The Silence of Ghosts (6 page)

‘Is it just you and your mum?’ I asked, thinking I might be skating on thin ice and adding, ‘or are you with your husband?’

She almost choked.

‘Husband? What husband? Have you not noticed I have no rings on my fingers?’

‘I thought that might be for nursing reasons.’

Sausages downed, she gave me a quick examination to check I hadn’t overdone things. She ran her fingers along my left thigh, and used a stethoscope to check the blood supply.

‘Don’t forget,’ she said, letting her hand lie gently on my leg, ‘that if there’s ever anything you need, whatever it is, you’ve only to ask.’

She looked at me intently, and it dawned on me that perhaps she didn’t mean helping me with a crutch.

‘By the way,’ she said, ‘something funny happened to me as I was coming back here on my bike. As I rode along the track between Howtown and here, I noticed a light in one of your upstairs windows. I thought at first you might have made your way upstairs on the crutches, but a moment’s thought told me that was highly unlikely. It must have been Octavia, but I didn’t think she liked to go upstairs in the dark, even with a lamp.’

‘That’s right.’

I told her what Octavia had told me earlier. When she looked at Octavia, my sister just looked back at her and nodded.

‘I’ll go up,’ she said.

‘I can’t let you do that. If you hold me, I can make it to the top.’

She shook her head.

‘Not for one moment. If you fell, you might fall backwards and break your neck at the bottom. Someone may have broken in, some kids perhaps. Just let me take a look.’

She saw my number 8 torch on my bedside table and picked it up with a look of triumph on her face.

‘I have one of these,’ she said, ‘but I can never find a number 8 battery for love or money. If you know where you can find some, just let me know.’

Before I could expostulate further, she tripped out of the room. I heard her climb the stairs, then waited in silence. I could hear her footsteps as she moved from room to room. It took around five minutes, then the door opened and she stepped back in.

‘Octavia,’ she said, ‘be a good girl and make some tea for us. Milk and sugar if you have them.’

Octavia sighed and got to her feet. She liked doing things for Rose, but it was near her bedtime. When she had gone, Rose sat down beside me.

‘No burglars,’ she said. ‘But then I didn’t think there were any. Dominic, has Octavia been upstairs?’

I shook my head.

‘Not that I know of. I really don’t think so.’

‘Has she told you why she’s reluctant to go up there?’

‘Just that she doesn’t like the atmosphere.’

‘Hmm. You see, that’s the problem. I don’t like the atmosphere up there either. I’ve always been a sensible woman. I’ve studied nursing, which is very scientific. I don’t believe in witches or ghosts. But upstairs just now, I felt something that I couldn’t see or touch or hear, and I don’t know what to make of it.’

‘Are you saying the house is haunted?’

I’m a sceptic too, and any talk of the supernatural annoys me. Of course, I had no wish to get annoyed with Rose. She’s the best thing in my life at the moment, and I don’t want to get some battleaxe in exchange and chase her away.

‘I don’t know what to say, Dominic. But I don’t think you and your sister should go up those stairs until we know what it really is.’

Octavia returned with the teas and some biscuits that had been baked by Rose’s mother. Baking is hard during rationing, as we all know, but I was very impressed by what Mrs Sansom had produced. We sat eating our biscuits and drinking tea – complete with milk and sugar – but neither Rose nor I could muster up any conversation at first, and sat with our own thoughts, unwilling to share them for fear of generating a crisis.

I thought Rose might leave, but there was still tea in the pot. Pouring it out I asked about her mother, what sort of woman she was.

‘She’s getting older now, but she’s still the cook in a restaurant for tourists. There’s plenty of work for her in spring and summer, but less for the rest of the year. In winter, she sews
nick-nacks for the tourist shops for them to sell come summer. Teddy bears and such: she’s very good. She’ll knit you a hat, if you like.’

I smiled.

‘Octavia might like a teddy bear. She left Boris behind in London. I’ll have to pay, of course.’

Her face lit up.

‘My mum’s teddy bears are the best in England. Wait and see. You’ll get a discount as my patient.’

I shook my head vigorously.

‘No discount, or I’ll cancel the order. Anyway, I’m quite a rich patient, so tell her she can overcharge.’

‘It’s a deal,’ she said.

‘How did your father die?’ I asked. ‘He can’t have been very old.’

‘He was the captain of the
Lady of the Lake
. One of his passengers fell overboard, a little boy. My father jumped in to save him, but a current caught him and pulled him under.’

‘And the boy?’

‘Someone else managed to hook him back on board. They took him to the infirmary, but he survived. He was a rich boy like you were, a scholar at Eton.’

‘Did his parents do anything to compensate for your father’s loss?’

She sighed and shook her head. ‘They went back to Manchester without a further word. My mother went out to cook and sew.’

I shook my head in disgust.

‘Some rich people don’t deserve what they have.’

She reached across the table and put her hand briefly on top of mine.

‘Would you have compensated my family, Dominic?’

I laughed.

‘If it were up to me, the answer is “yes”. But if it were down to my father or mother, they’d probably demand that you pay them. They’d probably say it was all your father’s fault for sailing badly.’

‘You don’t seem too happy with your father. Or is that just something you say when you’re talking to commoners like myself?’

‘If you ever meet my father, you’ll take that back. I admired him as a child, but once I got old enough to see what was going on, I learned to stay out of his way.’

‘What you need, Dominic Lancaster, is a woman. Someone who’ll stick with you through thick and thin, who’d take an interest in you.’

I sniffed.

‘I’m not much to be interested in. There’s a lot less of me now than there was a couple of months ago.’

‘Sometimes with amputees,’ she picked up on my jest, ‘they find there’s more of them afterwards than before. It will change your attitude to everything. It’s too early for you yet, but give it time. If we were to meet again a year from now, I’d find you a different person. But you were going to tell me about your family.’

I explained about the Lancasters’ long-standing involvement with Portugal and the port trade. She hung on my every word, fascinated by this exotic business of which she’d had no notion until then. She had never taken a glass of port, so I told her where she could find a bottle and some glasses with a decanter. I decanted the wine and poured two glasses. We sipped at them as we talked. She said she liked it. The irises of her eyes were a dark amber colour, and the candles caught fire in them.

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘things have grown difficult for us since the
war started. Portugal’s a neutral country, but the English have had a treaty with it since 1373. That was the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty, and it was ratified in 1386 with the Treaty of Windsor. It’s the oldest alliance in the world. So Portugal still sends goods to us. They have the largest deposits of wolfram in Europe, and they use it to keep both sides happy. They ship some white wine and some port, as well as wine from Madeira, but it’s hard to get ships and ensuring deliveries if you do get them. Our last shipment was sent to the bottom of the Atlantic by a U-boat.

‘We do have a large warehouse outside London, where we keep some barrels under strict conditions. And we provide some very fine ports to Buckingham Palace and the House of Lords, where there is always a demand. Ten-year-old crusted ports, some forty-year-old vintages, with some cheaper bottles for the wider market. But our stocks are running low, and we aren’t replenishing them as quickly as my father would like.’

She decided that she definitely liked the port and was enthralled by what I told her about Portugal. I had only been there a few times, but on one holiday I had taken up the Portuguese guitar, a very different creature to the standard Spanish instrument. I once dreamed of taking it up professionally and playing for
fado
singers in Lisbon.

‘I’ll get my parents to send one up from London,’ I said. ‘I should practise anyway, and the present moment is the perfect excuse.’

I was greatly tempted to ask her to stay the night, but thought she might misunderstand my motives, or, understanding them, find them cause for scorn. She left on her bicycle and Octavia locked the door.

I’ve been sleeping badly tonight, no doubt because of what Rose and Octavia had told me about the upstairs. My dreams
were dark, for I saw shapes moving in semi-darkness, shapes that were neither human nor something else, shapes with veils across their eyes, dressed in black or grey, swaying, watching me from a short distance and always coming closer and mumbling what seemed to be words but were not words of any earthly kind, shapes with long, slim hands and fingers that separated light from darkness. In the dreams I saw children with white faces, but not children of this earth, not dead and not alive, not physical children yet warm, their eyes like dead eyes, yet awake. Somewhere words were repeated, but I could not quite make them out, and as I wake in these early hours, the cries are echoing through my mind and have not yet quite left.

Thursday, 12 December

When Octavia and I woke, it was still early and freezing cold. Rose told me yesterday that the forecasters said we’d have Arctic weather this winter, after last year’s mild conditions. It certainly felt Arctic first thing. I was reminded of Narvik and the days I had spent freezing on those waters.

There were no disturbances of any kind during the morning, as far as I could tell. After lunch, Rose returned, bringing with her a man she introduced as Dr Raverat. He is a gentleman in his forties, tall and slender of build, mild of disposition, and quick to act. Rose had told him that we thought someone had broken in, and had been seen upstairs yesterday afternoon and later. She said nothing of the unpleasant sensations she and Octavia had experienced.

Together, they went upstairs, alert for anything suspicious that might still be there, but when they came back down they
admitted that they had seen nothing. The doctor said he had noticed a smell in the main bedroom, of burning or something very like it, but though he had searched diligently, he had found no trace of a fire in the room itself or in the large fireplace or, so far as he could tell, higher up in the chimney. It had been a false alarm, he said. He did find a dead raven covered in soot in the hearth, which he disposed of in the compost heap at the back of the house. It, he thought, may have been responsible for our disturbance, and it may well have dislodged enough ancient soot, and who could tell what else, giving rise to the burned smell.

The doctor examined me, paying special attention to my leg.

‘Well, young man,’ he said as he asked Rose to re-dress my stump, ‘I’d say you’ve got off quite lightly, though it may not seem that way to you now. A lot of the war wounded I see in Carlisle are in a bad way, and likely to go on much like that. Last week I saw a man younger than yourself, a boy really, who’d lost both arms. Nurse Sansom here will get you up and about, have no doubt of it. You won’t know yourself by Christmas. You won’t have me to thank for it either. The first person to bring you round will be yourself. We medical people can’t do anything without your help. The second most important person is Nurse Sansom. You may not know it, but she’s one of the best nurses I’ve ever worked with. She’ll take good care of you and she’ll keep you going every time you may feel like giving up. Just so long as you don’t go round falling in love with her, you’ll have nothing to worry about.’

I blushed, for I am indeed falling in love with her already. I think she noticed, but she looked away and continued to fasten my leg with her customary skill. I thought she would leave with the doctor, but he stood and made his apologies, saying he had some urgent appointments back in Pooley Bridge. At the door he turned.

‘You’ve missed the daffodils,’ he said. ‘Just across the lake from here, about four miles away, on Gowbarrow Fell. It’s a desperately romantic spot. I’m sure Nurse Sansom will take you there in the spring. They are the very descendants of the ones Dorothy and William Wordsworth saw during a walk here in 1802. He wrote the poem not long afterwards.’

‘I’ve never heard of them,’ I said. ‘I know the poem, but that’s all.’ My parents weren’t really literary types, and though I’d read the poem at school, I’d never realized the real daffodils were so near to hand.

‘They’re a glorious sight. But, as I said, you’ll have to wait till spring.’

‘I may not be here by spring,’ I replied. Rose looked at me askance, as though my still being in Hallinhag by the end of winter was a certain thing.

The doctor left. They’d brought her bicycle in the back of the vehicle, for Rose to get back on. They had also brought my artificial leg. She brought it in, carrying it in one hand to show how light it was. My spirits sank as I understood that this would be a key part of my life from here on.

My trousers were still on the bed. Rose came to me, a little brisk at first, then growing more solicitous as things progressed.

‘We’re going outside,’ she said. ‘You’re going to take me for a walk. Although there’s no need to look for daffodils today.’

‘But it’s freezing outside,’ I protested. ‘You said so yourself. I haven’t been outside for weeks, and now it’s winter. When I was last outside for any time, I was off the African coast.’

‘For goodness’ sake,’ she exclaimed, ‘act like a man. You’re not a baby, and your body can take anything the winter throws at you in its stride. Staying indoors, staying in bed isn’t doing you any good, alongside the morphia.’