“The housekeeper and the head gardener have conspired to keep me at the Manor for as long as they can.” I explained why, adding, “Is there any sort of story connected with the maze, particularly the garden and the island inside?”
“Didn’t know there was a garden and island inside it. That there maze been locked up for donkey’s years, ever since some kids got in one night and came out screaming, not knowing why. They never was really right in the head after that. Grew up with a proper hate for crows and magpies, and didn’t like hot winds, neither. Made ’em go mad, almost like a fit. Sorriest thing I ever saw, watching young Johnny Wilkes one hot summer day, crawling about and bawling his eyes out for no reason he could ever tell us.”
“But there’s no ‘ghost story’ to explain what happened to those kids in the maze?” I asked.
“Not really. There’s the legend of the blackamoor’s ghost that run amok in the Manor maybe a hundred and fifty year ago until it got nailed down someway by a North Country witch woman, but that has naught to do with the maze.”
“Her name wouldn’t have been Mother Gwynne, would it?”
“There’s naught saying who she was. The Woodthorpes don’t speak of the matter.” He fell to thinking for a moment, then said, “But I think I might once seen a picture of him, when I was a kiddie and up at the Manor for a Christmas do. They’d set a marquee on the lawn, but I got away somehow and played a game of hide-and-seek with myself in the Manor House where I weren’t supposed to be.” He chuckled at his memories. “Well, one way or another I managed to get right up under the roof, and I found this painting there, just lying there on its face. So I picked it up.” All expression of happy memories disappeared as he said, “I tell you I near died of fright, because it weren’t the sort of painting a six-year-old expects to find in the roof of the manor House at Christmas. It was the head of a black man, like a ebony block all chopped about to make a face. His hair and beard was gray, especially the beard, all stringy-like and had a little pouch tied into it.”
“If he was the one haunting the Manor way back when,” I said, thinking things through, “it could be that the witch woman stopped it by having his body buried on the island maze. There’s a notion in magic that spirits lose strength if they have to cross water.”
“It’s a thought, isn’t it,” said Mr Scudamore.
It was indeed, and I was thinking on it as I asked my way to my next port of call—the local vet.
The Norton was thumping along beautifully as I approached Woodthorpe Manor late that afternoon. The sun hung low in the west, and this time I wasn’t flattened by a sudden Roller.
Throttle back. Lean it through the gateway. Twist the grip, crackle up the drive.
The two groundsmen were emerging from the lodge to begin their evening rounds as I passed. Big boys carrying big sticks, they stared for a moment, then waved. I’d never met them, though I expected Keenen had spun them some story to explain my presence at the Manor. Perhaps they were even in on the conspiracy. Paranoid as that might sound, with what I’d heard from Mr. Scudamore and especially from the vet I was prepared to find almost anything under the bed now.
A face pulled away from an upstairs window as I pulled up outside the East Front. Now, I thought, perhaps now that I look on the verge of leaving, Mrs. Winton might be forced to resort to honesty.
She must’ve flown like a broomstick to get from that upstairs room to the entrance hall where I met her a few seconds later.
“Well,” she said after looking at me as if for the first time.
“Yes, well, I suppose I’ll be off now.” I was grinning inside, lying through my back teeth and loving it.
“Right now?”
“I’ve imposed long enough.”
Her expression was saying
“Oh, by the way,” I continued, “I found this on the maze island,” and produced from my jacket pocket the bone. “Did you know the local vet used to work at the London Zoo? He was able to tell me that this is part of the wing bone of the Australian emu bird. Now how do you suppose—”
I would never have guessed Mrs. Winton to be the fainting kind.
“It’s like Burke and Hare.”
I said nothing to Keenen’s comment, apt though it was. The sun was going down, the shadow of the marble ruin creeping over us. I just kept digging.
Mrs. Winton had revived after a moment, and I’d helped to get her into a sitting position on the stairs. “You should never have taken the bone from the island,” she said, settling herself against the banisters. “It was the only thing that really held him there; that and the water, though the water won’t stop him now once the sun goes down.”
“You should’ve told me all this—and a lot more besides—in the first place.”
“You would’ve left.”
“I should leave now.”
“He’ll run amok.”
“All the more reason to scram.” I let that sink in a moment. “He’s the black man whose ghost haunted the Manor a hundred and fifty years ago, isn’t he?”
She nodded. “Actually he’s from New South Wales. His name was Korrabilla, but they called him Birdfellow because he practiced bird-magic.”
“I see. It takes an Australian ghost hunter to hunt an Australian ghost.”
“Do you think we haven’t tried in the past, Mr. Pine? A dozen investigators over the past five years haven’t even known where to start. All they could tell His Lordship was to let sleeping dogs lie. But
“And the bone?” I held it up at eye level.
Mrs. Winton flinched. “I suppose you’ve been talking to Mr. Scudamore.”
“Yes.”
“Back in 1823 the Eleventh Earl brought this Birdfellow back from a voyage into the Pacific.”
“Which explains the palm and the gum trees in the grounds,” I said.
She nodded again, nervously. “The Earl though to train him as a servant, and perhaps even have him work magic. But Birdfellow ran away only a week after coming to the Manor. It must’ve been a terribly alien place to him—England, I mean. He didn’t know how to survive in one of our winters, and so he died. But it wasn’t long before his ghost began plaguing the Manor in the shape of a monstrous bird like an ostrich.”
“Emu,” I said.
“Was it? Servants and tenant farmers ran off, and livestock died. So the Earl called in the witch known as Mother Gwynne. She told him the body had to be surrounded by moving water, and to bury that,” she gestured at the bone I was holding, “with him as it was his source of magic. That stopped the haunting, though it didn’t put him to rest; possibly Mr. Scudamore told you about the children who wandered into the maze one night?”
I nodded.
“When the brooks running into the maze dried up five years ago, the pond water stopped moving, and the ghost began to come out into the maze itself. If it wasn’t for the bone, the ghost would’ve broken loose. It’s going to break loose tonight.” She peered despairingly through the banisters.
I sat down beside her. “What if I put the bone back.”
“The spell’s broken,” she said, and she was probably right. “Mother Gwynne said he couldn’t rest because he wasn’t buried in his own land, so you might think the obvious thing would be to ship his remains back to Australia. But she warned that the moment his bones leave the island he’ll come chasing them.”
What had been so wrong with winter back home?
I tried to remember all I knew about Aboriginal burial customs, which took about ten seconds. All I came up with was something to do with trees, a half-formed idea at best. Then, scraping the bottom of my brain, I recalled that during an inquest into Black deaths in police custody the court was instructed to refer to the dead only as “Deadfella” and “Deadlady,” as it was Aboriginal law that no record of the name, no image or belongings of the individual must be allowed to exist after death. I said, “There may be a second reason why Birdfellow doesn’t rest.
