Lost (27 page)

But how much to tell? “It's this house,” she said. “Rudge House. The Scrooge stories that got passed down the family may derive primarily from that accident of sound. Rudge, Scrooge, Scrooge, Rudge. There's a little something in the family letters about it, but most of the references, after the fact, are mocking.”

“So what kind of story is it, to be mocked or believed?”

She didn't want to say. “The builder of this house was my great-great-great-grandfather. Five generations back. A man named Ozias Rudge. His dates are—oh, I don't remember exactly, 1770s into the mid–Victorian age. He was involved in tin mines in Cornwall. He worked for a large firm—the Mines Royal or something like that—as an expert in timber supports. Something of an architectural engineer, I suppose you'd say now. There was a mine collapse, and many deaths, and Rudge lost his nerve in a big way. He came to London, took rooms in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and set himself up in the building trade. But bad London air scared him. Fearing consumption, maybe suffering from lung ailments from his mining days, he built a country house for himself in Hampstead to take the airs from time to time. This house, at the crown of Holly Hill, of course. To which he repaired alone, a middle-aged man without a wife and family.”

“This sounds very little like Scrooge. But you have the conviction of the natural storyteller. Do go on. I'm enjoying this hugely.”

Winnie doubted that, but went on anyway. “Be patient. Ozias Rudge had designed supports for the adits and stopes of tin mines. He parried this expertise into designing structural reinforcement of old buildings, using iron beams. He must have been close to a pioneer in the field. His clients included governors and overseers of ancient institutions, churches, the older colleges, that sort of thing. Here, and in France. There was good money to be had in architectural renovation and preservation at that time, and Ozias Rudge raked it in.”

Allegra suppressed a yawn. This pleased Winnie somehow and she continued more happily. “During one particular exercise in the early 1820s, Ozias Rudge was called to Normandy—to Mont-Saint-Michel—where the walls of some crypt had begun to buckle, threatening the stability of the buildings that leaned upon it. Rudge went
and did his work, and while he was gone, a business associate in London made himself overly familiar with a woman that O. R. had been courting, on and off. Rudge, on returning to England, learned the truth, and dueled with his partner and killed him. Or so it's said.”

“A horrible tale. Our ancestors were so . . . sincere. This did not win the widow back, I take it.”

“No.” Winnie was disappointed that Allegra wasn't more shocked. “But now I'm arriving at the confluence of stories. All of that is prologue. Old O. R. apparently became a curmudgeon worthy of the title Scrooge. He grew sullen and inward. He retired full-time to his country house. I mean here.”

“Yes, yes, I understand. Rudge House.”

“Maybe Ozias Rudge suffered remorse about the man he'd killed, or the miners who lost their lives in the mine collapse. Maybe he had weak nerves. Anyway, he became celebrated in Hampstead as a man who was pestered by ghosts. You can see a reference to him in the histories of Hampstead under ‘ghost stories.' The tourist pamphlets don't make the Dickens association, though. That's our own private family theory.”

“How do you work out such an association?”

“As a twelve-year-old boy Charles Dickens came to stay in Hampstead. In 1824, I think. All recollections of the young Dickens suggest that he had a lively and receptive mind. It's said that when Ozias Rudge was about fifty, a garrulous single man, probably lonely, a nutcake, he met the young Dickens and told him—as he told everyone—about his being haunted. Hampstead wasn't a large village in those days, and Rudge would have been a figure of some importance. And Dickens was always impressed by people of importance, and spent some time, especially as a young person, trying to be impressive back. We guess he may have befriended O. R., and listened to his tales of woe.”

“Shockingly thin evidence.”

“In adult life, Dickens said that the memory of children was prodigious. It was a mistake to fancy children ever forgot anything—those are nearly his exact words. So if he heard some tale of nocturnal hauntings of a guilt-ridden scoundrel, mightn't he have remembered enough of it to turn it into
A Christmas Carol,
twenty years or so later? It's not a very big jump from Rudge to Scrooge.”

“I see,” said Allegra. “I'm rather less convinced than I expected, frankly.”

“Well, there's the painting too.”

“The painting?”

Winnie studied Allegra to see if she was putting on ignorance. “You know, the painting in John's bedroom.”

“I couldn't say I know anything about paintings in John's bedroom.”

Oh, the coyness of it. Winnie was on her feet and feeling her way, and back with the painting in a moment. “Look at the back,” she said, “there's one bit of business.
NOT Scrooge but O. R
. Then look at the image and tell me if you think it's the Scrooge that Dickens imagined or a painting of a real nineteenth-century nutcase.” She glanced around for a place to hang it, and feeling feisty, she thudded into the kitchen and picked up a hammer again. She jerked at a nailhead in the pantry wall, pulling it out an inch. This time it stayed put, and on it she slung the painting of the frantic old gentleman. “Now look at it and tell me what you think.”

“Is this a quiz show? I have no opinions about this painting, nor about whether Rudge was the model for Scrooge or not. Does it matter that much?”

“I'm not saying I believe it,” said Winnie crossly. “I'm telling you what I've been told.”

“So did your grand-thingy ever mention the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and to Come?”

“Of course not. That was the sentimental invention of Dickens the storyteller. Like any writer, Dickens stole what he wanted from someone's real life and made off with it, and richly bastardized it and gussied it up. But who do you think this is? In the painting? Is it a portrait of someone unsound, or someone seriously haunted?”

“You're the astrologer—I yield to your professional opinion.”

“Don't patronize me,” she said, in a temper, “don't condescend.” She was rising, she was putting aside the teacup, she was working hard not to throw it against the wall. “Let's just put this ghost to bed, this wobble in the drains, this nonsense. Come on.”

“You mean?”

“Let's exhume it.”

There was an electric surge, but it wasn't a phantasmic event, it was the faintest tremor that occurs when the nature of a relationship shifts. Maybe Allegra didn't feel it—who could tell what she felt? Rather than compete with Allegra for the attention of John Comestor, Winnie would rather ally herself with Allegra against some third agent. “Come on, it's the ladies against the pantry, and not for the first time in history, I'll bet.”

Before long Winnie and Allegra had amassed a dozen or so tapers in a circle on the kitchen floor and windowsill and counters. The feeling began to be one of a Girl Scout campfire, the recital of a ghost story without teeth sufficient enough to bite.

“All right, you,” said Winnie to
Not Scrooge but O. R
. “Stand aside.” But now he looked, with his hand against the shadowy doorframe, as if he were blocking the way, keeping them from the shrieky diaphanous thing painted in the shadowy background behind him. Winnie removed the painting anyway.

“I like working with my hands.” Allegra picked up a crowbar.

“You make better mistakes with your hands than your head,” said Winnie. “I mean one does. I mean I do.” She took a hammer and a tea towel. “Okay, pantry, we're getting in touch with our inner demolition team.”

“What mistakes do you make with your head? I don't know what you mean,” said Allegra.

“It's all plot. Life is plot. Plot mistakes,” said Winnie. “What happens, and why.” She ran the towel over the surface of the wood, easily erasing the slashed sign of the cross. “In life you get at least the appearance of choice. In a book, even one I'm writing myself, the characters seem to have no choices. Only destiny. How it will work out.”

“We
have
no choice,” said Allegra. “We can't choose for this to be drains, or to be the ghost of your cousin. It will be whatever it is.”

“We can choose to stop exploring the minute we want,” said Winnie, “the minute it's too much for us. Poor Wendy can't—” She didn't go on. She just began to extract the nails from the vertical planking. This time the nails did not sink back into the wall.

 

Wendy and John in a room, high up over a dark city.

“What if it is the ghost of Jack the Ripper in that chimney stack?”

“What if it is?”

“What if someone lets it out without knowing it?”

“The curse of the mummy? The revenge threat on the tombstone of William Shakespeare?”

“What if it needs to take some time to gather its--memory--its intentionality--to remember what
it had been before it died? The way a child takes so long, coming up from a nap, to wake up? Come back to itself? What if the wall opens and nothing much emerges, but an invisible something, hovering in midair: taking its time to grow and amass invisible bulk to it, remember its appetites? Like a bundle of cancer cells, taking time to metastasize into a parasitic colony?”

“You mean,” said John, “what if it has remembered its calling, and it has fastened on you as a possible victim?”

“I don't mean that, exactly,” she said. “Everything isn't about me.”

They looked down on the city at night. It might have been a huddle of medieval houses and pubs and sheds, given how the silted shadows obliterated any telltale indication of the modern age. They might have been in Hamelin, with the circuit of rats making a hangman's rope around the perimeters of the town.

 

“That's the nails, then,” said Allegra. “Not hard to grip, for all that; I guess your worker friends managed that much for us.” The extracted nails, some of them tooled four-sided, lay in a pile like ancient and capable thorns.

“To the boards, then,” said Winnie. She took a hammer and used it to drive the screwdriver between the uprights. The paint was old and hard, and enough layers thick that the boards resisted separation, but as soon as Winnie had managed a small purchase Allegra joined with a chisel. The top of the first board came away from its backing with a sound like dry suction. A stir of dusty
plaster breathed into the hollow made by the board pulling away from the wall.

“Not a sound. Nobody home,” said Allegra.

“Not yet,” said Winnie.

“Well, let's demolish the home before it gets back, and then maybe it'll go someplace else.”

“There's not always someplace else to go,” said Winnie.

 

“There's always someplace else to go,” said Wendy.

 

Then the first board was off, set down delicately on the floor. The wall behind it, bricks laid slapdashedly, cemented with a coarse mortar.

“Surely this can't be a chimney stack?” said Allegra.

“Why can't it be?”

“Look at the joining compound. Hardly smoothed over, and full of gaps. A chimney fire should have burned this house down long ago. Furthermore, no evidence of smoke on the back of this board.”

“So you be the detective for a change. Or the novelist. What do you think it means?”

“I don't know, but there's no chimney here.”

“Of course there is, be reasonable,” said Winnie. “There are fireplaces on each of the floors below, and there's a chimney stack up top. Jenkins and Mac told me. How was the house heated and its smoke vented for two hundred years without a functioning respiratory system?”

“Well, I don't know. Let's keep going. Maybe we'll find something else.”

The second board was easier than the first, and the third easier still. Some boards had to be broken in half, and the upper and lower
parts extracted with force, dislodging ceiling plaster, which was making ghosts of Allegra and Winnie, and dusting their eyes.

“None of these boards look like one another,” said Winnie, looking more closely. “Different heights, widths, and thicknesses too—you didn't notice that from the pantry side; the wall seemed smooth.”

“Meaning there were gaps, and air passages.”

“Chimney flutes. The origin of the noise.”

“Which is even more gone than it seemed before.”

“All we need is the lights back on, and someone to jump through the door and say, ‘Surprise, it's your birthday,' and balloons and cake and confetti.”

“Right. But what about the bricking of this chimney stack?”

The exposed wall was a crazy quilt of handiwork. The bricks were of uneven shapes, some laid in vertical patches suggestive of a lazy herringbone. “The one thing that could be supposed,” said Allegra, running a hand over the surface ruminatively, “is that this wall was put up hastily.”

Winnie saw she was right. The worker or workers hadn't stopped to trim excess filler with a trowel or make sure the line was true. Maybe the boards had been slapped up hastily, too, before the mortar was dry.

Winnie stooped down and looked at the boards again. “If there was some sort of pattern appearing on the surface of the planks, maybe it was just moisture sponging out through nail holes punched in two hundred years ago. Just a freak natural phenomenon. Or who knows, maybe the workers were superstitious, and hammered in a design of nails to represent a cross.”

“Unlikely, though I suppose possible. But that is no reason for the nails to retract themselves showily into the wall when your men Jenkins and Mac were around to witness it.”

“I witnessed it too, Allegra, and my vision is twenty-twenty. Furthermore—” She didn't continue her sentence, which had threatened to be “there's still no explanation why the same pattern would show up on my computer screen just before the power went out.” But one thing at a time.