Returning through Gaulsford woods in the late evening, he caught glimpses of a white figure flitting through the branches, seemingly keeping pace with him as he trudged through the overgrowth—the local barn owls out hunting, no doubt, he thought to himself. And he shuddered at the fate of whatever poor field creatures were venturing abroad that night, oblivious to the silent death which awaited them from above. The keen talons that would pierce the skin in a swift and bloody embrace; the relentless beak tearing into the still quivering flesh…
When Leventhorp arrived home to Gaulsford, footsore and slightly dishevelled, the house was closing-up for the day and he engaged the tour guide in conversation as she was bolting and locking the main door after the last coach-party had departed.
“What do we really know about this chap?” he said, indicating the portrait of Sir Samuel at the foot of the stairs. “How did he die, for instance?”
“He suffered from a mental breakdown,” replied the guide. “At least that’s what the National Trust archivist tells us. According to the fragments of his letters that remain in our collections, he seems to have developed some sort of acute persecution mania in the last few months of his life. It was Sir Samuel who put up all these ugly bars on the inside of the windows and made the place a regular fortress. He became a recluse, refused to leave the house for any reason whatsoever and was found dead in his bed not long after. There’s a potted biography of him in the official guidebook; you’ll find copies by the front pay-desk. Help yourself!”
He thanked the guide and picked up a copy of the glossy National Trust guidebook to Gaulsford which had been written some years previously by a retired academic from Cambridge. According to the author, Sir Samuel suffered a sudden mental decline in the six months before his death in December 1653: an illness comprising paranoia, hypochondria, a black depression and most significantly, an obsessive persecution mania (hence the bars on the windows) as a result of which he never once ventured outside the house again. Some contemporaries said it was the result of the pox: the dementia praecox of tertiary syphilis, contracted from a mistress of ill-repute. But such scurrilous Royalist propaganda was typical for the times and highly unlikely to be true.
He saw from the blurb at the back of the book that the same author had written a history of the churches of Hertfordshire and with his master key he let himself into the gift shop and scanned the shelves until he found a copy. Looking up the index, he turned to the entry on Brockstone Court.
The account of Sir Samuel and his wanton desecration of the earlier chapel was substantially the same as he had been told by Mr Clark. There was an exhaustive description of the decoration of the new chapel, all rather dull, and a lengthy encomium on the church organ, which certainly hadn’t sounded so very special when he was playing ‘chopsticks’ on it. It was all as dry and tedious as any copy of Pevsner’s Buildings of England. But the author finally got into his stride once he began to relate the legends associated with Brockstone Court and the curious prayer-books:
A fascinating relic. The order of service is the same as the common edition except for the service for St Mark’s Day on April 25th, which is, significantly, also the day of Cromwell’s birth. The psalter and collects for this day are highly irregular. Psalm 109 is to be sung, a most terrible cantrip, both a curse and an invocation of God’s wrath upon the unnamed tyrant, and the subsequent petitionary prayers are equally bloodcurdling. As convinced Royalists, it is strongly suspected that the Sadleirs and their retinue would gather each year on this appointed date to invite divine execration on the head of Cromwell and his minions. It is said that all nine books—nine being the Ennead, the mystical number of creation—needed to be present together in order for the charm to work. And one supposes it must have been efficacious after a fashion, because Cromwell did indeed pass away in unspeakable agonies within a few years of the book’s printing.
Amongst the other passages of local colour, one in particular grabbed his attention:
The stone with the mysterious and laconic inscription ‘A.C.’ is often pointed out as evidence for Lady Sadleir’s unhealthy interest in occult matters. It is said by local people that the slab covers the tomb of one Anthony Cadman, infamous to all bibliophiles as the London-based printer of the sacrilegious Brockstone prayer-book. Cadman was suspected by many contemporaries of being a noted continental magician living incognito in the city and a confidante of the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria. According to the account rendered in John Evelyn’s Diary, the ‘gentleman calling himself Cadman’ was rumoured to have dabbled in alchemy and those areas of mystical theology which are perhaps best avoided by the unwary.
These murmurings reached a climax during the June of 1653, when, shortly after the printing of the infamous prayer-book, he was publically accused of ‘attempting to procure the deaths of divers persons by necromantic means’. While such accusations were not unusual for the times; Cadman’s links to the Royalist cause were doubly damning and he was swiftly trialled and hanged for the alleged offence. His wry-necked corpse was gibbeted at the crossroads at Hampstead Heath as a gruesome landmark for the populace and a warning to the curious. It has long been rumoured that his cage was blown down from the gibbet not long afterwards during a great tempest of allegedly supernatural origin, and the mummified remains secretly removed by agents of Lady Sadleir for burial in the new chapel at Brockstone.
Leventhorp was awakened the next morning by the screech of an angle-grinder. A workman was removing the bars in the library windows, apparently at the insistence of their insurers for health and safety reasons. The house was being shut up for the winter, and he could finally expect some peace from the screaming hordes of bored schoolchildren. The housekeepers moved methodically from room to room, giving the silver and ceramics a last clean and polish before boxing them away and covering the furniture and statuary in commodious dust-sheets, leaving each room with the faintly ridiculous appearance of an eerie tableau from some forlorn seaside ghost train.
As he sat down to watch television one evening after the final departure of the house staff, Leventhorp found his mind wandering. He was strangely troubled by the paintings in the Great Hall at Brockstone; there was something about the images under the scaffolding, that had registered subliminally in his brain, but which he could not recall to conscious scrutiny. Unable to concentrate on the programme he retreated to the library, reached down one of the collected volumes of Country Life, and began leafing randomly through it to pass the time.
Amongst the articles, one from the early 1990s caught his attention: a typical lightweight puff-piece entitled ‘Springtime at Brockstone Court’.
The article was mainly comprised of elegiac soft-focus scenes of the gardeners at their seasonal round: digging the beds, planting the walled garden with annuals and pruning the espaliers as the lawns and arbours of Brockstone bloomed with a glorious carpeting of snowdrops and crocuses. Inside the house, the winter cobwebs were being chased away by the housemaids; the rooms illuminated in the weak spring sunlight as they performed their duties. There was a photo of Mr Clark, then a much younger man, barely in his thirties, mentioned in the caption as having recently returned to his family sinecure after a stint at the Courtauld Institute. The various artworks of note were enumerated, mostly uninspiring 18th-century studio copies, and the article ended with a double-page spread of the paintings of the Great Hall.