The Nebuly Coat - John Meade Falkner

Edward Westray is a young architect sent to the former seaport of Cullerne by his employer to oversee the repairs to the Minster, St Sepulchre. Westray is a conscientious young man, intent on making his way in his profession. On his first visit to the church he meets the pompous rector, Canon Parkyn & the organist, Nicholas Sharnell. Sharnell & the Rector have little sympathy with each other & have very different ideas about the church. Westray also hears the story of the Nebuly Coat, the coat of arms of the Blandamer family, which is represented in the stained glass windows & monuments. The Blandamers are the local landowners although they've taken little interest in the church & its structural problems for some years. The current Lord Blandamer has been abroad & hasn't been seen for some years.

Sharnell offers to find Westray a room at his lodging house, a former inn called the Hand of God. The house has been renamed Bellevue House & is rented by a respectable but impoverished gentlewoman, Miss Euphemia Joliffe. Miss Joliffe lives frugally & is pleased to offer rooms to Westray. Her niece, Anastasia, lives with her & helps out with the work. Anastasia's father, Martin, had recently died & his life was a wasted one. He had become obsessed by the idea that he was the rightful Lord Blandamer & pursued his genealogical researches to the exclusion of all else. His mother, Sophia, had married Colonel Joliffe some years after Martin's birth & he never knew who his father was. The Colonel loved Martin as his own son but he was never satisfied. Even after Sophia abandoned her family to run away with a soldier, the Colonel indulged Martin above his own daughter, Euphemia.

Martin left his daughter with his sister for years at a time & returned only to sponge & run up debts before wandering away once more. His health suffered & he died still claiming that he was close to finding the proof that his mother had been married to Lord Blandamer & the current Lord had no right to his title & lands. Martin was taunted & laughed at for his fancies but his friend, Sharnell, indulged him & there were hints that there was more to his story than just imagination. Sophia had dabbled in painting & one of her pictures, a hideous still life of flowers & a caterpillar crawling along the bottom of the frame hung in Martin's room. Why should a London art dealer write to Miss Joliffe offering to buy the picture for £50? Who was the stranger who came to the house several times before Martin's death offering to buy the picture? Nobody but Martin saw this man so was he real or a figment of a sick man's imagination? Could there be a clue among Martin's jumble of papers?

Martin leaves the papers to Sharnell & he gradually became almost as obsessed with the quest as his friend. Sharnell drank heavily & his career had been blighted by drink. He told Westray the story of Martin & of his own strange fancies of being followed by a man holding a hammer. Is this reality or something supernatural? Lord Blandamer arrives in Cullerne after a long sojourn abroad & immediately offers to fund the church restoration, including the repairs to the bell tower that Westray has been urging. Blandamer befriends Westray & calls on him at the Hand of God where he meets Anastasia & hears of her father's obsession. Blandamer's motives are unclear as he pursues a friendship with Anastasia & seems to be searching for answers to questions of his own.

It's hard to say too much more about the plot of The Nebuly Coat without spoiling it. There are several ambiguities in the story that I'm still puzzling about days after I finished reading it. I read Falkner's The Lost Stradivarius a little while ago & this novel has similar elements of the supernatural. However, they're harder to fathom. Sharnell's man with the hammer could be real or could be a ghost or could just be a figment of a drunkard's imagination. St Sepulchre's is atmospheric enough without any supernatural additions. The building has a life of its own as it creaks & groans. Westray imagines he hears the arches of the tower whispering to him & Sharnell locks himself in to the organ loft when he practices alone at night.

I loved Euphemia Joliffe. She is loyal to her wastrel brother & loving to her niece who she has to support on very little. Keeping up appearances is everything. She is determined to pay his debts after his death but hesitates to sell her mother's awful painting because her mother painted it & her brother hung it in his room. She even paid to have the Hand of God inn sign painted over as she thought it blasphemous to live in a house with such a name, even though the old name keeps showing through. Cullerne is a melancholy place, full of lost souls. Once a thriving port, its glory days are long past as the channel silted up & destroyed business. The Blandamers have paid no attention to it for years & the church is in danger of falling down. Martin Joliffe's obsession is the catalyst for change for several people & I'm still puzzling over the meaning of the ending.

The Lost Stradivarius - John Meade Falkner

Halloween always seems to be the right time to read a few ghost stories. The Lost Stradivarius was the choice of my 19th century book group &, although I'd read it before, I enjoyed revisiting it at this ghostly time of year. Although, having said that, Halloween is in the middle of spring in Australia rather than autumn with that lovely sense of the year drawing in so it doesn't feel particularly ghostly. However, my reading focus is mostly toward northern hemisphere writers so I can feel autumnal no matter what the weather.

I think ghost stories work best as short stories or novellas. It's too much to expect a reader to keep up that suspension of disbelief (if you do, in fact, disbelieve) over hundreds of pages. The Lost Stradivarius is a very tidy 160pp & is in the form of two narratives. The first is by Miss Sophia Maltravers. Sophia is writing to her nephew, Edward, a student at Oxford in 1867, about events that happened some 30 years before. Edward's father, John, died young & his life was very unhappy at the end. Sophia wants her nephew to understand his father & so decides to tell him what she knows of his life & the strange events that led to his death.

John Maltravers went up to Oxford, to Magdalen Hall, at the age of 19. He loved music & was a violinist of some talent. He especially enjoyed playing duets with his good friend, William Gaskell.  Mr Gaskell visits Rome during his vacation to study piano & returns with some manuscript music bound into a volume. The young men begin to play a suite by Graziani for violin & harpsichord  & they are pleased with the result. However, John becomes almost obsessed with this suite & they play it every time they meet. One night, when he is practicing the piece alone, John hears a creaking sound, as if someone had sat down in the wicker chair in the corner of his room. He turns around but can see no one. When he finishes playing the suite, he hears a sound as if someone had risen from the chair but again, sees nothing. This phenomenon occurs whenever the piece is played &, one night, John does see the figure of a man rising from the chair & walking through the wall of his room.

At the place in the wall where the ghostly figure disappears, John discovers a secret cupboard & inside it, he finds a violin. The instrument needs restringing but is otherwise in good condition & the label inside proclaims it to be by the great Stradivari. John takes the violin to an expert for an opinion & when the man assumes that the violin belongs to him, John doesn't enlighten him. This first untruth is the beginning of John's downfall. John becomes consumed by the violin & becomes possessed by the malignant spirit of the original owner, Adrian Temple. Temple lived in the same rooms 80 years before John, had traveled to Italy to study music & led a dissolute life. He disappeared in Rome in mysterious circumstances & his body was never found.

John falls in love with Constance Temple, a friend of his sister's &, coincidentally, a member of the same family as Adrian Temple. On a visit to Royston, Constance's family home, John is so shocked by the sight of a portrait of the man he knows only as his ghostly visitor, that his health collapses. John & Constance marry & John insists on traveling to Italy for their honeymoon. John's behaviour grows stranger & his obsession with the violin & Rome results in estrangement from Constance. Eventually he returns to live in Rome alone under the malign influence of Adrian Temple, in the very same house Temple lived in at the end of his life. His identification with Temple becomes so strong that his health completely gives way & Sophia goes out to Italy to try to bring her brother home.

The other narrative is by William Gaskell. He attempts to explain the decline of John Maltravers's health in a more scientific rational way than Sophia who is convinced of the supernatural influence of Adrian Temple. He also explores the events of Temple's life in more detail & muses on the philosophical influence of certain pieces of music on a susceptible mind.

The Lost Stradivarius is an atmospheric tale with some very shivery, Gothic moments.  Constance tells the story as she heard it from her brother as well as from her own observations (her journey to Italy is wonderful as she experiences the strangeness of John's behavior & the foreignness of her surroundings) & what she discovers afterwards. John Meade Falkner only wrote two other novels. Moonfleet is a story of smugglers & adventure, written for children & The Nebuly Coat, which is a mystery set in Dorset where a young architect goes to supervise some restoration work in the local church. I have copies of both & would definitely like to read them one of these days.