One
The gates were beautifully wrought iron, elegantly monogrammed with interlockingWs. The motor-car’s headlights illuminated the black paint, the curlicues and details gleaming gold. It was an elegant, sophisticated gate. It was also twelve feet high if you counted the spikes, and it stood in a very solid brick wall that matched its height.
Zebedee Wyckham contemplated the gate and the towering wall, its top dimly picked out by the waning moon. He considered the bleak moorland through which they had been driving on the roughest possible track for hours without seeing evidence of human life. Then he asked the chauffeur, “Lackaday House, yes? Not Dartmoor Prison?”
“Lackaday House,” the man said, unsmiling.
“Right.”
Zeb had not been to Lackaday House before. Its owner was his cousin Wynn Wyckham, but Wynn was over two decadeshis senior, and the Wyckhams were not a close or a loving family. Zeb had met him exactly twice, both times as a child under orders to keep his mouth shut; he’d barely thought of the fellow since.
Then, six months ago, he’d had a letter, quite out of the blue, asking him to come for a visit. Since Zeb wouldn’t cross the street to see any of the relatives he knew, he had snorted at the idea of crossing the country for one he didn’t. Nevertheless, it had been a kindly gesture, so he’d replied, and Wynn had kept pressing. He’d been friendly and pleasant, which made a nice change, and various circumstances had arisen that made it appealing for Zeb to be somewhere else, and long story short, here he was. In cold, dark Dartmoor at the arse end of November, staring at a firmly closed gate.
He couldn’t help feeling he’d misjudged this.
“It’s extremely secure,” he remarked. “Is there much danger of burglars here?”
The chauffeur looked round at him with an expression of utter contempt. He was a heavy-set man, in his fifties but obviously powerful, with a rat-trap mouth, so the expression was very effective. “No.”
Zeb had spent the last two hours in silence, since the noise of the motor and the wind and the road surface had made conversation impossible. He’d also been sitting as close to still as he could, which was to say fidgeting relentlessly and hoping it wasn’t annoying his driver too much, and the combination of enforced immobility and enforced taciturnity was building upunder his skin. He really wanted to talk.
He’d been told often enough he should realise when people didn’t want to listen. He locked his jaw, concentrating on the feel of the rosary in his pocket, sliding the string of smooth beads round and round between finger and thumb while his foot tapped compulsively. He needed to be out of this blasted car. Maybe he could get out and walk the rest of the way down the drive, once they opened the gates. If they ever opened the gates.
“Gosh, this is taking a while,” he said. “It is rather cold to sit here, isn’t it? And it must be trying for you to wait like this every time. Unless it’s not every time?”
The chauffeur didn’t even answer. Zeb’s toes twitched violently in his shoes.
A man finally turned up to unlock the gates and haul them open. The procedure took several minutes and was accompanied by a deeply unpleasant screeching of metal on stone. The sound would drive Zeb mad if he were the gatekeeper.
Maybe they didn’t open the gates often. Maybe the gatekeeper was already mad and didn’t mind. Maybe they wanted it to be noisy so that nobody could escape the grounds in secret.
Zeb grinned to himself, recognising his imaginings as the sort that Gothic heroines frequently thought and dismissed at the start of a book. Specifically, it was very much what Clara thought and dismissed at the beginning of Walter Wyckham’s Gothic classicClara Lackaday, which was why she entered the brooding walls that would become her prison instead of leggingit for the horizon in chapter one. The more fool Clara.
The gates were finally pulled wide. The chauffeur got the motor going again, its bangs and growls an unwelcome intrusion into Dartmoor’s clean, quiet air, and they chugged along. Behind them, the gate screamed protest once more before shutting with a resoundingly final clang.
They drove on up the drive. After a few moments, Zeb said, “Where’s the house?”
“Not there yet, are we?” the chauffeur said contemptuously.
“Well, that’s why I asked. It seems an awfully long way. Are the grounds very extensive?”
The chauffeur ignored that as well. Zeb suspected they were unlikely to become friends.
Along with the motor’s headlamps, the sliver of moon gave just enough light to indicate that the grounds were as bleak as the moors outside. Zeb saw a few shapes which might be outbuildings, but oddly shaped ones if so. Eventually there were trees, and then Zeb saw Lackaday House at last.
It was huge, dark, towering against the night sky, a great octagonal tower topped by a cupola dominating its centre. Zeb thought he could make out crenellations and flying buttresses, perhaps because he knew they were there from photographs. He would have placed it in the year 1500 or so as a glowering relic of medieval religion and aristocratic pride, if he hadn’t known his entirely common grandfather had built the thing a mere century ago.
“That’s very Gothic,” he said, and was ignored once more.
The motor pulled up in front of the house. The chauffeur sat unmoving and unspeaking, so Zeb said, “Well, thank you” and got out.
The relief was overwhelming. He shook his arms out, rolled his shoulder, jiggled his ankles to kick out the infuriating accumulation of fidgets, and then realised the chauffeur was still sitting there, very possibly watching him in the wing mirror, and clearly had no intention of getting his luggage out.
Zeb considered that, then went to retrieve his suitcases from the back himself. He was starting to feel rather unsettled. It was a matter of course in big houses like this that the staff did things like taking bags or opening doors for guests, but the chauffeur didn’t seem to feel that was his responsibility, and there was no indication that anyone had even noticed their arrival.
He turned to the chauffeur, who took that opportunity to drive off without a word, leaving him in a cloud of stinking smoke.
“Bye, then,” Zeb said after him, and hoisted his suitcases towards the stairs and the front door.
