Tuppence abandoned her researches on Mr Boscowan to go along with an opinion on the Perrys. It was, she perceived, always better to go along with Mrs Copleigh who was a jumper from subject to subject.
‘Queer couple they are,’ said Mrs Copleigh.
George made his agreeing sound.
‘Keep themselves to themselves, they do. Don’t mingle much, as you’d say. And she goes about looking like nothing on earth, Alice Perry does.’
‘Mad,’ said Mr Copleigh.
‘Well, I don’t know as I’d say that. She looks mad all right.
All that scatty hair flying about. And she wears men’s coats and great rubber boots most of the time. And she says odd things and doesn’t sometimes answer you right when you ask her a question. But I wouldn’t say she was mad. Peculiar, that’s all.’ ‘Do people like her?’
‘Nobody knows her hardly, although they’ve been there several years. There’s all sorts of tales about her but then, there’s always tales.’
‘What sort of tales?’
Direct questions were never resented by Mrs Copleigh, who welcomed them as one who was only too eager to answer.
‘Calls up spirits, they say, at night. Sitting round a table.
And there’s stories of lights moving about the house at night.
· And she reads a lot of clever books, they say. With things drawn in them – circles and stars. If you ask me, it’s Amos Perry as is the one that’s not quite all right.’
‘He’s just simple,’ said Mr Copleigh indulgently.
‘Well, you may be right about that. But there were tales said of him once. Fond of his garden, but doesn’t know much.’
‘It’s only halfa house though, isn’t it?’ said Tuppence. ‘Mrs Perry asked me in very kindly.’
‘Did she now? Did she really? I don’t know as I’d have liked to go into that house,’ said Mrs Copleigh.
‘Their part of it’s all right,’ said Mr Copleigh.
‘Isn’t the other part all right?’ said Tuppence. ‘The front part that gives on the canal.’
‘Well, there used to be a lot of stories about it. Of course, nobody’s lived in it for years. They say there’s something queer about it. Lot of stories told. But when you come down to it, it’s not stories.in anybody’s memory here. It’s all long ago. It was built over a hundred years ago, you know. They say as there was a pretty lady kept there first, built for her, it was, by one of the gentlemen at Court.’
‘Queen Victoria’s Court?’ asked Tuppence with interest.
‘I don’t think it would be her. She was particular, the old Queen was. No, I’d say it was before that. Time of one of them Georges. This gentlemen, he used to come down and see her and the story goes that they had a quarrel and he cut her throat one night.’
‘How terrible!’ said Tuppence. ‘Did they hang him for it?’ ‘No. Oh no, there was nothing of that sort. The story is, you see, that he had to get rid of the body and he walled her up in the fireplace.’
‘Wailed her up in the fireplace!’ ‘Some ways they tell it, they say she was a nun, and she had run away from a convent and that’s why she had to be wailed up. That’s what they do at convents.’
‘But it wasn’t nuns who walled her up.’
‘No, no. He did it. Her lover, what had done her in. And he bricked up all the fireplace, they say, and nailed a big sheet of iron over it. Anyway, she was never seen again, poor soul, walking about in her frae dresses. Some said, of course, she’d gone away with him. Gone away to live in town or back to some other place. People used to hear noises and see lights in the house, and a lot of people don’t go near it after dark.’
‘But what happened later?’ said Tuppence, feeling that to go back beyond the reign of Queen Victoria seemed a little too far into the past for what she was looking for.
‘Well, I don’t rightly know as there was very much. A farmer called Blodgick took it over when it came up for sale, I believe.