The 9th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

THE SONG IN THE HOUSE Ann Bridge

When the Buddicombs took Netherfield Greys, that ancient house, and settled down there, they did so with an unspoken sense of usurpation and intrusion that was not wholly warranted by the facts. It was true that Mr Buddicomb had spent most of his life in the City, like his father before him, adding by respected and steady industry to the already considerable fortune left to him; always in London, he had never been a squire. But his mother had been a Hamilton, a distant cousin of the family who had lived at Netherfield Greys ever since a de Grey built the Manor House in Henry VII’s time, and it was the impoverished Hamilton-Greys themselves, stressing the relationship, who first suggested that their rich kinsman might care to buy the house when the discovery of death-watch beetles in the timbers of the roof made an immediate outlay imperative.

Seven thousand pounds, the architect said, must be spent, and spent at once, if the whole richly tinted mass of gables, dormers, chimneys, and carved leaden gutter tops was not to come crashing down, involving the house in its fall.

This was the last straw. Up till and through the war, the family had held on somehow, living in fewer and fewer rooms, with smaller and smaller fires, and ever fewer and more incompetent servants – putting away more and more silver, and themselves polishing the glorious furniture, bought as it was made by ten generations of good taste, which glowed richly against the panelling in the low rooms. They drank cider instead of wine, and then water instead of cider; with their own hands they dug and weeded in the long terraced borders overlooking the river, and clipped the living green arches and battlements of the great yew hedges that were the glory of the sundial garden; while, instead of the four or five respectful gardeners of earlier days, an ancient man, an ancient pony, and a callow, whistling boy mowed away through the hot summer days, trying to preserve the shaven turf which stretched down in sunshine to the river, and led the feet so softly into the deep shadow of the yew walks.

Early and late, harder than any wage earners, they worked – in a voluntary servitude, a proud and anxious devotion to that lovely entity, the house, at once the shelter and symbol of themselves as they most realised themselves – a family in a place where they belonged. Townsmen and dwellers in new countries can hardly understand the depth and spontaneity of this feeling: not that a place belongs to you, but that you belong – how profoundly and lovingly! – to it. But it was a losing fight, and the architect’s report merely precipitated the inevitable end. Seven thousand pounds were simply not there. Faced with the alternatives of seeing the beloved house crumble over their heads or of parting with it to those who could preserve its beauty, they chose the latter course, and approached Mr Buddicomb.

It was characteristic of this gentleman that he refused to buy the house. He never explained fully to anyone the reasons which moved him, not even to his daughter Monica, who enjoyed more of his diffident and difficult confidence than anyone else. He was retiring from business, and, like all retiring Englishmen, he sought the land. We cannot help it – it is in our blood. Why is it that, his work over, the Englishman turns for his rest to the quiet fields, the gentle muddy simplicity of his green countryside? I cannot say – but he does; and generally, if he can afford it, he buys.

But when Netherfield Greys was offered to Mr Buddicomb he would not buy it. He took a long lease; he agreed to restore the roof, and voluntarily undertook to leave the rest much as it was; rather shyly he suggested taking the house more or less furnished. The disposition of that vast accumulation of period pieces, so at home in the quiet rooms where they had shone for generations, had been a source of much anxiety to the family. Sadly, but with relief, they accepted the offer; gratefully they took the extra rent which a furnished house implies. Then, sighing, they moved out; and the Buddicombs, presently, moved in. To his wife, who had wished to live in a house she owned, and was disappointed, Mr Buddicomb, jingling his keys, said, ‘Oh, well, my dear . . .’ To Monica, as they stood gazing from the churchyard gate at the warm pink brickwork of the south front, he observed suddenly: ‘Pretty place – pretty place. I’m glad I didn’t buy it. You – well, you never know.’

Monica was pretty sure from the outset that she knew what it was that you never know. More even than her father, unable, as she guessed him to be, to take a step which would part the place irrevocably from its real owners, she felt that she was mere on sufferance. She, too, was in a way glad that the house had not been bought; and yet, if it had been theirs, their very own, it would, she felt, have done something rather important for her. It would have given a focus to her capacity for devotedness, supplied an anchor for those unexpressed emotions which, in her life, were something of a surplus. The unmarried daughter at home is generally left with a good deal of surplus of one sort or another – often time, frequently interest, nearly always emotion. For ten years now Monica had been filling up her life with things – the flowers, the dogs, calls, notes for her mother, new novels. All the spaces left vacant by her music and her feeling for her father she had diligently filled with occupations extraneous to herself – as one stuffs a doll with all sorts of rags, she thought sometimes, impatiently.

It was her own fault, more or less. When she was nineteen, and prettier than she would ever be again, she had refused Robert. Just then it didn’t seem possible to marry. Her elder sister was newly married and gone, her mother ill; the idea of leaving her father to cope with an invalid and endure a solitary table and the house-keeping of servants was impossible. Or it had seemed so. She hadn’t meant it, in her heart, to be a permanent refusal. She had always expected that Robert’s regiment, and Robert with it, would return from India some day, and then . . . On empty foggy afternoons, in Lancaster Gate, she used to imagine the heavy door of the drawing-room opening and Bridgeman saying, ‘Captain Shadforth, miss.’ It seemed to fill those afternoons, bring them alive, to imagine that – especially when her mother recovered, and became again her active and not too contented self.

But when, four years later, the regiment did return, Robert did not come to Lancaster Gate; she read in the papers of his engagement, and then of his marriage, to a lovely creature. Monica had never been a lovely creature, and she knew in her heart that no one would come now in Robert’s place. He had been her one golden chance – a gift, a bright jewel which life in a moment of caprice had held out to her. She had not taken the gift, and that was that.

All the same, she found it impossible not to love the house, even if she had not the right to serve it as did those others, on whom it laid a claim stronger than its beauty and its grace. With something of a sense of stewardship, Monica and her father delighted together in bringing the place back, slowly and carefully, to the perfection which they felt to be its due. The roof mended, they set to work on the interior. With infinite confabulation and care they chose fresh rugs for the great parlour, with its wide open hearth, and carved chimney-piece, and appropriate curtains for the many deep-set windows. Five gardeners returned to clip, sweep, trim, and shave, while the Buddicombs pored over garden catalogues to bring colour into the long borders and the terrace walk.

All this Monica enjoyed. The process of filling up was, quite definitely, easier and nicer in the country than in London. The dogs’ exercise took place not in crowded streets but in elm-shaded lanes and paths across open pasture and plough-land; and bit by bit she discovered, in consultation with the vicar, quite a number of village good works lying ready to her hand. Any contact with the villagers embarrassed her dreadfully at first – she felt that they must regard her with hatred as an intruder. But if they did, they were very polite about it; and the vicar, so long as someone would deliver his parish magazines, lead out his Cubs on a Saturday, and provide flowers for the altar in church, did not, apparently, care a hoot who did these things.

Most of all, Monica liked doing things in and about the church. It lay close to the house, enfolded in the same loop of river, only a low wall of soft rose-red brick separating the churchyard, with its cypresses and tombstones, from the garden; and by a little private gate she could enter it at any time unobserved. The church was full of Grey monuments.

There was a Crusader earlier than the house; the ruffed builder of it and his wife knelt face to face, with their minute ruffed offspring tailing off behind them – five sons and three daughters. There were later Hamilton-Greys, extravagantly mourned by the flamboyant marble angels of the eighteenth century; and there was the pitifully recent tablet to Guy and Nigel, one killed in 1914 and the other in 1918. But the memorial which most caught Monica’s fancy was a small, graceful white urn, in low relief on a grey marble tablet, with a simple inscription, ‘Sabina Grey. A Deare Daughter’ – and then the dates. Sabina died in 1601, aged thirty. Monica, as she emptied the altar vases, rinsed them, and put in fresh flowers, stepping to and fro in the empty echoing church, wondered whether Sabina had sometimes done the same, rustling there in her stiff dress. ‘A deare daughter’! Would the Elizabethans have called her that too? Sabina had not married – had she too had a Robert, and put him aside to tend her parents’ needs, and then filled empty afternoons for ten years?

Monica found the thought soothing; in some curious way it gave her a sense of companionship. Her own second name was Sabina. Sabina had been her grandmother’s name – that Hamilton kinswoman who was their one real link with the place. Had Sabina gone to Court, or lived always in the old pink-red house – not so old then, but relatively new and modern? She must have been there when the Queen came to stay, the year after the Armada, and slept in the great south bedroom, in the huge four-poster which still had the crowned ‘E’ carved in the central panel. The frail hangings of that bed, with their clear faded colours, had been in position then – it was all got for the occasion, so the Hamilton-Greys said. Essex had come in the Queen’s train, and a crowd of others. Was it then that life had held out to that other Sabina a jewel she did not take? Because everyone married in those days, Monica thought, sighing a little.

While Monica and her father devoted themselves to the house and garden, Mrs Buddicomb turned her attention to the neighbourhood. Called upon, she returned the calls promptly and imposingly. Such hospitality as she received she returned in double measure, giving lunches for teas, and dinners, as far as possible, for lunches. Mrs Buddicomb had a great belief in what she called ‘bringing people together’; she delighted in a throng; she liked to see her staircase a mass of people, struggling to get up. But she was rather clever with her entertaining; she would not attempt a throng without a lure. To her annoyance the house was not ready (owing to Monica and Mr Buddicomb’s intolerable fussiness over fabrics) for either a strawberry party or a raspberry party – that summer was wasted. It was autumn before her first large entertainment took place.

Actually she owed the lure for this particular gathering to one of those musical friends of Monica’s of whom she so much disapproved, because they had no style and were, as she said, ‘no use’. This young man was of less use than anyone imaginable, being barely twenty-four, shabby, and extremely poor. But, like so many of the very young nowadays, he knew an immense amount about his subject – it was really intolerable, Mrs Buddicomb thought, how learned the very young now were. When Monica had mentioned his name in Lord Dreadmouth’s hearing – a thing Mrs Buddicomb would never have done – the old gentleman spoke of him positively with reverence, as the authority in his own line.

His line was harpsichords; and on one of his visits he had pounced upon an ancient harpsichord which stood in a little-used room along the great upper corridor, crying out that it was an early – something, Mrs Buddicomb couldn’t remember the tiresome name – a treasure and a wonder. But when he went on to say that Olivia Pettigrew ought to – indeed simply must – come and sing contemporary Elizabethan songs to it, in costume, accompanying herself as she alone could, Mrs Buddicomb at once saw possibilities in the idea. A rare harpsichord in the great parlour, a rare singer in Elizabethan dress, in that marvellous contemporary setting – here was just the lure she required for her first party at Netherfield Greys. With unusual cordiality she inquired of the young man how one could get hold of Miss Pettigrew, whereupon he said carelessly that he could bring her; when she further inquired if he knew what her fee was, he thought, even more carelessly, that it was thirty guineas. The sum seemed reassuringly large to Mrs Buddicomb, for one afternoon; and with the help of the styleless young man the matter was put in train.

Monica accepted the party with her usual resignation. She wanted to hear Olivia Pettigrew sing with the harpsichord, but this singing in costume, to a crowd of people, seemed to her bound to combine the maximum of tiresomeness with the minimum of pleasure. Nevertheless, she and the young man arranged the harpsichord down by the great fireplace, and ransacked the house until they found the appropriate seat – a low-backed thing, contemporary, with faint traces of gilding, to place in front of the old instrument.

When Miss Pettigrew actually arrived, Monica had something of a shock. She was a smallish, smart, bouncing woman, very much made up, with a slight but unmistakable Cockney accent. Monica led her to the small boudoir which had been turned into an improvised green-room, where the singer unpacked her clothes, talking volubly all the time. She complained sharply of the bad light at the toilet table, and asked for innumerable things, including a glass of port, until Monica was reduced to feeling it an absolute profanation that such a person should sing in the house at all. When at last she left her and slid quietly into the great parlour, it was already full of the solid befurred and silken shapes of the neighbourhood in its best winter clothes. During the pause which ensued, while the audience chattered and rustled their programmes, she sat wishing it were all over. And then the door opened, and the young man ushered Olivia Pettigrew to the harpsichord.

Monica almost gasped – and a little breathing sound of wonder and pleasure passed through the room. A golden figure in Elizabethan dress – jewelled cap, puffed looped sleeves, wide lace collar, and square-toed shoes – stood for a moment outlined against the dark panelling before moving with slow stateliness to the instrument. In that marvellous dress Miss Pettigrew had gained height and dignity; Monica was swiftly aware that her appearance was no longer a profanation, but exquisitely in harmony with the great room. She sat with bent head, in an attitude of composed grace, while the young man spoke, introducing her; as he finished, she began to play. Her beautiful hands – Monica had noticed their beauty in the boudoir – ran over the keys, making the harpsichord send out its faint, rather touching, tinkling in a small accompaniment; and then she sang.

Before the first verse came to an end, Monica realised that the party was justified. The voice was lovely, a true mezzo-soprano, with just that touch of burr in the lower register, and boyishness in the upper, that was perfectly suited to the curious masculinity of sixteenth-century English music. But even more, as the song proceeded, she felt herself to be in the presence of a real artist. The ‘attack’ was perfect: with exquisite lightness the singer just emphasised the curious difficult beat of the words against the accompaniment, and yet allowed the emotion of the song to breathe through, lightly, lightly – like a little flutter of heart-beats through the graceful artificiality of some formal minuet. And she brought out, too, as she proceeded through the first group, the peculiar quality of Elizabethan songs – the sense of youth, of a generation young as no generation ever was before or since, held in a formal convention; of ardours and ecstasies under the stiff and stately dress of some prodigious masquerade.

A singer herself, Monica knew how desperately difficult it is, for this very reason, to sing those songs as they should be sung; her sense of this quality about them had increased of late. Curious about the Elizabethan Sabina, she had gone to the contemporary song writers – Campion, Dowland, and the rest – for illumination, and had found herself hearing their words with quite a new sense of what lay behind them, the background and the life. And here was Olivia Pettigrew, the irritable person with a Cockney accent, pouring out their songs in an interpretation so right and true and sure that it seemed suddenly to Monica as if the room itself sang.

Yes, it was that – the fancy, having once slipped into her head, stuck there: it was as if the great room were somehow repeating its own past, in the notes of that golden figure before the ancient instrument. Had Sabina sat and listened, as she now did, to some renowned singer of her day?

How silly she was, Monica said to herself. Lost in her fancies, she had practically missed the end of the first group. Now, after an interval, in which she felt sure Olivia was drinking more port, the songs began again. But the moment they did, she had once more that curious sense of the past opening before her, of the room giving up something which it held. Really absurd! Oh, but she must listen to this – she loved this! She knew the opening accompaniment – it was from Campion’s Third Book of Ayres; and glancing at her programme she read the words again, which she so loved for their curious haunted quality, the half-bitter invocation of magic summoned to the aid of the deserted heart:

Now Olivia was singing it – faultlessly! The passion, the suspense, the sort of horror of the amateur magician, rose in the room as her voice filled it. Monica shut her eyes. But at the close of the first verse she opened them again with a start. The singer had altered the words – she sang, ‘He will, or he will not.’ Now why had she done that? Monica listened again, with closer attention; she might have been mistaken. No – definite and clear, in the final verse, the voice sang:

And then, with the slower cadence of melancholy:

The last words were sung quite low, the very breathing of reminiscent joy and present sadness – precisely, oh, precisely so had she herself felt when Robert’s face, Robert’s eyes, had become a lost sweetness, edged with an intolerable regret. Her own memories invaded her, evoked by the music. But gradually her curiosity revived. Why should Miss Pettigrew have changed the words of that song? With a curious urgency Monica felt that she must find out, and when the music was over, and the company was moving – as slowly and congestedly as even Mrs Buddicomb could have wished – down the broad staircase towards tea, she went into the boudoir. The singer was three-parts changed. Her costume and music lay scattered about; she was touching up her eyes and lips before the dim mirror. Monica praised the singing warmly and sincerely, and Miss Pettigrew thawed at her evident knowledge and appreciation. Then she praised the rendering of that particular song, and at last, ‘But why,’ she said, touching the verses on the programme, ‘did you change the words?’

‘What do you mean – change the words? I never do such a thing,’ said Miss Pettigrew, whipping round briskly from the toilet table. ‘Here – let me see.’

Monica held out the paper. ‘Here – and here. You sang, “He hath an art to break them with his eyes”, and all of it as if it were a woman singing.’

Miss Pettigrew, scanning the page, said: ‘Sorry to contradict, but really, I did no such thing. You can’t have heard properly. I sang the words as they are written there. Really, Miss Buddicomb –’

Monica, soothing Olivia’s rising wrath, leading her down to tea, talking civilly to the guests, carried about within her an exciting puzzle, which she would examine later. She was quite sure she had not been mistaken. She had heard distinctly the words Miss Pettigrew sang; she was equally convinced that the singer, in spite of her temper, was honestly not aware of having deviated from the text. Then what? Turning it over in her mind afterwards, she remembered her strange fancy during the recital – that the room itself was, in the music, uttering some secret of its own past. The idea was fantastic, but in spite of its absurdity she was left with a curious feeling that something had happened.

They left the harpsichord in the great parlour after the party. Mrs Buddicomb liked to tell people about it, and Monica was learning to play on it. They left the curious gilt chair, too, though Monica actually used a music-stool when she was practising. She was sitting there one day, a week or so after the recital, working at the accompaniment of that song of Campion’s and humming the words softly as she played. It was a gusty afternoon, and presently a great puff of wind came down the chimney, blowing out a cloud of smoke and scattering fine ashes into the room from the open hearth. Coughing a little, Monica played on. But when another and another puff came, she got up and went over to the hearth, and with the tongs rearranged the great oak logs which were smouldering there, to see if that would improve matters.

As she stood up again, a little dizzy from stooping, she saw a woman sitting in the gilded chair, between the harpsichord and the window. The first thing Monica noticed was the face. It was a girl’s face, staring with a most strange tensity of expression, half longing and half horrified – indeed, the whole figure had a curious strained rigidity about it, as of a person waiting for something. And now she saw that the girl was dressed in some dark red stuff, full below and slender above, so that the body sprang like a flower-stalk from the spreading skirts. On the narrow bosom a jewel gleamed – Monica saw it clearly against the dark dress – a circle of moonstones, with a heart-shaped moonstone drop below it. The circle enclosed a faint tracery of some sort, like a monogram, but what it was she could not see.

Too astonished for fear, Monica stood by the hearth, staring. As her senses came back to her she was aware of two feelings – an intense curiosity, which told her that she must notice and remember everything, and a great compassion for the strained longing in the girl’s face. What was she waiting for, sitting so still in that chair?

Another puff of wind came down the chimney; it caught Monica full as she stood on the hearth, smothering her with ashes, choking her with the sharp smoke. She sneezed violently. Wiping her stinging eyes, she looked again towards the chair. The figure had gone.

Monica sat down on the music-stool, and, gazing at the empty chair, tried to collect herself. She must remember – everything! But she found she could not remember much. The red dress, the jewel, the slenderness; the face – dark haired, only rather pretty. But when she recalled the face, though she thought she remembered a cap of some sort, she could really only see the half-horrified longing of the expression. So strange, this; even more than wondering who the girl was, she wondered why she looked like that. Presently she closed the harpsichord and put away her music; folding the sheets together, she hummed absently the words of the song she had been singing when the fire puffed out. And suddenly, with the sharp, clear impact of a knock on the door, the thought struck her: Had she, the girl in the red dress, been using some such incantation? Had she sat there so still, waiting for the evocation of some image, some reality even?

Monica presently became very firm with herself. She did not doubt what she had seen, but she determined not to let her fancies run away with her – to be sternly scientific. Of course, she wanted the girl with the jewel to be Sabina, but just for that reason she must be on the watch with herself. She thought of hunting up the family history – the vicar was an antiquarian, and knew all about the place. But some instinct restrained her. The proper way was to wait and see more, if possible, first.

She waited nearly a month – long enough for the impression to have lost its first clearness, so that she almost began to doubt its reality. One afternoon she was down at the church, doing the flowers for All Saints’ next day. The old sexton was at work, making a huge bonfire outside the churchyard wall; he had been trimming the brambles which sprawled over it, and clearing up the debris of a cypress bough which had come down in a gale the week before. He chattered to Monica, taking the dead flowers from her to add to his fire. A general clear-up he was having, he said, afore All Saints’. ‘ ’Tis then the dead should have their garden tidy,’ he said with an aged grin, and Monica marvelled at the way the Shakespearean tradition still lingers in the English countryside. Down in that corner the deadly nightshade grew ‘something terrible’, he told her, but he had ‘grubbed ’en all out today’; and he showed her with pride an owl’s nest that he had pulled out of the belfry – a vast, untidy agglomeration of rubbish, full of feathers, which now awaited its turn on the bonfire. Monica was sorry for the owls; she loved their desolate voices on still nights, and the wheezy breathing sound they made when they sat in the belfry. Her task finished, she bade old Jenkins good afternoon, and started back to the house, her basket on her arm.

She decided to go round through the yew walks, to enjoy the last splendour of the chrysanthemums, and to see if she could find a late blossom or two in the rose garden. She turned into the broad walk, where the turf spread right up to the walls of yew. The smoke from Jenkins’s bonfire was drifting across the garden, and she knew that he must have put on the owl’s nest, for she could smell the salt, acrid odour of burning feathers. Suddenly, to her surprise, she saw a woman come into the walk from under the arch which led to the sundial garden, and move towards her with a rapid masculine stride. It was a stranger. Monica had never seen that long, pale face before, and never before had she seen a woman so angry – she was clenching her white hands as she walked, her thin lips moved, and her eyes were terrifying. Half frightened, Monica stepped aside as the woman strode past; she almost expected a blow from those clenched fists, on which she noticed a blaze of rings. Then, wondering who it could be, she turned to look after the receding figure. Was the hair really that strange chestnut-red? But, though she could see the woman striding away, she could not see the hair, for an odd erection of lace rising from the shoulders, like a screen, eclipsed the head. And now, no longer concentrated on that furious face, she noticed the stiff rich skirts, square at the hips, and the narrow bodice, before the figure turned out of the walk and disappeared.

When it had gone, Monica walked slowly forward. Most strange! It was not the girl in the red dress, though obviously someone of the same period. In fact, Elizabethan! And with the word a conjecture almost too wild to be believed darted into her mind. No – impossible! That was surely a living woman, a living anger! Half puzzled, she turned through another arch into the walk where the chrysanthemums were.

The smoke was thicker here, making a blue haze among the brilliant reds and bronzes of the flowers which stood in groups in front of the dark yew hedges, leaving only a strip of turf between. But there was something else among the flowers too. Slowly, moving to and fro, up and down the borders as though they also were a path, were innumerable people, men and women, all dressed in clothes like those Olivia Pettigrew had worn at the party – as various, as brilliant, as the flowers they so incredibly ignored. And suddenly that one circumstance brought Monica to a realisation of what she was seeing. For them, the borders were not there. They trod a turf coeval with themselves, which stretched from hedge to hedge; for them, the chrysanthemums were only phantasms of the future, as insubstantial as the phantasms of the past. Only for her was the curtain of space and time incredibly rolled up, so that past and present were visible together.

Suddenly she could not bear it – suddenly it was frightening. She felt that she could not endure this smiling, unconscious, bejewelled company among the flowers. Forgetting her determination to be scientific, Monica ran. Her scissors dropped from her basket, but she never heeded them. She turned through the farther arch into the sundial garden and came to a dead stop. For there, standing in one of the rose beds, among the late blooms she had meant to pick, was the girl in the red dress, a young man with her. Oh, and life was holding out a jewel to her! The thought came involuntarily. For the young man had an arm about the girl’s shoulders, protectingly, and though there were tears on her face, she was looking up into his with that security and rapture about which there is no mistake. A rush of sympathy took away Monica’s fear.

Now with a white hand he was stroking the girl’s head like a child’s. Oh, but she had no right to see, to spy on them! Softly, as if her step on the soft turf could have disturbed them, Monica tiptoed to the next opening in the square of clipped hedge. From it she looked back, just to be sure she was not mistaken. There among the roses which for them did not exist the pair stood; and now, in spite of a protesting movement of her hand, the young man slipped something over the girl’s head, with a reassuring gesture. Monica saw the gleam of moonstones on the girl’s breast, before he enfolded her in an embrace. Monica turned quickly away, and crossed the open lawn. She looked back, when she reached the house, at the dark shapes of the yew hedges, with a sort of awe for what they concealed. The smoke from the churchyard bonfire was still drifting over and through them, bluer still as the late afternoon light deepened; sniffing, she could still smell burning feathers. She went slowly into the house.

It was a day or two before Monica recovered sufficiently from the strangeness of this experience to begin to take stock of it. A whole gardenful of ghosts was rather overwhelming, she told herself, determined again now to be scientific. She had been rather ashamed when she went the next morning to recover her flower scissors and found them, rust-stained with dew, on the walk between the chrysanthemums. By daylight she went and studied the print of a famous contemporary portrait of Queen Elizabeth which hung in the dining-room. Oh, well, those old prints told you very little – certainly the dress was the same, with that immense lace collar as high as the top of the head; and the long face with thin lips was not unlike the angry face of the woman she had met in the grass walk. The next time she was in London she went to the National Portrait Gallery and studied the picture there. Well, that was very like, certainly. Thinking it over, she was pretty sure about Elizabeth. But mostly Monica’s curiosity centred on the identity of the girl in the red dress.

Now she tackled the vicar, on the grounds that it was time she knew more about the history of the place. He gave her books, told her what he knew from one source and another, and snowed her his notes on the family. The de Grey of Elizabeth’s time had two sons, one of whom succeeded him, and one daughter – that Sabina whose urn was in the church. The son who succeeded had only married in 1594, five years after the date of Elizabeth’s visit; the other son died, unmarried, on the Spanish Main.

Still, Monica felt, she was not much farther on. There was no certainty that the girl in the red dress was Sabina; she might have been the eldest son’s wife, come in Elizabeth’s train. And yet she had a curious instinct that it was Sabina. This gave a certain personal, almost tender, interest to her researches. She felt that she knew, from sympathy, from instinct, more about Sabina than books and records could tell.

And more and more, as time went on, and autumn deepened into winter, she became convinced that the red girl was not a mere visitor to the house but had been there a long time. She was there so much still! One day when Monica came in from a ride, her father was out on the lawn with his spud, and she rode her horse right across the broad gravel sweep to speak to him, so that from where they stood she could see the south front of the house. Some chance made her look up, and there, leaning from a window, was the girl, craning out expectantly; one hand held the stone mullion, so that the looped red sleeve was clear against the grey stone. Monica said nothing to her father; but afterwards, by counting the windows, she identified the room – a small spare room, never used, because it had no fireplace.

And presently she found that the sound of horses’ hoofs would almost always bring the girl to that window. One day in January, hounds met at Netherfield Greys – greatly to Mrs Buddicomb’s joy; but Monica slipped round to the south front to glance up, and there, sure enough, she was. Poor child, poor child! Oh yes, she had been there a long time – filling empty afternoons, running to the window at the sound of a horse’s hoofs, waiting for someone who never came; using, Monica felt secretly convinced, some piteous incantation like that in the song to bring him back.

At last Monica decided, so little did her inquiries yield, to apply to the Hamilton-Greys for information. She wrote, asking to be allowed to see them; was bidden to lunch, and went. It was a pleasant flat in London. Old Mrs Hamilton-Grey and a widowed daughter entertained her. Monica, in a renewal of her embarrassment, spoke about indifferent matters until lunch was done; then, over coffee, she broached the subject. Had they, she asked rather timidly, ever seen anything in the grass walks, in the great parlour?

The old lady laughed out. ‘Ghosts, do you mean? My dear Miss Buddicomb, someone is hoaxing you. Our great sorrow at Netherfield was always that it had no ghost! So incomplete, for a house of that age.’

‘Then who,’ said Monica nervously, ‘is the girl in the red dress?’

They had no idea. They asked her to describe the girl – politely, but a little derisively Monica felt. She had meant to tell them of the song, of the angry woman in the broad walk, and the jewelled company among the chrysanthemums; but now, feeling snubbed, she merely described the girl and her dress rather minutely. ‘And,’ she added, ‘she wears an odd jewel – a circle of moonstones, with a heart-shaped drop below it, and something in the middle.’

She saw their faces change, startlingly, at that. The old lady got up and went to a small glass case, unlocked it, and took something out. Then she put into Monica’s hands the very jewel she had seen on the breast of the girl in red. Monica looked eagerly at the cipher. An ‘R’ and an ‘E’ were intertwined within the circle of moonstones. The very same! Eagerly she begged them to tell her whose it was, and its history.

In a very different manner now they told her. It was always called the Queen’s Jewel, and was supposed to have been a gift either from Essex to Elizabeth or Elizabeth to Essex. ‘You know his name was Robert.’ But, oddly enough, they never had known exactly how it came into the family. ‘Of course they stayed at Netherfield some time before his marriage, which made her so angry when she found it out; and it has always been supposed that then, or later, she gave this to some member of the family.’ Was it known, Monica asked, if Sabina were at home then? Oh yes, Sabina had been at home. The Queen gave her a pair of gloves the day she arrived, and here they were, also in the glass case. And the daughter-in-law – was she there then? Oh no, they were clear about that; she was a Wiltshire girl, and Guy de Grey only met her when he went to stay at Wilton a few months before his marriage.

Now, in their turn, they questioned her – with interest, almost with respect. Monica felt herself under a sort of obligation to tell them what she had seen, and did so. After all, they were their ghosts! They listened thoughtfully. ‘Of course, that would explain Guy’s losing his place at Court that year,’ said the widow, ‘if there was some trouble over Essex.’ ‘Exactly,’ said the old lady. Monica was amused at their tone, which was that of those who discuss current family affairs. When she left, the old lady bade her goodbye with a certain warmth. ‘You have added a footnote to our history, my dear,’ she said.

On her way home Monica decided that this was something she must share with her father. He might think her fanciful, but she must risk that. The Queen’s Jewel was good evidence, and he loved the house so much it would certainly interest him. There were people at dinner that night, but the next day she spoke to him. They were sitting together in the great parlour, between lunch and tea. It was a dark, rainy February afternoon. Monica found herself curiously at a loss how to begin. At last, ‘Father, I’ve seen a ghost here,’ she blurted out.

‘D’you mean that poor girl in red?’ said Mr Buddicomb, tapping out his pipe on the logs of the hearth. ‘I often see her. Is that what you went to see the Greys about?’

Wonderful Dad! How much he saw, how little he said! Now, contentedly, they compared notes. He had never seen Sabina – they called her Sabina fearlessly after a time – except in the parlour and at the window; but in those places he had seen her repeatedly. ‘Poor thing, she doesn’t give a rap for motors,’ said Mr Buddicomb. ‘I’ve been to see, several times.’ He heard Monica’s story, and such confirmation as the Greys had been able to give, with the deepest interest. She even ventured to tell him about the song, and the ingredients of Jenkins’s bonfire. Happily, they pieced it all out together. At length Mr Buddicomb said whimsically, ‘Well, people would say it was fanciful, but then, ghosts are fanciful things! It’s funny, though, that they never saw anything.’ Monica knew that ‘they’ meant the Hamilton-Greys. ‘In a way, you know, it makes one feel – oh well . . .’

Monica also knew what it made one feel – she felt it herself. They were not intruders any more; to them the old house had yielded a secret withheld from its real owners. Sitting there, in the dusk and firelight, they felt at last very much at home.

But at the last her father gave Monica perhaps the greatest surprise of her life. ‘It’s all funny, you know,’ Mr Buddicomb said ruminatively. ‘Robert too.’ He paused. ‘Give me a kiss, my dear – you’re a great comfort to me.’ Trembling all over, Monica rose and kissed her father. He put his arm round her. ‘You’re my dear daughter,’ said Mr Buddicomb.