the couple who served my father lived in Princeton, not in the rooms over the east wing.
I knew she wasn’t there. I called her name anyway, just for the company of the sound, and it died away in the silence. I went to the foot of one of the several staircases scattered about the place and called her name again. I heard the old scampering sound from above, like dry newspapers blowing along a gutter. The cold and rain had driven the field mice inside from under the eaves and now they were running around trying to remember where they were, which was where countless generations of their ancestors had been before them.
When we were kids Val and I had decided that the noises we heard in the walls were made by the ghost whose story we seemed to have heard at birth. He was a boy, the tale went, who had killed an English officer behind their lines and made his escape with a couple of redcoats in hot pursuit. An earlier Ben Driskill had hidden him in one of the attics, but after a week the British search party came to the Driskill holdings and searched the house. They found the boy cowering in the darkness, half dead from pneumonia, and declared him guilty on the spot. They told this long-ago Ben Driskill they were going to hang him with the boy, an object lesson for the countryside, which prompted Ben’s wife, Hannah, to appear in the doorway with a blunderbuss and the promise to put a couple of ounces of sudden death into that redcoat’s breadbasket if he didn’t satisfy himself with the one prisoner and beat it. The Brit bowed, suggested that henceforth Ben should think twice before giving aid and comfort to an enemy of Good King George, and stalked off with the killer in tow. They took the lad to the orchard and hanged him with a length of Driskill rope from a stout Driskill apple tree, from whichBen cut him down shortly thereafter and buried him beneath the tree. His grave was still marked and we used to play out there. And we listened with wide-eyed fascination to the story of this brave rebel’s death and ghost.
I climbed the stairs now and waited but nobody—not a ghost, not a squirrel, not my sister—was going to answer me. I thought of my mother in one of her flowing nightgowns and lacy robes standing in the hallway, her hand out as if she were trying to reach me from far away. How long ago had that happened? Her lips forming words which I must have heard then but could no longer recall … Why couldn’t I remember what she’d said while I could recall exactly the scent of her cologne and powder? And why was her face lost in the shadows of the hall? Was she young? Or was she gray? How old had I been when she’d come forward, hand out, saying something, trying to make me understand something?
I went back downstairs, took an umbrella, went outside. The rain was blowing sideways in the ghostly glow of the coach lights. I pulled the trench-coat collar up and went to the little underpass between two wings of the house and ducked underneath. The rain rattled on the mullioned windows above and in the lead gutters, spewed out furiously, slowly turning to ice that would build up and eventually block the drainpipe. Some things just never changed.
I set off across the lawn where we used to play croquet and badminton. The lights from the windows of the Long Room cast yellow fingers pointing the way toward the chapel.
We had our own chapel, of course. My father’s father had built it in the twenties to satisfy one of my grandmother’s whims of iron. It was “of the period,” as they say in guidebooks, brick and stone and black and white trim with what my grandmother used to call “a very nice steeple, not too proud of itself,” which was always in need of repair. We weren’t English Catholics like Evelyn Waugh’s and we didn’t keep a tame priest of our own on the family payroll, but we pretty much supported those who served at St. Mary’s in the nearby village of New Prudence. Growing up, I thought that having
I knew she wasn’t there. I called her name anyway, just for the company of the sound, and it died away in the silence. I went to the foot of one of the several staircases scattered about the place and called her name again. I heard the old scampering sound from above, like dry newspapers blowing along a gutter. The cold and rain had driven the field mice inside from under the eaves and now they were running around trying to remember where they were, which was where countless generations of their ancestors had been before them.
When we were kids Val and I had decided that the noises we heard in the walls were made by the ghost whose story we seemed to have heard at birth. He was a boy, the tale went, who had killed an English officer behind their lines and made his escape with a couple of redcoats in hot pursuit. An earlier Ben Driskill had hidden him in one of the attics, but after a week the British search party came to the Driskill holdings and searched the house. They found the boy cowering in the darkness, half dead from pneumonia, and declared him guilty on the spot. They told this long-ago Ben Driskill they were going to hang him with the boy, an object lesson for the countryside, which prompted Ben’s wife, Hannah, to appear in the doorway with a blunderbuss and the promise to put a couple of ounces of sudden death into that redcoat’s breadbasket if he didn’t satisfy himself with the one prisoner and beat it. The Brit bowed, suggested that henceforth Ben should think twice before giving aid and comfort to an enemy of Good King George, and stalked off with the killer in tow. They took the lad to the orchard and hanged him with a length of Driskill rope from a stout Driskill apple tree, from whichBen cut him down shortly thereafter and buried him beneath the tree. His grave was still marked and we used to play out there. And we listened with wide-eyed fascination to the story of this brave rebel’s death and ghost.
I climbed the stairs now and waited but nobody—not a ghost, not a squirrel, not my sister—was going to answer me. I thought of my mother in one of her flowing nightgowns and lacy robes standing in the hallway, her hand out as if she were trying to reach me from far away. How long ago had that happened? Her lips forming words which I must have heard then but could no longer recall … Why couldn’t I remember what she’d said while I could recall exactly the scent of her cologne and powder? And why was her face lost in the shadows of the hall? Was she young? Or was she gray? How old had I been when she’d come forward, hand out, saying something, trying to make me understand something?
I went back downstairs, took an umbrella, went outside. The rain was blowing sideways in the ghostly glow of the coach lights. I pulled the trench-coat collar up and went to the little underpass between two wings of the house and ducked underneath. The rain rattled on the mullioned windows above and in the lead gutters, spewed out furiously, slowly turning to ice that would build up and eventually block the drainpipe. Some things just never changed.
I set off across the lawn where we used to play croquet and badminton. The lights from the windows of the Long Room cast yellow fingers pointing the way toward the chapel.
We had our own chapel, of course. My father’s father had built it in the twenties to satisfy one of my grandmother’s whims of iron. It was “of the period,” as they say in guidebooks, brick and stone and black and white trim with what my grandmother used to call “a very nice steeple, not too proud of itself,” which was always in need of repair. We weren’t English Catholics like Evelyn Waugh’s and we didn’t keep a tame priest of our own on the family payroll, but we pretty much supported those who served at St. Mary’s in the nearby village of New Prudence. Growing up, I thought that having
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