Chapter 10
10
After the departure of Mr Findlay, heavy clouds drifted from the west and settled overhead, casting the landscape in a theatrical light. Another storm was imminent and Luna asked if she might be carried through to join the Webbers in the kitchens. The drawing room unnerved her, even though she knew she was being silly by imagining the ghost of Marcus’s wife to be loitering in the fireplace. She had no proof that Luna was dead but had the inexplicable feeling that the house, or someone within it, was watching her, and she didn’t like it. Prickles dashed across her skin when she was alone and she occasionally caught fragmented whispers and couldn’t be certain if they were real or imagined.
Mr Webber didn’t like the mistress of the house being seated in what he considered the servants’ domain and grumbled about being watched, but his wife seemed happy to have someone to chat to. It also gave Luna the opportunity to make delicate suggestions with regard to improved food preparation and for her to observe how the household was run – which was rather haphazardly, as it turned out.
It was interesting watching the pair of them go about their tasks, the manservant sneering every time he so much as looked at his wife. There was no love there, to be sure, yet, despite wearing his contempt for the world permanently across his face, Luna thought he was still quite an attractive man for his age, with strong features and chocolate-brown eyes. She could imagine he had been quite the catch for Mrs Webber back in the day.
She asked if Bran might be brought downstairs, and was heartened to see him cautiously hopping about on his good leg across the flagstone floor, holding the other off the ground. The raven and the manservant kept to opposite corners of the large room though, she noticed.
She decided to quiz the couple about the Greybourne legend and the housekeeper confirmed that ravens had lived in the nearby woods for hundreds of years. When a holy well had been dug there by the nearby Cistercian monks in medieval times, the people of Little Doubton came to associate these curious and intelligent birds with the protection of this precious water source, even though those further afield persecuted them as harbingers of bad luck and death.
‘There’s a well in the woods at the back of the house?’ Luna said, somewhat surprised as the river was so close.
‘Yes, but it don’t have water in it no more,’ Mr Webber muttered from his dark corner, the smell of damp soil and cheap brandy quite obvious when he came in for his lunch. The rain was now beating against the windowpanes like a thousand tiny stampeding horses. ‘Dried up donkey’s years ago. But I don’t know what all the fuss was about. It’s hardly like we’re miles from water.’ He echoed her own thoughts, as he struck a match and began to puff on an old clay pipe.
‘Ignore him,’ his wife said. ‘He knows this was different. Pure. Came from under them hills and had magical properties. Some old monk in the thirteen hundreds was told in a vision to dig in a particular spot, and he happened upon this underground spring that fed into the Bran. Special water, it was. My grandmother remembers it curing a man of blindness.’
Luna was amazed that the water was so powerful it could make a man see again.
‘Part of the abbey lands back then, but then fat old King Henry sold it off and all’s left is ruins. You can still see some of the abbey walls when you walk into Doubton.’
‘Problem is…’ Mr Webber leaned forward in his chair so that his face loomed from the shadows, ‘…there be darker folk wanting that water – Devil-worshippers an’ such, who do their ill-wishing at the well.’ He spoke slowly and deliberately, like someone relaying a ghost story to children. If he’d wanted to scare Luna, it worked, as a distant rumble of thunder added to the eerie atmosphere. ‘They travelled from miles around to gather at the witching hour and called on evil spirits in them woods. You won’t find no one out after dark on All Hallows’ Eve in these parts, coz that’s when he’s summoned up through the well and walks through the village, collecting the restless souls of them that can’t move on.’
‘Who?’ she asked, suspecting she knew the answer.
‘The Devil,’ Mr Webber whispered and then, noticing her horrified expression and trembling hands, he laughed out loud. ‘You’re as bad as the missus. Look at yer both. Faces as pale as milk.’
He’d taken far too much pleasure in scaring them and she felt increasingly uncomfortable in his presence, even though Bran had flown to her side when the talk had turned to Devil worship and tortured souls unable to leave this realm.
Not long afterwards, Luna overheard the pair of them whispering in the scullery. Mrs Webber reminded her husband that he might well tell everyone to stay inside when the Devil was walking, yet she knew damn well he went out himself last All Hallows’ Eve. He told her to mind her own goddamn business, and Luna heard a scuffle of feet followed by a yelp from his wife, suggesting the man was not averse to lashing out when riled. Suddenly the kitchens no longer seemed an appealing option and she didn’t ask to sit with them again.
Every morning after that, Mr Webber carried her straight to the drawing room and Bran hopped slowly along behind them, not wanting to lose sight of the woman to whom he owed his recovery. He was now happier out of the crate and spent most of his time flapping between the windowsill and the top of her high-backed armchair. When he spread his obsidian-black wings wide, she was astounded by the size of him. It was obvious that the bird had become attached to her, even though he was growing increasingly pushy, nudging her hand when she had the effrontery to stop petting his soft black head. But at his most content, he would make a delightful low gurgling sound, and she liked his company, feeling safer with him beside her.
‘I asked my husband to make you these,’ Mrs Webber said, passing over a pair of rough-hewn crutches. ‘They ain’t nothing special and, despite the bit of padding I’ve wrapped around the crosspiece, you won’t be able to use them for long, but if you promise not to put any weight on that foot, you can at least get about now.’
Luna was moved by the woman’s kindness but also delighted to have more independence and not be totally reliant on the housekeeper’s gruff husband to carry her about. Thoughts of leaving were never far from her mind, so the quicker she could become mobile, the quicker she could cross the river and start a new life in London. Her nights had been increasingly troubled by imagined voices, whispering to her that she was not wanted, although with all she’d been through recently, these cruel tricks of the mind were not a surprise.
‘How thoughtful. This will allow me to explore the house and see where I could make improvements. Mr Greybourne mentioned sending me some catalogues and I would like to be of service whilst he is absent.’
The housekeeper raised an eyebrow. ‘Be prepared, is all I’m saying, coz you ain’t going to like what you find…’
In the few days since she’d been at the house, the only rooms Luna had seen were the kitchen, drawing room, and the gloomy bedroom, yet the property was sizeable and she was keen to explore – if only because she was so terribly bored.
The crutches were heavy and awkward, but she was able to hobble around the ground floor, only to find Mrs Webber was right; she was met with sights she couldn’t even begin to understand. Despite Marcus’s best efforts before he’d left for London, she found room after room lying empty and in various states of disrepair. Walls were covered in writing; dark and jagged words repeated over and over, barely decipherable but largely threatening, and all the rooms had a black eye painted somewhere on the wall, much like the one in her bedroom, as if to remind anyone entering that they were being watched. There were disturbing scratch marks around the bottom of the doors, as though someone or something had tried to claw their way out, and debris lay in every corner, swept to one side, but she recognised chair legs and broken china amongst the litter.
More alarmingly, there were several dark scorch marks in the floorboards, charred and black, where small fires had clearly been lit, and the floor of the library was covered in the same symbols and markings that she’d seen on the bed canopy. A huge sweeping chalk circle took up the central space, with melted pillar candles dotted at regular intervals, and animal bones (at least, she hoped they were animal bones) laid out in strange patterns in the gaps between.
Luna felt sick. Weird things had been going on in this house and this room was the most unsettling of all. As she turned to go, she noticed a dirty mattress and a small hoop-backed chair in the window, with one grey blanket thrown haphazardly across the makeshift bed. Was this where his wife had slept? She felt incredulous. Mrs Greybourne had been treated no better than an animal.
Mr Findlay may have claimed her husband was kind to his former wife, but he had not been privy to these rooms, and she started to wonder if Marcus was one of the ‘wholesome and good’ people that the cunning man had warned her about…