The Mistletoe Bride(60)

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.