No further conversation took place and no other guests turned up during the forty-five minutes we stayed at The Royal Oak. I tried not to think about the face in the window — and that gesture with the hand over the young man’s throat — with only limited success.
Before starting back towards Winsford Hill — this time on the other side of Halse Lane, and over rather more open ground if I had read the map correctly — we went for a short walk round the village. There can’t have been more than about fifty houses, but on the other side of the church I discovered a sign pointing to something called ‘Community Computer Centre’. It turned out to be a low, modern-looking building with white plaster and featureless office-type windows, and as we passed it I noticed that it was open. We went inside and found ourselves in a room looking like a school classroom with about twenty rather old-fashioned computers. Sitting at a slightly larger table was a dark-haired woman of about thirty, chewing at a pencil and staring at a screen. She looked up and smiled when she saw me.
And smiled even more broadly when she saw Castor.
Good, I thought. A human being.
‘Welcome! How can I help you? What a handsome dog! A ridgeback, methinks.’
‘He’s a very good friend,’ I said, without adding that he was the only one I had. ‘I gather you have links to the internet here, is that right?’
‘It certainly is. It would be a bit much if we called ourselves a Computer Centre and didn’t have a link to the web, don’t you think? Are you travelling through?’
I hesitated for a second before explaining that in fact I was living just outside the village. At Darne Lodge, if she knew where that was. Everything suddenly seemed very straightforward: I didn’t understand why I had been so reticent at The Royal Oak last week. If Mr Tawking wanted to let his house to a foreign woman writer for the whole winter, it was surely not impossible that he might have mentioned it to others, even if he was a miserable old curmudgeon. There was every reason to suppose that my presence up there was well known in the village.
‘Oh, so you’re the one, are you?’ said the woman with a smile. ‘I heard that somebody was going to be living there for quite some time. I’m Margaret, by the way. . Margaret Allen. Welcome to Winsford, the end of the world.’
‘Maria. Maria Anderson.’
We shook hands. Castor flopped down onto the floor with a sigh. I took the opportunity to introduce him as well. Margaret knelt down and stroked him over his neck and back. I felt the need to burst into tears, but managed to control it. There were occasions when weeping should be kept under control, even Gudrun Ewerts would agree with that.
‘I take it you don’t have an internet connection up there,’ said Margaret when she stood up again. ‘But you can come down here whenever you like. We’re usually open between eleven in the morning and six in the evening, but if there’s anything urgent you can always knock on the door of that little stone cottage next to the church — it says Biggs on the door. Alfred Biggs and I take it in turns to sit here, and he never says no to anybody, I can promise you that.’
I thanked her and said that I had no urgent need to contact anybody just now, but I would be back in a few days’ time.
‘Isn’t it a bit lonely up there? Forgive me for asking, but. .’
She burst out laughing, evidently embarrassed by her presumptuousness. ‘I speak out of turn. I’m sorry, but we haven’t had a single client so far today — most people have a link in their own homes nowadays. It was a bit different when we started this place fifteen years ago. There’s been lots of talk about closing it down, but we do get quite a few young people calling in after school. And there are in fact a few families who are still not connected. I don’t know if it’s because they can’t afford it, or for some other reason. .’
It was obvious that she wanted to talk, and mainly out of politeness I asked if she knew anything about Darne Lodge. When it was built, and why, for instance.
‘Oh yes,’ said Margaret enthusiastically. ‘There’s an awful lot to say about Darne Lodge. Didn’t old Tawking tell you anything?’
I shook my head.
‘No, I don’t suppose he would, that old miseryboots. Would you like a cup of tea?’
*
And while we drank tea and ate some biscuits with some black but rather tasty goo evidently called Branston Pickle, I was provided with a fair amount of information about the house I was living in — and would be living in for the best part of six months. I had the impression that despite her comparative youth, Margaret Allen knew more than most about what was what in the village. She also said that both she and her husband were active in the local folklore society, and in addition to her unpaid work at the computer centre she worked as a librarian in Dulverton.
But anyway, Darne Lodge. Well, Margaret recalled that it was built at the beginning of the nineteenth century as the residence of a certain Selwyn Byrnescotte. He was a soldier who returned home as some kind of hero after the Napoleonic wars — the Battle of Trafalgar and two other sea battles that Margaret named, but I didn’t recognize. The problem with this Selwyn was that even before he had gone to war he had been disowned by his family — or at least by his father, Lord Neville — on the Byrnescotte estate roughly midway between Winsford and Exford. The background was top secret, but probably had to do with homosexuality. In any case, the Lord had Darne Lodge built so that his decorated but wayward next-oldest son would have somewhere to live (had it been his eldest son, things would have been much more complicated) at a fairly safe distance away from the family seat. However, Selwyn didn’t like being isolated on the moor and soon moved to London, where he led a dissolute and debauched life for several years. The war was still raging, but he was unable to return to the battlefield because of some injury or other. He came back to Darne Lodge to die — it was the same year as the Battle of Waterloo — and he hanged himself from one of the roof beams. As a result of his London excesses he also had another serious injury: half his face had been shot away in a duel. Apparently he was not a pretty sight when he was eventually discovered and cut down after several months. Nobody knew that he had returned to Darne Lodge.
I suspected that Castor and I would be spending several hours with Margaret Allen — she didn’t leave out many details: but as luck would have it there was a hundred-year gap in the story. After Selwyn Byrnescotte’s tragic end, the house stood empty until about 1920 when it was bought by a Londoner who needed somewhere for himself and his household to spend the night while he was out hunting red deer on Exmoor. It was eventually taken over by his son for the same purpose, but after this unfortunate young man — his name was Ralph deBries and he seemed to be of Belgian extraction as far as one could make out — had also committed suicide there, this time with the aid of tablets, the house was sold at auction in 1958 and bought by the father of the current owner, Jeremy Tawking.
Anyway, nobody had died in the house since 1958 — Margaret Allen was careful to stress that fact — and no doubt over two hundred people had been living there as Mr Tawking had been renting it out for at least twenty years. Usually by the week during the summer months, of course, but Margaret recalled that somebody had been living there last winter as well. In any case, it seemed to be well built and insulated, and was able to withstand the winter storms.