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CHAPTER XXIV.

THE GHOST OF ENSOR HOUSE.

A t the breakfast table, the guests describe the presence of a silhouette in their chambers at night. Crouching in dark corners of the room, its visage black with blood or shadows. They titter nervously while describing how they sequester themselves in bed, drawing the bed-curtains about them; their eyes attuning to an obscure outline upon the brocade hangings, expecting them to slide open at any moment.

‘Ensor House’s very own ghost!’ exclaims Mrs Pounds. Eagerly and somewhat apprehensively, because she is trying to gauge whether having a ghost is a good thing or a bad thing.

‘If you look at a ghost in the eye, you’ll have bad luck for ever,’ Marigold says, leaning over the table so we all have no choice but to gaze down her bosom.

‘That’s black cats, Marigold,’ her husband says in a tone rich with abhorrence, and Marigold retreats into her chair, nose twitching.

‘Nurse is afraid of the ghost, too,’ says Andrew, chewing through his devilled lobster.

And Drusilla claims she heard the servants talk of paintings that appeared lopsided in the mornings and a room whose curtains kept drawing themselves throughout the day. ‘They thought it was Andrew and I at first,’ she says, ‘until they realized it couldn’t possibly be; these things happen when we’re asleep, or playing outside.’

She recites the things she’s heard them say, imitating their accents – ‘we munnot speak of it, I dar’nt goa in, yon chiller’s gooin mad.’ Andrew giggles and they both start repeating it – ‘yon chiller’s gooin mad, yon chiller’s gooin mad.’

WARY OF THE GHOST, the servants begin making mistakes. Fruit goes missing in the kitchen garden. In the laundry room, one of the maids hears a step on the stone floor behind her, a creak of a wooden rack where the linen hangs to dry. She holds her breath, for her mother has warned her of the devil and the devil does not always show himself at night. She wipes away the sweat that has gathered in the groove under her nose from the steam of the boiling coppers. And then she sees a face behind a hanging bedsheet. She claims, later, that this is why she pulls at the heavy, impeccably white linen. Sheet after sheet after sheet. They fall to the floor, ruined, and she keeps pulling them down, crying, gasping like she’s running over the moors, until Mrs Able chances upon the scene. Two footmen and a valet are required to hold the little maid down.

Warned of this incident, the chambermaids refuse to make the beds, afraid the sheets will fall upon the shape of an invisible body or reveal a face. There are rumours one of the guests has wet himself after a late-night apparition in his chamber. Candles go missing from the buttery as servants steal them for their quarters to abate their fear at night. The kitchen maid falls down the cellar stairs and claims she was pushed, but nobody sees what pushed her. They keep blaming the ghost, the ghost.

THREE NIGHTS ERE Christmas Eve, I hear bodies running through the house, dragging their coffin bells, tied to their toes, behind them.

By my bed there is a soft, laboured breathing and when I look towards it, I see Original Baby, standing upright on its tiny, chubby feet and rotting softly in stripes, like it’s been finger-painted grey.

Original Baby takes my hand. It shows me the Reverend drinking himself half to death after preaching his last sermon from the pulpit of Hopefernon Church. Believing he can hear dead Mother laughing under the church floor, from the family vault. Asking a little match girl on the streets of Hopefernon to set him on fire. Paying her with handwritten pound notes until she does. She lights the match against the stone wall of the church, sobbing as the flames ignite on the Reverend’s coat.

Original Baby shows me adult Andrew in a cheap brothel that consists of four badly illuminated corners, as he receives a flogging from a prostitute dressed as a governess. And his oldest schoolfriend, which he has yet to make, quivering beside him.

And Drusilla, locked into a carriage with a fly buzzing against the window glass and rubbing its hands with relish on her pregnant belly – on her way to her husband’s country house where she will die.

The shadows of the things that Will be, or that May be only?