‘Would one of these rooms have belonged to Annie Bishop?’ an American accent asked from the back of the group. They didn’t often get Americans on the tours. Americans always seemed to prefer to visit York or Harrogate rather than an old Georgian house in the middle of nowhere.
‘Yes,’ Viola replied. ‘Annie would have slept up here although we don’t have any records as to who slept in which room.’
‘Would she have shared a room?’ somebody else asked, slightly out of breath from the climb up to the servants’ quarters.
‘From what we know Annie was sixteen when she started as a housemaid so she would almost certainly have shared a room with one of the other maids. But later on, once she was a lady’s maid, she may well have earned the privilege of her own room – not that that counted for much. If you take a look you’ll see how small and bare the rooms were. We’ve kept them almost exactly as they would have been in the 1920s and 30s.’
‘Not much room to keep any of your stuff,’ a woman in a pink cardigan said, peering into the room.
Her friend nudged her. ‘They wouldn’t have had any stuff, silly,’ she said. ‘They were servants.’
‘It must have been awful,’ a young girl was saying to her mother. ‘She was the same age as me when she started working here. I can’t imagine.’
Viola felt herself wanting to stand up for the ghosts of the people who used to work here at Haverford House. She loved her job and the people she met on the tours. But she also loved the house and the people who used to work here, the people who had kept this house running decade after decade. She could still feel their presence in the very walls.
‘It would actually have been seen as a very good opportunity at the time,’ she said, smiling at the girl. ‘Annie’s mother would likely have been very proud of her.’
‘Would she have still been able to see her mum?’
Viola nodded. ‘She would have had an afternoon off each week and her mother lived in the village so she’d have still been able to go home for tea once a week.’
‘It’s not much is it?’ the girl said, looking miserable.
‘She wouldn’t have expected any more. Times were very different.’ Viola stuck to her usual platitudes and swallowed down the words she really wanted to say about privilege and poverty, about class divisions and women’s rights.
‘And Annie Bishop really just disappeared one day?’ the woman in the pink cardigan asked, her voice loud in the corridor outside the servants’ rooms. Viola was glad of the question, changing the subject from a complicated social history to one of her own particular favourite subjects.
‘That’s right. On the night of a house party at Haverford at the end of August 1933, when Annie was twenty-one, she packed up her few belongings, wrote what has become a rather famous letter, which she left with her employer, and was never seen again. Nobody ever found out what happened to her.’
‘Someone was arrested weren’t they?’
‘A man staying at the house was questioned by the police,’ Viola gently corrected, ‘but there was no evidence to charge him and…’
‘So they say,’ the woman in the pink cardigan interrupted. ‘But it’s always the boyfriend isn’t it. Just in this case the boyfriend was rich enough to pay off the police.’ The rest of the group began to nod and mutter among themselves.
It was always the way. The story of the disappearance of Annie Bishop was synonymous with Haverford House and the village of Cranmere and – in one of its various incantations – had become local legend, as famous as the day the king came to the village. Visitors came from all over the country and, occasionally, even other countries, to see where Annie Bishop had spent her last years, her last days, and to give voice to their own theories about what happened to her. People disappeared all the time, both then and now, but there was something about the story of Annie Bishop and the letter she left behind that had captured the imagination of people from all over the world. The version of the story that had taken hold most strongly was that Annie had been murdered by person or persons unknown, and that the police inquiry had been bungled.
People love an unsolved murder, and Viola’s story of Annie Bishop’s ghost that still haunted Haverford House played on this. She never gave anything away though, preferring the people on her tours to come to their own conclusions.
Viola had felt an affinity to Annie from the moment she’d first heard her story – a woman who, like herself, had wanted something more than what she felt was on offer and had taken an opportunity that had, somehow, gone wrong. She didn’t know what had happened on the night of 25 August 1933, the night Annie disappeared, but she often wished that she did. Was the woman in the pink cardigan right? Had Thomas Everard, the man questioned but not charged for the maid’s murder, had something to do with her disappearance and then paid off the police to stop asking questions? Had someone else got to Annie first? Or was it something else – an accident for example, a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Nobody had ever discovered the reason Annie Bishop failed to leave for America with Thomas Everard on that fateful night. All Viola or any of the Haverford tourists had were stories and conjecture. Whether or not it was murder, Viola had always wondered if the case would have been left open like that had Annie been a member of the upper classes, rather than just a lady’s maid.
And it was this that often made Viola wonder if Annie had ever left the grounds of Haverford at all that night. If she had, surely she would have made herself known later, when she knew that everyone had been looking for her and the police had been involved. Over the years she had become more and more convinced that Annie was somewhere here at Haverford. But where?
Viola’s colleagues at Haverford House and her friends in the village laughed gently at her convictions. ‘She just left for a better life,’ they’d say. ‘You only pretend not to believe that something terrible happened because it brings in more revenue for the house, which is fair enough.’
That was partly true of course. Bringing in revenue for Haverford House was Viola’s job after all, but there was more to it. She had been fascinated from the moment she first read the story of the old house in Yorkshire and the strange disappearance of one of its maids a few years before the Second World War. It had been reading that story that had made her apply for the job at Haverford House in the first place and the reason she’d packed her bag so suddenly and instinctively to leave London for Yorkshire.
One of the reasons anyway. But she didn’t allow herself to think about the other reasons very often.
‘There’s a New York connection to the story of Annie Bishop isn’t there?’ asked the American man at the back of the group. ‘I’d be interested to hear more about that.’
Before Viola had a chance to respond a little girl of about seven or eight turned to her. ‘When can we go and see the dollhouses?’ she asked.
‘Well, the dollhouses are in the nursery. Shall we head there now and I can tell you the story of Annie Bishop on the way?’
Haverford was famous for more than just the disappearance of a lady’s maid. While the legend was a draw, it wasn’t the only thing that brought visitors out into rural Yorkshire for the day. The grounds were exquisite and the garden tours very popular, the ballroom ceiling was something to behold and even the café passed muster. The coffee cake, in Viola’s opinion, was the best she’d ever tasted. But Annie Bishop’s story certainly got people through the doors, especially when embellished by Viola into a potential murder mystery. There were old houses all over the country that were having to be sold off because they were no longer viable to run, either as private estates or as tourist attractions. Visitor numbers were waning but Viola was determined that would not happen to Haverford.
Because where else would she go if she wasn’t here?
*
‘Thank you so much for that,’ the American man said to her at the end of the tour. ‘I really enjoyed it.’
‘I’m glad,’ Viola replied looking up at him. He was very handsome – dark hair, blue eyes and those all-American whiter than white teeth. ‘We don’t get many Americans visiting us and I certainly haven’t had anyone ask about Thomas Everard in a while.’ Interest in what happened to Annie Bishop was dropping off. Viola knew that, but this year was the seventieth anniversary of her disappearance and Viola was determined to make something of it.
‘What about Australians?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Viola looked up at him.
‘Your accent,’ he replied. ‘I just thought I detected a little Antipodean lilt.’
Viola smiled. ‘Yes, I’m from New South Wales but I’ve been in England a very long time.’
‘Chase Matthews,’ the American said, holding out a strong, tanned hand.
‘Viola Hendricks,’ she replied taking the proffered hand and noticing a spark of electricity when her skin touched his.
‘Viola like the play?’ Chase asked.
‘Twelfth Night you mean?’
Chase nodded. ‘The play Thomas Everard was putting on here at Haverford House the summer your Annie Bishop disappeared.’
‘You seem to know a lot about Thomas Everard.’ Viola hadn’t meant it to sound so accusatory. She simply wasn’t used to people taking such an interest in the history of the house. Especially once the tour was over. ‘But in answer to your question, yes. My mother named me after the character in Twelfth Night. It was her favourite play.’
‘Do you have a brother called Sebastian?’ Chase smiled his very white smile.
‘Funnily enough, yes.’
‘Really? I was only joking!’
Viola looked away, hoping to change the subject. There were times when she didn’t want to talk about her brother – it was always the same when people found out who he was, so she remained non-committal. Chase, clearly picking up on this, changed the course of the conversation instead.
‘So tell me, Viola Hendricks. Do you think that he did it?’
‘Thomas Everard, you mean?’
‘Yes. Do you think he killed Annie Bishop?’
‘He was questioned several times,’ Viola replied, warming to one of her favourite subjects. ‘But there was never enough evidence to charge him. It’s always been a bit of a mystery.’
‘But what do you think?’
Viola hesitated. She rarely gave away her own ideas. ‘I don’t think he did it,’ she said eventually. ‘I think he was meant to meet her that night and for some reason she didn’t turn up. But then people point out that it’s always the boyfriend and I wonder if I’m giving Mr Everard too much credit.’
‘Like the woman in pink on the tour today?’
‘Yes,’ Viola said. ‘To be fair her theory makes more sense but I don’t know…’
‘You think someone else did it?’
‘Maybe or, well, isn’t it more likely she had an accident somewhere on the grounds and…’
‘And her ghost still haunts the estate.’ Chase smiled, his eyes wide in mock horror.
Viola laughed. ‘You never know.’
Chase nudged her. ‘Perhaps I’ll need to stow away one night and see what goes bump in the night after closing time.’
‘We’ve actually had people try to do that,’ Viola said as she started to round up the straggling visitors and herd them towards the gift shop before closing time. ‘A group tried to hide in the house before we locked up for the night once last summer. They claimed to be professional ghost hunters writing a paper on the paranormal and investigating the mysterious sound of dusting in the library. Luckily we found them and escorted them off the premises but I do wonder if we should do some after-hours ghost hunts in the autumn as there’s clearly a market for it.’ She was always thinking up new ways of getting visitors through the gates and making the house turn a profit. She wished she could be a bit more successful at it. If enthusiasm paid the bills, she’d have nothing to worry about.
‘Well, I’d be up for it if you did!’ Chase stood next to her and suddenly Viola felt her mouth go dry, as though she didn’t really know what to say.
He ducked his head. ‘I’d better be going, Viola Hendricks,’ he said. ‘I’m staying in the village for a few days so I hope to see you around.’
It wasn’t until he’d left that she thought Chase Matthews might have been flirting with her and she remembered that flicker of feeling when her hand had touched his.
It had been so long that she’d almost forgotten how it felt.