Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (6 page)

The Bishop felt extraordinarily chilly. His hands, with the fingers lightly interlocked across his apron, as was his wont when speaking on a platform, had become stone cold. He was conscious of an odd sensation of ‘pins and needles' all over his body.

Perturbed as he was − for he believed that he had suddenly been taken ill and, like most active and conscientious persons, he had a dread of illness − his words continued to flow out with the smoothness of the accomplished orator. He was speaking of service and fellowship, was actually saying the words, ‘We cannot live
unto ourselves alone,' when he saw the figure standing under the beech tree.

It was the figure of a woman − of that he had no doubt, for though its attire was masculine, with long skirted coat and breeches and broad-brimmed hat, there was a distinctly feminine appearance about the face and form.

Moreover, this person who stood there with closed eyes was a young woman. ‘Beautiful and well favoured' were the words that came into the Bishop's numbed mind, but it was not a beauty that would commend itself to a Bishop, nor, for that matter, to any God-fearing man. The expression on the face was malign, predatory, doleful, and altogether most disquieting.

The archaic costume might have suggested someone decked out in fancy dress for the occasion of the fête, but no such comforting supposition came to the Bishop's aid. Something undefinable in the figure's looks and demeanour assured him with horrid certainty that this was no human being that he gazed upon, but an apparition. Rigid with fear, it seemed to him that he was enclosed with this unhallowed thing in a sphere apart − a sphere of icy coldness and a menacing stillness. The people on the platform beside him, the upturned faces beneath him, had receded from reality, were as meaningless as images painted upon glass. Enclosed together, and yet − final horror! − she was unaware of him, wrapt in some state of being beyond human comprehension.

Shutting his eyes, the Bishop clutched at a prayer. The wave of terror subsided, leaving him faint and sweating. He became aware of his own faltering voice, his wife looking at him in anxiety. He cleared his throat, poured himself out a
glass of water with a shaking hand. In the moment's respite which this action gave him, he glanced leftwards towards the river.

Upon the narrow stone bridge was a figure on a horse − the same figure which but a few seconds ago had stood upon his right hand some fifty feet distant under the beech tree.

The glass of water dropped from the Bishop's hand. He staggered and collapsed on to his chair.

They said it was the heat. They said it was his heart. They said it was overwork. The Bishop himself said very little, apologising to his host and hostess for the trouble that he was causing them, begging that the fête might proceed as though nothing had happened, and – when he was lying down in Sir Arthur's shaded dressing room – murmuring to his wife:

‘My dear, pray do not question me at present, but I should like to leave this house as soon as possible.'

Both the prelate and the child had been vouchsafed a glimpse of the unseen, and, in consequence, had suffered some emotional disturbance. The gross unfairness of life must be a continual source of distress to the sensitive-minded. They gave the Bishop a tot of Sir Arthur's Napoleonic brandy, but little Hugh got Gregory's Powder.
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‘Evil thing that walks by night.'
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A
S FAR AS
can be ascertained, the following experience was the only really startling one that occurred in Miss Isabella Skelton's placid and blameless life. There may have been others – though hardly, one imagines, of a like nature – but if so, there is no record of them either in the known facts of her life or in family traditions or journals.

Born in 1855, the youngest but one of the six daughters of Sir Wilfred and Lady Skelton, Isabella's existence pursued the sheltered course which might have been expected from the circumstances of her class, period and virginity.

Her childhood in the large and well-filled nurseries of Maryiot Cells was a cosy one. It could hardly have been otherwise with Nanny Callaghan, stout, comfortable, yet somehow superb, in her cap with streamers and her voluminous white apron, as their presiding genius. Nanny Callaghan was never flustered, never at a loss. To see her sitting before the fire in her rocking-chair you would suppose her nearly immovable, or at the least slow-moving. But let some nursery crisis occur – Miss Florence bellowing from the cupboard into which she had been bolted by her angel-faced toddler sister Miss Lucy, Miss Charlotte
shrieking at having thrust a marble up her nose, the adenoidal nurserymaid dropping a kettle of scalding water over her foot – and Nanny Callaghan was all speed and commanding movement.

She had a store of sagacious maxims which her charges accepted as hardly less sacred than scripture:

‘A sad child is a sick child.'

‘It is good to be helped.'

‘Of saving cometh having.'

‘With patience and perseverance you can drive a snail to Jerusalem.'

Nanny's sayings, the high, polished fire-grate, muffins for tea, the battered rocking-horse, the dolls' house, syrup roly-poly on winter Sundays, roast chestnuts and apples for Hallowe'en, a cuckoo clock which Aunt Bessie had brought back from Switzerland – these and innumerable other trifles were woven together to form a nursery pattern of rich security and happiness for Isabella and her sisters.

Living in the same house, but in a world somewhat apart, there was Papa and Mama, Papa with his beautiful side-whiskers, cravats and frock-coats – a magnificent being to be revered, a little feared but nevertheless adored. Ecstatic moment when he took Isabella on his knee at dessert and, smoothing out her frilled muslin frock and her silk sash, fed her with cherries. Or (there was a meet on the lawn at Maryiot Cells) bent down from his chestnut horse in all the splendour of his scarlet coat and white buckskin breeches, and lifted her on to the saddle.

Dear Mama suffered from delicate health. She spent a good deal of her time lying on a sofa. From their earliest years
it was impressed on Isabella and her sisters that they must not make too much noise on their visits to the drawing-room because of ‘poor Mama's head'.

A photograph of that same head (crowned with a luxuriant coil of hair) shows that Lady Skelton had the expression of a fretful if inoffensive sheep, but Isabella never noticed this. To Isabella her mother was something precious and fragile that might be snatched from the family circle at a moment's notice by singing angels. Nor did the fact that Lady Skelton lived to the age of eighty-five greatly alter her daughter's conception of her.

Childhood passed into girlhood. Nanny Callaghan was painlessly superseded by governesses and retired into the housekeeper's room, from whence she ruled, nursed, bullied and comforted the household. There was the mild discipline of lessons, good works, and ‘good' books, regular church services, sacred music on Sunday evenings, sketching and pianoforte lessons, relieved by picnics, skating, charades, drives in the brougham and games of croquet.

The evening came when Isabella wore her first ball dress of white satin trimmed with Valenciennes lace,
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and long white kid gloves, and attended her first grown-up ball. There is no reason to suppose that she was not a success either then or on her subsequent appearances in society, and her continued celibacy was certainly dictated by her own choice. It is known that she had several suitable ‘offers' and, though by no means a beauty, there were elderly gentlemen, in later years, who were ready to assure the younger generation that ‘though your aunt Blanche was the handsome one of the family, your aunt Bella was a very pleasant-looking girl.'

If some secret unsatisfied fancy, some frustrated romance, nipped like a belated November rosebud before it came to full blossom, prevented Isabella from fulfilling her woman's destiny, it must have been a mild and fugitive one, for there is no evidence that it impaired her contentment or her spirits to any marked degree. When girlhood was left behind and all her sisters married, she settled down cheerfully to the role of what Lady Skelton described as ‘our home bird'. She was her father's companion, her mother's right hand, and so active in parish affairs that the rector used to declare that she was worth two curates to him.

When her father's and, years later, her mother's deaths left Isabella to face middle-age alone, she was neither idle nor lonely. She lived on in the small dower house with a devoted maid. Her life was filled with good works, gardening, and the interests of her large band of nephews and nieces and, later, their children (her drawing-room was so thick with family photographs that there was hardly room to put down a cup of tea). She made one or two trips to Switzerland and the Italian lakes with a friend, another maiden lady, enjoyed herself, admired and sketched the scenery, but was glad to get back to Maiden Worthy where everyone spoke English.

Every Sunday, wet or fine, her neat little black-clad figure, growing more bent as the years went on, could be seen trotting, umbrella in hand, up the avenue of Maryiot Cells, for it was an understood thing that she always took tea on Sunday afternoons with her cousin Arthur and his wife.

When she died in her sleep in her late seventies, she was sincerely mourned, by her relations and regretted by
the village people. During her lifetime some of the more recalcitrant parishioners, habitual drunkards, faithless wives, unmarried mothers and the like, had resented her gentle but persistent interference in their affairs (she had a supply of text cards, decorated with lilies, violets and other devout-looking flowers which, in her opinion at least, were effective weapons against every form of spiritual wickedness that might flourish in the parish). But when she was gone, these irritations were forgotten in appreciation of her many acts of benevolence.

A placid colourless life, one would say, and a placid colourless personality. True, yet Isabella Skelton's reaction to the one extraordinary and alarming thing that happened to her, indicates that her conventional, timid nature possessed reserves of self-control that would have stood her in good stead in grimmer times.

It happened in 1873, and at a time when Maryiot Cells had so many people packed under its roof that not a single bed, far less bedroom, was unoccupied. The occasion was the marriage of Sir Wilfrid's and Lady Skelton's eldest daughter Blanche. The bridegroom was a young Irishman, William Allen of Castle Allen and his widowed mother, and his numerous sisters and younger brothers had been invited to stay at Maryiot Cells for the ceremony, only Mr William Allen himself being obliged, by a curious convention that supposed that the most temperate bridegroom's desires would prove too much for him on the wedding eve, to put up at a neighbouring country house.

Consequently even the rabbit warren of attics at Maryiot Cells was occupied by a bevy of young and giggling Miss Skeltons and Miss Allens, and by schoolboy cousins who tormented the young ladies by making them apple-pie beds,
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or, invading their maiden privacy in whooping gangs, tying them together by their stay-laces.