One of the many legends attached to beautiful Belheddon Hall, an ancient manor house set in lovely rolling parkland on the edge of the sea, concerns the family who lived there within very recent times. Mary Percival inherited the house on the death of her mother in 1884 when she was just twenty years old. A determined and resourceful young woman by all accounts, she resolved to run the huge estate single handed, rejecting all offers for her hand, offers of which as may be imagined, there were many.
As far as we can gather Mary was an attractive and popular member of the community and when at last she gave her heart it was to the handsome son of a Suffolk clergyman who was practising as a lawyer in Bury, a town some miles from Belheddon. John Bennet was a year her senior and on their marriage abandoned the law in order to help Mary look after the estate. This heavy responsibility he took over completely within a few months as Mary waited for the birth of her first child. Henry John Bennet was born in October 1900 and two years later his sister Lydia Sarah followed.
As far as is known all was contentment within the Bennet household and the first sign of a problem in the house was noted by the local rector. In his memoirs there are several references to Belheddon Hall and he was called to perform a Service of Exorcism in the house on at least two occasions. He was called to the Hall in the winter of 1902 after servants reported sightings of an apparition, variously described as a knight in armour, a Martian and astonishingly a ‘tripod’ (this was four years after the appearance of the War of the Worlds by Mr H. G. Wells) and a monster foretelling the end of the world. In the course of the next year the Bennets found it impossible to keep servants at the Hall. One after another they left and their replacements departed in similar short order. Only a few months later, in the spring of 1903, tragedy struck the family. Little Henry John died as the result of a terrible accident.
This is where the mystery begins. There is no record of how or why he died. It was presumably no ordinary childhood malady which carried him off. The shock and horror throughout the county precludes that.
Joss laid down the sheets of paper and reached for her tea cup thoughtfully. She gazed into the depths of the tea, remembering. She was sitting in the attic, the brilliant blue sky outside the windows, with John Bennet’s diary lying in her lap. The words sprang out at her as they had then.
So, he claims yet another victim. The boy is dead. Next it will be me.
She was not at all sure she wanted to go on reading this. Folding the pages she stood up and pushed them into the pocket of her trousers, then picking up the cup she made her way through to the great hall. The room was bright, sunshine flooding in through the rain smudged windows and casting moted beams across the floor. The flowers she had put on the refectory table only yesterday had shed petals all over the black polished oak and there was a dusting of sticky pollen round the silver bowl. With a shiver she glanced around the room and then she headed for the staircase.
She realised as she looked down into the crib that her heart was thudding with fear. What had she expected? To find something awful had happened to her baby? She gave a smile. He was awake, his little fists waving aimlessly free of his shawl.
‘Hello, stranger,’ she whispered. Stooping she scooped him up into her arms. Carrying him over to the chair by the window she settled herself comfortably so she could look out over the garden, and slowly she began to unbutton her blouse.
Ned. The name came to her out of nowhere. Edward. There were no Edwards in her family as far as she could remember. Frowning she tried to picture the family Bible downstairs in the study. And there were certainly none in the Davies family. ‘Edward Philip Joseph Grant.’ She repeated the names to herself out loud. ‘Not a bad handle for a very small chap.’ She dropped a kiss on the fuzz of dark hair.
When he was once more asleep she went over to sit on the window seat and only then did she pull the photocopied pages from her pocket once more.
Stories continued to circulate throughout the next few months and must have distressed the bereaved family enormously. Mr and Mrs Bennet became increasingly unsettled and the rector was repeatedly sent for to the Hall. Then at the end of June in that year John Bennet disappeared and despite country-wide attempts to locate him was nowhere to be found.
No trace of him was ever discovered at the time, but some fifteen years later rumours began to circulate around the Essex-Suffolk borders as to what had really happened.
An elderly man was reported to have been seen in several different hostelries, claiming to be the missing John Bennet. He looked like a man in his eighties (John Bennet would by now have been about fifty-five, a year older than his wife) with white hair, vacant eyes and a severe nervous twitch. Word of his presence on the Suffolk border of course reached Mary Sarah, living still at Belheddon Hall with her only surviving child, Lydia, now a young lady of sixteen. The demons of Belheddon had, it seemed, been laid to rest after the disappearance of the master of the house. Mary Sarah, it is reported, denounced the man as an impostor and refused to see him. He on his part refused to go to Belheddon Hall and when asked about his life in the intervening years became vague and troubled.
Nothing more would have been heard of him perhaps, had he not been discovered unconscious on the steps of the church in the village of Lawford. The rector had him carried into the rectory and there he was nursed back to a semblance of life. The story he told the rector was never divulged officially but a housemaid in the rectory said that on several occasions her duties took her into the rector’s study to stoke the fire while the two men were talking. The story the visitor was unravelling filled her with horror.