Chapter Five
It was not until the third day after the accident – and rather late in the afternoon – that Dido was able to revisit the abbey ruins. The demands of sewing, damsons and jelly-making did not permit an earlier escape. But her determination to solve the mystery was, by that time, increased rather than diminished.
For, although Penelope was recovering more rapidly than they had dared to hope, and her periods of consciousness becoming longer, it seemed that Mr Paynter had been right to doubt her memory of the accident. Questions on the subject elicited no more than a gentle shake of the head. She remembered nothing after their leaving the nave to climb the stairs.
And meanwhile, Lucy Crockford had altogether too much to say upon the subject for Dido’s liking.
‘Oh my dear friend,’ she murmured when she visited the vicarage two days after the accident. ‘I blame myself! I blame myself entirely! I who knew what terrible forces haunted the ruins! I should never have taken my poor friend there. Indeed I should not.’ She put a hand to her brow and arranged herself upon the hard sofa of Margaret’s parlour with all the grace that her stout little form would allow.
‘I am sure you have nothing to reproach yourself for,’ said Dido briskly. ‘Penelope lost her footing …’
‘Oh Dido!’ exclaimed Lucy so slowly that there seemed to be an eternity of pity in the words. ‘You do not understand.’ And she sat for a moment sorrowfully shaking her head, too much overcome to continue.
She had a plump, freckled face which was, in truth, ill-suited to sensibility: the eyes were too small and sharp, and there were ill-natured little lines between her brows betraying the peevishness which broke out all too easily when her languishing sentiments passed unheeded. She wore her brown hair pushed back in a careless tumble of curls. Lucy professed to be indifferent to her appearance; but Harriet had once confided to Dido that the careless curls were sustained only by the constant use of papers – and the freckles received generous, but unavailing, applications of Gowland’s Lotion.
‘It is all so very awful,’ she continued in a slow, thrilled voice, ‘for, you know, there must be some kind of trouble coming to the family of Harman-Foote. The ghost would not otherwise have appeared. She only comes as a warning.’
‘I do not think,’ said Dido firmly, ‘that we need concern ourselves with imagined woes. We have trouble enough with poor Penelope lying sick …’
‘Oh! But it cannot have been Pen’s fall the ghost came to warn of. Because …’ she paused a moment to add weight to the announcement of her great insight, ‘Penelope is not a part of the Madderstone family.’
‘No, of course she is not, but …’
‘No, Dido,’ Lucy shook her head. ‘I am afraid it is indisputable. There is some other disaster yet to come.’
‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Dido, tried beyond endurance. ‘We do not even know that Penelope saw a ghost!’
Lucy sat up sharply, her small mouth contracted, her brow furrowed. ‘I declare,’ she cried in a quick, peevish voice, ‘you are quite determined to find out that there is no ghost in the ruins, are you not?’
‘I am determined to come at the truth.’
‘But the truth is that there is a ghost. Everyone in the place has seen her now.’
‘Have they?’ cried Dido in amazement. Then, immediately suspecting the information, she asked, ‘And who, precisely is “everyone”?’
‘Oh, all the housemaids – well, I believe that two of them have. And Jones, who is Mrs Harman-Foote’s maid.’
‘They have seen the Grey Nun?’
‘Oh yes! Did you not know? – Well, they have not quite seen the nun herself. But they have seen a light – late at night, on the gallery – moving about. Which is as good as seeing the nun.’
‘Is it?’
‘So you see it is proved.’
‘I cannot at all agree that it is proved.’
‘You are determined to ignore the evidence.’
‘No, I am determined to consider all the evidence – not only that which supports my prejudice.’
‘And what, pray, is all this other evidence?’
‘Well … I do not yet quite know.’
Lucy smiled with insufferable satisfaction and resumed her languid accents. ‘Oh! My dear friend!’ she said pityingly, ‘I fear you listen too much to your head and too little to your heart. If you would only allow yourself to feel a little more. You would instinctively know, as I do, that there is something dark and terrible in the ruins …’
Dido promised herself that, come what may, she would prove there was no ghost.
As she passed through the little side gate which led from the park into the gardens of Madderstone Abbey, Dido paused a moment to catch her breath and gaze across the muddy lawns and felled trees to the house. A pleasant, rather rambling building standing on slightly rising ground, it had been built and added to and embellished ever since the first Harman had bought the land at the time of the Dissolution. Every generation had made ‘improvements’ according to its own taste, so that now the old Tudor core was flanked by many-windowed wings from Queen Anne’s time, a grand ballroom built by the late Mr Harman and a conservatory and orangery of the present owner’s creation.
At a short distance from the house stood the broken outline of the once great religious foundation; its mass of tumbled, ivy-covered walls appeared rough and irregular in the fading light, the great broken arch of the east window loomed against flying, red-tinted clouds. A likely home for a ghost, thought Dido as she set off through the mud towards the ruins.
And there had been a ghost at the abbey for as long as anyone in Madderstone or Badleigh could remember. Everyone could tell a story of the Grey Nun – though, as is generally the case with apparitions, she had usually been seen by a relative – or a friend – or the relative of a friend – rather than by the speaker himself. And Dido could not admire the originality of her story, for it was one which had probably been told of every ruined abbey since Henry VIII turned the nation to the Protestant faith.
In the ‘old days’ a rich young girl had fallen in love with a poor knight and had been parted from him by her cruel father – a baron (for barons are, by common consent, much more addicted to mistreating their daughters than any other class of men). The girl had refused the grand suitor her father would have forced upon her, become a nun and pined to death within the abbey walls. Her spirit had haunted the place ever since. Though why she should haunt the abbey, Dido did not know. She could not help but think that it would have been much more to the purpose to go off to the wicked baron’s castle and haunt him …
But by now she was approaching the ruins and, as she looked about at the red sky, the lengthening shadows, and the rising moon gleaming palely through an ivy-clad arch, she found that she was not quite above a superstitious shudder. Perhaps she should have deferred her visit to a more propitious time …
No, there was no rational reason why twilight should be feared more in a ruined abbey than in the parlour at home. She walked on resolutely, but a minute later there was a lurching of the heart. A dark figure was just visible among the great fallen stones of the nave, pacing towards the night stair – mounting towards the gallery above, and vanishing into the shadows.