Hugbert
Nell had read the section about Leonora Gilmore with faint surprise. Having found Stephen in Hugbert’s letters, she had not been expecting a second Gilmore to turn up. As Hugbert said, though, if Iskander was romantically involved with a member of Stephen’s family, it was natural that he had been drawn to Stephen. But Nell would still like to know what had happened to Iskander, and also his Leonora.
There were only a couple of pages left, and she saw with a sharp sense of loss that Hugbert’s letters had ended, and that the final brief section was taken up with a note from Freide Edreich. It was dated the year of the book’s publication.
My husband, Hugbert Edreich, never spoke of what happened in Fosse House that night in 1917, even to me. I believe, though, that the memory stayed with him all his life.
I never knew Stephen Gilmore’s eventual fate, and I never tried to find out. My husband said to me once that some parts of the past were better left sealed up, and I believe that night in 1917 is one of those parts. I always respected his deep reserve on that period of his life, and I did not ask questions, but I believe he was still haunted (if that is not too dramatic a word) by his memories of the place.
I understood and respected his feelings, for I, too, had my ghosts from those days – the ghosts of gnawing anxiety for my husband-to-be who had come through the horrors and dangers of active service, and had then been sent on a difficult and uncertain mission into a country with whom Germany was at war. For me, those fears and those ghosts were somehow bound inside a charcoal sketch, drawn by a young man who had been in extreme fear of a brutal death sentence. Stephen Gilmore’s sketch of the Holzminden courtyard hung in our house for many years – my husband had carried it with him from Germany – and I sometimes stood beneath it, staring into the dark shadows so deftly drawn, so cunningly suggestive.
‘Who is that figure within the shadows?’ I once asked my husband.
‘I don’t know. But I believe the young man who drew the sketch saw it as the symbol of his own insanity.’
The sketch’s macabre qualities seemed to deepen over the years, although I repeatedly told myself that it was no more than a sheet of paper with pencil markings. But the mind is a strange thing and at times it operates at curious levels. There came a night when, from nowhere, a thought formed: supposing that figure – what Hugbert had called the ‘symbol of insanity’ – escapes? That was the night I took the sketch down from the wall and burned it.
My husband stood with me, watching it curl and brown in the flames. Then, very quietly, he said, ‘Sometimes, in dreams I still walk along that tree-lined drive to Fosse House. I see the house through the trees and I see the lights glowing faintly at the windows – the lights Stephen longed to see, that he thought of as a symbol of his home. Only, in my dream they aren’t quite real, those lights. It’s as if they’re flickering ghosts, or the goblin lamps of some lost world. And, in those dreams, something always comes out of the house to meet me. I never quite see it, but I know it’s there.’
‘Stephen,’ I said, for I had always known that Stephen Gilmore’s ghost had never quite left my husband.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think it’s Stephen who comes to meet me in those dreams. Who walks with me along that drive. Because I think he’s still at Fosse House, Freide. I know that is a strange statement to make – a fanciful statement – but I believe it to be true. And it’s a bad feeling to think of him in that lonely, dark old house.’
The book ended there, and Nell closed it with a sense of loss and also an awareness that there were too many loose threads – the loosest being what had happened to Stephen Gilmore. Did Hugbert’s silence about that long-ago night mean the execution had gone ahead? That it had affected him so deeply, he had never been able to speak of it? Or did it mean he had found some way to sidestep Niemeyer’s order, but had done it in some way he dared not disclose?
There was also no clue to Iskander’s fate, or Leonora’s. It was unreasonable to expect Hugbert to have reported an idyllic, hand-in-hand into-the-sunset conclusion for them, but Nell would like to believe Iskander and Leonora had had some kind of happy ending.
But life did not always give people happy endings.
The bumbly local train out of Norwich was on time and painted bright scarlet with green trims, like a picture from a child’s storybook. This pleased Nell, who spent the first ten minutes of the short journey pretending she had stepped back into a 1940s film. Will Hay, perhaps, or Arthur Askey in The Ghost Train. She amused herself by imagining what the station would be like, and whether she would be greeted by the shade of some old station master who had died fifty years earlier but who could still occasionally be seen wandering through the dark tunnels, his lamp still burning in his hand.
There did not seem to be any shadowy station masters or spectral ticket collectors at the station; in fact, the station was little more than a platform with two small seats, a flower bed, and a narrow exit. It was dark by now, but Nell saw that Michael’s taxi was waiting on the roadside. This was good, because the train had been more than ten minutes early.
‘A good journey?’ asked the driver, companionably, stowing away her small case.
‘Very, thanks. We’re going to the Bell, I think?’
‘’s right,’ he said. ‘Dr Flint phoned the details through. He’s been doing some work out at Fosse House, seemingly. Shame about Miss Gilmore going like that. News got round pretty fast. Bit of a local legend, Miss Gilmore.’