Moon Rising (18 page)

Our days were much the same; it was a sunlit, timeless world, where nothing seemed to matter. I fell into a habit of retiring outdoors in the afternoon, to lie in the shade with a book or yesterday's newspaper to hand. It was such luxury to be able to read when and if I wanted, I no longer felt obliged to cram in words like a starving man.

Sometimes, drugged by an afternoon's love-making, I would gaze idly out to sea while Bram dozed, knowing I could please myself. That was part of my enjoyment. I loved the garden, loved its wild, neglected air, the overgrown hedge and collapsed drystone wall with its clumps of thyme and sea-pinks and valerian. I loved the scents and colours and sounds, the buzz of insects and the distant murmur of the sea; but it seemed no more permanent than a hoard of fairy-tale treasure. I knew I must appreciate it, since it might well disappear with the next shower of rain.

Perhaps that awareness was true for Bram as well. He loved the cottage, but he said I was the one who made him happy, the only one who could make him feel that life held some hope. It seemed a strange thing to say, but he wouldn't explain. I began to see how erratic his moods could be, veering between optimism and uncertainty, benevolent good humour and a kind of absent-minded melancholy I found difficult to comprehend.

Loving him seemed to help; in fact sometimes it was the only way I could bring him back from those bleak abstractions. I would hold him and caress him like a child until the mood broke, until he turned to me like a lover, stripping off my clothes and taking me to bed. In physical pleasure the black moods would be banished and forgotten.

The intensity of our encounters astonished me, as did the craving for more. I might have preferred to dismiss my experience with Bella as being of no account, but whether I knew it then or not, loving Bella had helped to open my mind and taught my body to respond; and in the sensual world Bram and I were creating for ourselves, right or wrong seemed to have no existence.

Certain practical considerations entered in, of course, and, besotted though we were, we tried not to invite trouble. We were mostly discreet in our dealings with the outside world, and careful when we made love. I appreciated his care, although there were times at the moment of climax when, contrarily, I longed for him to let go, to give me his heart and soul in the moment I gave him mine.

In this respect he'd been well tutored by his wife. Florence had borne their only child within the first year of marriage, had a difficult time with the birth and afterwards, and ultimately vowed never to go through that appalling experience again. I gathered that her chief method of prevention was to close her bedroom door, or, when her husband cajoled and pleaded, to lie as cold and unresponsive as a dead thing, so that his requests became less pressing and far less frequent. And yet he loved her, even then I knew it. It hurt me, because I was young and wanted him to love me. I wanted to be the only one. I didn't understand then about love and passion and the various accommodations of marriage.

For he was a passionate man, deeply so beneath that urbane and practical exterior, with a nature as generous as his features had always suggested. But it grieved me to discover that he disliked his own looks, that he thought himself ugly, with a jaw and brow too heavy and a mouth too full for masculine beauty. It was nonsense, of course. Classical ideals were all very well, I said, but who wanted to kiss a cold bronze statue, or make love to a description in a book? I certainly did not. Pushing aside my own private ideals, I told him I preferred a man of flesh and blood with kind hands and a generous smile, to any tight-lipped portrait of perfection.

But still he did not agree. So what was handsome? I asked, and for answer he described the kind of looks his friend Irving possessed, slender, fine-boned, aristocratic. At that I had to restrain a rude remark. Henry Irving was no more aristocratic than I was, and I found that I was beginning to dislike him almost as much as I disliked the prissy Florence. I wondered whether either of them knew Bram as well as I did, or cared for him a quarter as much.

The long hot days were enervating and seemingly endless. The sun rose at four and shone through a dazzling haze of heat until well after eight in the evening, when the moon appeared to transform the golden dusk into silvery twilight. Even when the weather was misty the nights were illumined by a pale, mysterious bloom. It was like walking through a dream. Everyday places were eerily unreal, recognisable but different, heightened and distorted by that strange diffusion of light.

Round about ten o'clock, after several hours at his makeshift desk, Bram was keen to be out, to walk and talk and explore, to loiter along the staiths watching boats and tides and the moon rising over the cliffs. Sometimes he came early to the studio and talked to Jack if he happened to be in, or he'd arrange to meet me in the churchyard, where a public bench caught the last of the long summer twilight. From there, as the moon grew larger and brighter with each succeeding night, we explored Whitby together.

Strange though it was, I soon came to enjoy that nocturnal existence. Nor were we alone. The paths between the town and outlying villages were often thronged with groups of visitors, enjoying the cooler air. Upstream, at Ruswarp, the river moved with summer slowness down to the dam, where moonlight revealed a string of rowing boats tied up beneath the trees. Here, midnight walks seemed have become quite the fashion amongst the younger set, and – judging by the excess of squealing laughter – so was playing the fool.

Hearing the howls and shrieks of one such group passing over the bridge at Ruswarp, I clicked my tongue. ‘What on earth's all that about? You'd think Old Goosey was after them.'

‘I imagine they're telling ghost stories,' he said with a grin, ‘frightening each other silly and enjoying every minute of it. Anyway, who's Old Goosey? Ghost or goblin? Man or gander?'

‘A man,' I replied, ‘whose ghost walks as a goose...' In the midst of Bram's sudden merriment I saw the joke for myself. A moment later I found myself telling the tale of Old Goosey, a local man who'd earned his nickname over a wager, and then lost his life because of it.

‘Many years ago, when times were hard, he bet a wealthy man that he could eat an entire goose in one sitting. The test took place at one of the local pubs, before a great crowd of people, and bets were running high. He lost the first time, having managed all but the rump – but he won the next round by starting at that end and finishing the rest. So he was Goosey ever after, and a popular man, until he came to grief over another wager a few months later. He won that time too, but he was struck down on the way home, his money stolen, and his body thrown into the Esk.

‘Whoever did it was never caught – so you see, that's why his ghost walks along the riverside, searching for the man who killed him . . .'

‘But surely not as a goose,' Bram protested, ‘that's too ridiculous!'

‘No, it isn't – that was his punishment, don't you see? Even though he was murdered, he invited it, in a way. It came about because of his greed and gluttony, and for that he was condemned to take on the form of a goose -'

‘Poetic justice?'

‘Yes, I think so. I believe that, don't you?'

Chuckling, Bram said we were getting into the realms of metaphysics, but that was a word beyond me then. I knew I believed in the existence of good and evil, and just occasionally the idea of divine retribution could frighten me rigid. My eyes were drawn to the far bank, downriver from the weir, where the land rose steeply above the Esk. There lay the densely wooded ravine of Cock Mill Woods, a place with an evil reputation.

Amongst summer visitors who knew nothing of its history it was regarded as a place of great beauty, where a waterfall tumbled some forty feet over huge rocks before rushing away to join the main stream further down. It was one thing to admire nature on a summer's day, however, and quite another at night. I was interested to note that the noisy group which had crossed the Ruswarp bridge earlier kept to the road, hurrying past the ravine with barely a pause for shrieks and shivers. Not that I blamed them; it was not a place to linger.

I made the mistake of saying so, and at once Bram wanted to know why. Having sensed a story, he wanted to see this dreaded spot and would not be put off. Reluctantly, I agreed, relating the history of the place as we approached the ravine.

In the woods somewhere above us lay the ancient mill with its great waterwheel, and the old cockpit which gave the place its name. I'd heard that both had been there since the days when the abbey owned everything along Whitby strand, but it was just far enough away and sufficiently hidden to be ignored by authority. In the old days, I said, the mill was known as a place of ill-repute, the haunt of smugglers and dice-players and loose women, a place where vast amounts of money changed hands, where salt and silks and fine wines were hidden in secret caves, and where men fought to the death over insults and ill-judged wagers.

‘Then, at the time of the wars with France,' I whispered, ‘it became a hideout for seamen escaping the press-gang. Few of His Majesty's bully-boys would risk body and soul up there...'

We stopped on the bridge over the beck, where patches of dappled moonlight revealed rocks and rushing water below. On either side a mass of trees stood tall and still and black, an occasional whispering of leaves prickling my spine with alarm. If we'd been in possession of a lantern, I'm sure Bram would have insisted on climbing further, despite my tales of death and disaster and of people disappearing, never to be seen again.

‘They say,' I added with a shiver, ‘that the Gentleman in Black still lurks in these woods...' At his questioning glance I was forced to swallow my dread and explain that Old Nick – the devil himself – was said to attend the cock-fights and dice games. That he was wont to stand amongst the crowd, more avid than the rest, stamping his feet, urging and inciting the worst excesses; and, if anyone happened to be trodden on or grasped by him, the marks remained, deep in the flesh, like the brands of a cloven hoof.

Bram shivered at that, then laughed softly, as though half ashamed of such foolishness. He pulled me closer and said there was nothing to fear, only darkness; but at night, just there, the idea of hell opening up from some hidden crevice seemed all too real. I wanted to leave, and for once my insistence was stronger than his bravado.

~~~

Even as he encouraged me to relate such stories, Bram liked to scare me with ones shared by his friends at the Lyceum. He described those evenings so well I could almost see him there. The great theatre, vast and empty, echoing with ghostly voices, while Bram, Irving and their novelist friend, Hall Caine, relaxed with brandy and cigars after a comfortable supper backstage.

After midnight when the fires burned low, when other guests had gone in search of cabs to see them home, the trio of friends vied with each other in exchanging strange stories and superstitions. Their meeting place, the Beefsteak Room, had been opened up again during Irving's first season there, its oak panelling and beamed ceiling lending the place the look of a medieval hall. As Bram described it, there were even suits of armour, a huge open fireplace and old portraits of famous actors looking down from the walls. Sometimes, he said, it was almost possible to feel their presence late at night, when the place was quiet; and to imagine the ghosts of great performers still lingering on the stage.

I thought my tales were tame by comparison, but Bram was writing them down – they were important, he said, which made me feel important too. He even said he would relate them to his friends. But that was a mixed blessing, since to tell them in London he would have to leave Whitby.

We were out most nights, becoming more than a little moonstruck, I think, as we walked and talked and found secluded places to picnic on whatever food I'd brought. Bram could not stay in, and if he did, he rarely slept. He survived on cat-naps, almost as though he were afraid of missing something or wasting precious time. Restless, almost voracious at times, he seemed as hungry for love as he was for knowledge, taking chances and tempting fate in ways that often left me breathless.

We toured Whitby with a thoroughness that would have put most visitors to shame, while I plumbed the depths of memory for stories to keep him entertained. I told him of wafts and hobs, witches and wisemen, empty houses and haunted yards. The Old Hall on Bagdale boasted the fearful presence of a headless Cavalier, while another old house nearby regularly showed lights moving in the empty upper storeys. I'd heard that a grey lady walked the cobbled steps of Union Road, and down a yard between Baxtergate and New Quay moved a ghostly whaling captain, the air around him cold as the Greenland seas.

Down by the harbour, as we watched brigs and barquentines being unloaded in the long summer dusk, he spoke of seagoing mysteries, of deserted ships come upon far out at sea, with the wheel lashed, or dinner set in the cabin and not a soul on board. I told him of the Dutch sea-captain my brother knew, who swore he'd conversed with the ship's mate in the wheelhouse one night, only to find that the man had been killed in a brawl ashore several hours previously. That story made me shiver even in the telling.

Over the bridge, in the narrow curve of Low Lane where the explorer James Cook had spent the winters of his youth, ancient alehouses and taverns with seedy reputations slouched before sober, straight-faced Georgian buildings. There, overlooking the harbour, where the penny-hedge was erected every year in penance for a medieval murder, it seemed the past was all around us, history and legend blending into one.

I found it easy to imagine a cluster of shadows, darker than the rest, taking on shape and evil intent. Flickering pinpoints of fire, which might have been no more than ill-tended gaslights, could so easily have been the eyes of the barghest, the spectral hound with eyes like burning coals which was said to haunt these footpaths. I could remember times, especially on winter's nights, when Bella and I had frightened ourselves silly, skittering home like rabbits because we thought we'd heard something following us, or seen great eyes staring from the darkness of one of the yards.