Page 47 of The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales

Sophia gave a final glance, then turned and retraced her steps. At the door she paused, noticing an inscription carved on the wooden frame.

Our brief partings on earth will appear one day as nothing

beside the joy of eternity together

Then she noticed a few words had been added underneath in black paint, almost rubbed away in places:

Lost but not forgotten

A piece of historic graffiti, if the ragged and inconsistent size of the letters were anything to go by. Sophia smiled, carried back to a summer long ago. Herself at seven years old – smocked dress, white ankle socks, the feel of cold metal in her hand – carving her name and the date on the bark of a tree with her brother’s penknife: SOPHIA P LOVELL 1955. Her mother had smacked her, yet it had seemed worth it. That all too human desire to stand out, to stamp one’s mark on a place. The fifteenth century, the twentieth, some things never changed. That fierce need in all of us to be remembered.

She peered closer, hoping for a date or name, but there was nothing to reveal who had added the words or for whom.

The sky had clouded over while she’d been inside and there was now an unseasonable chill in the air. Everything looked dull and grey. Sophia shivered. As she walked back through the avenue of trees, the world seemed bleached of colour. No sun burnishing the leaves of the beeches that stood at the furthest edges of the lawns, no birdsong. And the path between them seemed longer than before, the twisting branches that had provided a green canopy now oddly bare.

Sophia stopped. She wasn’t sure how it could have happened, but she had somehow lost her bearings. She wasn’t quite sure where she was. She thought back. The coach had left them on Manor Road, leaving Sophia and her three companions to make their own way past St Kenelm’s church to the ruins of Minster Lovell Hall. She’d excused herself and struck out on her own, following a path through the graveyard towards the river before noticing the chapel and going there instead. Since there was only one door and the path led directly to it, there was no choice but to go in and come out the same way. It was nigh on impossible to have got lost. And yet Sophia had the distinct impression of being in a different place. Or, rather, the same place which no longer looked quite the same.

She looked at her wrist, forgetting her watch was broken and in her pocket, wondering if it was possible the others had left the grounds and taken a short cut through the graveyard of St Kenelm’s. Rubbed the bare skin on her arm. Not that it mattered, she supposed, provided she was waiting at the right place for the coach at the appointed time. She didn’t think it could be anywhere close to twelve yet and, besides, she’d hear the church bells chime.

With the river at her back, she orientated towards the north, fixing the jagged outline and pointed stone gables of Minster Lovell Hall clearly in her sights. With a pinch of relief, Sophia walked towards the ruins. The less tended lawns closer to the river bank gave way to geometric ornamental gardens and the remains of neat foundation walls of Cotswold stone. The variegated shades of autumn, burgundy and gold, had given way to bare trunks and a few defiant firs. Sophia looked again for sight of her companions, keen to be back in company again, but there was no sign of them.

With a shrug, she determined to make the most of the time she had left. Told herself not to let her imagination run away with her. According to her guidebook, the house itself had taken shape over generations around three sides of a courtyard, with a high blind wall on the river side. When she reached the remains of a wide, circular well, and looked down into the narrow space, it crossed her mind that it was all less dilapidated than she’d expected. And as Sophia moved further into the body of the house, she found her sense of it growing stronger.

She walked through a stone arch set into a wall and along a vaulted corridor to the main hall. The roof was gone, so the high arched windows seemed to hang adrift, like flags, at the very top of the walls. Stone turned green by age and ivy, the beauty of the fifteenth-century outline silhouetted against the October sky. The remains of stairs leading up to the family’s private rooms.

Sophia turned and stepped back over one of the foundation walls, but stumbled and nearly lost her balance. She glanced down, then frowned. She could have sworn the outline of the wall had been little more than a mark on the ground. Now, it was several bricks high.

She shivered. It wasn’t like her to be clumsy or out-of-sorts. Her thin summer coat no longer seemed adequate. She tightened the belt and tucked her shiny yellow square scarf under her collar to keep warmer, but she still felt cold. She put her hand to her forehead, wondering if she was coming down with something, but she didn’t have a temperature. She didn’t feel ill, just chilly and rather odd. As if she was somehow watching everything from behind a sheet of glass. Both part of things and separate from them.

Increasingly uneasy, Sophia carried on. She refused to allow nerves to get the better of her. Resolutely, she followed a cobbled pathway which led to the north wing and through a sequence of smaller rooms, with the hint of a small fireplace set into the north wall. On to the east wing, now breathing the scents of the stables and working places of the house. Leather and straw and guttering set into the ground, the scratch of the hot iron and the hiss of metal in the stone water tanks.

As Sophia walked, the colours and shadows seemed to deepen and take a more profound shape. The elegant ruined outlines of Minster Lovell Hall were coming back to life, or so it seemed: the leaping flames in the great stone fireplaces in the hall, the walls soaring high above, the beauty of the arched windows. The tapestries and wall hangings, long tables with candles and dishes laid for a banquet, sweet melody trickling down from the minstrels’ dais. She could almost hear the song of lute and viol, citole and recorder, the mournful single beat of a drum.

Everywhere, white hawthorn and boughs of mistletoe.

Was this where the wedding feast had been held those hundreds of years before? Where a young bride had danced and been admired but then vanished? Sophia found herself looking into the empty space, imagining the ghostly outlines of men and of women, of servants and musicians, the lord of the manor and his retainers.

The mistletoe hung in the castle hall.

Shadow dancers, their features taking shape. Almost visible, almost returned. Sophia slowly moved on, feeling the unseen presence of others all around her, a prickling at the nape of her neck.

At last, she found herself at the foot of the tower that stood at the far south-west corner of the property. And she realised that her view of the gardens was obscured now by brick and stone.

The whispering was growing stronger, clearer.

A toast to the goodly company.

Sophia spun round and looked behind her. Still she could see no one, though she felt their presence strongly. Another flutter of nerves in her stomach: anticipation or premonition?

Now the echo of ancient words was clearer still, layered over the bristling disquiet of the day. Sounds of laughter and celebration, whispering and billowing and creaking of the old house. Footsteps on the flagstone floor, servants carrying and fetching, kitchen to table with dish after dish, doors opening and closing. A celebration, a feast.

Sophia felt the muscles in her stomach tighten. It wasn’t merely that the house was shifting and changing its shape around her, but also that there was a growing tension in the air. Beneath the echo of sounds of celebration and good cheer was a sense of threat. The harmless process of imagining the house as it once was had become something else. A crack in time, a slipping between this world and another.

She looked at the stairs. She didn’t want to go up, yet at the same time she felt she had no choice. Sophia took a deep breath, then put her hand against the rough stonework to anchor herself, and began to climb. Higher and higher she went, up into an octagonal turret nestled between the tower and the west wing. A mournful wind was crying in the gables and there was a bite in the air warning of snow. And when she looked out through the stone mullions of the window, there was a dusting of frost on the ground.

Sophia walked along a long corridor, towards the solar. Watching herself, as if from the outside, a woman in a cream coat and brown shoes, a yellow scarf knotted at her neck, heading towards a closed door.

Still the voices from the past called out to her. And again, the words of the old fireside song Sophia hardly remembered knowing.