The Hand of Glory’s half-timbered exterior, which had seemed so wonderfully quaint and picturesque to David, belied the thumping bass and drunken arguments of its interior. Thus, after making his way to the bar past throngs of loud undergraduates with vividly colored glasses of cider, he ordered his pint and walked out, past framed vintage Bass ads, to the relative peace of the beer garden.
Rebecca Grey was already there, sitting at a wooden table underneath a solitary plane tree, surrounded on all sides by concrete, with a glass of wine in her hand.
“I just walked past a dartboard,” he said, sitting down. “Which was fortunately not in use. I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to give drunk people sharp objects and encourage them to start throwing said objects.”
“Do you lack them in the States?” she asked.
“I suppose we do, at the kinds of sports bars that I don’t go to.”
“Mostly people staring at their mobile phones, then?” she asked, smiling.
“When I go drinking I usually go to microbreweries and there it’s a lot of adults playing Connect Four or tic-tac-toe.”
“Tic-tac-toe,” she repeated before taking another sip. “That is another of those Americanisms.”
“I think you call it ‘noughts and crosses,’” he replied. “As Churchill said, two countries divided by a common language. Good beer, by the way.”
She laughed at a dollop of beer foam that stuck to his upper lip.
“Speaking of Churchill,” he continued, “I visited his country home last month. Took the train. And I’ve been to Leeds Castle too. I actually grew up seeing these kinds of English country homes on tv, Sherlock Holmes would always go there and of course solve the case.”
“Well, it’s certainly no Leeds Castle,” she said. “But I grew up in what one would call a country home. Parts of the main house go back to the Tudors. Of course most of it is much newer than that.”
“Really?” asked David, for whom that word conjured images of Shakespeare and his world. “A country home? A stately home?”
“Yes, but don’t get the wrong impression. We do have electricity and running water and all that. And don’t get your hopes up too much for some castle.”
“What do you mean, don’t get your hopes up?”
“Well, you will come and visit it sometime, will you not? Do you want to come back from your time in England, having only seen the museums and National Trust sites that every tourist sees?”
“I’d love to visit your house. To come and see the real England, I mean.”
“Maybe you can come see Grey House next weekend then, if you have time?”
“Sure I have time. Grey House,” he repeated.
“Yes. It’s been in the family a very long time. The family seat.”
“I’ve only heard that word in 19th century novels,” David said, “But are you and your family members of the landed gentry?” He said the last two words as if repeating a famous quote.
“Yes, the Greys are some of the last vestiges of the landed gentry. Not dukes or earls or viscounts, mind you. The lowest rung of that ladder. But people do call my dad Sir Anthony.”
“And you still live in the old house, out in the country.”
“Yes. Yes, you’ll have to come see it.”
Afterwards he walked from the pub to the bus stop with a happiness that not even a red-faced man vomiting into the street could disrupt.
On his ride back to the university David told himself that he had only met her a few weeks ago, that he had not known her nearly long enough to be visiting her childhood home and meeting her family. But another part of him responded that he had not come all this way, to this royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea precisely to break out of his comfort zone, to try something new, to take a risk.
A pleasant reverie came to mind, that of showing her off and impressing all his friends back home.
After a morning Earl Grey with a splash of milk, David took a walk around the campus, noticing the cold in the air, the dried reddish leaves of the trees and the dark clouds that seemed heavy with upcoming rain. The graduate seminar dragged on with the kind of minutiae that even a professor would deride as academic.
Afterwards David walked over to the library, taking the stairs to the third floor which was the second floor in Britain. He placed his notebook, water bottle and umbrella on one of the available desks, one below a window, and walked towards the Shakespearean shelves. His dissertation, which now had the working title of Shakespearean and Jonsonian Comedy in the Nineteenth Century English Novel, seemed to cry out for an appropriate quote from Shakespeare himself, to be Something, Something and Something Else: Shakespearean and Jonsonian Comedy in the Nineteenth Century English Novel. His vision fell on a row of Penguin paperbacks of The Tempest. Perhaps one of Prospero’s speeches, David thought, contained some perfect comparison between the island and Milan which got at the country-city, nature-culture dichotomy at the center of the project. Perhaps Act I Scene 2, where Prospero recounts the story of his exile to Miranda.
When he returned to his desk he could see the beginnings of an actual tempest outside.
In the afternoon he taught a section of 19th Century English Literature and tried to impress upon his students their sheer proximity to the world of the novels they read for class. They could take a train to London and see Charles Dickens’ house or Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey or George Eliot’s grave in Highgate Cemetery. But they did not seem very interested.
David looked out the window at bare trees and the occasional oast house, and at the dark forest in the distance beyond. A recorded female voice listed the upcoming stops, Allingham, Waring, East Waring, Sedhurst, Staples-on-Wyke, names which seemed to him like the kinds of places where Jeeves and Wooster would spend an eventful weekend.
The train stopped at an isolated station which lacked even a car in its small parking lot. David looked up from his book to see a solitary man in a dark coat with an umbrella waiting on the platform, the walls behind him plastered with ads for online gambling and hard liquor. The lone man at the lonely station was a picturesque sight, picturesque enough to distract his eyes from The Way We See Now: Trollope, Mechanical Reproduction and Visions of Modernity, at least until the train started moving again.
Fields divided by hedgerows passed by in the window, giving way to a deep wood. This brought back memories of the sheer blackness of the English countryside at night, which made a late trip back from London seem almost like a voyage through outer space, with distance traffic lights or houselights glimpsed through branches as the shining stars.
He reached his station, where he was the only passenger to alight. Rebecca met him in her car.
“Did you notice an old stone church, on the other side of the train tracks, as you arrived?” she asked.
“Can’t say that I did.”
“We’ll have to go there tomorrow,” she replied. “It was built in the thirteenth century and has a beautiful stained glass window.”
David imagined ivy-covered walls and headstones in the churchyard, their inscriptions weathered to illegibility over centuries of wind and rain. A few moments later she drew his attention to a distant, red-leafed copse of tree that had once marked the boundary of a ducal deer park. That evocative phrase, along with the previous mention of a medieval century, sent him into a short reverie of lords and ladies on horseback, their clothes the rich reds, blues and golds of books of hours.
They turned off the road, passing through an open wrought-iron gate onto a driveway lined with yews on both sides.
“Welcome to Grey House,” Rebecca said.
As they got closer the low squat house seemed to extend its two symmetrical wings towards them like the claws of a crab, two chimneys rising from the central portion like antennae. David had the strong, strange sensation of walking into a painting on the wall, or through some dreamed landscape.
“Don’t get your hopes up too high,” she told him. “It won’t be quite like stepping back into a nineteenth century novel. For one, we lack a barouche, a post-chaise, a brougham, a four-in-hand, a phaeton or any other type of carriage. We also lack a butler, a celebrated French cook, a valet de chambre, a governess, a game warden or a stable boy. A maid who comes on Tuesdays and a gardener who comes on Fridays are all that remains of the old faithful retainers.”
“That’s understandable,” he replied. “Those days have come and gone. As I’ve seen for myself, most of those old stately homes are museums now. It’s like The Remains of the Day.”
They got out of the car and walked up to the driveway, past a sundial. Rebecca opened the large oaken front door and they walked into a high-roofed hallway with a floor of herringbone tiles. A young Asian man in a summery light blue suit stood in front of one of the paintings on the wall, gazing into it. The hall ended in a carpeted stairway with brass railings.
“I’ll be right back,” Rebecca said as she walked quickly down the hall and up the stairs. “Charles, this is my friend, David.”
“Hello and welcome,” said Charles. “I hope you enjoy your stay at Grey House.”
“I’m sure I will,” David replied. “Thank you.”
“Do you see this coat of arms?” asked Charles, directing his attention to an oil portrait of a severe-looking man surrounded by his hunting dogs. The plaque at the bottom of the gilded frame bore the legend James Grey, esquire 1827 and the family crest, a silver owl on a black and crimson striped shield.
“You can see it in the town,” Charles said, sitting in an upholstered chair and gesturing David to do the same, which he did. “On the pub sign of the Grey Arms.”
“There’s a pub named after the family?”
“Yes. They’ve been here a very long time. A Grey lived in a house on this property when Henry V died in France. That house, I believe, burned down during the reign of Henry VIII and was subsequently rebuilt.”
David’s eyes drifted to the portrait next to James Grey’s, which was of a woman in white sitting with her small children in the shade of an oak tree.
“That tree is still here,” Charles said, smiling. “I’m sure Rebecca will show it to you on a tour of the grounds.”
Charles continued after a pause. “I see you love old things as well.”
“Yes I do,” David replied. “I guess that’s why I’m here. Here in England and here at Grey House.”
“I grew up in Hong Kong. In fact, I was born in a Hong Kong that was still technically an outpost of the British empire. I remember high teas, rashers for breakfast, and of course great British stories.”
“Of course.”
“I suppose that we both have the same nostalgia for another country’s past.”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“Will you stay here in England?” asked Charles after what seemed a brief hesitation.
“I would love to,” David replied. “But I’m not sure how realistic that is.”
“Maybe you can stay. Maybe you will become more English than the English. You come from America, maybe you will be the next Henry James.”
“Charles seems like a nice guy,” David said to Rebecca as he walked up the stairway to meet her at the landing.
“Is that a twinge of jealousy I see in your face?” she asked, blushing. “Well, you certainly don’t have to worry about him as a romantic rival, as if this were some sort of romantic comedy. He is my adopted brother.”
“I see,” said David, for lack of anything else to say.
“His parents moved here from Hong Kong, oh, about fifteen years ago, if I remember correctly. They died in a terrible car crash and as close friends of the family my mum and dad took him in. And he has just been part of the family ever since.”
“I see. So he was an only child?”
“Yes.”
“So was I.”
They walked into the library, which had shelves of leather-covered books almost to the ceiling. Opposite the door three large windows looked out onto the grounds behind the house, onto a pond with a Greek temple folly, flanked by two cypresses, on its far shore.
David imagined himself sitting at the table in front of him, a pile of half a dozen books on it, his busy hand writing novels, essays, reviews. The scholar in his library or breaking his solitude for a walk around the property.
Rebecca directed his attention to a series of four paintings above the bookcases, telling him that they had been painted by a Dutch artist in the 18th century. They showed first Persephone, accompanied by two nymphs, bringing growth to a quiet landscape, then Hades emerging from the underworld amidst a forest of full trees and blooming flowers, then the trees shedding leaves and the flowers wilting as Hades carries Persephone back to his kingdom, then Demeter weeping over her lost daughter, with bare trees and snow falling.
“Allegories of the four seasons,” Rebecca said. “The middle two always scared me as a young girl, so much so that I tried to avoid this room as much as possible.”
“I can’t imagine a library being a place of fear.”
“But when I got a bit older it made it so much more exciting to come in here and get a book, especially at night. It was a kind of adventure, trying to get in and out quickly before Hades saw me and could get me. The book was a kind of prize, I suppose.”
“To be snatched out of the jaws of Cerberus?” David suggested.
“Yes, exactly.”
Rebecca’s tour took them from the library to the east wing, where David deposited The Tempest, The Way We See Now, his notebook, his toiletry bag and a change of clothes in his bedroom. This wing, two stories taller than the main house and topped with a gabled roof, had apparently been built in the 19th century on the site of a dilapidated mews, its twin on the other wing growing out of and incorporating a livery stables a decade later.
They walked past two guest bedrooms and the former servant’s quarters, now storage rooms, to arrive at the dining room, which had a marble fireplace and gilt-framed portraits of lords and ladies on each of its four walls. A window opened out onto a garden. A varnished wood table and its chairs, enough for at least a dozen visitors, stood on a Persian carpet. The chandelier that hung down from the ceiling had a patina of great age. A man in a white shirt and a grey scarf walked in through the kitchen door and stood at the window.
“Father,” said Rebecca, “Let me present my friend David Smith, from America.”
Nice to meet you, Sir Anthony,” said David. “I’ve never met a nobleman before.”
“We’ll have no Sir Anthonys here,” he responded, shaking his hand. “Mr. Grey, please. It’s not the middle ages and I am certainly no knight.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Grey. I won’t make an Earl Grey joke because I’m sure you’ve heard plenty in your time.”
“Yes, yes I have. Truth be told I don’t particularly enjoy the tea. I prefer coffee, personally.”
David paused for a second, searching for the best way to continue the conversation.
“I see that your eyes are drawn to the pictures of my ancestors,” Sir Anthony said. “They must be quite a tangle for the genealogists to sort out. If I am correct there were no fewer than seven Sir Jonathan Greys and three Sir Stephens. I myself am the very first Sir Anthony.”
“I see.”
“Yes. You will find that things here are not quite the same as they were, once.”
David and Rebecca walked through the kitchen into an herb garden surrounded by brick walls, with a wrought-iron gate through which he could see a tree-line path leading to the pond. A bench, shielded from the sun by a yew tree much taller than the wall it leaned against, seemed to him like a faultless place for contemplation and reflection.
“There’s rosemary”, said Rebecca, pointing to the garden. “That’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.”
“I do remember,” said David. “Who could forget Ophelia?”
“There’s fennel for you,” she said, “there by the thyme. There’s rue for you and here’s some for me, but no pansies, daisies, columbines or violets. We do have a rose garden but the roses are just stalks at this time of year.”
I played Ophelia in a play once,” she concluded.
“Really?”
“Yes. I can play other parts as well.”
She opened the gate and they walked out into the grounds. They walked to the pond in the shade of the tall beeches on each side of the lane, and upon reaching it passed willows and a gardener’s shed on their way around to the other side. They stood between the cypresses on the steps of the domed, columnated folly and observed the setting sun’s reflection on the water. He felt no need to speak at all. They walked, without speaking, across a lawn to a formal garden, surrounded on all sides by hedges, in the shadow of the west wing and with a burbling fountain at its center. They walked around the perimeter, following the gravel path, in the last of the sunlight.
David was introduced to Rebecca’s cousins Mark and Elizabeth, to Sir Anthony’s good friend Dr. Joshi, to Charles’ fiancée Morgan, to Aunt Henrietta and Uncle Michael and neighbors Phillip and Margaret and to the cook and waiter hired for the occasion. As David sat down at the table with a gin and tonic in his hand, Rebecca to his left and Elizabeth to his right, he gazed up at the old family portraits and observed, or thought he observed, that the descendants lacked the close family resemblance of their ancestors. A modern improvement, David thought, over the inbreeding among old European royal families, which was presumably imitated by their social inferiors in order to keep land and money within the family.
There was not much conversation during the soup, which David attributed to the stereotypical British reserve.
After celery soup came the main course, the roast beef of old England served with celery, parsnips, roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding. The waiter brough the natural accompaniment, cask ale served not cold but cool.
“A toast,” said Sir Anthony, raising his glass. “A toast to welcome this young man to Grey House. I believe that I speak for everyone here when I say that I hope it will not be his last, and that we will see much more of him in the coming months.”
This is too good to be true, though David. As Dr. Johnson said, beyond expectation, beyond hope. His imagination lit a cheery, crackling fire in the fireplace, arranged red and gold Christmas crackers around the table and replaced the beer glasses with steaming cups of mulled wine.
“Something special, before the port,” said Sir Anthony as the waiter pushed the various cups and dishes out of the hall on a cart, leaving an empty table. “Something so special, in fact, that we will serve it on antique Wedgwood china, china that my great-great-great-great grandfather bought when it was new.”
In the silence David observed a certain drunkenness on all the faces around him, a flushing of the cheeks and forehead.
The waiter brought a blue and white dish of pomegranate seeds.
“Grown,” said Sir Anthony, “In my own greenhouse.”
“I remember when it was planted,” said Rebecca.
“Let our guest have the first taste,” said Sir Anthony.
“Yes,” said the entire company in a unison that unnerved him.
As he raised the spoon to his mouth he noticed, in the center and corners of his eyes, an excitement, an anticipation appear on every face at the table. Fortified by alcohol he went ahead and as his mouth closed and his teeth crushed the seeds the faces assumed a crazed, giddy, mask-like smiled with wide-open bulging eyes, an insane smile, a smile with hunger behind it. His thoughts raced back to the pictures of Persephone and Hades. After she ate the pomegranate seed in his kingdom, he thought-
“I know exactly what you are thinking,” said the smiling Sir Anthony, in a voice that was not his own. “You have eaten of the pomegranate seed and now join our kingdom.”
“No going back,” said the waiter as he began pouring glasses of dark blood-red port, which they all drank in unison and in silence.
Afterwards David fell into a sleep from which he would never awake. The Grey House or, more properly, the entity inhabiting it, took over with the anticipation of a salivating wine connoisseur inserting a corkscrew into the cork of a rare, prized vintage. It devoured him, digesting every thought, every memory, arranging him with the others at the table, or on the lawn, or each in his or her various room at his or her various activity, as if they were dolls placed there by a child’s hand.
It puppeted them through a variety of situations and configurations, dressing them in a variety of costumes, savoring every nuance of personality and of life history, savoring possession itself as well as the new subtleties and combinations that each addition brought to its world.
And when the Grey House’s interest waned it would end its boredom by sending one of them out, prepared with the right script, to the town or city to find the right foreign exchange student, local eccentric, continental au pair or visiting romantic to add to the collection.
Author’s Note: This is the first of four short horror tales I’ll publish for Halloween this October, one per week.
In Kent, England, an oast house is a cylindrical hop kiln; they are one of the signature sights of the Kentish countryside.