always got this wrong. True, Constable captured the castle in oils. I saw a sketch of it at the Tate. But it wasn’t one of his romantic idylls. Painted after his wife’s death, he had picked out browns the colour of crumbling leaves, livid raven blacks, dismal ash greys. The castle, a skeletal ruin, was desolate and alone. And the sky was strange. If you looked at it closely you could see Constable’s brushstrokes were all over the place. The air was turbulent, full of dark storm clouds pregnant with terrible power.
Like something was in them. Waiting to come through.
I sensed that when I first saw the picture and I just know Constable felt it too.
Back then, in the 1820s, she would have been young and beautiful. She used to wander there often to escape the town. Maybe they met. Perhaps her story moved, horrified him?
So Sharon blah blahs about the rural prettiness being scarred and Martha’s on about nature versus industrialization, then I say something about how the biggest chimney, which has a ball of gas burning above it, reminds me of Mordor. The Eye of Sauron, to be precise. ‘I kind of like its otherworldliness,’ I said.
And Sharon went, ‘Ooh. Hark at you, Mrs Spooky.’ And everybody laughed. I don’t know why. I never do generally. ‘I don’t mean it frightens me.’ I knew I sounded like a petulant teen – the wine had fired my blood. ‘There’s plenty of other things round here that do.’
Sharon must have heard my indignant tone cos she got straight in and pacified me with platitudes. ‘Yeah. Yeah,’ she said. ‘I know. Not all the local history’s quaint.’ She shot a look at Corinne. ‘Isn’t this place meant to have something to do with some old Earl’s murder?’
We all looked at Corinne, who shrugged. Though not related, Sharon and Corinne’s families were inextricably intertwined in the way that happens when generations are content to live in the same place for a good length of time. Corinne came from a very old Leigh family so we automatically deferred to her on local matters.
‘Probably,’ she said. ‘I know a mysterious lead coffin was set down on Leigh beach around that time. Some locals had it that it was a murdered nobleman. My dad always said inside it was the body of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, who had been killed by Richard II’s men in Calais. He was strangled with a sheet so violently that his head was severed. The coffin was whisked up to the castle. The next day it had vanished.’
‘How awfully sinister,’ said Martha, and took a long swig of her wine.
Sharon coughed on her fag and told everyone the St Clements steps creeped her out. This was the steep pathway that connected the Old Town on the seafront to the newer part of town higher up. ‘I always feel like I’m going to have a heart attack when I get to the top. And people have done: they used to try to bring the coffins up by a different route, which wasn’t at such a sharp angle. But then some posh bloke built a new house and closed that road off as he wanted a bigger garden.’
‘The Reverend Robert Eden actually,’ said Corinne. ‘And it wasn’t exactly a house. He built a new rectory as the old one was falling down. It houses the library now.’
‘Right,’ said Sharon, completely disinterested. ‘Anyway, everyone in the Old Town had to start using the steps to get the bodies to the church but it was so steep a few of the pallbearers started popping their clogs at their mates’ funerals. Imagine that! My neighbour swears blind Church Hill is haunted.’ She spoke the last words in a Vincent Price style and punctuated the sentence with a wicked cackle.
We all looked at Corinne again. This time she smiled. ‘Perhaps it is. For such a small place, the town has lots of stories. There was Princess Beatrice way back in the thirteenth century. Daughter of Henry III. Obviously she was meant to marry well. Henry had arranged for her to marry a Spanish count but she fell in love with a young man, Ralph de Binley, and ran away to Leigh to elope. Someone found out about it and they caught the couple on Strand Wharf. Ralph was sent to Colchester, accused of murder, but managed to escape back here where he was banished from England never to return. Some say, on clear nights, you can see Beatrice out on the wharf, waiting for her lover, pacing up and down, crying her eyes out.’
I didn’t want melancholy tales on a drinking night and was about to make some kind of glib comment to lighten the tone, but Sharon got in before me. She must have still been raw from being dumped.
‘Pass me the bucket. That’s not spooky. I thought we were doing scary.’
Corinne looked put out again so I grabbed the wine and refilled her. She fixed her grey eyes on me like a cat noticing a wounded pigeon for the first time. Her eyes widened and she paused theatrically, then said, ‘Aha, well if you want a scary story,’ her fingers made a kind of flourishing gesture in my direction, ‘look no further than our namesake here, Sarah Grey.’
I groaned and rolled my eyes. I shared my name with a local character and the pub named after her. There was lots of mileage in this one.
‘The other Sarah Grey,’ Corinne grinned and poked me in the ribs, ‘was a right old witch. Have you heard the tale, Sarah?’
Of course I had. I couldn’t move around the town without someone making a lewd comment about me doing favours for sailors.
But Sharon piped up that she didn’t know the whole story and Martha wanted the gory details, so Corinne drew us closer to the fire and asked if we were sitting comfortably.
‘Then I’ll begin,’ she whispered in a proper storyteller’s voice. ‘What we know is this – Sarah Grey was a nineteenth-century sea-witch who made her living from the pennies sailors threw her for a good wind. She would sit on the edge of Bell Wharf conjuring blessings for those that would pay. Until the captain of The Smack came along. Now he was a zealous man.’
‘What’s zealous?’ asked Sharon and hiccupped. Everyone ignored her.
‘A fervent Christian, he would have nothing to do with witchcraft so he forbade his crew to give her money.’ Corinne licked her lips and lowered her voice further. ‘It was a calm and sunny day when they set sail from the wharf.
‘But as they steered into the estuary, a strong wind came out of nowhere and lashed the boat. The sailors tried desperately to bring the sails down but the wind had entangled them and The Smack was tossed about the waves like a …’ she paused to find a simile.
‘Plastic duck?’ Sharon offered unhelpfully.
‘They didn’t have plastic back then,’ said Martha, opening another bottle of wine. ‘Like a cork perhaps?’
Corinne was irritated. We had broken her rhythm. ‘OK, OK. The Smack was tossed around like a cork.’
‘A cork’s quite small though,’ I said mildly. ‘And a ship’s quite big …’
‘Do you want to hear this or not?’ she snapped.
We muttered apologies and tried to focus.
Corinne cleared her throat and continued. ‘So they’re in this massive storm. One of the crew started shouting, “It’s the witch! It’s the witch!” Suddenly the captain picked up an axe and hit the mast. The sailors watched him thinking he had gone completely mad but when, on the third stroke the mast fell, the wind immediately dropped. When the boat eventually managed to limp home to Bell Wharf, do you know what they found? There, on the side, was the body of Sarah Grey, three axe wounds to her head.’
We made approving noises and raised our eyebrows.
‘That made me shiver,’ said Sharon.
‘Well,’ said Martha. ‘It is a bit cold. You know, Corinne, I’ve heard another ending. Deano’s cousin told me that, yes, the captain had forbidden his men to give her money, so Sarah Grey put a curse on them. The wind came up when they went out to sea and they couldn’t get the mast down but, then he says, every member of the crew but the captain perished. When the captain finally made it back to the shore he swore vengeance on Sarah Grey. The next day her headless body was found floating in Doom Pond, the ducking pond.’
I