The Ghost Tree by Barbara Erskine
‘It may be an abomination to talk to them, but that’s not to say they don’t exist,’ Fanny retorted. She gave a wistful smile. ‘So, she may not have the choice. Besides, she knew you don’t seek to speak to the spirits of the dead. If they return to you it is because you have the God-given gift of hearing them.’
In the silence that followed they were both thinking of the same thing. The ghost of Andrew Farquhar.
‘He hasn’t returned,’ she said. ‘Has he?’
‘No.’ He was not going to tell her that the man haunted his dreams, his office, his library, the corridors in the Lincoln’s Inn house, his every waking moment, a shadow at the periphery of his vision, sometimes distant, no more than a hint of trouble on a stormy horizon, but sometimes there beside him in the road, or in the carriage or even standing at the head of his horse. His dogs and horses sensed him too. He would hear a quiet rumble in the throat of one of the dogs, see his hackles rise, or his horse would jib and sidestep and lay back its ears. Only in the silence of his garden in Hampstead, ringed with a safety cordon of magic, was there relief.
In the Lincoln’s Inn house, no one was safe. And it was there Farquhar struck again. It was the day after Christmas and Thomas had been out walking in the snow. As he arrived home the door opened. The footman who greeted him was white in the face and so agitated he forgot to bow. ‘Mr Erskine, sir, please come quickly. It’s Mrs Erskine, she’s had a fall.’ Thomas dropped his folder of papers and ran after him, his heart in his mouth.
Frances’s bedroom was hot, the fire blazing up the chimney and candles everywhere providing enough light for the two doctors who were bending over her as he burst into the room. Margaret and Abi were standing at the foot of the bed.
‘What is it? What happened?’
‘She fell, sir. Down the stairs.’ He did not recognise either doctor. The first straightened, spectacles on the end of his nose. ‘It is a concussion. She is already stirring.’ He glanced down at his patient, and leaning forward slightly took her wrist to feel her pulse. He looked up again. ‘It’s stronger. Nothing is broken, sir, I’m pleased to say.’
‘Mama has been unconscious a long time, Papa,’ Margaret put in softly. She came round the bed and took his hand. ‘I was there. I saw it happen. She must have tripped at the head of the staircase. One second she was talking to me, laughing as we prepared to go downstairs, and the next she gave a little cry of surprise. She seemed to fly out into the air.’ She choked on a sob. ‘It was awful.’
The second doctor, a younger man, looked up. ‘My colleague is correct, sir. There are no broken bones, her neck is undamaged and she is beginning to stir. If it please God, she will recover.’
‘Where is Samuel?’ Thomas asked suddenly. ‘Has someone sent for him?’ He had enormous faith in his son-in-law’s capabilities.
‘Of course we have, Papa. We have sent messengers to find him and Frances. They will be here soon.’ Margaret squeezed his hand. ‘She’ll be all right. She’s waking up.’ Her voice was tight with fear.
‘How did she fall?’ He looked at Margaret and saw the bewilderment in her eyes. ‘She was pushed.’ He answered his own question at last, his voice bleak.
Margaret was distraught. ‘How could she have been? I was the only one there. Papa! You don’t think it was me?’
‘No, I don’t think it was you!’ he shouted. He knew who it was. Farquhar, who had pushed her once before. Farquhar who had no physical body but who could use the sheer power of his energy to knock people over, drag them from the saddle, push them in front of galloping horses, in front of carriages and now down the stairs.
He sat by her bed all night. At some point Frances and Sam arrived. Sam spent a long time examining her, then shook his head. ‘My colleagues were right. I can find no broken bones, no sign of damage to her head or neck. We must wait for God to send her back to us.’
God chose to take her away. She lingered, unconscious, for several days, then one icy dawn she died in Thomas’s arms, surrounded by her children.
‘Ruth? What is it? What’s the matter?’
Malcolm, on getting no reply to his knock, had pushed the door open to find her sitting at the table, her face wet with tears. He knelt at her feet and reached up to stroke her face. ‘Ruth?’
She held out the piece of paper to him. It was a letter, folded, a piece of wax still clinging to the outside, addressed to the Rt Honourable, the Earl of Buchan, Dryburgh Abbey, Berwickshire. He glanced at her, then unfolded it carefully.
The letter began formally then turned into a wild outpouring of grief. It was signed ‘your unhappiest of brothers, Thomas’.
Malcolm glanced at the table in front of her. There were several similar letters, all in the same slanting hand.
‘What happened?’ he asked gently.
‘Fanny died. She fell down the stairs. He loved her so much.’ Ruth rubbed her eyes on her sleeve. Behind them there was a click of claws on the stone stairs and one of the dogs nosed his way into the room. He came to sit beside Ruth, licking her hand.
She patted his head. ‘It’s silly to be so upset about something that happened over two hundred years ago.’
‘How old was she, do you know?’
‘In her fifties. Like him. She had survived childbirth eight times and seemed so strong, then this.’
‘Was it Farquhar?’ Malcolm pulled up the other chair and sat down opposite her.
‘He doesn’t say so in the letter, but that is what he believed.’ She didn’t say how she knew.
‘He wouldn’t tell his brother. I was wondering how he got the letters back.’ Mal had noticed the length of ribbon now, lying on the table. It had obviously held the letters together.
‘Frances had them. His daughter. Lord Buchan must have sent them back to her. They must have been in her writing box.’ And tossed aside by Timothy.
Mal felt a tingle of excitement. This was history, first hand. He wanted to read them so badly it hurt, but carefully he refolded the letter and put it back on the pile. ‘So, was Farquhar satisfied with that, I wonder.’
‘If he had been satisfied he would have stopped haunting, wouldn’t he?’ She fished a tissue out of her pocket and scrubbed at her face with it. ‘And yet now, two hundred years later, he is still here, still full of anger, haunting me.’
‘All went well for Thomas after that, though, didn’t it?’ Malcolm sat back on the chair, his face thoughtful. ‘Only a year after the date on that letter he reached the peak of his career and was given his title.’
Ruth laughed sadly. ‘The title my father objected to so strongly, and which the family have always been so proud of. But the irony was it meant far less to Thomas because he couldn’t share it with Fanny. She wasn’t there at his side as Lady Erskine.’
‘She’d have hated all that flummery,’ he said wryly.
Ruth stared at him. ‘How do you know? You talk as though you knew her!’
He looked surprised. ‘I suppose it’s because you’ve told me so much about her. It’s true though, isn’t it?’
‘She seems to have been a very special woman. He was surrounded by strong women. His mother, his sisters, his daughters.’
‘Perhaps their ghosts kept Farquhar at bay,’ Malcolm said thoughtfully.
‘Seriously?’ She gave him her quizzical look.
‘I’m still interested in why Farquhar has reappeared on the scene now. I know you and Harriet invited him in, but why now? Why like this? You need to find out if there was any further mention of him in Thomas’s letters. This is where my knowledge of Thomas’s history is sketchy. I haven’t followed his career except where he and Pitt came up against one another. Were there any other calamities to show that Farquhar was on the rampage again?’
‘Apart from the fall of the government?’
He nodded. ‘I don’t think we can credit Farquhar with that.’
‘Perhaps it was then Thomas began to store up the wisdom that led to him becoming Dion Fortune’s super-guide.’
‘Curiouser and curiouser.’ Malcolm folded his arms. ‘The Master with No Name and the Man from the Shadows. There’s only one way to find out. Go on with your story.’
Thomas
Grief is a strange thing. It rises and falls like the tide, at times overwhelming and inundating, and at others a distant, gentle murmur lapping on a faraway shore. We buried Fanny in the church at Hampstead, in the village she had loved above all other places in the last years of her life, and there I raised a memorial to her memory.
I was not given the luxury to grieve for long.
After Pitt’s death his ministry fell, to be succeeded by that of Lord Grenville, in which my friend Charles James Fox was foreign secretary and to my great honour and delight I was made Lord Chancellor, on 7 February, going to the Queen’s Palace to receive the great seal of England from the king. I was elevated to the peerage in my own right as Lord Erskine of Restormel, the title suggested by the Prince of Wales – Restormel being, I was told, a beautiful but ruined castle in his Duchy of Cornwall. I would have liked to choose a title from my homeland of Scotland but my position was an English one; my brother Harry was now Lord Advocate of Scotland!
I was heartbroken that my darling Fanny, who had uncomplainingly shared so much hardship and grief with me in the early days of our marriage, could not share my honours and my title, but my children were ennobled with me. They all took the title of honourable. Davy would succeed to my title after me, and the burden of work did not stop me from giving a hand up to my two sons-in-law as well; Mary’s husband, Edward Morris, I made a Master in Chancery. To Frances’s husband, Samuel, who, after much heart searching, abandoned his profession of physician in order to enter his first love, the church, I was able to give two parishes in the preferment of the king, and therefore in the gift of the Lord Chancellor, Beaudesert in Warwickshire and Poynings in Sussex. It was to Poynings that they moved from London with their growing family. The parsonage was old and dilapidated, but very beautiful in its way, large enough for my Frances to make her home and for her to have her much-longed-for piano, and Samuel told me at once of his plans to rebuild the house one day in the latest style. But for the time being they were happy in their country retreat and near enough to Brighton, where the prince spent so much of his time, should they wish to join with the finest society.
I missed Frances very much. She reminded me so much of her mother and in my heart, secretly, I dreamed that maybe one day if I ever came to retire, I would move to Sussex to be near them. Not yet, though. The excitement and ambition of my early days were still with me. I was not planning on retiring for a long time yet. I enjoyed sitting on the Woolsack where one of my greatest triumphs was to be able to support the bill for the immediate abolition of the slave trade, ending my speech with the words, ‘Let us now set an example of humanity and justice which may be followed by all the nations of the earth.’ It fell to me to announce the royal assent to the bill.
70
It was time for RuthieD to make a new appearance. April smiled to herself as she bent over the keyboard.
So, our sexy historian has given up ghosts for a lady writer. She in turn has abandoned chef Finlay MacD for life in a Border Tower.
So much gossip and scandal in the wilds of the southern upland glens. Out there, no one can hear you scream.
She liked that one especially. And then,
Watch out. Your nemesis is on the way. A man with a knife is creeping through the trees even now.
April knew Tim wouldn’t be able to keep away. She had caught him looking up bus routes down towards the wild Moorfoot Hills, part of the endless lonely uplands around Malcolm’s stronghold and she had scoffed, ‘Trying to plan how to break into the castle now?’ He had glared at her and no more had been said, but today he had gone out early without a word. The longer he was absent the better. He had changed. His few days without her had made him coarser, more violent, less dependent on her. And if the police were to be believed he was a depraved vicious rapist. She found that hard to believe, even now, but they had the DNA. What an irony that he had been identified the very way they had planned to convince the authorities that he was Dunbar’s son.
It was time to go. She wasn’t going to hang around to find out what had really happened. She had been stupid to hook up with him again. She went into the sitting room and peered out through the curtains towards the road. Better to leave.
Where would she go? Somewhere with a uni where she could study English Literature. She would love that. Even as she thought about it she could hear Timothy’s wild laughter in her head, not his old nervous snigger but the raucous, scornful laugh he had developed lately. The laugh that told her she was rubbish and he would as soon dump her as she him. Well, she would save him the trouble. By the time he returned she would be gone and hopefully her tweets would ensure the police were waiting for him should he make it as far as Malcolm’s Tower. The decision made, she was astonished at the sudden feeling of release that overwhelmed her.
There was very little to pack. Her spare clothes and her laptop went into the new tote.
She never had, never would, trust Tim with her money. It was hidden under a loose floorboard she had found under the carpet in her bedroom. Pulling out the envelopes, each one with a thousand pounds in cash, she shoved the board back in place, looked round the room with a satisfied smile, turned off the light and headed for the stairs.
Bag in hand she opened the front door and stepped outside.
‘Going somewhere, Sis?’ Timothy was standing on the doorstep.
Ruth made the decision to show Mal everything that evening after removing another bundle of letters from a leather folder she had found amongst her mother’s books.
She sighed. ‘I know so little about this period. Why didn’t I pay more attention at school?’
‘Can you tell me the problem?’ Mal grinned. ‘I’m probably the nearest thing you’re going to find to a world expert on the Georgian period in this glen.’ He had been making some coffee and he wiped his hands and sat down opposite her at the kitchen table.
She smiled. ‘Modest with it.’
‘This is an underpopulated glen. Can I give you a tip: less is more. Pick out the most salient bits. You can read round any more details you feel you need later. And ask Thomas. I’m sure he would love to discuss his world with you.’
‘As would you. I’m sorry. I’ve been selfish. You must read this stuff.’ Impulsively she pushed the folder towards him.
‘Are you sure?’ He hesitated, then reached out towards it.
With the letters were several more of the small notebooks. They had all been wrapped in a sheet of paper, headed Poynings Rectory. A neatly written inscription read: ‘Papa’s writings. To be preserved. One day they will be valuable.’
‘I don’t think she meant monetary value,’ Ruth said.
‘No. She seems to have been a rather saintly lady in her old age.’ Malcolm had picked out a faded page from a magazine which, tucked in amongst the other papers, had turned out to be a copy of Frances’s obituary. He studied it for several minutes before putting it back in place and reached with extreme care for one of the small notebooks. This was clearly another journal. ‘I was looking through some of my own sources last night to find references to your Thomas and I found two quotes from Sir Walter Scott.’ He fished a piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘This will amuse you!’ he grinned. ‘This one is his comment on the Erskine brothers: “The earl’s wit was crack-brained and sometimes caustic, Henry’s was of the very kindest, best humoured and gayest sort that ever cheered society; that of Lord Erskine was moody and muddish—?
‘What!’ Ruth looked up indignantly. Then she laughed. ‘But then, Thomas and Scott didn’t get on. There was a row, wasn’t there, later, over some play in Edinburgh? The crowd stood up and applauded Thomas when he came in, rather than Scott who was the author of the play. And in one of his letters I saw him quote that Scott had said “Tom Erskine was stark mad”! He seemed quite pleased with the remark.’
‘Praise indeed! This one is more complimentary. Lord Byron this time: “… anything in Lord Erskine’s handwriting will be a treasure gathering compound interest for years”.’
‘Lord Byron was biased. He was a good friend of his.’
‘As was practically everyone of note at the time.’ Malcolm glanced at the scattered letters that lay between them. ‘What are you going to do with these?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘They should be preserved, shouldn’t they.’
He thought for a minute. ‘Use them for family history. That is your right, but after that?’
‘Perhaps I should give them to the nation. The British Library or something.’
‘That would be very generous. They are probably worth a lot of money. Think about it.’
Those letters are private!
The words tore through her brain, abrasive and angry.
She sat back at the table abruptly.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
They are not to be published!
‘I don’t know. Perhaps it’s a migraine coming.’ Ruth glanced up at him, rubbing her forehead distractedly. ‘Sorry. They hit sometimes.’ She flinched again.
‘Farquhar?’
She shook her head. ‘Thomas.’
Malcolm glanced round the room. ‘Obviously there are things in these papers he would rather you, we, the world, didn’t see. But would he have told his daughter such things?’
‘We will have to read them to find out.’ She gave him a faint smile. ‘When I know what’s in them, then I will decide.’