Chapter Twenty-Three #2
“I know what you mean,” Allan agreed. “And yes, I have come round to your way of thinking, Mel. Something is wrong with the house beyond my own feelings about it. Something I can’t explain.
Best to leave it to the professionals.” He twisted his mouth in a grimace.
“I am not looking forward to telling my brothers. They’ll be as skeptical as I was, and not as polite about it. ”
In the end, the brothers and their wives supported the exorcism.
Baldwin was the one most inclined to scoff, but Clara told a couple of stories from her village about a house that was thought to be haunted, and Baldwin never liked disagreeing with his wife.
Frank was wholeheartedly in favor, pointing out that the place had been oppressive all their lives and if what the bishop tried didn’t work, they had lost nothing.
Even practical Thomasina thought it was a good idea.
So, on the second Saturday in February, those chosen to represent the rest of the family gathered in the drawing room at Teign Tower, all except for Allan and Mel, who waited by the door for the bishop and his assistants.
After a round of introductions in the drawing room, the bishop suggested that they begin immediately. “It is a big house,” he said, “and I must repeat the exorcism in every room and closet.”
He led them through the Lord’s Prayer and the prayer of general confession, and then pronounced an absolution.
After a Gospel reading came several prayers asking God to cleanse the house and deliver it from “all evil spirits; all vain imaginations, projections and phantasms; and all deceits of the evil one.”
Then he sprinkled every corner of the room with water he’d brought with him, and pronounced a blessing on the room and all those within it.
It might have been her imagination, but to Mel, the room felt better.
Lighter, somehow, both in the sense of weight and of brightness.
Though neither of those words were right, precisely.
The sensation had nothing to do with normal senses.
“That’s one,” the bishop said. “Lord Kemble, let us proceed to the next room.”
He and his assistants were very thorough. No room was missed, not the smallest attic bedroom, not the linen closet or the butler’s pantry. In every room the bishop repeated the prayers of deliverance, the sprinkling of water—even into cupboards—and the blessing.
Since the house had grown over time, it was a bewildering maze, with corridors that apparently led nowhere or looped back on themselves, steps between levels, and another entire network of corridors to convey servants invisibly from one part of the house to another.
After an hour, they had visited fifteen rooms, blessing them and the corridors between them. They had almost completed the grandest floor of the house—the one designed for entertaining important guests and holding large gatherings.
On other floors, the rooms would be smaller and more numerous.
“How many rooms does the house have?” Mel whispered to Allan.
He shook his head. “I have never managed to count. Somewhere close to one hundred, I think.”
“We are going to need to provide refreshments,” Mel decided. One hundred rooms at this pace would take all day. And yet, already the rooms they had been in felt better.
Perhaps, as Baldwin insisted, it was her imagination.
Still, it was worth continuing, whether the bishop was succeeding in driving malign influences out of the house, or whether she and Allan—and the other members of the family—were simply being deluded into imagining both the bad feelings and their expulsion.
Most of the family present for the ritual had stayed in the drawing room. “I shall find Clara, and ask her to organize food and drink,” she told Allan, and he nodded his agreement before following the bishop’s party into the next room.
Mel hurried her errand. The instinct that seldom failed her was nagging at her now, telling her that she needed to be at Allan’s side as he went from room to room. There was danger in this house, and it was pointed firmly in the direction of Allan.
But it was not yet apparent where or when the danger would arise. She had time, and the immediate need was to make sure that those in the house for this exorcism were provided with food and drink as the day wore on. We had better make a priority of cleansing the kitchen.
Once Clara had promised to send for her own servants and food from her own kitchen, Mel returned to Allan, and tucked her hand into his. She was at his side, whatever the house had in store for them.
They completed the basement, with its kitchen, pantry, scullery, servants’ hall, housekeeper’s office, and all the other service rooms and moved on to the floor designed for family living and for hosting more intimate gatherings.
Once they had prayed in the family dining room on that floor, Clara escorted in a bevy of maids with trays and a couple of footmen with a tea urn, and they paused to eat and drink before continuing upstairs to the guest bedrooms and beyond that to the servants’ rooms in the attics.
Hour by hour, as they progressed room by room, nothing went wrong and no danger made itself apparent. Mel began to wonder if she had allowed the history of the house to cloud her instincts.
Certainly, they finished the main block of the house, basement to attics, without anything disturbing their progress. There remained the family wing and the tower, and they repaired to the family wing after stopping to recruit their energies with a buffet meal.
All doubts fled as they passed through the double doors into the main corridor to the ground floor Mel had visited before.
The marquess’s study was here, as well as the stewards’ office and visitor parlors in various sizes.
Here, too, the sense of the danger that had been hovering at the back of her mind became suddenly present and piercing.
She and Allan were leading the way, with the quietest of the clerics who was assisting the bishop beside them. This man—he had been introduced as Beauclair—had been walking with his neck bent and his lips moving in prayer.
He stopped as they crossed in front of the side entrance used by the marquess’s petitioners, his stewards, and other such visitors.
In fact, he stopped so abruptly that Mel turned to see what had given him pause.
She was in time to watch him lift his head and stretch it forward, his nostrils flared.
He looked from side to side, for all the world like a hound attempting sight and sniffing out the prey.
“Your Grace,” he said to the bishop, “this hall first, and then that room.” He pointed to the door that opened into the marquess’s study.
*
Mr. Beauclair’s voice broke through the fog of dread and despair that had been descending on Allan since they walked through the doors into the private wing. The emotions struggled to find expression in words. It is hopeless. We can never win. We should just give in.
He gripped Mel’s hand as a point of reference in the storm, and fought the words back. She had come to him like a light in the darkness. She was his hope, his reason to fight until they won, his compass and his anchor.
Again, Mr. Beauclair spoke, his voice sharp with alarm. “Lord Kemble is under attack, Your Grace. And Lords Ernest and Hudson, too.”
An attack. Is that what it is? From his father? The bishop’s voice came to Allan as if at a distance, like voices heard on the threshold of sleep. “What do you recommend, Mr. Beauclair?”
“Let us pray for the safety of each of the Sheppard brothers, and send them back to the drawing room before we finish these rooms,” proposed Mr. Beauclair. “And let Mr. Blasingstoke go with them, to pray with them for our success.”
“I can… fight… it,” Allan insisted.
The bishop was talking to Melody, and Allan was too busy to listen. He was trying not to succumb to the heavy weight of doom that pressed on his mind.
Then warm arms wrapped around him and pushed the weight back. Melody. It lightened still further at the light touch of hands on his shoulder—hands that drove back the dread while voices intoned the Lord’s Prayer.
He joined in the Amen.
“Come,” said Melody. “Let us leave it to the professionals for a while, and check on our brothers.”
Allan let her lead him, back past the side door and through into the main house. The burden of dread lightened still further as soon as he was on the other side of the doors. Ernest and Rosina had come, too, and Hudson and Parthena.
Also, Mr. Blasingstoke, another of the bishop’s assistants.
“What happened in there?” Hudson demanded. “I felt as if I had no reason for living, as if every good thing had been leached of its virtue, as if fighting was pointless.”
Ernest was nodding.
Mr. Blasingstoke quoted Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
“‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ My friend Mr. Beauclair understands these matters better than I. He says you were being attacked, Lord Hudson, and you too, Lord Kemble and Lord Ernest. A rationalist might suggest that you have been accustomed to such feelings in that part of the house, but the bishop has brought us here because the forces of evil are real, are able to produce—or perhaps merely to magnify—such feelings, and can be dispelled.”
After the last five minutes, Allan had no argument with Mr. Blasingstoke’s contention.
Back in the drawing room, the other brothers who had come to the house had also felt something—not to the same extent as the three who had accompanied the bishop, but enough that they didn’t argue about Mr. Blasingstoke’s explanation of what they had experienced.
Nor did they refuse to join Mr. Blasingstoke in prayer for the family and the house.
And throughout the wait for the bishop and his attendants, Allan clung to Mel’s hand.
*