I stared at her for a good five seconds, then remembered she’d seen my books. “Well, I have done what I like to call ‘ghost hunting’ in the past, but…”
“Is that why you’ve come to England?”
She said it as if I’d come to extradite some fugitive antipodean apparition. I said, “Not exactly. I’m just doing the spooky tour of England, the places I’ve only read about: Borley, Cloud’s Hill, Raynham Hall, 50 Berkeley Square. You know, places like that. I am interested in the supernatural, but… no, no more ghost hunting. I’ve found out the hard way that the occult is too unpleasant at close quarters.”
“But it must be a real experience to hunt a ghost.”
“It is. That is if that’s what you call trying to shove a cranky water elemental into a crystal geode, or facing up to a demon with all your runes round the wrong way, or nearly being strangled by a book illustration. No, no more ghost hunting for me, Mrs. Winton. Not even if you threatened me with money. From now on I’m strictly a tourist.”
“Oh.”
“You sound disappointed. Do you have a ghost in the house?” I got ready to run in case she said yes.
“There are no ghosts under His Lordship’s roof, sir, and that’s the plain and simple truth. It may make us look a bit out of step, what with every Manor and Lodge hereabouts sporting a haunted bedroom or a ghost’s gallery, some of which I dare say are trumped up for the tourist pound. Not that I’m a scoffer, sir. I’ve been in service since I was a lass, and know a lot more than most about the quality homes; and I can tell you, sir, that some of the best have things walking in them that aren’t right things, if you follow my meaning. Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir, I best be about my duties. Even with the family away there’s still a lot to be done.”
Mrs. Winton left me then to my own memories of things that walked that weren’t right things. It really spoiled my breakfast.
I got lost trying to find the front door.
There was a North Wing and a South Wing, an East Front and a West Front. There were wide corridors of thick carpet and polished oak paneling, and a long gallery of ancestral portraits that glared after me as I tiptoed past.
Once through the massive columns of the East Front I struck out on the first path I found, letting it take me where it would.
At first it wound its way through the trees scattered about the southeast lawn, at one point passing a scraggly palm looking decidedly unimpressed by the English climate. On the side of a hillock was a square of trees that looked very familiar. I’m no treeologist, but these looked like fair dinkum Australian gums—the smooth, light gray/dark gray-spotted bark, the eucalyptus tang of the leaves, the little plaque saying “Australian Gum.”
The path sloped, then forked farther along. The left-hand path led me to a lawn surrounding a marble structure I could only think of as a summer house with delusions of grandeur: open-sided, circular and gleaming white, its steps splaying out from three openings in its half walls, mock-Grecian columns, scrolled and fluted, supporting a domed roof.
Chiseled over one of the openings was THE SECOND PAVILION, below that ANNO DOMINI 1827. There were stone seats running along the inside wall and a circular slab raised at its center. Nothing I didn’t expect… except, there was this arrow scratched into the stonework between two of the columns. It was pointing to nothing but the tops of distant trees somewhere in the lower part of the grounds to the northwest. I started walking in that direction. I had no idea what I might be walking to, but it gave me time to think.
Here I was in the proverbial English country garden. To my left were outbuildings I took to be stables or garages, and the glittering glass of a greenhouse where the Earl probably grew his prize-winning marrows. To my right were ponds and grass and trees, what amounted to a private wood. Private. The word made me pause, to wonder, not exactly for the first time—What was I doing here?
Of course the Earl felt responsible for the accident and all, but…
I put myself in his place. A grand, ancient home crammed with paintings, silverware, jewelry, antiques, history; and into this he allows not only a stranger but a “colonial” of dubious social standing. Wouldn’t it have been safer, as far as the Earl was concerned, to simply put me up at the nearest hotel until the bike was fixed?
Something wasn’t quite kosher here. In fact the more I thought on it the more that uncomfortable out-of-place feeling increased.
It was a maze.
I somehow knew this even before I reached the ivy-crept stone wall. Possibly it was the wrought iron gate and the roofless walls I could see beyond it. The gate looked like it hadn’t been opened in years, and in fact there were rust marks showing it’d been chained shut until very recently. But when I pushed the gate it opened with a shiver and a screech, so I edged in.
The walls were all weatherstained and mossy, in some places even cracked and pitted. It was cold. Quiet, too. So quiet that I found myself stepping softly to lessen the echo of my footsteps in the stone paved alleys.
Every now and then I stopped to scrape dirt into piles against the walls as markers. The alley I followed had began to fork and twist fantastically, and the prospect of getting lost had become real, perhaps even dangerous.
Sometimes the path crossed another, making me wonder if I wasn’t going round and round and round. Farther in, the alleys widened occasionally into little gardens, all dead from long neglect, oblongs of dust and empty flower beds. And every time I found one I found more of the same coldness and a sense of sadness that the sun, sitting on the east-facing walls, couldn’t burn away. All I could see of the world was the sky holding one small cloud. It was just enough to show me that I was spiraling in toward the center. So I pushed on, now noticing a slight downwardness as I passed other oblong boxes of once-was gardens and the craters of dry pools with dry ruts leading in and out.
Small statues stood guard at random places, and there was even the occasional stone bench. It was while passing one of these that I thought I heard slow footsteps in the next alley. I stood up on the bench, but the wall was still too high. So I yelled, “Hello! Is anybody there?” For a long time I listened for an answer, hearing nothing, yet sure there was someone or something behind that wall. The silence grew, and I was wishing now I hadn’t called out. Then a wind leaped up with an almost human cry, stinging my face and hands with dirt. Something winked across the sun and was gone, leaving silence again, and an odd impression of dry heat and vast distances that passed as quickly as it’d come.
The alley was still, and for a long time I sat on the bench, wondering if it mightn’t be wiser to search my way out. No, I’d come too far to turn back just because a bird had startled me. And the wind? A freak gust. So I told myself, and so I continued on.
The alleys were still cold but had less shadow in them by the time I saw tree tops looming over the walls ahead. Not long after that I hit a path running beside a curving wall that these trees grew behind. I guessed they were the trees I’d seen from “The Second Pavilion.” But this curving wall, this inner circle, was beyond guessing. Following it round I came to a gate.
This was not like the one at the entrance. This inner gate was big, solid and sported a padlock perhaps a century old or more. It was as good as any Keep Out sign. Above the gate was a piece of stonework that had the look of being tacked on as an afterthought. On it was carved RETINE QUOD AQUA COERCETUR.
It was all Greek to me, or rather Latin, though the third word was obviously water. I noted the words down on a parking ticket I’d gotten in Oxfordshire, then set off following the rest of the wall. It took me a few minutes to get back to the gate. I’d found only that one gate in my circuit of the wall, though at one point I thought I heard something like tinkling bells coming from somewhere.