It was a cool day in late September with the threat of an autumn storm hovering over the Yorkshire moors. The tour bus was approaching from the east, just ahead of the storm, and heading to one of the prime destinations in Yorkshire, a great and rambling manor called Blackmoor Hall. It was settled on the moor like a great stone sentinel, looking oddly misplaced among the flat moors.
Something about it stuck out like a sore thumb.
In the tour bus, the guide was sitting up at the front with his microphone, rattling off a history of the old place that was difficult to hear because of the pipe in his mouth. He wasn’t smoking it, but he kept it between his teeth purely out of habit. He was also difficult to understand because he tended to mumble, which had his tour group mostly reading the guide and not listening. That included two attractive, middle-aged American women sitting somewhere mid-bus.
“Did you catch what he just said?” A redhead with streaks of gray in her hair asked her blonde companion. “I can’t understand what he’s saying half the time.”
Her nose buried in the guidebook, the blonde grinned. “Two days of him and I’m getting better at deciphering,” she said. “He’s talking about that painting I want to see now.”
“Which one?”
“The one called Hope.”
The redhead nodded as she remembered that particular detail. “Oh, yes,” she said. “That’s the one we kept seeing in Easingwold, in the gift shops. On dish towels and playing cards.”
“Right.”
The redhead yawned, trying to pay more attention to the guide when she caught sight of the structure of Blackmoor looming in the distance.
“Lee, look,” she said, pointing. “See it?”
Lee Williams looked up from her guidebook, her gaze drinking in the vision of the dark-stoned house on the rise. “Wow,” she finally said. “So that’s it? Deb, get some shots. My phone is buried in my purse.”
Debra Michaelson dutifully dug around in her backpack, producing her phone and proceeding to take some images of the distant house. As she did, Lee leaned against the window and stared at it, watching the place as the bus closed in on it.
“I have wanted to see this place for as long as I can remember,” she said, somewhat dreamily. “My mom had a book on this place. It’s really got a history, you know. It has belonged to the same family for four hundred years, but it’s that painting that everyone wants to see.”
Debra was looking at the images she’d just taken with her phone. “You’ve mentioned that before,” she said, “but what is it about that picture that everyone goes crazy about?”
Lee looked at her, grinning. “Do you not listen to anything I say? That was all I talked about on the plane.”
“I was drunk. And sleeping. Tell me again.”
Lee laughed softly. “Because some say that’s where Oscar Wilde got his idea for The Picture of Dorian Gray,” she said. “The picture is that of a beautiful young woman with red hair, dressed in a black dress and carrying a candelabra. It all looks normal enough, but in certain light, some say they can see big scars on her face, like she turns into something creepy and Gothic.”
That had Debra interested. “Really?” she said. “Then why is the picture called Hope?”
“Maybe it’s her name. No one seems to know.”
The conversation dragged as the bus made a big loop on the drive and pulled into a car park that was already half-full, even at this time in the morning. As the mumbling tour guide explained, Blackmoor Hall was built in the late sixteenth century by the wealthy de Russe family, war lords from the middle ages but a family that eventually made their money in mining and coal.
In its prime, Blackmoor Hall had been quite a showplace, with magnificent gardens and priceless furnishing. Kings and queens had stayed at the place and it had a reputation of being one of the finer country homes until the Regency period when it fell into disrepair. As Lee and Debra followed the tour guide towards the house, someone had asked him to speak up, so they began to hear more of what he was saying.
“… and movie companies have used the locale for many Hollywood movies,” he was saying. “You’ll notice that it was recently used for a BBC hit called ‘Halls of Valor’, a World War One drama. But the most redeeming factor of Blackmoor Hall is, of course, the painting that inspired The