Mistress of the Moor: A gripping gothic romance mystery Read online

  Mistress of the Moor

  Abigail Clements

  Copyright © Abigail Clements 1974

  This edition first published by Wyndham Books 2020

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  www.wyndhambooks.com/abigail-clements

  First published in 1974

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover artwork: images © Boiko Olha / James Elkington (Shutterstock)

  Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd

  Titles by Abigail Clements

  from Wyndham Books

  Mistress of the Moor

  Christabel’s Room

  Highland Fire

  The Sea-Harrower

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Preview: Christabel’s Room

  Preview: Abigail Clements

  Chapter One

  My Dear Emma,

  I want to ask a great favour of you. Though I have not seen you since the tragic events of two years ago when your dear Aunt was lost to us in that sad and horrible manner, I remember you so well as a child here at Goathlands. You were always my favourite niece and I watched with great happiness as you grew up into a charming and beautiful lady. I sometimes wondered if you would not have been happier had you been a boy. There was always a streak of independence in you, one which I doubt if even my brother could have curbed, and it came as no surprise to me when, after your father was lost in South Africa, you decided to go to London and earn your own living.

  My dear, that was eight years ago and times have changed. We are now almost through the first decade of the twentieth century, the old Queen has gone and with her a great many of the prejudices that epitomized her reign. There are no raised eyebrows here in Goathlands when I tell people that my favourite niece is a ‘lady typewriter’ in London; there is rather a sense of admiration.

  I always felt that you needed to be needed and that if this circumstance was lacking you would never be interested in anything. Dear Emma, I want to put that opinion to the test, for I need you now.

  I have two positions vacant here, both of which can be filled by only one person. Because of the nature of my present research, these positions can only go to a person in whom I have complete and absolute trust. Details I cannot give you until I know for certain that you will accept, but broadly speaking, one post would be that of hostess at Goathlands while the other, which in my opinion is the one which will require the greatest trust and may provide the greatest temptations, is that of confidential lady typewriter to myself.

  I am sorry that at this time it is impossible for me to give you any further details, but I am sure you will understand the urgency when I say that a reply by return of post is essential.

  If you accept this offer, rather odd-sounding I must admit, I would like you to leave London on the Flying Scotsman on Friday. You would arrive in York in time to catch the four p.m. train to Malton.

  A carriage will be waiting for you at the station to drive you to Goathlands. There I shall be waiting for you and there, when we meet, you will understand why it would be impossible for me to drive to the station myself.

  If, and I hope that this will not be the case, you should decide that you cannot accept for any reason whatsoever, then I must ask you to please destroy this letter and do not reply.

  There is little more that I can say except to reiterate that which I said earlier. I need you. How true this is will be revealed to you but slowly, but in considering this, do remember that the one thing I need more than anything is your complete and absolute trust.

  I await your reply and pray that it comes,

  Always your loving Uncle,

  Joshua.

  The letter had arrived at nine o’clock in the morning. I read it for the fifth or sixth time. Of course I remembered Uncle Joshua; I remembered him well. A jolly, rather tubby man with a great red smiling face and a huge brow, so shiny that you might almost have used it for a vanity mirror. Really, he looked more like a Dales farmer than Sir Joshua Waldron, Bart, Master of Goathlands.

  There was nothing of the aristocrat about Uncle Josh. He loved tinkering; anything mechanical was a matter of great joy to him. I believe that he owned no less than three of those horrid, smelly horseless carriages, two of which he had built himself.

  His wife, my dear Aunt Hester, had died tragically and horribly two years ago when the fire gutted the west wing and central hall of Goathlands. I was in Paris at the time, typewriting at the British Consulate, and did not hear of these terrifying happenings until my return to London several months later. Of course I wrote immediately to express my sympathy, but the reply came, not from Uncle Joshua, but from his son, Cousin Henry. He advised me against visiting Goathlands, as Uncle Josh was under medical care and the doctors advised against visitors. I tried to contact my uncle on two further occasions, but both replies were from Cousin Henry, who continued to discourage me from visiting Goathlands. After that I gave up, and over the next eighteen months there was silence. Now this letter!

  The question I had to answer was simple. Should I decide here and now that I should go to Goathlands, or should I destroy the letter and forget that it had ever been written?

  If I decided to accept Uncle Joshua’s proposition there would be no obstacle to my instant departure from London. I was not in any form of regular employment; I was typing play scripts for theatrical producers, including one script, if you will forgive the pride, for no less a person than Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. This I could quite easily finish in the three days before Friday. The trouble was that Uncle Joshua’s letter said absolutely nothing except to express his almost desperate desire for me to come to Goathlands.

  I loved Goathlands; I was born there, and the childhood memories of that dear spot were still very close to my heart. I am sure that it was this fact more than any other which caused me to make my decision and to reply to Uncle Joshua with w
hat must have been one of the shortest letters ever written. It ran:

  Dear Uncle Josh,

  Send your carriage to Malton, I shall be there.

  Love,

  Emma.

  It was twenty minutes to ten on the morning of Friday, the ninth of October, 1909, when the porter put my trunk into the luggage van. I breathed deeply the smell of that wonderful aromatic mixture of steam and coal smoke and looked at the massive locomotives, hissing and wheezing as they waited for the guiding hands of their drivers to send them hurtling along their metal ways to all the corners of the country. I was filled with childhood memories of trains and stations: going home from school, home to Goathlands. I felt like a child again as I settled comfortably into a corner seat in a ‘Ladies Only’ compartment, peering at the station clock while the seconds ticked away ‒ until the upright minute hand signalled the Flying Scotsman away on the start of its four-hundred-mile journey north through York, Newcastle, and on to Edinburgh. The hand jumped the last half-minute. It was ten o’clock. With a great clanking and hissing, the giant engine backed its fourteen coaches together and then drew them apart to the full stretch of their couplings. Then the train smoothly and almost silently glided toward the first of the long tunnels which lie to the north of Kings Cross Station.

  I’m going home! I’m going home! I’m going home! As the speed of the man-made monster increased, the wheels pounded the rhythm of those words faster and faster into my ears. Goathlands was home, and it always would be, even though it was eight years since I had been there. On my last day at Goathlands, I had wept in the village chapel while they held a memorial service for my dear father, killed in action near Kimberley. Though the following day I had left Goathlands, resolving never to return, I knew now, as deep in my heart I always had known, that Goathlands was home. The clay of the North Yorkshire moors on which it stood was the clay which had formed me. The windswept gorse and the angry North Sea, the golden buttercups of spring, the song of the lark, and the deep soft snow of the winter were all part of me. The fishermen of Whitby and Scarborough, the farmers of the Yorkshire moors and dales who used to explain to a little girl the wonders of their crafts, the smell of horses at the racing stables near Malton, the scent of wildflowers in Troutdale, York hams hanging from the beams in the pantry, living coal and log fires flickering and crackling in the fireplaces ‒ I remembered them all. I wondered how many of the people there would remember Emma, a little girl with pink ribbons in her hair and freckles which she tried to rub off with her school eraser. Then there was Honey, my Welsh pony. He was the colour of his name, with a long white tail and mane and dun-coloured legs which always made him look as if he had been standing up to his knees in mud all day. People used to call him ‘the rocking-horse pony’. He should still be there; he would be fifteen now. Would Honeybunch remember me, come trotting across his field to greet me, and munch the apple that I always carried for him while I whispered all my secrets in his dear fuzzy ear? Next to Uncle Josh, I think I wanted to see Honey again more than anyone.

  I’m going home! I’m going home! The words pounded in my ears as the wheels clattered over the gaps in the rails and we raced through the flat expanse of Lincolnshire. I was going home to Uncle Josh, Honey, and, of course, Cousin Henry. I wondered about Henry; he and I had never been close. He was older than I and I remembered him as a tall, handsome youth who had very little time for a female cousin five years his junior. When I thought about Henry I realized that I did not really know him at all; I never had. My grandfather, the first baronet, had left the estate and all of the income in trust to Uncle Joshua, on whose death the house and title would of course go to Henry. But my grandfather’s not-inconsiderable fortune was to be divided into three parts, one part going to Henry and the other two going to myself as the only other grandchild. It was a somewhat unusual and controversial will in an age when younger sons usually got nothing more than a token income and women received nothing apart from the family efforts to arrange a good match. I felt, rightly or wrongly I did not know, that Henry had always resented this, in spite of the known fact that at Uncle Joshua’s instigation, the will had been drawn up in those terms.

  For myself, it would have been less than honest to suggest that the prospect of a very comfortable and independent life gave me no satisfaction. But this did not really matter so very much. After all, I was capable of earning my own living. I had proved it over the last eight years. Now, I had reached a stage when, at twenty-six, wealth had but a limited appeal to me, and marriage seemed a rapidly disappearing vision.

  We were through Doncaster, and my reverie was interrupted by the sight of the broad acres of my native Yorkshire. The names on the little wayside stations became more and more familiar. As we passed through Bishopsthorpe, I rose from my seat and got my hand luggage down from the rack, realizing for the first time that I was hungry. All the thoughts which had raced through my mind as we sped northward, through the beautiful autumn English countryside, had made me forget all about food. But no matter. Some tea and a sandwich at the Station Hotel in York would be a pleasant way of passing the hour I had to wait for my connection to Malton.

  It was raining in Malton when the train pulled into the little station, and the wind was getting up. As I reached the door of my compartment, a familiar figure came trotting along beside it until the train lurched and was still. He flung the door open.

  ‘Little Miss Emma,’ said Ormerod, a huge smile creasing his gnarled features into another million wrinkles. ‘Welcome home.’

  This huge man, well over six feet tall, his massive frame completely filling the door of the compartment, must by now have been approaching his sixtieth year. I had always loved Ormerod ‒ dear, big, sweet, gentle Ormerod. He was my uncle’s head groom and coachman when I was a child. It was he who taught me how to ride, how to handle a pair of hackneys, and where to find a plover’s nest. Most important of all, it was he who found Honey for me. ‘The prettiest little yearling I ever did see, and he’ll be a good ’un,’ was how he described him.

  I was delighted to see Ormerod. I must confess I had been just a little apprehensive at the prospect of being met by my rather aloof cousin Henry. When Ormerod said, ‘Welcome home,’ I knew that home I was. I felt home. I put my hand into his great calloused paw, which could have bent an iron bar as easily as I could have snapped a twig, and he gently helped me to alight into the wonderful, clean, refreshing Yorkshire rain. I told him, and I meant it, how nice it was that he should be the one to meet me. His face creased into another huge smile, and he said, ‘When I heard that thou was coming home, I did try to put it into Sir Joshua’s mind that I should be the one to meet thee. But come now, let’s get thee into the waiting room so that I can get thee ready for the ride home.’

  ‘You haven’t brought saddle horses?’ I said, surprised and apprehensive. It was twenty miles to Howl Moor, where Goathlands stood.

  ‘Nay, lass,’ he replied. ‘Thou could not be more wrong. I’ve got one of Sir Joshua’s horseless carriages. But there’s no coach roof and it’s going to be a bit wet, so I’ve brought thee a motoring coat, sou’wester, and goggles. Come now, Miss Emma, we’ll get thee wrapped up and we’ll be off.’

  I am only five feet, and the coat must have been made for a tall man, for when I put it on it lay in concertinalike folds around my feet. Ormerod laughed and told me that it was probably a good thing, as it would certainly keep me drier than one which had been fashioned to fit me.

  Outside the station yard, the motor car had already attracted the attention of a crowd of small urchins, but they rapidly dispersed under the lash of Ormerod’s tongue.

  ‘Begging thy pardon, Miss Emma, but that kind don’t understand any other language.’

  I smiled and assured him that I was not shocked, as indeed I was not, having heard much worse language in the glittering salons of London society.

  The porter came out of the station with my luggage. I told him to put it on the back seat, as I had no intent
ion of being separated from Ormerod during the journey home. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much that I wanted to know before we arrived at Goathlands.

  Alas for my desire for information. Ormerod sat me in the passenger seat and wrapped me in a great rug, and then he went to the front of the machine, spat on his hands, and proceeded to wind the starting handle so fiercely that for the life of me I feared that the motor car would turn over. There were one or two loud explosions before the engine finally burst into life. What a rattling and a clanking it was. It caused a couple of horses, standing in their shafts on the cab rank, to shy so violently that the poor creatures lost a good proportion of the feed from their nosebags. Once the engine had started, any attempt at conversation would have been futile. So we rattled and snorted out of Malton toward Pickering and the north and away across the moors toward Goathlands.

  Once or twice during the journey I smiled at Ormerod, though I don’t think he noticed me. He sat there, a study in grim concentration, gripping the wheel and occasionally adjusting one of the countless little levers with which the carriage was equipped. We travelled at great speed. I learned later that on occasions we exceeded thirty miles to the hour, a truly great speed. And I quite believe it, for it was certainly less than an hour after leaving Malton that I caught my first glimpse of Goathlands, rising stark and massive from the moorland waste which surrounded it. The house stood on the edge of Howl Moor, one of a group of smaller areas which together comprised Goathlands Moors.

  I don’t know what I expected. After the fire, I was sure that Goathlands would have been remodelled, that it would not be the Goathlands that I remembered. But there it was, the same mass of contrasts that I had loved so much as a child. The house was stark but solid, of cold grey stone, but not without a suggestion of the warmth inside. The lights shone pale in the windows as they combated the gathering gloom. Goathlands was grim but honest. It did not give friendship easily, and yet it reached out across the moors to embrace those whom it loved. No, it had not changed; it was still home.