A Ghost Story of the Norfolk Broads Page 2
Towards half-ten, we decided to turn in. We'd had a long day, and we wanted to start early the next day. It was almost silent as we rowed back across the river; just the sound of our oars splashing in the water, and a bird calling like a lost soul. I think it was a curlew; but Matt and I are both townies, and we couldn't really tell.
We slept well till about two in the morning, when a sudden noise woke us. I'm still not sure what it was, perhaps a wind-driven wave against the hull, or a bird landing in the water. Matt had heard it too, and suggested we take a look outside.
There's always something a bit threatening about being moored up in the wild, with no other boats around, and hearing a noise in the small hours, so I was happy to agree to his suggestion.
The sky had cleared while we were asleep; the moonlight was bright on the water. It was a clear night, and cold; a month later, and it would have been frosty. There was a smell of burning in the air, as if someone had started a bonfire. Across the river, the windows of the pub glowed orange; the fire must still be blazing up. A lock-in, perhaps.
It was just as we were ready to go below again that we heard the hiss of oars softly feathered in water. A man was rowing across the river from the pub; we couldn't tell who at this distance, perhaps the landlord, or perhaps a customer who had arrived after we'd left.
When he reached the bank, he got out, and looked back across to the pub; and then he let the boat go, which we thought odd. It began to drift in the river; and he set off across the marshes, walking quickly, sometimes half tripping in the dark. Not drunk, but perhaps a little the worse for wear; and the clarity of moonlight can be deceptive sometimes, concealing more than it shows.
The alarm woke us early the next morning, before dawn had properly arrived. Matt has faster reactions than me, and he usually manages to catch the alarm clock in between the click that signals the engagement of the mechanism and the atrociously loud ringing of the bell. But this time, he wasn't fast enough, and the noise tore into the silent morning.
We ate breakfast quickly. It was cold and a little damp, so I cooked up some beans with fried bread; not healthy, I know, but we had no means of making toast on the boat. I threw a bit of chorizo we had left into the beans; so it might not have been a gourmet meal, but it was interesting. Anyway, that's not really the point.
We were marooned in fog. Even though by the time we'd percolated our coffees and drunk them the mist was beginning to spiral off the river, we could only see the other bank in patches; no sign of the pub. A pity, as it had been too dark to notice its name last night, and though it wasn't worth recommending to friends, it was intriguing that it wasn't in any of the guidebooks.
The mist seemed to cling to the boat that morning; it deadened all sound, so that we could hear almost nothing except the blurry chug of our motor. All around us was empty, soft white; it didn't clear till we had got well past Acle. In the end we decided not to carry on; instead, we stayed at Upton, and spent the evening in the White Horse.
The landlord here was much chattier than the couple of the night before. He was a mine of local information, too. He told us how the writer Chateaubriand had become a French tutor in Beccles, hiding out from the worst excesses of the Terror, and enjoyed a mild affair with a local girl till she found out about his wife; how the swans of the Broads were marked for each owner with nicks on their bills, and how the Master of the Great Hospital in Norwich ate swan at the major feasts, and how the Hospital still had a gruesome machine for quartering the birds; and how the squint in the tower of Thurne church looked directly out to St Benet's, but for what reason no one knew.
And eventually we asked about that isolated pub. Somewhere between Acle and Stracey Arms, on the southern side of the river, exactly where, we couldn't tell.
“It's not on the map at all,” Matt said. “But there's a pub there, isn't there?”
“Not any more,” the landlord said, shooting Matt a curious glance. “There was a pub there, the Silent Woman, but it burned down in about 1910.”
“Not rebuilt?” I asked.
“It wasn't worth it, once the wherries had stopped trading. I think the brewer just let it crumble. There are a few walls left, under bramble bushes, and there's a wild rose bush that might go back to the days of the old pub. That's about it.”
I looked at Matt, and Matt looked at me, and we both shivered as if someone had drawn a cold fingertip down our backs. (I know he did; he told me later.)
“I've got the newspaper reports somewhere. I do keep quite a few curios here. From what I remember, the couple that ran it had been running into problems. Maisie and Ernest Howson, I remember their names were. She'd got herself involved with a wherryman who used to call into the pub, and they quarrelled, and some people said he'd run off across the marshes and got caught by the lantern man. But others said he'd moved to Gorleston to run a pub there. Who knows. Anyway, the relationship between Ernest and Maisie went from bad to worse and by the time of the fire, they were hardly speaking to one another.”
“What happened to them? Did they get another pub?”
“Ah, there's the mystery. They found her body in the pub. But they never found his.”
I thought of the way the husband had laid those logs by the fire. And then I thought of that figure we saw slipping through the marshes, and the way he'd set the little boat adrift.
“So the wife died. And the husband escaped.”
“The wife? Oh, I see, both being called Howson, it's an easy conclusion. No, not quite; Maisie was his sister.”
We've been on the Broads for a few holidays since then. Matt's taste in photography hasn't got any better, and my waist hasn't got any thinner, but we still take a boat out of Stalham every year for our summer holiday. We make a point, though, of mooring up early; and we never stop between Stracey Arms and Stokesby.
About the Author
A M Kirkby writes fantasy, SF, and historical fiction, as well as children's books.
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