It may have been an owl that awakened Honeybath in the small hours, but what he awoke to was a ghost. The ghost – which like many ghosts might have been no more than a perambulating scarecrow in a white sheet – was standing silently in a corner of the bedroom, in which the only illumination was from a faint moonlight. There was no reason to suppose that the ghost had uttered, moaned, or clanked a chain: its effect was of one waiting considerately to be taken notice of. Honeybath was not alarmed or even surprised, and he might thus be said to be conforming to the customary behaviour of persons encountering veridical apparitions as distinct from the story-book variety. Honeybath, in fact, got briskly out of bed.
‘Can I do anything for you?’ he asked politely.
At this the ghost did move, and did produce a sound. It turned and walked slowly towards the door to the accompaniment of a faint tap-tapping on the polished floor. It opened the door (which is a much more difficult feat for a ghost than merely vanishing through a solid wall), passed out of the bedroom, and closed the door behind it. Then the tap-tapping receded down the corridor.
A brief irresolution now possessed Honeybath. Although his privacy had been invaded, and his just repose disturbed, it was really no business of his. There was no doubt in his mind that he had simply witnessed something already described to him: untoward nocturnal behaviour on the part of Miss Camilla Wyndowe. Whether somnambulistically or otherwise, the old lady was prone to these wanderings around Mullion Castle – and apparently with a degree of mobility scarcely commanded by her on other occasions. He couldn’t recall that Lady Mullion had recorded herself as taking any action during the similar incident she had described to him, so he had no clue as to what, if anything, he should himself do. It was hard to believe that this aged and crazed person was allowed thus to wander at will, or that she was doing so now other than because, thus in the middle of the night, she had eluded the care of whatever nurse or similar attendant had the duty of looking after her. She had been without torch or candle, and although she presumably knew the castle well it could not be anything except a singularly dangerous place to wander about in after such a fashion. It would be irresponsible not to follow her at once, and keep an eye on her till he could somehow summon help.
Honeybath, unfortunately, had neither torch nor candle either – and not even a box of matches. Unlike Miss Wyndowe, he was totally unfamiliar with the lay-out of the castle, vague about which way to turn as soon as he left his room, totally unaware of where anybody else was sleeping. So he must catch up with the old lady before she disappeared from view, and keep her in sight until he could decide how, with least fuss, to alert one or another member of the household.
These thoughts had taken him out of his bedroom and into the corridor. There was fortunately a gleam of moonlight here as well, but it afforded no glimpse of Miss Wyndowe. It looked as if there was nothing for it but move about knocking on doors at random until he found a tenanted one and could report on the situation. But now, half-way down the corridor, another door opened and Miss Wyndowe emerged through it. She shut it softly behind her, crossed the corridor to another door, appeared to listen intently for a moment, and then disappeared into this further room. It occurred to Honeybath that she was simply engaged in the bizarre ritual of making a round of the castle and satisfying herself that all its inmates were safely in bed and asleep. Perhaps she was re-enacting, in some strange fashion, what had once been her actual duty in some different situation.
She was in the corridor again, and again closing a door softly behind her. She moved on – painfully and with the aid of her stick, yet purposefully and as if she had a good deal still in front of her. This went on, confusingly and down several corridors, for some time. Honeybath felt that his duty was now clear. He must tackle Miss Wyndowe himself and quietly suggest that she might be better back in bed. With this intention he walked straight towards her. But even as he did so she turned and looked at him. Or, rather, she performed the first of these actions, but not the second. Her eyes were closed as if in the most tranquil sleep.
In the same moment that Honeybath witnessed this startling phenomenon something happened to the moonlight. It must have been a full moon that had been observing these events, but one veiled behind cloud. Now the cloud had dispersed, with the result that a good deal more swam into view. At its further end this corridor was revealed as merging into a thoroughly medieval piece of décor: a vaulted roof, lancet windows, and the beginning of what appeared to be a spiral staircase ascending to some chamber or turret above. Before this stood Miss Wyndowe, who had become a sort of Woman in White – or rather some enigmatical figure corresponding to that in an earlier species of Gothic romance. There was something peculiarly unnerving about this small transformation, but it was not this alone that gave Honeybath pause. He supposed that Miss Wyndowe must be in the strictest sense sleep-walking, and he recalled having somewhere heard or read that considerable danger attends the abrupt arousing of a person in such a condition. Grave nervous shock may result. And as Miss Wyndowe was already far from in the best of nervous conditions, on her the effect might be all the more disastrous. So Honeybath hesitated again. And as he did so Miss Wyndowe disappeared.
As Miss Wyndowe disappeared the moonlight disappeared also – much as if the old lady had herself switched it off. A much denser cloud must have turned up. All that Honeybath could do was listen, and this he did. For some moments the tap-tap of the walking-stick was audible, and then it faded away. But in its place there was another sound: a low hum which, although he had heard it only twice before, he at once recognized. Miss Wyndowe’s lift was in motion. It was to be presumed that, her unconscious mind having satisfied itself that all was in order at Mullion Castle, she was returning to her own elevated situation, where she would no doubt simply get into bed again. And this meant that Honeybath could do the same – always presuming that he had not already so lost his bearings that he had little hope of finding his own bedroom door. This was an alarming thought, and one apt to conjure up in the imagination all sorts of embarrassing possibilities.
But, after all, was the inference he had just made a secure one? Lifts can go down as well as up, and he was fairly clear that he was now located on the second floor of the castle. Might not Miss Wyndowe be proposing to extend her vigilance to the rather splendid apartments – the ‘state apartments’, as the guiding ladies no doubt called them – that lay below? What if, having done that, she soared aloft again, went one higher than her own aerie, and began to perambulate those crenulations with which the ennobled descendants of Sir Rufus Windy had been permitted to embellish their residence rather late on in the Tudor age? This was a horrible thought, and eminently Gothic. Honeybath felt that further action was required of him, and he moved hastily and quite blindly down the corridor. As with so many unconsidered actions, this had an unfortunate result. He tripped over some invisible but hard and painful object (it was, in fact, a fire bucket), fell sprawling on the floor with what seemed to him an overpowering effect of racket, and picked himself up amid a blaze of light. Another bedroom door had opened, a switch had been flicked, and in nothing more modest than his pyjamas he was confronting Lady Patience Wyndowe.
Patty was even more lightly clad than he was – not an untoward circumstance in the case of a young woman who, on a warm summer night, has jumped straight out of bed. Honeybath was immediately sensible of the impropriety of the confrontation, and cast round for words with which to excuse himself. To Patty, naturally, no such nonsense occurred.
‘Hullo, Mr Honeybath,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got lost, have you?’
‘Well, yes – I have in a way.’ It struck Honeybath that Patty might have forgotten that he had been put in a bedroom with its own bathroom opening off it, and might be supposing that he had gone wandering off in search of a loo. ‘I haven’t been sleep-walking, or anything of that sort. But I rather think your Great-aunt has. She paid me an odd kind of visit, and I felt I’d better follow her up. I’m afraid that my tumbling around in that clumsy way must have awakened you.’
‘I wasn’t asleep. I was thinking about something.’ Momentarily, Patty gave the impression of still being a good deal more interested in whatever she had been meditating than in the state of affairs that had interrupted her. ‘But where is Camilla now?’
‘Well, I heard her lift. So I suppose she must have returned to her own part of the house. Is this habit of hers supposed to be altogether safe? Your mother offered me a kind of warning about it. But I was a little alarmed, all the same.’
‘I’m so sorry. But our doctor says there’s no real danger: or not on such familiar ground. But Mrs Trumper will be upset. She looks after Camilla up there, you know, and is very vigilant. But the poor soul has to sleep, after all. I’d better go up and see.’
‘Perhaps you better had. Shall I come with you, Patty?’
‘No, I think not. The arrival of a male might alarm them both. But it’s chilly out here. Stay in my room, Mr Honeybath, until I’ve seen that all is well, and then I’ll return you to base. It is a confusing place, Mullion, I’m afraid. You can nip into my bed if you’re shivering.’
Honeybath accepted this proposal, at least in part, and not without the disturbing thought that he had involved himself in a situation recalling that of Mr Pickwick and the middle-aged lady in the double-bedded room. The night was much too warm for shivering, and he supposed that Patty had not been able to resist making a little fun of him. They went into her room; she pulled on a dressing-gown, and then departed with the sort of reassuring smile and nod that might be offered to a small boy who has to be left alone for a few minutes on a railway platform. Honeybath took no exception to this further mild mischief. He was coming to form a good opinion of Lady Patience Wyndowe.
There was a comfortable chintz-covered chair, in which he settled down now with as much unconcern as if the room belonged to a daughter of his own. He found himself wondering about fathers and daughters. Did they commonly establish a really confidential relationship? To which parent did a girl commonly first take her troubles, and to which parent a boy? It was something he knew nothing about. You could keep your eyes open for an answer, he supposed, when reading novels – or you could if you believed that novelists have all that to tell in a reliable way about human nature. But he rather doubted whether they had. Did even Cervantes tell you as much about Don Quixote de la Mancha as Velazquez told you, much more economically, about a whole phalanx of Spanish royalty and nobility?
Honeybath sat up in his chair, having realized that this was so muddled a question that it must have drifted into his head only when he was on the brink of falling asleep. It would be very absurd if Patty came back and found that he had dropped off into an elderly gentleman’s nap. And it was about Patty that he had really been thinking. For some reason that he couldn’t pin down, he was strongly persuaded that she had on her mind a problem more commanding than that constituted by the erratic behaviour of Great-aunt Camilla. Would she take anything of the kind to her father – seeking the wisdom of his riper years? It was this specific question, lurking in his head, that had prompted him to ask himself the conundrum in general terms.
He couldn’t recall that he had ever before thus sat in a young woman’s bedroom in the small hours, and as he now took his bearings in it he had a feeling that he mustn’t in any sense poke around. But he could look around, and this he did with the idea of possibly finding out a little more about Patty’s character. That she was a perfectly sensible girl was evident from the way she had handled the present situation. He had already decided that she had a clear head, and he wondered whether it contained much in the way of brains as well. The Wyndowes as a family had never much gone in for intellectual pursuits, nor had they made any mark in the public life of the country; in fact it might fairly be said that nobody had ever heard of them. In this they were by no means singular among the English aristocracy. But Patty’s mother belonged to a different tradition. There had been plenty of brains there for many generations, at least of the quality that takes people possessed of the springboard of rank and wealth pretty far. Lady Mullion belonged here; she was, at least, a woman of character; and it might not have been quite fairly that she had placed herself among those who feel no need for ‘scope’. Lady Patience might be like that.
There were a few pictures on the walls. They had the appearance of having been picked out of the general Wyndowe clutter of such things by the exercise of a good deal of taste, and included a couple of William Ward’s engravings after George Morland, a small aquatint probably by Sandby, and a tiny watercolour of a cottage and a tree and a boat which could only be by John Varley. All this told one no more than that Patty had predictably rural tastes, and the same impression was rendered by a row of books on a shelf sufficiently close to Honeybath to be scanned from where he sat. There were juvenile works about small girls and their four-footed friends, grown-up works on botany and gardening, more than a dozen anthologies of English and French poetry, and a number of fat volumes of a self-improving kind, typified by Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. It was Honeybath’s overriding impression that Patty had been very correctly educated, although not quite in the way that she deserved. There was nothing else to be particularly remarked in the room, unless it was a diminutive vase on an otherwise bare bedside table in which had been stuck two or three unimpressive sprigs of wallflower. (Honeybath was not in a position to attribute any significance to this.)
The door opened and Patty appeared again. It struck Honeybath as he got to his feet that she had been absent for quite a long time.
‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Not until we’ve talked a little. I’ll perch on the bed.’
Honeybath sat down again. Patty had spoken in rather a commanding way, and he supposed that she had something serious to say about the mission she had just accomplished.
‘Is the old lady safely tucked away?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes – safe and sound. But she only got there some time after I did, and Mrs Trumper had woken up and was in a bit of a stew. I calmed her down. Goodness knows how far afield Camilla had been. But she’s probably asleep by now.’
‘Wasn’t she asleep all the time?’
‘Either that, I suppose, or in some sort of trance or state of general dottiness. Isn’t there something called a fugue, that means bolting after something you want without knowing it, and even having forgotten who you are? I’ve read about that somewhere, but I don’t believe Dr Hinkstone has. He’s our GP, and a bit old-fashioned, it seems to me. But he’s probably right when he says the main thing is not to badger her.’
‘I see.’ Honeybath reflected that something of the comfortable Wyndowe vagueness sounded in these remarks.
‘Cyprian says that something nasty must have happened to her in the woodshed when she was a kid, and that little Martin Atlay was probably the villain of the piece.’
‘Little–? Oh, you mean the vicar.’
‘Yes, of course. He’s been a man-and-boy character around these parts since the middle ages. He’s even older than he seems – and probably one of our innumerable distant relations, who picked up the family living as a perk. Don’t you think the Church of England is an extraordinary institution?’
‘I believe I do.’ Honeybath was beginning to find this conversation odd. ‘Dr Atlay certainly seems interested in your family history. Your father told me to consult him if I ever wanted to find my way around it.’
‘You’re not likely to do that, I suppose.’ Patty had settled back on her pillows as if this were really the start of a sustained chat. ‘Did Dr Atlay have a great deal to say when you were sheltering in the church?’
‘He was variously informative.’
‘Did he blow off about what he called the grand principle of subordination?’
‘He certainly did.’ Honeybath was surprised. ‘Is it an obsession of his?’
‘Something like that. What do you think?’
‘About just what, Patty?’
‘Gentle and simple, and so on. Class and privilege, and different social habits and assumptions and kinds and levels of education. Everything of that sort.’ Patty paused for long enough to afford Honeybath a sudden inkling of the nature of her present mystery. ‘Do you approve of all that?’
‘In a general way, no.’ It seemed to Honeybath that here was yet another delicate situation confronting him – unexpectedly, and at what must now be near dawn. He realized, too, that he was being consulted by this young woman, still almost a stranger to him, in a fashion that might readily flatter his vanity. He must not, on this abruptly emerging territory, be led into producing facile or irresponsible remarks. ‘But for a start,’ he said, ‘what are essentially class differences have never for long been successfully ironed out of any civilized society – which doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be agreeable if they could be. But they do go awfully deep into human nature, Patty. Some primitive people seem at a first glance to have managed, or retained, an egalitarian set-up or ready-made communist Utopia. But scrutiny often shows them to be rigidly hierarchical, after all. Take marriage, for instance. It turns out that you can marry only within, or only outside, a set band of relationships.’
‘You mean it would be a terrible thing if I married the vet’s son?’
‘Come, come, Patty. This is serious, or I suspect it is. And I don’t believe that the vet has a son – or, if he has, that you’ve ever set eyes on him.’
‘Perfectly true. I was only–’
‘Put it this way.’ Honeybath paused to choose his words. ‘Think of foreign marriages: marrying, say, a Frenchman or a German. It’s something that happens rather more frequently in your class than in others – under influences and assumptions that go right back, I suppose, into a feudal age. But if it’s wise to think twice about any marriage, then it’s wise to think three times about a foreign one. That’s because difficulties that seem trivial and unimportant when one falls in love can turn out to be pretty formidable, after all.’
‘And the vet’s son would require thinking about four times?’ Henry’s elder daughter had fired up as she asked this. ‘And perhaps it should be five times if–’
‘Patty, dear, stop counting. And realize that I’ve been talking only in the most general way – and saying what any elderly man like me would be likely to say. But on any specific situation that turned up I’d have absolutely no title to say a word.’
‘It comes to being on one’s own?’
‘That’s a very hard question, indeed.’
‘So you don’t know whether Boosie or I ought to consult old Dr Atlay about the vet’s son? He’s supposed to be our spiritual adviser.’
‘I do know that neither of you is remotely likely to do anything of the kind, so I needn’t pronounce upon the matter. But I’m grateful to your great-aunt for getting us off to a good start together, Patty. We must talk again. But now you have a second old person to see back to bed.’
‘Oh, dear – how boring I’ve been!’ It was unaffectedly and not defensively that Patty said this as she jumped to the floor and led the way from her room. She was undoubtedly, Honeybath thought a very nice child. His eye fell momentarily on the wallflowers as he followed her into the corridor.