The manor-house opposite is now to let, and long has been. They say it is haunted—but “they”? Who then are they? No very reliable folk, be sure: only those irresponsible gossips who scent mysteries behind every board announcing “This Desirable Mansion to Let.” The more desirable the mansion, the more inexplicable that it should not be desired of some one and become let. As the months go by and lengthen into years and the house-agents’ boards begin themselves to show some evidences of antiquity, the mystery deepens and the ghost is born. I think this especial ghost was born in the bar-parlour of the “Swan’s Nest.” But it is difficult to get any exact information about this spirit. It would be: it invariably is. Whether the midnight spook be some mournful White Lady who looks from the dust-grimed windows of yonder gazebo upon the road, or some horrific spectre who like the ghost of Hamlet’s father “could a tale unfold, whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul” and make
“Each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine,”
I cannot say. But the local gossip will not lessen as time goes on and the place remains unlet. There could not, for one thing, be a much better setting for ghostly manifestations. It is true that the road is one much used by traffic, and by motorists in especial, whose dust and horrid odours might well disgust any but the hardiest of wraiths; but here is the old garden-pavilion or gazebo on the wall at the fork of roads, with its quaint roof and the windows from which the people of the manor would look out upon the traffic when it was not so dusty and did not stink so much, and here are still the trunks of the magnificent elms that until recently cast a grateful shade upon the road and made the bridge-end so beautiful a scene. But the elms have been lopped and show cruelly amputated limbs, and no one looks any more from the gazebo: it is an eloquent picture of the Past.
Beyond this spot we leave the Shipston road and turn to the right, coming in two miles to Clifford Chambers, which is not the block of offices or residential flats its name would seem to the Londoner to imply, but a picturesque village, taking the first part of its name from an olden ford on the Stour, and the second part from the manor having formerly been the property of the house-stewards, or “Chamberers,” of the great Abbey of Gloucester.
The village street of Clifford Chambers stands at an angle from the road, and so keeps its ancient character the better, for the way through it down to the Stour is only a rustic track. Clifford Chambers is therefore entirely unspoiled. Here is the church, grouping beautifully with the ancient parsonage, now a farmhouse again, as it was during the time of the plague at Stratford, in the year when William Shakespeare was born, and when a mysterious John Shakespeare was living here. “Mysterious” because nothing more is known of him, and because the question arises in some minds, “Was the John Shakespeare then living at Clifford Chambers identical with the John Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon, father of William? Was William Shakespeare, in fact, born here, instead of at ‘the Birthplace’ in Henley Street, or did John Shakespeare remove his wife and infant son hither when the plague broke out in the summer of 1564?” Any question of this being the birthplace would seem to be at once disposed of by the undoubted baptism of William Shakespeare at the parish church of Stratford-on-Avon; but the summer retreat of the Shakespeares to this place may yet be a field for interesting speculation.
There is not a more charming old black-and-white house in the neighbourhood than this, with its long range of perpendicular timbers, roughly-split in the old English fashion, which might well show some “restorers” how to do it; and the odd outside stairway at the gable-end, roofed over with its little penthouse roof. It comes well enough in black and white, but forms a feast of mellow colour, in the rich but subdued tints that the lichens and the stains of time and weather have given.
Facing up the rustic street, more like a village green than street, is another and a statelier house: the manor-house, enclosed within its garden-walls. It is of stone, in the early years of the eighteenth century, when Queen Anne reigned.
“Anna, whom three realms obey,
Who sometimes counsel takes, and sometimes tay.”