Lace for Milady (5 page)

“Happens off and on,” he told us. “Took to bumping a few years ago and gives a good rattle every now and again. The house settling it could be.”

“A house going on a hundred years old must be settled already. It wasn’t that,” I informed him.

“Well, it happens anyway. Nothing to worry about. It’s why the Seymours left. Or part of the reason. Mama had rented it to them a year or so ago, but the bumping grate worried them. And the other noises. Daresay you don’t believe in ghosts, Priscilla?"

“I do not, but I believe in bumping grates, and I mean to discover the cause.”

There was no fire in the grate, so I got down on my hands and knees and stuck my head up the flue, using a candle to give me a light. I saw a great deal of soot, some quantity of which brushed loose and landed on my hair, but I discovered nothing of interest. “I’ll go down in the basement and have a look,” I decided.

“Wait till morning,” Slack advised.

“The house may fall on our heads before morning. I’ll go now, but if
you
are afraid, Slack, perhaps George will accompany me.

George looked more frightened than Slack, to tell the truth, but was not about to admit before two ladies that he was afraid of ghosts, and with an unsteady hand he took up a candelabrum and came with me.

I am not afraid of ghosts, nor the dark, nor of long shadows stretching along gloomy passages, but I am not entirely insensitive, and I admit the atmosphere was eerie. It was also—I grasp in vain for the proper word. I could
almost
swear I heard sounds behind the wall on which the grate was located. Sounds of movement, and once what might even have been human voices. The grate is situated on the east wall of Hillcrest, the wall that faces Belview. That particular wall is entirely different from the others in the cellar. It is made of stone, beautifully cut, fitted, really a work of art. The other walls are of irregular stone, and on one side the wall is just plain dirt for the bottom two feet. There is no shaft going from grate to cellar, for easier cleaning of the ashes. The ashes have to be swept from the hearth abovestairs each day. I had already noticed this feature and found it a little inconvenient, but then not every grate has a shaft going to the cellar, so that was not unusual. The stone wall was extremely solid. There was not a single sign of loose work that might have moved involuntarily. The trouble was not in this area, and before long George and I were retreating rather hastily up the stairs, stumbling over ourselves and each other in our eagerness to get away.

“Everything is firm belowstairs. The trouble must be outside, in the chimney,” I told Slack.

Glancing to her, I observed that while George and I had done the investigating, it was Slack who was trembling, her face chalk white. “I heard voices!” she declared in a hollow voice. “The place is
haunted,
Priscilla.”

“Nonsense! You don’t believe in ghosts, and neither do I. If you heard voices, you heard human voices. Mine and George’s very likely.”

“No, they were deep men’s voices,” she insisted.

George took no umbrage at this, nor had he the right to. His voice is high, and in fact we said very little to each other while in the cellar.

“Come outside, George, and let us see if there is someone prowling about,” I said to him.

George licked his lips, and they discovered a new position—terror. The bottom one hung slack and trembling. “Oh, now, Priscilla, you don’t want to go out on such a night as this.”

“It is not cold and not raining. I
do
want to go out. Do you refuse to come with me? Slack, as George is afraid of his own shadow, perhaps
you...
"

“No, no, I ain’t afraid,” George said, quite obviously lying. “The thing is, it might be the Gentlemen, you know.”

“Smugglers!” Slack goggled, and took a step backward into her chair.

“We have a saying hereabouts,” George told us. “‘Watch the wall, my darling.’ Turn your head the other way, in other words, and see and hear nothing when the Gentlemen are about. That way you will come to no harm. They don’t like interfering with.”

“Neither do
I
like interfering with my grate. Do you come or not, George?” I took up a candle as I spoke, to show him I meant to go, alone, if necessary.

“Yes, yes, I’ll go with you, but we don’t want a light. We’ll slip out the back way and go quietly forward without being seen. There’s no thinking we can stop them, Priscilla. If we see anything, I’ll nip into town and report it to the revenue officer.”

I was not afraid but am not quite a fool either, I hope, and agreed to his plan. We went out the kitchen door, eased our way silently around the house to the front, and saw absolutely nothing. No sound or sign disturbed the calm of a late night in summer. The moon shone, an owl hooted hauntingly from some faraway tree, and in the distance the ocean lapped peacefully.

“Let us see if there are boats at the seaside,” I suggested. We have a view of the ocean from my house front, but not of the shore. It is necessary to cross the road and walk a couple of yards to the top of the embankment and look down. There was no boat, nobody there at all. The beach was totally deserted. In some mystification, and also some relief, we returned home rather quickly.

Slack sat waiting for us, on the anxious seat.

“Nothing. There was no one there,” I told her, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’d prefer a ghost to a smuggler,” she said.

We had a glass of wine to calm our nerves (I had long since augmented the dozen bottles in the cellar), discussed the matter in the fruitless fashion in which mysteries must always be discussed, and finally began hinting George away. He usually tumbles to a hint very readily, for the truth is he enjoys these social calls no more than do I; but on this occasion he was reluctant to leave, and the reason, I suspected, was plain and simple fear to go out alone.

Slack suggested he take my carriage and two foot-boys for the half-mile drive, and he snatched at it. Really, I hardly blamed him. We went to bed with our heads full of smugglers, Slack to dream of them, I with a decision to discover of Officer Smith, our local revenueman, just how great a threat they constituted.

The next morning gave me a foretaste of how bleak and dreary it can be on the Atlantic coast in autumn. It was not yet into really bad weather, but Nature threw up at summer’s end a day that reeked of autumn. It was raining hard, grey sheets driven by a raucous gale from the ocean, causing the drops to slap the windowpanes with a driving force. No lesson on Juliette was possible today. I had determined I would have another, the knee notwithstanding. All plans for the day were cancelled perforce. Slack and I sat huddled before the grate in the Blue Saloon, with our faces and fronts too hot from the flames and our backs chilled by the draughts from the windows. In mid-morning we had candles lit to lighten the gloom. Really, it was remarkably uncomfortable. I half wished I had not rejected Clavering’s offer out of hand. I held a book in my hands but did not read; Slack held her knitting and did knit.

“The only thing to be said for this day is that George will not come to call,” I said a little petulantly. It was eleven o’clock, an hour which frequently saw him at our door. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than the knocker sounded.

“Maybe something happened last night on the way home,” Slack said with a smile. She was always happy to welcome him.

“If anything had happened, I trust my footboys would have told us when they returned,” I pointed out.

The caller proved not to be George but an even less welcome one, the Duke of Clavering. I recognized his deep voice as he handed his coat and hat to the butler, saying, “Looks like autumn’s here, eh?” in an abominably cheerful tone.

He must have moved swiftly, for before the butler could announce him he strode in, rubbing his hands together and smiling. “Good morning, ladies. Nice day.”

We both surveyed him with hostile eyes. He ought to have realized he was not welcome, but he was one of those people with elephant-like hides. He advanced to the fire and drew up a chair for himself between us. “How is the sprained knee going on?” he asked me.

“Sprained knee?” I enquired, as though the matter had slipped my mind. “Oh, you refer to the incident yesterday.”

“Yes, the spill you took from Juliette.”

“I had forgotten all about it. My knee is fine, thank you."

“Good.”

“In fact, I had been looking forward to another ride today, but the weather, of course, makes it impossible. I am surprised to find anyone out in such a gale.”

He did not take the hint and explain what brought him out, but said instead, “Autumn is come. This is typical autumn weather here on the coast. You will become inured to it if you stay.”

‘‘There is no question of my not staying."

“Ah, then you like the rain. That is good. We get a great deal of it.”

“We always got a deal of rain in Wiltshire,” I replied.

“Of course, the winds here make the rain more unpleasant. A very driving rain we get, and cold.”

“Particularly inclement weather for an invalid with lung trouble I should think,” I replied, letting him know I understood very well the direction of his talk. He was painting a glum picture to encourage me to sell.

He made no reply to this, but the flash of comprehension from his dark eyes told me he had understood my remark.

He glanced around the room to give himself time to think of another tactic and said at length, “I see you have redone the draperies, very nice.”

“Thank you.”

“A pity the way everything deteriorates so quickly here on the coast. Those lovely rose velvet hangings will be faded to grey in a year’s time. The sun and salt air combined are very hard on them.”

“We had the same difficulty in Wiltshire, don’t you remember, Slack?” I asked. “But there it was the sun and dust that did the mischief. We had to change the draperies very frequently.”

“Every year,” Slack seconded me. For a moment there I feared she meant to fail me, for she
is
really honest almost to a fault. She had no more love for Clavering than I had myself, however. She would have been glad enough for me to sell, but the Duke was an arrogant, aggressive man, and thus she had taken him in dislike.

He gave up trying to outdo us on bad weather and turned to other disadvantages of the area. “I hope the road isn’t flooded with this downpour. It happens every spring. The road is always washed out for a month with the high tides and rain. This low-lying land you are situated on is the worst, of course. Up on the hill at Belview it doesn’t trouble us.” Actually we, too, were on a little hill, but Belview was higher.

“How nice! We shall have to set up a yacht, Slack. I always wanted to do some boating. We were landlocked at Wiltshire.”

“You certainly must make some arrangement for the month or so you will be cut off. Get in supplies, have your livestock removed, set up an emergency station, and so on.”

“The spring is a long way off yet.”

“Oh, yes, we are just getting into the bitter autumn and winter weather now. Half a year of wind and lashing rains ahead of us. I daresay your first month here gave you a very misleading picture of the place. In the summer months it is lively and pleasant on the coast, with all the visitors from London and sunshine and so on. The winter is long and bleak.”

“I did not particularly enjoy the crowds of visitors. I look forward to the peace and quiet. We are not the sort, Slack and I, who enjoy a mass of milling strangers at our doorstep but will do very well with our few friends.”

“Not much to do all winter long, of course. You will have read the two dozen books at the circulating library by then, and the assemblies in Pevensey are cancelled every winter.”

“I gave up attending assemblies some years ago, about the same time I began
buying
books. You were not particularly looking forward to them, were you Slack?” I asked in an ironic vein.

Slack gave no verbal reply but only smirked on Clavering to show him that she, too, understood what he was up to. He sat on unoffended and undismayed, racking his brain for other levers to pry us loose.

“Have you had any trouble with smugglers at all?” he asked, to draw our attention to yet another coastal plague. No mild “Gentlemen” for him; he wanted to make them sound as blood-curdling as possible.

“No. That is..." I stopped, and he looked up quickly with interest. I related the episode of the banging grate, making it a sort of interesting phenomenon, or joke.

“It sounds as though you’ve been visited by smugglers all right,” he told us, with the greatest relish.

“I can’t think so, unless they were phantom smugglers. There wasn’t a sign of a boat on the beach.”

“You weren’t foolish enough to leave the house when they were around!” he shouted, as though it were only by the sheerest of luck I lived to tell it. “You never want to do that. It is courting disaster. Anyway, they wouldn’t leave the stuff out in full view—or the boats either. It was probably landed some nights ago and has been stored on your property to be transferred later.”

“They surely wouldn’t be so bold as to hide it on my land without permission!”

“Permission!” He threw back his head and went off into a roar of mirth out of all proportion to the humour of the remark. “My dear Miss Denver, the smugglers don’t ask permission. They are a law unto themselves, do exactly as they wish; and if you are wise, you won’t trouble them. They are very vicious. As to you two women living alone here in such an ideal spot for them to bring the brandy ashore, there in the cove at your doorstep... Really, you don’t want to make any trouble for them, or you will certainly suffer reprisals.”

“I shall report it to the revenue officer. I had planned to do so today, but the rain kept me home.”

“What, this little shower? You must get used to that. It is nothing out of the ordinary. This is one of the better days we are likely to see before next spring.”

“When the
floods
set in!” I added. “I understand you very well, Your Grace. You are painting the most lugubrious picture possible to get me to change my mind about selling Hillcrest.”