The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

We buried her on the third day, in a driving snow-storm. There were few people in the church, for it was bad weather to come from town, and I’ve a notion my mistress was one that hadn’t many near friends. Mr Ranford was among the last to come, just before they carried her up the aisle. He was in black, of course, being such a friend of the family, and I never saw a gentleman so pale. As he passed me I noticed that he leaned a trifle on a stick he carried; and I fancy Mr Brympton noticed it too, for the red spot came out sharp on his forehead, and all through the service he kept staring across the church at Mr Ranford, instead of following the prayers as a mourner should.

When it was over and we went out to the graveyard, Mr Ranford had disappeared, and as soon as my poor mistress’s body was underground, Mr Brympton jumped into the carriage nearest the gate and drove off without a word to any of us. I heard him call out, “To the station,” and we servants went back alone to the house.

The Duenna

Marie Belloc Lowndes

Location:  Treville Place, Yorkshire.

Time:  January, 1925.

Eyewitness Description:  “She found with delight that Mrs Doray spoke excellent French and told her that if she heard strange sounds, or maybe a stifled sob, she was not to feel afraid, as it would only be the wraith of La Belle Julie expiating her sin where that sin had not only been committed but exulted in . . .”

Author:  Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868–1947) was as challenging and forward-looking in her fiction as her American contemporary Edith Wharton. The daughter of a radical mother and French barrister father, and sister of Hilaire Belloc, she grew up in a free-speaking household and had her first story published when she was just 16. An early champion of feminism and women’s rights, she became famous in 1913 with The Lodger, a fictionalized version of the Jack the Ripper murders which sold over a million copies. In 1919 she published a novel, The Lonely House, and several short stories about a short, stout, very vain former Paris Surété policeman turned private detective, Hercules Popeau. This rather pompous little man with his intense curiosity and keen insight into human nature has been suggested as a source of inspiration for Agatha Christie’s more famous Hercule Poirot, who made his debut in 1920. Be that as it may, Lowndes also wrote some very significant stories of “ghost feelers” like this tale of beautiful, neglected Laura Delacourt who finds her temptation to commit adultery tested by an unseen force that both entices and frightens her.

“Que vous me coutez cher, O, mon coeur, pour vos plaisirs.”

1

Laura Delacourt, after a long and gallant defence of what those who formed the old-fashioned world to which she belonged would have called her virtue, had capitulated to the entreaties of Julian Treville. They had been friends – from tomorrow they would be lovers.

As she lay enfolded in his arms, her head resting on his breast, while now and again their lips met in a trembling, clinging kiss, the strangest and, in some ways, the most incongruous thoughts flitted shadow-wise through her mind, mingled with terror at the possible, though not the probable, consequences of her surrender.

Her husband, Roger Delacourt, was thirty years older than herself. Though still a vigorous man, he had come to a time of life when even a vigorous man longs instinctively for warmth; so he had left London the day after Christmas Day to join a friend’s yacht for a month’s cruise in the Mediterranean. And now, just a week later, the wife whom he considered a negligible quantity in his self-indulgent, still agreeable existence, had consented to embark on what she knew must be a perilous adventure in a one-storied stone house, well named The Folly, built by Julian Treville’s great-grandfather.

Long, low, fantastic – it stood at the narrow end of a wide lake on the confines of his property; and a French dancer, known in the Paris of her day as La Belle Julie, had spent there a lifetime in exile.

Though Laura in her lover’s arms felt strangely at peace, her homing joy was threaded with terror. Constantly her thoughts reverted to her child, David, who, till the man who now held her so closely to him had come into her life, had been the only thing that made that then mournful life worth living.