Wraiths and changelings, p.1
Wraiths and Changelings, page 1
part #53 of Mrs Bradley Series
Wraiths And Changelings
Gladys Mitchell
Bradley 53
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A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0
click for scan notes and proofing history
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Contents
Chapter One: Ghost Stories
Chapter Two: Developments
Chapter Three: Rearrangements
Chapter Four: The Ghost-Hunters Encamp
Chapter Five: The Bure at Night
Chapter Six: The Bure by Day
Chapter Seven: Plainsong at Salhouse
Chapter Eight: The Ghost of Gariannonum
Chapter Nine: Hauntings at Horning
Chapter Ten: The Wrong Ghost
Chapter Eleven: Black Monk, Black Dog
Chapter Twelve: Black Deeds
Chapter Thirteen: Interlude for Two Inquests
Chapter Fourteen: Notes and Queries
Chapter Fifteen: The Young Men’s Story
Chapter Sixteen: Tweedledum
Chapter Seventeen: Lies and Evasions
Chapter Eighteen: Till Truth Make All Things Plain
Chapter Nineteen: Brother Pacificus
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WRAITHS AND CHANGELINGS
A party of thrill-seekers meet to go on a ghost hunt on the moors. Their reasons vary and it soon becomes apparent that there is a criminal among them. When the fun turns into murder, it’s time for the indefatigable Dame Beatrice to become involved and expose the killer and the reason for his crime.
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GLADYS MITCHELL TITLES IN LARGE PRINT
Winking at the Brim
Watson’s Choice
Convent on Styx
My Bones Will Keep
Twelve Horses & The Hangman’s Noose
Noonday and Night
Fault in the Structure
Faintley Speaking
Late, Late in the Evening
Wraiths & Changelings
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MAGNA PRINT BOOKS
Bolton-by-Bowland Lancashire . England
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Mitchell, Gladys
Wraiths & changelings.—Large print ed.
I. Title
823'.9'1F PR6025.1832W/
ISBN 0-86009-276-3
First Published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1978
Copyright © 1978 by Gladys Mitchell
Published in Large Print 1980 by arrangement with Michael Joseph Ltd London
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Copyright owner.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Redwood Burn Limited Trowbridge and Esher
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For
HELEN BRACE,
to whom I owe everything
SALVE DOMINA
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Chapter One
Ghost Stories
‘I suppose nothing was said and done to frighten her?
You were not talking of anything very terrible, were you?’
Wilkie Collins—The Woman in White
^ »
The night was Hallowe’en and there had been the usual innocuous nonsense of bobbing for apples, lighting turnip lanterns, roasting chestnuts, picking up flaming raisins and an indoor barbeque in the enormous, stone-flagged kitchen. This had been followed, to the delight of the little boys, by the production of a box of pre-Christmas crackers, decorated with three-inch spiders with waggling wire legs, and the resultant shrieks and squeals as they chased the girls with these had convinced the host and hostess that everybody was having a splendid time. This may well have been true, since no expense had been spared in the preparations for the party and this often makes for success in any kind of entertainment.
With the cessation of childish yells, screams and laughter after the young had been sent to bed, the house might have seemed preternaturally quiet and a sense of anticlimax might have followed, except that, in place of the children’s pandemonium, other sounds had taken over.
What had begun as the evening of a mild, late-autumn day had changed, almost as soon as the children had gone upstairs, to a night of rain and wind. There was a roaring in the chimneys, the hiss of water dripping on to the vast log fire and great gusts of wind-driven rain slashed at the windows. A branch rapped and tapped against the glass like a stormbound traveller seeking admittance and this was of no help to the nervous.
‘I suppose there isn’t somebody outside?’ asked one of the women guests, a Mrs Crieff-Tweedle.
‘It’s a proper night for ghosts,’ said one of the men.
‘ “The night it is gude Hallowe’en;
The fairy folk do ride,” ’ said Laura Gavin, with a shudder that was only partly histrionic.
‘Ah, yes, come on, Mrs Gavin!’ cried somebody else. ‘If you know the rest of that ballad, do let’s have it!’
‘Much too long, dear,’ said Laura.
‘Give us the “Lyke Wake Dirge”, mamma,’ suggested her son Hamish.
‘I don’t know whether it’s generally known,’ said Lance Crofton, the host, realising that Laura was not anxious to perform, ‘but All Hallows is thought to have been the New Year’s Day of our pagan forefathers, so tonight would have seen the Old Year out, taking with it all its worries and troubles. No wonder superstition still attached itself to Hallowe’en. The Church’— he looked half-apologetically across at Father Melrose, an uninvited guest— ‘with its customary acumen and good sense, turned the pagan rejoicings which greeted the advent of another year into the great festival of All Saints. What is more, realising that one day of feasting would not satisfy their new converts, the monks instituted All Souls Day in further celebration.’
‘ “Celebration” seems an odd word to use with reference to dies irae, dies illa,’ said Hamish Gavin, ‘but don’t let us become too solemn. Doesn’t anybody know a good ghost story to finish up with?’ He looked hopefully at the priest. ‘Robert Hugh Benson had some very fine ones, I believe, sir? Couldn’t you tell us one of his?’
‘I was greatly impressed by Father Girdlestone’s Tale,’ said the priest, ‘but, as the author himself caused his raconteur to protest, it is a very long story. I suggest that we each be responsible for telling a short anecdote, preferably about something which has come within our own experience.’
‘Then you must begin, and give us a lead,’ said Laura, realising that this was what the uninvited visitor intended to do.
‘Very well, so long as you are prepared to follow on, my dear lady,’ he said.
‘But my story is more amusing than frightening,’ Laura explained.
‘All the better,’ said the woman whom the tapping branch at the window had appeared to alarm. All done to create an effect, Laura decided. She did not like Mrs Crieff-Tweedle.
‘Let me give everybody a drink,’ said the host, getting up from his armchair to carry out this purpose.
‘And then we must have the lights out,’ said his wife. ‘Ghost stories must be told in the dark.’
‘Well,’ said the priest, when everybody was settled and the fire-glow remained as the only light in the vast room, ‘my story is of something which happened to me some time ago in the west of Ireland. So far as I know, it had nothing to do with the troubles in Ulster, although those had begun.
‘I was staying with a small community of Benedictines, whose prior had been at seminary with me, and I had better explain that I was convalescent after illness, although well on the road to recovery.
‘One evening I was talking to some of the others after Compline when the brother who was in charge of the door came to say that a man was asking to speak to me.
‘ “But I know nobody in the parish,” I said, “except the young man who brought me here from the boat.”
‘ “He asked for you by name, Father. He said it was urgent and that he knows you.”
‘I went with the monk into the vestibule and there, sure enough, was Tim Cooley, my recent young acquaintance. He was looking so pale and ill that I felt greatly concerned.
‘ “Why, Tim,” I began; but he interrupted me. “Come quick, Father,” he said. “He’s in a bad way. There’s been a fight and himself dying with all his sins on him. He’s on the floor of my cottage. It’s just a piece down the road.”
‘I got together what was necessary, but when I went back to the vestibule there was no sign of Tim. I concluded that he had been in the fight, too, and was anxious to make himself scarce. However, the prior told me that Tim’s cottage was only about two hundred yards down the road. All the same, he insisted upon sending one of the brothers with me, as I was still very weak from my illness.
‘The cottage door was on the latch, so we went inside and found a man lying on the floor. We had brought a storm-lantern with us and this was the only light we had. The man had been groaning and praying when we walked in, but as soon as he knew we were there he managed to say, “God bless you, Father, for coming so quick. I’m dying.”
‘I administered the last rites and die he did. He was Tim Cooley.’
‘But—well, I mean, is that the end of the story?’ asked one of the women guests. ‘It is.’
‘But what about the ghost?’
‘The ghost was the wraith which came to the priory to summon me to the cottage. The doctor who examined the body said there was no way a man in Tim’s condition could have walked to the priory. Apart from some terrible head injuries, he had a broken leg. The Whatever it was which came to summon me had no injuries of any kind, but only looked deathly pale, as I said, and, as I told you, he had disappeared by the time I got back to the vestibule.’
‘A case of identical twins?’ asked one of the men. ‘That is what I should think.’
‘Think what you like,’ said the priest. ‘That is my story and now I am going to take my leave. Thank you so very much for a delightful evening.’
There was a long pause after his departure. The rain made new assaults on the windows and the branch tapped and tapped on the glass.
‘Must have been identical twins,’ said the man who had already suggested this.
‘Then why didn’t the twin who went to the priory stay and accompany Father Melrose to the cottage?’ said the woman who asked whether the story had reached its conclusion.
‘I expect the twin had been involved in the fight and wanted to go into hiding. I should think, in this weather, the good Father wishes he were in hiding, too,’ said the host.
‘I wish I knew why he thought I had invited him,’ said the hostess. ‘I mean, somehow, Hallowe’en and all the witches and things don’t seem to fit in with a priest, do they? You’d think he’d want to be preparing for All Saints Day tomorrow.’
‘Oh, priests like a bit of harmless fun, just like everybody else, I suppose,’ said her husband. ‘As for his gate-crashing our party, I expect he was invited some place else and got it all mixed up in his unworldly way. Still, his was a strange story, however you look at it, and quite a good one, too. Gives one something to think about. Oh, well, come on, Laura! Let’s have a bit of light relief.’
‘I’m not so sure that it will be,’ said Laura. ‘There could, I suppose, be an explanation of Father Melrose’s story, but I’ve never been able to find an explanation for mine. I ran a motor-bike, not a car, in those days, because I was only just down from College and hadn’t much money. This was just before Dame B. engaged my services, so I had been doing odd bits of supply work in various schools. I don’t know whether you know the sort of thing. A supply teacher puts in a week or two here, a fortnight there, in schools where somebody on the staff is away ill, and that’s what I’d been doing.
‘Well, come the autumn half-term break there was I, stooging about on the old velocipede in Yorkshire. One late afternoon when I was not far from Marston Moor, a thick mist came down. I was on an unfenced moorland road, so I decided, when I spotted a biggish pub, that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to pull up for a bit.
They weren’t open, but they were decent souls and let me in, and the result was that the landlord’s wife offered me a bed for the night, telling me that a mist on the moors at that time in the evening wasn’t going to lift until the morning, if then.
‘Well, I’d got to spend the night somewhere, although actually my basic idea had been a youth hostel, so I asked about terms and they were so reasonable that I closed with them very thankfully, picked up my haversack and asked her to show me to the appointed room.
‘ “Well,” she said, “you can have your choice of two. I’ve nobody else staying. It’s out of season. There’s a nice little single room in the new part, or there’s Oliver Cromwell’s room. It’s not so convenient, but it’s historic. The only thing is that it’s directly above our new saloon bar. Still, the saloon won’t be as noisy as the public and that’s at the other end of the house, so you won’t hear much from there, and everybody gets turned out at half-past ten, anyway. Come to that, I daresay a good number won’t come out on a night like this at all, so we’re bound to be fairly quiet.”
‘Well, she showed me the two rooms and, of course, I didn’t hesitate. Oliver Cromwell’s room, so-called, was small and inconvenient, but it had an oak-beamed ceiling, funny little cupboards so high up that you’d need a step-ladder to reach them, an oak floor with planks the width of a tree-trunk and with such a rake that they’d had to anchor the bed to stop it from sliding into the window. This was a diamond-paned affair which, anyway, did open, though I didn’t open it wide because of the thick mist outside.
The woman took me downstairs again and gave me a smashing meal of ham and eggs followed by fruit cake, about half a pound of Wensleydale and an enormous pot of tea, and after that I sat in her parlour and we yarned for a bit and then I went to bed.
‘Well, I’ve never needed much sleep — about four hours is my average—so by three in the morning I was wide awake. I know it was three in the morning because I lit the candle—there wasn’t any other form of lighting in the room—and looked at my watch and wondered how I was going to get through the rest of the night. I had a book in my haversack, but I’m not keen on reading by candlelight, so I put out the candle and was about to settle down again when I heard this horseman.’
‘What horseman?’ somebody asked.
‘I didn’t know. He came galloping up to the inn and passed right under the floor of my room.’
‘But—’ objected somebody else.
‘Don’t spoil the story,’ said the host.
‘Well,’ Laura went on, ‘after that there was dead silence. It was rather an uncomfortable silence, as though there ought to be other sounds, but there weren’t any. Actually it was a bit uncanny, as though the world, for a second, had stopped ticking over and had left a sort of hiatus in time. It’s hard to explain what I mean.’
‘You said this story wasn’t frightening,’ said the hostess.
‘I got up as soon as it was light,’ Laura went on, ‘packed my few things, found a bathroom, dressed and went down to breakfast. It was a jolly good breakfast and when I’d got to the baps and marmalade stage the landlady came in and asked me how I’d slept.
‘ “Fine,” I said, “but who was your horse-riding visitor at three o’clock this morning?”
‘ “Him?” she said. “Oh, did you hear Oliver Cromwell’s messenger? Most people can’t hear him, but some are tuned in, I suppose. We’re so used to him ourselves that we don’t take any notice.”
‘ “But he galloped right under the floor of my room,” I said. “That means he galloped right through the saloon bar.”
‘ “Yes, of course he did,” she said. “Before we had the alterations done, that room you slept in was over the old entrance to the inn-yard, so it’s the only way to the stables—well, what used to be the stables —that he knows.” ’
‘Marston Moor? Oliver Cromwell’s room? Oliver Cromwell’s messenger? Mamma, you’ve made it all up,’ said her son sternly.
‘No, really, it’s mostly true,’ protested Laura.
‘Then why haven’t you told it to me before?’
‘I’d forgotten about it until now. It all happened years and years ago.’
‘And had anybody ever seen the horse-man?’ asked the host.
‘I asked the landlady that, and she said none of them at the inn had ever seen anything, but that some people in the village wouldn’t go to the inn on certain nights of the year because on those nights the Gytrash—remember Jane Eyre? — was to be seen pursuing a horseman who was carrying a man’s head stuck on the end of a pike, but that, I think, is a bit of local folklore.’
‘I call it a jolly good story,’ said the host. ‘Anybody else ready with a touch of the eldritch?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said a middle-aged woman who was related to the host’s wife and was there with her husband, Professor Byland, ‘but, when I was very much younger than I am now, my parents booked a holiday in Winchester at a very old-fashioned hotel well away from the centre of the city. I had a single room on the first floor and because I wanted to be up early to go for a walk before breakfast beside the Itchen towards St Cross, I drew my curtains back from the window so that the morning light would wake me.
‘I rather regretted this later on, for it was the time of the full moon and the room was flooded with its brilliance so much so that I could not get to sleep.
‘At last I sat up, intending to go over to the window and draw the curtains across it, but there, by the dressing-table, I saw her, a young nun in a white habit.
