A part of Michael’s mind was registering that Luisa was almost speaking as if she had first-hand knowledge of Leonora’s emotions, but he merely said, ‘She sounds an unusual girl.’
‘Oh, she was.’ There was definite eagerness in her voice now. ‘She was only sixteen when the Great War broke out, but she—’ She broke off, as if something had interrupted her, and turned her head towards the curtained windows as if she was listening to something. Or is she listening for something, thought Michael, slightly startled.
‘Is something wrong, Miss Gilmore?’
‘Did you hear that?’ Her face had paled and the bones stood out sharply. ‘Dr Flint, did you hear it?’
‘Only the storm,’ said Michael. ‘I did think I heard someone outside earlier, but—’
‘What did you hear? Dr Flint, what did you hear?’
‘Just vague noises,’ said Michael, concerned by the note of urgency in her voice, but unwilling to worry her by saying he thought someone had tried the front door. ‘It’s a wild night, isn’t it, and—’
He stopped, because now there were unquestionably sounds outside, and they were not from the storm. Someone was walking along the garden path immediately outside the dining-room window. He looked across at Luisa, saw that her eyes had dilated with fear. Aware of a beat of apprehension he got up from the table and went towards the window.
At once Luisa said, ‘Don’t open the curtains.’
‘I’m only going to see if anyone is out there.’
‘There’s no need,’ she said in a strained voice, then sat up a little straighter, as if making a physical attempt to draw about her the remnants of composure. ‘You mustn’t open the door—’
‘Miss Gilmore, I’m sure I heard someone. And when I arrived here earlier I thought there was someone in the gardens. Let me take a quick look outside—’
‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘No, please don’t. It’s quite all right. This house is a good two hundred years old. I’m afraid it’s a bit creaky.’ Her colour was returning, and her voice sounded normal again. ‘Houses can be a bit like people. Creaky and sometimes erratic.’ A sudden, surprisingly sweet smile showed briefly.
‘I’ve often thought that,’ said Michael. He was just trying to decide whether he ought to investigate the footsteps anyway, or whether he should try to nudge her back on to the subject of Leonora and the Choir, when she said, ‘Have you had enough to eat? There’s cheese and fruit left out in the kitchen if you want. And coffee can be filtered very quickly.’
It was a polite dismissal. Intruders, imaginary or real, had been relegated to their place. So Michael said, ‘I’ve had more than enough, thank you, and it was very good. But a cup of coffee would be welcome. I’ll take it into the library if that’s all right. I can put in another hour’s work, perhaps more. Can I fetch the coffee? Bring yours in here?’
‘That would be kind of you. The filter machine only needs switching on. There will be milk in the fridge. I take mine black, with no sugar.’
Michael nodded and found his way to the kitchen.
He took his hostess’s cup to her, but before pouring his own he went up to his bedroom to phone Nell. He had suddenly found that he wanted to hear her voice very much. If anyone could dispel Fosse House’s eeriness, it would be Nell. With that in mind, he told her about hearing the whispering on his arrival.
‘Michael, my love, you’re so suggestible, you’d hear ghosts in a supermarket car park,’ said Nell. ‘I’ll bet you drove up to that dark old house – it is a dark old house, I suppose? Yes, I thought it would be – and you saw it as the setting for cobweb-draped Victorian skeletons, or the background to somebody’s graveyard elegy, not to mention doomed Gothic heroines.’
‘I wish,’ said Michael, already feeling better, ‘that you weren’t able to walk in and out of my mind quite so easily.’
‘It’s always a nice journey though,’ she said, and Michael heard the smile in her voice. ‘What did the whispers say?’
‘They were quite macabre,’ said Michael, hesitating.
‘If a dark old house has a whispering voice, it’s bound to be a macabre one. Seriously, what did the whispers say?’
‘About trying to hold on to sanity – that seemed to be the main burden of the song. And about not being caught, for sanity’s sake.’
‘Those are quite sibilant words,’ said Nell thoughtfully. ‘I’ll bet what you heard was simply the storm wind blowing down the guttering.’
‘I expect you’re right,’ said Michael. ‘Thanks, my love. You’ve put me back in touch with reality. You always do put my feet back on the ground.’
‘Well, you send my head into the clouds quite often, so that balances out.’
‘I’ll tell you about something I’ve found here that might do that properly,’ he said. ‘No, it isn’t a Van Dyck or a Delft dinner service – it’s quite an unusual framed sketch with the date 1917 on it.’ He briefly considered whether to mention the unnerving fact that Stephen Gilmore appeared in a photograph of twenty-five years later, and decided that the whispering was more than enough gothic content for one phone call. Instead he described the sketch carefully, and was aware of Nell’s instant interest.
‘Did you say Holzminden? Michael, are you sure about that?’
‘Yes, I am. What exactly is Holzminden? Or should I say, where is it? Because it sounds like a place rather than someone’s name.’
‘It is a place. It’s a town, or it might even be a city, in Germany – Lower Saxony, I think. I’ll have to look it up. But I think it was originally one of those medieval settlements that existed under the rule of a princedom or a dukedom. Turreted castles and stone arches, and Wolfenbuttels, I expect. But there was a prisoner-of-war camp there in the First World War—’