Elizabeth: Part VI

(Story begins here.)

``Mr Higgins, don't leave---take a seat. Will you be so kind as to tell me more about Eliz... ah the apparition of the stairs?'' The housekeeper paused and looked at Anton quizzically and was about to reply when Anton interjected with, ``and please don't tell me how it is inappropriate for the housekeeper to sit at the dining table. I will hear none of this. When there are no guests about, you can be more at ease here than you would otherwise be accustomed to. All the officiousness is something that I cannot really tolerate within myself, and please humour me by being at ease and take a seat before you answer me anything.''

The housekeeper looked at Anton, gave a small bow, and pulled up the chair that was next to the head of the dining table and sat down. Anton started on his breakfast, and looked at Mr Higgins in expectation, waiting for the latter to begin his tale.

``Is there anything specific that you would like to know about the apparition, Master Anton?''

``Well Mr Higgins, nothing truly specific, just what you have known about Eliz... the apparition from the previous masters of the manor.''

The housekeeper looked at Anton, his face scrunched as though deep in thought, the wrinkles on his sixty-five-year-old face developing into much deeper crevices.

``As you know, Master Anton, I have been a housekeeper of this manor for over fifty years, having taken on the role as an understudy of my father who served as the previous housekeeper before he retired. Over the fifty years, there has been roughly three or four before you who sat here as masters of the manor. Within the first couple of months of their arrival to the manor, they would all exclaim the same thing.''

`` `Does ``Elizabeth'' ring a bell?' '' Anton replied.

``Yes,'' the housekeeper nodded, ``they all asked me if `Elizabeth' meant anything to me. And I had been truthful to each of them in saying that I knew no more than what I had heard from the previous masters of the manor who had met up with the apparition.''

``And what was it that you have heard from the previous masters?''

``The earliest thing I could remember was what I learnt from my father, the previous housekeeper. In his day, he said that `Elizabeth' was not something that appeared in the early days. It was only towards the latter part of his tenure that he heard the masters talking about the apparition. The story was almost always the same; the apparition would know the master's name, and please Master Anton, let me assure you that none of the other master's were called Anton, and would inform them that they were the person that it had been waiting for all its life. It would talk about some marriage that did not occur, and that it was left at the altar when it was still alive, and how it died of a broken heart. Then it would make a promise with the master of that time to meet up on a regular basis to be close to the part of the master that resembled some part of its lost love.''

Anton sat there in silence, eating his omelette quietly, his mind processing what the housekeeper just said. There were many parts that he had said that matched the experience that Anton had quite strongly, and yet Anton hadn't actually told Mr Higgins about what had actually occurred. And from the way that the housekeeper was saying it, Anton had a weird feeling that it never did end well for each of the masters of the manor who followed through with their promises to Elizabeth.

(Story continues here.)