A Ghost Story of the Norfolk Broads
by A M Kirkby
Published by A M Kirkby at Smashwords
Text Copyright © 2011 A M Kirkby
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.
Also by A M Kirkby on Smashwords
Short stories
A Ghost Story of the Norfolk Broads
The Tin Heart
Sword of Sorcery
Novellas
Walsingham Way
Green Land
Doppelgänger
Novels
Etruscan Spring – forthcoming
Etruscan Blood - forthcoming
Children's books
Kasbah cat
Pagliaccio the opera cat
A Ghost Story of the Norfolk Broads
by A M Kirkby
We were on the homeward stretch of our holiday on the Broads. A late holiday that year – we'd both been busy at work till the end of September – but we didn't regret it; the Broads were quiet, the sky clear, mornings misty and demure, tall church towers rising dark from the grey mists. When we'd set off from Stalham, it had been just after dawn; the trees overhanging the Ant dripped with moisture, and with the engine off and the sails catching the lightest of breezes, all we could hear was the slow splashing of dewdrops into the still river.
We'd been down as far as Geldeston, the furthest you can take a boat on the Waveney; ate in the firelit bar at the Locks, and moored up on the bank there, cosy in our two berths.
But the next day, everything started to go wrong. It had rained heavily overnight, and the Waveney was flowing fast and deep. We scraped under Beccles Old Bridge with half an inch to spare – if that.
We reached Breydon an hour before we'd planned, and although working from the tide tables we should have been at slack water when we passed through Yarmouth, the Bure was running fast. Our motor could hardly push the boat forward. The confluence of the rivers had become a whirlpool, and the boat – shallow in draught and broad in the beam like all the classic Broads cruisers – started to spin in the mangling currents. We were losing control. Desperately, I tried to steer against the current, pushing the throttle as far as it would go. The boat shuddered, started to veer the other way, into the reverse of the spin it was already in; and then with a jolt, we were out of the maelstrom and pushing heavily, slowly, up the Bure.
On a bright summer's day this stretch of the river isn't unattractive, if you have a post-modern appreciation of urban detritus. Matt does, I know, though I sometimes tease him about the way he obsessively photographs graffiti. There are sheds, old scrapyards, allotments, a few Asda trolleys lying on their backs like overturned sheep, helpless and moribund. There are peeling black-painted garage doors with multiple padlocks, and I wonder what secrets they are keeping.
When it's raining, though, and you're making heavy weather of a river in flood that's running against you, and your gloves are soaked, and the rain's started to trickle down your neck, annoyingly both freezing and tickling, and you can feel the cold coming up through the soles of your shoes – well, the back side of Yarmouth is grey and dull and horrible. Matt brought me a cup of thick vegetable soup, but though the cup warmed my fingers, the rain soon started diluting the soup, and by the time we'd passed the last rusting scrapyard, I was left with a cup of congealing slime.
We'd planned to motor up the Bure as far as we could, and moor up near Thurne. We'd done it before. But with the flood against it, we were falling way behind. The river here is bare; featureless marshes on both sides. Reeds and grass rustle in the wind; marsh harriers hang almost unmoving in the sky, and the few scattered cows we saw seemed to be congealed in time, as if the clock had stopped and our boat – and the driving rain - was the only thing left moving. But though it didn't feel like it, the afternoon was trickling away, and it was already half dark when we got to Stracey Arms, the lights of the pub garish across the water, the sunset ahead of us, glaring with nightmare streaks of red and orange.
We made the wrong decision. We should have moored up there; but instead we decided to stick to our plan, and try to get as far as Thurne. We thought the full moon might give us some light; but soon after the Stracey Arms, dark clouds strangled it, and our weak navigation lights hardly shone as far as the banks of the wide river.
Eventually we gave up. It was fully dark now, only a smear of purple on the far horizon remaining, and a far line of streetlight orange to our left. We decided to moor where we were. Matt played his torch on the bank till we found a wooden post to tie to at the bow; we put in the mudweight aft, so the boat wouldn't swing out into the river.
The flood waters were well up; Matt slipped on the slimy wood, and swore as his foot slid into water where the earth behind the pilings had been sucked away by the river. There seemed to be water everywhere, and no land visible. There was no sound but rain and wind, and the shrouds beating their interminable rhythm on the mast of our boat.
Still, we were well equipped for the evening. We both changed our sodden clothes, and a bowl of spaghetti made us a bit happier. I tipped about a quarter of our last bottle of red wine into the spaghetti, and we drank the rest, and hugged for a bit to keep warm, and were about to draw the curtains and turn in when we saw the pub across the river.
No strings of lights like Stracey Arms; here only the windows shone out dimly over the water.
“Funny,” said Matt, “We didn't see it before.”
I looked on the chart. “Nothing on the map. Not before Thurne, and that's this side of the river.”
“Give that map here. You've probably got it the wrong way... no, no, you're right.”
A small victory, but I allowed myself a little smile. I knew that would annoy him. Anyway, whether or not it was on the map, there was the pub, with a single lamp swinging from a bracket outside, and the windows yellow and warm, like firelight. By now, the rain had stopped, and though it was cold, we decided to risk taking the dinghy across.
There was another boat tied up outside, a small rowing boat with a tarpaulin crumpled up in the back, and the oars shipped. We tied up next to it, and went in.
It was a traditional pub; lit only by gas lamps, as if the generator had cut out. There was a single handpump, unlabelled, and a couple of bottles of whisky with names we didn't recognise, and packs of Players behind the bar. An eel glaive hung over the fireplace, its tines shining in the light of the flames. Time passes slowly in places like this.
The landlady was behind the bar. She had a long, rather sullen face; so did her husband. Not the usual kind of square-jawed crudeness of many of the locals, but the rather aristocratic, disapproving look of the saints we'd seen on the fifteenth century painted rood screen at Ranworth church. They were wearing rather old fashioned clothes, too; you don't often see a man wearing a grey suit like that these days, with a dark tie and a dark waistcoat; and she had her hair brushed up on her head. Though I suppose she might have been paying a more up-to-date tribute to Amy Winehouse – but if she was, she'd got the style badly wrong; it was more Upstairs downstairs (Matt would say I'm showing my age by remembering that). Besides, she looked to be in her thirties; I wouldn't have thought she was a fan.
“Bit quiet tonight,” I said.
“Trade is poor, “ the landlady told me. “Now the wherries don't come, we've lost a lot of our business.”
The wherries haven't come for years, I thought, but fortunately I had enough tact to keep my mouth shut. (Matt often says I've got no tact, and he's usually right, but I was a bit edgy tonight; I'm not sure why.)
We ordered a couple of whiskies, and sat down by the fire. Oddly, though the fire warmed our fronts nicely, we could still feel a cold draught at our backs, and though we moved the chairs a couple of times, we could never quite manage to avoid it. The landlady wasn't particularly chatty, and her husband didn't seem encouraging – he was busy anyway , going out to bring in more wood for the fire, and piling it up in the hearth - so we just sat and stared into the crackling flames.
Though the husband said nothing, he was very demonstrative with his wife; every time he passed her behind the bar, he'd brush her neck or her waist with one hand. And I noticed he looked at us both as if we were competition. Not likely – two old queens on a boat – but he seemed suspicious of us; I caught him staring at us a couple of times.
And the landlady seemed a bit nervous, too. She seemed to be waiting for someone; a couple of times she crossed the bar to look out of the window, both times when her husband was out of the room.
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.