‘I think “The House” will have to do for now, then, my lady. Will you be wanting any supper?’
‘Oh, I hadn’t thought. Perhaps some more sandwiches? And cards. We haven’t played cards for simply ever.’
‘Right you are, my lady.’
‘And brandy. We can’t possibly play cards without brandy.’
I laughed. ‘Is there anything we can do without brandy?’
‘Very little, I find, pet, very little.’
The evening passed in a pleasing blur of cognac-fuelled cheating and giggling.
We were called upon several times over the ensuing weeks to attend police interviews, coroner’s courts and magistrate’s courts, but other than that, our lives were comparatively carefree once more. Lady Hardcastle had returned to full health and found much to occupy us both, most of it entertaining, including a small celebration in honour of my birthday.
Her two pet projects were the installation of a telephone and the purchase of a motorcar. The first was going to take some time, but matters had finally been set in motion. The approval of various bodies had been sought and obtained, and the installation of a marching line of telegraph poles to extend the line from the heart of the village along the lane to The House had been planned. There had been some grumbling from people who complained that we were marring the beauty of the countryside, and I couldn’t help but agree with them to a certain extent, but the promise of being able to call The Grange, or to talk to Lady Hardcastle’s brother Harry in London soon overcame my own objections, and the village grumblers found something else to grumble about long before work was due to commence. It would be weeks, possibly months, before we had our telephone, but at least things were moving.
The second project, the purchase of a motorcar, proved to be equally problematic in its own way. The motor dealer we approached in Bristol was reluctant at first even to deal with Lady Hardcastle, insisting that he would only talk to her husband. When she offered to engage the services of a medium to conduct a séance so that he could, he relented slightly, but still refused to take her driving ambitions entirely seriously. But her persistence slowly wore him down and eventually he agreed to sell her the pillar-box red Rover 6 in the showroom on the strict understanding that she should return the car as soon as she found that it was unsuitable and that he would happily agree favourable terms.
Within a week the car was delivered and a local builder was engaged to construct a garage for it beside the house. We were mobile, and soon to be telephonically connected; the twentieth century had arrived in Littleton Cotterell.
TWO
The Ghost of the Dog & Duck
“April showers”, that’s what the rhyme calls them. “Nightmarish April storms such as might herald the imminent apocalypse” would have been more apt for the weather we were having, but it would neither scan nor rhyme, so I suppose we have to stick with the official version.
Just when Lady Hardcastle had rediscovered her taste for the outdoors and for life among the living, we were more or less trapped indoors for days at a time as vicious storms swept in from… from… actually, I have no proper recollection where the storms swept in from. The west would be normal for wet weather, but there’d been thunder so it was more likely that they’d come from the south. Or from Hades itself.
Wherever they were from, they were dampening our fun and our spirits as well as our garden. The brand new motorcar had been sitting under its tarpaulin in the front garden for days; the weather was too vile for the drives Lady Hardcastle had planned, and the builders she had hired to build its little house suddenly found themselves engaged on other work as soon as the rain began to fall.
The fires were still lit, as were the lamps for most of the day as we struggled to banish the gloom. And it was all but impossible to get into the little laundry room for all the wet linen hanging in there.
There was little to do but cook, eat, and read.
We had settled down in the drawing room together with our books one evening after supper. I had already scoured the newspaper for something interesting, but beyond an explosion at the electricity substation which supplied power to the tramway, there was nothing of any interest there and instead turned to a local history that Dr Fitzsimmons had lent me when a passage caught my imagination. I looked up from the book and saw that Lady Hardcastle had also stopped reading and was staring into the fire.
‘Do you believe in ghosts, my lady?’ I asked.
‘Do I what?’ she asked, distractedly.
‘Ghosts,’ I said. ‘Do you believe in them?’
‘Believe, pet?’ she said, looking over at me. ‘No, I don’t “believe”. My mind is open to the possibility that there’s something going on that we don’t understand, but I do try awfully hard not to believe in things. I’m an empirical girl, you know me. Show me some evidence and I’ll be excited as a puppy, but a few credulous folk hearing bumps in the night isn’t enough for me.’
‘Oh,’ I said, feeling strangely disappointed.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Just something I was reading,’ I said.
‘I thought you were reading that local history the doctor gave you.’
‘I am. Chipping Bevington has a ghost.’
‘Does it, by crikey?’ she said, sitting up. ‘Why don’t we have one?’
‘That’s not recorded, my lady,’ I said. ‘There’s just a story about the Chipping Bevington ghost.’
‘Well go on then, you’re dying to tell me.’
‘Really, my lady? You won’t think it’s silly?’
‘Of course not.’
‘There’s a long, dreary section about the town and its history, about the market and the pubs. Did you know there were six pubs, my lady?’
‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ she said with a smile, warming to my own enthusiasm.
‘And then there’s this bit about the ghost of Sir Samuel Lagthorpe,’ I said as I picked up the book and began to read.
The Chipping Bevington Ghost
Sir Samuel Lagthorpe spent many years abroad managing various Colonial enterprises, and by the time he returned to England at the beginning of 1873 he had amassed a fortune large enough that he need never work again. He bought a modest, but nonetheless comfortable, cottage just outside the town in the village of Littleton Cotterell and settled into country life, enjoying his new role as the exotic village squire “from overseas”.