The Mistletoe Bride & Other Haunting Tales Read online

  The party started to wind down at three o’clock in the morning. The men were slumped in the low armchairs with their ties loosened and their eyes bleary with booze and smoke. One of the girls had passed out on the sofa in the Oak Hall. Teddy had long since taken himself off to bed.

  Daphne slipped away, averting her gaze from the display case as she climbed the stairs. The upstairs corridor was in shadow now and, though she glanced as she passed, there was no light to be seen in the doll’s house.

  Her room was cold, the meagre fire in the grate long since burnt out. The maid had turned down the bed, but omitted to close the curtains. The house on the hill was no longer visible, but out on the Downs, the glint of white chalk in the Sussex soil turned over by the plough glistened white in the moonlight, like fragments of bone.

  Daphne undressed and got in to her wonderfully warm cotton pyjamas. Before, she would have worn a nightgown, regardless of the temperature, knowing her appearance at night mattered quite as much as her appearance during the day. Now, she could at least put comfort before glamour. In fact, she’d taken up many things since Douglas had gone. Smoking, drinking cocktails and wearing trousers. Without her husband at her side, she could at last please herself.

  But as she climbed into the cold bed, even though she told herself the evening had been a roaring success and a welcome change from her usual scratch suppers eaten alone with just a magazine for company, the stark truth was that she still felt as lonely as she ever did.

  Daphne wasn’t sure what woke her, shortly after five in the morning. One moment she was fast asleep, dreaming of the beach at Deauville, the sun on her skin and sand between her toes and Douglas’s arm resting on her shoulders. The next moment, she was wide awake, heart pounding and mouth dry.

  She sat up, hearing nothing. The silence of the sleeping house surged around her, interrupted only by the gurgling of the water pipes, but yet there was something. As if the air itself was alive.

  Daphne waited for her eyes to adjust, then realised it was a disturbance of light, not sound, that had roused her. Through the window, the sky was no longer black, but the colour of an August sunset. It took a moment to gather her wits, then she flung back the covers and ran to the glass. In the space between the two clusters of trees, where she had seen the single candle burning, the sky was now orange and gold. Fierce and violent flames, flickering and dancing.

  The house on the hill was burning.

  Daphne pushed her feet into her travelling shoes, pulled her coat over her pyjamas and, not bothering who might see her, ran out of her room. Down the corridor, shouting to raise the alarm even though she didn’t know whether any other of the guests were in this part of the house. The blaze seemed to be inside almost, the orange glow reflecting off the glass surfaces, making it look as if the corridor itself, the doll’s house itself, the petrified birds, were on fire too.

  Down the main stairs, struggling with the bolts on the heavy front door, Daphne flew out into the night. Still shouting, assuming others would hear and follow. Somehow, she thought she might be able to help. The sky was overcast now, grey clouds – or smoke, she couldn’t be sure – obscuring the face of the moon. She couldn’t even see the house, hidden between the trees and the curve of the hill, but Daphne ran over the lawns and to the track she’d seen from her bedroom window.

  She couldn’t understand why no one else was out here. Surely the farm workers must have seen something. Her throat was raw from shouting and from the exertion of running. The muscles in her legs complained at the steep gradient of the hill, but Daphne forced herself on.

  At last, she did catch a glimpse of someone. Some distance ahead of her, clearing the brow of the hill. She had no breath to call out – besides, she didn’t want to slow him down – but she hoped he’d had more success than her in raising help.

  Still she kept going, long strides, half stumbling, half running, keeping the man in her sights. One of Teddy’s other guests? The closer she got, the more she felt sure she knew him – the cut of his jacket, his silhouette in the burning sky – and this time, she called out.

  ‘Please! Wait.’

  He either did not hear her, or heard her, but didn’t stop.

  Suddenly, between the trees, Daphne found herself in front of the house. For a split second, before she realised that everything was wrong, the only thought that went through her mind was how perfectly beautiful it was. The wooden painted façade and sloping red tiled roof and tall stack chimneys. The clock and the date: 1810. An exact copy of the doll’s house on the first floor of the Hall, in fact. Of course, that was why it had seemed familiar earlier. She frowned. No, that was ridiculous. It was the other way round. This was the original, the child’s toy the copy.

  Then, a less welcome thought chasing hard on the heels of the other. The house was fine, utterly untouched, undamaged. How could that be?

  Daphne felt a cold trickle run down her spine. There was no crackling of flames, no heat scorching the trees and her face, no sign that anything was wrong. The only sign of life was that one single flame, like a candle, shining in a room on the first floor.

  She looked up and saw there was a peculiar translucent orange glow in the sky, behind the clouds, so she hadn’t imagined that. Besides, the man had clearly seen something too. Like her, had come to help. But where was he?

  ‘Hello?’

  It didn’t occur to her not to go in. She took a step towards the front door, then another. When she tried the handle, it swung open to reveal red and grey tiles on the floor and a staircase straight ahead.

  ‘Is there anybody here?’

  No one answered. She hesitated a moment more, then stepped into the entrance hall with its stone fireplace and marble mantel. She heard the ticking of the grandmother clock and, though there was no sign of him or anyone else, Daphne knew she wasn’t alone.

  ‘Where are you?’

  Then, on the floor above, she heard a sound. A thud, like a piece of furniture falling over. And, in that moment between one beat of her heart and the next, she understood. Drawn inexorably now, Daphne went to the stairs and walked slowly up, heading towards the room on the first floor where that solitary flame still burnt.

  At the top, she turned right and looked at the study door. It was ajar. Daphne carried on, one step further, another and another. Now the flat of her hand was on the wooden panel, pushing it wide open. Knowing – fearing – what she was going to see. A low armchair and brass table to her left, the folded letter there and the candle. Ahead, the chair kicked away from the desk. The photograph with her image in the tortoiseshell frame.

  She could feel there was someone in the room with her. Slowly, she turned and saw the image that had haunted her for five years. Slowly, she raised her eyes and forced herself to see now, in this house on the hill, what she had never seen in life. Feet swinging in the air, hands limp and lifeless by his side, a man hanging, twisting in the still air.

  ‘No . . .’

  Daphne clamped her hand to her mouth to stop herself from screaming. She couldn’t know whether he was a ghost or an imprint left in time, only that it was Douglas – her Douglas – just as he had been found, in the study of his parents’ house, five years ago. Douglas, who had promised to look after her, but who had been unable to live with his nightmares of gas and barbed wire and his friends lying dead in the trenches. Leaving a letter saying he didn’t want to be a burden, certain that she’d be better off without him, Douglas had left her to cope alone.

  But now, as she forced herself to look on his beloved, lifeless face, she saw a kind of peace. Finally, Daphne understood. He had been unable to save himself, but he had saved her. She had blamed him for leaving her. Been angry with him. Now the time had come to grieve. She could miss him and mourn the loss of their shared life together, but then set her eyes to the future.

  The tears began to fall.

  They found her hours later, still dazed. Appearing, as Teddy put it later, like a wraith out of the mist. Cold, rath
er disorientated, but otherwise all right.

  It turned out Daphne had been extremely lucky. There had been some kind of electrical short circuit in the south wing. The wiring in the top corridor had blown and the sparks had set fire to the doll’s house and taken hold. The old summer curtains and brocade stored on the wooden slatted shelves in the housekeeper’s room had caught next and burnt like paper and tinder, cutting off Daphne’s room from the rest of the house. She wouldn’t have stood a chance. She would have been overcome by smoke long before the fire had reached her.

  The gardener had tried to get a ladder up to her window, but been beaten back by the flames. They’d called out and shouted, but when she hadn’t answered, they’d feared the worst. It was only as dawn broke and Daphne appeared from the direction of the park, they realised she hadn’t been in her room at all.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Teddy had said, ‘is what the hell you were doing out in the gardens in the middle of the night anyway.’

  Daphne tried to explain how she had seen a light burning in the house on the hill, about the man she had followed away from the Hall, but Teddy shook his head. There was no other house on the estate – he had asked around – just workmen’s cottages, certainly nothing grand. As for the doll’s house, it had been bought by the current owners from a Belgian dealer. It wasn’t connected with Dean Hall at all.

  And then he patted her hand and, though everyone smiled and said how lucky she’d been, Daphne could see they thought she was in shock. That she was imagining things. The pity in their eyes burned her and she fell silent and turned away.

  But Daphne knew. She knew, now, what had happened.

  Later, as she rested on the sofa in the Oak Hall – having accepted Teddy’s invitation to stay at Dean Hall as long as she liked, until she felt well enough to go back to London – Daphne began to plan. How she would leave Berwick Street and return to the little house in Chelsea she’d abandoned after Douglas’s death.

  Now it was up to her.

  Next year, would be better. It was time to begin again.

  Author’s Note

  This story was inspired by the West Dean Estate in Sussex, the former country home of Edward James. A great benefactor and patron of the arts – dance, sculpture and painting in particular – he was a significant supporter of the Surrealist artists; the original Dali lobster telephone and lips sofa started their life there. When James died, he left the house to be ‘an Eden for the arts’. The flint-faced mansion is still at the heart of the college and filled with many of James’s curios and oddities from his travels, from cases of stuffed birds to a giraffe’s head. A magnificent five-storey doll’s house, dating from the seventeenth century, is thought to be one of the oldest examples anywhere in the world.

  A shorter version of the story was first published in Woman & Home magazine in 2009.

  WHY THE YEW TREE LIVES SO LONG

  Kingley Vale, West Sussex

  The Past & Present

  Why the Yew Tree Lives So Long

  The Lives of Three Wattles, The Life of a Hound;

  The Lives of Three Hounds, The Life of a Steed;

  The Lives of Three Steeds, The Life of a Man;

  The Lives of Three Men; The Life of an Eagle;

  The Lives of Three Eagles, The Life of a Yew,

  The Lives of Three Yews, The Length of an Age.

  TRADITIONAL

  Once, the Yew tree lived and died in the company of its friends, the blackthorn and the hawthorn, the birch, the spindle, the ash and the oak. The Yew did not envy the blighted elm or the vulnerable hazel, with their passing brief lives, but it had no ambition to live longer than any other tree in the forest. It was content with its allotted time, by the way of things that were always and forever so.

  Neolithic man cleared the wildwood of Kingley Vale for grazing animals and crops, but the Yew on the lower slopes did not mind. Later, Bronze Age artisans constructed burial mounds on the chalky grasslands and limestone hills above the woods, the sleeping tombs of warriors long dead. Later and later still, on the summit of Bow Hill, came the Devil’s Humps and Goosehill Camp and a shabby temple to Roman Gods, and still the Yew did not object. As time walked its steady pace, beneath the dappled light and its ancient green shadow in the glade, Jutes and Britons and Angles breathed and lived and sighed and loved. These tribes were not the same, any more than the trees of the forest were the same. These tribes were not fashioned by the same rituals or traditions or superstitions, yet they lived side by side, in harmonious coexistence, as did the trees. Yew with birch with willow with conifer.

  But then, then.

  In the year 874 came the Vikings, came the Vikings who seized and burnt and destroyed. They swept north from Chichester into the Sussex weald and forest of Kingley Vale. The Saxon defenders sought sanctuary among the ancient green and mossy pathways where the Yew trees held sway, but found no respite there. The Yew could only watch and grieve as, day after night after day, the once silent groves echoed with the violence of sword and shield, shriek of iron and split bone. The inhumanity of it, the pointlessness of it, slipped weeping into the leaf and the bough of the Yew tree, turning the brown bark to purple. And the presentiment of death seeped into the berries, staining the pale, subtle fruit a vivid red.

  Then the Yew understood that the cycle of things had changed. How their destiny was to stand witness, memorials to those who had fallen in order that such things should not happen again. That they must live until the lesson of harmony had been remembered. They did not wish it, they did not wish to be left behind as the rowan and the sycamore and the beech passed into different lives, different dimensions, but they accepted it was their lot because of the battles that had been fought beneath their branches. So where each warrior fell in Kingley Vale, a Yew touched the earth with long, trailing fingers and a new tree sprang up. Soon, where the bodies of the courageous slain lay, a copse of sixty Yews stood sentinel, a reminder of where the last battle had been fought and lost.

  So the ancient Yews of Kingley Vale lived and lived and lived and lived, bound now to an unkind cycle of decay and rebirth and memory. Their branches grew down into the soil to form new stems. The trunks of the sixty trees rotted, but gave life within to new trees that grew and grew until they were indistinguishable from the root.

  The years passed. The generations passed, the centuries passed in the endless pattern of silver springs and shimmering summers, golden autumns and hoary winters. But still men did not learn that death breeds only death. Little by little, the reputation of the Yew grew. Without wishing it, the Yew became a symbol of resurrection and hope, of wisdom. In Marden and Painswick, Clifton-upon-Teme and Iona, throughout the length and breadth of the country, the Yew became the favoured tree of the graveyard, of mourning, testament to the transience of memory and the frailty of human experience.

  Twelve hundred years have passed since that first battle. Still, if you follow the path to the centre of Kingley Vale, the sixty stand untouched by sun or moon or rain. Their branches are gnarled, twisted like an old man’s knuckles, their boughs are weary. Fingers, tendrils, trail the ground, touch the earth, paddle deep around in mossy roots and stippled bark. And within and above and around the wood, dwell green woodpeckers, red kites and buzzards, deer and stag, the chalkhill blue, holly blue and brimstone butterflies, so brief.

  The people of Sussex fear to walk in the oldest part of the forest. They say that, at the winter solstice, the Yew trees whisper to one another, sing sibilant song of the folly of men. And so they do. Each year, when the shimmering spirits walk, if you listen carefully you will hear the trees speak of the hopes, the stories, the delusions of men, all the words they have captured in the seams of their leaves, the run of their branches, over the previous year. The indiscretions of human beings as they have come to the grove to walk, to pray, to weep, to climb, to rest, to wish.

  These Yew trees are the oldest living things in the country. They wish it was not so. They would like to slide soft
ly away, as can the ash and the oak and the elder. But human memory is brief, stupid, unconnected. Men have not yet learnt to live side by side, like the trees of the forest. So when the white winter dawn comes once more, and the solstice is over, the Yews sigh and stretch and settle back into their ancient selves once more.

  For the length of an age.

  Author’s Note

  This is one of four stories inspired by mythology or ancient legend. ‘Why the Yew Tree Lives So Long’ was commissioned in 2011 for a short story collection published in aid of the Woodland Trust. All proceeds raised went towards the charity which protects our woodlands.

  Why Willows Weep was the brainchild of bestselling novelist Tracy Chevalier, who edited the collection which includes stories from Richard Mabey, Rachel Billington, Blake Morrison, Joanne Harris, Philippa Gregory, Tahmima Anam, Ali Smith and Philip Hensher. Each piece was inspired by a different tree – silver birch, oak, ash, beech – and with woodcut illustrations by Leanne Shapton.

  I chose the yew trees of Kingley Vale, close to where I was born and grew up in Sussex. The oldest yew forest in Europe, there are many myths and legends associated with the nature reserve, not least that the oldest of the trees sprang up at the spot where the Saxon defenders of the Sussex Weald fell trying to hold back the Viking invasion of the ninth century.

  SAINTE-THÉRÈSE

  Montolieu, Languedoc, south-west France

  Summer 2003

  Sainte-Thérèse

  Still, methinks,

  There is an air comes from her: what fine chisel