Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (4 page)

King-Hall depicts the oppressive patriarchal system within which Barbara is trapped with bleak irony, noting, for instance, during the wedding ceremony that ‘The bride, being the weaker vessel, naturally came in for the larger slice of Mr Belcher's advice' (
p. 84
). Barbara's wedding night foreshadows her fate, and it is made fairly clear that, for all the flaws in her personality, she is also a victim, and her downfall has a certain inevitability to it. She stands ‘like a forlorn and resentful ghost' (
p. 90
) as she waits to enter her marriage bed, and she feels as though her bridesmaids are preparing her for her execution rather than the consummation of her marriage. The crushing disappointment and inadequacy of her sexual relationship with her husband are conveyed in the restrained but withering line, ‘She submitted to Sir Ralph but did not enjoy him' (
p. 92
). This inadequacy results in the shocking declaration that after five years of tedious married life, Barbara ‘would have welcomed the
distraction of a lover' (
p. 99
). King-Hall is careful to frame this more as a desire for interest and stimulation than as a calculating decision to betray her husband. It is the featureless boredom of married life, and the limited prospects available for an intelligent, energetic woman, which are really being critiqued here: ‘Inside herself she led an intense impatient life, all her thoughts concentrated on her own personality, and always watchful to seize the opportunity for self-expression that must surely come to her before long' (
p. 101
). The expected life of a genteel lady offers her no such opportunities, making it inevitable that she must transgress that role.

The prospect of women continuing to exercise their sexuality outside of marriage was a source of paranoia for many men, perhaps with good cause; and in mainstream discourse such behaviour was characterised not only as immoral, but also unpatriotic. In this context, perhaps, the story of Barbara Skelton acts as a reassurance and a warning – that women who indulge their desires and refuse to conform to their expected role will be punished, by fate if not by the legal system. However, the novel's later chapters, in which Barbara falls in love with Kit Locksby, the fiancé of her sister-in-law Paulina, are arguably the least convincing and least interesting section of the novel. After seducing him almost instantly, her sudden, overwhelming need to reform in order to make her lover happy seems forced, and the ending rushed. King-Hall was constrained by the inherited ‘plot' of the legend, of course, which required Barbara's death; but the attempt to generate extra pathos – by having her resolve to submit herself to male
control shortly before she dies – falls rather flat. It seems to me, then, that the moralistic message articulated in the closing chapters fails to dislodge the much more potent image of a woman who relishes the freedom and power afforded to her by her cross-dressing disguise, and the indulgence of her desires.

For a novel which has, until now, been largely forgotten,
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
can lay claim to a significant cultural legacy. It was one of a number of popular and influential historical novels written by – and largely for – women in the 1940s, providing a crucial imaginative outlet for their hopes, fears and desires. Diana Wallace has noted that many women writers and critics who grew up in the post-war era ‘have attested to the importance of women's popular historical novels in their emotional, intellectual and literary development', so that, she suggests, ‘it is perhaps not too far-fetched to argue that the roots of second-wave feminism itself can be found […] in the popular historical fiction read by these women'.
¹⁷
Many of these texts were adapted into equally popular films, and if people think of the costume melodrama today, they are most likely to remember
The Wicked Lady
, which in many ways was the high point of the genre which it came to define.
¹⁸
Finally, it seems likely that the success of the novel and the film effectively reanimated the original legend, imbuing it with a cultural energy which has ensured its survival. In 1907, W.B. Gerish, an antiquarian and folklorist, visited Markyate in pursuit of the legend, but noted that in the last forty years ‘the believers in the apparition have nearly all passed away'.
¹⁹
It is perhaps not too fanciful to
suggest that without King-Hall's intervention, the ghost of Katherine Ferrers might have finally rested in peace. We should be grateful that, fired with the rebellious spirit of the green-eyed Barbara Skelton, she seems destined to ride the highways of Hertfordshire for a little longer yet.

Rowland Hughes

M
Y GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
are due to Miss Christina Hole's book,
Haunted England
(Messrs B.T. Batsford, Ltd.), which records that there was once a seventeenth-century lady of quality who took to the Road, and subsequently haunted the family mansion.

To that extent this novel is founded on tradition, but the adventures and crimes of Lady Skelton are fictitious, and my apologies are due to her prototype the Wicked Lady Ferrers for the liberties taken in this book.

M. K.-H.

To Jock and Phoebe
With my love

A
T MIDNIGHT ON
April 3rd 1942, a Nazi bomber, seeking to escape from the just vengeance of our night fighters, unloaded its bombs on the peaceful Buckinghamshire parish of Maiden Worthy. One of the bombs fell on the village of that name, destroying a row of cottages and burying several families beneath the ruins. Another made a harmless crater in a field. Yet another hit the ancient manor house of Maryiot Cells.

The house was so deep among the trees, lying furthermore in a hollow, that it was some twenty minutes before a reddish glow warned the villagers that it was on fire. Soon antlers of flame trembled against the sky; sparks shot upwards; the place was ablaze. By morning the house was a smoking, blackened shell.

Maryiot Cells was unoccupied by any human tenant. Its owner, Sir Hugh Skelton, had closed it some years before the outbreak of war. It had been requisitioned during that past winter as a convalescent home for A.T.S. girls
¹
but, for some reason or other, perhaps because of its lack of modern amenities, and its notoriously clammy coldness, it was soon empty and shuttered again.

What more natural than that the villagers, occupied as they were on that disastrous night with the task of rescuing the living, searching for the dead, succouring the wounded and comforting the bereaved, should have no time and little thought to spare for Maryiot Cells?

Yet Maryiot Cells had been the dominant house of the locality since the Middle Ages, first as monastery, later
as manor house. Even in times of war, when human lives are poured out like water on the ground, the destruction of buildings, hallowed and made lovelier by time, is mourned with an acute and personal sense of loss.

Not so with Maryiot Cells. A stranger, knowing nothing of the house and its history, would have noticed a singular lack of regret among the country people, though few of them were as explicit as the landlord of the Red Lion, who declared that ‘those Nazi—s did one good job, anyhow, when they put a finish to that house.'

But tradition dies hard in England. Once recovered from the shock of the bombing, the local people paid Maryiot Cells a tribute which doubtless would have been more acceptable to the begetter of its uneasy reputation than any sentimental lamentations.

There was a vigorous revival of the rumour, which had already been the talk of the neighbourhood, to the effect that the A.T.S. girls (stalwart and intrepid young women though they were) had flatly refused to convalesce in a house where the sound of slow dragging footsteps could be heard across the floors, and lights seen in the windows of unoccupied rooms; where mysterious rappings, sighs and whisperings disturbed the stillness of the night hours.

More than that, there are several reputable people, in the neighbouring village of Abbots Worthy, who are ready to state on oath that passing by the short cut across the beech avenue of Maryiot Cells (a midnight walk that would have been favoured by few in normal times, but these were A.R.P. workers
²
and hurrying to their duties), they heard the thud of a horse's hooves galloping down the
avenue, approaching nearer and nearer to them, passing so close that they sprang back alarmed into the ditch, receding into the distance and into silence – and not a horse nor rider to be seen.

Something of this kind was to be expected, whichever way you look at it. ‘Suggestion – aural illusion – collective hallucination' (nourished by centuries of local legend and superstition) – the arguments are familiar.

On the other hand, how typical of the insensate egotism of Barbara Skelton, dead and buried these two hundred and sixty years, to thrust her fading entity into that night of twentieth-century horror and woe.

The crimes that earned her the title of ‘The Wicked Lady Skelton' seem those of a dilettante beside the vast, organised evil of the Nazis, the impersonal but deadly malevolence of a German bomber. Has this greater violence by destroying Maryiot Cells, her earthly habitation, brought release to her distracted spirit, or will her form still appear at the gaping windows of the ruined house, with no audience but owls and foxes, her spectre horse still gallop down the overgrown and deserted glades?

It is too soon to say. Meanwhile there may be some interest, if not edification, in casting a backward glance through time at some of her better authenticated manifestations, till Barbara Skelton the living woman herself and her misdeeds shall be revealed.

‘
I would therefore willingly know if you are of the opinion that phantoms are real figures…or are empty vain shadows raised in our imaginations by the effect of fear?'

Pliny the Younger:
Concerning Phantoms
²

‘The thin habit of spirits.'
¹

I
T WAS BEAUTIFUL
weather that day, August 1911, for Lady Skelton's garden fête at Maryiot Cells in aid of the Umweulu Mission Fund. This was almost to be expected. Lady Skelton was so efficient. One might fancifully imagine that she had ordered the fine day from the Clerk of the Weather at the same time that she had ordered the ices, the marquee and the band.

Few people, in staid fact, came in contact with Lady Skelton without paying her some tribute of intimidation or respect. Her more flippant neighbours had nicknamed her ‘Boadicea' and there was something reminiscent of the warrior queen about her monumental but comely person, her imposing nose and firmly modelled chin, and her head of hair which, in her late thirties, was still blonde and abundant, though a trifle faded. But one imagines that Boadicea lacked Lady Skelton's formidable graciousness; the Iceni were probably more fractious than the villagers of Maiden Worthy, the Romans less amenable than Lady Skelton's county neighbours. There was no need for Maud Skelton to career about in a chariot with wildly streaming hair. She had only to smile, to suggest, to command. She got her own way every time.

How fortunate for the Umweulu Mission and the young African convert whose education was the special charge of the parish of Maiden Worthy, that Lady Skelton had decided to take their affairs in hand.

There had been signs of late that the interest of the parishioners in their African protégé was flagging. This was not altogether surprising, as they had been subscribing to his upbringing for some forty years. Presumably he had grown up by now and entered into his labours, other dusky young converts taking his place; but this had never been clearly explained to his benefactors, with the result that he (or rather they) had in the minds of the parishioners assumed the guise of an African Peter Pan, who would have to be sustained to the end of the ages by annual bazaars and parish teas.

The old rector, Mr Chambers, had very wisely cast his worries, spiritual and financial, on this score at Lady Skelton's feet, and she had promised her assistance, a promise of which this garden fête was the fulfilment.

Lady Skelton never did things by halves − she was not built that way − and this fête was one that would be remembered for some time in the neighbourhood. The locals − hot and respectful in their Sunday best − were to be admitted to the park, the yew glades and the kitchen garden for the sum of one shilling. There was to be lemonade, ginger beer and bath buns for their refreshment; for their entertainment, a Punch and Judy show, the band, skittles, bowls, a fortune teller's tent (with the rector's sister Miss Chambers disguised as a gipsy) and a regatta on the river.

The ‘county', before driving up the long beech avenue in their carriages and pony traps, or snorting up it in their
motor cars, would pay the entrance fee too. There was a kind of piquant absurdity in handing their shillings to old Hatch the lodge keeper, who had so often touched his hat to them when they had arrived for house parties and shoots.

‘Good day, me lady. Good day, Sir Thomas.'

‘Fine day for her ladyship's fête, Hatch.'

‘Yes, indeed, sir.'

But, once arrived at the house, they could have a chat with Arthur and Maud, smoke one of Arthur's excellent cigars, or be taken up to Maud's bedroom to titivate (according to sex), and generally collect themselves before emerging into the hot August sunshine to listen to the Bishop's opening speech.

For them, and for the lesser lights of the county − old, rather mad Miss Moffat, who dressed like a scarecrow and yet maintained an unmistakable air of withered gentility, genial Doctor Wilson and his wife and three bouncing daughters, Colonel and Mrs McRoberts, old Mrs Horley, the late rector's widow, and the like − there was tea and ices and sugared cakes in the marquee, and the run of the rose garden and the picture gallery. Lady Skelton had secured for her fête the presence of two distinguished though very different visitors, the Bishop of Chiltern and Lady Ansborough, Lord Ansborough's young and lovely bride. The Bishop could be relied upon to give a suavely sacerdotal air to any gathering, while Lady Ansborough, however much one might disapprove of her fantastic hats, hobble skirts
²
and general air of frivolity, would certainly give it the stamp of fashion. Thus everything seemed propitious, set on the smooth and successful course that
Lady Skelton's projects invariably took. The first intimation that anything out of the usual might disturb events occurred at midday, before the guests had arrived or the fête itself had begun.