Island of Bones

II.5

Casper Grace did not travel as far from the lake as he had intended. He heard word as he left Keswick that one of the farmers between that village and Naddle Bridge had been asking for him, so he retraced his steps past the Druidic circle to call on him. The farmer, Kerrick, was a tall man with thick knuckles and the grave demeanour of a man who trusted neither his luck nor his land not to play a trick on him. He consulted Casper in a regular way, so Casper was welcomed into his kitchen with respectful friendliness. While Mistress Kerrick served them with house cheese, oatcakes and beer, her husband told Casper slowly that he was thinking on the purchase of a piece of land on the edges of what he already owned. Casper listened to the terms and when the beer was done, walked the ground with him. Casper thought it a fair price and he said so. He was ready to make his way off again, his eye on the progress of the red disk of the fogged sun, when Kerrick put a hand on his arm.

‘There’s also the matter of our lass, Mr Grace.’

The man had three daughters. The two younger ones were still infants, and if it were a matter of fever or shakes, Kerrick would have said so at their first words.

‘Agnes?’

Kerrick nodded and studied his thick boots. ‘There’s something in her manner these last weeks. She’s off and away in her head half the time, been out late in the evenings when she’s no right to be, and there’s a twitch to her. The livestock are nervous of her.’

Casper heard the rising whisperings of the witches in the still air. No wonder that Kerrick looked so wary. Casper liked Agnes. He had watched her grow from a stumbling toddler to a fine dark-haired girl of sixteen wearing the shape of a woman like a new dress. She had a certain wit and manner and had been quick to learn from him whatever he had thought to tell her. She was a wanderer in the wild places, like himself. He had seen her as he walked up to the stones with the boy from the Hall and his friends, and had thought the genteel company had made her shy when she did not come to meet them. Now he wondered if she had been shy of him.

‘Is she in the house now?’ he asked. Kerrick nodded. ‘Send her out to me then.’

Kerrick went back to his cottage, his shoulders hunched and his footsteps heavy. Casper sniffed. Then took a seat on the mossy turf, pulled his carvings from his pocket and began to work his knife.

As the evening started to darken, Mrs Briggs’s guests began to make their way around the head of the lake towards Crow Park for the next stage of their day’s entertainment. There, in a roped-off area where the park’s low swell sank gently again to the shore, they found their numbers augmented by the local yeoman farmers and tradesmen and their families who could afford the shillings necessary to watch the fireworks from a comfortable seat and with a glass of punch in their hands, but were not eligible to be invited into the grounds of Silverside Hall.

As they surveyed the ground and assessed the quality of the refreshments, the continual topic was the dousing of Mr Quince. There was much speculation as to whether any of the party resident in Silverside would attend the fireworks at all. Some maintained that Mr Quince would stay away, too humiliated to show his face; others vigorously disagreed and said rather it was Felix who should remain at the Hall. Others still agreed he most certainly should, but reminded their friends that von Bolsenheim was a foreigner by birth, for all the advantages of his heritage and education, so his behaviour would be unpredictable. He had proved himself to be no gentleman by pushing Mr Quince in the lake. He might now do so again by inflicting himself on the company. A certain amount of money changed hands. Several women also remarked they thought Felix’s good looks had been over-rated, and Mr Quince was of a much more English mode. All the men claimed to have spoken to the tutor and thought him a promising young man of great good sense. They also muttered darkly that some ‘foreign manners’ seemed to have rubbed off on the Vizegrafin.

While these opinions were being rehearsed and refined in Crow Park, Mr Quince was sitting in the little room next to his own bedroom which served as a temporary study for Stephen and himself. He was no longer wet, but was perhaps still a little damp around the edges. He had changed his clothing, but still felt the lakewater on his skin.

Harriet sat opposite him.

‘I do think you should come to the fireworks, Mr Quince.’ He did not reply. ‘Please do, for my sake.’

He shifted in his seat and sneezed, then having buried himself briefly in his pocket handkerchief said: ‘I do not wish to be stared at and talked about, Mrs Westerman.’

‘You have my sympathies,’ she replied dryly and when he looked up at her, she saw a glimmer of reluctant amusement in his eyes.

‘Mrs Westerman, I appreciate you have insight into being discussed by a crowd, but nothing you have done has rendered you ridiculous.’ He twitched as he said the word. Harriet wondered if it was difficult for this young, educated man to have an employer like herself. She had never really considered the matter or the man, beyond his abilities to educate her son. She realised that she knew nothing of his ambitions and tried to recall if she had mentioned to him that she intended to send Stephen to school in a year or so.

‘You have not made yourself ridiculous, Mr Quince. He did push you, I suppose?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Quince hung his head again. ‘It was quite deliberate. Though I must count myself lucky he claimed it was an accident and apologised as he did. I should have had to call him out otherwise, and then probably would have ended up dead as well as wet. I have no doubt he is an expert shot. Men such as he always are.’

‘I don’t suppose you would be willing to tell me what passed between you?’

He shook his head, which made the flesh under his chin wobble. ‘It was a private matter, but there was nothing offensive in it to my knowledge. I have never been so surprised in my life as when I found myself spitting up lakewater.’

Harriet laughed softly and saw a smile twitch again on Quince’s face.

‘I am beginning to consider Felix a rather foul young man,’ she said. ‘If he continues like this, Crowther will find some way to cut off his inheritance, I think.’

‘But he is very handsome,’ the tutor said sadly.

Mr Quince would never be handsome, but Harriet hoped very much he would someday find a woman who would make him believe he was, at least from time to time.

‘I would rather have a man like you in the circle of my acquaintance, Mr Quince, than a dozen Felixes,’ she said firmly. ‘Now will you come to the fireworks? Crowther, I know, intends to spend his evening among the boiled bones of the wretch from the island.’ She caught Quince’s look of surprise and lifted her hand. ‘Please, do not ask, Mr Quince. But I would like to go with Stephen. May I take your arm as we walk? Then we may be talked about together, as it were.’

Mr Quince held his head on one side. ‘Does the Vizegrafin intend to go?’

‘Her son will drive her in the phaeton. You and Stephen will travel in the carriage with Mrs Briggs and myself.’

‘I should go. I know it.’ He put his hand to his head and smoothed his hair, then straightened his back and met her eyes. ‘Very well, Mrs Westerman.’

‘I shall see you downstairs in a quarter of an hour then, Mr Quince.’ She stood and made her way to the door.

‘Thank you,’ he said quietly, and she let herself out of the room.

Casper heard the girl approach but continued to carve, listening to the chatter of the witches and spirits arguing with each other, advising, cursing or cajoling him until her shadow fell softly over his work. The black witch, loudest and most vicious of them all in his head, spat and growled.

‘Sit down, Agnes,’ he said without looking up. She did so, just opposite him on the grass with her legs tucked under her and leaning on her arm. He lifted his eyes to her face and the black witch howled. She was a good-looking girl. Thick dark hair hung round her shoulders in a sheet; grey eyes with a sharp edge to them. She was paler than she should be, and her lips had a whiteness to them. He knew then.

‘Well?’ he demanded. Her chin started to tremble and she put her arms around her knees. Casper continued to carve. ‘Who began it?’

‘She did.’

‘What occurred? Steal your beau, did she?’

The girl had started to rock a little. ‘I thought she was my friend, but then at the Greeup wedding in May she wouldn’t leave him alone. She’s not even pretty.’

Casper sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. ‘Such things occur, girly. No reason to start playing games you shouldn’t. You know those games have a price. Tell me what you did.’

The girl pushed back her hair from her face and lifted her eyes towards the horizon. ‘I made a poppet.’

Casper felt the air chill around him and was afraid. ‘You fed it?’

‘Blood and rue.’

‘How do you know such things?’

She looked uncomfortable. ‘They are spoken of.’

His knife ceased work for a moment. ‘So this girl we are speaking of is Stella Giles, who broke her ankle in June?’ The black witch was already howling as he asked.

‘Yes.’ She looked at him, mumbled, ‘I didn’t mean it to be so bad, but she deserved it.’

He leaned forward and pointed at her chest with his knife so that she flinched back. ‘And what do you deserve now, Agnes? This is hateful work. You get snubbed by some lad, then young Stella isn’t able to work for a month. I should have known there was something in it, her taking so long to heal. You might have killed her.’ He spat on the ground. ‘You’ll have to pay it back, my girl, or it’ll go rotten on you — on you and in you.’ He paused, picking up the threads of talk from the arguing voices in his head. ‘Such matters are black. Tonight, no fireworks. Dig up the doll and take it up Swineside. Wash it in running water, and wash it well. Gather rowan and hazel enough to pack round it tight, tight — and bury it. Then you sit and you pray over it for forgiveness and think on what you have done. Never let me hear tell of you playing with such things again. Till dawn, mind — no creeping off. We’ll find a way for you to pay what you owe to Stella too, but first the lines must be straightened out.’

He got to his feet in one fluid movement and walked quickly away without waiting for an answer, carrying off his anger before it spilled all over her.

The reception of the party from Silverside was all but passionate. Harriet and Mr Quince found friends on all sides and were ushered to their seats like royalty. Harriet tried to ignore the sight of money changing hands between some of the men, and simply enjoy the warmth. Every word Mr Quince managed to utter was treated as gospel and his occasional attempts at a witticism were greeted with such gales of refined laughter one expected to see a duke in the centre of all this attention rather than a humble tutor. Mrs Briggs and Harriet shone contentedly in his reflected glory and found themselves feted as his supporters and friends.

In spite of the assiduity of their welcome, Harriet was still able to see enough of the reception Felix and the Vizegrafin received to note it contrasted most markedly with their own. It seemed that the populace of Keswick were suddenly overcome with a terrible clumsiness whenever they came close to Felix. His elbow was jogged repeatedly. He received apologies ranging from the curt to the satirically effusive. Harriet noted his smile becoming rather tight. The Vizegrafin was finding that men and women who a few hours before had found her fascinating were now passing her by with hardly a nod, and those that were forced by the press of people into conversation with her, seemed to be continually finding something far more interesting to look at over her shoulder. Harriet was glad to see them seated at last, and relieved that Felix made his way back from the refreshment table with glasses for himself and his mother only a little lessened by one or two unfortunate spillages.

Harriet had found herself in crowds that seemed to disapprove of her too often to take great pleasure in this treatment of the Vizegrafin and her son, but she did take a certain pride in the way her countrymen adopted so wholeheartedly the cause of the underdog. She was not surprised to find that, by the time the crowd’s attention was drawn to the north shore of Vicar’s Island where the fireworks were to be let off, the seats of the Vizegrafin and her son were empty.

Mr Askew, having made sure the more popular members of the Silverside party were comfortable, looked around him with satisfaction. It was a profitable arrangement for him, and he hoped an easy one for his guests. A great number of tables and chairs, rented from every inn in Keswick, had been placed in the area and he had sat at each one to make sure they would provide a noble view of Vicar’s Island. He had paced that shore a dozen times with the gentleman who was providing the fireworks to check that all was well, and was assured it was a perfect spot. He had supervised the placing of the torches and seen them stamped firmly into the ground. Mr Askew had also arranged for a collection of passable musicians, hired from Cockermouth, to provide an accompaniment to the display. As the party from Silverside arrived they were already sawing away at old Handel with all of the delicacy and less of the artistry than the fellers of the oaks of Crow Park had displayed some forty years before. However, the gentry Mr Askew had gathered together seemed to be happy enough with the performance and he found, in the moments he had between greeting newcomers and shooing away local boys from the supper table, great pleasure in composing in his mind a description of the scene for the Westmorland Paquet.

Stephen, having spent over a year with only his country neighbours for society, was as pleased by the company as he could have been at Versailles. He realised everyone was being kind to Mr Quince, and enjoyed the fact that the good humour spilled over onto himself. He was perhaps patted on the head too often, but two men had already given him shillings and for that, he felt, they could pet him like a toy poodle if they wished. He saw beautiful powdered women about him, and men in tight coats, decorated with enamelled fobs and jewels. It seemed to him a scene of splendour.

Harriet, her memories of polished London society rather more accurate, saw in the company the simple manners and dress of a provincial crowd, but was pleased to be among them. She had found the brittle brilliance of the capital trying when she was last in Town, though that might have been an effect of her preoccupations whilst there. Here, by the still-darkening shores of the lake, she was disposed to see in every face honesty and prosperity earned, rather than inherited. She knew she was surrounded by a few minor nobility, but the bulk of the crowd behind Mr Askew’s velvet ropes were professional men and their families, traders and farm-owners. She felt, as the wife of a self-made man, that she knew them and their concerns, and was at ease, particularly after Crowther’s sister and nephew removed themselves. It must be bitter for them, so used to ballrooms crammed with ducal crowns, to be snubbed by lawyers and shopkeepers.

She smiled and let her eyes pick out one character from the crowd, then another: the man with the large wig must be a lawyer, the lady who watched from behind her fan and frowned as he refilled his glass at the punch bowl again, his wife. It was possible she had been introduced to them at Silverside. The red-faced man with large hands who shifted awkwardly from foot to foot was a farmer and surely only one generation away from earth floors, so still not sure in his blood of how to conduct himself at this level of society. She was pondering the fine distinctions made in her country and the silk-like strength of polite conventions when she noticed Mr Quince stiffen at her side, and turned to see what had caught his attention. There was a very beautiful dark-haired girl standing just beyond the ropes — looking, it seemed from her attitude, for someone in the crowd.

‘Do you know that lady, Mr Quince?’

‘Stephen and I met her today. She accompanied us to the Druidic stones,’ he said, still watching her.

‘She seems to be looking for someone, don’t you think? Please, do go and offer your assistance. I am quite content here.’

Mr Quince stood at once and bowed to her before making his way through the throng to the place where the lady was. Harriet watched as he addressed her. The woman’s first look was of recognition, then as Mr Quince spoke, her face darkened. After a moment of silence Harriet saw her ask Quince something. He bowed and crossed to where Mr Askew was standing. Again a question was asked, Mr Askew shook his head, then Quince went back to the woman. For Harriet it was like watching a dumbshow and she found it quite entertaining. The lady’s eyes as he approached were again hopeful, then when he spoke, downcast once more. Quince said something further — he seemed to be inviting the young lady to join him. She shook her head and in the same moment turned away from the ropes, and Harriet found Mr Quince returning to her side with a frown on his face. She realised she had not been alone in observing him. Mrs Briggs was taking a seat to Harriet’s right, and as Quince came up to them, she opened her mouth to speak.

‘Who is that handsome lady, Mr Quince? She is not a native of this place, I think. Will she not join us?’

‘Her name is Fraulein Hurst,’ Quince replied. ‘Stephen and I met her today during our explorations of the town. She mentioned that she might attend this evening, but tells me she came here in search of her father. He did not return to their lodgings when expected. Mr Askew informs me that, although bought tickets for the entertainment, Herr Hurst has not been seen here. I asked her to join our party, but she said she would rather return to her lodgings, and insisted on doing so alone.’

‘She will be quite safe,’ said Mrs Briggs, and patted the tutor’s arm. ‘The lakeside people make far too many guineas out of these visitors to allow any harm to come to them, young man. Her father has probably found his way into one of the inns of Borrowdale and will spend the night under their roof.’ She added more quietly, ‘They brew very strong down there.’

‘No doubt,’ Quince replied, then drew his watch from his pocket. ‘I believe the fireworks will commence shortly. May I fetch any refreshment for you, ladies?’

The ladies wished for nothing, and all turned their chairs in the direction of the lake and waited.

Crowther’s work that evening was delicate. It required concentration and care, and he was glad of it. He was content to do this sort of work alone. It made him grateful his intellectual interests had not turned towards pure scholarship; here in his temporary laboratory, he looked as much a butcher or cook as a baron. He wrestled answers, or more questions, from flesh rather from the immateriality of his own brain, and he took pleasure in the physicality of his work. As he looked into the cooling coppers he thought of his brother, and wondered again with a revulsion that his work never normally engendered, if he were looking at Addie’s first victim. Then he found his thoughts straying to his family and his own youth. His father had been an exacting parent, and Crowther remembered being sent away from the family group in disgrace if he had appeared unscrubbed or with the chemical signatures of his early experiments on his sleeves. What would Sir William think now, to see his son bend over old coppers in the semi-darkness?

Crowther realised he had become still with thought, and returned to the practicalities before him. The last of the body’s flesh had melted away in the water and heat. Now it was his intention to remake the form of the man. In the silence of the old brew house, in the pools of fluttering light shed by the lanterns, he lifted each bone from the warm water and on the old workbench, remade the skeleton.

Time passed.

When the bones were laid out before him, Crowther removed his apron and dried his hands, then began to examine them in detail. The body was that of a mature male. He had guessed as much from the probable height of the corpse and the clothing, but the bones of the pelvis confirmed it. Ilium, ischium and pubis all fully fused; the pubic arch showed the steep incline typical of the male of the species. Next he lifted the skull, letting his fingers travel across it like a blind man trying to trace the features of a friend, then, settling it on his fingertips, he brought it towards himself in the lamplight until he stared into the empty sockets, turning it from left to right. There was no sign of damage, or of damage healed.

‘What would you tell us, friend?’ he murmured under his breath, and for a moment touched his free hand to his own thin face. ‘Alas, poor Yorick indeed. .’ As he set the skull down at the head of the table he was momentarily startled by the sound of explosions from the lake and saw the darkness outside the window stained suddenly red and yellow. The fireworks hissed and flashed, their light enough, even at this distance, to colour the pale bones below him. Something cracked in the air and a white phosphorescence fell across the bones, making a new shadow across the ribs.

Crowther knelt and brought the lamp as close as he dared to the flattened cage. On the underside of the third rib, on the left side, there was something not quite right. He traced his finger along its falling edge and found a nick in the bone, such as might be made by a blade driven into the chest. The mark was suggestive, not conclusive. Crowther was sure the damage was not a result of his own treatment of the relics. He had handled each bone as a craftsman handles gold leaf.

Moving away from the remains to the pile of clothing remnants, he gently teased the waistcoat flat, then straightened and placed his fingers on his own chest, counting down his own ribs until he reached that which matched the damaged bone on the skeleton. It would be on the left, far enough clear of the button-holes. The shirt was too ragged to be of any use, but the material of the waistcoat had been thicker.

He bent low, inhaling the gravesmoke that hung around the clothes. Perhaps. The threads here were cut rather than thinned with age, but the blade, if blade it was, must have been very narrow. He lifted the waistcoat to his eye and shifted to let as much light fall on it as it might. Baron, butcher, now he seemed a tailor. A hole indeed, and another, possibly, to match on the back panel of cloth. There was no particular staining he could see, but the fabric was dark. He teased it with his fingertip. There was another flash outside, a sound like heavy rain, and the light in the room shifted into the deep reds of blood in darkness.

Stephen flinched when the explosions began. The man Mr Askew had hired provided a brave show. Stephen could see the workers moving along the shore, shadows in front of the blaze of light they controlled, like minions at work in Vulcan’s forge. He would ask Mr Quince tomorrow about gunpowder. For a moment his ambition to be a ship’s Captain like his father wavered, as he thought of himself grinding powders to make all these rainbows of noise and light. He glanced towards where his mother was sitting, her face bathed white, red and green, and he could see the red of her hair light up as if the glowing sparks had fallen on her and were burning coldly among her curls.

There was a pause and the crowd began to applaud, then Stephen saw another shadow, moving towards the centre of the wooden platform from whence the fireworks flew, torch in hand. The crowd saw him too and the applause fell away. Suddenly a breath of white fire ran up from the place where the man had touched his torch, drawing the outline of a cross on the darkness behind it. Catherine wheels caught all round its edges, spewing white sparks in tight circles. Then within the shape, fires of other colours caught till it seemed alive with angry jewels of red and green. The crowd gasped, and Stephen closed his hand round the little rowan Luck in his pocket.

Crowther put out the lantern that swung above the skeleton and, content that the place was secure, he left the brewery and locked the door behind him before beginning to climb up the steep lawn to the main house. It was still so warm he barely needed the coat that hung over his shoulders, and the moon was bright enough he could have made his way along the gravel path without the light he carried. He looked up at the house above him, showing palely against the wooded hillside. Most of the windows in the upper storeys were dark, but the one that gave onto what had been his mother’s room had a candle showing on the sill. He caught a movement in the shadow above it. His sister, watching him, he presumed, as he so often had been used to watch his neighbours from his house in Hartswood. She must have returned early from the fireworks. He guessed the reason. He would have to speak to her in the morning and ask her what she could remember of Addie’s visits home, but not until he had allowed Mrs Westerman to pick through his thoughts. Margaret seemed to have survived the disgrace of their youth. Had she loved their father? Had she found something in the baron he had not, or seen something?

Crowther had left home in 1741 first for a repellent boarding school for sons of rich men in Lincolnshire, then for Cambridge, returning rarely and reluctantly. His mother he had been glad to see in Town, but although she at times made some effort to understand her second son in the years before her death, she reached across a gulf that could not be spanned, and he remained a mystery to her, so cold and inward. His intellectual pursuits meant nothing to her. She seemed always to be surrounded by light and noise, even in her isolated home in Silverside. Lady Keswick had been a joyful, rather impulsive character always ready to be amused. She teased Sir William, and her dour husband had seemed to dote on her as a result; Addie had always made her laugh, and Margaret she could dress up in costumes that were copies of her own and parade with her as some women did with little black slave boys in a parody of exotic dress. She had loved him too, he supposed, but his strongest memory of her was the sound of her laughter coming from some other room in the house, from some place where he was not.

Casper made for the woodsmen’s cabins above Silverside, flinching as the fireworks rattled behind him. He was satisfied that the night in the open would be punishment enough for Agnes, but he still felt angry, and the explosions on the lakeside made the witches shriek till he could hardly follow the thread of his own thoughts. He wondered where she had got the idea of the poppet from. It was a strong notion — he could feel the tang of magic on it. Agnes was a clever girl, but she’d become a dangerous one if she got into the habit of such tricks.

Casper had only once in the last twenty years named a witch in these hills. She was an old woman, Blanche Grice, grown powerful and used to her power while he was still gaining and measuring the strength of his own. When she cursed a young woman in Pontiscale one winter and made her miscarry, he had gone up against her at last. It had been a bitter thing, but much as she played the innocent, he knew he had been right. She was spurned on his word so left her home, setting out on the Kendal Road, and had not been seen since. Some said she had changed herself into a hare and now stayed that way most of the time. Casper knew better. She had crawled into the old mines on the flank of Ullock Moss and let her body die there, ready instead to live in Casper’s mind, chattering at him and cursing. He found her body in the spring and buried it himself, but though he had red threads tied round his wrists, she still crawled into his skull somehow and had been there ever since. She was loud now, yelling delightedly at the explosions from the lakeside, trying to twitch him round so she could see them through his eyes. He was striving to quiet her as he approached the clearing where his cabin waited, so did not mark the nervous twittings and cawing from Joe — and the blow that felled him came like thunder from a clear sky.

The applause for the fireworks and their glorious finale was still rippling around a beaming Mr Askew when the first fat drops fell. Harriet looked up, then hissed as something stung her arm. She turned towards Mr Quince, who looked as bemused as she did herself, then with a crack something fell into Harriet’s glass of punch on the table between them and splashed the liquor onto the tablecloth. Mr Quince picked up the glass and looked into it.

‘My goodness! Hail!’ he said, then sneezed.

The air seemed to chill around them with such rapidity Harriet felt as if she had fallen out of a glasshouse and into an ice cellar. All around them, the crowd had begun to move. Mrs Briggs yelped as a hailstone the size of Stephen’s fist landed on their table and rolled to the ground.

‘Mr Quince, if you will give Mrs Briggs your arm, perhaps we should return to the carriage. Stephen! Come here, please.’ As the boy hurried towards her there was a crack and roar that made Harriet start and turn to the lake. A blast of lightning coated the water in white light that made her eyes hurt and she froze, stupefied by the image of the lakes and hills so suddenly revealed in all their folded outlines, then hidden again. She felt Stephen’s hand slip into her own and squeeze it. The touch woke her and she turned to hurry after Mrs Briggs and Mr Quince.

The hailstones were falling faster now, and as she went towards the carriage as quickly as she could manage in her long skirts, Harriet could hear them rattling the crockery through the exclamations of the crowd. The coachman, Ham, was waiting for them, and managed to get them onto the road before the great press of people clogged it solid. Harriet turned and in repeated flashes of light saw, like a series of engravings, scenes of the breaking-up of the party: the musicians struggling to protect their instruments, the men and women scattering to the protection of the trees, chairs and tables overturned. As the carriage drew them out of sight, the hard rattle of the hail on the roof ceased and for a moment there was silence from the sky. Then the rain began to thunder down, slapping its palms on the roof like judgement, and lightning cracked the sky wide open again. Stephen pressed himself to his mother’s side, watching the world appear and disappear beyond the window.

Mr Quince was shivering when they returned to the Hall and was sent to bed just as firmly as Stephen was, though he was encouraged to take a large glass of brandy with him. Harriet said goodnight to her hostess, and with her mind still flashing with gunpowder, made her way upstairs.

She entered her sitting room just as another sheet of lightning rattled the glass — and in the sudden whitening she saw Crowther seated in one of the armchairs facing her. She started and put her hand to her chest.

‘Good God! That was like something from The Castle of Otranto,’ she said. ‘I shall expect to be kidnapped by faceless monks at any moment.’

The rain beat steadily at the windows and she saw Crowther smile in the candlelight. He was holding a single sheet of paper in his hands.

‘I am sorry to alarm you, Mrs Westerman. It was an unfortunately timed strike.’

‘Not at all.’ She took her seat opposite him. ‘I would not miss the excitement for all the world. I need fear no bogle or ghost if I can stand the sight of you revealed by lightning without a scream.’

He frowned a little, which amused Harriet, and passed her the note he held. He had his pride, this strange friend of hers, and it pleased her to tease him from time to time. She unfolded the piece of paper and her smile faded quickly.

Master Charles,

The man came looking for something and found your father. I saw them leave together for the Island of Bones. The man never came back. I grieve that you find more blood in your history.

Charlotte Tyers

‘Who, Crowther, is Charlotte Tyers?’

Crowther tented his fingers together. ‘The housekeeper here in my father’s time. She must be in her eighties now, and has a cottage in Portinscale.’

‘And do you understand this note?’

He shook his head. ‘No, other than “Island of Bones”, which is how many of the local people refer to Saint Herbert’s Island because of the tombs in the old chapel. But I am sure you have guessed this for yourself. I think we should pay Mrs Tyers a visit tomorrow, don’t you agree?’ A gust of wind threw another handful of rain against the window. ‘Unless we have all been swept to the bottom of the lake by then. The man was stabbed through the heart, I believe.’

‘And this note suggests it was your father, not your brother, who struck the blow.’

He was silent for a moment. ‘Indeed it does, Mrs Westerman. It is curious, I have remembered. .’ The thunder rolled round the house again, and he stood up. ‘But no more gothic tales tonight. Even my imagination may be enlivened to a dangerous degree. I will see you in the morning, Mrs Westerman.’ And with that he disappeared into the darkness again.

From the collection of Mr Askew, Keswick Museum

Letter to The Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1752

Mr Urban,

As one of your correspondents expressed themselves curious as to the life and character of the late Sir William Penhaligon, 1st Baron of Keswick, and as none of his remaining family has come forward to furnish those details, I send to you these notes and observations on the history of this unfortunate gentleman, and while one may not presume to probe the secrets of another mind, they may be relied on as the witness of a near neighbour of many years’ acquaintance.

Sir William was born in 1683, the only surviving son of a baronet who had more pride in his position in society, and a greater love of show than his property could bear. I have heard Sir William remark more than once, that the very spoons and knives in his father’s house were found to be mortgaged on his parent’s death. There was little that could be saved from the estate, but what remained included a small house on the banks of Derwent Water called Silverside, perhaps preserved because Sir William’s father had all but forgotten it. Sir William took up residence there in 1712, and for some time busied himself with a study of the minerals of the area, and made an attempt to repair his fortunes by severe retrenchment. This gentlemanly scholarship became the well-spring of all Sir William’s fortunes. He was often out on the hills, and told his neighbours he witnessed in 1715 the last Lord Greta make his preparations to ride out from Gutherscale Hall to rebellion, ignominy and exile. Some little while after Greta and his family left these shores for ever, Sir William was able after years of stringent economy to buy from the government a small piece of land on which he discovered the last copper deposits in the area. His cottage was rebuilt as Silverside Hall and was ready to receive his bride, the Honourable Julia O’Brien, in 1724. His charming wife was an ornament to the area, he was made a proud father two years later, and all his enterprises seemed blessed.

How unlucky, however, is the man who outlives his most successful and happy years! In ’44 Sir William purchased the land on which stood Gutherscale Hall itself, and convinced he was now the true inheritor of the lands of the ancient Greta line, declared he would take his family to that ancient Hall and make it their own. However, the tragic fire of ’45 which rendered that great house a ruin, intervened, and Sir William’s frustration was extreme. Not even the title of Lord Keswick could mitigate his disappointment. Nor were his family able to lighten his burden. His eldest son began to develop an unsavoury reputation as a gamer and libertine, and his younger brother was thought of as an awkward and eccentric child. His lovely wife, Lady Julia, began to spend more time in Town, and after her death, Lord Keswick became a complete recluse, his solitude alleviated only by the presence of his young daughter till she too left his once-happy home for her schooling. His death at the hand of his eldest and favourite son made a tragic finale to his history. One can only hope that in his last moments he was ignorant of whose hand had dealt the fatal blow. His second son sold the estate entire to a Mr Briggs and now is thought to travel incognito on the continent. His daughter has made a home with her mother’s relatives in Ireland. Thus we see that though ambition can make a man, it can also poison our happiness with frustration at the last.

Yours c W. L.