The Mistress of Bedlow Hall
A Gothic short story
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Due to the germs currently galloping through our family, this bit of Saturday fiction is a few hours later than usual, so thank you for your patience!
The craggy hills were treacherous even by daylight. In the darkness and fog, when the mires were hidden, slick, hungry, and deep, one misstep spelled death. Those hills were no place for night travel and no place for a lady. I said as much to my unexpected visitor, for by her clothes and speech I knew she was no housekeeper or dairy maid.
She waved off my quiet scolding. “Only lend me use of your horse, and I’ll trouble you no further.”
I promised the horse for her borrowing but insisted on supplying her with dry clothing, which I pulled from the cedar chest packed with my late wife’s belongings. She’d had a warm dress, hearty enough for the wet and cold of the hills, and still in fair condition to offer to a stranger.
The stranger accepted with a sad smile, as if she guessed, by the lack of a woman’s presence in the cottage, the origin of the clothes. Promising to have the clothing sent back as soon as possible, she thanked me with a weary dignity at odds with her bedraggled hair, her mud-spattered clothes and one bare foot. She was clearly in the family way, a bulge below the middle of her soaked dress, and yet she had fled across desolate lands during the foggy night.
Gray early morning light crept through the cracks in the shutters, bringing with it the chilled scent of frosty wind. I added peat to the fire to coax it back to a strength that could rival the encroaching cold.
The woman cocked her head at the blaze, then sat and stretched her hands toward the flames. “I’m not so pressed for time as I was before,” she said quietly, “but I’ll not stay above an hour.”
“Where is it that you’ve come from, and where are you headed? The nearest house is Bedlow Hall, over four miles to the west, up by Peregrine Tor.”
“Only four miles,” she said, more to herself than to me. “I’ve walked far more than that. Wandering in circles, I must have been.”
“The mist rolled in mighty thick last night.”
“It did. Very suddenly too.”
“You were staying at Bedlow Hall?”
She looked up at me with sharp eyes, but after a moment the suspicion in them simmered down to an animal wariness. “Yes. I was staying there, after a fashion.”
I filled a kettle and slid it over the popping fire, waiting, letting the silence fill the cottage. A twinge of curiosity prodded within me, a sensation my grief-numbed mind hadn’t experienced in such a long, long time that at first I could not tell why I was suddenly fidgeting. But I stayed quiet and waited, waited for the woman to tell the story that was boiling within her, fit to overflow.
“He was on horseback,” she said suddenly, her voice still quiet, as though recounting the story to herself. “I could have sworn he was on horseback. I hadn’t yet been running for half an hour when I heard hoofbeats behind me. Then the mist came like an otherworldly swarm, and I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.”
“No good can come of being out in the fog, especially at night,” I said. “Even worse on horseback.”
“The hoofbeats seemed to come from everywhere, all around me, and I’d no idea which way to run,” she said, as though I hadn’t spoken. “I thought of the pixies, the spirits that superstitious old ladies claim lead travelers into bogs and over cliffs. I was afraid to move, for fear I’d tumble down the steep side of Peregrine Tor, which I knew was near. But I was more afraid of those hoofbeats coming closer. They came at me from one side, so I stumbled, blind, over the rocky ground. Then they seemed to come from another direction entirely, and I doubled back. Running in circles, again and again in the freezing, foggy darkness.”
“That mist’ll do things to sound,” I said. “Throw noises against the rocks ‘til it sounds like it’s coming from everywhere.”
The he, I warranted, was the gentleman of the Hall, though not much of a gentleman from the few accounts I’d heard. A harsh, tightfisted landlord and a surly, nasty sort of man. He was a big man, hardy and sturdy and strong, as different from the wispy woman before me as a leaf is from an oak tree. I’d heard he had a lady, though no one ever seemed to see her, even in the village. Could it be the mistress of Bedlow Hall herself who was my visitor?
“I kept hearing the coins clanking together in my pocket, striking against my conscience.” She stared into the fireplace, twisting her hands in her lap. Her face grew red, though whether from warmth or agitation I couldn’t tell. She didn’t look at me, didn’t look anywhere except the flames, her eyes fixed with a gleam that in its intensity was almost mad. Her words made little sense to me as she murmured them into the quiet. “But what was I to do? I’m little more than a slave; I had nothing of my own to take. What else was I to do?”
A screech escaped the kettle, and the woman jerked back, her notice turning outward again. Shaking her head, as though just remembering I was present, she watched me pour out two servings of tea.
Then, her face to the flames and a warm cup in her hands, she continued, more calmly. “You’ve experienced it, I’m sure, that uncanny feeling one gets when out of doors at night, that sensation of being watched. I fancied I felt it, then, though surely it was nothing more than the mist and darkness and the anxiety of the moment. And yet it has been so long since my imagination had leisure to run away with me. I’d thought my imagination long since dead, so I didn’t recognize the foolish sensation for the whimsy that it was.”
“I shouldn’t be so quick to call it whimsy, ma’am,” I said. I did not consider myself a superstitious man, but a life in these hills had taught me caution when speaking of otherworldly things.
She frowned, still looking into the fire rather than at me, and we sat in the thin, crackling warmth as the gray light turned to pale, wintry yellow.
At last, she spoke again, squeezing the untouched cup of tea in her cold-chapped hands. “I could no longer hear the hoofbeats, and I thought I’d lost him, that he’d given up or become as turned around in the mist as I was. I began to think of finding a small shelter in the rocks, a place to hide from the wind until morning, when I missed my footing, and my boot slipped into a thick, squelching mire.”
I fought back a gasp. That was a nightmare of mine, to fall into a bog, alone and trapped, with no hope of rescue in this isolated, windswept place, my body never discovered, mummified by the pressed, decaying plant corpses. To drown in the muck or to die slowly of starvation, my calls for help unheard – I didn’t know which I feared more.
“It was only my foot,” she said, “and I managed to yank it out, though I lost my shoe somewhere in the mist and the bog. But he must have let the horse go fleeing back to the Hall, knowing that I would hear him coming. He must have been lying in wait, silent, listening for my lost, wandering footsteps. Because when my foot popped free of the sucking mud, I felt his hands snatch my dress, my arm. I knew I’d lost, that he’d drag me back, and I’d never again have a moment’s opportunity of escape.”
The tea turned cold in my throat, and I coughed. A strange, terrible image had appeared in my mind, as clear and stark as if it was before my very eyes – a small, mud-covered shoe lost beside the mire –
And a hand, white as death, outstretched from the muck and grasping for a deliverance that would never come.
The woman waited while I coughed and gasped and cleared my throat, an odd expression on her tilted face.
“And what happened?” I said through the lingering splutter. “Where is your husband now?”
She was silent for several minutes, her mind ticking behind her mild eyes, the same watery blue as a summer river reflecting a cloudless sky. Too mild, somehow, like an unwrinkled veil concealing a roiling storm. The worry in her face slowly slipped away, and she looked to me older, more composed, not a cold and frightened girl spewing out a harrowing tale but a woman, sure and steady.
“I’ve no idea,” she said, the dreaminess gone from her voice. There was a pert, clipped certainty to her tone now, the breathless, exhausted fear replaced by authority. “I heard nothing more of him once the hoofbeats disappeared. The grasping hands must have been my imagination, for the sensation disappeared after a moment. Perhaps some gorse bushes caught at my dress, or perhaps the old ladies of the parish are right about mischievous spirits. Freed, I crawled from the small ditch into which I had wandered, and I searched through the hills until the morning light cleared away the mist and revealed your home.”
The woman’s story tumbled through my head, a disturbing conglomeration of dark, dangerous images and unspoken words. I do not know how long I sat, caught up in uneasy thoughts, before the woman stood.
“I will have someone bring back your horse and these clothes, with my most grateful thanks, once I return home,” she said. “I shall not trouble you with any further ill-advised nighttime wanderings. But I said I would not stay above an hour, and I have four miles to go before I will be safely back at Bedlow Hall.”
“Suppose someone from the Hall should come searching for your husband, ma’am, if he did not return?” I said as I stood to fetch the horse. “What am I to tell them?”
“There is nothing to tell. I have repented of my foolish venture of last night, and I have no knowledge of what befell my husband after he pursued me into the moors.”
The woman disappeared over the windswept hills, riding my horse toward the Hall, and after an interval I turned my steps in the same direction, toward the treacherous, boggy moor. A nasty suspicion ate at me, a thought I would not name.
In those hilltops were furrows with nowhere for water to drain, and the hungry muck changed shape and place with the weather, forever a moving hazard lying in wait for unsuspecting travelers. At night, and in the sudden concealing mist, those hills were a lonely death trap.
As I made my way up a hill, the wind howled and wailed through the grass like a voice, a human scream. It was a noise I’d heard many times before, and yet I shivered. Uncanny, it was, like the shriek of a desperate man echoed on the breeze.
In a ditch, the frosty heather gave way to slick, shining moss, beneath which I knew was mire, generations of decaying plants and dead creatures, forever ravenous. I traversed the edge of the ditch with slow steps, careful of my footing, and the same wailing wind rushed around me like a death cry.
What I was looking for I did not know, but I tramped along the ridge of the hill, my eyes searching, my ears following the unearthly screaming gale.
Then, suddenly, the wail died away, though the gusts continued to whip around me. I walked further in the direction of the Hall, then paused, resolved on turning back from my foolish, impulsive errand.
But something caught my eye, an odd shape beside the stretch of camouflaged bog. A small boot, a thick layer of black mud reaching to its ankle. I crept closer, squinting through the last remnants of the mist.
Yes, it was a boot, perhaps the same my visitor claimed to have lost. The size would be about right. Satisfied, I straightened up to return to my warm fireplace, when the wintry sunlight caught on something white against the black muck.
Skin, splattered with mud. Deathly white, a hand outstretched in a last hopeless reach for aid.
I skittered closer, struggling to ignore the lurch of my stomach. The hand was large and sinewy and was still sinking, bit by bit. And it was not stiff.
The hand was limp, newly dead.
The wail I’d heard, that had led me up into the hills – perhaps it had been more than just the wind.
Whirling round, I turned my gaze toward the distant Hall, concealed and tucked within mist and rolling hills. At the edge of my vision, from my wide vantage point, was a tiny dot of a figure, moving across the heather-dotted moor. My horse and its rider, the mistress of Bedlow Hall.
Thank you so much for taking time to read “The Mistress of Bedlow Hall”! If you enjoyed this story, feel free to let me know with a like, comment or restack, and tune in next week for more Naptime Novelist fiction.
The next installment in Judith Temple’s paranormal mystery series will appear in late March, so stay tuned for more on that in the coming weeks!
While recovering from the physical and emotional toll caused by her most recent case, Judith Temple decides to switch gears and take a stab at working as a paranormal investigator. When she receives a plea for help from a family who claims their house is haunted, Judith throws herself into the case, determined to get to the bottom of both the eerie happenings in the little home and also her own hopes and feelings regarding Sheriff Tim Morrissey.
The first season of Judith’s story, Down in the Holler, is currently behind a paywall, but it will soon (!) be available in book form. In the lead-up to Murmurs in the Walls, I will also bring Down in the Holler out from behind a paywall for a limited time to allow new readers to catch up!
Beasts of the Field, the second season, is freely available here on Substack.
Someone's been reading Wuthering Heights 👀. Very eerie. ❤️
Excellent story. It has a great Poe feel.