The Revenant of Thraxton Hall

CHAPTER 11 MADAME ZHOZHOVSKY

During the rumpus when Hume was carried from the parlor, Madame Zhozhovsky remained in her seat, stroking the monkey in her lap. When calm returned, she asked in a quavering voice for a chair to be set in the middle of the room, along with a low footstool on which to rest her sore foot. Then she levered her bulk from the sofa using the crooked black walking stick and stumped to the waiting chair with her pet monkey trailing on its leash. Before sitting, she faced the room, looking left and then right without smiling, and raised a hand in a seeking gesture, staring over the heads of her audience, as if her gray gaze were penetrating the veil separating this world from the next.

“I can tell the lady practices that gaze in the mirror,” Wilde muttered, and Conan Doyle stifled a laugh in his handkerchief.

With a mystical look upon her face, she swept the uncanny gaze around the room like a searchlight before pitching her tremulous voice to its lowest register: “This is a dangerous house…” She allowed several seconds for that ominous pronouncement to sink in, and then added, “… and you are all in peril for your souls.”

She shuffled backward to the chair and dropped heavily into it, then gingerly set her sore foot on the footstool and leaned on her stick, peering around. “Before this meeting proceeds, you need to know what dangers you face and how to defend your minds against psychic attack.” She fell silent for a moment and then raised her stick and banged it on the floor, making everyone jump. “Thraxton Hall is one of the most haunted houses in England. Over the centuries, it has been the scene of much unhappiness. Sir Henry Thraxton, the first lord of the house, was murdered by a brother who coveted his wife. The second lord was sucked into a bog while stalking a wounded deer and drowned in full sight of all his retainers. There is also a ghostly child, a young girl in a blue dress: Annalette Thraxton, the youngest daughter of the second lord, thrown from an upstairs window by her crazed mother in a fit of madness, the poor child’s brains dashed upon the rocky ground.”

Conan Doyle straightened in his chair, thinking of the spectral girl he had glimpsed in the coppice of the stone circle. He was about to speak up, but Madame Zhozhovksy continued, “Whenever the blue girl is seen, death follows soon after.”

Conan Doyle’s stomach fluttered and he reigned in the words he was about to speak.

“But more recent times have seen their share of tragedy. Lady Florence Thraxton was found dead at the base of the grand staircase, her neck so badly broken her head was turned completely around—”

“That’s not a ghost story,” Wilde murmured to Conan Doyle, “that’s a tale of shoddy carpentry. Fix the bally staircase, I say.”

“And six short months later,” Madame Zhozhovsky continued, apparently just getting into her stride, “Sir Edmund Thraxton, the last sitting lord, vanished whilst walking on the moors and was never seen again. But most famously, there is the white lady—”

“Ah!” Wilde said, louder than he intended. “There is always a white lady.”

Every head turned to look. Wilde dropped his head and pretended to be picking fluff from his trousers.

“The white lady,” Zhozhovsky began again, pulling her eyes away from the Irishman, “is reputedly Mariah Thraxton, the scorned wife of the third Lord Alfred Thraxton of the 1780s.”

“And did she also die a violent death?” Conan Doyle spoke up.

Madam Zhozhovsky nodded, setting her multiple chins jiggling. “Murdered during a séance.” A cruel smile congealed on the old lady’s lips.

The news shocked Conan Doyle, who suddenly found his gaze locked with Hope Thraxton’s startled violet eyes. He looked away with difficulty. “Do we know any more of the circumstances?”

“Yes, indeed, we do,” Henry Sidgwick interrupted, clearly proud to show off his academic knowledge. “It’s well documented, thanks to the trial of Lord Thraxton. He caught his wife performing a séance with her maid in the turret room in the western wing; he accused her of witchcraft, produced a brace of pistols, and shot her dead on the spot.”

The room contracted with the collective catching of breath. Conan Doyle’s gaze turned back to Hope Thraxton, who was staring down at the rug, her lips quivering.

“I presume Lord Thraxton was hanged for the crime?” Wilde spoke aloud.

“Oh no,” Sidgwick countered in a cheerful voice. “Quite the opposite. At the court of inquiry, he was commended for his actions and all charges dropped.” Sidgwick chuckled from somewhere inside the white vortex of beard. “This was, after all, during the height of the witch hunting craze.”

“They would not allow her to be buried in consecrated ground,” Hope Thraxton interjected. “And so she was buried at the crossroads just outside Slattenmere.”

“Gallows Hill,” Conan Doyle murmured to his companion. “The very crossroads we passed through just this morning.”

“It is a very lonely place,” Hope Thraxton continued, her gaze focused on something far in the past. “Even in the realm of the spirits, the centuries pass slowly.…”

Madame Zhozhovsky banged her stick on the floor to jerk everyone’s attention back to her. “Mariah Thraxton did not die immediately but lived long enough to utter a curse against her husband and the house of Thraxton. Her husband followed her in death soon after. Thrown from his horse whilst riding to hounds, his spine was severed. Alfred writhed in screaming agony for a full week before death released him — the first victim of Mariah Thraxton’s curse, a curse that lingers to this very day.”

Wilde turned to Conan Doyle with a wide-eyed, mocking look and whispered, “Not very cheery is she?”

Madame Zhozhovsky overheard Wilde’s flippant remark and lashed him a scorching look that curdled the air between them.

“This house is filled with ghosts, revenants, inchoate spirits, and what some call…” She added in a voice that set the syllables trembling, “… the lower intelligences.”

Oscar Wilde’s hand shot up. “I should know this, coming from the Emerald Isle — the land of spooks and banshees — but what exactly is a revenant?”

Madame Zhozhovsky shifted forward in her chair, leaning heavily on the walking stick. She thrust out a hand, her penetrating gaze once again seeming to pierce the veil between this world and the next. “A revenant is a ghost or a corpse that rises from its grave and walks among the living. Sometimes, when death is sudden, the soul is expelled violently from the body. Incorporeal, confused and frightened, it drifts in shock. It does not know it is dead, so it clings to the places it knew in life. In other cases, an unconfessed soul returns, animated by all the wickedness it did in life, to do harm to the living.”

“If it’s a ghost, how can it possibly do any harm?” It was Sir William Crookes, his speech slurred by 95 proof.

Madame Zhozhovsky pushed on the gnarled stick, straining to heave her bulk up from the chair. “All malevolent ghosts are a threat. Revenants are the most dangerous form of spirit. They appear as solid and human as you and I, but they are here to deceive the living. To lead them to death and ruination. The lower intelligences are fragments, broken pieces of the psyche absorbed by the stone and wood of a building. They are the residue of violent emotions: love, lust, fear, anger, rage. If you open yourself to them, if you allow yourself to be vulnerable, such strong emotions can enter you and poison your mind. A revenant cannot enter a house unless it is invited in. But malicious spirits are full of tricks and cunning. Amateurs who dabble in necromancy do so at the peril of their immortal souls.”

While she had been talking, the monkey had scampered a circular path, winding the leash tight around her legs.

“You are all in terrible danger,” Madame Zhozhovsky added. “All of you.”

Conan Doyle happened to look down and saw the leather strap wrapped around the elderly lady’s legs. He raised his hand and started to speak. “Madame—”

“All of you!” she said. “Fear for your souls. I can offer you a protective spell—”

“Madame,” Conan Doyle said aloud. “If I might—”

“For the danger is near, Very near—” Madame Zhozhovsky tried to take a step forward and the leash cinched tight. She fell full length and somersaulted over the footstool, hitting the floor with a tremendous thump, horrifying the watching Society members and sending the monkey into a shrieking frenzy. Members leaped to their feet and rushed to assist, but the monkey hissed and flashed its fangs menacingly, keeping everyone at bay.

Wilde pushed back the red fez on his head and regarded Conan Doyle archly. “The deuce,” he said. “I’ll wager that is the first time her feet have been higher than her head in decades. This truly has been a diverting evening. First a floating American and then an acrobatic old lady with a monkey. I’m very happy now I didn’t stay home.”