House of Echoes (43 page)

No one saw her approach. Leaving a trail of darker footprints in the wet grass she stepped onto the terrace, shivering with cold and walked towards the windows. Peering into the great hall she could see the room in the dim morning light. There was no fire and on the table she could see a vase of dead flowers, petals scattered around on the dusty surface. Her scalp was tingling and she rammed her fingers down into her pockets. They were ordinary flowers. Chrysanthemums and autumn daisies, but why had Lyn left them to die?

With heavy steps she walked round towards the gate into the courtyard and stopped. The coach house doors were open and the lights were on, brilliant strips of fluorescent tubing, and she could hear the cheerful banging of a hammer on metal. Someone – Jimbo – was whistling.

It was like looking at a stage from a darkened auditorium; a world that was separate and unreal was displayed before her – a
world of noise and bright lights and happiness and laughter while she, on the outside, peering through the bars of the gate was in some strange limbo where time stood still and shadows lurked in the darkness.

There was a tightness in her chest and in her pockets the palms of her hands were beginning to sweat. Quietly she unlatched the gate and pushed it open. Passing the garage without announcing herself she let herself into the kitchen and stopped in astonishment. A stranger was standing near the kitchen table.

‘Joss?’ The young woman held out her hand. ‘I’m Natalie Cotting, Jim’s sister. I’ve come to help.’

‘T
his was always one of the centres of activity.’ They were standing in the great hall in front of the fireplace. ‘Here and the large bedroom upstairs.’ Natalie stood for a long moment in complete silence, her eyes on the floor a few inches in front of her feet. Joss watched her, standing a yard or so from her. She could feel a tight knot of tension somewhere below her ribs. It was interfering with her breathing.

Slowly Natalie nodded. Without saying a word she moved towards the staircase where she stopped for a moment. ‘There never used to be any trouble in the study. Is it still happy in there?’

Joss nodded.

‘Good. Let’s go upstairs then.’

They toured the house slowly, room by room, then found themselves back once more in the kitchen. There too Natalie stood in silence, her head bowed until at last she looked up and caught Joss’s eye. ‘Sorry. You must think I’m loopy.’

Joss smiled. ‘No. Tell me what you’ve been doing.’

‘Just having a feel around.’ Natalie slipped into the chair at the head of the table and leaned forward earnestly, her chin cupped in her hands. She looked as if she were about to address a board of directors. ‘I used to come here a lot when I was little. I would play with the boys, Georgie and Sam. Georgie died about ten years before I was born and Sam I think about ten years before that. They must have been your brothers, I suppose?’ She waited for Joss’s nod. ‘Of course they didn’t know each other in life, but where they are now, in whatever dimension it is, they are a pair of tearaways.’ She smiled affectionately.

‘My son Tom talks about them. He’s found some of their toys. And –’ Joss hesitated, ‘I’ve heard them calling to each other.’

Natalie nodded. ‘Monkeys. There are other children here too
of course – the boys who have been lost. There’s Robert. He was your mum’s brother. And little John. He’s only a wee thing of about three, with golden curls and big blue eyes.’

Joss gasped. ‘You can see them?’

Natalie nodded. ‘Inside my head. Not always. Not today. I’m not seeing today.’ She frowned. ‘There’s a lot of other things here today. Unpleasant things.’ She clenched her fists. ‘People have been meddling. The Reverend Gower – Jim told me. He always made things worse because he didn’t understand what he’s dealing with here. Exorcism works when the priests understand. So many don’t. Often they are dealing with people – people like you and me – not demons. Other times they are dealing with evil far worse than they can conceive and their faith in what they are doing lets them down. They aren’t strong enough.’

‘And what are we dealing with here?’ whispered Joss. Her eyes were fixed on Natalie’s.

‘I’m not sure yet. When I came as a child I was always welcome. I could talk to Sam or Georgie or Robert. But they’re not there. They’re hiding. There’s something else.’ She stood up, her movements restless and quick. Looking out of the window she shook her head. ‘There’s too much here now. It’s confused. I’m going to need some time. Let’s go back to the great hall.’

A few minutes later standing in front of the fireplace she shook her head again. ‘I can feel so much anger and so much pain.’ She put her hands to her temples. ‘It’s filling my head. I can’t sort out the voices.’

Joss shivered. There was something in her own head as well – an echo, nothing more; an echo she couldn’t quite hear.

K
atherine

It was the name from the shadows.

‘Katherine,’ she whispered. ‘Is she a part of this?’

Natalie frowned. She half raised a hand to silence Joss, still listening hard to something Joss could not hear.

Katherine, my love. You were meant to be mine forever

Katherine! Where are you
?

Natalie was nodding. ‘Katherine is part of the grief. His mourning is trapped in every stone and timber and tile of this house.’

‘Whose mourning?’ Joss whispered. ‘Is it the king?’

Natalie’s eyes focused sharply. ‘So you know? You’ve seen him?’

Joss shrugged helplessly. The shutter had suddenly come down in her mind again; the black wall she could not penetrate. ‘I think so. Yes. My little boy calls him the tin man because of his armour.’

Natalie gave a small puzzled smile and nodded. ‘It is odd, isn’t it, to wear armour in his lover’s house.’

‘That’s what I thought. But he’s an angry, bitter man. Why else should he kill?’

‘Ssh.’ Natalie lifted her hand sharply. ‘Perhaps we can get him to speak to us. But not now.’ She shook her head. ‘Let’s go outside. Do you mind?’

There was no sign of Jimbo or Luke in the coach house as they walked out and into the garden, Natalie wearing a pair of Lyn’s boots and an old jacket of Joss’s over her smart office clothes.

Once on the grass she shook her neat, glossy hair out in the wind and took a couple of small childish skips across the grass.

‘Sorry. The atmosphere in there was so oppressive I couldn’t think straight. I could feel them listening all round me. Better to talk out here and decide what to do in private as it were.’

‘Tom and Ned are in danger, aren’t they.’ Joss was walking beside her slowly, her hands in her pockets as they headed towards the lake.

‘I think if the past history of this place is anything to go by, you must assume so, yes.’

‘But why? Why does he hurt the boys?’ She paused for a moment then she looked up. ‘Did you mean it? Can you get him to speak to us?’

Natalie shrugged. ‘I can try.’ She sighed. ‘I wish I wasn’t feeling so tired. I feel as though I’m being drained.’

They had reached the lake. She stood staring down into the water. ‘You know, I said in there I couldn’t sort out the voices. There were more than I expected. Not the children’s voices, not the lost boys or the men who have died. Other voices, powerful voices.’

‘Men’s voices or women’s!’ Joss was watching the moorhen scurrying back and forth between the water lily leaves.

‘That’s the strange thing. I’m not sure. I can hear snatches of words – powerful words, but I can’t make them out. It’s like fiddling with the dial on a radio. One flashes backwards and forwards through the stations – some are loud, some faint and
there is lots of static – then occasionally – just occasionally – one finds a station where one can understand the language and the reception is good and for a while one can tune in, then something happens – perhaps the wind changes or the antennae in my head move slightly and it’s gone and I can’t find it again.’

There was a long silence. Joss was shivering. ‘You can hear them, but can they hear you?’

‘Why do you think I came out here?’

‘You think they’re trapped within the walls of the house; that they can’t travel?’

Natalie shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ She gave a grimace. ‘But I feel safer out here.’

Joss pulled up the collar of her jacket. ‘Luke and I have just returned from France. We went over there to see Paul Deauville, my mother’s second husband. He gave me her last diaries. She mentioned Edward by name. She said she dreamed that he was looking everywhere for her here. He couldn’t reach her in France. Then she made a strange entry: she said, “I was so sure she could not cross water”.’

‘She?’

‘What kind of person can’t cross water? A vampire? A dead person?’

‘A witch?’ Natalie’s voice was very thoughtful.

‘Margaret de Vere was accused of witchcraft; accused of trying to kill the king,’ Joss went on slowly. ‘She was Katherine’s mother; Katherine, who we think was the king’s lover. Here.’ The moorhen took flight suddenly. Flapping its wings wildly it ran across the top of the lilies until it was airborne and dived out of sight behind the hedge. ‘While we were in France I found out that Katherine – a Katherine no one except my mother saw – visited her when she was dying. She took my mother white roses. Paul says that a Katherine had been the mistress of the man who became my mother’s lover here at Belheddon, and that her rage and jealousy were so great she hunted my mother down across the water.’ She was staring sightlessly down at the slowly spreading ripples beneath a wind-spun leaf. ‘I’m trying to work this out, and it makes no sense. Are we saying that King Edward of England, a man who had been dead for five hundred years, was my mother’s lover?’ She looked up and held Natalie’s gaze. ‘That is what we’re saying, aren’t we? But it can’t be. It can’t.’

‘They were both lonely, Joss. Your father had died. And he, Edward, had lost his Katherine.’

‘But he was dead!’ Joss was revolted.

‘He’s an earthbound spirit who still has earthly emotions,’ Natalie said gently. ‘He still feels anger and fear and bitterness – those are the things which I suspect anchor him here – but perhaps he also feels loneliness and even love. We don’t understand these things, Joss, so we must use our intuition. It’s all we have.’

Joss was staring down at the water again. A memory had surfaced out of nowhere. The cellar; a face; a pair of arms …

‘Joss? Joss, what is it? What’s wrong?’ Natalie’s arm was round her shoulders. ‘Joss, you’re white as a sheet. Come on, it’s cold out here. We ought to go in.’

‘No.’ Joss shook her off. She was trying to think, to remember, to grasp at a sliding mirage, a chimera at the edge of her mind, but already it had gone and the wall was once more firmly back in place, leaving nothing but the sour aftertaste of blinding panic.

Natalie was watching her carefully. She could see the fear and the revulsion like a cloak around the other woman and suddenly she began to understand. ‘Dear God,’ she whispered. ‘He’s made love to you too.’

‘No!’ Joss shook her head violently. ‘No, of course he hasn’t. How could he? That’s disgusting. It’s not possible! No!’ She was growing increasingly agitated. Running a few steps along the bank she stopped. Under the warm layers of jacket and sweater and shirt her skin was ice cold and she could feel crawling shivers of disgust. Another memory flashed before her. Eyes. Blue, warm eyes, close to her face and a swirl of soft dark velvet then they were gone again and she was standing by the lake with Natalie under the lowering November clouds.

There was another long silence, then, ‘Are you all right?’ Natalie said softly. She had followed her and her eyes met Joss’s sympathetically.

Joss gave a weak smile. ‘Let’s go back in.’

‘All right. If that’s what you want.’ Natalie hesitated. ‘I could try and speak to him on my own, but –’ she paused, ‘it would be better if you were with me. You belong to the house, you see. You’re part of it all.’

Joss nodded. Walking slowly back up the lawn she stared at the house in front of her. It looked strangely blank, the study
windows shuttered, her bedroom curtains only half open, the glass deadened and unreflective beneath the heavy sky. ‘David Tregarron is coming up sometime this afternoon,’ she said at last. ‘He’s a friend of ours – Ned’s godfather. He was with Edgar Gower when he had his heart attack. He’s been studying the history of the house. He’s the one who found out about Margaret de Vere.’

Natalie stopped dead. ‘Does he see?’

Joss shook her head. ‘Not that I know of. He loves the history and romance of it all. And the mystery, of course.’

‘Of course.’ It was said somewhat dryly.

‘I asked him to come so I could find out what really happened that night with Edgar and also because he believes it all. Unlike my husband, who questions my sanity. He believes Margaret de Vere really was a witch. Not a poor silly misguided old woman, but an educated clever practitioner of some kind of black magic. There’s a brass to her in the floor of the church here, did you know?’

Natalie stopped in her tracks. ‘A brass? In the church?’

‘Under that old rug in the chancel.’

‘She can’t be buried there. It must be just a monument.’

‘Why not? Why can’t she be buried here?’

‘Not if she was a witch.’

‘Of course not.’ Joss hesitated. ‘Do you want to come and see the brass?’

‘Now?’

‘Why not.’ Joss gestured towards the church. She shuddered. It would at least put off for a while the need to go back inside the house.

A few cold drops of rain were beginning to fall as Joss grasped the iron ring to lift the latch and pushed open the door. The church was very dark. Behind her, Natalie hesitated. ‘Wait, I’ll switch on the lights.’ Joss moved ahead, and a few seconds later those in the nave and the chancel came on, illuminating the vaulted roof.

‘It’s over here. See?’ Joss was standing near the rug. ‘Natalie?’ Natalie was still hesitating in the doorway. ‘What’s wrong?’ She stooped to lift the corner of the rug.

‘Don’t touch it!’ Natalie called sharply. Slowly she stepped away from the door and began walking up the aisle between the pews.
She could feel the thick miasma of hatred coming from the spot where Joss was standing. It was like a tangible object in the centre of the floor.

By the time she was beside her she could feel the sweat standing out on the palms of her hands. ‘She is buried here, and whoever did it, did so against the wishes of the church and with her they buried the tools of her trade,’ she whispered. ‘They must have been very powerful or very influential to have managed to do that.’

‘They were a powerful family,’ Joss murmured back. ‘In with the king.’

‘Indeed,’ Natalie replied grimly. She hooked her foot under the corner of the rug and nudged it backwards, exposing a little of the beautiful filigree metalwork in the stone. ‘I don’t remember ever seeing this before; ever feeling anything before. Something has awoken the evil.’

Joss grimaced. She gave a small shudder. ‘There’s another brass over there – a tiny one let into the wall, to her daughter, Katherine.’

Natalie glanced at her. She too shivered. The church was cold.

‘Margaret was accused of bewitching the king to win him for Katherine, but then she died. Natalie?’ Her voice sharpened suddenly. ‘What’s that? It smells like smoke.’

‘It is smoke.’ Natalie was staring down the church towards the door through which they had just come. A column of smoke, wispy, smelling of autumn bonfires, was slowly revolving in the back of the church.