The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories, page 1
THE BISHOP OF HELL
and other stories
by
MARJORIE BOWEN
Introduction by Melanie R. Anderson
VALANCOURT BOOKS
The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories
First published by The Bodley Head in 1949
First Valancourt Books edition 2021
Text copyright © 1949 by Marjorie Bowen
Introduction copyright © 2021 by Melanie R. Anderson
“Monster, She Wrote” trade dress designed by Andie Reid, copyright
© 2019 Quirk Books. Used under license. All rights reserved.
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.
Cover by M. S. Corley
Introduction
‘If I go to Hell to-morrow, I’ll pay you a visit to let you know what ’tis like.’
— Marjorie Bowen, ‘The Bishop of Hell’
Ghosts have to be the oldest props of horror. They aren’t always the most popular supernatural creatures, but they never completely go away. I think one reason ghosts keep hanging around is because they are personal. By virtue of being alive, every person has the potential to be a spectre, and by virtue of haunting, every spectre was a person. This terrifying paradox forces us to confront the mysteries of the afterlife. Ghosts similarly play with our concept of time. There is something fascinating (and deeply unsettling) about traces of the past continuing to haunt the present, whether at a historical battlefield or in a home. Hauntings force us to face unresolvable existential questions that we would rather ignore. Telling ghost stories becomes a way to explore and attempt to exert control over these anxieties.
Because of these intimate connections to our humanity, ghosts are tremendously adaptable metaphors. Ghosts are memories, traces of loved ones that keep spaces open for mourning. Conversely, ghosts can signal repression and secrets, those things we don’t want to remember or share with others. A ghost can be a sign of unfinished business or of an unsolved mystery. Moreover, hauntings are often connected to families and domestic spaces. Unfortunately, homes and families are not always safe and nurturing, and the walls of a house can hide hideous abuse, violence, and neglect. In the hands of British and American women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ghost stories became a way to make this hidden abuse visible. The fictional women who are living or ghostly protagonists in these stories face real-life fears. They are dominated by distant fathers, trapped in terrible marriages, pursued by greedy and nefarious individuals, ruined socially, traumatized, and afforded few choices. Sometimes, in these stories, the husband and wife are mutually damaged by societal expectations. Far from conjugal happiness, their relationship becomes an open wound that reminds them of unfulfilled desires, impossible ambitions, and loss.
Marjorie Bowen was one of these writers. She was born Gabrielle Margaret Vere Campbell in Hampshire, England, in 1885. After the death of Bowen’s father when she was a young child, her mother faced financial difficulties and frequently moved the family. As she grew older, Bowen was drawn to writing, and she used her talent to become the family breadwinner, publishing her first novel in 1906. Through two marriages and while raising three sons, she never stopped writing, and, like other women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she supported her family with her work. By the time of her death in 1952, she had a prolific publication record of over 150 books under several pen names, one of which was Marjorie Bowen. She began her career writing historical romances, but her output spanned numerous genres, and included, of course, the supernatural.
While reading Bowen’s The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories, you will see her deft use of the ghost to suggest varied themes, such as the passage of time, grief and memory, secrets, unsolved mysteries, and vengeance. Even though most of the tales were initially published in the 1920s and the 1930s, their settings are usually much older. Several of the stories take place in the 1600s or 1700s, or, if the setting is more recent, the characters are haunted by events from much earlier. In ‘Florence Flannery,’ the characters are haunted by a past trauma that occurred in the 1500s, even though they are living in the 1800s. Not surprising for an author who loved history, Bowen highlights time in her work, thereby forcing us to reckon with the effects of the past on the present. Additionally, her ghosts are tied to homes and families. Although most of her narrators are men, there are many women throughout these pages who face violence, and a few fight back, before and after death. ‘The Avenging of Ann Leete,’ for example, focuses on the mystery of a young woman’s death and the grief of her lover through multiple forms of haunting, both literal and figurative. Two of her more traditional haunted house tales are ‘The Crown Derby Plate’ and ‘The Grey Chamber.’ The former is a British Christmas ghost story with chills. The latter is a German Gothic ghost story with a large mansion, a dungeon, and secret passages, but it continues Bowen’s theme of violence in a distant past.
Perhaps most striking, Bowen has her characters face the existential terrors of death and what may follow it. In ‘Kecksies,’ there is much confusion over who is dead and how permanent death may be, and it doesn’t help that alcohol is involved. Hector Greatrix, the speaker of the epigraph to this introduction, is a fallen clergyman in ‘The Bishop of Hell.’ Greatrix swears he is an unbeliever, but he still fears the unknown of the afterlife. With a flourish of bravado, he promises his friend that he will return to tell him what it’s like. You’ll have to read the story to find out if he keeps that promise.
Classic ghost story enthusiasts will appreciate Bowen’s versatile uses of hauntings. She’s as comfortable creating a harmless ghost who refuses to leave his house, as she is creating a vengeful spirit who stalks her murderer. She skillfully constructs settings that are lonely, atmospheric, and weird, and she doesn’t shy away from the ambiguities that surround death and the afterlife. If you love ghost stories and haven’t yet read Bowen’s work, you’re in for a treat. I recommend reading them at night, perhaps during a storm. Make sure you ignore the sounds of the house settling around you. Those creaks and pops couldn’t possibly be footsteps.
Melanie R. Anderson
October 2020
Melanie R. Anderson is the Bram Stoker Award and Locus Award winning co-author of Monster, She Wrote (Quirk Books, 2019) and the co-host of The Know Fear Cast and Monster, She Wrote podcasts. She is an assistant professor of English at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. Her academic publication Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2013) was a winner of the 2014 South Central MLA Book Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in American literature.
The Fair Hair of Ambrosine
Claude Boucher found himself awaiting with increasing dread the approach of the 12th of December.
He still called it December to himself; the new names of the divisions of the years of liberty had never taken root in his heart, which remained faithful to many of the old traditions.
Yet he was a good servant of the new Republic and had so far escaped peril during perilous times without sinking into servile insignificance.
He was a clerk in the Chamber of Deputies, well paid and unmolested. From the safe vantage of a dignified obscurity he watched greater men come and go; and ate his supper and smoked his pipe in peace while the death-carts went to and from the prisons and the Place de la Revolution—which Boucher, in his mind, thought of as the Place du Louis XVI.
He had his ambitions, but he held them suspended till safer times: he was not the man for a brilliant, fiery career ending in the guillotine; he was not, either, pessimistic; a better epoch, he would declare, would certainly emerge from the present confusion (he refused to accept it as anything else), which could but be regarded as the birth-throes of a settled state.
Therefore, being young and calm and having lost nothing by the upheaval of society, he waited, as he felt he could afford to wait, until the order of things was once more stable and established. The horrors that had washed, like a sea of filth and blood, round his safety, had scarcely touched him; this terror he felt at looking forward to the 12th of December was the first fear that he had ever known.
A fear unreasonable and by no means to be explained.
The first and main cause of his dread was a trifle, an affair so slight that when he had first heard of it he had put it from his mind as a thing of no importance.
One of the Deputies of Lille had put his finger on a conspiracy in the Department of Béarn, involving several names that had hitherto passed as those of good friends of the Republic. The matter did not loom large, but required some delicacy in the handling. The Deputy for the Department concerned was away; no steps were to be taken until his return, which would be on the 12th of December; then Boucher, as a man reliable and trustworthy, was to carry all papers relating to the alleged conspiracy to his house at Saint-Cloud.
At first the young clerk had thought nothing of this; then he had been rather pleased at the slight importance the mission gave him.
That night, over his sup
She was a little actress in a light theatre that existed during the days of the Terror like a poisonous flower blooming on corruption.
She had lived in a little house on the way to Saint-Cloud, a house on the banks of the river, an innocent and modest-looking place to shelter Ambrosine, who was neither innocent nor modest.
Claude Boucher had loved her; and every night after she had finished her part in the wild and indecent performance, he would drive her home in a little yellow cabriolet which had once belonged to a lady of fashion.
They had been quite happy; she was certainly fond of Claude and, he believed, faithful to him; he had rivals, and it flattered him to take her away from these and make her completely his, almost subservient to him; she was only a child of the gutters of Saint-Antoine, but she was graceful and charming, and endearing too in her simplicity and ardour, which she preserved despite her manifold deceits and vices.
She was not beautiful, but she had dark blue eyes and kept her skin lily pale, and her hair was wonderful, and untouched by bleach or powder; fair and thick and uncurling, yet full with a natural ripple, she kept it piled carelessly high with such fantastic combs as she could afford, and from these it fell continuously on to her thin bosom and slanting shoulders.
Claude, sitting in his café, remembered this fair hair, and how it would fly about her when she ran from the stage, flushed, panting, half naked from the dance by which she had amused men inflamed with blood.
He thought: ‘To take those papers I shall have to pass the house where she lived . . .’
He checked himself; then his thought continued: ‘Where she died.’
Ambrosine had been murdered three years ago.
One day in winter she had not appeared at the theatre. As there was a new topical song for her to learn, they had sent a messenger to the little house on the river.
He found her in her bed-gown on the floor of her bedchamber, stabbed through and through the fragile body. The house was in confusion and had been stripped of its few poor valuables.
No one knew anything: the house was lonely, and Ambrosine lived alone; the old woman who worked for her came in for a portion of the day only. It was found that she had no friends or relatives and that no one knew her real name—she was just a waif from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
That night Claude went to see her; they had quarrelled a little, and for two days he had kept away.
Rough care had disposed her decently on the tawdry silks of the canopied bed; she was covered to the chin, and her face, bruised and slightly distorted, had the aggrieved look of a startled child.
Her hair was smoothed and folded like a pillow beneath her head, her little peaked features looked insignificant beside this unchanged splendour of her hair.
As Claude looked at her he wondered how he could have ever loved her—a creature so thin, so charmless; his one desire was to forget her, for she now seemed something malignant.
He paid what was needful to save her from a pauper’s burial and went back to Paris to forget. No one found it difficult to forget Ambrosine; her obscure tragedy troubled no one—there was too much else happening in France. Thieves had obviously murdered her for her few possessions: it was left at that, for no one really cared. The Faubourg Saint-Antoine could provide plenty such as she.
For a while she held Claude at night; with the darkness would come her image, holding him off sleep.
Always he saw her dead, with the strained, half-open lips, the half-closed, fixed eyes, the thin nose, and the cheeks and chin of sharp delicacy outlined against the pillow of yellow hair.
Always dead. Again and again he tried to picture her living face, her moving form, but he could not capture them.
He could not recall the feel of her kisses or her warm caresses, but the sensation of her cold yet soft dead cheek as he had felt it beneath a furtive touch was long with him.
But after a while he escaped from Ambrosine; he forgot.
Now, as he remembered the way his route took him on the 12th of December, he remembered.
Not that he had any horror of the house or the locality—it simply had not happened that he had ever had occasion to go there since her death. Probably there were other people living there now, or the house might even be destroyed—in any case he would take a detour round the deserted park.
But it was absurd to suppose that he was afraid of that house or unwilling to pass the way he had last passed coming from her death-bed. It was all over and he had forgotten. So he assured himself; yet he began to recall Ambrosine, and always with a sensation of faint horror.
That night was the beginning of his fear.
He went home late to his lodging near the café and, on sleeping, dreamt very exactly this dream, which had the clearness and force of a vision.
He dreamt that it was the 12th of December and that he was riding towards Saint-Cloud carrying the papers he was to take to the Béarnais Deputy.
It was a cold, clear, melancholy afternoon, and the silence of dreams encompassed him as he rode.
When he reached the great iron gates of the dismantled park, his horse fell lame. He was not very far from his destination, and he decided to go on foot. Leaving his horse at a little inn, he struck out across the park.
He saw it all perfectly plainly—the great avenues of leafless trees, the stretches of greensward scattered with dead leaves, the carp ponds and fountains with their neglected statues and choked basins, the parterres where flowers had bloomed not so long ago, and that now looked as utterly decayed; and to his right, as he walked, always the pale glimpse of the river, shining between the trees.
Now, as he proceeded and the dusk began to fill the great park with shadows, he was aware of a companion walking at his side, step for step with him. He could not discern the head and face of this man, which seemed inextricably blended with the shadows, but he saw that he wore a green coat with dark blue frogs.
And he at once began to conceive of this companion a horror and dread unspeakable. He hastened his steps; but the other, with the silent precision of dreams, was ever beside him. The day had now faded to that fixed, colourless light which is the proper atmosphere of visions, and the trees and grass were still, the water without a ripple.
They came now, Claude and the figure that dogged him, to a flat carp-basin, dried and lined with green moss. A group of trees overshadowed it with bare branches; a straight stone figure rose behind, faceless and ominous. Claude could not remember this place, well known as was Saint-Cloud to him.
His companion stopped and bent down to adjust the buckles of his shoe. Claude longed to hasten on, but could not move; the other rose, took his hand, and led him hurriedly across the dry grass.
They approached the bank of a river and a house that stood there, on the confines of the park.
Claude knew the house. It was shuttered as when he had seen it on his last visit to Ambrosine. The garden was a mass of tangled weeds—he noticed a bramble that barred the door across and across.
‘They did not find the place so easy to let,’ he found himself saying.
His companion released him, and, wrenching off the rotting shutter of one of the lower windows, climbed into the house. Claude, impelled against his will, followed.
He saw, very distinctly (as, indeed, he had seen everything very distinctly in his dream), the dreadful, bare, disordered room of Ambrosine.
Then a deeper and more utter horror descended on him. He knew, suddenly, and with utter conviction, that he was with the murderer of Ambrosine.
And while he formed a shriek, the creature came at him with raised knife and had him by the throat, and he knew that he was being killed as she had been killed, that their two fates were bound together; and that her destiny, from which he had tried to free himself, had closed on him also.
