Page 46 of The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales

On the stage, the costumes sigh and look at one another. Like children to bed, they regretfully take their leave. A bow, a cuff unfurled, a skirt curtsied, a gentle withdrawal. The cue has been given. The light of another day is seeping through the gaps in the window frames, beneath the door frame and the skylight.

Soon, it will be morning. Soon, the coopers and the milk boys and the barrow boys will be out, wheels over the cobbled stones, the pale yellow sunlight rising over London.

The watchman staggers to his feet and stretches, prepares to do his rounds. As he wanders through the empty passageways of the theatre, he thinks things don’t look quite as he left them. He chalks that down to his memory. It does not occur to him that the objects we surround ourselves with have lives of their own.

Author’s Note

I’ve always felt that one of the most exciting places in the world is backstage in a theatre.

At school and university, I spent a great deal of time backstage – being ‘helpful’. Moving props, negotiating for the hire of scaffolding or clothes, wine or printing of programmes. I had no talent as a performer, but that sense in theatre that every night something unique, something special, might happen – and wanting to be part of it – has never left me.

Thirty years later, a fledgling playwright now, I am still beguiled by the idea that the fixtures and fittings of a theatre – the costumes and wigs, the props and the armoury – might know more than the people who come to direct and produce, act and usher. The sense of a secret life, the belief that the fabric and architecture of a place is more important than the transience of people who come and go, is very attractive.

This is both the shortest of the stories in the collection and the most gentle. It is deliberately old-fashioned, inspired by a belief that possessions carry an imprint of all those who have come into contact. What Neil MacGregor calls ‘the charisma of things’*, it’s the beguiling idea that we could pick up a brooch or a sword, put on a coat or pick up a bus ticket and be connected to someone decades, centuries, ago.

* Neil MacGregor, Shakespeare’s Restless World (Penguin, 2012)

THE YELLOW SCARF

Minster Lovell Hall, Oxfordshire

October 1975

The Yellow Scarf

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies

from ‘Church Going’

PHILIP LARKIN

Once she was sure nothing was going on, Sophia pushed open the door and went inside. A pleasing smell of must and antiquity – parchment and stone, candles with the wicks burnt low. The air infused with the scent of incense long gone.

The chapel was empty. She slipped into the pew closest to the door, feeling the hard press of the wood through her thin summer coat, and exhaled. Five minutes to herself.

Sophia was accompanying her aunt on a coach tour of minor stately homes. A week’s holiday from work, all expenses paid. For the most part, she was enjoying herself. A small independent company, designed for ‘the more mature’ traveller, they were visiting the less well-known, less celebrated houses – none of the Blenheims or Chatsworths or Burghleys. The brochure promised four counties in seven days: Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, the so-called ‘Cradle of England’. Sophia’s aunt was sharp as a pin and self-sufficient – and the other retired ladies and two gentlemen in the party were lovely – but Sophia was finding it a little tiring to be always in company. Also, since most of her aunt’s friends were a little hard of hearing, the constant leaning forward in her seat and shouting over the thrumming of the engine as the coach made its way through Oxfordshire, had given Sophia a headache. Since most of the party had opted to take a look at the famous Charterville Allotments in the village of Minster Lovell, it was a chance to have some time to herself. There were two more visits scheduled for the afternoon – then an illustrated talk with slides (this picked out in italics in the itinerary) over dinner in Oxford that night – it was likely to be her only chance today for a little peace and quiet.

She’d been particularly looking forward to this visit to the ruins of a medieval manor house on the outskirts of the village. There was rumoured to be some distant family link with the place. Like all such stories, it came from the coincidence of their shared surname, rather than anything based in history or fact, but Sophia liked the idea of a connection all the same.

She placed her hands in her lap, shut her eyes and let the timeless calm wash over her. She took deep breaths, feeling her shoulders rise and fall, clearing her mind of schedules and tea shops and ‘comfort breaks’. Gradually, the band of pain behind her eyes loosened its grip. Sophia could hear the song of the River Windrush outside, chasing over stone and branch and bank. And in her mind’s eye, too, half-caught sounds echoing back through the centuries.

There wasn’t much in her guidebook about Minster Lovell Hall. Owned by the Lovell family in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the estate had changed hands after the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. The House of Lancaster defeating the House of York, the fall of the Plantagenet dynasty and the ascendancy of the Tudors, the Lovell family had refused to put their faith in Henry, then Duke of Richmond. Their lands were forfeit to the Crown, passing into the hands of the Coke family, then fallen into disrepair centuries later.

Sophia didn’t remember mention of a separate family chapel – since St Kenelm’s Church and graveyard were so close, she couldn’t see there would have been much need for a place of worship set away from the house. But as she sat now, in the small chapel, she found it easy to imagine flickering candles and a servant going ahead to light the way in the dark to this tiny stone building.

More intriguing was the folklore that a young bride – married to a nobleman called Lovell – was said to have disappeared here on her wedding night. In one version of the story, she had simply vanished during the feast and never been seen again. In another, a skeleton still dressed in bridal clothes was discovered in a hidden space between the walls of the ruined house by workmen in the eighteenth century: a murder or accident, no one knew. A fragment of history, or legend? No one seemed to know. Even so, in the peaceful silence of the chapel, it piqued Sophia’s interest in her surroundings.

Five minutes turned to ten. Feeling a pleasant drowsiness, a prickling at the base of her neck, and knowing she couldn’t allow herself to drop off, Sophia reluctantly opened her eyes. She only had an hour and a half before the coach came back to pick them up and she wanted to explore the grounds and ruins themselves too.

She looked at her watch. Tapped the glass with her fingernail. The minute hand had been sticking for days, but usually she could jolt it back into life. She tapped again, but this time nothing happened. It had stopped. It was a nuisance – their days were organised to the minute – but Sophia didn’t think she’d been in the chapel very long. Promising herself to find a jeweller’s in Oxford later to replace the battery, Sophia undid the strap, put the watch in her coat pocket and then stood to have a quick look around the chapel.

There was nothing of particular merit. Four plaques with the coat of arms of the Lovell family, a hound in flight, and a wooden bas-relief in the chancel – Sophia picked out a swan and a dove, an animal that might have been a hart or a stag, and a female figure in long, ornate robes. Sophia peered closely. Here was evidence linking the story of the vanished bride to Minster Lovell Hall. Long ribbons threaded through her hair, a beaded dress, slippers on her feet. In her hands, a wedding wreath of winter holly and mistletoe.

Sophia held the young bride’s gaze for a little longer, then moved on. Two brass candlesticks stood on the modest altar with a wooden lectern standing beside. A standard King James Bible, which suggested the chapel was still in use long after the Lovell family had renounced their claims to the estate.