Chapter Twenty-Three
Before the wedding, Allan and Melody had barely made a start at picking up the reins of the widespread Teign holdings. Throughout the rest of a cold and wet January, those responsibilities consumed much of their time.
At Melody’s suggestion, Allan took one estate, one investment or one enterprise at a time, spending as much time as he needed to understand the potential, the problems, and the possible paths forward.
Dellborough’s advice was invaluable. The duke became Allan’s mentor, helping him with advice and practical recommendations. And the duchess was equally supportive of Melody.
Every day, Allan thanked God for Melody’s presence at his side.
Her common sense and her encouragement made it possible for him to tackle the Herculean task of cramming the lessons that he should have had three decades to learn, if the marquess had ever had any interest in training his heir to take over.
“We also need to find a place to live,” Allan said to his wife one morning as they prepared for the day. “We cannot go on indefinitely living with Clara. Especially once she and Baldwin move up to Edinburgh.”
“After today, it will just be us and the girls as visitors in their house,” Melody mused.
They were dressing to attend the wedding of Phineas and Harmony, and that afternoon the newly married couple would be moving, with Benjie and the pet mice, to a house in Cheapside where Phineas planned to open a school for day pupils.
As many wealthy merchants lived in the vicinity, he was certain his school would be a success, and Harmony was gleefully planning to mother all the boys who came under her roof.
“Exactly,” said Allan. “It is time for us to make our own home.”
“What of the marquess’s townhouse?” Melody asked.
Allan shuddered. That hellhole? He never wanted to set foot in it again.
But Melody hadn’t finished. “From what you’ve told me of its history, it was a happy place once—a family home, as well as the London center from which previous marquesses had the kind of influence that Dellborough has now.
It can be restored, Allan. Completely refurbished and redecorated.
Rooms returned to their original purpose.
” She turned her back to him, silently asking him to do up the buttons on her fashionable day dress.
The buttons found the buttonholes, but Allan’s gaze was inward, contemplating a grim reality.
“They dug up the cellars, my love. They found more than fifty bodies in shallow graves. More than fifty women who ended their lives in pain and suffering. In that house.” He cringed inside to think of it.
All those murders and more at the hands of that awful man.
And I must have been living in the house when at least some of them took place!
“Then what do you want to do?” Melody turned and slipped her arms around his waist. “I support whatever choice you make, my love. We can raze the buildings to the ground and build again. We can sell the townhouse and buy another one. We can ask the bishop for an exorcism.”
“An exorcism?” Whatever Allan thought she might say, that wasn’t it. Wasn’t Melody one of the most level-headed people he knew? “Are you saying the place is haunted? Or infested with demons?” This is the nineteenth century. Nobody of sense believes in such things.
“Do you not want to avoid it because it reminds you of things you would rather forget?” asked his wife. “For you, the house is haunted by memories. As to the demon, he is gone. I would feel a great deal better if I knew where, but he is no longer in the house.”
She slipped from his embrace and bent over the sparse collection in her jewelry case, took out the locket he had given her as a wedding present, and handed it to him.
Once again, she turned her back to him, presenting the nape of her neck as she said, “I only know that places have an atmosphere. I have entered a building and known people were happy there. Churches often feel peaceful and holy. Your townhouse is one where my skin crawled with discomfort from the moment I entered.”
Allan obeyed the mute request, put the chain around his wife’s neck, and fastened the catch.
Melody had not finished. “As the people are, so is the house. You are being too polite to scoff, beloved. But I have seen strange things enough to believe that an exorcism and blessing by the bishop will help to change the atmosphere, as will having servants who no longer live in fear, and owners who love one another.”
She turned again and kissed his cheek. “Here I am, talking on and on when I have already said it is your decision, and I shall support you. I love you, Allan Sheppard.”
“And I love you,” Allan told her. He gathered her closer for a kiss that meant redoing her hair and changing the linen fichu they had crushed between them.
Later that day, after a long wrestle between his fear and his pride—he never wanted to enter that house again, but nor did he want his wife to pity him for a coward—he made a decision.
“We shall keep the house,” he told Melody.
“Let us refurbish it and change it to our liking. And yes. Let us ask the bishop to come and bless it.”
*
Allan and Mel visited the bishop, who was not encouraging. “While I cannot deny the existence of malign influences, Lord Kemble, in general, I regard exorcisms as a relic of a more superstitious time. If you wish to dispel such influences, a simple prayer will generally do.”
He nodded at his own wisdom. “In the first instance, I suggest you and your wife try sincere and faithful prayer. Perhaps do a careful examination of conscience, receive communion in your parish church, and then pray together for God to cleanse the house and free it from the pains and suffering of the past.”
Mel pointed out how much evil had been committed in the house, and how difficult it had always been to retain servants. She did not mention her own reaction to the atmosphere—she had the impression that the bishop would discount her discomfort as womanly imagining.
The bishop would not change his mind, though he did agree to reconsider if his proposed approach did not work. He also gave them a little booklet with some prayers they could try.
They followed his prescription to the letter.
Allan overcame his distaste for the house sufficiently to walk through it with her, reciting the prayers that the bishop had given them in each of the principal rooms. Room by room, Mel felt more and more oppressed.
“I feel as if the house is glaring at me,” she told Allan.
“I’ve heard that before,” Allan told her. “One of the maids who resigned said much the same thing.”
In fact, all the servants who had not been arrested as accomplices to the marquess and Farnham had either resigned or requested to be transferred elsewhere.
The house was standing empty, with a pair of night watchmen patrolling the grounds at night, and a squad of maids from an agency coming in every second day to dust and sweep.
And even then, several of them had refused to return after their first day of work, and one had walked out the door five minutes after walking in. Furthermore, they had hired a second night watchman because no one would stay even in the grounds at night if he was on his own.
“That was our last room,” Mel told Allan. “Unless you want to do the kitchen?”
“Let’s leave,” said Allan. “We shall see whether that makes a difference to the maids. And us, for that matter, since we must be back here tomorrow to take the architect and the master builder on a tour to discuss what we want to have done.”
The master builder only made it as far as the second floor before he told Allan he would not be taking the commission.
“Some buildings just feel wrong, Lord Kemble. And I’ve learned over the years that working on them isn’t worth it.
Accidents happen. And fights, and other disturbances.
People even lose their lives. This is that kind of building, and the worst of its sort I’ve ever seen. ”
The architect lasted the full tour, but he was clearly uncomfortable even before the builder’s defection—pale and sweating, starting at the least sound, constantly looking over his shoulder.
In the end, he, too, expressed his dislike of the building, though he prefaced his remarks with, “I know it is irrational, but…”
Before they even reached the tower, which they intended to reopen as overflow accommodation for the main house, he claimed another meeting.
“I shall begin making concept drawings, Lord and Lady Kemble. I shall be in touch when they are ready. And you have told me enough about the tower for me to include a few ideas.” His eyes darting from shadow to shadow, he hurried out of the building.
When the agency contacted them the following morning to say that the maid-team had threatened to quit if they were sent back to Teign Tower, Allan had had enough.
“We need to see the bishop again,” he told Mel. “And if that doesn’t work, the building will have to come down. If we can find someone willing to demolish it.”
Hearing what had happened, the bishop reluctantly agreed to perform what he called “an exorcism and blessing. A deliverance, if you will.” He and several priests whom he trusted would prepare, he said.
It would require several days, and he had other engagements in the meantime.
The date was set for the second Saturday in February.
“All those who are going to be present must also prepare with prayer and fasting,” he warned. “We shall start in the main room of the house, and move through room by room.”
He described the process in detail, his initial skepticism no longer in evidence. Mel wondered if he doubted her and Allan rather than the existence of inimical powers. That theory made sense, since—as a bishop—he presumably had a firm faith in spiritual beings beyond human imagining.
“I am relieved,” she told Allan. “He is taking this seriously. It gives me hope that he knows what he is doing.”