HAUNT OF MURDER, A by P. C. Doherty Read Free Book Online

from her.
    ‘Who are you?’
    ‘Welcome to the kingdom of the dead, Beatrice Arrowner. Look at me and weep. Lady Johanna de Mandeville, walled up, tombed in for death. Nothing but darkness. He shouldn’t have done it. It was cruel and no one raised a hand. No pity in life, no mercy in death. Nothing but a desert of hate and chambers full of spectres!’
    Beatrice could stand no more and fled like a shadow from Midnight Tower.

Chapter 3
    Beatrice found herself on the path leading from the barbican. The stars were bright above her, the silver moon slipped in and out of the clouds yet it wasn’t the usual blue-black of country nights. The heathland, Devil’s Spinney and the walls of Ravenscroft were bathed in that eerie bronze tinge, like light reflected in a brass pot. The silence, too, was strange, not the calm and peace of the countryside at night but more threatening, as if other phantasms lurked behind the curtain of night, ready to spring out. Beatrice stopped and looked back at the castle. She’d walked this way earlier, her mind full of Ralph, May celebrations and, of course, her wedding day. The castle had always seemed friendly with its familiar turrets and towers. Now it looked foreign. Where there had been windows were now plain bricks, strange emblems and pennants flew from the ramparts, and ghostly lights glowed on the tops of the towers.
    A group of horsemen burst out of Devil’s Spinney, fleeing like bats under the moon. They charged towards the drawbridge, thundering across in ghostly cavalcade – a vision of things as they once were rather than the reality she had left. Strange cries overhead made Beatrice glance up at the sky and she saw geese-like forms flying between the clouds. Fires burnt in Devil’s Spinney and loud shouts and cries came from the darkness on her right. Beatrice felt afraid and then laughed.
    ‘If I am dreaming,’ she murmured, ‘then I shall wake up and
these are nothing but phantasms. If I am truly dead, separated from Ralph, then what else can happen to me?’
    She walked on and came to the crossroads. She recognised them immediately but not the gibbet which stretched out against the night sky or the grisly cadaver which hung in chains from its rusting hook. Beneath it a young woman, red hair falling down to her shoulders and dressed in a white shift, was staring in horror at the great bloody patch on her chest. She raised her head as Beatrice approached.
    ‘Who are you?’ the young woman asked. Her face was ghoulish, her eyes like those of a dead fish, the pallid skin of her hands tinged with dirt and mud.
    ‘I am Beatrice Arrowner.’
    ‘And I am Etheldreda.’ She saw the puzzlement in Beatrice’s face. ‘We see each other, we can talk and hear.’ Etheldreda smiled in a show of blackened teeth. ‘But we are of the nether world, in the kingdom of the dead.’
    ‘Why don’t you leave?’ Beatrice asked. As soon as the words were out, she realised this was how she used to speak in dreams.
    ‘I cannot leave,’ Etheldreda moaned. ‘So long ago yet just like yesterday. What year is it?’
    Beatrice stared at her. ‘I am not too sure.’
    ‘Well, who is King?’
    ‘Young Richard reigns in Westminster.’ Beatrice recalled the proclamations read out in the parish church four years ago after the old King had died. ‘It is the year of Our Lord 1381.’
    ‘Young Richard?’ Etheldreda stared at her, lips opening and closing like a landed carp. ‘Has time passed so quickly? In the parish church Father Bernard preached against King John.’
    ‘King John? But he lived many years ago. The ancient ones tell stories about him. How he marched through Wessex and lost his treasure in the Wash.’
    ‘Where’s that?’ Etheldreda asked.

    ‘To the north,’ Beatrice replied. ‘Where the sea comes in and drowns the fields.’
    Etheldreda nodded her head. ‘Aye,’ she murmured. ‘And I drowned myself in Blackwater. Seduced, I was, by Simon the reeve.’ Her dead eyes