The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery(17)



Somewhere in the house a clock chimed eight o’clock, and, as if answering, from beyond the house came a deeper chime of some distant church tower. A bird flew out of a tree and twitteringly dive-bombed the lawn for its own breakfast, and the spell of the old garden splintered. The chimes died away, and Michael forgot about ghosts and sat down at the big leather-topped table, to step into the past.





Six


Nell was having a good morning.

Before opening the shop at ten, she had arranged for a longer loan of the books borrowed for Owen Bracegirdle which Owen, the previous evening, had thought might be very helpful, and would almost certainly buy. The bookseller in Quire Court, learning who the potential customer was, expressed himself as perfectly happy to grant an extension. He observed that since Dr Bracegirdle, whom he knew slightly, was accustomed to the jealously-guarded treasures of the Bodleian and on page-flipping terms with assorted incunabula, it was unlikely in the extreme that he would tear the dust jackets or spill gin on the pages. Appealed to for help, he thought he did have one or two volumes about WWI POW camps and vanished artefacts from that war, and proceeded to scurry along his shelves like an energetic grasshopper.

‘Did you say Holzminden? Where exactly is it?’

‘Lower Saxony.’ Nell, feeling it incumbent on her to help with the search, followed him along the shelves, navigating around the piles of books on the floor which the bookseller had not got around to cataloguing. ‘I looked it up. It’s one of those places dating back to the eighth or ninth century. Princes of the Wolfenbuttel line dodging in and out of its ownership, and various monastic settlements, and a royal charter in eleven-or-twelve hundred.’

‘I haven’t heard of the place,’ said the bookseller, ‘but I’m sure I’ve got— Ha! Here it is.’ He extracted a large tome from the end of a shelf, blew dust off its leaves, and presented it beamingly. ‘There are several chapters in this about internment camps in that war. He’s something of an authority, the author. There might be a reference to Holzminden. Oh, and this one as well.’ He darted at another section of shelf and seized an even heavier book. ‘You’re more than welcome to borrow both of them for the afternoon.’

‘Thank you, Godfrey. I won’t tear the dust jackets or spill gin on them, either,’ said Nell.

She carried the books back to her own shop. Beth was in Scotland for the entire week and Quire Court was never particularly busy on Wednesday afternoons, so after she had finished applying Danish oil to a beautiful but neglected Regency escritoire destined for a customer in Hertfordshire, she had a snack lunch then curled up in the little office behind the shop.

The more promising of the books was called Fragments of Great War Treasures and had several index references to Holzminden and to the sketches themselves. It was slightly annoying, however, to discover that the author wrote about the sketches with an air of faint contempt, as if feeling a pitying amusement for anyone sufficiently credulous to actually think they might exist. He or she wrote:

They are almost certainly apocryphal. Indeed, it would not be making too strong a statement to place them with such ephemeral objects as the Holy Grail, the Lost City of Atlantis and/or Avalon, and the missing jade zodiac heads of China.

In my opinion, the fabulous Holzminden sketches fall squarely into these categories – and I use the word ‘fabulous’ in the sense of fabled or mythical. They even have a sinister legend attached to them, one that might have come out of an M.R. James ghost story or even, (God help us), a Sixties horror film. No real credence can be given to the legend, of course, but I am including it as a curio.

Nell, who liked and admired M.R. James’s stories and found some horror films quite entertaining, turned to the title page to see who the author of these rather sneering put-downs might be, and was unreasonably annoyed to discover that it was a certain B.D. Bodkin, whose works she had sometimes consulted, and with whom she had in fact exchanged correspondence last year while trying to provenance some Victorian watercolours. But she wanted to know more about these sketches, so she read on. He wrote, didactically:

Reports vary as to how many sketches there are. But most sources agree that there were probably two. The belief is that the sketches were done while the artist was under sentence of death, and that he had been driven mad by his approaching execution. One source, (uncorroborated), suggests that the taint of madness clings to the sketches. That macabre legend has clung to the sketches down the years and has no doubt added to their notoriety.

Well, B.D. Bodkin, thought Nell, I’d very much like to hear what you’d have to say if you knew there’s a framed sketch hanging in a dark old house in the depths of East Anglia, with the legend ‘Holzminden 1917’ inscribed on it. I suppose you’d say it was a fake. I suppose it might be a fake. Or perhaps a copy of an original – yes, I’d better keep that possibility in mind.

But one of the sentences from the book had stuck in her mind. The taint of madness clings to the sketches.

Nell certainly did not believe that statement, any more than B.D. Bodkin did, but she was aware of a prickle of unease at the knowledge that if one of those sketches really was inside Fosse House, Michael was shut in with it – until tomorrow at the very least. It did not matter, of course. And yet …

And yet with no knowledge of the legend, he had already talked about hearing whisperings in the house. A whispering voice, he had said; a voice that had murmured about needing to keep a hold on sanity … I do wish he hadn’t said that, thought Nell.

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