She’s met most of Leo Defford’s core production team now, and they tend to be scarily young. Have names like Emily and Jamie. Go bounding like puppies, in and out of Knap Hall. Woohoo Hall is what they’ve taken to calling it. Which kind of annoys Grayle. You must never let this stuff take you over, but equally you don’t diss it.
Couple of the puppies have taken her to dinner at country pubs, evidently with a view to booking a room for the night, but she’s resisted, pretending she thinks it’s just a working dinner. They discussed the programme, she avoided talking about her background. They make her feel old, these guys, so full of ambition and ideas they clearly think are new and exciting but which sound flimsy and obvious to Grayle. Except, perhaps, for Defford himself, she’s yet to encounter someone who thinks a disturbed old house is any different from a fair-ground ghost train.
Not that Knap Hall has done anything to suggest otherwise. Sometimes, around dusk, as she’s about to leave for home, she looks down at the empty house, with its blackened, mullioned windows in its pie-crust walls, and thinks she sees movement there.
Not shapes behind old glass, more a slow shifting and resettling of the whole building. Like respiration.
But that’s what dusk does.
18
Still there
Otherwise, Knap Hall is still being evasive, its ghosts indistinct.
We still have to bring its hidden history alive.
Defford. She doesn’t see as much of him now. He sends these terse texts and emails from his phone. Hidden history. Huh. Suppose there isn’t any? Does that even matter if they have the big two: Trinity and KP.
They’ve been shooting stuff in the house to use as insert-material. Pictures of the rooms stripped back to their basics, with rushes on the flags. People in rough clothing who will appear on the screen dulled by sepia and shadows. But who are they? They have no identities, no personalities, and time’s running out. If she doesn’t want to be sent in search of a reliable medium she needs to come up with something HGTV can dramatize, and fast.
From local records, libraries and the Internet, she’s compiled a list of former owners and tenants of Knap Hall, going back to the early sixteenth century when it had different names – the name Knap Hall didn’t appear till the eighteenth century – and was occupied by working farmers, yeoman-types, raising livestock and big families.
Sepia is right. They were not colourful people. History – even local history – has stepped over them. She’s talked to four local historians so far, not finding much to excite her. Knap Hall is still well overshadowed by the lustrously restored castle which once played host to Elizabeth I and her parents, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and is now a resting place at last for Katherine Parr. All these big people, in the fast lane of history. No real surprise this place has been bypassed.
*
Down towards the main gate, some guys are assembling the prefabricated hotel block – yeah, really – that will house Grayle’s personal suite. She’ll be expected to live here during the transmission period – what Defford calls the final days. He keeps using that phrase, evidently finding it satisfyingly portentous.
Grayle walks beside the main lawn, past slender rowan trees with their blood-bright berries, thinking of Katherine Parr and Trinity Ansell, dead at a younger age than she is now. Mortality thrown in your face at every turn.
Beyond the lawn are small fields, made private by still-green hedgerows. Coming from a country of endless fences, Grayle enjoys the intimacy of hedgework. She watches Jordan Aspen-wall squatting outside his shed beside his ride-on mower, tools spread out on the grass. He’s now on the HGTV payroll till Christmas, apparently for more money than he was getting from Harry Ansell. He looks contented enough, a not unfriendly hand raised. All seems peaceful until a hostile fizzing on the ground directly in front of her sends Grayle backing off from a gang of wasps savaging an early-windfall apple…
… almost into the path of the white Discovery ripping up the drive far too fast. Leo Defford at the wheel, being a crazy English bastard and not even noticing her until the big SUV has gone crunching past.
The Discovery doesn’t stop, but Grayle feels uncomfortable being caught just walking the grounds like she doesn’t have enough work to do, even though the truth is she’s barely had a day off since early April. Probably now knows more about Trinity Ansell than either of Trinity’s shallow, showbiz biographers, both of whom raced to write final, unenlightening chapters for post-mortem editions. Grayle bought both these women expensive lunches, learning nothing significant. Neither ever met Trinity.
‘Man in a hurry.’ It’s the gardener. ‘You all right, Miss Underhill?’
‘Grayle. I’m fine, thanks. You?’
‘Lot still to do,’ Jordan says. ‘Just hope there’s time, that’s all.’
Jordan is not what she was expecting, which was either one of those private-school-educated types who write gardening columns in the posh papers, or some dark, unfriendly Mellors figure furtively fancying Trinity Ansell. Turns out to be a stocky, earnest, middle-aged local man in a plaid work shirt.
She stops at the lawn’s edge. She’s tried a couple of times to talk to him about the stories with which he’d tried to frighten Lisa, the scullery maid:
said people used to think they were being followed in the passages, and they’d turn round and there’d be, like, a shadow?
Jordan said he was just having a bit of fun and, no, he’d seen nothing. He always prefers to talk about his work, particularly the Elizabethan-style knot garden he’s planted in what used to be a flat paddock to the side of the house, a smaller version of the fine specimen at Sudeley. It’s a complex mosaic of sculpted bushes with a gravel path around it, formerly used to reach an old barn. It’s geometrically exact, Jordan says.
‘So you’ll be like winding down with the fall, Jordan?’
He smiles, a tad shyly.
‘Anybody notice if I did?’
‘I guess I would. That’s not to say—’
‘I seen you taking it all in. Nobody else seems to notice much.’
‘I guess they’re all too…’
… up their own asses.
There’s a patch of quiet, the lawn dappled with shadows of trees.
‘He notices.’
Jordan’s nodding towards the house. Grayle says nothing. He means Knap Hall itself? Is that just how they talk around
here, everything male or female, or does he see the house as some kind of sentient being?
People in overalls go in and out, guys with tools, guys with clipboards and cameras. Carpenters and electricians and plumbers and designers. The house is just another prop. Few of these people know just what’s going to happen there next month, and neither does Jordan – most of the planning meetings have taken place in London or at Defford’s Cotswold second home, miles from here.
‘He’s, um, he’s resisting me,’ Grayle says.
Jordan looks only slightly curious, says nothing. She decides to tell him more than she should, have one last go at bringing him out… if there’s anything to come out. She’ll grab anything now.
‘See, my job – some of what I do here – is to find out what happened at Knap Hall before Trinity Ansell? Saw herself as restoring the house to what it had been. Only it’s becoming clear she was just intent on creating some kind of small Sudeley Castle. Which history tells us really wasn’t what this house had been at all. More of a working farm.’
Jordan’s nodding slowly.
‘And the kind of people who lived here,’ Grayle says, ‘were not exactly aristocracy.’
‘Wouldn’t be doing no knot garden them days, that’s for sure.’
‘I guess not.’
‘Chance of a lifetime for me, look. I’m back on it, now, but for how long? He don’t want it, Mr Ansell. Never really paid any of it much notice.’
‘Trinity’s house, Trinity’s garden. You spend much time with her, Jordan?’
‘Never got that close to her, to be honest. She was our boss but she never made demands.’
‘What about Harry Ansell?’
‘Wasn’t his house. You ever talked to Mr Ansell you knew he wouldn’t keep the place if… well, if she went off, folks used to say. Nobody thought…’
‘Maybe it’ll be sold to some Russian oligarch when we’re through here. Who wants a well-made garden. Um… whoever lived here in the past, my boss, he wants to get some actors to appear as them? Only we don’t really know what they were like? They’re just names in the records.’
Jordan nods, expressionless.
‘So I’m looking for people who might know the real history? Stuff you can’t get out of books. I was wondering if you knew anybody might help.’
‘Dunno who you talked to.’
‘Well, nobody too local.’
Grayle lists the names of the historians she’s consulted. For two of them she had to go to university faculties, in Birmingham and Bristol. And, still, most of what they knew was about Sudeley and the town of Winchcombe, one telling her at length about how tobacco was grown in the area before it was banned to protect imports.
‘Tobacco Close,’ Jordan says. ‘That’s the road where I live. Down Winchcombe.’
‘But, sadly, unless Knap Hall was owned by some early tobacco baron, it’s not relevant.’
Jordan considers, breathing in deeply.
‘Sir Joshua Wishatt?’
‘He was a tobacco baron?’
‘Dunno ’bout that, but he owned Knap Farm.’
‘When was this?’
Jordan shakes his head.
‘En’t good with dates. You talked to Mary Rutter?’
‘Who is she?’
‘Mary Rutter. In Winchcombe. Wrote a book. Way back. Don’t think you can buy ’em now. Didn’t go down too well with some folks. Went talking to the old ’uns and some folks reckoned she was taken for a ride. All I can tell you is she wasn’t wrong about all of it. When I was a kid, it was kind of, don’t you go playing up near Knap Farm or you’ll wind up paying Abel’s
Rent. Wasn’t my dad, said that, it was my… my mother’s dad. So it goes back.’
‘And what was Abel’s Rent?’
‘I don’t know the details except there was a bloke called Abel and he worked for Wishatt and you didn’t wanner be alone with either of them if you was female, and they used to say he was still there, kind of thing.’
‘Wishatt?’
‘Abel.’
‘Who said he was still here?’
‘I dunno. I en’t never been that interested in that ole stuff. Talk to Mary Rutter, I would, but don’t say it was me—’
‘Your grandfather told you about it?’
Jordan shakes his head.
‘I said enough. Talk to Mary Rutter. Just don’t say it was me put you on to her. Always a sore point, that book. She wrote a few others, but I don’t think she ever wrote about Wishatt again.’
‘And she lives in Winchcombe?’
‘Old cloth-weavers’ cottages, opposite the church.’
‘Thank you. Um… I’ve heard some ghost stories. About the house? I guess your grandad wouldn’t be…?’
‘Been dead years. He was a bugger for the old stories, if you bought him a glass or two. Me, I’m a man of science, Miss Underhill. Horticulture’s a science, and science got an answer to everything we sees and thinks we understands. All this spirits of the dead stuff, I got no patience with that, look. It’s just an old house. Old houses – well, be funny if there hadn’t been some bad things happen there in four or five hundred years.’
‘You remember the, um, holiday home for bad kids?’
‘Weren’t the best idea.’
‘I heard about that. Nineteen sixties?’
‘Before I was born, but it’s never been forgotten. Wasn’t properly thought out. These fellers, they think the countryside’s
like a desert where you can’t do no harm running wild. Boys didn’t even get locked up at night.’
‘And one of them raped a girl. A local girl?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘Never the same again.’
‘The girl? Is she… still around?’
‘Dead.’
‘What… recently?’
‘Year or so after it happened. Brutal. Nasty. Couldn’t live with it. Took her own life.’
‘Jesus.’
Another reason for local people not to be too fond of Knap Hall. Jordan’s looking past her, towards the house.
‘They shut the place down within a year of it, and after that it was derelict for a good while. Rooms turned into dormitories, and the extensions, so it wasn’t much good for anything. After that it was a youth hostel, but I don’t think that did too well.
He
don’t look happy.’
‘What?’ Grayle turning, thinking he means the house. ‘Oh.’
It’s Defford, hands on hips, planted like a fire hydrant at the top of the yellow steps leading up from the house. He’s staring across, maybe at Grayle, battered leather manbag over a shoulder, and, no, he doesn’t look happy.
Something’s happened.
She pretends she hasn’t noticed Defford, thanks Jordan and heads off back to her cabin, repeating ‘Mary Rutter’ under her breath. ‘Mary Rutter, Mary Rutter’, like some combination of a mantra and a tongue-twister, until she can write it down.
Along with Abel.
And
still there
.
In the cabin the company cellphone’s bleeping on her desk. She’s supposed to take it everywhere, forgot.
‘I’ve been calling you for twenty minutes, Grayle.’
Kate Lyons, Defford’s formidable PA. In London today, surely, even if she does sound like she’s in the same room.
‘I went out without the phone, Kate, I’m sorry.’
‘I think you need to call Mr Sebold. He rang here an hour ago, very unhappy. Thinks he’s being spied on. People talking to his friends and former colleagues about him. You, in other words.’
‘Well… yeah. But that was weeks… months ago.’
‘He seems to think it’s still going on.’
‘Well it isn’t.’
In relation to her inquiries about both Sebold and Parrish, Defford gave her numbers for the more reliably talkative of his former colleagues at the BBC. It’s the part of the job she hates. Makes her feel her like a seedy private eye.
‘You could have been more discreet, Grayle.’
What? Like how?
Grayle says nothing.
‘Anyway, someone gave him your name. We think you should be the one to talk to him, put his mind at rest. This afternoon, not now, don’t want him to think he’s in control. Tell him this is something that happens to everybody going into the house. Be nice to him. He’ll be reassured to hear your voice.’