Ghosts of Thornfield Hall

The east wing's never been right. Not just cold — wrong.

Mrs Drummond said this on the telephone three days ago, tucked between directions to the stone cross and a reminder to bring wellies. She said it the way a woman says the milk's gone off — plainly, practically, as though wrongness in a wing of a Jacobean manor were simply another household fact to manage alongside the damp and the intermittent hot water. Poppy wrote it down. She writes everything down. But she circled that one.

Now, driving through rain that has been trying to kill her since Scotch Corner, Poppy Ashford-Jones holds the steering wheel at ten and two and thinks about the word wrong. She has worked in houses where the plumbing was wrong and houses where the foundation was wrong and one house in Dorset where the previous owner's taste in wallpaper was so catastrophically wrong that three surveyors refused to enter the drawing room. Wrong is a word with range. But Mrs Drummond did not say it the way people say it about plumbing.

She said it the way you say it about a thing you have lived with for a very long time and have decided you are simply going to manage.

The moors look like they are trying to swallow the road.

She has driven through rain in Cornwall, in the Highlands, in the kind of Welsh downpour that makes you wonder whether God has a particular grudge against the A470, but this is something else. This is rain that falls sideways across the windscreen and turns the moors into a grey blur of heather and sky and nothing. The satnav lost signal twenty minutes ago. She is following handwritten directions Mrs Drummond posted to her, actual handwritten directions on actual paper, and the last instruction says left at the stone cross, then the drive is half a mile on your right.

She has not seen a stone cross. She has not seen much of anything except sheep and the occasional dry-stone wall materialising out of the fog like a suggestion.

Her car, a ten-year-old Volvo estate that smells permanently of old books and takeaway coffee, judders over a cattle grid. The road narrows. And then, through a gap in the rain, she sees it.

Thornfield Hall.

It sits on a rise of land at the edge of the moor like something that grew there. Jacobean, she thinks immediately: the mullioned windows, the stone gables, the chimneys clustered in groups of four. It is enormous and half-ruined and beautiful in the way that dying things are beautiful. Ivy has taken the east end. Several windows on the upper floors are dark, the glass cracked or missing entirely. The roof sags in the middle like a horse that has been ridden too long.

Poppy pulls the Volvo up to the front entrance, kills the engine, and sits for a moment listening to the rain hammer the roof. She thinks: wrong. She files this thought alongside Mrs Drummond's directions and the absence of a stone cross and the feeling she has had since the cattle grid that the landscape is watching her arrive.

Two weeks. She has two weeks to catalogue the library before the auction house arrives. Pemberton & Hart, York, who handle estate dispersals for half the crumbling manors in the north. Felix Napier, the estate agent, was precise on the phone. Fourteen days, Miss Ashford-Jones. The executors want the property cleared and valued by month's end.

From the passenger seat she grabs her bag: leather satchel, acid-free tissue, cotton gloves, a pocket magnifying glass, a digital camera, her laptop, and a thermos of tea she made at the last services on the A1. The things she needs. Ten years of this, since finishing her PhD at twenty-two, and she has worked in houses grander than this one and houses far worse. At thirty-two, one of the best rare book historians in England, and the work speaks for itself.

The wind hits her like a wall as she steps out of the car.

Yorkshire. Late October. Right.

She pulls her coat tighter and hauls her overnight bag from the boot. The gravel drive is overgrown, weeds push through the stones and puddles the colour of milky tea have formed in the ruts. Up close, Thornfield is even more imposing. The front entrance is framed by stone columns, and above the door, carved into the lintel, a date: 1612. Moss has colonised the letters. A wisteria, long dead, still clings to the stonework in a tangle of grey rope.

The house smells of damp stone and something older, something earthy and mineral that Poppy has come to associate with buildings that have been standing long enough to become part of the landscape. She can feel it already, the low hum, the background frequency of accumulated time. Every old building has it. This one is louder than most.

The front door opens before she reaches it, and Mrs Eileen Drummond stands in the frame, short, solid, white-haired, wearing a quilted gilet over a jumper and the expression of someone who has been expecting you and is relieved you have finally arrived.

'You must be Miss Ashford-Jones.' Her voice is warm, Yorkshire vowels broad and unhurried. 'Come in before you drown. The kettle's on.'

'Poppy,' Poppy says, because nobody has called her Miss Ashford-Jones since her viva. 'Thank you. It's… quite a drive.'

'It's quite a place,' Mrs Drummond says, and there is something in the way she says it that is not entirely about the architecture.

Inside, the entrance hall is stone-flagged and cold, but not unpleasantly so. More the specific cold of a building that has been standing for four hundred years and does not intend to warm up for anyone. A wide staircase curves upward. Portraits line the walls, dark oil paintings of men and women in various states of historical dress, their faces half-visible in the dim light. Poppy's hand brushes the newel post as she passes and she feels —

Something.

A hum, deep in the wood, as though the banister has been holding something for a very long time and is tired. She pulls her hand away.

She does not call this a gift. She has never called it that. She calls it instinct, or training, or a good eye — the thing that tells a genuine manuscript from a forgery before she has checked the watermark. She has carried it since she was nine years old and touched her grandfather's pocket watch at his funeral and knew, with a certainty that went beyond knowing, that he had been afraid when he died. She did not tell anyone. She was nine. She did not have the words. And now, at thirty-two, she has the words and still does not use them. Objects speak to her in a language she has never named and does not intend to.

[ Chapter 1 continues in the full book — coming soon to Amazon ]