I laughed and we picked our way back to the steps in the old sea wall.
And that was that: a fragment, an incident unconnected with anything much. An item of little real interest. One of Nature’s periodic quirks, affecting nothing a great deal. Apparently...
***
It seemed not long after the time of the deep kelp that David got tied up with his wedding plans. I had known, of course, that he had a girl—June Anderson, a solicitor’s daughter from Sunderland, which boasts the prettiest girls in all the land—for I had met her and found her utterly charming; but I had not realised that things were so advanced.
I say it did not seem a long time, and now looking back I see that the period was indeed quite short—the very next summer. Perhaps the span of time was foreshortened even more for me by the suddenness with which their plans culminated. For all was brought dramatically forward by the curious and unexpected vacancy of Kettlethorpe Farm, an extensive property on the edge of Kettlethorpe Dene.
No longer a farm proper but a forlorn relic of another age, the great stone house and its outbuildings were badly in need of repair; but in David’s eyes the place had an Olde Worlde magic all its own, and with his expertise he knew that he could soon convert it into a modern home of great beauty and value. And the place was going remarkably cheap.
As to the farm’s previous tenant: here something peculiar. And here too the second link in my seemingly unconnected chain of occurrences and circumstances.
Old Jason Carpenter had not been well liked in the locality, in fact not at all. Grey-bearded, taciturn, cold and reclusive—with eyes grey as the rolling North Sea and never a smile for man or beast—he had occupied Kettlethorpe Farm for close on thirty years. Never a wife, a manservant or maid, not even a neighbour had entered the place on old Jason’s invitation. No one strayed onto the grounds for fear of Jason’s dog and shotgun; even tradesmen were wary on those rare occasions when they must make deliveries.
But Carpenter had liked his beer and rum chaser, and twice a week would visit The Trust Hotel in Harden. There he had used to sit in the smokeroom and linger over his tipple, his dog Bones alert under the table and between his master’s feet. And customers had used to fear Bones a little, but not as much as the dog feared his master.
And now Jason Carpenter was gone. Note that I do not say dead, simply gone, disappeared. There was no evidence to support any other conclusion—not at that time. It had happened like this:
Over a period of several months various tradesmen had reported Jason’s absence from Kettlethorpe, and eventually, because his customary seat at The Trust had been vacant over that same period, members of the local police went to the farm and forced entry into the main building. No trace had been found of the old hermit, but the police had come away instead with certain documents—chiefly a will, of sorts—which had evidently been left pending just such a search or investigation.
In the documents the recluse had directed that in the event of his “termination of occupancy,” the house, attendant buildings and grounds “be allowed to relapse into the dirt and decay from which they sprang”; but since it was later shown that he was in considerable debt, the property had been put up for sale to settle his various accounts. The house had in fact been under threat of the bailiffs.
All of this, of course, had taken some considerable time, during which a thorough search of the rambling house, its outbuildings and grounds had been made for obvious reasons. But to no avail.
Jason Carpenter was gone. He had not been known to have relatives; indeed, very little had been known of him at all; it was almost as if he had never been. And to many of the people of Harden, that made for a most satisfactory epitaph.
One other note: it would seem that his “termination of occupancy” had come about during the Roodmas time of the deep kelp...
***
And so to the wedding of David Parker and June Anderson, a sparkling affair held at the Catholic Church in Harden, where not even the drab, near-distant background of the colliery’s chimneys and cooling towers should have been able to dampen the gaiety and excitement of the moment. And yet even here, in the steep, crowd-packed streets outside the church, a note of discord. Just one, but one too many.
For as the cheering commenced and the couple left the church to be showered with confetti and jostled to their car, I overheard as if they were spoken directly into my ear—or uttered especially for my notice—the words of a crone in shawl and pinafore, come out of her smoke-grimed miner’s terraced house to shake her head and mutter:
“Aye, an’ he’ll take that bonnie lass ta Kettlethorpe, will he? Arl the bells are ringin’ now, it’s true, but what about the other bell, eh? It’s only rung once or twice arl these lang years—since old Jason had the house—but now there’s word it’s ringin’ again, when nights are dark an’ the sea has a swell ta it.”
I heard it as clearly as that, for I was one of the spectators.
I would have been more closely linked with the celebrations but had expected to be busy, and only by the skin of my teeth managed to be there at all. But when I heard the guttural imprecation of the old lady I turned to seek her out, even caught a glimpse of her, before being engulfed by a horde of Harden urchins leaping for a handful of hurled pennies, threepenny bits and sixpences as the newlyweds’ car drove off.
By which time summer thunderclouds had gathered, breaking at the command of a distant flash of lightning, and rain had begun to pelt down. Which served to put an end to the matter. The crowd rapidly dispersed and I headed for shelter.
But... I would have liked to know what the old woman had meant...
III: GHOST STORY
“Haunted?” I echoed David’s words.
I had bumped into him at the library in Hartlepool some three weeks after his wedding. A voracious reader, an “addict” for hard-boiled detective novels, I had been on my way in as he was coming out.
“Haunted, yes!” he repeated, his voice half-amused, half-excited. “The old farm—haunted!”
The alarm his words conjured in me was almost immediately relieved by his grin and wide-awake expression. Whatever ghosts they were at the farm, he obviously didn’t fear them. Was he having a little joke at my expense? I grinned with him, saying: “Well, I shouldn’t care to have been your ghosts. Not for the last thirty years, at any rate. Not with old man Carpenter about the place. That would be a classic case of the biter bit!”
“Old Jason Carpenter,” he reminded me, smiling still but less brilliantly, “has disappeared, remember?”
“Oh!” I said, feeling a little foolish. “Of course he has.” And I followed up quickly with: “But what do you mean, haunted?”
“Local village legend,” he shrugged. “I heard it from Father Nicholls, who married us. He had it from the priest before him, and so on. Handed down for centuries, so to speak. I wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t stopped me and asked how we were getting on up at the farm. If we’d seen anything—you know—odd? He wouldn’t have said anything more but I pressed him.”
“And?”
“Well, it seems the original owners were something of a fishy bunch.”
“Fishy?”
“Quite literally! I mean, they looked fishy. Or maybe froggy? Protuberant lips, wide-mouthed, scaly-skinned, popeyed—you name it. To use Father Nicholls’ own expression, ‘ichthyic’.”
“Slow down,” I told him, seeing his excitement rising up again. “First of all, what do you mean by the ‘original’ owners? The people who built the place?”
“Good heavens, no!” he chuckled; and then he took me by the elbow and guided me into the library and to a table. We sat. “No one knows—no one can remember—who actually built the place. If ever there were records, well, they’re long lost. God, it probably dates back to Roman times! It’s likely as old as the Wall itself—even older. Certainly it has been a landmark on maps for the last four hundred and fifty years. No, I mean the first recorded family to live there. Which was something like two-and-a-half centuries ago.