The Empty Frame is my fifth ghost story. As before, having decided to write about ghosts, I wanted to find a basic story with some real “meat” in it, to start me off. By this I mean that I didn’t want to invent a series of spooky happenings out of my own head. I am not very good at that and if a writer isn’t convinced by her own story you may be sure that her readers won’t be convinced either.
So I looked around for a convincing story with a ghostly theme on which to base my own book and I found one quite near home. The other books had taken me to Ireland, Cheshire, Scotland and London but I discovered the story for The Empty Frame on my own doorstep, in nearby Buckinghamshire where I lived before I moved to Oxford and where I was a schoolteacher.
In a little book called Discovering Ghosts I read a story called “The Blotted Copy Book”. This described the ghost of an Elizabethan lady who has frequently been seen walking about in Bisham Abbey, an ancient house on the Thames, near Marlow. This is now a centre for sport and conferences but in the sixteenth century it was the home of the Hoby family and before that it had been, among other things, a home for the Knights Templar.
The bare bones of the story are these: In Tudor times one of Lady Elizabeth Hoby’s sons died a mysterious death. He may have been locked up in a room to get on with his lessons, as a punishment, or he may literally have been forgotten. It is possible that somebody murdered him, or killed him accidentally, in a fit of temper. No body was ever discovered at Bisham but the tradition of the dead child persisted and in the 1850s some workmen, pulling up a floor, discovered a collection of Elizabethan school books. These belonged to a William Hoby and they were said to be full of blots! Unfortunately, and as you might expect, these books have long since disappeared.
From this had developed the story of a “cruel mother”, Lady Elizabeth Hoby, and the idea that she might have driven her son too hard over his lessons, that he was perhaps rather stupid, that possibly she beat him about the head until he died. While it is hard to believe that a mother would have done such a thing (and one theory is that she went riding one day, with young Queen Elizabeth, thinking he was in the care of a servant, and stayed the night at Windsor) it is her ghost that haunts the Abbey and it is certainly very troubled. Tragic Lady Hoby has been seen walking the corridors washing her son’s blood from her hands in a basin which floats mysteriously before her. She reminds us of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth who could not escape from the guilt of killing King Duncan. “Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”
I went to Bisham Abbey to see it for myself and to talk to some of the people who lived and worked there. On arrival I was given a glossy brochure advertising the sports and conference centre. The cover portrayed a ghostly Elizabethan lady (somebody posing for the part of course) walking under an arched doorway. So whatever the truth of the story, the legend had certainly persisted. I learned that at one time school parties had come to stay at Bisham Abbey, to enjoy its sporting facilities, and that some of the children had not liked their quarters very much, particularly those sleeping in the old parts of the Abbey. They reported a strange atmosphere which frightened them. And it was not only young people who had picked up these mysterious feelings. One or two of the sports coaches had also sensed an unhappiness in the air, a sensation that all was not well. I was told that one of them had left altogether and taken a job elsewhere. Of course these are only stories and they may well have been elaborated in the telling, but for the purposes of writing a ghost novel they were excellent material.
After wandering about the Abbey and its grounds and looking long and hard at the portrait of the formidable and unsmiling Lady Hoby which hangs in its Great Hall, I made an unforgettable visit to the lady I call “Miss Adeline” in my story. She knew the Abbey intimately and while she admitted that she herself (like me) had never seen a ghost, and certainly not Lady Hoby, she had heard too much from too many sensible people to dismiss as ridiculous the ghostly sightings of an obviously troubled woman in Elizabethan dress. It was she who told me that the portrait “did not like to be moved”, of how a locked conference room had once had its pretty flower arrangements (daffodils) wrecked, by an unseen hand and how, when the ghost walks in the Abbey, the frame holding the portrait is supposed to turn blank. She told me too of the wounded soldiers who convalesced there in the Second World War and of the nurse who, changing a poultice, heard an inexplicable weeping in the night. Lastly she showed me a scrap of beautiful fabric which may have belonged to Elizabeth the First, who was a frequent visitor when she was young.
From Miss Adeline, I went to Henley Library where I read a history of Bisham Abbey for myself because the author, Piers Compton, had also talked with her. Here I found the story of the retired admiral who, sitting alone in a panelled room after a late game of chess, and “overlooked by the painting”, saw “Dame Hoby” standing beside him, and fled in terror.
I went home, opened a “plotting” notebook and sat thinking for a very long time about all I had heard and seen, my brain full of the most marvellous bits and pieces. I knew that I had enough, and more than enough, for my story. But how was I to begin?
Into my head came Magnus, a modern boy who, like William Hoby, had been abused and who had suffered cruelty. In my story his father and mother were both sick in their minds, otherwise he would not have suffered so. But why, I asked myself, did Lady Hoby kill her child? Was she, too, mentally sick? Or was it an accident? Or did she simply lose her temper and hit him too hard or did she have a tyrannical husband ambitious to succeed at court? Was the death his doing? Could he not tolerate the idea of a stupid son?
Magnus was followed by Floss, desperate to land the part of Lady Macbeth in her school play – a great opportunity for me to explore the theme of guilt. Then practical, no-nonsense Sam came along, Sam who is always on the lookout for scientific explanations for everything but who is at last taken by surprise when he sees Lady Neale for himself.
When I read books for my own enjoyment I greatly dislike it when the plot is neatly tied up at the end, and absolutely everything is “explained”. “To see through all things is the same as not to see” said C S Lewis, and I agree with him.
The Empty Frame is meant to keep you guessing. You will never know the real truth behind the story of the dead boy because, in real life, nobody did know. So the book ends with a question mark. The other thing I dislike in my books is an ending of unrelieved sadness and gloom. There is certainly a lot of suffering in The Empty Frame but at the end of the story the important things have been resolved and we go forward in hope. William and Magnus hold hands, if you like, across the centuries. The modern boy has laid the Elizabethan boy to rest and his poor tortured mother can have peace at last.
In an act of thanksgiving Lady Neale saves Magnus from death by drowning. Ghosts, as the three children discover, are “about time” and in the ghost’s final action the time barriers are truly crossed. “Many waters cannot quench love neither can the floods drown it” wrote King Solomon. The story of The Empty Frame tells us that love is the strongest force in the world, and that it is indestructible.
Ann Pilling, 1997