The Haunting of Highdown Hall Read Online Free Page A

their tea, she was stopped in her tracks.
    “I’ve got a feeling about Highdown Hall...” Theo’s tone had changed, her furrowed brow highlighting her concern. “I think it may take a bit more than a simple cleansing to shift Cynthia – for whatever reason, she seems thoroughly intent on staying put.”
    “Hmmm...” Ruby’s normally smooth features developed a frown of their own.
    After all, if Theo said they had a problem, usually, they had a problem.

Chapter Two
     
    After the meeting, various phone calls and typing up of more surveys, Ruby knew the sensible thing to do was to go home, have a hot bath and climb into bed. But the thing was she could murder a rum and coke. She grabbed the book she was currently reading from her desk, threw it into her rucksack, locked up the office and headed for The Rights of Man pub.
    Next to the Law Courts, The Rights of Man was a favourite haunt of hers, run by the uber-efficient Gracie Lawless, an amusing surname considering the pub’s location and the town’s history. The pub paid homage to its most famous resident, Thomas Paine. Paine, who had lived there for several years in the eighteenth century and even married a local girl, was a radical free thinker whose political ideas and writing were highly influential in inspiring the American Revolution. Friends with none other than Benjamin Franklin, Paine had become known as ‘The Godfather of American Independence’. One of the first places he’d expounded and developed his ideas in was The White Hart Hotel, just down the road from her office.
    Ruby had always felt at home in Lewes, which is why she’d decided it was the perfect place to set up her business. She loved its anarchic side, its liberal attitudes, its highly varied history and particularly the annual bonfire processions on November 5 th . Every year the town boarded up its shops and closed its roads to traffic so that different bonfire societies from the town and local villages could dress up in wonderfully ornate costumes and parade through the dark streets to the sound of primitive drumming and marching bands, before eventually setting off huge firework displays around the town. All to commemorate the successful foiling of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the king in the Houses of Parliament in 1605. It was ironic that this should be such a massive part of the town’s identity now, when the revolutionary Thomas Paine had also had his time here.
    As she wandered through its historic streets and twittens, Ruby would often muse about the amazing number of interesting and influential people that had lived in this small Sussex county town: famous writers, artists, poets, musicians, physicians, scientists, even an Archbishop of Canterbury at one time. Sometimes she’d stroll through the ruins of Lewes Priory, on the outskirts of town, imagining the goings on in what had once been one of the richest monasteries in England; at others she’d take a walk up towards Offham Hill, picking up residual feelings from Lewes’s famous battle of 1264 as she went. Thankfully, most people seemed to have passed successfully now. For such an ancient place, Lewes was surprisingly spirit free. Not even the souls of the protestant martyrs (who were burnt at the stake in the town for their supposedly ‘heretical’ beliefs during Catholic Mary Tudor’s reign and whose sacrifice was also marked on Bonfire night) remained. Although again, residual feelings did – far too powerful to be erased from the atmosphere entirely, Ruby would regularly experience insights into a torturous death she could really do without.
    Shuddering, and not entirely because of the chill night air, Ruby pulled her coat closer. She could rely on the pub to be warm, a log fire almost always burned in the grate during the winter months. She would sit beside it, plough through several chapters of her book, sip at her drink and then return home for that well-earned bath. A perfect evening by anybody’s