The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery (19 page)

He had intended to simply glance through the opening pages of the journal to find names or phone numbers for the hospital, and to do no more than skim a few more pages, in deference to Luisa's words. But at some barely-acknowledged level of his mind he had already made the decision to remain in this room and read the whole thing. If nothing else, it might distract him from listening for soft footsteps, or wondering what might lie inside the oak chest. It was a peculiar way of spending the night alone in a haunted house, but it was the precept of whatever gets you through. Wasn't it John Lennon who had said that? Michael was so pleased at remembering this snippet of comparatively modern philosophy that he wrote it down in order to prove to Nell that he did not live half inside the world of the metaphysical and romantic poets.

He glanced around the room, but all seemed quiet, and if Stephen walked the halls of his old home he did so unobtrusively. Michael adjusted the desk lamp and returned to Luisa's diary.

He was an adventurer, of course, that man with whom Leonora ran away. A rogue and a vagabond – a gentleman of fortune … Do I say ‘gentleman'? But, in a strange way, I think he was a gentleman. He was the one who sought out people in Liège after that brutal attack on the convent. He routed out the townspeople, the young, strong sons who could fight, and he rallied them, ignoring the danger from the other troops of German soldiers already roaming the streets. He was the one who saved the nuns – that must never be forgotten.

So, a thief and a gambler, but always a gentleman.

He was a gentleman when he broke into the wealthy houses on that flight from Liège and took whatever could be taken and sold to fund their journey. He was deft and stealthy and he could enter a house like a shadow and vanish into the night afterwards without the occupants knowing.

‘Only take what will not cause hardship or loss,' he said to Leonora. ‘These people will not miss that – they will not suffer from the loss of that, or that – oh, or that, we cannot possibly leave that behind for it is beautiful and valuable …'

Somehow, throughout everything, he managed to send articles to the newspapers which employed him, travelling from place to place, as the original invasion developed into full-blown war. Money was sent to him by incomprehensible means – banks were sometimes involved. Leonora did not always entirely understand how this was done; there was something called wiring of funds, and sometimes there were bank drafts to be collected from pre-arranged places.

When this money did not arrive as expected, or the collection place could not be reached, the pieces of jewellery, the silver snuff boxes, the small beautiful ikons, could be sold to provide sufficient money for travel and food. The travel was nearly always the best available, and the food was the finest.

‘I do not settle for the inferior when I can have the best,' he said, with his unfailing air of believing the world was arranged for his specific enjoyment.

Even that night in the bedroom of a roadside tavern on the Dutch/German borders, with midnight chimes sounding romantically, with the owl-light draining the colour from the trees, and the scent of roses from the gardens … Even then, he was a gentleman …

‘Leonora, my sweet, innocent girl, we must stop this … I mustn't do this, I must not … We may be forced to share a room because the others were all booked, but I can quite well sleep in the chair – on the floor … I can be honourable, and I will be. Oh, but if you look at me like that I don't think I can be honourable for much longer …'

French was not his first language and the words were fragmented, but the emotions, the sheer driving urgency of passion, were whole and sweet and undeniable.

And here, at that part of Leonora's memories, I am faced with a blank, brick wall, for whatever those two did that night – and, I suppose, on subsequent nights – I have not the knowledge or the experience of the knowledge to interpret it. I cannot enter into their emotions, either physically or mentally. I know Iskander's emotions got the better of him, and I know Leonora matched his passion. But that is all I know. Leonora retreats from me at that point. Her wild, dangerous, uncharted flight across war-ravaged Europe with her lover vanishes, and I am left with only my own memories where once I had hers.

I've liked setting down all that about Leonora and Iskander. It makes it all less shadowy – it makes them more real. But they were real, they lived.

Do my parents ever guess that Leonora is inside my mind? How far does it go, this overshadowing? Does she sit at my place in the dining room, and do my parents ever have the impression that it is no longer their daughter but another person who is there?

But I shall not let her take over completely, I shall
not …

I cannot write more now. Fosse House's darknesses are closing around me …

There came another of the breaks, and Michael got up to pour a drink from the decanter on the desk.

Luisa's diary lay on the desk, the lamp casting a pool of soft light over its pages. The room was warm and the house was silent and unthreatening. Michael was even starting to feel a bit sleepy. But he would prefer not to actually fall asleep, and Luisa's diary might help to keep him awake. He had no idea what he would do if he heard footsteps beyond this room, or if the door from the hall was slowly pushed open.

He reached for the diary again, seeing that the next entry was in slightly different ink, and that it appeared to have been made some considerable time after the previous one.

I see I ended my last entry with a reference to Fosse House's darknesses. They were here before I was born, of course, so I grew up with them. I accepted them without thinking about them, as I accepted the other things that made up my life – the draughty rooms of the house, the exercises I was set by my governess, the sewing tasks allotted by Mother, Father's fussiness about keeping doors locked and windows secured after nightfall. The vast wastelands of silence when my mother and father went away.

They returned from Liège and Holzminden two weeks ago, because, so they said, they did not want to miss my fifteenth birthday. We had a small lunch party for the occasion; some of the ladies from church attended, along with the vicar and his family and the curate. The ladies argued about the flower rota at St Augustine's; the vicar and my father discussed Horace throughout all three courses to the exclusion of the rest of the guests, the vicar's wife and two daughters enjoyed their usual Poor-Luisa-no-friends-no-life session, and the curate upset most of a bottle of Father's wine over the tablecloth. Mother says the tablecloth is ruined, even though she soaked it in cold water and salt, damask never washes well, and it is enough to send a person straight into the arms of Rome.

But it was a small, welcome event, even with a little laughter when the vicar emerged from Horace for long enough to make a mild joke, and to wish me many happy returns of the day. Life resumed its ordinary pace after that.

It is November – when I look back I think it has always been November in this house, as if it might be trapped inside some kind of grey, hopeless Autumn of its own. And it's evening. The house should be silent at this hour – as much as it ever is silent – but it is not. It is filled with the whisperings and soft footfalls that I have heard ever since I can remember. Mother often complains about them. Bad plumbing, she says. Ill-fitting windows, or the wind blowing through chinks in the roof. An army of carpenters and builders would never cure the problems, and how a person is expected to sleep at nights in such a ramshackle, ill-kept house is beyond her comprehension.

This afternoon, with a dull light creeping across the fens, I was in the little sitting-room, finishing some sewing. Presently, Mother would come in, as she always did at that time of the evening, and say please to tidy away my work and help lay the table for supper. She would wonder whether Father would join us in the dining room, or whether he would want a tray in the library, and grumble yet again about him being eccentric, and say that eccentricity was all very well in its place, but it made a great deal of extra work in a house. Then she would say she should have married her cousin Charles.

I was pretending that just this once she would say something different. ‘A young man has called for you, Luisa,' she might say. Or, ‘I have invited neighbours for supper tonight, so put on a nice frock and brush your hair.' Deep down I knew it would never happen, but I liked to imagine it.

But when the door opened it was not Mother, it was Father, and he was carrying the sketch he brought from Liège together with a sheaf of papers covered in his handwriting.

‘I'm glad you're in here, Luisa,' he said. ‘I need your help with a little project.'

This was instantly interesting because Father never asked anyone for help, or, if he did, it was never me.

‘It's about my cousin,' he said.

‘Stephen? The one in the war camp? In the sketch?'

He was pleased I had remembered. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘I don't know if he really is in the sketch, but I'd like to think he is.' He sat down, and I saw that he was holding the sketch in the way he had when he first showed it to me – smoothing his hands over and over the glass. Once he lifted it and pressed it against his chest, and once – this was quite disturbing – he raised it and laid his cheek against it.

Then he set it down and said, ‘I've had some papers sent to me by the curator of the museum in Liège – the place where I found the sketch. There are a couple of letters written by a German officer. My German isn't as good as it might be, but I did study it briefly, you know, and I think I've got the sense of what the man wrote. And there are several articles written by a Russian journalist – I can't read Russian, but some are written in French and those I can read. I expect I can find a Russian translator for the others. They both knew Stephen – the German, and the Russian journalist. It's a real find, Luisa.'

‘What do they say?'

‘That Stephen came home. He escaped from the prisoner of war camp at Holzminden and somehow he got back to England. He came here to this house.' He sat back, for once glowing with achievement, waiting for me to say something.

‘How did he escape?'

‘I don't know, and it doesn't matter,' he said impatiently, and got up and went to the window to try the latch, as if reassuring himself it was fastened. He often did this, but until now I had never seen it as anything other than what Mother called his finickiness.

‘Luisa, do you ever hear strange sounds in this house? Footsteps. Soft whisperings and tappings, as if someone is—'

‘Trying to get in?' I had never put it into words before – I had never even allowed the thought to form, but now that I said it I knew it was what I had thought for some time.

‘Yes,' said my father eagerly. He leaned forward and there was a look in his eyes I had seen occasionally before – a look that always made me feel a bit sick and vaguely frightened. ‘And someone really is trying to get in,' he said, in a soft voice. ‘Someone comes to those windows almost every night and tries to get in. Asks to be let in …'

I stared at him, remembering the soft entreaties I had heard over the years.
‘Let me in …'
How often had I heard those whispers, and how often had I drawn the curtains tightly, walked to another room, immersed myself in a book with my hands pressed over my ears so I should not hear. I had thought it was part of Leonora – that it was another of her tricks to get into my mind – but since father brought the sketch back, I had begun to think the
let-me-in
whisper was a man's voice. Was that because Stephen really was in the sketch, and bringing it into the house had somehow strengthened his presence here? But this was so horrible an idea that I pushed it away.

Father was watching me. ‘You've heard him, haven't you?' he said, and before I could answer he continued. ‘But I can see you have. I've heard him as well. Asking to be let in. I've never let him in, though – I've never dared.' His face was white and shrunken, as if the flesh had shrivelled away from the bones, but his eyes blazed with life. ‘But now we must do it. Tonight, Luisa, we must let him in.'

‘Oh no—'

‘I must. I'll never have any peace until I do. Until I find out the truth. The people who come to live here after me – you, Luisa, perhaps your children if you have any – they won't have any peace, either. Stephen won't let them.'

I said, ‘But – he isn't real. He died all those years ago. We mightn't know how he died or where or exactly when, but it's so long ago. He's just a – an old memory. Houses have old memories, and that's what Stephen is. That's all he is.' As I said it, I was thinking: please, oh please, say that I'm right.

But he didn't. He said, ‘It's sharp of you to say he's a memory. So he is. But you see, Luisa, some memories can be dangerous.'

‘How? What could he do?'

‘It's not what he could do,' said my father. ‘I think he was a gentle soul. Damaged by the war, but essentially gentle. It's what people want to do to him. You remember I told you about him being sentenced to death?'

‘Yes.'

‘Listen to this from the German letters,' he said, eagerly, and took several sheets of paper from the large envelope. They were covered with his neat, scholarly writing.

‘It was written by an officer called Hugbert Edreich,' said Father. ‘He seems to have been part of a small secret group of German soldiers who came to England for the express purpose of finding Stephen.'

‘And executing him?'

‘Oh yes,' said Father, eagerly. ‘Yes, they came to do that.'

It's a curious thing about my father – also, to some extent, my mother – that they never seem to realize that some of things they say or do might be hurtful. Leonora's parents had been the same – I knew that. Unable to feel or imagine feelings in others. It simply did not occur to my father that I might find it upsetting to hear that a young man had been hunted down in this very house, so that he could be killed.