‘I have an excellent memory, Mr Gilbert. Too good, it has sometimes seemed to me. I can remember being a tiny thing; my father was still alive, and we all lived in the house in Hampstead. My sister Clare was five years older than I was and used to grow impatient playing with me, but Edward would keep us both spellbound with his tales. They were often terrifying, but always electric. Some of the happiest moments of my life were spent listening as he wove his story. But one day everything changed in our household and a terrible darkness descended.’
Leonard had read about the death of Edward’s father, killed when he was run down by a carriage in Mayfair late one night. ‘How old were you when your father died?’
‘My father?’ She frowned, but the gesture was soon swept aside by a delighted laugh. ‘Oh, Mr Gilbert, dear me, no. I barely remember the man. No, no, I meant when Edward was sent away to boarding school. It was dreadful for all of us, but nightmarish for him. He was twelve years old and hated every minute of it. For a boy whose imagination worked as Edward’s did, whose temper was unguarded and whose passions were dazzling, who didn’t enjoy cricket or rugby or rowing but preferred to bury himself in ancient books about alchemy and astronomy, a school like Lechmere was a poor fit.’
Leonard understood. He’d attended a similar school when he was a boy. He was still trying to slip free of its yoke. ‘Was it while he was at school that Edward came across the house?’
‘Mr Gilbert, really. Lechmere was miles away, up near the Lakes – I hardly think that Edward would have had the opportunity to stumble upon Birchwood Manor whilst at school. No, it was when he was fourteen years old and home for the holidays. Our parents travelled frequently, so that summer, home was the estate belonging to my grandparents. Beechworth, it’s called; not far from here. Our grandfather saw too much of our mother in Edward – a wildness of spirit, a disregard for convention – and decided it was his duty to beat it out of him so that Edward might be forced to take on the “proper” Radcliffe form. My brother reacted by doing everything that he could to antagonise the old man. He used to steal his whisky and took to climbing from the window after we’d been sent to bed, taking long walks across the night-darkened fields, returning with esoteric signs and symbols drawn upon his body in charcoal, with mud on his face and clothing, with stones and sticks and river weed in his pockets. He was quite ungovernable.’ Her face was full of admiration, before a grim cast replaced it. ‘One night, though, he did not come home. I woke and his bed was empty, and when he finally reappeared, he was pale and very quiet. It took him days to tell me what had happened.’
Leonard was alert with anticipation. After all of the hints as to an event in Radcliffe’s past that had driven his obsession with Birchwood Manor, it seemed that answers were finally in reach.
Lucy was watching him closely and he suspected that not much passed beneath her notice. She took a long sip of tea. ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Mr Gilbert?’
Leonard flinched at the unexpected question. ‘I believe that a person can find himself haunted.’
Her eyes were still fixed upon him and, at length, she smiled. Leonard had the disquieting sense that she could see inside his soul. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘just so. A person can be haunted. And my brother certainly was. Something followed him home that night and he could never shake it off.’
The Night of the Following. This, then, was what the young Lucy and Edward had been referencing in their letters. ‘What sort of something?’
‘Edward headed out that night with the intention of raising a ghost. He had found a book in the school library, an ancient book, filled with old ideas and incantations. Being Edward he couldn’t wait to put them into practice, but in the end, he didn’t get a chance to try. Something happened to him in the woods. He read everything that he could afterwards and came to the conclusion that he had been followed by the Black Dog.’
‘A spirit?’ Vague memories returned to Leonard from childhood: sinister creatures of folklore said to be found in ancient places where the two worlds met. ‘Like in The Hound of the Baskervilles?’
‘The “what” is not important, Mr Gilbert. All that matters is that he feared for his life, and as he fled across the fields he saw a light in the attic window of a house on the horizon. He ran towards it and found the front door open to him and a fire in the hearth.’
‘And that house was Birchwood Manor,’ Leonard said softly.
‘Edward said that as soon as he set foot inside he knew that he was safe.’
‘The people who lived in the house took care of him?’
‘Mr Gilbert, you are missing the point entirely.’
‘But I thought—’
‘I take it your research has included the history of Birchwood Manor?’
Leonard confessed that it had not; that it hadn’t occurred to him that the house’s past, prior to Edward’s purchase of it, was remotely relevant.
Lucy lifted her eyebrows with the same mix of disappointment and surprise that he might have expected had he handed her his notebook and asked her to write his thesis for him. ‘The house as you see it today was built in the sixteenth century. It was designed by a man called Nicholas Owen with the intention of providing safety to Catholic priests. But there was a reason that they chose to build in that spot, Mr Gilbert, for the land on which Birchwood Manor stands is of course much older than the house. It has its own history. Has nobody told you yet about the Eldritch Children?’
Movement at the corner of his vision made Leonard startle. He glanced into the darkest recess of the room and saw that the cat who had slipped through the door earlier was stretching now, shiny eyes turned on Leonard.
‘It is an old local folk tale, Mr Gilbert, about three fairy children who many years ago crossed between the worlds. They emerged from the woods one day into the fields where the local farmers were burning stubble and were taken in by an elderly couple. From the start, there was something uncanny about them. They spoke a strange language, they left no footprints behind them when they walked, and it is said that at times their skin appeared almost to glow.
‘They were tolerated at first, but as things began to go wrong in the village – a failed crop, the stillbirth of a baby, the drowning of the butcher’s son – people started to look to the three strange children in their midst. Eventually, when the well ran dry, the villagers demanded that the couple hand them over. They refused and were banished from the village.
‘The family set up instead in a small stone croft by the river, and for a time they lived in peace. But when an illness came to the village, a mob was formed and one night, with torches lit, they marched upon the croft. The couple and the children clung together, surrounded, their fates seemingly inevitable. But just as the villagers began to close in, there came the eerie sound of a horn on the wind and a woman appeared from nowhere, a magnificent woman with long, gleaming hair and luminous skin.
‘The Fairy Queen had come to claim her children. And when she did, she cast a protection spell upon the house and land of the old couple in gratitude to them for protecting the prince and princesses of fairyland.
‘The bend of the river upon which Birchwood Manor now stands has been recognised ever since amongst locals as a place of safety. It is even said that there are those who can still see the fairy enchantment – that it appears to a lucky few as a light, high up in the attic window of the house.’