As we crossed that gloomy entrance hall I felt a sudden cold draft on the back of my neck and that strange feeling of being watched. I couldn’t help glancing up the stairs again. “Tell me, Mrs. McCreedy,” I said. “Is this house haunted?”
“Haunted?” She laughed. “Oh, no, ma’am. This house is much too new to be haunted. Only finished in 1890 it was. That’s too young to have acquired a ghost or two, even if the master might have liked a resident ghost to add a little atmosphere to his castle. Now back in Ireland I’ve seen my share of haunted places and I expect you have too. We had a castle ruin near our village and the local people used to swear that they saw a white figure on the battlements. Well, one night my friends and I went there for a dare. As we got close we heard this unearthly moan and we all ran for our lives. I suspect, looking back on it, that it must have been a cow.” She paused, laughing. “Ah, well, no time for gossiping now. I’ve work to be done. But come back at tea time and you can sample my freshly baked soda bread. I’ll be baking a batch for the master. He’s particularly fond of his soda bread, he is, and he says I’m a dab hand at baking.”
With that she almost pushed us out of the front door and shut it firmly behind us.
Four
“She was certainly in a hurry to get rid of us, wasn’t she?” Daniel looked back at the house.
“I rather suspect she had been slacking on her chores and now has found herself with too much to do,” I said.
“She could always bring in local girls to help her,” Daniel dismissed this. “What was all that about the house being haunted?”
“I was thinking of that face I saw last night,” I said. “I know what I saw, Daniel. I didn’t imagine it. And I felt something today. Standing in that hallway. It was almost as if a presence was watching me.”
“Are you always going to be this fey?” Daniel asked. “I saw no faces last night and felt nothing evil today. The only mysterious thing was where that dratted woman came from. She certainly didn’t come from the hallway and I didn’t notice a door behind us, did you? Perhaps she is your ghost herself and she can appear and vanish at will.” He looked at my worried face and chuckled. “Come on, let’s go and explore Newport while the sun is shining.”
And so off we went. I could hear the click of shears and noticed a gardener at work on the rose bushes, and the big iron gates slid open easily. First we turned away from town and followed the street to our left. One lovely estate followed the next, each one grander than the one before. Through tall gates we glimpsed marble palaces and stately homes that made the Hartley’s manor house that I had always looked up to as the height of elegance look small and ordinary. One of these so-called “cottages” stood on the cliffs like a very posh hotel, one had a marble portico with columns like a Roman temple. I was overawed into silence as we glimpsed one after another. In fact I had never seen anything so grand in my life.
“And these are just summer homes?” I demanded. “Look at them. You’d expect to find a king living in each of them, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, they are owned by Vanderbilts and Astors, which is almost the same thing here in America,” Daniel replied. “They don’t need to count their pennies.”
“But to build such places for just a few weeks in the summer, it seems criminal doesn’t it?”
“They do a lot of entertaining,” Daniel said, “although I understand that most of them are built with few bedrooms. They expect their guests to own their own cottages.” He smiled.
“I wonder what the Vanderbilts and Astors think about having Alderman Hannan as a neighbor.” I paused to stare through ornate gilded gates. “He’s not exactly one of the Four Hundred, is he?”
“No, I don’t suppose he gets invited to dinner very often,” Daniel said. “But I expect they snubbed him in a very polite and well-bred manner. That may be one of his reasons for wanting to get into politics. Becoming an alderman certainly helps. If he becomes their senator he’ll find a lot of doors open to him. Everyone will want to be his friend then.”
The road petered out at the end of a point. We stood for a while looking out at the ocean. There were yachts sailing in the stiff breeze, and a ferry crossing the Bay. Suddenly I found that I was enjoying myself enormously. Several days with nothing to do except making the most of sea and sun and fresh air was not something I’d experienced in my life before although I knew that the wealthy went away for holidays all the time. I was beginning to see that being married to Daniel might have its benefits!
“We should go on a boat trip,” Daniel said, again as if reading my thoughts. “Do you feel up to walking into town and seeing what we can find there?”
“I’m no little delicate flower.” I looked up at him, smiling. “I walk miles every day when I’m following someone in the pursuit of my profession.”
“Walked,” Daniel said. “Past tense, remember. Now you will have no need to wear out your shoe leather, and you can take a pleasant stroll around Washington Square instead.”