Eileen St Claire brought men nothing but trouble. And now, it was quite clear, she had caused me to lose the Earl’s goodwill. What a fool I am! I always come to grief when I do favours for other people. John Bonaventura Pendragon was right: “Every good deed gets the punishment it deserves.”

I took a bath, changed again, and went down to dinner. The lady of the house was seated next to me, in a magnificent gown. I cannot have amused her greatly. I was too nervous and feeling sorry for myself, and with good reason.

On the other hand, she was very good-looking. But even if she had not been so very pretty, she was also the Lady of the Castle, the descendent of Pendragons, and I felt too unworthy to do so much as open my mouth. The reader might think me a snob: let him think so. I admit that I do privately believe that an Earl is different from other men.

The things she was telling Maloney intimidated me even more. Two years earlier she had been presented at court; she spent the London season with her aunt, the Duchess of Warwick, who lived in Belgravia in a street so superbly exclusive that tears came to my eyes whenever I walked down it. And garden parties with Lady This, and evening parties with Lady That, and bazaars with someone else … The names of her girl friends, all resonantly historic names that tripped so lightly off her tongue, fell on my head like hammer blows.

If every meal is to be taken in such an aristocratic milieu, I thought, I shall waste away. I should mention that during my time in England I had quite often been in ‘good society’, but almost invariably as a hired secretary, not as a guest. But these Pendragons were something above ‘good society’. And, last but not least, a distinguished young woman was in my eyes even more exalted and formidable than, for example, a distinguished old gentleman.

To all this was added the oppressive sense that, through Eileen St Claire’s intrigues, I had permanently forfeited the right ever to be made a welcome guest at Llanvygan. In my misery I drank a great deal of the full-bodied wine of the house, hoping it might help me sleep. Such was the introduction to my first night at Llanvygan, the start of my supernatural and inexplicable adventures.

 

I was lying in my oppressively historic bed (no doubt dating back to Queen Anne), reading and reading. It was a philosophical work. Philosophy nearly always calms my mind and sends me quickly to sleep, perhaps as a refuge from boredom. The subjective and the objective, whose particular mutual relationship had been the topic in question, began to take on human characteristics in my half-waking, half-dreaming state.

“What a wind!” said Subject to Object.

“Don’t worry about it, it’s blowing from windward,” replied Object to Subject, the way the left half of the brain will chat to the right half when one is half-asleep … Then I found myself most thoroughly awake.

What was that?

I became aware that I had been hearing the noise for quite some time—that human-inhuman, indefinable something of a noise. Now, in the darkness, nothing else seemed to exist. First it went tap, tap; then something like tree-ee; and then came something that could never be recorded in writing—a long drawn-out sigh, like a terrified gasping for air. It was deeply unnerving.

And the whole sequence was repeating itself at intervals of about three minutes, though the timing cannot have been entirely regular—it was more a question of when I noticed it.

Anyway, I switched the light on. The room was now at least two hundred years more historic than when I had gone to bed. I had seen rooms like it in London museums and French chateaux, but then there had been guides and written inscriptions to direct one as to what to imagine—Napoleon strutting back and forth with his hands behind his back, or a slender woman seated at her spinning wheel. But none of the elaborately carved wardrobes in this room carried any such source of enlightenment. Nothing tied the imagination to what was merely informative and comforting. For all I knew, some ancestor might have died in here, repenting his unspeakable crimes amid horrific visions … And all the while, there came this unceasing sound: tap, tree-ee, and the terrible sigh. Not a pleasant sensation.

I lit a cigarette.