The changeling

She looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. “You’d be the only one who could, I suppose. But I know how it is between you. You’re not what you might call loving father and daughter.”

I thought: Our lives are exposed to our servants. They are aware of everything that is going on. They know in this house that Celeste is passionately in love with a husband who rejects her because he is still so deeply in love with his dead wife that he makes a shrine to her and spends nights in that room from which the present Mrs. Lansdon is shut out.

“We’ll have to wait and see,” I said. “Perhaps if the right moment comes it might be possible to say something.”

She nodded.

“While that room stays locked it’s unhealthy. That’s what I’ve always said and I’ll go on saying it. I don’t like it, Miss Rebecca, I don’t like it at all.” I agreed with her. I did not like it either.

Belinda was very sullen after that. She hardly spoke to me and Miss Stringer said she was more difficult than usual.

Lucie was also in disgrace. She was a sensitive child and what upset her most was that she thought I was angry with her.

I explained to her: “I am not angry. I just want you to understand that it is not polite to imitate people. It is all right to play the Queen or the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain because they are far away and it is a long time ago when the Queen was called from her bed to be told she was Queen and had her coronation and marriage, but to pretend to be people around you could be hurtful to them ... and so it is different.”

She saw the point and was contrite.

It took several days for Belinda’s sullen mood to pass but finally she reverted to her old exuberant self. I remarked to Miss Stringer that she appeared to have given up her theatrical ambitions.

Miss Stringer said: “It was a passing fancy ... all due to Mrs. Carston-Browne and her tableaux vivants. “

I agreed.

The children were in the garden with Leah one day when I joined them. We had not been there long when one of the maids came running out. She was breathless. “It’s that new gardener’s boy, Miss Rebecca.

He’s cutting down the oak tree.”

“He can’t be,” I cried. “It’s far too big.”

I went across the lawn to that spot past the pond below my window onto which I looked down so often. All the boy was doing was trimming the branches. “Who told you to do that?” I asked.

“Nobody, Miss. I just thought it needed a trim like.”

“We don’t like the oak tree being touched.”

The maid who had told us what was happening said: “The ghosts wouldn’t like it.”

The boy stared open-mouthed at the tree.

“It’s an old legend attached to the house,” I said. “I don’t think we want it trimmed. Of course, if Mr. Camps thinks it should be done, he should speak to someone about it. But for the time being leave it.”

“Well, I never,” said the maid. “It was a good thing, Miss Rebecca, that I saw him in time. Cutting up that tree. Goodness knows what would happen.”

“Why is it haunted?” asked Lucie.

“Oh, that’s just a story.”

“What sort of a story?” asked Belinda.

“Something that was once said. I’ve forgotten.”

“Ghosts don’t like it if people forget about them,” said Belinda. “They come back and haunt them to remind them.”

“It was nothing,” I said. “Would you two like to go for a ride?” November had come - misty autumnal with the days drawing in so that it was dark soon after four.

Ever since the gardener’s boy had attempted to lop the branches off the oak tree there seemed to have been a revival of the hauntings. One of the maids swore she saw a shadow at the window of the locked room. She ran screaming into the house. Some of them would not go into the garden after dusk and certainly not in the vicinity of the oak tree.

I began to be affected by it and often at night I would go down to my window and look down on it, in spite of myself, expecting to see Lady Flamstead or her daughter there ... and I would have given a great deal to see my mother.

I thought about what Mrs. Emery had said regarding the locked room. How could one stop young people having fancies in a house like this? It seemed to be enveloped in the unhappy atmosphere created by a husband who did not love the wife he had recently married and continued to mourn the one he had lost. I understood his passionate obsession;

I had one of a kind myself for I could not forget her either; but I still blamed Benedict. Perhaps it was due to living in a house of shadows where the past seemed to intrude on the present where neither he nor I could come to terms with life as it was and were both craving to be back in those days when she was with us. I wondered if I might speak to him about the locked room. But how could I? He would not listen to me. He found his solace there. He communed with her. I had once felt that she came back to me. Surely she would come and try to comfort him if that were possible.