‘Are you selling the house furnished?’ asked Cooper, stumbling against the corner of what felt like a dining table.
‘This is a little different from the normal house sale,’ said Casey. ‘Some of these items have great historic value in the right context.’
‘You mean they belong here and nowhere else?’
‘I suppose you could put it that way. The vendors were concerned that some of the rooms should stay intact, if possible. Of course, it raised the price a little.’
‘Most people like to stamp their own personality on a place when they move in,’ said Cooper. ‘They want to change everything.’ ‘Not here.’
John Casey stopped in front of a door. It might have led to a boiler room, or a furniture store - some aspect of the
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behind-the-scenes activities in a large house. There was no outward clue to the stone steps that were revealed when the agent produced the key from his ring and eased open the lock. The steps were deeply worn in the middle, as if many feet had passed up and down them over the centuries.
Casey went first, after finding the light switch. Cold air greeted him as he descended - the coolness characteristic of a cellar, a chill caused by being too close to the damp soil pressing against the walls.
Cooper was glad that the lights were working. He wouldn’t have welcomed walking into this room in the dark, even if he’d known what to expect. The problem was the skulls. Hundreds of them grinned from shelves and niches cut into the stone walls. Some of them had fallen apart, their jaw bones slipping and sitting at awkward angles, their teeth loosened and lying in the dust. Some had gone beyond grinning, and had deteriorated into expressions of slack-mouthed, manic laughter.
Beneath the skulls, hundreds of bones had been stacked in ragged piles. Among a jumble of tibias, fibulas and femurs, Cooper distinguished the shape of a pelvis and a few ribs. They’d been heaped together with no regard for their original ownership. Not unless the pile of bones nearest to him had belonged to a man with three legs and no hips.
‘Quite impressive, aren’t they?’ said Casey. ‘Not everybody’s cup of tea, of course.’
He reached out a hand to stroke the cranium of a large skull occupying a niche of its own near the bottom of the steps. The bony plates over its eye sockets were smooth and shiny, gleaming with a pearly luminescence in the reflected light.
‘This one is supposed to bring you luck, if you rub it,’ said Casey. ‘He’s called the General.’
Even with the lights on, it was impossible to estimate how many skulls there were. The long shelves were packed two
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deep, and shadows in the niches made it difficult to see right to the back. A hundred? Two hundred? Cooper wouldn’t have liked to make a guess.
‘Where did they all come from?’ asked Fry. ‘Are these all ancestors of the Saxton family?’
‘Good heavens, no,’ said Casey. ‘The Saxtons themselves are either buried under the nave of the village church, or in a rather elaborate family tomb in the churchyard. I believe there are several quite fine effigies in the church, if you’re interested in such things.’
Fry pointed at the rows of skulls. ‘So who are they}’
‘The story is that they were Royalist soldiers, ambushed and killed by Parliamentary militia on their way to help raise the siege of Wingfield Manor.’
‘The Civil War?’ said Cooper, bending to look closer at the skulls. ‘Seventeenth century, then.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But that’s before the hall was built, let alone the chapel.’
‘The remains weren’t found right here, but somewhere on the estate when forestry work was being carried out. As I said, there was an earlier house on this site, and the Saxtons are known to have been Royalist sympathizers, so perhaps the soldiers were billeted here. Certainly, the original house was severely damaged by the Parliamentarians and had to be demolished. A punishment for supporting the wrong side, I suppose.’
Cooper had never heard this story, though there were many others like it in Derbyshire, where the English Civil War had split local sympathies. At Chapel-en-le-Frith, the church had become known as ‘Derbyshire’s Black Hole’ after it was used to imprison fifteen hundred Scottish troops captured at the Battle of Ribbleton Moor. The Parliamentary army had left them crammed in the church for two weeks and forty-four of them were dead when the doors were opened.
‘Has anyone ever had the bones authenticated? I mean, to confirm that they actually are from the Civil War period?’
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‘I’m told it was done some years ago,’ said Casey. ‘But the findings were never made public’
‘So there must be a record of how many skulls and bones are in the collection?’
‘Yes, of course. But again …’
‘It hasn’t been made public. I see.’
Cooper found a torch in his pocket and shone it into the dusty corners. Large black spiders scuttled away from the light. Their webs stretched from skull to skull and filled the eye sockets like pale cataracts. Powdered stone from the walls coated the shelves. In the curious silence typical of cellars, he thought he heard a faint scuttling movement. But it was only Fry, edging back towards the steps, restless to move on.
They walked back upstairs to inspect bedrooms complete with dusty four-poster beds, and bathrooms with ancient plumbing and stained ceramic baths. The roof must be leaking in places, because some of the ornate plasterwork on the ceilings was crumbling and in danger of collapse. Cooper found it sad to see history mouldering away. He’d rather a hotel or conference centre moved in and restored the-place, installing en-suite bathrooms and a fitness centre.
Many armies had marched across Derbyshire over the centuries, and not just in the Civil War. It struck Cooper that Alder Hall would have been newly built when Bonnie Prince Charlie led his Jacobite rebels south as far as Derby in the winter of 1745. Wasn’t it the Duke of Devonshire’s regiment, the Derby Blues, who abandoned the city ahead
