It was late at night; the hour when the children have gone to sleep, and no longer even cry plaintively for a drink of water, when the embers glow dully in the grate, when even the very wind off the moors has died down as if tired after a long day, and the only sound is the sonorous ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. I was sitting up with Miss Agnes Grey, we were both drinking hot chocolate, and had been discussing, in the lazy and diffident fashion which makes late night conversation so interesting and relaxing, the supernatural and related topics. I have long had a scholar's interest in the late nineteenth century's fascination for faerie photographs and the fourth dimension, but on the subject of ghostly occurences my mind was firmly material and everyday.

Miss Grey let me state, was a retired nanny. Not what passes for a nanny today; a jeans and shirt-tail clad Scandinavian girl having a working holiday in Britain, or a gum-chewing Australian with a degree in progressive child care and the buttocks of a Darling Downs heifer. No, Agnes Grey was of the old school; she had worn a nanny's aproned uniform and 'sensible' shoes, and knew how to rock a Silver Cross pram with just the right light touch of her index finger. She had mentioned that she had had one strange experience in her life, only one, but she had never stopped turning it over in her mind, and we are talking of an event that happened nearly sixty years ago.

Do you know Mandeville Abbey? You must. It is surely one of the nation's great stately homes. Yes, 'Country Life' did a special about it just last year. Well, during the Second World War, at the height of the blitz, Nanny Grey was living at Mandeville Abbey. As you know it was necessary to move London's children away from the bombing, many went to the United States for the duration, and large country houses accomodated a lot of the remaining children. And some of them were orphans. That was inevitable I suppose.

Mandeville Abbey is a venerable pile, built on the foundations of an old abbey of course. It's next to Hobb's Hill in Wiltshire, in the parts that go way back before Christianity, when men built stone circles to measure the drama of the sun's progress. The monks were a harmless enough lot, but the family, who were made dukes by Charles the First,  had some pretty rum ancestors. There had been ghostly sightings in the past, but that is just about de rigeur for a house like Mandeville Abbey, or you'll never get the visitors through the turnstile on Sundays...

Miss Grey told me that it was a house that you never seemed to find the end of, there was always another dusty passage, always another winding back staircase...but she didn't have too much time to explore the gardens and the old stone summer house with its fluted Doric columns though. She had charge of a good hundred children, and with new arrivals, and children leaving for other refuges in the country, she was kept busy. Of course a hundred was only a couple of school classes in those days. And she had the skills of an excellent nanny and teacher - she knew all of their names, and what their favourite sweets were and that sort of thing. This was the story she told me, and I will try to tell it as much as possible in her own words.

There was one boy with striking golden hair, beautifully wavy, and with the sweet face of a very young child, even though he was eleven years old. His name was Henry, and his parents had perished during an especially severe night of bombing. He kept to himself, clearly stricken by his terrible loss, and who, according to Miss Grey, was fascinated by certain pictures that Lord and Lady Mandeville had in their collection. He would often leave the other children and make his way towards the ornate rooms where the paintings hung - and which were supposed to be out-of-bounds to the small fry, for obvious reasons.

The paintings he loved were all paintings of children - mainly girls in fact. You know the Gainsborough portrait of the Marsham Children? Yes...it does look like the boy is ruled by his sisters...not surprising when you look at that mischievous little gypsy in the centre! And 'The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit' by John Singer Sargent? Agnes Grey believed that Harry was especially attached to the sweet little girl in the front, the one sitting on the rug.

And there was a French painting too, believe it or not Renoir's 'Madame Charpentier and her Children' , a lovely portrait. It had been sent to England for safekeeping, ahead of the enemy advance. And you're right, one of them is a boy. But the painting that seemed to fascinate him the most was a Helen Allingham study of her daughter, in a blue dress and pinafore, sitting in a brown velvet upholstered armchair, and reading a book. Henry could not be torn away from it.

Miss Grey tried to get Harry to play more with the others, but without much success. But she did discover something. The boy loved dressing in girls' clothes, old-fashioned beribboned drawers, and smocks from the turn of the century. She found him going through the clothing in a tallboy in an old nursery or child's bedroom, not used for fifty years probably, in one of the more remote passsages of that rambling house. He was holding up the clothes in fascination, completely bewitched, and trying on some of the garments with furtive, trembling hands.

He didn't hear her enter, and she caught herself for a moment at the precious sight, and so did not react angrily. He was overwhelmed with embarrassment of course, but Miss Grey reassured him, and promised him that no one would know. At the time she had felt that he just needed the warm love that he was missing, and that these elaborately childish garments had somehow helped.

Harry was fascinated by an old sundial in the garden too. He used to gaze at its face for minutes, even on dull days. And then, one bright and blue summer's morning, when Miss Grey was enjoying a well-earned cup of tea, there was a light knock at the kitchen door. Thinking it was one of the children, she opened the door - but it was the figure of a man, dressed in a brown hooded cowl, perhaps a gardener's assistant. His tone was urgent, and Miss Grey was told that there had been an bad accident near the old sundial...she ran all the way, but the sundial was as it had always been, and there was nobody nearby.

Miss Grey looked around. The mysterious male figure had vanished. The sun-filled garden seemed preternaturally silent, as if the bees and birds had been struck dumb. A butterfly landed lightly on the sundial's face: the dial's shadow pointed to 11 o'clock. And then the spell was broken, the trees moved in the light breeze, and the scarcely perceived sounds of an English country garden returned.

She walked back to the house. Things seemed normal again, but a horrible discovery awaited her. At tea time she realised that Harry was missing. When Miss Grey was not attending directly to the children, Alice, a girl of 16, was left in charge. Yes, Alice said, she had seen Harry. He had run away with one of the children, to play some game of their own. Which child? Alice did not know the children as Miss Grey did. It was a girl - but she wasn't at tea either, Alice noticed. A girl in a blue dress, wearing an apron.

Miss Grey was frantic. The children were ordered to search the grounds of the Abbey, and Miss Grey had the difficult task of disturbing the Mandevilles in the wing of the house that they kept as their own. They did not like the bother that the war had caused to their life as it was, although they understood that it was their duty.

Yes, she was told by His Lordship, Miss Grey and some servants were allowed to search the whole house, but for God's sake be careful of the china in the Blue Room. Well, something like that. The search took ages. There did not even seem to be a plan of the house available, and it is possible that not even the Duke and Duchess had ever fully explored its meandering extent. But the boy seemed to have vanished.

Nobody was very interested - except Miss Grey. To the other children it was just a curious adventure. Harold had no relatives, and local authorities had other things on their mind. Miss Grey was told to search the property again; the child had to be somewhere, or would turn up when he was hungry - and this was after three days! And then Miss Grey made an astonishing discovery. She and Alice were trying to carefully go through the rooms again in a systematic way, and lightly sticking a stationer's label onto any doorway that had been fully inspected.

She was in the room where the Helen Allingham painting hung. But it had changed...it was different. There were two children sitting reading the book now. Seated next to the girl was a younger child with golden hair, wearing a pinafore. A little girl apparently...or was it? Miss Grey looked at the transfigured painting closely...the new child was younger, but was otherwise identical to Harry. Miss Grey burst into tears, she was not that kind of woman I can assure you, but the shock was just too overwhelming.

She composed herself and went in search of Alice. Had the painting changed? Alice didn't know. This part of the house was forbidden to the children, wasn't it? Alice could sense Miss Grey's agitation. She screwed up her eyes...no, it didn't really look like that girl who had gone away with Harry, she said uncertainly. Miss Grey did not want to disturb the Mandevilles. They were upset enough already by the exposure of all their possessions. And so she decided she would have to find out the truth herself.

In a ghost story there is always the visit to the library, ever noticed that? The search for the explanation.
Well -  now that old literary tradition touched Miss Grey with its gnarled, vein-encrusted fingers. The library at Mandeville Abbey was celebrated, one of the finest in the country. If you wanted a rare Latin translation of the Apocrypha, published in 1652, that would be the place to go. But there was nothing on its polished oak shelves
about Helen Allingham.

Miss Grey had to wait for three weeks before she had a chance to get to the library in the nearest town. And yes, she found a volume dealing with woman artists of the Victorian age. And a black and white print of the work was there, oil on canvas, 48" x 46", Mandeville Abbey, Wiltshire. And there were two children in it. Miss Grey leafed back to the book's publication year. 1927. Before Henry had even been born.

She must have gone insane. The stress of the war no doubt. Those were the thoughts that bedevilled her as
she caught the omnibus back to the Abbey. But she was not that kind of person; she knew it wasn't true. But
the picture had changed everywhere. As time passed, after the end of the war, as she entered middle age,
and then old age, Miss Grey never missed a chance, if she were in a library, of looking up that picture. She
must know it better than any person on earth. And it has a pair of children in it, seated side by side, and
reading a book. Always.

I know the picture - you may be familiar with it too. It portrays two children, there is no question of that. But Miss Grey was not a fool, and she was a very strong and down-to-earth woman.

How can I explain her story? Well, think of a ghost, any ghost. Let's make one up - the Lonely Cavalier of Hollyhocks Hall. Every Christmas Eve, for four centuries, witnesses have seen the cavalier galloping his white horse through the dark forest that surrounds the estate, he rides up to the house and stops under a certain window, climbs the ivy, and fades and vanishes from sight as he nears the window. Perhaps his lover awaits him behind the window pane.

Written accounts of our imaginary ghost describe him as 'returning' each Christmas Eve. But note that exactly the same action is always seen. His horse never stumbles over a fallen branch. He...never rubs his hands before tackling the climb. Now, how does the ghost, the cavalier, perceive things? He does not 'return' surely. He is merely performing one action, in the same short duration that it would take a living being. Centuries do not pass for him. Rather, he is trapped in a zone of existence which is outside the arrow of time, and we are merely seeing the repeated rotation of that zone through our more mundane plane of existence...

Miss Grey had turned over this strange experience in her mind hundreds of times. She had come to a similar conclusion, I think. She saw the child as having 'slipped sideways through time' in order to enter the world of the painting. Those were her very words. And she even thought she could identify the exact moment...there was that moment of odd stillness in the garden...

So, the linear perception of time that we have, the thing that makes us all grow old, loses its meaning. And so it is possible for the picture to have taken possession of that lonely child, and yet for him to have been in it before his own birth - at least as we perceive things.

And what of the child? He had lost his parents. He wanted to wear pretty, girlish clothes, and to remain a curly haired boy in a pinafore, in the company of an older girl who loved him. Surely the spirit that called Miss Grey away was a benign spirit, despite the consternation and trouble she had to go through. The little boy has what he yearned for. How many people on our side of the dark mirror can say the same?
Susan MacDonald, December 2001