We chatted a while, inconsequentially. Anxious to be away, I was somewhat abrupt, I suspect; but I doubt that Americans would notice this.
As soon as I was free, I made a run for the shade of the forest. Some twenty or thirty yards ahead, a small trail led off from the main path, into the trees, and I urged Storm onto it.
The smaller path hadn’t been used in some time. Our progress was slow and unpleasant. Brambles crowded in on us from either side. Spider webs as thick as shrouds stretched like great bats across the track. Gnarled muscular roots with flaking bark twisted from the earth and snaked along it.
At last we came to another, broader path in the looming forest; an ancient road, it seemed, roughly perpendicular to the track. I gave Storm-my brave unflinching mount-some sugar and then urged him to the left.
The forest was dark and silent. In light of what happened, you will claim that, now, retrospectively, I invent the silence. Forests, you will claim, are never silent, no matter what the poets say. Always, birds whistle and chirp, insects buzz and whine and whiz annoyingly about. But, truly, all I could hear was the dry whisper of Storm’s hooves as they moved through brown decaying leaves, and an occasional sharp crackle as they snapped a dead twig.
Beside the path ran a narrow brook, its water clear but tinted the colour of rust, as though some large creature had bled away its life upstream; and even the brook was soundless.
I’ve whimpered often enough about the noise and bustle of London, but I found this stillness unsettling. The trees, with their black, deformed trunks, seemed to grow taller, wider, blacker and more deformed, and to edge more closely together, and closer to the path. Overhead, the dense netting of limb and leaf seemed to grow denser. My brave unflinching mount, perhaps sensing its rider’s unease, twitched his ears and flicked his head from side to side. He whickered-nervously, I judged. I was about to turn him back, return to the comfort and safety of the manor, when I saw that, up ahead, the path opened onto a sunlit clearing. I kicked Storm lightly, and he trotted reluctantly forward.
We stopped when we reached the light. In the clearing was a pond, perhaps fifty feet across, smooth and glossy in the sunshine, but as black as a pool of tar. Grey rushes sagged along its banks.
To the right, some twenty feet away, crouched an old mill house.
It was a ruin: the grey thatched roof was torn and tufted, the grey stone walls were crumbling, the big grey wooden wheel, collapsed from its shaft, lay atilt in the murky stream, buckled and smashed.
Beneath that gaudy sun, under that taut blue canopy of sky, the ruin should have seemed quaint, rustic, picturesque. It did not. It seemed to me (and again you will claim that I invent) ominous, even sinister. The exposed ribs of the roofing, gaunt and rotting, seemed somehow grotesque. The grey stones of the disintegrating walls seemed to radiate a kind of bitter, empty cold. One got the feeling, I got the feeling, that the mill had been abandoned because of some long-ago, horrific death which took place here: some slaughter or pestilence.
I suddenly realized that this was the old mill Cecily had mentioned at dinner. The old mill where came, so she said, the two mysterious ghosts, the mother and the small boy.
I glanced to my left, and there, across the pond, was the willow tree, its pale branches draped over the black water like a woman’s hair over a basin. And there, in the shade beneath it, as real and as substantial as everything else, as real as anything I have ever seen, the two of them stood. A tall slender woman and a slender young boy.
Do you know the opening to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor? Those three abrupt notes from the organ, so swift and harsh and chill? When I saw the two figures silently standing there, exactly where they ought to be, but could not be, I felt those notes hammer through me, blood and bone, as if my spine were an organ, and some demented organist were flailing at it.
They were there, Evy. I saw them. They were there, under the willow tree, the woman and the young boy.
At first they were gazing at each other, the woman’s hand along the boy’s cheek. She was wearing white, he was wearing black. Then, as I watched, she dropped her arm and the two of them turned toward me. They gazed at me from across the glistening, pitch-black pond.
I feel that, whatever my faults, I am a woman of basically sound mind. Or so I once felt, before I arrived at Maplewhite. At any rate, my reaction, when they turned to me, was less stalwart than I should have hoped. And certainly less so than Mrs Applewhite would have demanded of me.
I panicked completely. I tugged at the reins, snapping poor Storm’s head around. As he spun about, lunging back down the path, I raked his flanks with my spurs. I whacked at him with the crop, again and again, like a maniac.
But how we raced! Storm was a marvel, swift and strong and powerful, and we thundered over the earth like some mythological beast. Trees whisked by us, the path spun away beneath. It’s been years since I’ve had a horse under me: if I hadn’t already been reeling with fear, I should have been reeling with excitement. I think that perhaps I was, even so.
I rose higher in the stirrups and turned around, to look back. This was an error. A low-hanging branch smashed into my shoulder and I toppled, buttock over bonnet, from the saddle.
I cannot remember alighting. I was unconscious for a time-I couldn’t say for how long-and then I was lying on my back and something was thumping me in the side.
Storm.
I attributed his concern, at first, to a laudable equine loyalty; but realized, when his nose nudged at me again, that he was after his sugar. I clambered to my feet and determined that I was more or less intact. No bones appeared to be broken.
The horse, big boorish brute, was still prodding me. I gave him a few lumps of his damnable sugar and then climbed stiffly back into the saddle.
Speed seemed less crucial now. No ghosts pursued me. My body throbbed all over. I let Storm walk at his own pace for a bit, and then, when we came to a path that looked as though it led back toward the manor, I eased him onto it. I didn’t see the snake until Storm reared up and nearly tossed me from the saddle again.
I haven’t the faintest idea what sort of snake it was. It was no adder, I believe, and it was perfectly harmless, and far more terrified than I.
But not more terrified than Storm. His forelegs came pounding down and he thrust his head forward and bolted up the path, muscles pumping, hooves thudding. The reins slipped from my grasp. I was only barely holding on, one arm around his wide slick neck, the other groping frantically for the reins, when we burst from dimness into sunshine and green. I realized that we were on the pathway that circled Maplewhite; and, just then, finally, I managed to snag the reins.
When I had the horse under control again, I discovered that my return to civilization had not been effected in altogether the privacy I should have preferred. Ahead of me, in an excited group by the side of the pathway, beneath a big copper beech, were Lord Purleigh, Mrs Corneille, Mr Houdini, and Mr Beaumont. And, of course, the Allardyce.
As soon as I was near enough, they all began to hurl questions at me. I couldn’t find my voice, Evy. I could only stare at them, hopelessly, and mumble.
And then, off to my left, there was a bright quick flicker of light, and a sharp explosive crack. I believed-in a kind of delirium, I suppose-that my two ghosts had stalked me all this way, followed me back to the manor, and that now they were shooting at me. And so, with the quickness of mind common to all gothic heroines, I fainted dead away.
Enough for now. My hand is cramping. I’ll post this and I’ll write again, later.