Eloise – A Ghost Story for Christmas

‘Stand still Adolphus do’ scolded Daphne Bridger-Davies as she brushed an imaginary speck of dust off the shoulder of his green velvet jacket.

She had endlessly pored over the illustration of Queen Victoria and her family standing around their Christmas Tree in the Illustrated London News, and was determined that as this was their very first Festive Season residing in Attlewood Hall that she too would have a similar picture of her own family to show off. After all if it was how the Queen chose to celebrate Christmas, then it would be what Daphne Bridger-Davies did too. So having had the tallest, finest fir tree brought in from the estate and the most expensive coloured glass ornaments and tinsel ordered from a very fine emporium in London to decorate it, Mrs Bridger-Davies was vainly attempting to coax her family into posing in front of the magically transformed tree for the fashionable photographer that she had brought in from nearby Bristol. But Ernest would keep huffing, stamping his feet and flicking open his pocket watch irritably, as he wanted to be away to a meeting at his factory and, of course, her darling Adolphus seemed unable to stand still for more than a minute at a time.

Only little Amabel was standing as she should, gazing shyly at the camera and looking like a fairy child in her daintily embroidered muslin frock tied with a wide blue velvet sash. This was the very first Christmas tree that she had ever seen and she had watched it being dragged into the great hall with eyes like saucers and had insisted on choosing where every single jewel-like glass bauble was to be hung on the fragrant green boughs. Her ever indulgent father had even lifted her high in his arms so that she could place the star on the very top and, under the close supervision of Nurse; she had been allowed to light some of the little white candles.

Eventually Mrs Bridger-Davies was as satisfied as she ever would be with the tableau that they had formed, and gave the photographer the signal with her hand. The old great hall was illumined by a huge burst of light and the Bridger-Davies’s were caught on film lined up in front of their very first Christmas tree in their new home for all eternity.

Ernest didn’t give his exasperated wife any time to be dissatisfied with the photograph and strode off down the wide stone steps to jump into his carriage, and Adolphus also ran away immediately to don a warm jacket and grab his skates, giving no thought to his best clothes or his tutor patiently waiting for him in the school room.

Only Amabel seemed in no hurry to rush away to the dolls and teddies waiting for her in the warm fastness of her new nursery. She stood entranced, gazing at all the spun glass balls, carved wooden toys, and the way that the gentle light from the candles glinted off the silver and gold of the tinsel. She already knew exactly how many ornaments there were on the tree, and currently her favourite was a brightly painted carving of a soldier in a red coat that was banging on a drum. She allowed her eyes to drift all over the entrancing Christmas Tree, checking that all the ornaments were hanging from the right branches and that Betsy the parlour maid hadn’t moved any of them. She suddenly stopped her examination and frowned. She had spotted something that hadn’t been there before; something that probably had no right to be hanging from her Christmas tree.

She cautiously reached in and unhooked the interloper from where it had been hung on one of the lower branches and carefully wriggled it out, so that she wouldn’t be scratched by the rough pine needles. Her fingers touched the smooth nap of worn velvet, and as she pulled it out she could see that it was a small stuffed heart in faded red velvet, rather like a small pin cushion. It had been hung on the tree with a piece of gold thread, but this seemed to be new and rather hastily attached.

‘Whatever are you doing, Miss Amabel’ came Nurse’s kind but firm voice ‘you know that you are not supposed to get too close to that tree when the candles are lit. Do you want your pretty frock to catch fire?’

‘Look’ cried Amabel twirling around to face her Nurse ‘this wasn’t here before, and it’s got something written on it’.

‘What do you mean?’ Nurse asked suspiciously ‘all of those decorations are new. Your Mama had them sent down from London special’.

‘Not this one, I’ve not seen this one before’ persisted Amabel setting her little rosebud mouth into a stubborn pout and thrusting the little red cushion as close to her Nurse’s face as she could reach.

Nurse reluctantly took hold of the mysterious object and looked it over carefully.

‘Well this looks right old, Miss Amabel’ she said ‘look how faded the velvet is. Could you not read the writing?’ she said pointing the front of the little cushion towards Amabel so that she could see the name Eloise that was embroidered there in faded blue silk thread.

‘No’ pouted Amabel petulantly, who had little time for learning and knew that her mother thought that too much studying and reading was not seemly for young ladies. After all, who wanted to grow up to be a spinster, blue stocking like her new governess Miss Longmuir?

‘Well it says Eloise’ said Nurse patiently ‘and it looks like some little girl a long time ago embroidered this onto the cushion’.

‘Why a long time ago?’ asked Amabel curiously.

‘Well, look how worn and faded the material is’ she explained ‘and look how old-fashioned the writing is?’

Amabel peered at the little cushion as if she expected it to tell her a story.

‘But how did it get on our Christmas tree, and where did it come from?’ she asked.

‘Oh I expect that it was that brother of yours again’ sighed Nurse ‘he probably found it trawling through the attics or somewhere he shouldn’t have been and thought it would be funny to hang it on the tree. Who knows what goes on in that mind of his, and this is a very old house you know’.

Amabel suddenly shivered and looked up and around at the great wooden beams supporting the lofty ceiling of the great hall. She had not had time while settling in to really think about it all, but this house was so different, and so much bigger, than the snug Georgian villa that they used to live in Clifton.

‘Come along young lady, we don’t have time to be mooning around here; we need to get you changed and into your outdoor things for our walk and then it will be time for your lessons.’

With these words Nurse grabbed Amabel firmly by the hand and led her towards the massive wooden staircase, casually tossing the little red velvet heart onto the sideboard as she went. Amabel paused long enough to mark where she had thrown it, so that she could retrieve it later and hang it over her dollies’ crib.

The cold winter’s day passed slowly for Amabel in the closely regimented routine of a typical Victorian nursery. She walked in the snowy grounds with Nurse, practised her writing and pointed to far distant lands on her globe with her governess, and then had to practice her piano and continue with her sewing.

It wasn’t until tea time in the nursery, where they had had a lively tussle over the last crumpet dripping with golden butter, that she had the opportunity to question her older brother about the velvet heart.

‘Dolph, where did you get that red velvet heart that you hung on the Christmas tree?’

‘Don’t know what you are talking about’ grunted Adolphus in reply as he was busy trying to ram both a piece of Cook’s award winning fruit cake and a jam tart into his mouth at the same time.

‘You know the one with that girl’s name, Eloise, sewn on it’ continued Amabel who, through long experience, was not one to believe her brother the first time of asking.

‘Told you, I don’t what you are talking about. And why would I bother to hang some girl’s thing on Mama’s ridiculous tree?’

Adolphus’ hand was by this time hovering once more over the loaded plates on the tea table, so Amabel hastily snatched away the one containing the cream horns so that her greedy brother wouldn’t guzzle the lot.

‘Well if it wasn’t you, where did it come from?’

‘Who knows, who cares’ replied Adolphus looking baffled at his sister’s fascination with a Christmas tree ornament.

‘You should care because this is a very big mystery; one that we need to solve so that we can find out where it came from and who Eloise was’ said Amabel firmly.

Adolphus just rolled his eyes in mock despair.

‘Well where is the thing now?’ he asked.

‘Nurse threw it on to the sideboard in the great hall’.

‘Well if you want it back, we’ll have to go down there after lights out and retrieve it. Nurse will never fetch it for us, and if we leave it until tomorrow one of the servants will have moved it’.

‘You mean walk around the house in the dark?’ queried Amabel who was scared of shadows and darkness and always slept with a night light.

‘During dinner would be best, as all the servants go below stairs between courses’ said Adolphus cheerfully as he liked adventures.

Later that evening, having been scrubbed within an inch of their lives by Nurse and warmly clad in thick flannel night gowns, the two children lurked in the bend of the great staircase. They watched the stately old butler open and close the double doors to the dining room and the footman and maids bring in silver platters of food. But now that the main course had been served, their path to the sideboard was clear.

‘Come on’ whispered Adolphus ‘they’ve got the Vicar over for dinner and he is such a pompous old windbag that Mama won’t ring for them to clear for ages; no chance that he will stop gassing in a hurry’.

They cautiously tip toed down the last steps and ran lightly over the stained oak floorboards. Adolphus lifted Amabel up so that she could see over the top of the high sideboard, but she couldn’t see anything there except for gleaming, polished wood and the fir cones and evergreen boughs that her mother had scattered for effect.

‘It isn’t there anymore’ Amabel hissed when Adolphus dropped her back onto the floor.

‘Better check the Christmas Tree’ said Adolphus thoughtfully ‘somebody may have hung it back up’.

They scurried over to the brightly decorated fir tree standing in the corner, lit by a myriad of tiny candle flames, and carefully examined the branches. But of the little velvet heart they could see no sign.

‘I reckon that you were hallucinating and that this thing doesn’t really exist’ whispered Adolphus as they crouched behind a dusty suit of armour, after having been driven into hiding by the unexpected sound of Barrett’s stately tread as he brought the port up early ‘or is it you who has been playing tricks on me missy?’

Amabel stuck her tongue out at her brother in disgust at this outrageous statement, and it was only their awareness of the terrible punishments that would befall them if they were caught out of bed at this hour that prevented another fight breaking out.

The children managed to regain the safety of the night nursery without incident, but as Amabel was thankfully sticking her icy toes back down into her still warm blankets they struck something soft. She shoved her hand down the bed and brought out a little worn red velvet heart.

‘It was you Dolph, you’re playing games with me!’ she cried in disgust.

‘What do you mean’ complained Adolphus grumpily who was busy trying to rearrange his pillows to his liking.

‘Look’ she shrieked ‘you shoved it down my bed, you did, you did!’

‘Stop shouting ‘Bel’ he said ‘you’ll wake Nurse. Let me have a look, I swear to you that I haven’t put anything down your bed.’

His sister, who had enjoyed a long history of her brother putting frogs, spiders, stones and even wet seaweed between her sheets wasn’t mollified.

‘Come on let me have a look?’ her brother cajoled and eventually she relinquished her treasure.

‘Well it does look old’ he said thoughtfully turning the little cushion over in his hands ‘I wonder if we can find out who this Eloise girl was?’

The next few days continued to be snowy and icy, with clear blue skies and a biting wind. The children were busy with their lessons and skating on the lake in the grounds that had formed a thick crust of ice. Adolphus seemed to have forgotten all about the mysterious little cushion, but Amabel, who had hidden it away in her toy chest, would take it out a couple of times a day and just gaze at it, tracing the letters of the embroidered name with one small finger. Eloise! It almost felt as if the name hung in the still air of the nursery even though it hadn’t been said aloud, and Amabel was almost sure that she could smell the lingering scent of lavender when she brought the little red heart up towards her face.

On a cold, sunny afternoon a couple of days later Amabel found herself skating on an unfamiliar part of the large lake. She had had been daydreaming as she skated; trying to imagine what the elusive Eloise would have looked like, what games she would have played and how many brothers and sisters she would have had. She looked up and saw that her brother and some of the village children who were skating with them had become tiny stick figures in the distance and that the even more distant figure of Nurse standing on the shore was turned away from her charges on the ice as she gossiped with old Mrs Lorrimer. Suddenly alarmed by how far away she was from all that was familiar, Amabel turned sharply and started skating towards the edge of the lake and home. Her new trajectory had taken her to an area of the ice that was shadowed by the overhanging branches of some ancient willow, and she was skating steadily when suddenly in front of her she saw the face of a young girl with glossy dark ringlets and a red velvet hat sporting a long white feather staring up at her from underneath the ice.

Amabel was so startled by this apparition that she tripped heavily backwards over her skates onto her behind and at the same time there was a loud cracking sound as an old, rotting bough crashed out of one of the trees and plunged through the ice, shattering it as it went. Sitting back on the ice in total shock, Amabel realised that she probably would have been killed if she had kept on skating. But who was the girl and how did she get under the ice? She peered as far forward as she dared, but couldn’t see any signs of anyone in the water. Whoever it was had saved her life, but who had it been? Eloise. The name was sighed to her in the cold winter air, it was Eloise.

Later that afternoon after she had been rescued from off the ice, hustled into a hot bath and wrapped up warmly in clean night robes by a distraught Nurse, Amabel was still pondering on the face that had appeared so suddenly in the ice. She had been put into bed with a hot brick wrapped in flannel to stop her from catching cold and been given her tea on large wooden tray. As she picked up a finger of neatly buttered bread to poke it into her boiled egg, she asked aloud ‘Eloise who are you?’

The only reply she got was the sound of a log snapping in the fire burning away merrily in the nursery grate.

‘Eloise’ she repeated ‘who are you? Why are you here?’

Amabel held her breath in anticipation but nothing stirred the air of the nursery. She was just about to return to eating her egg when she caught a shadow moving out of the corner of her eye. The flash of a dark ringlet, a wide lace collar and the faint scent of lavender was all it was, and when Amabel turned her head sharply there was nothing there. But Eloise, it is I Eloise hung in the air on the faintest of draughts.

When Amabel woke up the next morning something was tickling her nose. She sleepily brought up her hand and found that there was a long, curling white feather on her pillow. She sat up and looked at it; it really did look very like the feather that had been in the hat of the girl under the ice. She jumped out of bed and flung on her dressing gown. She had to find out who Eloise was, and why she seemed to want to contact her. She thrust her feet into her slippers, and decided to visit the library. It wasn’t a room that would normally interest her, as she still couldn’t really read properly, but maybe there was an old book or something that could help her. Deciding that waking Adolphus to help her with the reading would be more trouble than it was worth; she softly slipped out of the door and ran down the stairs.

As she pushed the heavy wooden door of the library open she was surprised to see that the curtains had already been opened and that the fire had been lit. As she progressed further into the room she saw to her horror that the Vicar was happily ensconced in a wing chair by the hearth reading a book and drinking tea. Adolphus was always rather less than complimentary about the Vicar, primarily because he always seemed to be talking in a loud booming voice, and Amabel was rather afraid of him. She was just about to try and sneak away without being seen, when the Vicar caught sight of her standing there and put his teacup down.

‘Well good morning Miss Amabel, and what brings you into the library so early’ he asked genially in his rather loud voice.

Amabel found that she could not answer him.

‘O come on, don’t be shy’ he continued ‘come and sit over here at the fire where it is warm and have a cup of tea with me?’

Amabel shuffled forward cautiously and perched on the edge of the other armchair, as the Vicar poured out another cup.

‘So child, what does bring you into the library; are these not rather heavy tomes for such small hands to carry?’

Amabel regarded the Vicar gravely over the edge of her teacup. She was not sure what a tome was, but she thought that he was trying to be kind.

‘I want to find something out’ she told him seriously ‘and somebody told me that you go to a library to find things out?’

‘Well that was very good advice’ agreed the Vicar ‘as there are a lot of books here, containing a great deal of information. I myself am here because your Papa has kindly agreed to let me use your excellent library for my research. I am the leading local Antiquarian you know and am quite the expert on the history of the Hall and the surrounding villages’.

‘I don’t know what an antiq...., an ant thingy is’ she replied doubtfully ‘but history is about old things, and people who are dead isn’t it?’

‘That is correct Miss Amabel’.

‘So do you know who used to live in the Hall before us? Have there been any other little girls like me?’

‘Indeed there have been’ laughed the Vicar ‘very many other little girls over the centuries. The building of the Hall started in 1236 you know!’

‘But how would I find out about a particular little girl?’ she persisted ‘I think that her name was Eloise?’

The Vicar lifted one shaggy eyebrow in surprise at the mention of the name.

‘Who has been talking to you about Eloise Langham?’ he asked curiously ‘I didn’t realise that any of the servants knew the legend; most of them are new, come from Bristol with your parents’.

‘I just heard the name’ said Amabel cautiously, sensing that it might not be such a good idea to tell a grown up about the little girl under the ice.

‘Well it is an interesting old tale’ said the Vicar ‘though how much of it is true we cannot tell. The Langhams had owned the Hall since Tudor times, and when the Civil War started Sir Hugh Langham supported the king and was an ardent royalist. But after King Charles I had his head chopped off, Sir Hugh returned to the Hall and disguised himself as a gamekeeper until he could arrange to flee to France to join the new king. His family, Lady Arabella and their two children Jeremy and Eloise, carried on as if they did not know of his whereabouts and put it around that he had already fled to the Continent’.

‘They had very little money as most of their lands had been seized by the Parliamentarians and lived very quietly, but talk soon got around as it does in these country areas and rumours started to spread that Sir Hugh was still hiding in the area. Word of this came to the ears of the head of the local militia. This gentleman was a staunch Parliamentarian and a puritan to boot. He heartily disapproved of the Langhams for both their royalist sympathies and what he regarded as their frivolous, pleasure loving ways.’

‘On the day before Christmas, he brought his men to the Hall to search for Sir Hugh. Lady Arabella was distraught at the thought that they would find her beloved husband and imprison him, so she sent her young daughter Eloise out to warn him. He had been living in a woodsman’s hut on the edge of the estate, so she slipped out one of the side doors and started off across the park, keeping to the shelter of the trees as much as she could. Unfortunately for the little girl it was a bitterly cold day with snow on the ground, and one of the soldiers glimpsed the deep red velvet of her cloak against the white landscape as she ran.’

‘The soldiers started after her and chased the terrified child through the park. Unwilling to be caught, she ran out onto the ice of the frozen lake thinking that they wouldn’t follow her there. They didn’t follow, but their leader told his men to throw rocks onto the ice as close to her feet as they could aim. I think that they were merely trying to frighten her into turning back, but one of the rocks managed to crack the ice and she slipped through. The soldiers, it was said, did nothing to help the screaming girl thrashing in the frozen water and clutching the edge of the ice frantically. But her screams had alerted her father, who came running out of his hut and threw himself onto the ice grabbing her hand.’

‘Tragedy struck when the militia chief recognised that it was Sir Hugh and ordered his men to shoot. Sir Hugh was just dragging Eloise from the water when a musket ball hit him in the back of the head and sent him plunging into the water along with his daughter. Neither of them was ever seen again and all that remained was a long white feather on the ice that had come from the little girl’s hat. It is said that Eloise has not really left the Hall and that her lonely ghost appears when there is danger threatened for one of the family’.

Amabel just stared at the Vicar in horror at this story and two fat teardrops slipped down her cheeks.

‘Oh Miss Amabel’ wailed the Vicar in distress when he saw the tears ‘it is just an old story, and probably not true. Let me ring for your Nurse, so that she can comfort you and take you back upstairs’.

A few days later it was the Eve of Christmas, and the Bridger-Davies’ hosted a magnificent feast in the great hall. Amabel and Adolphus sat huddled in a corner of the stairs watching the celebrations unfolding below them, as the snow softly fell outside the leaded windows and the candles twinkled softly on the Christmas tree. And as Bassett carried through the heavy silver platter loaded with the huge roasted goose, Amabel caught sight of a flash of red velvet over in the corner and as she moved her head to look a single white feather lazily floated down onto her lap.

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