The building stood on a small island, with the river Neap on one side, describing a semicircle, and the millrace on the other, spanned by a three-arched bridge.
What better place to bake cakes than a mill? thought Miss Sibley.
When she inquired why the place had remained uninhabited for so long, she received a variety of answers. The mill itself had ceased to grind corn after the closure of Hasworth Station and its branch railway line, which had made the transport of corn and flour so much more costly. Then there had been legal disputes between the heirs of the last owner. One had been in Canada, one in Australia; the affair had dragged on for years. Meanwhile the damp rotted the woodwork as the mill stood empty. Purchasers don’t like damp, Miss Sibley was told. But damp is, after all, to be expected if you live on an island, she replied sensibly. Then there were the trees, very large: a huge cedar, twice the height of the mill, guarded the approach bridge; some willows grew on the island; a row of Lombardy poplars screened the meadow beyond. Trees make a place dark; some people dislike it.
Miss Sibley had lived all her life on a brick street; to her the prospect of owning twelve Lombardy poplars, five willows, and a giant cedar was intoxicating.
The word haunted never passed anyone’s lips.
The island itself was small; not much bigger than a tennis court. During the years that the mill had stood empty, brambles had proliferated and the place was a wilderness; Miss Sibley looked forward to turning it into a garden by and by. Meanwhile the builders used it as a dumping place for their loads of brick and stacks of new timber The brambles were cut and trampled down, and some of them dug up as new drains had to be laid and damp-proof foundations inserted; in the process of this digging a male skeleton was unearthed.
It had been buried with care, and quite deep, handsomely coffined and wrapped in some half-rotted piece of brocade material, which Dr. Adams, the coroner, who was also a keen local historian, inspected carefully and pronounced to be the remains of an altar cloth or consecrated banner.
“In fact, my dear Miss Sibley, the body is probably that of a Catholic priest who died here while on an undercover mission during Queen Elizabeth’s reign and was secretly buried. The age of the remains make that the most likely hypothesis.”
“But why should he be buried on my island?” crossly demanded Miss Sibley.
“Why, Jeffrey Howard, the miller at that period, had been suspected of being an undeclared papist. This seems to confirm it. Perhaps he was giving hospitality to one of the traveling priests who rode about in disguise, saying a secret Mass here and there. I suppose there was some fatality. That would account—” began Dr. Adams, and stopped short.
“So what happens now?” inquired Miss Sibley, not noticing this.
“Oh, we’ll have him reburied properly in the graveyard, poor fellow,” said Dr. Adams cheerfully. “The vicar won’t mind a bit. He’ll enjoy an excuse for some research into the background of it all.”
Once the coffin and its melancholy contents had been removed, Miss Sibley put the matter out of her mind. She was much too busy, buying curtain material and discussing fitments with the builders to trouble her head about old unhappy far-off things. Her new kitchen was taking shape, a fine, spacious room with a view through dangling willow fronds over the white, frothy, and turbulent millpond. The sun blazed through the wide new south window, her large modern oven would soon keep the kitchen warm and airy.
Miss Sibley had a deep trunk full of cake recipes which, all her life, she had been cutting out of newspapers. She could hardly wait to get started. Waffles, Aberdeen butteries, orange and walnut cake, tipsy cake, scruggin cake, apricot-caramel cake, mocha layer cake, Tivoli cake, orange tea bread, date shorties, fat rascals, cut-and-come-again cake, honey and walnut scone ring, Lancashire wakes cakes, nut crescent, currant roll-ups, rum baba—these names sang themselves through her head like a glorious invocation.
Just wait till I can get the builders out of here, she thought. And shelves put up in the little room and my cookery books on them.
She had collected cookbooks with the enthusiasm of an autograph hunter. Not a recipe had yet been tried.
To encourage them, Miss Sibley pampered her builders in every way possible. She brewed them cups of tea five or six times daily, accompanied by store bought biscuits. She mailed letters, took messages, phoned their wives, and ran errands for them. But none of this disguised her extreme impatience to see them leave. As soon as it was at all possible, she planned to move from her rented room over the post office into the mill; meanwhile she visited the site daily and dug up brambles on the island. She was therefore on hand when Mr. Hoskins, the foreman, came to say, “Beg your pardon, mum, but we found something you should see.”
“And what is that?” asked Miss Sibley. The seriousness of his tone made her heart tip over most anxiously. What could the wretches have found now? A plague pit? A cavern under the foundation, requiring ninety tons of concrete? Some terrible gaping crack that would entail construction of five expensive buttresses?
“It’s a room,” said Mr. Hoskins.
“A room? A room? Surely there are plenty of those?”
“One we didn’t know of,” replied Mr. Hoskins, who had lived in the village all his life. “Halfway up a wall. Come and see, mum.”
Her curiosity kindled, Miss Sibley came and saw.
The room was approached by a paneled door, neatly concealed at one side over the mantel in a small upstairs bedroom. The panel door was operated by a hidden spring, which one of the workmen had accidentally released. Inside, a flight of narrow dark stairs led up to a small, low, irregularly shaped chamber with a sloped ceiling and several oak beams passing through the floor at odd angles. The place was not much larger than a coat closet and was dimly lit by a tiny window, made of thick greenish glass tiles, which also admitted a little fresh air.
“Why has no one ever noticed the window?” demanded Miss Sibley.
“’Tis hid by the ivy, you see, mum, and also ’tis tucked in under the overhang of the eaves, like, where you’d never notice it,” Mr. Hoskins pointed out.
Later, going outside, Miss Sibley verified this, and the fact that a projecting lower gable concealed the window from anyone standing on the ground.
Disappointingly the room held no furniture.
“But we did find this,” said Mr. Hoskins, and handed Miss Sibley a small grimed leather-bound book. “’Twas tucked on the joist.”
Opening the book, Miss Sibley found that the pages were handwritten. It seemed to be a diary.
“Thank you, Mr. Hoskins,” she said.
“Would you want the room decorated, miss?”
“On the whole, no, thank you, Mr. Hoskins. I don’t imagine I shall be using it a great deal. If you could just clear away the dust. . . .”
Miss Sibley’s mind was already floating back to Sicilian chocolate cheesecake.
But she did take a cursory glance at the diary, which was written in faded brown ink and a decidedly crabbed and difficult handwriting.
“I, Gabriel Jerome Campion, S.J., leave this journal as a memorial in case it should happen that I do not quit this place a living man. And I ask whomsoever shall find it to pray for the repose of my soul. . . .”
Well, of course I will do that for the poor man, thought Miss Sibley, and she methodically tied a knot in her handkerchief to remind herself.
I wonder if he was in here for very long, and what did happen to him?
“Thank you, Mr. Hoskins,” she repeated absently and withdrew down the narrow approach stair to the builder’s stepladder, which stood below the panel opening.
“Woud you wish me to put a different fastening on the door, mum?”
“Why, no, thank you, I think the existing one will do well enough.”
“Or build a flight of steps so’s to
reach the door?”
“No,” said Miss Sibley, “as you may recall, I plan to turn this little bedroom into my cookery library, so I shall want shelves built across those two facing walls for my cookbooks. And then, you see, I’ll buy one of those little library stepladders, so if I ever should wish to enter the secret room (which is not very likely), I can use the stepladder. Thank you, Mr. Hoskins. Gracious me—it is teatime already; I’ll just run and put on the kettle.”
Dr. Adams and Mr. Wakehurst the vicar were greatly excited by the discovery of the diary, news of which reached them that evening by village grapevine; and the next day Mr. Wakehurst came around to ask if he might borrow the document?
“This, you know, clears up a four-hundred-year-old mystery,” said he, happily. “There is a local legend about a black-coated stranger who was heard asking the way to Hasworth Mill and was then never seen again. But that was the winter of the great flood, when the Neap overran its banks and covered all the land as far as the foot of Tripp Hill (where the deserted station now stands). Various people from the village were drowned in the floods, including Howard the miller. It was supposed that the stranger must have been drowned, too, and his body washed downstream to Shoreby. Now we can guess that he had been billeted in the secret room by Howard, who no doubt proposed to see him off the premises when the coast was clear; but because of his death in the flood he never did return. So the poor priest probably starved to death. Howard’s son, a sailor who returned from the sea to claim his inheritance, no doubt found and secretly interred the body. Poor fellow, what a miserable, lonely end.”
“Oh, he wasn’t lonely,” said Miss Sibley. “Somebody called Mr. Watkyn kept him company. He wrote, several times, in his diary, ‘I don’t know how I should have managed to remain tranquil and composed without the company of my dear and charming Watkyn.’”
“Indeed?” exclaimed the vicar, with the liveliest curiosity. “Now I do wonder who Watkyn can have been?”
“Another priest, I daresay,” remarked Miss Sibley without a great deal of interest, and she handed Mr. Wakehurst the fragile and grimy little volume. “Please do keep it, Vicar, it is of no great interest to me.”
“May I really? I shall write a paper on it for the Wessex Archaeological Society,” cried the vicar joyfully, and hastened away with his treasure before she could change her mind.
At the door he turned, remembering his manners, to ask, “When do you plan to move in, Miss Sibley?”
“Why, tonight,” said she. “There are still quite a few things to be done, but the kitchen stove works now, and the hot water is on, and one of the bedrooms is finished, so there is no reason why I can’t sleep here. That way I shall be even more on the spot if there are any problems—not that I anticipate any.”
Mr. Wakehurst’s face wore a slightly doubtful, frowning look as he crossed the three-arched bridge and looked down at the careering millrace and swirling millpond. But what, after all, are ghosts? he thought. Some people never see them at all. And, as the century nears its end, they seem to be losing their power. And Miss Sibley is such a sensible, practical person, it would be a most unpardonable piece of folly to confuse her mind with ideas about things that may never happen.
Poor Father Gabriel! As good a man as ever stepped, I daresay, even if he did hold erroneous, wrongheaded religious opinions. In any case, we are all so much more ecumenical and broad-minded now.
I do wonder who Watkyn can have been? And why no other body was found? Dear me, how very, very interested Adams will be in this discovery.
Besides, nobody has actually seen anything in the mill. Or not that I have been told of. It is only some exaggerated stories about what people felt, or fancied they felt, or heard, or fancied they heard.
He hurried on, under a threatening and plum-colored sky, absorbed by the diary, which he read as he walked.
“Conducted a long dialogue on transubstantiation with Watkyn, which served to distract me from the pangs of hunger. His is a surpassingly sympathetic and comprehending nature. And his expression is so captivatingly cordial! If he chose, I know that he would confide in me all his innermost thoughts.”
Can Watkyn have been a mute? wondered Mr. Wakehurst. Or a foreigner, speaking no English?
“I have confessed to Watkyn not only my major transgressions but the most minor peccadilloes, the kind of small sins that, in the presence of a confessor, one is often almost ashamed to mention. Watkyn, now, knows more of my faults than any other living being. He does not behave any less kindly. And I feel a wondrous easement of soul. Sick enfeebled, confused as I begin to grow, I do not at all fear to meet my Maker. And it is all thanks to my good Watkyn. If only I could bestow a like grace on him!”
“Another discussion with W. on the subject of miracles,” recorded Father Gabriel a day later, in a hand that was perceptibly weaker.
Now, what in the world can have become of Watkyn? wondered the vicar.
“Talked to W. on the subject of Redemption . . .” The text trailed away.
Miss Sibley celebrated her first night of residence in Hasworth Mill by making a Swiss roll. Not surprisingly, it was a total disaster. What she had thought to be one of the most simple, basic, and boring of cakes is, on the contrary, the most tricky and delicate, on no account to be attempted by a beginner. The flour must be of a special kind, the eggs carefully chosen, the oven well trained, familiar to the cook, and under perfect control. Not one of these factors obtained at the mill. It was the first time Miss Sibley had used her new oven, which was not yet correctly adjusted; the flour was damp and in any case not a good brand. The eggs were a mixed lot. The cake turned out sodden, leathery, and had to be scraped from the bottom of the pan, like badly laid cement. Not surprisingly, after eating a mouthful or two, Miss Sibley went to bed very quenched and dejected and then found it almost impossible to fall asleep in her bare and paint-scented bedroom.
A gusty and fidgety wind had blown up. As Miss Sibley sat after supper in her warm kitchen, she could see, through the great pane of clear glass, long, dangling fronds of the willows in wild and eldritch motion, blown and wrung and swung like witches’ locks. And after she retired to bed, her high window, facing out over the water-meadow, showed the row of Lombardy poplars like a maniac keep-fit class, violently bowing and bending their slender shafts in each and every direction.
Miss Sibley could not hear the wind, for, to anybody inside the mill house, the roar of water drowned out any external sound. But as the gale increased, she could hear that, somewhere within the house a door had begun to bang; and after ten minutes or so of increasing irritation she left her bed to find the source of the annoyance and put a stop to it.
The offending door proved to be the one opening into her little library room.
Queer, thought Miss Sibley; the window in here is shut; why should there be a draft? Why should the door bang?
And then she noticed the high black square in the wall, the cavity where the panel door stood open. That’s very peculiar, she reflected. I’m sure Mr. Hoskins had left it closed when the men went off work, and I certainly haven’t opened it, so how in the world could it have come open all by itself? But perhaps this wild and drafty wind somehow undid the catch. At any rate I may as well close it up again; it is letting a nasty lot of cold air into the upper story.
Since the panel door and its catch were too high for her to reach, she pushed a table, which she proposed to use as a writing desk, across the small room, perched a chair on the table, and then climbed up onto the chair.
She was in the act of closing the door when she thought she heard, from inside the little upper room, a faint and piteous moan. She paused, listened harder, but there was no repetition of the sound.
I was mistaken, decided Miss Sibley. She closed the panel, climbed down from the table, and was about to return to bed, when, from inside the panel, came thre
e, loud, measured knocks.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Then a moment’s silence. Then the three knocks again.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Can that be the wind? Miss Sibley wondered and, after a moment’s hesitation and just a little nervous this time, she climbed up onto the table once more, reopened the door, and peered inside. There was nothing to be seen.
But again, after the door was shut, before she had left the room, she heard the three knocks: Bang. Bang. Bang.
“This is perfectly ridiculous,” said Miss Sibley angrily. “However, I certainly can’t lie all night listening to those thumps, so I suppose I shall have to investigate further. But I’m not going dressed like this.”
Accordingly she returned to her bedroom, pulled on a pair of trousers and thick cardigan, and equipped herself with a powerful flashlight, which she had bought in case of any trouble with the newly installed electrical system. Once again she climbed onto the table, and this time scrambled right up into the panel entrance.
No sooner was she well inside the entrance than the door swung violently closed behind her and latched itself. She hard the spring click into place.
Miss Sibley was a calm and level-headed person. But even so, well aware that there was no means of opening the panel from the inside, she felt an acute lowering of the spirits. For she recalled also that tomorrow was Saturday, when the builders did not come to the house, and that was inevitably followed by Sunday, so that it might be at least fifty hours before anybody became aware of her plight and set her free.