Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 20, No. 1, January 1975

Mad Maud, the Harrowgate Hag by Mary Costantin

To gain the advantage, one must get the number of an adversary.

My name is Ken Wenks. I am a Canadian journalist who, once having got to London, has made a career of staying here, I like it that much. Over the course of ten years, I have developed an intimate knowledge of the convolutions of Westminster and have used this expertise to guarantee my steady employment by a succession of North American publications, each better than the last. I am reasonably well-paid for my journalistic labors.

As Rob MacKenzie, prolific author of paperback thrillers, however, I have made a bundle and a half, even after the Inland Revenue has taken its cut. I have also made the acquaintance of one of my fans: the beauteous Shelagh O’Keeffe. Ah, Shelagh. Irish, beautiful, semi-aristocratic and the highly successful proprietress of an antiques shop and interior decorating service in the smartest part of Chelsea.

Shelagh convinced me that I should sink some of my booty into real estate. Houses. Well, to begin with, a house. The initial plan was that I’d buy a house, she, funded by me, would furnish and decorate it, and then I’d sell it at a handsome profit — minus Shelagh’s 10 % — to somebody like an American millionaire. House not even purchased, I had begun to entertain a second plan: once the house was fixed up, it would be the ideal place for Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Wenks to set up housekeeping, Shelagh being the Mrs. of the title. Shelagh... such red hair! Such green eyes!

Well, it wasn’t as easy as that. No, not at all. In hunting for a house, I kept looking backwards from Georgian while Shelagh kept looking forward from, let me be kind, 1984. A mystifying propensity, I hear you saying, in a girl who makes her living searching out antique furniture and bibelots. The truth is, she has made most of her money out of being the Modest decorator around: plastic slate, crocodile fabrics, wet-look wallpaper, all that.

What to do?

Even before I answer, I predict cries of “Male chauvinist pig!” I, however, prefer to think of myself as a student of human foibles. Shelagh’s foible is that she is something of a snob. She thinks a martini cocktail mixed with American ingredients, U.S. Air Force PX, is highly superior to a plain old Beefeater’s martini. One starry evening I plied her with this elixir and she finally agreed, among other things, to let me buy the house on my own if I would let her decorate the house on her own. A further martini applied, she also agreed to work into her interior schemes the assorted Queen Anne and earlier and later stuff I had already collected in my tiny service flat.

Free of Shelagh’s penchant for floor-to-ceiling glass, I did not find my search for a house an easy task. I quickly ran through the repertoire of one estate agent after another.

“A little fixing, that’s all it needs, truly.” That was an old Etonian trying to flog a boathouse on the Thames that had been uninhabited since the Great Fire.

“Trendy, baby, trendy.” A sharp-lapelled Cockney showing me a loft in Whitechapel that had most recently been a dress factory (surely Fagan had turned it down as depressing) complete with obscene scrawlings on the wall of the single, stinking, highly primitive loo.

“Of course, the lions crying at night may disturb your sleep,” the lady estate agent, probably a near-miss as a lady-in-waiting, said haughtily as she showed me around a Regents Park terrace house, “especially if you have young children. But, after all, they’re asking so awfully much for it, it really should be you crying, shouldn’t it?”

One morning, having got to the stage of utter hopelessness, I spotted the ad in the Times. Cracking the code, I discovered that a house in Hampstead, one of my favorite parts of Greater London, had come up for sale as the result of a particularly complicated estate finally having been settled. I smelled a rat, of course, since houses in Hampstead, which has become trendy, baby, trendy, for perhaps the tenth time in the last three hundred years, can easily be sold by word of mouth rather than by costly ads in the Times, but I held my nose and telephoned the private number listed in the ad.

No. 11 Jolly Row.

I wanted it for its rosy brick exterior even before I saw the delights of its interior: a cheerful daylight basement, front-to-back drawing room, front-to-back dining room, numerous spacious bedrooms upstairs; and, at the end of the elegant entry hall, a small room with a view of the garden now overgrown with weeds the size of sequoias. It would make an ideal study for me.

The rat I had smelled soon revealed itself as the price the inheritor was asking. Unnecessarily huge considering the house had been abandoned for ages, though not totally unreasonable.

For a time I played a waiting game, hoping for a reduction in price. I sent round an engineer who marvelled at the construction, the slate roof, the copper plumbing; an architect who offered to do his projections for almost nothing if I’d just let him work on such a gem of a place, and my daily. She said the servants’ quarters were so “comfy,” she could put together a staff for me in a matter of minutes.

With so many resounding Ayes! I handed over a check to the rather rabbity-looking estatee and, little time wasted, moved into My House. Shelagh went straight to work on the living and dining rooms and, even though surrounded by tea-swilling workmen who seemed only secondarily interested in ripping up floors and laying down carpets, and even though taken somewhat aback by the Mod stuff Shelagh was strewing around on the first floor, I found myself a happy man.

That agreeable state did not last very long.

Having worked in my sparsely furnished study until nearly midnight one night, I crawled into bed, only to be disturbed immediately by a violent storm which suddenly blew up. The windows rattled so severely it was almost as if the storm were trying to break into the house. At the very height of the gusts I heard a frantic banging on my front door. At first I thought a shutter had come loose, since the house was not in the best of repair, but it soon became obvious that someone was urgently summoning me.

I jumped into my robe and slippers, every Rob Mackenzie plot I had ever concocted flashing through my mind, and hurried down the stairs and went through a great deal of unbolting to open the front door a crack for a peek.

There was no one there.

The knocking had been so urgent, however, that I ventured out into the middle of the street. But Jolly Row was as quiet and as calm as an unopened tomb.

“Overwork,” I said to myself and went back up my front steps. Just as I opened the front door, a blast of wind caught it with such force that I was thrown, virtually headfirst, into the entry hall. Bruised and smarting over my insult by nature, I eventually made my way back to bed. The storm continued unabated and three more times I went downstairs to answer the banging. I at last decided that I was being tormented by the neighborhood drunk, thug or idiot who knew just how far the single occupied bedroom in my house was from the front door, and pulled the covers over my head, falling after a long time into a nervous, unrefreshing sleep.

Having been so harassed, I very naturally overslept the next morning and, since I had an early appointment, dived into my clothes and sped out of the house, not returning until long after the tea I had promised to give to Shelagh over her never-ending supply of sample books.

I let myself in and was immediately confronted with Ireland, rampant. Shelagh was clearly angry as hell which, even for her, was somewhat an overreaction for a delayed tea.

“Look here,” she said, doing a splendid imitation of Glenda Jack-son being arch and bitter, “if you don’t like the things I’m choosing for the house, just say so, why don’t you? There’s no need to throw the furniture about and pull the pictures off the walls!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, really! You know just what I’m talking about! Your cleaner took one look at it and says to tell you she’s off to South-end for a holiday until further notice! And don’t blame it on the workmen. They’ve walked off in sympathy with the dockers today over containerized shipping!”

“Shelagh?” I tried to catch hold of her.

“Just have a look at that, then!” she said, steering me at top speed into the livingroom.

It was a sight to see. The room, as does the dining room, runs from the front to the back of the house and is about forty feet long with French doors opening onto a long balcony overlooking the garden at the back. It was simply littered with overturned furniture, mainly the new stuff Shelagh had bought to mix with the 18th Century furniture I had purchased and liked so much better. I had no objections to this eclectic style since Shelagh seemed to know what she was doing, but I could not help but silently congratulate the burglars who had concocted this mess.

“And the dining table!” she wailed. I perked up my ears. The dining table was a twenty-foot Parsons table done up in puce Formica. “It’s scratched, scratched, scratched! You wicked man!”

I got my hands on Shelagh’s softness, getting a couple of scratches myself in the process. “Burglars,” I whispered into her ear.

“Fancy that,” she snarled, breaking away and tenderly picking up the toppled Francis Bacon reproduction of a peeled, howling nun, “Rob MacKenzie himself being burgled!”

I broke out the American gin from my Adam commode and mixed a pitcher of therapeutic martinis. Over the drinks and a half-tin of stale peanuts, I explained to the gradually mollified Shelagh about the banging the night before.

“You’re not making it all up, are you?”

“Darling girl, I need my sleep. Abdington was very shirty when I arrived late this morning and he’s not a source of information I can afford to annoy.”

I could see this went down very well with her and was just on the point of suggesting she go downstairs to the kitchen and fix us some kind of tea when she looked at her watch and exclaimed she had to flee to an after-hours preview of kinetic sculpture at Harrod’s. I seemed bound to miss all my meals that day.

Which is why I was up and about that night when the banging started again. I immediately rushed from the kitchen up the stairs to the livingroom, which I had set aright, but it was perfectly undisturbed. So, like a fool, I opened the front door and was almost knocked down by a blast of air from the dry, windless street. Quite on its own, the hair on the back of my neck rose.

The banging was now inside my house but, by the time I reached the livingroom, it had stopped. No wonder. All Shelagh’s stuff had already been chucked about.

“All right, whoever you are,” I shouted, a la Rob Mackenzie, “you might as well come out. I’m armed and a crack shot!” I manipulated the chicken leg in my robe pocket menacingly.

There was that damned blast of graveyard air again and I found myself flat on my back on Shelagh’s cream-colored wall-to-wall watching the shutters on the open window at the turn of the stairs rattle as the damp wind let itself out.

Had I a ghost?

“A ghost? A spirit? Rob, darling, you’ve been reading too many of your own books.”

Shelagh calls me, affectionately and always, by my pen name since she says, and I confess I see her point, that plain old Ken Wenks lacks a certain cachet.

“Have you a better explanation? If our furniture-tosser were corporeal, I’d surely have caught him last night.”

“Quite a conservative ghost, I’d say,” Shelagh mused, trying to restore a chrome and rice-paper balloon lamp to its former glory, but I could see her mind was already elsewhere. I was going to lose this smashing girl if I didn’t get rid of my nightly visitor.

“Remember what Larry Olivier did when he was faced with something like this?” The green eyes were reduced to a speculative slit.

“I don’t even know Sir Larry.”

“In the film, darling. They did show it in the Canadian wild, didn’t they? Hamlet, Rob.”

So she was not indulging in non sequiturs, after all.

“With the ghost of his father! Larry, I mean, Prince Hamlet, held up his sword and used it as a cross in case—”

“Yes! Is there a cycle shop roundabouts? We’re going to get a packet of that reflecting tape cyclists use to make their cycles ultra-visible at night and we’re going to stick a cross made of it outside every door and window in this entire, awful house!”

“What a bright girl you are!” I said, attempting to bestow a kiss on her.

“Never mind that. I’m bloody well fed up with having my furniture bashed about!”

At about midnight, and I can tell you I was very wide-awake, the banging began and it was wilder than I had ever heard. My front door knocker chattered as if possessed. Then, one after another, each window in the house shook until I thought the glass would shatter. There was a terrible crashing in the garden and then in the outside stairwell leading to the kitchen door. I put my head under my pillow, only to remove it a moment later. That was real silence I was hearing. Shelagh’s scheme had worked!

Far up over my head, I heard a drumbeat on the roof. The house was filled with the sound of a great “Ah-h-h-h” and I knew two things: the bicycle tape had failed and, sometime tomorrow, I would have to face Shelagh over the wreckage in the drawing room.

I didn’t mind the livingroom in its, by now, familiar disarray, but I really did resent the long-armed desk lamp in my hitherto-untouched study being twisted into a pretzel knot, never mind what my haunt had done to my books and papers, now strewed everywhere.

Shelagh pointed out the very large soot-stain on the pale carpet in front of the fireplace and left. Actually, what she said was: “You bloody damned fool, why didn’t you think to go up onto the roof and attach crosses to all the chimneys your bloody spook’s spoiled this fitted carpet beyond, bee-YOND repair and I hate you here’s your bloody ring back and I hope I never see you or your damned house ever again!”

It was time to call in the big guns: the sort of psychologists who look into ghosts.

I found Harry Chisholm, a fellow Canadian who makes his living writing about science, in his local, the Duke of York, and told him a load of rubbish about doing a piece for a Sunday paper on Hampstead ghosts. Could he give me the name of a parapsychologist?

“Ken, they’re all nutty! You want somebody sane and reputable. You want, pardon me, the MacKenzies. He’s a mathematician and she’s an experimental psychologist, both at University College. Here’s his number. Call them up. Ghosts are only their hobby!”

My only problem was: should I use Wenks or Mackenzie in ringing up my rescuers? I decided on Wenks, and the MacKenzies made an appointment to visit my house two evenings hence.

He and she turned out to be not Mr. and Mrs. but father and daughter, dazzling daughter. Connie stood five-feet-eight in her highly decorative Mary Quant as she asked me questions off her clipboard. Her father, Angus, was off checking and measuring in the dining room, while the two of us walked up and down the livingroom.

“Cycle tape applied as crosses. Very ingenious,” she noted. “Are you religious?”

“No,” I said. “My girlfriend thought of it.”

“Ah. Is she religious and staying here with you?”

“Good heavens, no! She got the idea from a film.”

“I see.” Her violet eyes gave me the benefit of the doubt.

“You know, Hamlet. Where he uses his sword like a crucifix in case the ghost of his father is really an invention of the devil.”

“Oh, of course.”

“Your eyes are just the color of heather coming to bloom,” I said, quite, quite forgetting myself.

“So I’ve been told,” she said, peering into the fireplace my ghost had used as an entry.

I retreated to my study, leaving unplayed my trump card of also being a MacKenzie — occasionally.

I did as the MacKenzies asked, and they spent two nights holed up with me in my bedroom, listening. On the first night, I placed a board emblazoned with a red Scotchlite cross in each fireplace, facing up toward the chimney opening. We were treated to a frenzy of smashing and crashing, but all out-of-doors. The only casualties were the redwood furniture and the Plexiglas fountain in the garden.

On the second night, I removed the placards from the fireplaces and the MacKenzies heard the full treatment: a night-long ravaging of the first floor.

All Angus had to say was: “Has it ever touched the kitchen or the bedrooms?”

All I could answer was: “No.”

“We’ll be back in a few days,” he said. “In the meantime, can you give us a bit of breakfast? Connie will cook if you don’t, but she’ll hate it.”

“Daddy!” she protested.

Connie laid on a very nice breakfast while Angus discussed with me the possibility of my seeing a psychiatrist in case all the furniture upheaval emanated from conflicts within myself.

“Really, Daddy, I don’t know why I put up with your primitive ideas. There’s some perfectly logical explanation here and you needn’t carry on trying to make Ken sound as if he’s...”

I was just admiring how shining brown is Connie’s hair and how truly heather violet her eyes are when there was a voice from the doorway of the kitchen. Shelagh.

“I know several terribly reputable psycho-people in Harley Street who deal with problems of this sort,” she announced, clearly having no time for Connie, the cook-psychologist.

“This wretched thing you’ve been wanting has turned up, so here it is, use it in good health, and I hope I never see or hear of you again, EVER, Rob Mackenzie!” She turned on her heel and left, having first thrust into my hands a gorgeous old brass warming pan on which she had stuck a red Scotchlite cross. Obviously, she had meant it as a patching-up present, but Connie’s presence had put her off altogether. Leaving the MacKenzies to sort out the Rob Mackenzie crack on their own, I raced after Shelagh and was, very shortly, chatting things over with one of her Harley Street psycho-people at an improbable number of guineas per hour. His verdict was I seemed okay to him and that I either did have a ghost or else I had been spending too much time listening in on the House of Lords where everybody, Bedford and Bath excluded, appeared dead for centuries. A second psychiatrist, called in as a consultant, told me to lay off martini cocktails on an empty stomach.

Meanwhile, back in Jolly Row, Connie and her dad seemed in no way to be able to curb or contain my visitor. Once or twice Shelagh came by, but it was clear our relationship had cooled; she made unnecessary mention of the captain in the Horse Guards who had taken to squiring her about. She took away the modern pictures for their own safety, and shook her head sadly over the balloon lamp and the Scandinavian settee which, by now, looked more appropriate to a barrow in the Portobello Road than to the pages of House and Garden. I was bloody well fed up because the Whatever It Was, let in so the MacKenzies could record it, had taken to ripping the phone out of the wall and to snapping off light bulbs at their bases. I was also, by now, convinced that my ghost must have some kind of history known to a local historian or elderly resident of the neighborhood.

I, therefore, set to work and struck gold, or the promise of it, at the news agent’s.

“The only way I know e’s still alive is e’s ould ousekeeper comes in ere to buy your thrillers. Great fan of yours, e is. Asn’t set foot out of e’s ouse these last ten years is my best guess, but e’s just the man for the task. Must be upwards of ninety years and e’s family’s lived ereabouts for generations.”

The Honorable Decimus Peyton-Lennox was so terribly old and fragile and transparently thin that for a second I thought I had come on a Hampstead ghost operating in the open.

“Haven’t been in Jolly Row in years,” he gasped. “A charming little street. The brick fronts remind one of what Hampstead must have looked like when Keats lived here, poor chap. A country town dotted with the houses of city fellahs, large establishments built cheap.”

“Actually, mine’s the only one left in Jolly Row with its original brick. Not painted up or plastered over, you understand. It’s been closed up for years; some problems with the estate, I believe.”

“Aha!” Mr. Lennox’s triumph appeared to overcome his voice. At last it came back: “Aha!” In the interim I had died a thousand deaths.

“You know something about my house?” I inquired solicitously.

“Jolly Row. Jolly Row. Murders there, a very long time ago. I remember as a mere lad, my grandfather and his chums talking about it once or twice, lowered voices, of course. Something nasty that had happened when they were still young men. Perhaps even, some of their friends carried off in it. Murders. A mass of people killed, all at once. How d’ye suppose it was done? I can’t remember. No blood, though. No blood. Poison. It was poison. ’Bout the time of that second war with the Yanks.”

All this information, you realize, took the old gentleman just under half an hour to convey, what with him needing to cough or lie down or take tea or sit up. But, in these intervals, my mind was racketing around at a terrific rate, cataloguing possible sources of information: old newspapers, histories, public records. It might take some time but, if my noisome spook didn’t keep me up all night every night, I would be more than up to it. I wanted my house back from It.

“I’ve narrowed it down to two cases,” I told the MacKenzies over tea late the next week. “The first happened in the winter of 1801 and had to do with a man shooting his wife, her lover, and her mother.”

“Decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a goat,” the elder Mackenzie cackled.

“What’s the other one, Ken?” Connie had abandoned her clipboard but was still, scientifically or unscientifically, interested.

“My ghost, I’m sure of it. Mad Maud, the Harrowgate Hag. Ever heard of her?”

There was a slight pause as the M’s ran over their mental inventory of unearthly creatures.

“No,” they replied.

“Maud worked first as a serving girl, then as a cook in several establishments up north in and around Harrowgate, until someone happened to notice that people seemed to die unexpectedly wherever our Maudie prepared the vittles. An old aunt here, a child there, once or twice the master of the house or his wife. Nothing out of the way, unless you counted up the deaths.”

“If no one noticed the deaths, why was she called ‘mad’?” my brainy Connie asked.

“Because she had the terrifying habit, when crossed in some way, even by a child, of rushing out into the nearest available open space and shrieking her head off while she dashed about. Since she was very bad-tempered, she did this sort of thing often enough to be noticed...”

“Your visitor fills that bill of particulars except it doesn’t shriek,” Angus observed.

“Agreed. At any rate, Maud left Harrowgate under a cloud and turned up as a cook...”

“At No. 11 Jolly Row,” Connie pronounced.

“Dead right. Maud worked at No. 11 for almost a year without incident. Oh, a footman did die without warning in that year, but that may just have been statistics rather than Maudie operating. The crunch came, however, with the wedding of the eldest daughter at No. 11. She had made rather a good match and her father, one John Wexcombe who had made a fortune off slaves and rum but came of humble origins, was so delighted that he gave each servant in the household, and there were dozens, a present of money. To cut a long story short, Maud didn’t get as much as she had expected, there was a row, she did her customary chasing and screaming, this time on the heath, but then she quietly settled down to the massive preparations for the wedding supper. Rumor has it the master had promised her a more generous settlement at some later, unspecified time. Maud had to feed, you see, somewhere between sixty and seventy-five people, accounts differ as to the exact number, and the sole survivor, a serving girl of fourteen, could hardly be expected to stand around counting bodies, now could she?”

Connie’s eyes were very wide. “Ken, you’re saying she killed off the lot? All those people? How on earth...”

“She fiddled with the punch, didn’t she?” Angus was clearly enjoying the hunt. “Even the children at an affair like that would be given a taste of the punch. Am I right?”

“Indeed you are. The punch was intended for the wedding toasts so the master, in another burst of generosity, sent a batch of the stuff downstairs to the staff. The toasts weren’t even finished before people, above and below-stairs, began to drop like flies. When all was silent, Maudie came up to the party, which filled both rooms of the first floor, to view her handiwork. It appears she was so overcome by the incredible success of her revenge against the double-crossing Wexcombe that she took an impromptu slug of the fatal punch herself, realizing her blunder too late, of course. The little girl saw it all from behind the curtain where she had hidden when people began to gasp and fall dead. No one could get her to speak for days, not surprising under the circumstances. When she did, though, she said Maud had shouted: ‘Where’s me money, y’devil Wexcombe, where’s me money?’ before she died, and the penny press of the day really went to town, even to exposing Maudie’s career in Harrowgate. Thank God they did or I’d still be in the dark.”

“It may sound old-fashioned to you, Ken,” Angus said, “but I’d call in the local High Church parson for an exorcism rite. It seems to work when the visitor’s been named.”

“In this case, old man, I don’t think it would work. You see, I quite by accident picked up another piece of information in my investigations which, for the present, I intend to keep to myself. Maud’s the one who needs to know it. And I shall tell it to her when she arrives tonight.”

Arrive she did, at the stroke of midnight. The banging on the knocker began, then stopped straightaway (I had left the front door ajar), and there was the usual tumult of flying furniture downstairs. I lay in my bed upstairs, having fortified myself with a stiff shot of Scotch, frightened enough at the audacities I had planned to have second thoughts. There was only one thing to do, though, if I was ever to have peace.

“Hey! Ho! Maud! Maudie! Where are you, you great old fool? What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? I haven’t yet heard one of your famous shrieks, you old monstrosity! Let me have a look at you, you faking terror...” I don’t know if you have ever tried to shout insults at the tops of your lungs while your larynx is constricting out of sheer fright, but I can tell you it is a painful business. Especially when you discover your efforts have worked and there is a mass of screaming air roaring up the staircase toward your bedroom like a Boeing 747 gone berserk.

She, it (I don’t know, what to call something that has no discernible shape) zoomed into my room through the door, left ajar as downstairs, and immediately hurled my extension phone and bedlight across the room. There wasn’t anything else in the room, entirely Queen Anne, she seemed inclined to pulverize and, since I had taken the precaution of unplugging the phone, no real damage was done there, either. She caromed off the walls a couple of times, then shot out of the room and I could hear her banging around in the other bedrooms, all unfurnished. When I finally got my voice going again by the expedient of having a long draw on the Scotch bottle I had thoughtfully put in my bed with me, I yelled to her:

“The trouble with you, Maudie dear, is you believe everything you read. You hear that?” (She was having some fun smashing windows downstairs at this point.) “Did you hear what I said, or are you deaf as well as dumb...”

The door of my room flew wide open with a resounding crash.

“...the trouble with you,” I continued squeakily, “is that you believe everything you read. You really believe you’re smashing up the house of that John Wexcombe, don’t you? That it’s his wretched strange furniture, bought with the slave and rum money he should have given to you, you’re breaking to bits. Well, you are an enormous, bloody fool!”

While I was saying this, she/it was slowly, then a bit more rapidly, then quite rapidly indeed, lifting up and abruptly dropping the foot of my bed. In fear of being shaken to death, I shouted out my bit of information: “They’ve changed the house numberings on Jolly Row twice over! This house isn’t your No. 11. This house was your No. 6. Your No. 11 is now No. 19! Got it? You’re haunting the wrong house, you bleeding idiot! You numskull!”

There was a sudden pause in her bouncing of me and my bed. I had got her attention. Rather uncomfortably for me, I must add, since she was holding the foot of my bed at a 45-degree angle from the floor.

“The big white house on the corner, that was John Wexcombe’s! It’s been painted over, that’s all. It’s the same house, right down to the Indian-head brass knocker on the front door. Only they’ve changed the number!”

She let down the foot of the bed with such a terrific thump I thought I was a goner, especially when, instantly, all the slats let go, tumbling me, exposed and vulnerable, out onto the floor. The room became a whirling cyclone of boards and pillows, bits and pieces of my phone and lamp and, something new for Maud, entire hulks of my antique furniture. From the corner where I eventually landed, half-crushed but kept out of sight by my former bed’s headboard, I watched fascinated as my mattress flew about like a magic carpet, as my highboy did a little jig on its slender legs.

Then Maudie was gone, with the thunder of an express train, down the stairs and out the front door. At the very moment that great door banged shut behind her, every other door in the entire house also slammed resoundingly and I heard the distinct sound of my lovely Early Georgian pier glass smashing on the parquet of the entry hall. A small price to pay, I told myself, to be rid of the Harrowgate Hag and it was then, I guess, that I passed out.

“Ken, I know you won’t tell Daddy what all that babbling you were doing in hospital before you came round meant, but you will tell me, won’t you?” Connie handed me a glass of brandy, then poked at the embers of the fire dying in my livingroom fireplace. Done, she came and sat down next to me on my sooty wall-to-wall and I slid an aching arm around her.

“That was a splendid meal you fixed,” I said to her. “By this time next week, though, Cook should be installed and we’ll be dining off a Hepplewhite table my dear Mrs. Mapes has assured me she can put her hands on immediately, if not sooner. And by tomorrow lunch, the junkman will have carted off that trash,” I indicated the splintered remains of Shelagh’s furniture heaped in a far comer, “and the carpenter and the glazier will have fixed up the balcony doors and windows in the dining room” — Maud had tossed the puce Formica straight through the closed French doors and over the balcony — “and then, just about then, I think I shall start being a happy man, now that you’ve promised to marry me, of course.” I nuzzled her glowing cheek. “Mrs. Mapes has carte blanche and, since her idea of Radically Modern is the Royal Pavillion at Brighton...”

Connie turned my face toward hers and looked me straight in the eyes. “What were you talking about in hospital? I know you know, and I know it has something to do with Maud, the poor mad creature.”

Some things I had discovered about Connie early on: she is not only a smashing beauty and a smashing cook, she is also bright and independent. She prefers reading by the fireside to going to smart parties with the same boring, beetle-brained people. Even though I have explained it to her, she hasn’t a clue as to who Rob MacKenzie is and couldn’t care less. She thinks I’m terribly bright. She would get on extremely well working away in a study of her own made over from one of the spare bedrooms upstairs. Last, merely incidentally, I could fill this house with the most horrific junk from the nearest hire-purchase place and she wouldn’t give a damn so long as I was included in the setup.

“It sounded as if you were saying ‘Bow-wow,’ ” she prompted.

She deserved to be let in on my secret. In my delirium I had apparently felt pangs of guilt, but not now. “Bauhaus. What I was saying was ‘Bauhaus.’ You know, that geometric German bunker style of architecture and decoration.”

“All angles, no curves. Primary colors.”

“Maud was haunting the wrong house. She wanted the big white one down at the corner but the house numbering had been changed so she thought this house was the scene of her most spectacular crime. And since this house had been empty for years, there had been no one to disabuse her of her notion.”

“And?” Constance is a terribly patient girl.

“The big white house down the way is owned by one Raymond Hatherleigh, London’s trendiest hairdresser. Shelagh and I went there once for drinks. An abominable twit. He’s left the outside of the house alone, someone before him slapped on the white paint and the old-gold shutters, but he’s the one who’s gutted the inside, the fool, and he’s...”

“Turned it into a Bauhaus extravaganza.”

“Yes.”

“You are going to tell him, aren’t you? I’ve grown almost fond of Maud, she did bring us together, but she is frightfully destructive with that wicked temper of hers. I know you think what Dad said is silly but, on her home ground, she may be vulnerable to exorcism.”

“I know, I know. But I thought I’d let her have a go at old Ray-moan for another couple of weeks before I allow Angus to call in the parson with the bell, book and candle. Hatherleigh deserves Maud. He’s really spoiled that house; he’s almost as offensive as Maudie must have found Wexcombe, the slaver.”

“Maudie herself is very offensive.”

“I’m counting on that.” I put both aching arms around Connie to show what else I might be counting on.

“Dearest Ken, I regret it but I must go. I’ve promised Daddy I’d sit up with him tonight in a house in Swiss Cottage that’s been having groans in its pantry and flying objects in its library.”

“To keep you, must I woo back Maud? I had thought of reminding her that, as a ghost, she was perfectly capable of passing through walls. I had also thought of yelling at her to take a solid shape, except she’s so dim she’d probably come back as a wolverine or something even more dangerous.”

“Good thinking, Wenks, but suppose you leave the psychology, abnormal and otherwise, to me, and stick to Westminster and whatever else it is you write for all that money. If you start taunting Maud once again, she’s liable to come back and frighten our children.”

“We’re sure to have children,” I said, kissing her, then letting her go off to her night’s work.

As I went off to bed, I could hear a wind raging down at the corner of the street.

“Cheer-o, Maudie,” I said, very silently. “If the first one’s a girl, we’ll name it after you.”