Property of a Lady(44)
Thirty was quite old, though. I said, ‘Is she my aunt? What’s her name?’
‘I’m not sure of the precise degree of relationship,’ said Father. ‘She’s a cousin to me – perhaps a third cousin. So she’d be a cousin to you, as well. Her name is Elvira Lee.’
Elvira Lee. The name seemed to jump out of the page and snatch Michael’s throat. Elvira, who had been commemorated on an old, forgotten grave as a dearly loved daughter of Elizabeth. Elvira, who Ellie insisted was in danger, and Beth said was being sought by the man in her nightmare.
If Harriet’s journal could be believed, Elvira had ended her life, blind and insane, in a place called Brank Asylum.
Michael suddenly wanted to talk to Nell about this, but saw it was after eleven already. He would phone her tomorrow. But he would read some more of Harriet’s journal before going to bed.
FIFTEEN
17th February 1939
9.15 a.m.
Sunlight is pouring into my room at the Black Boar, and it’s almost dispelled the ghosts. But not quite. I can’t stop remembering Elvira Lee, poor haunted creature, incarcerated in Brank Asylum for all those years – thirty years at least. How much of those thirty years did she spend inside that dark madness?
She was fifty-eight when she died – I know that because the solicitor sent me her birth and death certificates. She was born in 1880 at Charect House, and she died in 1938 in Brank Asylum of arterial embolism. I looked that up in Mother’s old Home Doctor reference book, and I think it’s what we would call a stroke.
Even all these years later I can remember how sane Elvira sounded when she talked about her own madness. I can remember her terror of the man she believed searched for her, as well.
After breakfast, I asked at the reception desk for directions to Charect House. The man gave me a slightly startled look, but said it was easy enough to find.
‘Out of the village, and along Blackberry Lane, past the old carriageway to the manor – that’s long since gone, of course – and there you’ll be. It’s a fair old walk, though. I could telephone the local taxi service. They’d be here in a matter of minutes, well, always supposing they’re free.’
A ‘fair old walk’ might mean anything from a mile to five miles, so I’ve accepted the taxi offer, and I’m writing this in my room while I wait for it to arrive. The romantic in me would like to walk by myself to the home of my ancestors, savouring every blade of grass and every breath of atmosphere, but the pragmatist knows perfectly well I should get lost in the bewilderment of lanes around here. So I shall approach my inheritance, Father’s cherished dream, in a cloud of exhaust fumes.
3.15 p.m.
In the end I compromised. I asked the taxi driver to let me down at the end of Blackberry Lane so I could walk the rest of the way. With a faint echo of my childhood, I arranged for him to collect me in an hour’s time.
Blackberry Lane is like any other English country lane. It’s fringed with hedges, and at this time of year there’s the promise of cowslips in the fields and of May blossom and lilac to come. As I walked, my spirits rose, and the lovely evocative line that opens Rebecca was strongly with me.
Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again . . . The ruinous Manderley with its iron gates and blackened walls and sad secrets would not be at the end of the lane. But whatever was ahead, it was mine. I was coming home.
Everywhere was so quiet and still, I could almost have believed I had stepped back to the days when Elvira Lee lived here. There are places in England – I dare say all over the world – that have that effect. As if, here and there, something has puckered the fabric of time and tiny shards of the past can trickle out.
I went past the ruined carriageway, pausing to glance along it and sparing a thought for a manor house no longer there. I do know it’s more important for ordinary people to have decent houses and a bit of garden, but it’s such a shame that so many of England’s great houses have been lost – to fire, to flood, to improvidence or debt. If this war that’s coming lasts as long as the war that took my Harry and all those other young men, I suppose even more of them will be lost.
I don’t think Charect House will ever be lost, though. It has such a stubborn air of survival. It stands well back from Blackberry Lane behind overgrown gardens, and it’s one of those four-square red-brick houses built about a century and a half ago. (Which means everywhere will be crumbling or sagging or rotten, and it will probably cost far more money than I shall ever possess to restore it . . .)
Tacked on to the gate was an oblong of wood with the house’s name and a rusting chain that snapped in two when I lifted it. When I unlocked the door and pushed it open, there was the most tremendous feeling of ownership. Again, I thought: I am coming home.
What did I expect from the inside of the house? Gothic gloom, shrouded rooms, dusty sunlight lying across oak floors . . . ? I got that, all right. But I also got the depressing, bad-smelling evidence of forty years of neglect and dereliction. The best ghost stories don’t mention the smell you get from an old, deserted house. They don’t mention the damp, dank stench – decades of ingrained grime and mouse droppings and rusting taps that drip into green-crusted sinks.
(Actually, there was a faint sound of water dripping all the time I was there – there’s something so lonely about the sound of a tap dripping, and this was a particularly insistent, very nearly rhythmic dripping. It seemed to follow me into every room.)