else to leave it to,’ Robin surmised. ‘He wasn’t really my great-uncle. Or yours. My grandfather’s cousin. Might make him my great-cousin, I suppose. Maybe a couple of greats.’
‘One will do,’ said Fern.
‘He must have been awfully old,’ Will mused.
‘Youngest of his family,’ Robin explained. ‘Lots of sisters. Story goes, he ran away to sea when he was a boy—merchant navy—and didn’t come back till they’d all died. Part of the Capel legend. Don’t know if that’s what really happened. None of the sisters married—unless some of them were widowed—anyway, there were no children. Ned Capel didn’t marry either. Overdosed on women at an early age, I expect. The sisters all lived in that house until they sort of faded away and then he came home and vegetated there too. Must have been about ninety when he died. The sisters were fairly ancient as well. Remember visiting once with my grandparents: I think I was about Will’s age. There were three or four of them left by then: Esme and Deirdre and Irene—don’t recall any other names. Esme—no, Eithne—they called her the baby. Seventy-five at least. Very small with a wrinkled little face all eyes, like a marmoset in flowered chiffon. “I made the seed cake myself,” she told me. Frightful stuff. Tasted of sand.’
‘What’s seed cake?’ asked Will, intrigued.
‘Told you,’ said Robin. ‘Sand.’
They arrived in Yorkshire around ten that evening. Fern, normally a faultless map-reader, was in an edgy mood after losing them twice. Although it was May the weather was cold and a thin drizzle misted the windscreen whenever Robin tried switching off the wipers. The lights of a straggling village glittered through the rain as they crossed the Yarrow and climbed uphill; few lights and far between, lurking behind deep-set windows and close-drawn curtains, not unwelcoming but distant, keeping themselves to themselves. Following directions conveyed by Ned Capel’s solicitors they left the village and continued on into the dark, turning off at last up a steep drive which proved to be more like a cart-track, their rough passage shaking the Audi until its Vorsprung seemed about to come unsprung. The drive widened and levelled out in front of the house and Robin stopped the car. Little of the façade was visible through the rain-swept gloom except for the tall windows, many of them arched, black in the grey wall. The former housekeeper, a local woman, had been informed of their advent but there were no lights showing, no indications that they were expected. The house might have stood unoccupied for years. It looked dour, unfriendly, desolate as the surrounding countryside, hugging itself around the hollow darkness of its dusty rooms. Fern produced a torch and the roving beam picked out the entrance, tag-ends of creeper casting wavering fingers of shadow across the front door. In the blurred lozenge of light this was seen to be of unvarnished oak, splintered and weather-bleached, and as solid as the door to a dungeon. A modern Yale lock had been added, but the key turned reluctantly and the door creaked open under duress, scraping over bare boards. The hall inside was chilly and almost pitch-black. Fern took a long time finding the lightswitch: the skittering beam glanced over the lower treads of a winding stair and flicked in and out of curious niches and past angled doorways, blinking back abruptly from the depths of a stained mirror. Low-wattage illumination did little to improve matters, showing the details of cobwebs trailing from ceiling and lamp-shade and patches of discoloration on walls which might originally have been painted white.
Will gazed about him without enthusiasm. ‘Fern’s right,’ he said. ‘What’s the point of a house we won’t use? I think we should sell.’
‘I must say,’ Robin averred, ‘it looks a bit off-putting. Could move on, I suppose. Find a B & Β. Come back in the morning.’
‘No.’ Fern’s tone did not admit of argument. ‘We’re here and we’re going to stay. You were both so set on coming: well, I don’t intend to run away just because there isn’t a red carpet. Mrs Wicklow was asked to leave us tea and milk and so on. Let’s find the kitchen.’
She deposited the torch on a table and opened the door to her left, flicking an adjacent switch. A yellow glow sprang into being, no mellow radiance but a tired, sickly, off-colour light, as if the bulbs which provided it were continuously on the verge of expiring. It illumined a long drawing room with a few pieces of cumbersome furniture, the velvet upholstery rubbed raw by past occupants, a carpet mottled with age and dirt, and a wide empty fireplace bringing to her the dreary moan of the wind in the chimney. A grandfather clock ticked loudly, but there were no other sounds. At the far end of the room was an alcove, and peering out of it was the Face. For an instant, for all her resolute nerves, Fern stifled a gasp that was almost a cry. It was the face of a malevolent Buddha, not pensive and serene but gloating, somehow sly, the broad lips half parted in an unholy smile, the eyelids creased at some inscrutable jest, stubby horns protruding above a low brow. One of the light-bulbs flickered and she had the illusion that the idol had winked at her. ‘It’s a statue,’ she told herself. ‘Only a statue.’ Inadvertently, she spoke aloud.
Will and Robin had been investigating other doors but her brother heard her and came back to the hall. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Did you call?’
‘It was the statue,’ she said, ‘It gave me a shock.’
Will pushed past her to take a closer look. ‘It’s hideous,’ he said gleefully. ‘I’ll bet Great-Cousin Ned brought it back from his travels. Sailors always pick up stuff in foreign parts, don’t they? This place could be full of strange things. Some of them might be valuable.’
‘Pirates’ treasure, I suppose?’ said Fern, reassured by his ebullience. ‘Doubloons, and pieces of eight.’
‘I thought a doubloon was something you wore.’ Will had stopped a couple of feet in front of the idol, and suddenly he turned away. ‘Actually, I don’t think I do like it very much. I wonder what it’s laughing at?’
‘I don’t really want to know,’ said Fern.
Robin found the kitchen, at the back of the house. It was stone-flagged, cold but clean, with the barren air of a kitchen where nothing had been cooked in a long while. A jar of coffee, packets of sugar and tea, and a plate of sandwiches in clingfilm stood on the table, looking like the isolated relics of an alien visitation. There was milk in the fridge. They had snacked at a pub on the way, but Will and Robin tucked into the sandwiches, one eagerly, the other absent-mindedly. Fern searched for a teapot to make tea.
‘It’s a depressing sort of house, isn’t it?’ Robin commented between mouthfuls.
‘That’s Yorkshire for you,’ said his daughter.
The building was on three storeys, with eight bedrooms but only one bathroom and an extra loo downstairs. ‘The Victorians,’ Robin explained. ‘Grubby lot. Didn’t reckon too much to bathrooms.’ The cistern slurped and gurgled at the slightest provocation; hot water was not forthcoming. They went to bed unwashed, like the Victorians. Mrs Wicklow had made up the beds in three of the first-floor rooms; Robin chose the front room, Fern and Will slept at the back of the house. Fern lay awake for some time, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of a country night. The rain was silent and there was no traffic, although once she heard the grating roar of an untuned engine on the road below, possibly a motorbike. A strange mewing cry must, she assumed, have been some nocturnal creature, maybe a bird: it was only the unfamiliarity of it which disturbed her. She slept fitfully, falling between uneasy dreams, not sure if the snuffling she could hear, along the wall beneath her window, was real or simply another phantom from the shadows of sleep.
In the morning she woke around nine and got up to look at her surroundings in daylight. There was a small garden at the back of the house but the flower-beds were scantily planted and the grass grew in tufts on what might have been
