PETER BRANDON WAS quite as angry with Thomasina as she was with him. There were moments during the afternoon and evening when he found himself disliking her to such an extent that he would have turned his back on Deep End and shaken its soggy clay off his feet for good and all if he hadn’t been unalterably convinced that she would get herself into some really horrible mess if he wasn’t there to restrain her. He had been fond of Thomasina for a great many years in the casual, unemotional way of family relationship. He had teased her, criticized her, and quarrelled with her, all without heat, but it was only in the last six months that he had committed the folly of falling in love with her. He hadn’t had the slightest intention of doing it. Somewhere between thirty and thirty-five he intended to marry and have children—not less than two and not more than four, and preferably two boys and a girl. He proposed to be a good husband and father, and to have the kind of pleasant calm affection for his wife which made no demands upon the emotions and conduced to a tranquil atmosphere in the home. The wife had remained a quite nebulous figure—she bore no resemblance whatever to Thomasina. And then he had to go and fall in love with a creature whom he had known in her pram.
When the fact came home to him he told himself that it was a temporary aberration. He had been summoned to Barbara Brandon’s deathbed, and his emotions were not under the usual control. He saw Thomasina being incredibly brave, and when everything was over he saw her heartbroken and desolate. She wept on his shoulder. They were both quite taken out of themselves. But when he went back to London he couldn’t get her out of his head. He told himself that it would pass, but it didn’t pass, it got worse. He began to write her long letters and to look out for the answers. And then all this damnable business about Anna Ball blew up, and when Thomasina came south he could do nothing but quarrel with her.
It ought to have put him out of love with her, but it didn’t. It is quite extraordinary how angrily you can dislike a person with whom you are in love. Peter had moments of cold fury in which he told himself that he never wanted to see her again. As these persisted side by side with a complete inability to stay away from her, his mental state was naturally an extremely uncomfortable one, and as far as possible removed from the placidity of his hypothetical courtship.
When he had walked himself tired he returned to his room at the Masters’ cottage, where he read doggedly by the light of an oil lamp until summoned by old Mr Masters to the evening meal. Mrs Masters being absent on an errand of mercy—a neighbour having scalded her hand—they sat down to a tête-à-tête.
‘And she may be long, or she mayn’t, there’s no saying with scalds, but I shouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t all a much about little, seeing it’s Louie Gregory that’s been known from a child to be one to cry out afore she’s hurt. Six children she’s had, and was agoing to die with every one of them, and there they all are a-flourishing like weeds, and Louie trying to make out what a time she’s had a-bringing of them up.’
They had scrambled eggs, and Mr Masters claimed with justice that he made them better than his daughter-in-law did. He was in high feather, and by the time the meal was over and he had lighted his pipe he had got going upon his repertory of old stories, and by way of that to the history of the Everlys.
‘And I wouldn’t tell it, not to anyone but you, Mr Brandon, because it isn’t a thing that ought to be spoken of. There’s those that would come here and ask their questions, but they’d never get no answers out of me. All happened a long time ago and best forgotten, that’s what I say, and that’s what I told him when he come asking, that there Craddock up at the House. And he says, “What’s the story, Mr Masters?” And, “What story?” I says. And he says, “Is it anything about a hand?” And I says, “Lord—who told you that! Have you been a-seeing things?” I says. Well, he says he might have been. But I didn’t tell him nothing, because it wasn’t none of his business. Stands to reason, if there’s hauntings going on, those that’s doing it wouldn’t want no upstarting strangers a-coming in. Very high-up people they was, the Everlys—kep’ themselves to themselves, very proud and haughty, as you might say. And the three Miss Everlys that was the last of them, they weren’t no different from the rest. I knew them all when I was a lad—Miss Maria, Miss Isabella, and Miss Clarice. …’
He dawdled on through his tale of three lonely women in a decaying house and the cousin who came to stay and was going to marry Miss Clarice.
‘Only Miss Isabella, she wouldn’t have it. Seems she wouldn’t bear to have her younger sister put over her, and she went out of her head with spite, and it come to murder between them. So when Miss Clarice was dead and Miss Isabella was shut up for mad there was only Miss Maria left, and she lived on there alone in the shut-up house until she died. And they say it’s Miss Clarice that haunts the house with her cut-off hand.’
‘Her cut-off hand?’
Old Mr Masters screwed up his face into a thousand wrinkles and nodded.
‘That’s what Miss Isabella did—cut off her hand with the ring on it.’
There was something about the casual way he said this that added to the horror. It was as if it had been repeated so many times as to become a mere shadow of a tale long told. The old voice going on in the old room with the lamplight spilled in a patch of brightness and the shadows black beyond, all heightened the effect. Peter had a sense of the stark facts of human nature against the peacefully flowing current of village life. This horrible thing had happened, and the village had gaped and accepted it, but it seemed they kept away from the place where it had happened. Old Mr Masters was saying so.
‘I won’t say I’m afraid of ghosts, not if they was my own folk and such that’s died lawful in their beds, but I wouldn’t go up round Deepe House in the night—not in that middle part of the house where the murder was, not for a pound weight of gold I wouldn’t. There was a boy that lost his wits and never spoke after, and there was others. Stands to reason Everlys don’t want no one prying in on them, nor I wouldn’t be the one to pry.’ He dropped his voice to a croaking whisper. ‘There was a tramping chap thought he’d get in and sleep there the way they do where there’s an empty house. They say he got up to the window—all cracked it was after the bomb, and he thought he’d pull out a bit of the glass and get in. But when he put his hand to it there was another hand came out of the dark to meet him, and he upped and ran for it through the courtyard and down the drive, yelling his head off.’
There might have been more to say, or there might not. Whether there was or no, old Mr Masters did not get the chance of saying it, because that was where his daughter-in-law came in, a good deal put about and with views of her own to air on the subject of people who didn’t know enough to tie up a scalded finger without sending for someone else to do it for them.
‘And that’s Louie Gregory all over, if it’s the last word I spoke. And her mother the same before her. So long as there’s someone else to do a thing you won’t never need to do it yourself—that’s the way they looked at it, and that’s the way they acted it out. Whether it was borrowing sugar and forgetting to pay it back, or leaving you to bathe the baby whilst they had a nice comfortable faint on their beds, that was them!’
Old Mr Masters looked up with a twinkling eye.
‘Been bathing the baby, Sarah?’
Mrs Masters’ cheeks, already flushed with vexation and fatigue, became a rich shade of plum. She stared angrily at her father-in-law.
‘More fool me!’ she said. ‘And washed up the dinner things which no one hadn’t thought to do, and given the children their tea which they was crying for, and cleared up the worst of the muck in the house! And that poor fool of a Louie setting there crying over her finger!’
‘What do’ee do it for?’ said old Mr Masters.
Sarah Masters was slapping plates together as she cleared the table.
‘Because I’m a fool, I suppose! Go on—tell me so!’
Old Mr Masters told her so with a sardonic chuckle, adding as a crowning insult that she’d got too soft a heart and it would get her into trouble one of these days if she didn’t look out. After which she banged out of the room, and could be heard clattering plates and dishes in the scullery.
Peter went back to his room and tried to write. It was not a great success. His pen travelled, but just what part of his mind prompted it, he did not know. Not a very intelligent part, because when he came to read over what he had written it didn’t seem to mean anything at all. Thomasina’s name had got into it twice. When he had torn it up and started all over again he did manage to keep some control over what went down on the paper. And at the end of it a duller lot of tripe he had never read in his life. It joined the other torn pages in the wastepaper basket. If he couldn’t get away from thinking about Thomasina he had better do it in an orderly and intelligent manner. To start with, what was he in such a stew about? It wasn’t the first time they had quarrelled, and it wouldn’t be the last. It wasn’t the quarrel that was worrying him.
Well then, what was it? The moment he began to think about it he knew very well what it was. He had taken up the attitude of the confirmed sceptic in this matter of Anna Ball, but there was just a chance that there was something in it. Girls did get murdered, and Anna was just the aggravating kind who might have asked for it and got it. And if she had—then there was no saying what kind of a mess Thomasina might land in. He didn’t like Deepe House, with its rickety bomb-damaged rooms and its boarded-up windows. If it wasn’t anything else it was probably insanitary. He didn’t like old Mr Masters’ story about the Everly sisters. Like a surprisingly large number of people, he didn’t believe in haunted houses, but he didn’t like them. They linked up with old horrible things that ought to be forgotten. And at this point he knew very well what was making him afraid. It was the idea of Thomasina going off by herself on some crazy search for Anna Ball in that old dilapidated house.
He remembered what she had said about the cellars. Suppose she took it into her head to go looking for Anna Ball in that crazy place in the dark. She was certainly capable of it. She was angry, she was stubborn, and quite disastrously brave. And she might stumble into almost anything, from a hole in the floor to whatever it was that had sent old Mr Masters’ tramp running hell-for-leather down the drive yelling his head off.
A picture came up in his mind, small but horribly vivid—not Thomasina riding her high horse, proud, angry, sure of herself, but a girl with all the courage scared out of her screaming in the dark. He looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes past eleven. He had been too long over his writing, over his thoughts. Anything might have happened, or be happening now, up there at Deepe House. Here the Masters were in bed and asleep, old Mr Masters by nine o’clock, and Sarah as soon as she had finished her angry clattering and clearing up. He opened the window, hung by his hands from the sill, and dropped. Since the downstair rooms were a bare eight foot from ceiling to floor, it was easy enough, and when it came to getting in again—well, he thought he wouldn’t be the first to use the old pear tree as a ladder.
The night was damp and chill but not really cold. He had no plan except to go up to the Miss Tremletts and see whether any light burned there or not. He had no further thought or purpose, and it came to him that it was a senseless one, because if the windows were all dark, it might mean that Thomasina was in bed and asleep, or it might mean that she was out and away. And if there was a light in her window, it could mean that she was awake. She could be reading in bed. She could be doing any one of the things you do when you don’t want to go to sleep. Or she could be out in the dark, with the light left in her window to guide her home.
He came up to the cottage and found all the front of it dark. What had been the stable yard now had a little paling round it painted green, and a gate with one of those fancy latches which are equally difficult to open or shut. It was shut when Peter came up to it, and he made a bad job of getting it open, pinching his fingers and swearing under his breath. Inside, most of the cobblestones had been left, but some square beds had been dug and filled with bulbs. In the dark they were soggy traps through which you blundered.
When he got round to the back, there were three lots of windows, and only one of them showed a light. The dark windows looked as if they were open, but the lighted window was shut, which meant that somebody was up, since you don’t open your window on a January night until you are ready to dive into bed and pull the clothes about you.
Well then, someone was up. But there was nothing to say that it was Thomasina. It might be Gwyneth, or it might be Elaine. And Thomasina out of the house and well away on a fool’s errand! He stood looking at the window and fighting down a rising fury and a rising fear.
There are states of mind in which time flies, and others in which it lags. Peter hadn’t the slightest idea how long he had stood looking up at the light filtering through curtains which gave it a blueish tinge, when he suddenly felt that he wasn’t doing any good. If Thomasina was here she was all right. But if she wasn’t here she was up at Deepe House, and the best thing he could do was to go and find her.
He blundered into another flower bed, shut the gate without bothering about the latch, and set off in the direction of the house. He had a torch, but he didn’t want to use it, and once away from the cottage, the path lay across the open park and was not really hard to keep. The mass of Deepe House showed up against the sky, first as mere density, then as a black rectangle with its two wings foreshortened.
He came into the courtyard between the wings and stopped to look and listen. Here it was absolutely dark, the skyline lost. And absolutely still. Not a breath, not a whisper, not the slightest, smallest sound. Since he had seen the place by day, he knew that the windows to the right were curtained and those on the left boarded-up. While straight ahead—now there he couldn’t remember whether the whole front was eyeless, every window nailed up against wind and weather, or whether here and there there was still glass in some of the windows.
He moved across the courtyard, his hands out before him. There was a door—he remembered that there was a door with some kind of canopy over it. Yes, that was it, a canopy with pillars. His hand touched one of them and felt a cold slime upon it. There were two steps, smooth and shallow, and beyond the steps a heavy door. He remembered seeing it in the daylight, with a scar on it where the knocker had been wrenched away, he supposed for salvage. His left hand found the place and felt it now. Quite a deep hole where a nail had been driven in. The nail, the scar, just touched his thought and was flung off it by the sudden realization that the surface he was touching was a slanting one. It should have been flat, and it wasn’t flat. It should have been steady, and it wasn’t steady. It slanted and it moved. The door was ajar.