The Seance (8 page)

‘Miss Langton,’ he said at last, ‘I assure you, I know nothing of your history beyond what you have told me. What you divine is – only the wildest of fancies on my part. No – the best advice I can give you is to sell the estate, sight unseen, enjoy whatever wealth it brings you, and let the name of Wraxford vanish from memory.’

‘But how can I be certain of that,’ I persisted, emboldened by his hesitation, ‘if you will not tell me what you suspect – or who you think that I resemble?’

He seemed more struck by this than I would have expected, and resumed his communion with the flames.

‘I confess, Miss Langton,’ he said finally, ‘that I do not know how to answer you. You must allow me time to reflect; I shall write to you within the week.’ And soon after that he took his leave.

My uncle was naturally astounded by the news, but the name Wraxford meant nothing to him, beyond vague associations with some ancient crime or scandal, and the weather remained so bitter that the streets were mired with frozen slush, while the hours dragged by in an endless round of speculation until, on the fourth morning after Mr Montague’s visit, a stoutly wrapped parcel arrived for me by registered mail. It contained another package, also sealed; a brief letter, and a chart of the Wraxford genealogy, drawn in the same small, precise hand.

20
th
Jan
y
1889

Dear Miss Langton,

You have trusted me with your secret, and I have resolved to trust you with mine. I sealed this packet nearly twenty years ago, and have not opened it since. As you will see, I am placing my reputation in your hands, but I find I do not greatly care. My health is failing; I shall shortly retire from practice; and if anyone has a right to these papers, it is you. When you have read them, you will understand why I say to you: sell the Hall unseen; burn it to the ground and plough the earth with salt, if you will; but never live there.

Yours most sincerely,

John Montague

have at last resolved to set down everything I know of the strange and terrible events at Wraxford Hall, in the hope of appeasing my conscience, which has never ceased to trouble me. A fitting enough night for such a decision, for it is bitter cold, and the wind howls about the house as if it will never cease. I shrink from what I must reveal of my own history, but if anyone is ever to understand why I acted as I did – and why else attempt this? – I must not withhold anything of relevance, no matter how painful. I shall feel easier in my mind, I trust, knowing that if the case is ever reopened after I am gone, this account may help uncover the truth about the Wraxford Mystery.

I first met Magnus Wraxford in the spring of 1866 – my thirtieth year – in my capacity as solicitor to his uncle Cornelius, a trust I had inherited from my father. Ours was a small family firm in the town of Aldeburgh, and I had followed my father as he had followed his. Like every boy
growing up in that part of Suffolk, I had heard tales of Wraxford Hall, which lies at the heart of Monks Wood, about seven miles to the south of Aldeburgh as the crow flies, but a good deal further by road. Old Cornelius Wraxford had lived there in complete seclusion for as long as anyone could remember, attended by a handful of servants seemingly chosen for their taciturn qualities, while the house slowly decayed around him and the wilderness reclaimed the park. Even poachers avoided the place, for Monks Wood was said to be haunted by – as one might expect – the ghost of a monk; according to local legend, anyone who saw the apparition would die within the month. Cornelius, besides, was rumoured to keep a pack of dogs so savage they would tear you to pieces if they caught you. Some said that the old miser was guarding an immense hoard of gold and precious stones; others maintained that he had sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for the gift of flight, or a cloak of invisibility, or some such diabolical attribute. Then there was William Brent the poacher, who used to boast that he could hunt as close as he liked to the Hall without arousing the dogs, until the night he saw a malignant face peering down at him from an upstairs window and was dead within a month; of pleurisy, admittedly, but all the same ... My father scoffed at the rumours, but could shed no light of his own, as he had met Cornelius only once, at the office, several years before I was born. Even then, he said, Cornelius had looked like an old man; small, wizened and suspicious. All of their business thereafter had been conducted by letter.

As I grew older, I absorbed more of the Hall’s history from my father. It had been built in the time of Henry VIII, on the site of the monastery which had given Monks Wood its name. The Wraxfords, like many Catholic families, had renounced their religion during Queen Elizabeth’s reign; Wraxford Hall, indeed, had served as a Royalist stronghold throughout the Civil War. Charles II himself was said to have hidden in the priest’s hole while Henry Wraxford faced down Cromwell’s men. At the Restoration, Henry was rewarded with a knighthood, but the title died
with him, and for the next hundred or so years the Hall served as a summer retreat for several generations of Wraxfords, mostly scholars and clerics who seemed to have done nothing whatever of note.

In the 1780s it passed to one Thomas Wraxford, a man of grander ambitions who had recently married an heiress. He immediately set about extending the house and grounds, with a view to entertaining in the grand style, deaf to warnings about its remoteness and difficulty of access. He spent a good part of his wife’s fortune, as well as his own, on this plan, but the great parties never eventuated; the invitations were politely declined, and the newly fitted out rooms remained unoccupied. And then, around 1795, his only son Felix died at the age of ten, in a fall from a gallery above the Great Hall.

Thomas Wraxford’s wife left him soon after the tragedy and went back to her own people. He lived on at the Hall for another thirty years, until one morning, in the spring of 1821, his manservant brought up the hot water at the usual hour and found his master gone. The bed had not been slept in, but there was no sign of struggle or disturbance; the outer doors and windows were all secured as usual; and the only thing missing was the nightshirt he had been wearing when the servant had last seen him the evening before. The house and grounds were thoroughly searched, in vain: Thomas Wraxford had vanished from the face of the earth, and no trace of him was ever found.

It was generally assumed that the old man’s wits had finally given way, and that he had somehow got out of the house in his nightshirt, wandered off into Monks Wood, and fallen into a pit. The area had been mined for tin many centuries before, and some of the old workings still remained, roofed over by bracken and fallen leaves, as snares for the unwary. A year and a day after Thomas’s disappearance, Cornelius Wraxford, his nephew and sole heir, petitioned the county court for a judgment of Thomas Wraxford’s decease, which was granted readily enough. And so Cornelius, a reclusive, unmarried scholar, resigned his fellowship at Cambridge and took possession of the Hall. And that was all that my father could tell
me, save that over the years, Cornelius had gradually sold off the land from which the estate had once derived its income, except for Monks Wood and the Hall itself.

I spent a great deal of time, as a young boy, happily plotting with my companions as to how we might make our way through the forest, evade the dogs, and creep into the Hall through the secret passage which was said to lead from the house to a disused chapel in the woods nearby. None of us had seen more than a distant glimpse of Monks Wood, and so our imaginations were free to run wild; the terrors we invoked haunted my dreams for years afterwards. Our plans, of course, came to nothing; I was sent away to school, where I endured the usual brutalities, until the shock of my dear mother’s death left me for a while indifferent to lesser torments.

It was then I think that I began to find refuge in sketching and drawing, for which I possessed a natural facility, although I had never taken it very seriously, or received much in the way of instruction. My forté was natural scenery – the wilder the better – houses, castles and, especially, ruins. Something in me was struggling towards the light, but it seemed to have nothing to do with my destiny, which was to read for the law at Corpus Christi, my father’s old college at Cambridge. This I duly did; and there, in my second year, I met a young man named Arthur Wilmot. He was reading classics but his real passion was for painting, and through him I discovered a new world of which I had been ignorant. It was in his company in London that I saw Turner’s work for the first time, and felt that I understood at last those lines of Keats about stout Cortez gazing upon the ocean with a wild surmise. During that long vacation we spent three weeks painting and sketching in the Highlands, and with Arthur’s encouragement I began to believe that my future might lie in a studio rather than a solicitor’s office.

Arthur was about my own height, but very slightly built, with fair skin of the sort which burns easily, and delicate features. But the impression of frailty was misleading, as I realised on our first day in
Scotland when he went scampering up a steep incline with the agility of a goat while I followed, panting, in his wake. He spoke a great deal of Orchard House – a perfect Arcadia, as he made it sound – near Aylesbury, where his father, a clergyman, had a living, and especially of his sister Phoebe, who was plainly very dear to him: he grew anxious if more than a day or two had passed without a letter from her. By the end of our tour, it was settled that instead of returning to Aldeburgh, I should accompany him home and stay at least a fortnight. I had neither brothers nor sisters – my mother had been very ill after my birth – and I knew that my father had been looking forward to having me at home again. But I did not want to disappoint Arthur; or so I told myself in justification.

Orchard House was everything he had promised, and more: a rambling place of thatch and dazzling whitewash, set as its name implied amidst groves of apple and pear trees. Arthur’s father, white-haired, genial, rubicund, might have stepped straight from a canvas by Birket Foster (though I did not see that at the time), as might his mother, a serene, slender, fine-boned woman – one could see where Arthur had got his looks – always to be found somewhere in her garden when there was nothing else to attend to. And then there was Phoebe herself. She was beautiful, yes, with her mother’s classical profile and slender figure; she had thick lustrous hair the colour of dark honey, and her eyes were hazel, the eyelids always slightly lowered, though there was nothing coquettish about her. But it was her voice that first enchanted me: low and vibrant, with a singing undertone which made the most commonplace remark seem charged with emotion.

My love for Phoebe was returned; I had her promise soon enough, though consent to our engagement was much longer in coming. I put aside all thought of starving in garrets and applied myself to the law, knowing that the sooner I had secured my articles, the sooner we would be married. Aside from the torments of longing I endured away from her, swinging between bouts of wild elation and terror lest she should change her mind, the one cloud on our horizon was the question of where we
were to live. I was serving my articles with my father in Aldeburgh; to turn my back upon the firm would break his heart, and lead perhaps to a permanent breach between us. But to keep my place with him would mean separating Phoebe from all that she loved best in the world. She and my father had tried to like each other for my sake, but did not quite know how to go about it. I knew, too, that she found our house, a plainly furnished bungalow overlooking the strand, windswept and bleak.

In the end we reached an uneasy compromise: we would live in Aldeburgh, but in a house of our own, somewhere away from the sound of the waves which, as Phoebe reluctantly admitted, seemed to her melancholy and oppressive: I would more than once catch her murmuring, half-unconsciously, ‘Break, break, break, on thy cold grey stones, O sea ...’ And we were to spend as much time at Orchard House as the demands of the office would allow.

After three long years we were married, in the spring of 1859; I was just twenty-three years old, and Phoebe a year younger. We spent part of our honeymoon in Devon; I had wished to take her to Rome, but her family were anxious about the journey, and the dangers of disease. Those days and nights alone with her seemed, at the time, the happiest of my life; but by the end of a fortnight she was pining for Orchard House, and thence we returned, with much rejoicing on the part of her family, until the time came for us to begin our life in Aldeburgh.