A face pulled away from an upstairs window as I pulled up outside the East Front. Now, I thought, perhaps now that I look on the verge of leaving, Mrs. Winton might be forced to resort to honesty.
She must’ve flown like a broomstick to get from that upstairs room to the entrance hall where I met her a few seconds later.
“Well,” she said after looking at me as if for the first time.
“Yes, well, I suppose I’ll be off now.” I was grinning inside, lying through my back teeth and loving it.
“Right now?”
“I’ve imposed long enough.”
Her expression was saying Please impose!
“Oh, by the way,” I continued, “I found this on the maze island,” and produced from my jacket pocket the bone. “Did you know the local vet used to work at the London Zoo? He was able to tell me that this is part of the wing bone of the Australian emu bird. Now how do you suppose—”
I would never have guessed Mrs. Winton to be the fainting kind.
“It’s like Burke and Hare.”
I said nothing to Keenen’s comment, apt though it was. The sun was going down, the shadow of the marble ruin creeping over us. I just kept digging.
Mrs. Winton had revived after a moment, and I’d helped to get her into a sitting position on the stairs. “You should never have taken the bone from the island,” she said, settling herself against the banisters. “It was the only thing that really held him there; that and the water, though the water won’t stop him now once the sun goes down.”
“You should’ve told me all this—and a lot more besides—in the first place.”
“You would’ve left.”
“I should leave now.”
“He’ll run amok.”
“All the more reason to scram.” I let that sink in a moment. “He’s the black man whose ghost haunted the Manor a hundred and fifty years ago, isn’t he?”
She nodded. “Actually he’s from New South Wales. His name was Korrabilla, but they called him Birdfellow because he practiced bird-magic.”
“I see. It takes an Australian ghost hunter to hunt an Australian ghost.”
“Do you think we haven’t tried in the past, Mr. Pine? A dozen investigators over the past five years haven’t even known where to start. All they could tell His Lordship was to let sleeping dogs lie. But they haven’t looked across the grounds on still evenings to see the trees in the center of the maze tossing and tossing. They’ve never felt as if there’s an animal out there crashing against its cage, and that one day it’ll break out.”
“And the bone?” I held it up at eye level.
Mrs. Winton flinched. “I suppose you’ve been talking to Mr. Scudamore.”
“Yes.”
“Back in 1823 the Eleventh Earl brought this Birdfellow back from a voyage into the Pacific.”
“Which explains the palm and the gum trees in the grounds,” I said.
She nodded again, nervously. “The Earl though to train him as a servant, and perhaps even have him work magic. But Birdfellow ran away only a week after coming to the Manor. It must’ve been a terribly alien place to him—England, I mean. He didn’t know how to survive in one of our winters, and so he died. But it wasn’t long before his ghost began plaguing the Manor in the shape of a monstrous bird like an ostrich.”
“Emu,” I said.
“Was it? Servants and tenant farmers ran off, and livestock died. So the Earl called in the witch known as Mother Gwynne. She told him the body had to be surrounded by moving water, and to bury that,” she gestured at the bone I was holding, “with him as it was his source of magic. That stopped the haunting, though it didn’t put him to rest; possibly Mr. Scudamore told you about the children who wandered into the maze one night?”
I nodded.
“When the brooks running into the maze dried up five years ago, the pond water stopped moving, and the ghost began to come out into the maze itself. If it wasn’t for the bone, the ghost would’ve broken loose. It’s going to break loose tonight.” She peered despairingly through the banisters.
I sat down beside her. “What if I put the bone back.”
“The spell’s broken,” she said, and she was probably right. “Mother Gwynne said he couldn’t rest because he wasn’t buried in his own land, so you might think the obvious thing would be to ship his remains back to Australia. But she warned that the moment his bones leave the island he’ll come chasing them.”
What had been so wrong with winter back home?
I tried to remember all I knew about Aboriginal burial customs, which took about ten seconds. All I came up with was something to do with trees, a half-formed idea at best. Then, scraping the bottom of my brain, I recalled that during an inquest into Black deaths in police custody the court was instructed to refer to the dead only as “Deadfella” and “Deadlady,” as it was Aboriginal law that no record of the name, no image or belongings of the individual must be allowed to exist after death. I said, “There may be a second reason why Birdfellow doesn’t rest. Is there anything connected to him that’s still in the house: writings, drawings, paintings, belongings?”
“There’s only the diary I hoped you’d find on the library shelf and a portrait painting up in the roof.”
I suddenly remembered where trees might come into all of this. “Better find it and bring it with the diary to the southeast lawn. Get the groundsmen to hollow out one of the gum trees with axes.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Shift old Birdfellow’s bones.”
The front door opened. Keenen entered, his footsteps echoing in the hall, slowing to a stop at the bottom of the stairs. He saw the emu bone in my hand and went very pale.
“But I won’t be shifting the bones alone,” I said, and meant it.
“It’s like Burke and Hare.”
I said nothing to Keenen’s comment. The sun was going down, the shadow of the marble ruin creeping over us. I just kept digging, and presently our shovels brought up vertebrae. Birdfellow had been buried facedown, an ancient way of burying the feared dead.
We dug with small spades, with our hands and with the care of archaeologists, gathering up the arms, legs, pelvis, ribs, every vertebra, every finger and toe bone. And of course the skull and its gray, stringy beard with the little kangaroo skin pouch tied into its strands. “This contains magic powders,” I said to Keenen, trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about as I placed the pouch in the canvas sack with the bones. One of the eye teeth on the lower jaw was missing, had probably been knocked out as part of manhood initiation ceremonies. But to make sure we sifted the bottom of the grave until just on sunset when we made a hurried retreat from the island.
As we reached the gate in the inner wall, I yielded to temptation and turned around for one quick look. There was a shadow over the island, somehow darker than the night coming on; a shadow that seemed to flex out across the water. I hurried Keenen through the gate, pulling it shut on its rusty hinges. We were out of the garden, but not yet out of the woods. There was still a long, crooked course ahead of us to the southeast lawn.
A couple of minutes later and several alleys into the maze we became aware of a growing dryness in the air, a smell of deserts and a sense of open spaces.
“The ghost is following its bones,” said Keenen.
I nodded. “God knows what’ll happen if it finds them, and God help us if it finds them with us.”
“I think it’s about to catch up,” whispered Keenen.