. Remember your statistics,’ David put in sternly. He was suddenly strangely uncomfortable with this close encounter with the past.

Joss went on. ‘“Mary Sarah, born 2nd July 1864. Married John Bennet spring 1893. Our firstborn, Henry John was born the 12th October 1900” – she must have written that. “Our daughter Lydia” – I suppose that’s my grandmother – “was born in 1902” and then, oh no –’ she stopped for a moment. ‘Little Henry John died in 1903. He was only three years old. That entry is in a different handwriting. The next entry is dated 24th June, 1919. “In the year 1903, three months after the death of our son Henry, my husband John Bennet disappeared. I no longer expect his return. This day my daughter, Lydia Sarah, married Samuel Manners who has come to Belheddon in his turn.”’

‘That sounds a bit cryptic.’ Luke was sitting opposite her, his attention suddenly caught. ‘What’s next?’

‘“Our son, Samuel, was born on 30th November, 1920. Three days later my mother, Mary Sarah Bennet, died of the influenza.”’

‘Incredible.’ David shook his head. ‘It’s a social history in miniature. I wonder if she caught the tail end of the great flu epidemic which spread round the world after the First World War. Poor woman. So she probably never saw her grandson.’

‘I wonder what happened to poor old John Bennet?’ Thoughtfully Luke sat back in his chair.

‘There is a letter in the study,’ Joss said slowly, reverting to a previous thought. ‘A note from Lydia to her cousin John Duncan telling him about her son’s birth. She must have written it straight away, before she realised her mother was dying.’ She glanced back at the page. ‘She had three more children, John, Robert and Laura, my mother, each born two years apart and then –’ she paused. ‘Look, she herself died the year after Laura’s birth. She was only twenty-three years old!’

‘How sad.’ Luke reached out and touched her hand. ‘It was all a long time ago, Joss. You mustn’t get depressed about it, you know.’

She smiled. ‘I’m not really. It’s just so strange. Reading her letter, holding it in my hand. It brings her so close.’

‘I expect the house is full of letters and documents about the family,’ David put in. ‘The fact that your mother obviously left everything just as it was is wonderful from the historian’s point
of view. Just wonderful. There must be pictures of these people. Portraits, photos, daguerreotypes.’ He rocked back on his chair, balancing against the table with his finger tips. ‘You must draw up a family tree.’

Joss smiled. ‘It would be interesting. Especially for Tom Tom when he’s big.’ She shook her head slowly, turning back to the endpapers where the scrawled Italic inscriptions, faded to brown, raced across the page. The first four generations, she realised, had been filled in by the same hand – a catching up job in the front of the new Bible perhaps. After that, year after year, generation after generation, each new branch of the family was recorded by a different pen, a different name. ‘If I copy these out, I can take the list over to the church and find out how many of them were buried there,’ she said. ‘I wonder what did happen to John Bennet. There is no further mention of him. It would be interesting to see if he was buried here. Do you think he had an accident?’

‘Perhaps he was murdered.’ Luke chuckled. ‘Not every name in this book can have died a gentle natural death …’