“Yes,” she agreed after a pause that was a little too long. “I’m afraid the route I took was somewhat precipitous. Nye was forced to come to my rescue. But I’m sure I will find a more sedate path at some point.”
“You’re fond of the sea, then?”
“That was the first time I’ve ever seen it,” Mina admitted.
Gus looked shocked. “Well fancy that!” he exclaimed roundly, setting down his cup in its saucer with a clatter. “Never seen the sea before! I can scarcely credit it.”
“You were born and bred here I take it?”
“That I was not,” he admitted. “I hail from Norfolk parts by rights, but I been here some ten years or so.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I’ve always been a seafaring man, me and my father before me.”
“You are a fisherman, Mr. Hopkirk?”
“I am now,” he agreed. “But when I were in my prime, I was in the merchant navy.”
“Indeed? You must have seen a good deal of the world?” Mina spoke around her mouthful of pins in a way she knew would make her mother quite shocked. Somehow, she did not think Gus Hopkirk would care at her lack of etiquette. Her fingers flew as she pinned and tacked the curtains into their new incarnation.
“That I have.” He beamed. “That I have, though if its sights and wonders you’re after, then this part of the world is the right one to come to.” He lowered his voice. “There’s sights and sounds along this coastline would curdle the blood in your veins,” he said. “More to petrify any man who’d traveled the breadth and depth of the world! This coastline,” he said ominously. “Has more mysteries and terrors to rival any other in the civilized world, or the uncivilized, if you takes my meaning.” When she looked up, she found him tapping his rather broad nose.
“Well,” Mina said cautiously. “It rather sounds as though you are speaking of ghost stories, Mr. Hopkirk.”
“Ghost stories! I should think I am!” he agreed with a chuckle. “Are you partial to a yarn or two, Mrs. Nye, on a cold, rainy day in spring?”
Mina thought of the thrilling short stories in her periodicals that her father had frowned at. “I confess, I do enjoy them,” she admitted. “Though I tend to associate them more with Christmas time.”
“Then, perhaps…?” He withdrew a flask from his waistcoat and tipped the contents into his tea, holding up the bottle quizzically.
Mina shook her head. “No, thank you, not if I want these curtains to be fit for purpose.”
Gus chuckled and settled back in his chair. He told her tales of spectral hounds and restless grey ladies, of hand-wringing wraiths and ghostly hunts who pursued lost souls along the cliffs on a stormy night. He told her of the malevolent monks who had once lived in a medieval monastery on this very spot who had been disbanded and punished by the bishop for their wickedness and sin. If you saw them, you were surely cursed to an unhappy fate. Some travelers, he added ominously had been known to drop dead at the sight of their sinister habits, their empty cowls creeping up to them on a dark, stormy night.
“They must surely have had weak hearts,” Mina said with a shudder. “Or some other such predisposition?”
“Aye, mebbe,” Gus agreed, closing his teeth on his pipe stem.
Mina hesitated, dying to know what wickedness and sin the monks had indulged in during their lives, but maidenly decorum held her back. Gus’s eyes twinkled.
“The monastery had a relic,” he explained. “And so, became a popular route for pilgrims in those days. They flocked there, to touch the holy bones of St Grayking.”
“St Grayking?” Mina frowned. Surely, she had heard that name before.
“Aye,” he nodded. “The monks built an annex for the pilgrims to take their overnight rest in,” he continued comfortably. “There, for a handsome fee mind, they served them with roasted goose and plum pudding and all sorts of fine wines.”
“I see.” Mina picked up her tacking thread. “It does not sound like typical monastic fare.”
“No indeed,” Gus agreed heartily. “They was supposed to subsist on weak gruel and pottage, but they had grown used to rich foods and vice. But that’s not the worst of it.”
Mina threaded her needle and looked up enquiringly. “It wasn’t?”
He shook his head. “No indeed! Once these pilgrims was soused to the gills, they would lure the richest of them out to the headland on some pretext and fling them off the nearest cliff and help themselves to all his worldly goods.”
“How terrible! But surely some of these murdered pilgrims must have washed up on the shore?”
“Aye, that they did,” Gus agreed. “But their party would usually have moved on by then, so no-one knew whence they came. If anyone stayed on, the monks would say their victim must have gone out for a walk and been set on by thieves or else sleep-walked to his death.”
Mina considered this. “Yet you said the bishop punished them, so their secret must have been discovered eventually?”
“Aye, that it was,” Gus agreed, removing his pipe. “Too many dead bodies washed up and someone wrote to the bishop about all the unsavory rumors of wine, loose women and song. One time, they had the misfortune to pick out a wealthy merchant with powerful connections who wouldn’t let his disappearance lie. They found his gold ring on the beach and two witnesses who’d seen him take to his bed the night before, despite the monks denying they’d ever laid eyes on him. Kicked up a fuss they did, then one of the monks he confessed. Some say under torture and the rest was all hung on a gibbet on the harbor wall.
“The bishop had their monastery torn down and the annex burned to the ground.” Gus nodded with satisfaction. “So may all sinners be punished. It don’t stop ‘em walking though. Not on a moonless night. They’re doomed to tread their old path up to the cliffs and then back home again. Dragging their feet and rolling their cart with them.”
Mina looked up with a quick breath. “Rolling their cart?”
“Aye, for sometimes their victims was so dead drunk they had to be dragged from their beds and rolled up to the cliffs.”
Mina felt herself turn pale. That couldn’t possibly have been what she heard in the early hours, could it? She lowered her sewing and stared at Gus. “How horrible.” He nodded in solemn agreement. “I don’t suppose—? I mean, that you’ve ever—?” She couldn’t quite bring herself to ask it.
“No, Mrs Nye. I ain’t never seen hide nor hair of any ghostly monks. But you can bet if I did, I’d take to my heels so fast you wouldn’t see me for dust.” He chuckled, tapping his nose with his pipe. “Now, are you sure you won’t take a nip of this?” he said, picking his tin flask back up with a flourish.
“No, indeed thank you.”
“How’s them curtains a-lookin’ of?”
Mina broke her thread and shook out the folds of the one she was working on. “They’re all pinned and tacked now, ready to be sewn up. I shall finish them this afternoon.”
“That’s good, Mrs. Nye. You’ve an industrious nature and no mistake. Think Nye said as you was a schoolmistress in your past life?”