Inheritance

  Paul J. McAuley

  First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited November 1988 by Edward L. Ferman.

  This copy derived from Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, ISBN 978-1-56975-984-4, edited September 2011 by Stephen Jones.

  There was no doubt about it: he was lost.

  Richard Tolley tossed the map onto the backseat, levered himself out of the rented Volkswagen, and walked back to the T-junction and looked at the signpost. Sure enough, the fingerboard pointing in the direction from which he’d just come indicated that South Heyston was a mile away, and Upper Heyston three miles.

  According to his Ordnance Survey map, Steeple Heyston was situated between these two villages, but he’d now driven through both villages from east to west and back again, and had seen no trace of it. He knew there wasn’t much left of the place, but there was a church clearly marked on the map, and a river and a railroad. How had he missed it?

  He’d parked the car in front of a gate in the hedgerow, so that he wouldn’t block the narrow country road. He leaned against the gate now, a tall, bear-like man in a white Burberry raincoat he’d purchased in London two days ago, twisting his signet ring around and around the middle finger of his right hand as he wondered if he should give up the search and try to find his way back to Oxford.

  The car, cooling, ticked behind him. A fine rain only slightly heavier than a mist hazed the cold air, the kind of rain the English called a “mizzle.” That quaint way with words they had, like calling an elevator a lift, or fall autumn, or the way the peppy red Volkswagen was badged as a Golf rather than a Rabbit. Like, but not like. The way the fields, vividly green even in the middle of December, were subtly different from the New Hampshire pastures of his childhood. Softer, nature’s rawness blurred by centuries of human history.

  Three in the afternoon, and it was already growing dark. He would try again tomorrow, Tolley decided, and was about to get back in the car when he saw two figures leave the cover of a clump of leafless trees in the far corner of the field.

  Their dog, a black-and-white collie, raced across the field ahead of them and wriggled under the gate and barked at Tolley, who held his hands out of reach of its sharp white teeth and murmured, “Good boy, good boy,” afraid that it would jump up and muddy his brand new Burberry.

  One of the walkers, a man, whistled sharply, but the collie didn’t stop barking at Tolley until the man had clambered over the stile and clipped a lead to its collar. He was in his sixties, small and wiry and sharp-featured. A flat cap was pulled low over his springy white hair. An expensive camera was slung over the shoulder of his Norfolk jacket and a walking stick with a heavy carved head was tucked under his arm.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “He’s young and excitable, but he rarely takes a bite from strangers.”

  “Maybe you can help me,” Tolley said. “I guess I’m a little lost.”

  “Ask away,” the man said, as he turned to help the woman—Tolley assumed she was his wife—over the stile. She was a short, plump woman with glossy black hair bound back in a girlish ponytail. Heavy amber earrings, silver rings on every finger of her hands and the magenta silk scarf that peeked above the top button of her fur-collared coat gave her an exotic, gypsy-ish air.

  Tolley said, “I was looking for a place called Steeple Heyston. You know it?”

  “You must have missed the turn,” the man said. “It’s about two miles back, past South Heyston. There’s a wood, and a sharp bend in the road. Steeple Heyston’s off to the left of that bend, down a rough track.”

  “I think I remember the sharp bend.”

  “The track isn’t signposted. No one lives there anymore, you see.”

  “Isn’t there an old manor house, something like that? That’s what I’ve come to see—my family on my father’s side used to live there. Tolley. The name mean anything to you?”

  The man and the woman shared a look.

  The man said, “There’s a bit of the old manor house still standing.”

  The woman said, “You’re American, aren’t you? We have a son over there, in Boston.”

  “Harvard University,” her husband said.

  “He’s a professor in the Medical School,” the woman said.

  Tolley told them that he’d heard of Harvard, but he was from New York. The man introduced himself as Gerald Beaumont, a retired mining engineer, introduced his wife, Marjorie, and the dog, Sam. Marjorie Beaumont studied Tolley for a moment, her gaze unnervingly direct as he said that he was some sort of academic himself.

  “I work in a picture library,” Tolley added, slightly flustered.

  “Give her another minute,” her husband said, with a fond twinkle, “and she’ll tell you your age, how long you’ve been married, and how many children you have.”

  “Actually, I’m divorced. Or rather, I’m getting divorced. That’s kind of why I’m on holiday, to get away from all that. And take a look at the place my folks came from.”

  And to spend as much of his money as possible in one glorious jamboree before Rachel and her lawyer got their hands on it. How she’d started the divorce, she’d phoned him at work one day, after the latest in a series of rows about money, and told him not to come home. Which he’d done straight away, of course, to find she’d changed the locks on their apartment—strictly speaking it was her apartment, but they’d been living there as man and wife for two years.

  He’d hammered on the door; she’d called the police; two days later a process server had handed Tolley divorce papers and a court order forbidding him to go within five hundred yards of his soon-to-be-ex-wife. That’s when Tolley, who’d been couch surfing in the apartment of an increasingly grumpy workmate, had decided to take the holiday of a lifetime, and go check out his roots, the place in England his family had once owned.

  After he’d told the old couple something of this (leaving out the humiliating bits about the rows, being locked out of his own home, the court order), Marjorie Beaumont asked if he knew anything about his family history. Tolley said that all he knew was that they had once owned the manor house at Steeple Heyston and a good deal of farmland around it, that his grandfather had sold up and moved to the States in the late 19th century.

  “I know the manor house burned down around then,” Tolley said, “but I don’t know much else. I think there was some kind of scandal, but my family’s papers have been lost over the years. I’m hoping to look in the local history archives and find out about what would have been my inheritance, if things had turned out different.”

  Marjorie Beaumont said, “It’s a terribly sad place. The saddest place I know.”

  “Now, Marjorie,” Gerald Beaumont said.

  “Even people without my gifts know that Steeple Heyston is an unquiet place,” his wife said. “Even you think it’s haunted, dear.”

  “I don’t know about ghosts,” Gerald Beaumont said, “but it is a lonely place with a lot of history. The manor house and the mill burnt down, and before that there was the railway accident, of course.”

  Tolley said, “There was a railway accident?”

  Gerald Beaumont told him that it was a very famous one that had happened over a hundred years ago, that more than forty people had been killed, that some thought it was why Steeple Heyston was haunted.

  “He should hear the story properly,” his wife said. “Perhaps, when you’ve visited Steeple Heyston, Mr. Tolley, you would like to have tea with us. I can tell you all about it then.”

  “I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” Tolley said. He was amused and charmed: the Beaumonts were like two eccentric supporting characters from that Agatha Christie detective show Rachel used to watch on Masterpiece Theatre.

  “He doesn’t want to be bothered with these old stories,” Gerald Beaumont said.

  “It concerns his family,” Marjorie Beaumont said firmly, “and it’s no trouble, is it, Gerald?”

  “Of course not,” her husband said, with fond patience, and told Tolley that they lived in South Heyston. “Glebe Cottage, two doors down from the pub. You can’t miss it. Come and see us when you’ve done at Steeple Heyston, and we’ll tell you what we know.”

  He repeated his directions to Steeple Heyston, and his wife told Tolley that he shouldn’t stay there too long because it would be dark soon.

  They watched as Tolley fitted himself into his rental car and awkwardly turned it in the narrow road, grinding gears because he wasn’t used to the stick shift, and then the Beaumonts and their dog were dwindling between the hedgerows in the rearview mirror.

  Tolley found the turning and steered the car, its springs complaining, down a rough, unsurfaced track that ended in a small turnaround with trees on one side and an unkempt hedge on the other.

  He switched off the motor and clambered out into the unnerving stillness of the unpopulated countryside. There was a farm gate half-buried in the hedge, held shut by a loop of orange twine.

  Beyond was a wide, rough meadow backstopped by a steep railway embankment, with a line of bare trees on one side and a small river on the other.

  As Tolley unhooked the gate and stepped through, a train hurtled out of the misty gloom, the lights of its passenger cars like a string of yellow beads, dragging a dull roar behind as it dwindled away.

  There had once been a narrow road or street here; there were grassy humps on either side where houses and cottages had once stood, although not a stone showed now. Tolley followed its line towards the trees and realized, as he wandered beneath them, that here were the ruins of the manor house his family had once owned.

  The moment was curiously disappointing; perhaps it was because there was hardly anything left of the place. A low hummock, narrow and straight, was all that remained of a wall; a huge briar patch might have once been a rose garden; ragged shoulders of red brick fell away either side of a tall cluster of octagonal chimneys.

  Tolley used his pocket Olympus to take a few photographs in the doubtful light; as he framed the last, he noticed the small church that stood a few hundred yards beyond the ruins, its square tower not much higher than the railway embankment behind it.

  The hedge around its graveyard had grown tall and wild; long briers trailed from it like unkempt hair. Tolley found an iron gate, saw headstones standing in waist-high grass obviously untrimmed since spring, saw a bramble bush that had rooted in the shoulders of a headless stone angel. Yet the gravel path was free of weeds, and a hand-sized hole in one of the stained-glass windows had been patched with hardboard, suggesting that although its congregation had long since deserted it, or lay under the long grass, someone still cared for the place.

  It was growing dark, the sun a bloody smear in clouds low over cold fields where mist was beginning to gather. Too dark, Tolley thought, to examine the inscriptions on gravestones or look in the church for relics of his family.

  He walked back through the overgrown ruins of the manor house, and in the last of the light crossed the hummocky meadow to the little river. Where it passed beneath a steel railway bridge, the water dropped in a glassy rush over the step of a weir; on the far bank were the remains of a big, square building that had to be the mill Tolley’s family had once owned.

  As Tolley framed in his camera’s view finder a broken wall that stood amongst a clump of leafless trees, he thought for a moment that someone was lurking in the shadows there, a man with an oddly shaped head. Or no, he seemed to be wearing a top hat.

  A freight train trundled around the curve and crossed the bridge with a hollow roar, sounding a two-note horn. Tolley glanced up, then took his photograph. The figure, if that’s what it had been, was gone.

  He had another bad moment when he got back to the car, and saw what he thought was a face peeking up at him from the back seat: but it was only the map, lying where he’d tossed it.

  All that talk about ghosts had evidently primed his jet-lagged imagination, he thought, as he drove the scant mile to South Heyston. There was a tumbledown farm, a string of pebble-dash council houses, and then a cluster of picturesque stone cottages around a tiny village green, a church steeple poking against the evening sky behind them. Glebe Cottage was next to the churchyard.

  Gerald Beaumont shook Tolley’s hand at the front door and ushered him into what he called the lounge, turning down, but not quite muting, the sound of a big color television that was showing some old B movie. During the strange conversation that followed, the television flickered and mumbled in its corner like some idiot child.

  Seated in an overstuffed armchair, Tolley felt like a fledgling cuckoo as the Beaumonts fluttered about, plying him with hot, milky tea and cookies and small, buttery cakes.

  He learned that Gerald Beaumont had worked in the Yorkshire coal mines, but had taken early retirement when many of them were closed down in the aftermath of a big strike. The Beaumonts had moved to Oxford to be near their only child and his family when he had been working at the University, but then their son had become another statistic in the Brain Drain, and had moved to America.

  Tolley guessed that they were lonely, like a lot of retired folk who move from where they have lived and worked; it was as if they, not their son, were exiles in a foreign land.

  When Marjorie Beaumont asked him about his impression of Steeple Heyston, Tolley told her that he hadn’t seen all that much; it had gotten dark too quickly. He had forgotten until that moment the glimpse he’d had of that shadowy figure—perhaps it had been nothing more than a figment of his imagination, conjured out of twilight and Marjorie Beaumont’s talk of ghosts, but now he felt a shiver, an undeniable frisson.

  He said, “I guess I’ll have to come back tomorrow. I want to take a look at that church, and take some photographs, too.”

  Gerald Beaumont said, “It’s a good place for photography, all right. Let me show you a few I took of the place.”

  “He won’t want to look at your snaps,” Marjorie Beaumont said, as her husband rooted in the cupboard under the glass-fronted bookcase that held an Encyclopaedia Britannica and what looked like a complete run of Reader’s Digest condensed novels.

  “He can tell me himself if he isn’t interested,” Gerald Beaumont said, and pulled out a spiral-bound album and passed it to Tolley, saying that he would appreciate a professional opinion.

  Tolley wiped his buttery fingers on his sweater before he took the album—he’d eaten all of the little cakes, and most of the cookies (no, they called them biscuits here)—saying, “I work in a photographic library, but I’m no photographer.”

  Large 8 x 10 prints, black-and-white, one to a page. The church stark against a wintry sky. Gravestones leaning this way and that, all sunlight and shadow. The brambly angel Tolley had noticed, shot from an acute angle, the sun making a halo behind it. Grassy hummocks defined by their shadows. Dead weeds bent before a lichenous stone. The ruined chimney standing stark amongst leafless trees. The ruined chimney rising out of a cloud of wild roses.

  Tolley was impressed, and told Gerald Beaumont that he had definitely captured the atmosphere of the place.

  “There are some things photographs can’t capture,” Marjorie Beaumont said. A lavender cardigan was draped over her shoulders like a matador’s cape, pinned at her neck by a big Victorian brooch. The paste jewel flickered in the light of the fire that burned in the brick fireplace. “I expect you saw the railway that runs past. That’s the old Oxford-to-Birmingham line, and it was about a hundred years ago that the tragedy happened.”

  “A hundred and six,” Gerald Beaumont said.

  His wife ignored him. “There was a passenger train on its way to Birmingham, and a goods train going towards Oxford. One of the wagons of the goods train jumped the tracks and pulled others across the line, and the passenger train couldn’t stop in time, and crashed into them. They said that you could hear the shriek of its brakes in Oxford, that the sparks from its wheels set fire to three miles of the embankment. More than forty people died, but it’s said that many of them would have been saved if the squire—I suppose he’d be your great-grandfather, Mr. Tolley—if he hadn’t stopped the villagers of Steeple Heyston from helping the injured.”

  “He hated the railway with a passion,” Gerald Beaumont said. “He’d lost a lot of money fighting and losing a legal battle against the Act of Parliament that gave it the right of way across his land. When the other passengers carried the injured away from the wreck, he told his tenants that anyone who lifted a hand to help would lose their livelihood and their home. ‘Let them use their blasted railway to save themselves,’ he’s supposed to have said. Anyhow, it was more than two hours before a relief train arrived, and by that time many had died who might otherwise have survived.”

  “There’s a monument to them in a corner of the churchyard, raised by public subscription,” Marjorie Beaumont said. “The squire tried to prevent that, too, but the diocese council overruled him. Two bodies, a man and a woman, were never identified, and they’re buried in the churchyard. They say you can see them on the anniversary of the accident, walking along the railway line, as if they’re looking for something they’ve lost or left behind.”

  Tolley smiled. “Have you ever seen these ghosts?”

  Marjorie Beaumont shook her head. “I wouldn’t go near Steeple Heyston on that night or on any other, for that matter. Even on a hot summer’s day, it’s a sad, lonely place.”

  Gerald Beaumont said, “I’m not given to believing in ghosts and such myself, but it’s true that Marjorie fainted there once, and she’s never gone back.”

  “It’s the woman, I expect,” Marjorie Beaumont said softly, as if to herself. “Their ghosts are stronger.”

  Gerald Beaumont pretended to ignore this, saying quickly, “You didn’t know about this story, Mr. Tolley?”

 

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