The Mistletoe Bride(4)

These things I see and I don’t see.

The echo of my heart starts to beat faster. They are making a final sweep of the house, moving from room to room. Now I can hear someone outside my door. Men’s voices – always men’s voices – searching and asking for instructions.

I catch the memory of my breath.

The door to the room is opening, I hear its judder as the wood sticks on the floor, then releases itself and swings back. This is the sound I have prayed for. Footsteps crossing the bare floorboards, coming towards me. Hands resting on the old oak chest.

It is too heavy for one man to move. I hear him grunt with the effort, then call for assistance. Now other footsteps. Four feet, not two. Then, I feel the lurch and heave as the chest is picked up, lower at my feet, higher at my head. Like a ship at sea, it rocks to and fro as they try to find purchase, but the weight and bulk defeats them. They cannot hold it. A curse, a shout, fingers slipping.

I am falling.

One end goes down and I am thrown sideways, an odd lurching sensation as the chest hits the floor with a thud. The metal gives, the clasp breaks and the lid, finally, cracks open.

At last.

A moment of silence, then one of the men screams. He shouts for help as he runs from the room. Gibbering about a skeleton in a bridal gown, bones tumbling out of an old oak chest.

I am smiling.

Now I can smell lilies of the valley once more.

And I can feel the sweet memory of happiness and I remember what it was to laugh and to love and to hope. My smile grows stronger as I think of my husband and how soon – after so very long – we shall be reunited.

Lovell and his mistletoe bride.



Author’s Note



When I was little, my parents had a book – Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. Published by Reader’s Digest in 1973, it had a black cloth cover and a gold embossed image of a Viking, with beard and horned helmet. Inside, a cornucopia of stories that had endured for two thousand years. Divided into three sections – the ‘Lore of Britain’, the ‘Romance of Britain’ and ‘People of Myth’ – I was so entranced with the book, I flirted with the idea of applying to read Folklore Studies at university instead of English. My parents – sensibly – took no notice and the moment passed.

And yet . . .

It was in Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain that I first came across the story of ‘The Mistletoe Bride’. Several places in Britain claimed to be the historical setting for the story – Skelton in Yorkshire, Minster Lovell Hall in Oxfordshire, Marwell Old Hall in Hampshire, Castle Horneck in Cornwall, Exton Hall in Rutland, Brockdish Hall in Norfolk, and Bawdrip Rectory and Shapwick in Somerset. The Cope family of Bramshill House claimed to be able to produce the famous oak chest, in which the young bride was supposed to have suffocated. Grisly, oddly compelling, it is the sort of story that sticks in the imagination.

The story of the Mistletoe Bride first appeared in 1823 as a blank verse poem, ‘Ginevra’, in Samuel Rogers’ book Italy. He made claim for the story to be ‘founded on fact, though the time and the place are uncertain.’ However, its popularity can be laid at the door of the nineteenth-century songwriter Thomas Haynes Bayly, who set the story to music by H. R. Bishop, and published it as ‘The Mistletoe Bough’ in his 1844 volume Songs, Ballads and Other Poems. It was an instant hit and became one of the most popular Victorian and Edwardian Christmas music hall songs.

My parents’ book is long gone. I managed, some years later, to find an old replacement copy which sits now – the spine missing and in pride of place – in my study where I write. In idle moments, I take it down and let it fall open at a page of its own choosing. Lose myself for an hour or two.

In memory of those long and happy teenage days reading back in the 1970s, I wrote two versions of the story of the bride who vanished on her wedding day for this collection. This, the first of them – a ‘white lady’ story – is dedicated to my wonderful mother and my beloved father, who died in 2011.



DUET



Pinewalk Heights, Bournemouth

October 1965





Duet





True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad?





from ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’

EDGAR ALLAN POE

‘It was the smell.’

‘The smell?’ I say.

‘No reason for it and, to tell you the truth, I didn’t notice it, not at first. I was that busy. Working all the hours God sent, looking for a promotion. First step on the ladder. And I had a girl – nothing serious, but nice enough. Willing enough, if you know what I mean – so I wasn’t much home.’ He stops to sigh. He enjoys sighing. ‘Those days, I did all the right things. Fitted in. Making my way, then. Going up in the world.’