This House Is Haunted Read online

  Sitting back now, I watched as the scenery, what little I could see of it anyway, passed by. The carriage was rather comfortable and I was glad of that. A thick blanket had been left on the seat and I laid it across my lap, settling my hands atop and feeling quite contented. As the roads over which we passed were rather bumpy it would have been a much more difficult journey had not the seating been so exquisite, which gave me every reason to believe that my employer was a man of substantial means. I fell to thinking about H. Bennet and the life that I was going towards. I prayed that the home would be a happy one, that the Bennets would be a loving couple and that their children, however many there might be, would be kind and welcoming. I had no home of my own now, after all, and assuming that the employment worked out and they took to me as I hoped to take to them, then Gaudlin Hall might be where I resided for many years to come.

  In my mind, I pictured a large house with many rooms, something rather palatial, with a spiralling driveway and lawns that went on as far as the eye could see. I think I based this entirely on the fact that my host’s name was Bennet and I associated this with the young lady at the heart of Pride and Prejudice. Her story had resolved itself in an extraordinary mansion, Mr. Darcy’s home at Pemberley. Perhaps these Bennets would have earned similar good fortune? Although of course Elizabeth and her sisters were part of a fiction and this, the house that I was travelling towards, was not. Still, as I reached out and ran my hand against the thick fabric of the carriage seat, it did pass through my mind that they must be moneyed at least, and that should mean that Gaudlin was something special.

  “Mr. Bennet,” I said, leaning forward again and wiping my face, for a thin drizzle of rain had begun to fall. “He is in business, I suppose?”

  “Who?” asked Heckling, holding fast to his reins, keeping a close eye on the dark road ahead.

  “Mr. Bennet,” I repeated. “My new employer. I wondered what he does for a living. Is he in business perhaps? Or …” I struggled to think of an alternative. (I barely even knew what “in business” meant, other than the fact that a great many men seemed to describe themselves thus and seemed unwilling or unable to define the term in more intelligible ways.) “Is he the local Member perhaps? I understand that a great many wealthy families offer the head of the household to Parliament.”

  Heckling deigned to turn now and he fixed me with an irritated expression. Truthfully, he looked at me as if I was a dog, scampering about his feet, desperate for attention, yapping and pawing at him when all he wanted was to be left alone with his thoughts. Another in my position might have looked away but I held his glance; he would not intimidate me. I was to be governess, after all, and he was merely the Gaudlin man.

  “Who be he?” he asked finally in a contemptuous fashion.

  “Who be who?” I replied, then shook my head, annoyed by how quickly I was adopting his Norfolk style. “What do you mean by who be he?” I asked.

  “You said Mr. Bennet. I don’t know any Mr. Bennet.”

  I laughed. Was this a trick of some sort? A game that he and the other servants had invented to make the new governess feel ill at ease? If it was, it was cruel and malicious and I wanted no part of it. I knew from teaching my small girls that if one showed the slightest sign of vulnerability at the start then one was lost for ever. I was made of stronger stuff than that and was determined to show it.

  “Really, Mr. Heckling,” I said, laughing a little, trying to keep my tone light. “Of course you do. He sent you to collect me, after all.”

  “I were sent to collect you,” agreed Heckling. “But not by no Mr. Bennet.”

  A sudden rush of wind forced me back in my seat as the rain started to fall in heavier drops and I wished that Heckling had brought the covered carriage rather than the open one. (Foolish girl! I was still adrift in my notions of Pemberley. In my mind there was an entire fleet of carriages waiting at Gaudlin Hall for me, one for every day of the week.)

  “Did the housekeeper send you then?” I asked.

  “Mr. Raisin sent me,” he replied. “Well, Mr. Raisin and Miss Bennet anyway. Between them, I s’pose.”

  “And who, pray tell,” I asked, “is Mr. Raisin?”

  Heckling stroked his chin and, with the approach of evening, I could see the manner in which his dark whiskers were turning to grey in the moonlight. “Lawyer fellow, i’nt he,” he said.

  “A lawyer?” I asked.

  “Aye.”

  I considered this. “But whose lawyer?”

  “Gaudlin lawyer.”

  I said nothing, simply placed these facts together in my mind and considered them for a moment. “Mr. Raisin is the family solicitor,” I said, more for my own benefit than his. “And he instructed you to collect me from the station. Well, who is this Miss Bennet then? She is the master’s sister perhaps?”

  “What master?” asked Heckling and, really, I had had quite enough by now.

  “The master of Gaudlin,” I said with a sigh.

  Heckling laughed, then seemed to think better of it. “Ain’t no master of Gaudlin,” he said finally. “Not no more. Missus took care of that, di’nt she?”

  “No master?” I asked, wondering what ridiculous game he was playing with me. “But of course there’s a master. There must be. Who is this Miss Bennet if not some relative of the master? Why, she is the one who employed me, after all. I assumed she was head of the household but according to you she holds no such position.”

  “Miss Bennet were now’t more than a governess,” he said. “Just like you. Now’t more, now’t less.”

  “But that’s ridiculous. Why would the governess advertise for a new governess? It’s quite beyond her responsibilities.”

  “She were leaving, weren’t she?” explained Heckling. “But she wouldn’t go till she found someone new. I took her in carriage to t’station, she got out, told me to wait, said you’d be along shortly and here you are. To take her place. Winnie here din’t have more than ten minutes to rest.”

  I sat back, open-mouthed, uncertain what to make of this. It sounded ridiculous. According to this man, this driver, Gaudlin Hall had no master, my position had been advertised by the previous incumbent, who, upon knowing that I had arrived in the county, saw fit to leave it immediately. What sense could such a thing make? I decided the man must be mad or drunk or both and resolved not to discuss this with him any further and simply sit back, keep my own counsel, and wait until I arrived at our destination, at which point matters would surely be explained.

  And then I remembered. HB. The woman who had collided with me after I disembarked the London train. It must have been her. H. Bennet. She had looked at me and seemed to know me. She must have been watching for a young woman who fitted my description, satisfied herself that I was she, and then made her escape. But why would she do such a thing? It was extraordinary behaviour. Quite incomprehensible.

  Chapter Six

  IMUST HAVE DOZED off shortly after this for I was soon in a fitful, uncomfortable sleep. I dreamed that I was back in my school, or rather something resembling St. Elizabeth’s but not entirely the same, and Mrs. Farnsworth was there, speaking to my small girls, while Father was seated in the back row engaged in conversation with someone I identified as Miss Bennet, although she did not bear the same physical characteristics as the woman on the platform. Where she had been stocky and red-haired, the woman in my dream was dark and beautiful with Mediterranean features. No one would speak to me—it was as if they did not see me at all—and from there things grew rather more hazy and descended into a blend of strangeness and mystery, in the way that dreams will, but I fancy that I was asleep for some time for when I woke it was even darker than before, night-time now, and we were turning on to a narrow laneway that opened out finally to present a view of two extraordinary iron gates.

  “Gaudlin Hall up yonder,” said Heckling, pausing the horse for a moment and indicating some place in the distance, although it was impossible to see it clearly through the darkness of the nigh
t. I sat up in my seat, adjusting my skirt beneath the blanket, aware of a stale, dry taste in my mouth and the heaviness of my eyes. My clothes were rather wet now and I regretted the fact that I would be meeting my new employers—whoever they were—for the first time in such a bedraggled state. I had never been an attractive woman but worked on my appearance to present the best possible aspect; such refinements were lost to me now. I hoped that they would excuse me quickly to my room after my arrival so that I could make some basic repairs.

  My idea of a long driveway was not inaccurate and it took a few minutes for the house to come fully into sight. It was no Pemberley, that was for sure, but it was a grand country house nevertheless. Tall and imposing, the exterior bore a certain Baroque splendour with two wings jutting out from an impressive front portico, and I suspected that it was seventeenth century in origin, one of those houses whose design was influenced by the European fashions after the Restoration. I wondered how many bedrooms there might be inside—at least a dozen, I imagined—and whether or not the ballroom, for there was sure to be one in a house of this size, was still in use. Of course, I was in no way accustomed to this style of living and it rather excited me to imagine myself residing in such a place. And yet there was something frightening about it too, some darkness that I assumed would be washed away by the coming morning. But as I stared at my new home, I felt a curious urge to ask Heckling to turn the carriage around and drive me back to Norwich, where I might sit on a bench at Thorpe Station until the sun came up and then return to London, a job badly done.

  “Now, Winnie,” said Heckling as we pulled up at the front door and he descended, his boots crunching in the gravel as he moved to the back of the carriage to remove my suitcase. Realizing that the man did not have the manners to open the door for me, I reached down to the handle to twist it. To my surprise, it would not budge. I frowned, recalling how lightly it had given way when I boarded the carriage in the first place, but now it appeared to be sealed fast.

  “Staying in there, are you?” asked Heckling, ignorant fellow, standing on the opposite side of the carriage and making no move whatsoever to come to my aid.

  “I can’t get out, Mr. Heckling,” I replied. “The door appears to be jammed.”

  “Now’t wrong wi’ it,” he said, coughing some horrendous mess up from the base of his throat and spitting it on the driveway. “Turn it, that’s all.”

  I sighed and reached down once again for the handle—where were the man’s manners, after all?—and as I tried to twist it, I had a sudden reminiscence about one of my small girls, Jane Hebley, who had taken against school one day for some silly reason and refused to emerge from the girls’ bathroom. When I attempted to open it from the outside she held it tightly and, resilient in her determination, managed to stay in there for several minutes before I was able to wrench it open. That was how this felt now. It was a ridiculous notion, of course, but it felt as if the harder I tried to twist the handle, the tighter some unseen force held it shut from the outside. Had I not been outdoors, and had Heckling not been the only other soul in sight, I would have sworn that someone was playing tricks with me.

  “Please,” I said, turning round to glare at him. “Can’t you help me?”

  He swore a blasphemy under his breath, dropped my suitcase on the ground without ceremony and walked around, and I stared at him irritably, wondering why he was being so difficult. I looked forward to him trying the door for himself so he would see that I was not some foolish woman who did not know how to turn a handle, but to my surprise, the moment he reached out for it, it opened easily, quite as easily as it had when I had first boarded the carriage a couple of hours earlier.

  “Ain’t too difficult,” he grumbled, walking away, refusing even to offer me his hand as I descended, and I simply shook my head, wondering what on earth was wrong with me. Had I been turning it the wrong way? It was ridiculous, after all. The door had been sealed shut. I could not open it. And yet he could.

  “Gaudlin Hall,” he said as we made our way towards the front door. He pulled a heavy rope and I heard the bell ringing within, at which time he placed my suitcase on the step beside me and tipped his hat. “Evening then, Governess,” he said.

  “Aren’t you coming in?” I asked, surprised that I should just be deposited here like this, as if I was little more than a piece of luggage.

  “Never do,” he said, walking away. “I live out yonder.”

  And to my astonishment, he simply boarded the carriage and started to drive away, while I stood there, open-mouthed, wondering whether this was the manner in which all new employees were treated here.

  A moment later, the door opened and I turned, expecting at last to come face to face with my new employer, whoever he or she might be.

  It was not a man or woman standing there, however, but a little girl. She was about twelve years old, I thought, older than my small girls, and very pale and pretty. Her hair was curled into ringlets that hung down to her shoulders and perhaps a little further. She was dressed in a white nightdress, fastened at the neck and hanging to her ankles, and as she stood there, the candles in the hallway illuminating her from behind, she took on a spectral appearance that rather frightened me.

  “Hello,” she said quietly.

  “Good evening,” I replied, smiling, trying to put myself at ease by pretending that nothing was amiss. “I didn’t expect the door to be answered by the daughter of the house.”

  “Oh no? Who did you expect to answer it then? The Prime Minister?”

  “Well, the butler,” I said. “Or the maid.”

  The little girl smiled. “We have fallen on diminished times,” she said after a long pause.

  I nodded. I had no answer to this. “Well then,” I said. “Perhaps I should introduce myself. I’m Eliza Caine. The new governess.”

  There was an almost imperceptible roll of the girl’s eyes and she opened the door wider to let me in. “It’s only been a few hours,” she said.

  “Since what?”

  “Since the last one left. Miss Bennet. Still, at least she’s gone. She wanted to go, terribly. But she couldn’t, of course. Not until she found someone to take her place. That was kind of her, I suppose. It does her great credit. And here you are.”

  I stepped inside, uncertain what to make of this extraordinary speech. Looking around, expecting her mother or father to descend the staircase despite what Heckling had said, I found myself immediately impressed by the grandeur of the house. It was very traditional and no expense had been spared on its ornamentation. And yet, for all that, it seemed to me to be a home which had been decorated perhaps several years before, and little had been done to keep it looking fresh in recent times. Still, it was clean and well ordered. Whoever took care of the place did a good job. As the little girl closed the door behind me, it sealed with a heavy sound, making me jump and turn round in fright, at which point I startled again, for standing next to her, wearing a similarly white, crisp nightshirt, was a little boy, perhaps four years her junior. I hadn’t seen him before. Had he been hiding behind the door?

  “Eliza Caine,” said the little girl, tapping her index finger against her lower lip. “What a funny name. It sounds common.”

  “The working classes all have names like that, I think,” said the little boy, scrunching his face up as if he was almost certain that this was true but not entirely so. I stared at him, wondering whether he meant to be rude, but he offered me such a friendly smile that I felt he was just stating the obvious. If we had to speak in terms of classes, then I supposed I was working class. I was here, after all, to work.

  “Did you have a governess when you were a girl?” he asked me then. “Or did you go to school?”

  “I went to school,” I told him. “St. Elizabeth’s in London.”

  “I’ve always wondered what that would be like,” said the girl. “Eustace here would suffer dreadfully at a normal school, I think,” she added, nodding in the direction of her brother. “He’s quite a
delicate child, as you can see, and boys can be terribly rough. Or so I’ve heard. I don’t know any boys myself. Other than Eustace, of course. Do you know many boys, Miss Caine?”

  “Only the brothers of the small girls I teach,” I said. “Or taught. I was a teacher, you see.”

  “At the same school you attended as a girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “My goodness,” she said, smirking a little. “It’s almost as if you never grew up. Or never wanted to. But it’s true what I say, isn’t it? About little boys. They can be terribly rough.”

  “Some,” I said, looking around, wondering whether we were going to stand here chatting all night or whether I might be shown to my room and introduced to the adults. “So,” I said, smiling at them and attempting to speak in an authoritative manner. “Here I am anyway. I wonder, could you let your mama know that I have arrived? Or your papa? They might not have heard the carriage.”

  I noticed the boy, Eustace, stiffen slightly as I made reference to his parents but chose not to remark on it. The little girl, however, allowed her demeanour to slip a little and she bit her lip and looked away with an expression approaching, but not quite reaching, embarrassment.

  “Poor Eliza Caine,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ve been brought here under false pretences. That is a phrase, isn’t it?” she added. “I read it in a book recently and rather liked the sound of it.”

  “It is a phrase, yes,” I said. “Although I don’t think it can mean what you think it means. I’ve been hired to be your governess. Your father placed the advertisement in the Morning Post.” I didn’t care what Heckling had said; the notion that the previous governess had placed the notice was quite absurd.

  “He didn’t, as it happens,” said the girl lightly, and now Eustace turned and pressed his small body against hers, and she put an arm around him. It was true, he was a delicate child. I thought he could break quite easily. “Perhaps we should sit down, Miss Caine,” she said, leading the way towards the drawing room. “You must be tired after your journey.”