Jan Siegel - Prospero’s Children

‘Is there a village shop?’ Fern inquired, transferring the kettle to an unheated surface.

‘Probably.’

Robin returned about three quarters of an hour later with squash instead of juice and no Frosties. ‘Only cornflakes,’ he explained, ‘and porridge oats. Didn’t think you’d like those. Sorry about the juice. Said they’d run out.’

‘No Frosties!’ Will bewailed.

‘You took a long time,’ said Fern.

‘Met the vicar. Nice chap. Name of Dinsdale—Gus Dinsdale. Invited us to tea. Thought we might like to visit Edward Capel’s grave, pay our respects, I suppose. He’s buried here: local churchyard. Anyway, I said fine. Nothing else to do.’

‘A visit to a grave and tea with the vicar,’ said Will. ‘Lovely weekend we’re having.’

They spent the rest of the morning going through the house. Fern found a long-handled broom for the cobwebs and an antiquated vacuum cleaner which made a noise like a small tornado and seemed bent on sucking up the carpets. In the drawing room, she moved the idol to a place where it would not catch her eye every time she opened the door. It was much heavier than she had anticipated and the stone felt rough and chill; she shivered when she set it down. On the first floor, Robin became absorbed in the paintings and estimated that a couple of murky landscapes and the portrait of a little girl with Shirley Temple ringlets clutching a puppy might possibly be worth something. Will, disappointed to find that the vaulted gloom of the cellar contained nothing more promising than a wine-rack with several bottles of superior burgundy, was cheered by the discovery of an attic running the length of the house, colonised by spiders and littered with bric-a-brac, including an iron-bound chest which might have come straight from a pirates’ hoard. His enthusiasm was enhanced rather than mitigated when the chest proved to be locked, with no immediate sign of a key.

‘Looking for it will give you something useless to occupy your time,’ said Fern, who had stubbed her toe on a lurking footstool and was determined to find nothing intriguing in an overcrowded attic. She was too old for treasure hunts.

‘I say,’ said Robin from behind her. ‘Quite a place. Might find all kinds of stuff here—family heirlooms, missing works of art…That chair looks like a Chippendale. Pity it’s broken. Not much light, is there? We need Fern’s torch.’

They came down finally at lunchtime when Mrs Wicklow arrived carrying a covered dish. Her greeting was abrupt and her face only slightly less stony than that of the idol but the dish emanated an agreeable aroma of steak-and-kidney and Fern concluded that her attitude was not actively grudging, it was simply that she was resistant to change and unused to the incursion of strangers. ‘Solicitors told me t’ Captain was your great-uncle,’ she said to Robin over their meal.

‘Well, not exactly…’

‘We decided he was our great-cousin,’ Will said, ‘with an extra great for Fern and me.’

‘You must miss him,’ Fern offered.

‘He was a good man,’ Mrs Wicklow conceded, ‘but tired. He was old and he didn’t like it. He couldn’t go walking the way he used to. Folks say long life is a thing to wish for, but I’m not so sure. It can’t be pleasant to outlive your friends. T’ Captain, he wasn’t t’ same since his dog died.’

‘Was he really a captain?’ Will asked.

‘He was that. Been all over the world, he had. I don’t know as how he ever really took to it, being what he called a landsman all the time. Of course, we’re near the coast here. He’d go down to look at t’ sea often and often, and come back sad about the eyes. Can’t say I trust it myself, t’ sea: it can seem so blue and gentle, but t’ water’s always cold and tricksy underneath.’

‘He must have collected a lot of things on his travels,’ Will said opportunely. ‘I don’t suppose you know where I could find the key to that big chest in the attic?’

‘Could be anywhere.’ Mrs Wicklow achieved a shrug. ‘House is full of stuff. Most of it’s rubbish, if you ask me; he wasn’t one for throwing things away. T’ key’ll be tucked in a drawer in t’ study or bedroom if you’re that set on it.’

‘Which was the Captain’s room?’ Will pursued.

‘One Mr Capel has now,’ Mrs Wicklow said. She had done some investigative bed-making before serving the pie.

‘Er—make it Robin,’ their father interjected. ‘Mr Capel…bit formal.’

‘Mr Robin, then.’

‘Might not all be rubbish, you know,’ Mr Robin remarked, discarding any further attempt at informality. ‘There are some good pictures, although I expect those came to him through the family.’

‘I don’t mind pictures,’ said Mrs Wicklow. ‘It’s that heathen idol in the drawing room I don’t like. Evil-looking object, I told t’ Captain to his face. Unchristian. He said it amused him. There’s different kinds of God, he used to say, all over t’ world. That’s not a kind I’d want in my prayers, I told him, nor any respectable person.’

‘I don’t care for it much either,’ said Fern.

‘And then there’s that woman,’ Mrs Wicklow continued, obscurely. ‘Carved out of a whole tree, according to t’ Captain, painted up as bright as life, and showing her all just like in t’ Sunday papers. She came from a shipwreck, he said, back in t’ old days when ships had a real lady up front for t’ sailors to warm to, only she doesn’t look much like a lady to me. T’ prow, that’s what they call it. He kept it in t’ barn next door, and a big piece of t’ ship with it.’

‘We haven’t looked in the barn yet,’ said Will, glancing compellingly at his father, his interest in sea chests temporarily in abeyance.

‘We ought to go and see,’ Robin affirmed. ‘A ship’s figurehead—sounds pretty exciting.’ His eyes were as bright as his son’s.

Fern stayed in the kitchen, although her offer to help with the washing up was firmly rejected.

‘Funny thing, what your brother was asking,’ Mrs Wicklow resumed. ‘There was a young woman over from Guisborough, not long before t’ Captain died. Something to do with antiques. They’re all crooks, so I hear. Wanting him to sell stuff, she was. He sent her about her business. Anyway, I was doing t’ drawing room when they came downstairs, and I heard them talking. She was asking about keys.’

Later that afternoon they paid a brief visit to the churchyard, where Ned Capel lay in the lee of a dry stone wall, with the turf plumped up like a pillow over his grave. It was a quiet place hollowed into the hillside, with the petals of a hawthorn drifting across the ground like a spring snowfall. ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea,’ Fern quoted, and for an instant she felt, irrationally, that she too had come home—home to the grimness of Dale House and the wild country waiting in the wings. ‘Is it supposed to be haunted?’ she asked the vicar, over tea.

‘Extraordinary question,’ said Robin. ‘Didn’t think you believed in ghosts.’

‘I don’t. It’s just—when we arrived, the house appeared, not exactly menacing, but reserved, sort of sullen, unwilling—or afraid—to let us in. I almost fancied…’ She checked herself, remembering her vaunted distrust of fancies.

‘I’ve never been too sure about hauntings,’ said the Reverend Dinsdale. He was younger than Fern had expected, probably under forty, with a friendly bony face and a long neck in which a mobile Adam’s apple fluctuated expressively. ‘I can’t really imagine a human spirit is going to mope around the same old place for centuries just because it was murdered there, or something equally nasty. All the more reason to move on, I would have thought. On the other hand, some houses have a definite personality. I’ve often wondered if it’s the buildings themselves which remember—and maybe sometimes the memory can be strong enough to reproduce an old image, a sound, even a smell, so that human senses can detect it Perhaps there’s a kind of house-spirit which lives in such places, a degenerate form of something that was once akin to mankind, craving the company of the living even while it resents them, reminded of what it might have been.’