The Tiled House

Above all, Le Fanu established what we can now judge to be the correct and most effective narrational mode for ghost fiction, a descriptive method in which precision and ambivalence are held in balance by the voice of a detached narrator. This potent blend of objective reportage and careful manipulation of the reader’s responses is characteristic of Le Fanu’s style at its best. Take this passage from ‘Schalken the Painter’ describing the horrendous Vanderhausen, a passage that juxtaposes half-glimpses and indirection with images of terrible clarity:

A quantity of grizzled hair descended in long tresses from his head, and rested upon the plaits of a stiff ruff, which effectually concealed his neck. So far all was well; but the face! – all the flesh was coloured with the bluish leaden hue, which is sometimes produced by metallic medicines, administered in excessive quantities; the eyes showed an undue proportion of muddy white, and had a certain indefinable character of insanity; the hue of the lips bearing the usual relation to that of the face, was sensual, malignant, and even satanic … There was something indescribably odd, even horrible, about all his motions, something undefinable, that was unnatural, unhuman; it was as if the limbs were guided and directed by a spirit unused to the management of bodily machinery.

The world in which Le Fanu’s characters – many of them victims – move is a hostile one, threatened both from without and within. Whereas many later ghost-story writers – M.R. James amongst them – wrote from an ostensible desire to entertain (the American writer Edith Wharton once spoke of ‘the fun of the shudder’), Le Fanu’s motives are altogether more enigmatic and complex. No reader of Le Fanu’s ghost stories can escape the conclusion that private anguish, in some degree, informs these public fictions. The stories are surrounded by an infinity of outer darkness, whilst at their heart is a similarly inpenetrable and menacing inner mystery. The closest Le Fanu came to articulating an explanatory metaphysic was through the character of Captain Barton in ‘The Familiar’, who confesses to Dr Macklin:

I am deeply and horribly convinced, that there does exist beyond this a spiritual world – a system whose workings are generally in mercy hidden from us – a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. I am sure – I know … that there is a God – a dreadful God – and that retribution follows guilt, in ways the most mysterious and stupendous – by agencies the most inexplicable and terrific; – there is a spiritual system – great God, how I have been convinced! – a system malignant, and implacable, and omnipotent …

Just as the ghost story and the tale of detection are related literary forms, so Le Fanu’s work encompassed mystery as well as supernatural fiction: indeed elements of the mystery story frequently invade his ghost stories, and vice versa, whilst a pure ghost story like ‘Madam Crowl’s Ghost’ is found within the mystery novel A Strange Adventure in the Life of Miss Laura Mildmay (1871).

Though Le Fanu’s reputation is principally as a ghost-story writer, the bulk of his fiction actually falls within the Victorian mystery genre. One particular situation that fascinated him – and of which he was an early, probably the first, exponent – was the sealed-room/isolated-room mystery, the possibilities of which were explored in ‘Some Account of the Latter Days of the Hon. Richard Marston of Dunoran’ (DUM, 1848), later modified as ‘The Evil Guest’ (Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, 1851) and expanded into the novel A Lost Name (1868). The motif is also used in ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’, a tale of the Wilkie Collins type that E.F. Bleiler rightly called ‘easily one of the best mystery-adventure stories of the nineteenth century’.

Le Fanu’s stories – be they ghost stories or tales of mystery – are of the good old-fashioned type, best enjoyed in the sort of setting he himself described: ‘the old-fashioned parlour fire-side and its listening circle of excited faces, and, outside, the wintry blast and the moan of leafless boughs, with an occasional rattle of the clumsy old window-frame behind the shutter and curtain, as the blast [sweeps] by …’. The possibilities for the literary critic of Le Fanu’s stories are one thing; their success as stories to be enjoyed, savoured, and shivered at is another, and for most modern readers it is Le Fanu’s power as a storyteller and descriptive writer that will be appreciated most. This was principally what M.R. James admired about him:

As to his peculiar power: I think the origin of it is not far to seek. Le Fanu had both French and Irish blood in his veins, and in his works I seem to see both strains coming out, though the Irish predominates. The indefinable melancholy which the air of Ireland and its colouring inspire – a melancholy which inspires many Irish writers – is caught by Le Fanu and fixed in words with an almost complete success. He dwells very fondly and very frequently on sunset scenes over a horizon of dark hanging woods, on moonlight shining on a winding river with wooded banks, on a heavily-timbered park, a black tarn in a lonely glen, an old air heard in the distance at night, a ruined chapel or manor-house, a torchlight funeral in a gloomy church. Pictures like these strike his fancy and he makes them stand out for his readers.[14]

And so, draw the curtains; pull your chair towards the fire: Schalken, Madam Crowl, Squire. Toby, Captain Walshawe, Mr Justice Harbottle and the rest await you. And when at last you put the book down and return to the ‘real’ world you may perhaps be inclined to reflect on the words of Sir Victor Pritchett: ‘The evil of the justified ghost is not sportive, wilful, involuntary or extravagant. In Le Fanu the fright is that effect follows cause.’[15]

Be warned.

Michael Cox

Denford, Northamptonshire

April 1988

GHOST STORIES OF THE TILED HOUSE

I

Old Sally always attended her young mistress while she prepared for bed – not that Lilias required help, for she had the spirit of neatness and a joyous, gentle alacrity, and only troubled the good old creature enough to prevent her thinking herself grown old and useless.

Sally, in her quiet way, was garrulous, and she had all sorts of old-world tales of wonder and adventure, to which Lilias often went pleasantly to sleep; for there was no danger while old Sally sat knitting there by the fire, and the sound of the rector’s mounting upon his chairs, as was his wont, and taking down and putting up his books in the study beneath, though muffled and faint, gave evidence that that good and loving influence was awake and busy.

Old Sally was telling her young mistress, who sometimes listened with a smile, and sometimes lost a good five minutes together of her gentle prattle, how the young gentleman, Mr Mervyn, had taken that awful old haunted habitation, the Tiled House ‘beyant at Ballyfermot’, and was going to stay there, and wondered no one had told him of the mysterious dangers of that desolate mansion.

It stood by a lonely bend of the narrow road. Lilias had often looked up the short, straight, grass-grown avenue with an awful curiosity at the old house which she had learned in childhood to fear as the abode of shadowy tenants and unearthly dangers.

‘There are people, Sally, now-a-days, who call themselves freethinkers, and don’t believe in any thing – even in ghosts,’ said Lilias.

‘A then the place he’s stopping in now, Miss Lilly, ’ill soon cure him of freethinking, if the half they say about it’s true,’ answered Sally.

‘But I don’t say, mind, he’s a freethinker, for I don’t know any thing of Mr Mervyn; but if he be not, he must be very brave, or very good, indeed. I know, Sally, I should be horribly afraid, indeed, to sleep in it myself,’ answered Lilias, with a cosy little shudder, as the aërial image of the old house for a moment stood before her, with its peculiar malign, scared, and skulking aspect, as if it had drawn back in shame and guilt among the melancholy old elms and tall hemlock and nettles.

‘And now, Sally, I’m safe in bed. Stir the fire, my old darling.’ For although it was the first week in May, the night was frosty. ‘And tell me about the Tiled House again, and frighten me out of my wits.’

So good old Sally, whose faith in such matters was a religion, went off over the well-known ground in a gentle little amble – sometimes subsiding into a walk as she approached some special horror, and pulling up altogether – that is to say, suspending her knitting, and looking with a mysterious nod at her young mistress in the four-poster, or lowering her voice to a sort of whisper when the crisis came.

So she told her how when the neighbours hired the orchard that ran up to the windows at the back of the house, the dogs they kept then used to howl so wildly and wolfishly all night among the trees, and prowl under the walls of the house so dejectedly, that they were fain to open the door and let them in at last; and, indeed, small need there was there for dogs; for no one, young or old, dared go near the orchard after night-fall. No, the golden pippins that peeped so splendid through the leaves in the western rays of evening, and made the mouths of the Ballyfermot schoolboys water, glowed undisturbed in the morning sunbeams, and secure in the mysterious tutelage of the night, smiled coyly on their predatory longings. And this was no fanciful reserve and avoidance. Mick Daly, when he had the orchard, used to sleep in the loft over the kitchen; and he swore that within five or six weeks, while he lodged there, he twice saw the same thing, and that was a lady in a hood and a loose dress, her head drooping, and her finger on her lip, walking in silence among the crooked stems, with a little child by the hand, who ran smiling and skipping beside her. And the Widow Cresswell once met them at night-fall on the path through the orchard to the back-door, and she did not know what it was until she saw the men looking at one another as she told it.

‘It’s often she told it to me,’ said old Sally; ‘and how she came on them all of a sudden at the turn of the path, just by the thick clump of alder trees; and how she stopped, thinking it was some lady that had a right to be there; and how they went by as swift as the shadow of a cloud, though she only seemed to be walking slow enough, and the little child pulling by her arm, this way and that way, and took no notice of her, nor even raised her head, though she stopped and curtsied. And old Clinton, don’t you remember old Clinton, Miss Lilly?’

‘I think I do, the old man who limped, and wore the odd black wig?’

‘Yes, indeed, acushla, so he did. See how well she remembers? That was by a kick of one of the earl’s horses – he was groom then,’ resumed Sally. ‘He used to be troubled with hearing the very sounds his master used to make to bring him and old Oliver to the door, when he came back late. It was only on very dark nights when there was no moon. They used to hear, all on a sudden, the whimpering and scraping of dogs at the hall-door, and the sound of the whistle, and the light stroke across the window with the lash of the whip, just like as if the earl himself – may his poor soul find rest – was there. First the wind ’id stop, like you’d be holding your breath, then came these sounds they knew so well, and when they made no sign of stirring or opening the door, the wind ’id begin again with such a hoo-hoo-o-o-high, you’d think it was laughing, and crying, and hooting, all at once.’

Here old Sally resumed her knitting, suspended for a moment, as if she were listening to the wind outside the haunted precincts of the Tiled House, and she took up her parable again.

‘The very night he met his death in London, old Oliver, the butler, was listening to Clinton – for Clinton was a scholar – reading the letter that came to him through the post that day, telling him to get things ready, for his troubles were nearly over, and he expected to be with them again in a few days, and maybe almost as soon as the letter; and sure enough, while he was reading, there came a frightful rattle to the window, like some one all in a tremble, trying to shake it open, and the earl’s voice, as they both conceited, cries from the outside, “Let me in, let me in, let me in!” “It’s him,” says the butler. “’Tis so, bedad,” says Clinton, and they both looked at the windy, and at one another – and then back again – overjoyed and frightened all at onst. Old Oliver was bad with the rheumatiz in his knee, and went lame like. So away goes Clinton to the hall-door, and he calls, who’s there? and no answer. Maybe, says Clinton, to himself, ’tis what he’s rid round to the back-door; so to the back-door with him, and there he shouts again – and no answer, and not a sound outside – and he began to feel quare, and to the hall-door with him back again. “Who’s there? do you hear, who’s there?” he shouts, and receiving no answer still. “I’ll open the door at any rate,” says he, “maybe it’s what he’s made his escape,” for they knew all about his troubles, “and wants to get in without noise,” so praying all the time – for his mind misgave him, it might not be all right – he shifts the bars and unlocks the door; but neither man, woman, nor child, nor horse, nor any living shape, was standing there, only something or another slipt into the house close by his leg; it might be a dog, or something that way, he could not tell, for he only seen it for a moment with the corner of his eye, and it went in just like as if it belonged to the place. He could not see which way it went, up or down, but the house was never a happy one, or a quiet house after; and Clinton bangs the hall-door, and he took a sort of a turn and a thrembling, and back with him to Oliver, the butler, looking as white as the blank leaf of his master’s letter that was flutering between his finger and thumb. “What is it? what is it?” says the butler, catching his crutch like a waypon, fastening his eyes on Clinton’s white face, and growing almost as pale himself. “The master’s dead,” says Clinton – and so he was, signs on it.

‘After the turn she got by what she seen in the orchard, when she came to know the truth of what it was, Jinny Cresswell, you may be sure, did not stay there any longer than she could help; and she began to take notice of things she did not mind before – such as when she went into the big bedroom over the hall that the lord used to sleep in, whenever she went in at one door the other door used to be pulled to very quick, as if some one avoiding her was getting out in haste; but the thing that frightened her most was just this – that sometimes she used to find a long, straight mark from the head to the foot of her bed, as if ’twas made by something heavy lying there, and the place where it was used to feel warm, as if – whoever it was – they only left it as she came into the room.

‘But the worst of all was poor Kitty Halpin, the young woman that died of what she seen. Her mother said it was how she was kept awake all the night with the walking about of some one in the next room, tumbling about boxes and pulling open drawers and talking and sighing to himself, and she, poor thing, wishing to go to sleep and wondering who it could be, when in he comes, a fine man, in a sort of loose silk morning-dress an’ no wig, but a velvet cap on, and to the windy with him quiet and aisy, and she makes a turn in the bed to let him know there was some one there, thinking he’d go away, but instead of that, over he comes to the side of the bed, looking very bad, and says something to her – but his speech was thick and queer, like a dummy’s that ’id be trying to spake – and she grew very frightened, and says she, “I ask your honour’s pardon, sir, but I can’t hear you right,” and with that he stretches up his neck high out of his cravat, turning his face up towards the ceiling, and – grace between us and harm! – his throat was cut across like another mouth, wide open, laughing at her; she seen no more, but dropped in a dead faint in the bed, and back to her mother with her in the morning, and she never swallied bit or sup more, only she just sat by the fire holding her mother’s hand, crying and trembling, and peepin’ over her shoulder, and starting with every sound, till she took the fever and died, poor thing, not five weeks after.’—

And so on, and on, and on flowed the stream of old Sally’s narrative, while Lilias dropped into a dreamless sleep, and then the story-teller stole away to her own tidy bedroom and innocent slumbers.

II

I’m sure she believed every word she related, for old Sally was veracious. But all this was worth just so much as such talk commonly is – marvels, fabulae, what our ancestors call winter’s tales – which gathered details from every narrator and dilated in the act of narration. Still it was not quite for nothing that the house was held to be haunted. Under all this smoke there smouldered just a little spark of truth – an authenticated mystery, for the solution of which some of my readers may possibly suggest a theory, though I confess I can’t.

Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, in a letter dated late in the autumn of 1753, gives a minute and curious relation of occurrences in the Tiled House, which, it is plain, although at starting she protests against all such fooleries, she has heard with a peculiar sort of interest, and relates it certainly with an awful sort of particularity.

I was for printing the entire letter, which is really very singular as well as characteristic. But my publisher meets me with his veto; and I believe he is right. The worthy old lady’s letter is, perhaps, too long; and I must rest content with a few hungry notes of its tenor.

That year, and somewhere about the 24th October, there broke out a strange dispute between Mr Alderman Harper, of High-street, Dublin, and my Lord Castlemallard, who, in virtue of his cousinship to the young heir’s mother, had undertaken for him the management of the tiny estate on which the Tiled or Tyled House – for I find it spelt both ways – stood.

This Alderman Harper had agreed for a lease of the house for his daughter, who was married to a gentleman named Prosser. He furnished it and put up hangings, and otherwise went to considerable expense. Mr and Mrs Prosser came there some time in June, and after having parted with a good many servants in the interval, she made up her mind that she could not live in the house, and her father waited on Lord Castlemallard and told him plainly that he would not take out the lease because the house was subjected to annoyances which he could not explain. In plain terms, he said it was haunted, and that no servants would live there more than a few weeks, and that after what his son-in-law’s family had suffered there, not only should he be excused from taking a lease of it, but that the house itself ought to be pulled down as a nuisance and the habitual haunt of something worse than human malefactors.

Lord Castlemallard filed a bill in the Equity side of Exchequer to compel Mr Alderman Harper to perform his contract, by taking out the lease. But the alderman drew an answer, supported by no less than seven long affidavits, copies of all which were furnished to his lordship, and with the desired effect; for rather than compel him to place them upon the file of the court, his lordship struck, and consented to release him.

I am sorry the cause did not proceed at least far enough to place upon the records of the court the very authentic and unaccountable story which Miss Rebecca relates.

The annoyances described did not begin till the end of August, when, one evening, Mrs Prosser, quite alone, was sitting in the twilight at the back parlour window, which was open, looking out into the orchard, and plainly saw a hand stealthily placed upon the stone windowsill outside, as if by some one beneath the window, at her right side, intending to climb up. There was nothing but the hand, which was rather short, but handsomely formed, and white and plump, laid on the edge of the windowsill; and it was not a very young hand, but one aged, somewhere above forty, as she conjectured. It was only a few weeks before that the horrible robbery at Clondalkin had taken place, and the lady fancied that the hand was that of one of the miscreants who was now about to scale the windows of the Tiled House. She uttered a loud scream and an ejaculation of terror, and at the same moment the hand was quietly withdrawn.

Search was made in the orchard, but there were no indications of any person’s having been under the window, beneath which, ranged along the wall, stood a great column of flower-pots, which it seemed must have prevented any one’s coming within reach of it.

The same night there came a hasty tapping, every now and then, at the window of the kitchen. The women grew frightened, and the servant-man, taking fire-arms with him, opened the back-door, but discovered nothing. As he shut it, however, he said ‘a thump came on it’, and a pressure as of somebody striving to force his way in, which frightened him; and though the tapping went on upon the kitchen window-panes, he made no further explorations.

About six o’clock on Saturday evening, the cook, ‘an honest, sober woman, now aged nigh sixty years’, being alone in the kitchen, saw, on looking up, it is supposed, the same fat but aristocratic-looking hand laid with its palm against the glass, near the side of the window, and this time moving slowly up and down, pressed all the while against the glass, as if feeling carefully for some inequality in its surface. She cried out, and said something like a prayer, on seeing it. But it was not withdrawn for several seconds after.

After this, for a great many nights, there came at first a low, and afterwards an angry rapping, as it seemed with a set of clenched knuckles, at the back-door. And the servant-man would not open it, but called to know who was there; and there came no answer, only a sound as if the palm of the hand was placed against it, and drawn slowly from side to side, with a sort of soft, groping motion.

All this time, sitting in the back parlour, which, for the time, they used as a drawing-room, Mr and Mrs Prosser were disturbed by rappings at the window, sometimes very low and furtive, like a clandestine signal, and at others sudden and so loud as to threaten the breaking of the pane.

This was all at the back of the house, which looked upon the orchard, as you know. But on a Tuesday night, at about half-past nine, there came precisely the same rapping at the hall-door, and went on, to the great annoyance of the master and terror of his wife, at intervals, for nearly two hours.

After this, for several days and nights, they had no annoyance whatsoever, and began to think that the nuisance had expended itself. But on the night of the 13th September, Jane Easterbrook, an English maid, having gone into the pantry for the small silver bowl in which her mistress’s posset was served, happening to look up at the little window of only four panes, observed through an auger-hole which was drilled through the window-frame, for the admission of a bolt to secure the shutter, a white pudgy finger – first the tip, and then the two first joints introduced, and turned about this way and that, crooked against the inside, as if in search of a fastening which its owner designed to push aside. When the maid got back into the kitchen, we are told ‘she fell into “A swounde”, and was all the next day very weak.’

Mr Prosser being, I’ve heard, a hard-headed and conceited sort of fellow, scouted the ghost, and sneered at the fears of his family. He was privately of opinion that the whole affair was a practical joke or a fraud, and waited an opportunity of catching the rogue flagrante delicto. He did not long keep this theory to himself, but let it out by degrees with no stint of oaths and threats, believing that some domestic traitor held the thread of the conspiracy.

Indeed it was time something were done; for not only his servants, but good Mrs Prosser herself, had grown to look unhappy and anxious, and kept at home from the hour of sunset, and would not venture about the house after nightfall, except in couples.