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Florence and Giles and The Turn of the Screw
John Harding


A sinister Gothic tale in the tradition of The Woman in Black and The Fall of the House of Usher1891. In a remote and crumbling New England mansion, 12-year-old orphan Florence is neglected by her guardian uncle and banned from reading. Left to her own devices she devours books in secret and talks to herself - and narrates this, her story - in a unique language of her own invention. By night, she sleepwalks the corridors like one of the old house's many ghosts and is troubled by a recurrent dream in which a mysterious woman appears to threaten her younger brother Giles. Sometimes Florence doesn't sleepwalk at all, but simply pretends to so she can roam at will and search the house for clues to her own baffling past.After the sudden violent death of the children's first governess, a second teacher, Miss Taylor, arrives, and immediately strange phenomena begin to occur. Florence becomes convinced that the new governess is a vengeful and malevolent spirit who means to do Giles harm. Against this powerful supernatural enemy, and without any adult to whom she can turn for help, Florence must use all her intelligence and ingenuity to both protect her little brother and preserve her private world.Inspired by and in the tradition of Henry James' s The Turn of the Screw, Florence & Giles is a gripping gothic page-turner told in a startlingly different and wonderfully captivating narrative voice.









Florence & Giles

John Harding












For Norah




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#ue410808c-4644-5fd2-8607-2623fe145fc8)

Title Page (#u0e24d316-bd6c-5f77-a60e-7966582310c0)

Dedication (#uc5d35160-11d2-5214-accc-9262a42adb12)

The Swan (#u1ea4c3f0-9476-5838-9a06-0ddf103c67ef)

Part One (#ude60fca2-5d7e-5c22-9cbc-b0588bb1f6a6)

1 (#u687fca84-3f9d-5a84-9f42-a9adce1df580)

2 (#u683c13c0-36ce-52eb-977c-0d47bf888945)

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9 (#u819f527c-e05e-5c66-b393-e1161bd6a4e0)

Part Two (#u461c7725-1820-5ae9-b05e-af127a01e393)

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Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by John Harding (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




The Swan (#ulink_1d96d17c-f5a6-5854-ad48-19174d63467b)


It was April, I remember, though my spirit was December,

When a broken bird was lifted from the darkness of the lake,

In the sun white feathers gleaming, from her mouth black water streaming,

While within my voice was screaming until I thought my heart would break;

It was I who watched her dying, drifting, drifting, waiting in her wake

For God her soul to take.



PART ONE (#ulink_2e540fbe-debf-586c-b33c-c0e387f4cca8)




1 (#ulink_ac75b4aa-4d71-5719-9fe8-ad17c150b9a1)


It is a curious story I have to tell, one not easily absorbed and understood, so it is fortunate I have the words for the task. If I say so myself, who probably shouldn’t, for a girl my age I am very well worded. Exceeding well worded, to speak plain. But because of the strict views of my uncle regarding the education of females, I have hidden my eloquence, under-a-bushelled it, and kept any but the simplest forms of expression bridewelled within my brain. Such concealment has become my habit and began on account of my fear, my very great fear, that were I to speak as I think, it would be obvious I had been at the books and the library would be banned. And, as I explained to poor Miss Whitaker (it was shortly before she tragicked upon the lake), that was a thing I did not think I could bear.

Blithe House is a great barn, a crusty stone mansion of many rooms, so immense it takes my little brother, Giles, who is as fast of limb as he is not of wit, three minutes and more to run through its length, a house uncomfortabled and shabbied by prudence, a neglect of a place, tightly pursed (my absent uncle having lost interest in it), leaked and rotted and mothed and rusted, coldly draughted, dim lit and crawled with dark corners, so that, even though I have lived here all of my life that I can remember, sometimes, especially on a winter’s eve in the fadery of twilight, it shivers me quite.

Blithe is two-hearted, one warm, one cold; one bright, the other shadowy even on the sunniest of days. The kitchen, where the stove is always burny hot, is jollied by fat Meg, our cook, smiley and elbowed in flour, often to be found flirted by John, the manservant, who seeks a kiss but is happy to make do with a floury smack. Next door, with a roaring fire nine months of the year, is the housekeeper’s sitting room, where you may find Mrs Grouse either armchaired and sewing or desked with a puzzlery of papers, trying, as she says, to ‘make head nor tail’ of things and – what seems to me contradictory – to make their ends meet. These two rooms together make one heart, the warm.

The cold heart (but not for me! Ah, not for me!) beats at the other end of the house. Unloved and unvisited, save by me, the library could not be more unlike the kitchen: unfired, cool even in the burnery of summer, freezing in winter, windows darked by never-opened thick drapes, so I have to steal candles to read there and afterward scrape their guilty drippery from the floor. From one end to the other is one hundred and four of my shoed feet, and thirty-seven wide. Three men could stand one upon the other and scarce touch the ceiling. Every inch of wall, aside from the door, the draped windows and their window seats, is wooden shelving, from floor to ceiling, all fully booked.

No maid ever ventures here; the floors are left unbroomed, for unfootfalled as they are, what would be the point? The shelves go unfingerprinted, the wheeled ladders to the upper ones unmoved, the books upon them yearning for an opening, the whole place a dustery of disregard.

It has always been so (apart from the governessed times, of which more anon), leastways as far as I remember, for I first made my way here a third of my lifetime ago, when I was eight. We were then still ungovernessed, because Giles, who is some three years my junior, the one the teaching’s for, was considered too young for school or indeed any kind of learning, and we were hide-and-seeking one day when I opened a strange door, one that hitherto had always been locked – or so I had thought, probably on account of its stiffness, which my younger self could not manage – to refuge from him there, and discovered this great treasury of words. The game was straightway forgotten; I shelf-to-shelfed, extracting book after book, the opening of each a sneezery of dust. Of course I could not then read, yet that somehow wondered me even more, all these thousands – millions more like – of coded lines of undecipherable print. Many books were illustrated, woodcutted and colour-plated, a frustratory of captions beneath, every one of which taught me the miserable impotence of finger-tracery.

Later, after I had been scolded for going missing for so long that Mrs Grouse had everyone searching for me, not only all the maids but floury Meg and John too, I asked her if she would teach me to read. I instincted not to mention the library and it feared me quite when she gave me a quizzical look and said, ‘Now missy, what in the world has made you think of that?’

It was one of those questions it’s best not to answer, for if you keep quiet, grown-ups will always go on to something else; they lack the persistence of children. She deep-breathed in and long-sighed it out. ‘The truth is, Miss Florence, that I’m not exactly sure your uncle would want that. He has made clear to me his views on the education of young women. I think he would say that this was not the time.’

‘But please, Mrs Grouse, he wouldn’t have to know. I wouldn’t tell a soul and if he should visit unexpectedly I would hide my book behind my back and stuff it under the cushions of the chair. You could teach me in your sitting room; even the servants need not know.’

She laughed and then serioused again. She lined her brow. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Florence, I wish I could, I really do, but it’s more than my job’s worth.’ She got her mouth into a smile, something it was always ready to do. ‘But I tell you what, there’s a little housekeeping left this month, maybe enough for a new doll. Now, young lady, what say you to a new doll?’

I said yes to the doll; it was better to appear bought off, but her refusal to help me, far from discouraging me, opposited, and merely stubborned my resolve. Slowly, and with some difficulty, I taught myself to read. I lingered the kitchen and stole letters from John when he was reading the newspaper. I would point to an ‘s’ or a ‘b’ and ask him to tell me its sound. One day in the library I fortuned upon a child’s primer and from that and from here and there, I eventually broke the code.

So began the sneakery of my life. In those early days Giles and I were let wild; much of the day we could play as we liked. We had only two restrictions: one was to avoid the old well, although that was anyway covered up with planks and paving slabs too heavy for us to lift and so was just one of those things grown-ups like to worry themselves about and presented no danger to us at all; the other was to stay away from the lake, which was exceeding deep in parts, and perhaps might. How like grown-ups it is to see danger where there is none; to look for it in a lake or a well, which offer no harm in themselves without the agency of human malevolence or neglect. Yet these same cautious adults would be all unaware when the threat to us children actually came, for unlike us, for all their talk of the house being full of ghosts and ghouls, they had long ago ceased to hear unexplained footsteps in the dark.

Running apart, my brother Giles has not many talents, but one thing he is good at is keeping a secret. When I took him to the library, he little cared for the books, although he could be occupied by colour plates of birds or butterflies for an hour or two. He was happy enough scampering up and down the ladders and climbing the shelves or hiding behind the drapes, or else he would play outside; you could trust him, even at that early age, to avoid the lake, or Mrs Grouse’s prying eyes.

I, meanwhile, spent hour after hour reading, and because my absences, although unremarked during the daytime, would be noticed in the evenings, my bedroom became a smugglery of books. After Giles reached the age of eight and was sent away to school, of course, my life turned into an unheedery of anyone else. I could come and go as I liked; this part of the house was largely unvisited, and I grew so bold I scarce worried about anyone seeing me enter or leave the library, or disturbing the dust that lived there. In this way I absorbed Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, the poetry of Longfellow, Whitman, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, they were all there. But one writer towered them all. Shakespeare, of course. I started with Romeo and Juliet, moved on to the histories, and soon made short work of the rest. I wept for King Lear, I feared Othello, and dreaded Macbeth; Hamlet I simply adored. The sonnets weeped me. Above all, I fell in love with the iambic pentameter, a strange passion for an eleven-year-old girl.

The thing I liked most about Shakespeare was his free and easy way with words. It seemed that if there wasn’t a word for what he wanted to say, he simply made one up. He barded the language. For making up words, he knocks any other writer dead. When I am grown and a writer myself, as I know I shall be, I intend to Shakespeare a few words of my own. I am already practising now.

It was always my greatest ambition to see Shakespeare on stage, but there is no theatre between here and New York City, hopelessing my wish. Last summer, not long before Giles was sent off to school, the people who have the estate next door, the Van Hoosiers, came calling; they had a son, Theodore, a couple of years older than me, an only child they wished to unbore. They lived in New York most of the year, travelling the hundred miles or so up here only in summer to escape the heat of the city, and the young man had no one to keep him amused and so he excited to find me. He sat and doe-eyed me all through tea.

Afterward Mrs Grouse suggested I show Theodore the lake. Now it misfortuned that Giles was ill in bed that day, confined by a severe headache. My brother is as sickly as I am well; he has illness enough for us both, while I have no time to be indisposed, having all the looking after and worrying to do. Giles’s absence now, when young Van Hoosier and I outdoorsed, gave my visitor free rein with me. He nuisanced me, obsessed as he was by my allowing him to give me a kiss. I had no fixed objection to this, being, as I was, not much younger than Juliet when she got herself romanced, but young Van Hoosier was no Romeo. He had a large head and eyes like balls that stood out from their sockets. He looked like a giant bug. Now, I am tall for my age, but Theodore was even taller, without half as much flesh; he beanpoled above me, which did not endear him to me, for I have never been one who could stand to be looked down upon.

We were side-by-siding on a stone bench beside the lake and I shifted myself to other-end from him, for I found his attentions annoying and was about ready to get up and leave, but then he let slip, no doubt at some mention of mine of Shakespeare, that he had seen Hamlet. I alerted and sat up straight and looked at him anew. Perhaps, after all, this boy might not be so unbooked as he succeeded so well in appearing; there were possibilities here, I sensed. I offered him a deal. I would allow him the kiss he so craved, if he would write a love poem for me.

Well, he pulled out a notebook and pencil and got right down to it there and then, and in no time at all was ripping out the page he’d written on and handing it to me, which impressed me quite, though I dare say you can guess what befell. Foolish girl, I wanted him to summer’s day me, I really thought he might. Instead, of course, he doggerelled me and, after he’d forced the kiss he claimed was his due, left me crying by the lake, not only roughly kissed but badly Longfellowed too. Here is how the Van Hoosier ode finished, so you’ll understand for yourself:

What fellow who has any sense

Would not want to kiss Florence?




2 (#ulink_f955c710-be7b-5b99-8f91-d42ebcb2b695)


Giles was sent away to school last fall when he was eight, which, although young, was in keeping with other boys of his class who lived in remote places such as Blithe, where there was no suitable local school. We horse-and-trapped him to the station, John and Mrs Grouse and I, to put him on the train to New York, where he was to be met by teachers from the school. We cried him there; at least Mrs Grouse and I did, while John losing-battled with a quivering lower lip. Giles himself was happy and laughing. He could not remember ever having been on a train and, in his simple, childlike way, futured no further than that. Once on board, he sat in his seat, windowing us with smiles and waves, and I bit my lip and did my best to smile him back, but it was a hard act and I was glad when at last the train began to move and he vanished in a cloud of steam.

I berefted my way home. All our lives, Giles and I had never been apart; it was as though I had lost a limb. How would he fare unprotected by me, who understood his shortcomings so well and loved him for them? Although I had no experience of boys apart from Giles and the silly Van Hoosier boy, I knew from my reading how they cruelled one another, especially at boarding schools. The idea of my little Giles being Flashmanned weeped me all over again when I had just gotten myself back under control. When we neared Blithe House and the trap turned off the road into the long drive, avenued by its mighty oaks rooked with nests, it heavied my heart; I did not know how my new, amputated life was to be borne.

Most girls my age and situation in life would long have been governessed, but I understood this was not for me. By careful quizzery of Mrs Grouse, and a hint or two dropped by John, and general eavesdroppery of servantile gossip, I piecemealed the reason why. My uncle, who had been handsome as a young man, as you could see in the picture in oils of him that hung at the turn of the main staircase, had at one time been married, or if not actually wed, then engaged to, or at least deeply in love with, a young woman, a state of affairs that lasted a number of years. The young lady was dazzlingly beautiful but not his equal in refinement and education, although at first that seemed not to matter. All futured well until she took it into her head (or rather had it put there by my uncle) that she beneathed him in intellectual and cultural things; their life together would be enriched, it was decided, if they could share not just love, but matters of the mind. The young lady duly enrolled in a number of courses at a college in New York City.

Well, you can guess what happened. She wasn’t there long before she got herself booked, and musicked and poetried and theatred and philosophied and all ideaed up, and pretty soon she offrailed, and most probably started drinking and smoking and doing all sorts of other dark deeds, and the upshot of it was that she ended up considering she’d overtaken my uncle and intellectually down-nosing him, and of course then it was inevitable but that she someone-elsed. At least, I think that’s what happened, although I misremember now how much of the above I eavesdropped and how much my mind just made up, as it is wont to do.

And so my uncle took against the education of women. He pretty much decultured himself too, far as I can tell. He shut up Blithe House and left the library to moulder and moved to New York, where I could not imagine he could have had so many books. I had no idea how he passed his time without books, for I had never met him, but I somehow pictured him big-armchaired, brandied and cigared, blank eyes staring out of his once handsome, but now tragically ruined, face into space and thinking about how education had done for his girl and blighted his life.

So I lonelied my way round the big house, opening doors and disturbing the dust in unslept bedrooms. Sometimes I would stretch myself out on a bed and imagine myself the person who had once slumbered there. Thus I peopled the house with their ghosts, phantomed a whole family, and, when I heard unidentified sounds in the attic above me, would not countenance the idea of mice, but saw a small girl, such as I must once have been, whom I imagined in a white frock with a pale face to match, balleting herself lightly across the bare boards.

The thought of this little girl, whom I began to believe might be real, for Blithe was a house abandoned by people and ripe for ghosts, would always eventually recall me to the games I had played with Giles. To unweep me, I would practical myself and search for new places to hide for when he should return at the end of the semester, and when that staled, which it did with increasing frequency, I libraried myself, buried me in that cold heart that more and more had become my real home.

One morning I settled myself down with – I remember it so well – The Mysteries of Udolpho, and after two or three hours, as I thought, I’d near ended it when I awared a sound outside the window, a man’s voice calling. Now, this was an unusual occurrence at Blithe, any human voice outdoors, for there was only John who worked outside and he had not, as I have, the habit of talking with himself, and everywhere was especially quiet now with Giles gone and our sometimes noisy games interrupted, so that I ought to have been surprised and to have immediately investigated, but so absorbed was I in my gothic tale, that the noise failed to curious me, but rather irritated me instead. Eventually the voice began to distant, until it died altogether or was blown away by the autumn wind that was gathering strength outside. I had relished a few more pages when I heard footsteps, more than one person’s, growing louder, coming toward me, and more shouting, but this time inside, followed by a flurry of feet in the passage outside, and the voice of Mary, the maid, calling, ‘Miss Florence! Miss Florence!’ And then the door of the library was flung open followed by Mary again calling my name.

I froze. As luck would have it I was ensconced in a large wingbacked chair, its back to the door, invisibling me from any who stood there, providing, of course, they no-furthered into the room. My heart bounced in my chest. If I were discovered it would be my life’s end. No more books.

Then Meg’s voice, ‘She’s not here, you silly ninny. What would she be doing in here? The girl can’t read. She’s never been let to.’

I muttered a prayer that they wouldn’t notice the many books whose spines I had fingerprinted, my footsteps on the dusty floor.

‘Well, that’s as maybe,’ replied Mary, ‘but she’s got to be somewhere.’

The sound of the door closing.

The sound of Florence exhaling. I closed the book carefully and made sure to put it back in its place upon the shelf. I crept to the door, put my ear to it and listened. No sound. Quick and quiet as a mouse, I opened the door, outed, closed it behind me, and sped along the passage to put as much distance as possible between me and my sanctum before I was found. As I made my way to the kitchen I wondered what all the to-do was about. Obviously something had happened that required me at once.

I could hear voices in the drawing room as I tiptoed past and went into the kitchen, where I interrupted Meg and young Mary, who were having an animated chat. At the sound of the door they stopped talking and looked up at me in a mixture of surprise and relief.

‘Oh, thank goodness, there you are, Miss Florence,’ said Meg, deflouring her arm with a swishery of kitchen cloth. ‘Have you any idea what the time is, young lady?’ She nodded her head at the big clock that hangs on the wall opposite the stove and my eyes followed hers to gaze at its face. It claimed the hour as five after three.

‘B-but that’s impossible,’ I muttered. ‘The clock must be wrong. It cannot have gotten so late.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with the clock, missy,’ snapped Meg. ‘Begging your pardon, miss, it’s you that’s wrong. You’re surely going to catch it from Mrs Grouse, you’ve had the whole household worried sick. Where on earth were you?’

Before I could answer I heard footsteps behind me and turned and face-to-faced with Mrs Grouse.

‘M-Mrs Grouse, I – I’m sorry…’ I stammered, and then stopped. Her face, rosy-cheeked with its Mississippi delta of broken veins and their tributaries, was arranged in a big smile.

‘Never mind that, now, my dear,’ she said kindly. ‘You have a visitor.’

She turned and went into the passage. I rooted to the spot. A visitor! Who could it possibly be? I didn’t know anyone. Except, of course, my uncle! I had never met him and knew little about him except that, according to his portrait, he was very handsome, the which would be endorsed by Miss Whitaker when she arrived.

Mrs Grouse paused in the passageway and turned back to me. ‘Well, come along, miss, you mustn’t keep him waiting.’

Him! So it was my uncle! Now perhaps I could ask him all the things I wanted to ask. About my parents, of whom Mrs Grouse claimed to know nothing, for she and all the servants had come to Blithe only after they had died. About my education. Perhaps when he saw me in the flesh, a real, living young lady rather than a name in a letter, he would relent and allow me a governess, or at least books. Perhaps I could charm him and make him see I wasn’t at all like her, the woman who had been cultured away.

Mrs Grouse stopped at the entrance to the drawing room and waved me ahead of her. I heard a cough from within. It made me want to cough myself. I entered nervously and stopped dead.

‘Theo Van Hoosier! What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at school?’

‘Asthma,’ he said, apologetically. Then triumphantly, ‘I have asthma!’

‘I – I don’t understand.’

He walked over to me and smiled. ‘I have asthma. I’ve been sent home from school. My mother has brought me up here to recuperate. She thinks I’ll be better off here in the country, with the clean air.’

Mrs Grouse bustled into the room. ‘Isn’t that just grand, Miss Florence. I knew you’d be pleased.’ She dropped a nod to Theo. ‘Not that you have asthma, of course, Mr Van Hoosier, but that you’ll be able to visit us. Miss Florence has been so miserable since Master Giles went off to school, moping around the house on her own. You’ll be company for one another.’

‘I can call on you every day,’ said Theo. ‘If you’ll permit me, of course.’

‘I – I’m not sure about that,’ I mumbled. ‘I may be…busy.’

‘Busy, Miss Florence,’ said Mrs Grouse. ‘Why, whatever have you to be busy with? You don’t even know how to sew.’

‘So does that mean I may, then?’ said Theo. He puppied me a smile. ‘May I call on you, please?’ He stood holding his hat in his hand, fiddling with the brim. I wanted to spit in his eye but that was out of the question.

I nodded. ‘I guess, but only after luncheon.’

‘That’s dandy!’ he said and immediately got himself into a coughing fit, which went on for some time until he pulled from his jacket pocket a little metal bottle with a rubber bulb attached, like a perfume spray. He pointed the top of the bottle at his face and squeezed the bulb, jetting a fine mist into his open mouth, which seemed to quieten the cough.

I curioused a glance at him and then at the bottle.

‘Tulsi and ma huang,’ he said. ‘It’s an invention of your Dr Bradley here.’

I puzzled him one.

‘The former is extracted from the leaves of the Holy Basil plant, the latter a Chinese herb long used to treat asthma. It is Dr Bradley’s great idea to put them together in liquid form and to spray them into the throat for quick absorption. He is experimenting with it and I am his first subject. It appears to work.’

There followed an awkward silence as Theo slowly absorbed that the subject had not the interest for me that it had for him. Then, in repocketing the bottle, he managed to drop his hat and as he and Mrs Grouse both went to pick it up they banged heads and that started him off coughing and wheezing all over again. Finally, when he had stopped coughing and had his hat to fiddle with once more, he gave me a weak smile and said, ‘May I visit with you now, then? After all, it is after luncheon.’

‘It may be after yours,’ I said, ‘but it ain’t after mine. I haven’t had my luncheon today.’ And I turned and swept from the room with as much poise as I could muster, hoping that in getting rid of Theo, I hadn’t jumped it back into Mrs Grouse’s mind about me going missing earlier on.




3 (#ulink_d94e9800-8a65-5c3f-aba8-c059a72634da)


Suddenly my existence was uncosied. I was seriously problemed. First I had to make sure I didn’t fail to show up for a meal again, lest next time they went looking for me they find me, with all the repercussions that would involve. But the question was easier posed than solved. I had no timepiece. Then over a late luncheon, when Mrs Grouse was so full of Theo Van Hoosier she didn’t think to interrogate me as to my whereabouts earlier, I pictured me something about the library that might undifficulty me regarding my problem and, as soon as I’d finished eating, slipped off and made my way there.

Sure enough, tucked away in a dark corner, mute and unnoticed, was a grandfather clock. It was big, taller than I, though not nearly so tall as Theo Van Hoosier, the prospect of whose daily visits almost unthrilled me of the finding of the clock. Gingerly I opened the case, as I had seen John do with other clocks in the house, and felt about for the key. At first I thought I was to be unfortuned, but then as I empty-handed from the case there was a tinkle as my little finger touched something hanging from a tiny hook and there was the key. I inserted it in the hole in the face and began winding, being careful to stop when I met resistance, for John had warned me that overwinding had been the death of many a timepiece.

I had noted the time when leaving the kitchen and to be safe added fifteen minutes on to that to allow for my getting to the library and for the finding of the key. The clock had a satisfyingly loud tick and I thought how at last I would no longer feel alone here. There would be me, my books and something akin to another heartbeat, if only in its regularity. Something, moreover, that wasn’t Theo Van Hoosier.

Of course, no sooner did the starting of the clock end one problem than it began another. For if anyone should venture into the library its ticking was so loud they could not fail to notice it and so be set to wondering who had started it and kept it wound and then on to working out who had been here. I shrugged the threat away. So be it. I had to know the time during my sojourns here or I would be discovered anyway. Besides, no one else had ever been in here in all my librarying years, so it unlikelied anyone would now. Too bad if they did; it was a risk I had to take.

That afternoon it colded and our first snow of the fall fell. I watched it gleefully, hoping it would mean that Theo Van Hoosier would not be able to visit. Surely if his asthma was enough to keep him from school he should not be trudging through snow with it? I kept my fingers crossed and imagined him asthmaed up at home, consoling himself with a bad verse or two.

With this promise of salvation, though, the snow difficulted me in another way. Or rather the drop in temperature did. I had never wintered much in the library, because it had no fire and colded there, and because before I always had Giles to keep me amused elsewhere. Although I tried gamely, determined reader that I am, to carry on there, my fingers were so cold I could scarce hold my book or turn its pages, let alone keep my numbed mind on it. I slipped out of the room and by means of the back staircase made my way to the floor above. There I found a bedroom whose stripped bed was quilted only in dust, but footing it was an oak linen chest in which were three thick blankets. Of course, there was riskery in transporting these to the library, because if I encountered anyone en route I would be completely unexplained. And unlike a book, I could not simply slip a bulky blanket inside my dress.

Nevertheless, without the blankets I would not be able to read anyway, so it had to be done. I resolved to take all three at once since one would be just as hard to conceal as three and the fewer blanketed trips I made, the lower the risk. They were a heavy and awkward burden, the three together piled so high I could scarce see over them, but I outed the room and pulled the door shut after me with a skill of foot-flickery. I had halfwayed down the back stairs and was about to make the turn in them when I heard the unmistakable creak of a foot on the bottom step of the flight below. I near dropped my load. It was no good turning and running, one way or another I would be caught. There was nothing for it but to stand and await my fate. I held my breath, listening for another step below. It never came. Instead I heard Mary’s voice, talking to herself (ah, I thought, so I am not the only one who does that!). ‘Now where did I put the darned thing? I made sure it was in my pocket. Damnation, I shall have to go back for it.’

I heard a slight grateful groan as the stair released her foot and then angry footsteps hurrying along the corridor below. I waited a moment after their sound had faded away, then scurried down, tore along the passage and ducked through the library door.

There I pushed together two of the big leather wingbacked armchairs, toe to toe, and nested me in them with two of the blankets for a bed and the third stretched over the tops of the chair backs to make a canopy. I thought of it as my own four-poster, though of course it had nary a single one. When I left the room I pushed apart the chairs again, folded the blankets and hid them behind a chaise longue. It might offchance that someone entering the room would just not notice the clock, or attach the correct significance to it if they did, clocks being an ever present in many rooms and an often unnoticed background kind of thing. But they could not fail to see my nest and so it had to be constructed every day anew.

Thus began a new pattern to my days. The mornings I tick-tocked away in my nest, contenting me over my books until the clock struck the quarter hour before one, when I denested, slipped from the room and hurried to lunch. But soon as Theo Van Hoosier began to call, the afternoons problemed me anew. I had no way of knowing what time he might arrive and despite my best efforts to schedule him he proved as unreliable as he was tall. Sometimes he appeared directly after lunch; others he turned up as late as half past four. He excused himself on the grounds that he had a tutor and was dependent upon the whimmery of same.

Now, suppose I went to the library and young Van Hoosier came while I was there, it would be as bad as the time I missed lunch. They would search for me and either my secret would be discovered or later they would question it out of me. On the other hand, if I hung around in the drawing room or the kitchen waiting for Theo and he arrived late, I could waste hours of precious reading time.

That is what I was forced to do, the first few Van Hoosier days. I sat in a twiddlery of thumbs looking out the window at the snow or playing solitaire. The worst thing was my idleness attentioned me to Mrs Grouse and set her to wondering why she had not noticed it before; she didn’t guess how I had always out-of-sighted-out-of-minded me, and it started her talking about me doing something useful, such as learning to sew. She even sat me down one day and began to mystify me with stitchery. I thought I would lose my mind.

I have read somewhere that boredom mothers great ideas and so it was with me. Where I was going wrong was in my association of reading with the library, whereas in fact all I needed was somewhere I could private myself and from where I could keep an eye on the front drive to see the approach of Theo Van Hoosier. No sooner had I thought of this than I solutioned it. Blithe House had two towers, one at the end of either wing. They were mock gothic, all crenellations, like ancient fortresses, and neither was at all used any more. I suspect they were never made much of, since each had its own separate staircase, its upper floors reachable only from the ground, so that to go from the room on the second floor to one on the same floor in the neighbouring part of the house, you first had to descend the tower stairs to the first floor, go to one of the staircases leading to the rest of the house and then ascend again. But what the towers promised to offer was a commanding view of the drive. From the uppermost room, of either, I guessed, I would be able to see all its curvy length. The function of the towers had always been decorative rather than practical, and the one on the west wing had been out-of-bounded to Giles and me because it was in need of repair, which naturally, with my uncle’s tight pursery, never came. Therefore I could be sure that no one would ever go there. If I could get to it unobserved, I would be able to read whilst looking up from time to time to observe the drive. Moreover, the west tower had another great convenience: it was only a short corridor and a staircase away from the library, a necessary proximity, because I would have to carry books up there.

Consequently, the following afternoon, armed with a couple of books in readiness for an afternoon of reading and Van Hoosier spotting, I duly set off for the west tower, only to be met by the most awful hope-dashery at the foot of its stairs. In all my plotting there was something I had quite forgot. Placed across the bottom of the stairs, nailed to the newel post, were several thick boards, floorboards no less, completely blocking any ascent, put there, like the planks and stone slabs over the well, to prevent Giles and me from dreadful accidenting. I set down my books and tried to move the planks, but they were firmly fixed, so I only splintered a finger for my trouble; no budgery was to be had. I was in a weepery of frustration. I tried putting my feet on one board to clamber over, but there was no foothold for it, access was totally denied. Besides, I realised, even if I had been able to climb over, any entry so arduous and difficult would be so slow I’d be laying myself open to redhandery should anyone chance that way.

I picked up my books and had started to walk away, utterly disconsolate at the loss of my afternoons just when I thought to have recovered them, when I brained an idea. I dashed back, went around the side of the staircase, pushed my books through one of the gaps between the banisters, then hoisted myself up and found I could climb the stairs from the outside, by putting my feet in the gaps. In this way I was able to ascend past the barricade and then, thanks to my leg-lengthery, haul myself over the banister rail and onto the staircase. I stood and looked down with satisfaction at the barrier below and felt how safe and secure I would be in my new domain. I certained no one else would be able to follow me. I couldn’t imagine Mary or fat Meg or plump Mrs Grouse stretching a leg over the banister rail, even if they had been witted enough to think of it.

I made my way up to the second floor, then to the third and finally through a trapdoor to the fourth, the uppermost, from which I could look down upon not only the driveway but also the roof of the main building. The top of the tower consisted of a single room, windowed on all sides. I stood there now, mistress of all I surveyed, fairytaled in my tower, Rapunzelled above all my known world. I looked around my new kingdom. It was sparsely furnished and appeared to have been at one time a study. There was a chaise and a heavy leather-topped keyhole desk, the leather itself tooled with a fine layer of mould, and before the desk, a revolving captain’s chair. It was heads or tails whether the library or this room contained more dust and I would not have liked to wager upon it. The windows were leaded lights and a few of the small panes were missing, so a fine draught blew through the room and there were bird droppings on the dusty floor, showing that the wind was not the only thing that entered this way.

Still, it was all a wonder to me. The windows had drapes at the four corners but these were all tied back and I realised I would have to be careful and keep my head low so as not to be visible from below. No matter, if I sat at the desk, I could Van Hoosier the drive and so long as I did not move about excessively no one was likely to see me.

The ventilation of the missing panes meant the room would always be cold and my first task was to secure more blanketry. I set down my books and duly went scavenging. It tedioused having to go right down to the first floor and then up again to the second for my purloinery but there was no other way. I had emptied my old chest of blankets for the library and I did not fortune upon another such. However, I did find a couple of guest bedrooms that were kept in readiness should we ever have another guest and I to-the-winded my caution, stripped them of their quilts, stole two of the three blankets beneath and then replaced the quilts. I surveyed what I had done. I had skinnied the beds but I couldn’t imagine anyone would notice, and should a maid remake the bed she probably wouldn’t suspect. After all, who at Blithe – other than a shivering ghost – would steal a blanket?

I made sure the coast was clear and sped down the staircase to the first floor, along the main corridor, and threw the blankets over the barrier at the bottom of the tower stairs. I had just hauled myself up onto the outside of the stairs when the door to the main corridor opened. No time to wait! I hurled myself head over toe over banister rail and onto the stairs, where I crouched behind the barricade, hoping for unseenery through the gaps.

‘Oh my goodness, what was that!’ It was Mary’s voice.

‘Ghosts most likely,’ said a voice I recognised as belonging to Meg. ‘They say Blithe is full of ghosts.’

‘Tch! You don’t believe in that nonsense, do you?’ Mary’s voice betrayed a certain lack of confidence in the words it uttered.

I spyholed them through the barricade. Meg raised an eyebrow. ‘I reckon I’ve worked here five years and seen many things. When you’ve been here as long as I have, you’ll know, you’ll know.’ And she opened the door to the main corridor again, picking up a dustpan into which she’d evidently just swept something. She disappeared inside; before Mary followed her, she pulled a face at the older woman’s retreating back.

So here I was, princessed in my tower, blanketed at my desk, shivering some when the wind blew, but alone and able to read, at least until it twilighted, because I could have no giveaway candles here. I suddened a twinge, thinking – I knew not why just then – of Giles, away at his school, in turn thinking perhaps of me, and I wondered if he was happy. It brought to mind how I had once torn in two a playing card – the queen of spades it was – straight across the middle, thinking to make two queens from one, the picture at the top and its mirror image below, but found instead I did not even have one, the separate parts useless on their own, and it struck me this was me without Giles, who was a part of my own person. How I longed for his holidays to begin so I could show him our new kingdom. This was all I lacked for happiness, for Giles to be here to share it with me.

It was not to be. And so I started off on my new life. I morninged in the library and afternooned in my tower. I reasoned early on that it would be foolish to keep returning books to the library after finishing my day in the tower; carrying them about increased the likelihood of being caught. This meant that if I were reading something in the morning, I could not continue with the same book in the afternoon. I resolved therefore to make a smugglery of books in the tower (where there was little chance of detection anyway), which would remain there until they were finished, and for my reading day to be of two separate parts. I libraried the mornings away on solid books, philosophy, history and the like; I also began to teach myself languages and to work up a passable knowledge of French, Italian, Latin and Greek, although I would not vouch for my accent in the two former, never having heard either of them spoke; the afternoons were my fantasy time, appropriate for my tower. I indulged myself in Mrs Radcliffe, ancient myths and Edgar Allan Poe. The only fly in my ointment here, though, was that I must never let my concentration lapse, must never surrender myself too much to the words that swam before my eyes and in my head and distract myself to my doom.

On the day after I first occupied my tower, I morninged out up the drive, measuring how long it would take Theo Van Hoosier to walk its length, from the moment he first visibled from the tower, to the moment when he vanished from view under the front porch of the house. How did I work out the time, I who had no timepiece? I counted it out, second by second, and to make sure my seconds were all the right length I figured them thus: one Shakespeare, two Shakespeare, three Shakespeare. In this way I reckoned that young Van Hoosier would be in view for four and a half minutes. Thus, when I set out for the tower room after lunch I would first sneak into the drawing room, which has a direct view of the drive, and make sure Van Hoosier was not in view. If he was not, then I had four and a half minutes to get to the tower, otherwise, if I took any longer and he should appear unviewed at the precise moment my back was turned when I set off, he could have reached the front door and be out of view again before I was at my post and so occasion all the dangerous calling and searching for me. Let me tell you, it was a stretch to make it to the tower in that time. If I happened to meet John or Mary or Meg or Mrs Grouse and they delayed me for even a few seconds it impossibled my journey in the allotted time and so meant I had to go back and check the drive and start once more from the beginning. Not only that, all the while I had to be one-Shakespearing-two-Shakespearing and if someone should speak to me and I should lose my number, then it was back to the drawing board – that is the drawing room – all over again.

By the time I reached the bottom of the tower staircase I was usually up to two hundred-Shakespeare and it was touch and go whether I could climb the outside of the staircase, haul myself over the banisters, take off my shoes (for fear of my running feet booming out on the uncarpeted treads) and get to the tower room in time. On one occasion I just made it, peeped through the window and saw Van Hoosier’s hat disappearing under the front porch, so that I had to tear back down the staircase, haul myself back over the banisters, climb down the outside bit and get myself into the main corridor all over again before they started hollering for me. But then, no one had ever told me having a secret life was going to be easy.




4 (#ulink_92fe9f5f-158e-56c4-a9fc-dcece82c946e)


That first day when it snowed I figured myself likely weather-proofed against the Van Hoosier boy, but I had made the very mistake that all too many people made with me (who would have thought I had two book nests? who would have thought I Frenched and Shakespeared?), namely I judged him by appearances. I figured him a spineless sort of tall weed, who would buckle in two without his starched shirt to hold him upright. So I grudged an admiration for him that day when I upglanced the drive from the drawing room (I had not then found my tower refuge, of course) and saw him Wenceslasing his way through the drifted snow. A dogged and doglike devotion to me, I realised, worth so much more than his doggerel could ever be.

Mrs Grouse told me to wait in the drawing room. I heard her open the front door and invite him to shake the snow from his boots, followed by an interval of quite prodigious stamping. Shortly afterward, the door to the drawing room opened and Mrs Grouse said, ‘Young Mr Van Hoosier to see you, miss,’ as though we didn’t both know I was sitting in there waiting for him and as if, too, I were much used to visitory. In this, and in adjectiving our guest as young, Mrs Grouse showed that she herself didn’t know how to behave, that she was a housekeeper and childminder, not a hostess. When she shut the door behind him, I noticed she had even neglected to relieve Van Hoosier of his hat.

I invited him to sit down. I had positioned myself in an armchair so as to preclude any possibility of him nexting me and he couched himself opposite, folding himself as though he were hinged at the knees and hips. We sat and smiled politely at one another. I did not know what to do with him and he did not know what to do with his hat. He sat and Gargeried it, twisting it this way and that, rotating it with one hand through the thumb and forefinger of the other, flipping it over and over. Finally, after he’d dropped it for the third time, I upped and overed to him. I irritabled out a hand. ‘Please, may I take that?’

He gratefulled it to me. I outed to the hall and hung it with his coat. But when we were seated again I realised I might have removed the hat but I had not removed the problem. Indeed I had exacerbated it, for now he had nothing to fiddle with. He was forced to fall back on cracking his knuckles, or crossing and uncrossing his legs, this way and that. I hard-stared his shins and he caught my gaze and, uncrossing his legs, put both feet firmly on the floor. He looked scolded and in that moment his face so Gilesed I twinged guilt.

‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘here we are.’

‘It would appear so,’ I frosted back.

‘It is very cold outside. The snow is deep.’

‘And crisp and even,’ I said.

‘What?’ He knew he was being made fun of, but could not quite figure out how.

We sat in silence some moments more. Then he said, ‘Oh yes, I almost forgot,’ and began patting the different pockets of his jacket and pants in an unconvincery of unknowing the whereabouts of something. Finally he pulled out a folded paper and began to unfold it. ‘I wrote you another poem.’

The look I gave him was several degrees colder than the snow and like enough to have sent him scuttling back out into it. ‘Oh no, it’s OK; you don’t have to entertain a kiss this time. There’s no question of any kissing being involved.’

I thawed my face and settled back in my chair. ‘Well, in that case, Mr Van Hoosier, fire away.’

Well, the least said about the second Van Hoosier verse, the better. The best you could say was that it was nowhere near as bad as the first, especially as it didn’t carry the threat of a kiss, although, then again, I wasn’t too impressed by the final rhyme of ‘immense’ and ‘Florence’; fortunately the reference was to the supposed number of my admirers, not my size.

When he’d finished reading it, Theo looked up from the paper and saw my expression. ‘Still not the thing, huh?’

‘Not quite,’ I said.

He crumpled the paper into a ball and thrust it into his pocket. ‘Darn it,’ he said good-naturedly, ‘but I’ll keep going at it till I crack it, you see if I don’t. I’m not one for giving up.’

In this last he proved as good as his word, not just in the versifying but in the snow trudgery too. It didn’t matter if it blizzarded, or galed or howled like the end of the world outside, he Blithed it every afternoon for the next couple of weeks. After he’d visited with me a few times I began to see that, like his verse, his lanky body rhymed awkwardly and scanned badly. His long limbs didn’t fit too easily into a drawing room, where it seemed one or other of them was always flailing out of its own accord, tipping a little side table here or tripping a rug there; he was like a huge epileptic heron. It impossibled to comfortable him indoors, so on the fourth or fifth visit, when he suggested we take ourselves outside, I was somewhat relieved, for if we stayed in it was only a matter of time before china got broke; not that I minded that, for there was nothing of value at Blithe and no one to care about it anyhow, but I could imagine how distraught he would be. It was only as we put on our coats that I second-thoughted. Was it really safe to have him clumsying about on snow and ice? Would not his parents blame me if it were one of his arms or legs, rather than china, that got broke? God knows, there was enough of them to damage.

‘Is this wise?’ I said, as he mufflered himself up.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, your asthma and all. Taking it out into the cold.’

‘Not at all. It’s the best thing for it, a nice bright frosty day like today when the air is dry and clear. It’s the damp dreary days that get on my chest and set me to coughing.’

So out we went and, to my surprise, my very great surprise, we funned it for a couple of hours. It was not that Theo lost his awkwardness in this new element, but rather that this element was so bare and empty of obstacles that he had nothing to do but fall over on the ice, which he did time and time again. When he went you had to stand clear as his great arms windmilled fit to knock your head off if you should happen to put it in the way of them and his legs jerked up like a marionette’s and then everything collapsed like a deckchair and left a dead spidery bundle on the ground. It was so comical that the first time I burst out laughing before I could help myself and then, when the pile of his bones didn’t move, rushed to him, fearfulling what I would find. But he always pulled himself up with a smile and so after a while we got to making snowballs and throwing them at one another, at which he took a terrible pasting because his own throws were so bad he was as like to hit himself as put one on me. And then he suggested we make a snowman, and we started but we had only got halfway through fashioning a sizeable head when it reminded me of the winter before, how I’d done this with Giles, and it guilted me. I thought of him classroomed somewhere while I was still here enjoying myself and not thinking of him for a single moment for two whole hours together, and all at once I was chilled to my core and couldn’t unchatter my teeth, so that Theo, seeing this, insisted we repair indoors.

As if my thoughts had either been stirred by those of Giles himself or themselves stirred him, next day there was a letter from him. He was not a great correspondent, lacking as he did my facility with the written word, although I had done my best to teach him to read and write. Mrs Grouse, who totally ignoranted this, of course, thought it a marvel how quickly the school had taught him to write, although his letters were so badly formed it took me a great while to figure out even this short epistle. Before I had the letter to myself, though, I had to listen to Mrs Grouse’s guesses as to what Giles’s mangled hieroglyphics might mean, for, of course, I was not supposed to be able to read them for myself. The poor woman, who was, I suspected, as literate, or rather illiterate, as my brother himself, could make a fair fist of only three-quarters of it and more or less guessed the rest. But when I had it to myself, I managed by long study, and knowledge of Giles, to pretty much figure it out.

Dear Flo,

I am to write home every other Sunday. We have a time for it and all the boys must do it. I hope you are well. I hope Mrs Grouse is well. I hope Meg and Mary and John are all well. I am very well thank you. I am not homesick. I am very slow with my lessons but I don’t mind. The other boys laugh at me for this, but I don’t mind the laughing so much. I will close now.

Your loving brother

Giles

What did it mean, ‘I don’t mind the laughing so much’? So much as what? Were there other things that he minded more, physical intimidation perhaps, some kind of pinching or hitting or hair-tugging or fire-roasting? Or was it merely a figure of speech, a way of saying he wasn’t greatly bothered by it? And why did he talk about not being homesick? Why mention it at all, unless perhaps he was and had been instructed not to worry those at home by writing them about it. The letter weeped me and that night in bed I puzzled over it again, then pillowed it, wanting thereby to feel close to poor Giles.




5 (#ulink_e796571a-2b28-5b1b-92a7-394f5688f198)


You should not deduce from that afternoon in the snow with Theo Van Hoosier that I was all joy unalloyed at his visits. There was plenty to alloy my joy, but nothing more so than the disturbance to my reading. It was not simply the long and often untimely interruptions the visits occasioned. It was also all the moments when he unappeared. You will recall that whenever I was towered I had to check the drive once every four and a half minutes. To leave margin for error this meant once every four minutes. But, of course, I was untimepieced and I didn’t see myself hauling no grandfather clock over the banisters and up the stairs. The only way I could judge the time, therefore, was by the turn of my pages, the pace at which I read. So before taking each book from the library I timed myself reading a few pages by the grandfather clock, to determine exactly how far four minutes would take me. If it were three and a half pages, then up in the tower room I would have to look out the window at every such interval. I cannot begin to tell you how annoying this was. It was like trying not to drop off to sleep; all the time, as the book drew me in, as its author surrounded me with a whole new world, some part of me was fighting the delicious surrender to such absorption and saying, three and a half, three and a half, three and a half. Sometimes I’d sudden I’d forgotten, that seven or eight pages, or even ten or fourteen, had passed with no looking up. When that occurred I had no way of knowing whether Van Hoosier had all unseen upped the drive during my relapse, and so there was nothing for it but to down book and clamber all the way down the stairs, and run along the corridor to check out the hall and drawing room and then, if they were un Hoosiered, upglance the drive, and if that were likewise Theo-free, make the mad dash up to the tower again. On a good book such as Jane Eyre I might be up-and-downstairsing four or five times in an afternoon.

One day in the tower, I lifted my eyes from my book, resenting this crazy, jerky four-minute way of reading and, through the window, saw a rook pecking at something in the snow. The scene was the perfect picture of a new state of mind I realised I had reached. The perfect white snow, the black rook a nasty stain upon a newly laundered sheet; for the first time I understood that there was nothing wholly good and nothing wholly bad, that every page has some blot, and, by the same token, I hoped, every dark night some distant tiny shining light. This hoped me some. The rook on my landscape was Giles, and all the suffering he might be going through, and all the suffering I endured from the great hole inside of me where he should have been. But the rook was one small black dot and the rest was all white. Did that not offer the prospect that most of my brother’s school life might be happy and carefree, with perhaps one or two small things he did not like? And yet, why had he mentioned not being homesick, except to reassure me? What could it mean but that he was?

Anyway, there were the Christmas holidays to look forward to when Giles would be home and I would be able to worm the truth from him, although what good that would do me I couldn’t be sure. Meanwhile I read all the mornings and some of the afternoons and then Van Hoosiered my way through the rest. Because of his restless and wayward limbs and the need to keep them from fine china, Theo was always up for getting out in the snow. One day I looked out my tower window and saw a bent figure trudging up the drive and almost went back to my book, for I thought it must be some delivery man and could not be he. This fellow appeared to be a hunchback with a great lump on his spine, but it fortuned me to watch him a bit longer and then the hump moved, leapt off his back and dangled from one of his hands and the rest of the shape organised itself into the unmistakable gangle of Theo and I was off, leaping the banisters and racing the corridor.

In the hall Theo opened the leather bag he was carrying with a flourish like a magician dehatting a rabbit. ‘What…?’ I cried.

‘Skates. Well, you have a lake out back, don’t you?’

Mrs Grouse was all concern. Suppose the ice crust was too thin and broke and we fell through it and drowned? What would she say to Theo’s mother then? I thought that seeking to concern us about her social difficulty rather than our own deaths was the wrong way to go with this argument, but I held my peace. Of course, nobody was worried about what to tell my mother. And significantly Mrs Grouse hadn’t mentioned any possible embarrassment with my uncle, for we both knew he would mourn such an event as a disencumbrance.

John fortuned at this point to be passing through the hallway on some errand and to overhear and intervene. He assured Mrs Grouse that he had skated on lakes in these parts every winter as a boy and that at this time of year the ice was at least a foot thick. He undertook to accompany us out there and, at Mrs Grouse’s insistence, check the lake’s surface very carefully ‘lest there be any cracks’, which caused John to roll his eyes and smile behind her back.

To my great surprise, especially after his previous slipping and sliding on the snow around the house, Theo proved to be an accomplished skater. Once he had those skates on he was transformed. From an early age, he’d had plenty of practice every year in Central Park, and was able to zoom around the lake at great speed, to turn and spin and glide, every movement smooth and graceful. He minded me of a swan, which is ungainly as a walker, waddling from side to side, and awkward as a flier, struggling to get off the ground and into the air, and then making a great difficulty of staying up there, but which on the water serenes and glides. I guess it was a great relief to Theo to be out on the frozen lake with nothing to collide with, no delicate side tables and fine china out to get him, no rug-trippery to untranquil his progress.

By contrast I hopelessed the task. My legs were determined to set off in opposite directions, my head had an affinity with the ice and wanted to keep a nodding acquaintance with it, my backside had sedentary intentions. But Theo kinded me and helped me; he was a different person, taking control, instructing me, commanding me as I commanded him on unvarnished land. And gradually, over a period of a couple of weeks, I began to improve, so that soon I was going a whole ten minutes without butting or buttocking the ice.

So it was that each afternoon I found myself looking up every page or so, instead of four-minuting, for I longed to see Theo upping the drive. And then, one day, he didn’t come at all. I was reading The Monk, making the hairs on my neck stand on end, shivering myself in the dead silence of the tower, when I looked up anxiousing for Theo and realised I could scarce see the drive, as the light was fading fast; I was still able to read, for my tower, being the highest and westernmost point of Blithe, is where the sun lingers longest. I put down my book and downstairsed. What could have happened to Theo? Why had he not come? True, it had snowed mightily that morning, but that had never put him off before. Had his tutor forbidden his visits? Had he perhaps some new work schedule that disafternooned him?

I found Mrs Grouse in the kitchen. ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded crossly, adding before I could answer, ‘A note has come for you,’ and she produced an envelope that she opened, taking out the single sheet inside and unfolding it. She put on her spectacles and peered at it. ‘It’s from young Mr Van Hoosier,’ she said, and then began to read.

Dear Florence,

I am sorry I cannot come today. Asthma is my companion this afternoon. Doctor called, strenuous exercise forbidden. Please continue to skate and do a circuit or two for me.

The note ended with a poem:

To Florence I would make a trip

But asthma

Hasma

In its grip

I liked that. It wasn’t exactly Walt Whitman. But it was better, much better.

As she folded the note and handed it to me (although what she thought I, whom she supposed unable to read, could do with it, I do not know) Mrs Grouse said, ‘You must pay a visit to the Van Hoosiers, to ask after him. It’s what they would expect. It’s what a young lady should do.’

‘But…’ I was about to say I never visited anywhere, for I never had. Giles and I had never played with other children, for we knew none. This was one reason why I so concerned for him at school. But Giles leaving home and all the Theoing I’d had had changed all that. I saw that now.

‘Very well, I’ll go in the morning.’

And Mrs Grouse smiled and I could feel her eyes on my back as I walked off to the kitchen to ask Meg what sweet pastries she might have for me to take to Theo.




6 (#ulink_3cb3bed3-459d-5a62-ba8e-386c8a2a6b50)


I don’t know when the nightwalks started, for I had had them as long as I remembered, and of course, of the walks themselves I recalled nothing, except the waking-up afterward in strange places, for example the conservatory, and once in Mary’s room up in the attic, and several times in the kitchen. I knew, though, how the walks always began; it was with a dream, and the dream was every time the same.

In it I was in bed, just as I actually was, except that it was always the old nursery bedroom which was now Giles’s alone but which I used to share with him, until Mrs Grouse said I was getting to be quite the young lady and ought not to be in a room with my brother any longer. I would wake and moonlight would be streaming through the window – oftentimes, though far from always, the walks happened around the time of the full moon – and I would look up and see a shape bending over Giles’s bed. At first that was all it was, a shape, but gradually I realised it was a person, a woman, dressed all in black, a black travelling dress with a matching cloak and a hood. As I watched she put her arms around Giles and – he was always quite small in the dream – lifted him from the bed. Then the hood of her cloak always fell back and I would catch a glimpse of her face. She gazed at my brother’s sleeping face – for he never ever woke – and said, always the same words, ‘Ah, my dear, I could eat you!’ and indeed, her eyes had a hungry glint. At this moment in the dream I wanted to cry out but I never could. Something restricted my throat; it was as though an icy hand had its grip around it and I could scarce get my breath. Then the woman would gather her cloak around Giles and, as she did so, turn abruptly and seem to see me for the first time. She would quickly pull her hood back over her head and steal swiftly and silently from the room, taking my infant brother with her.

I would make to follow but it was as though I were bound to the bed. My body was leaded and it was only with a superhuman effort that I was finally able to lift my arms and legs. I would sit up and try to scream, to wake the household, but nothing would come, save for the merest sparrow squawk that died as soon as it touched my lips. I would put my feet to the floor, steady myself and walk slowly – my limbs would still not function as I wished them to, in spite of the urgency of the situation – to the doorway. There I would look in either direction along the corridor but have no clue which way the woman had gone. It was no good trying to reason things, she was as likely to have gone left as right and I was wasting valuable time prevaricating. And so I would choose right, it was always right, and begin to walk, urging my weighted legs to move. And then…and then…I would wake up, sitting on the piano stool in the drawing room, perhaps, or in Meg’s chair in the kitchen, sometimes alone but like as not surrounded by the servants, who would be watching me, making sure I did not have some accident and harm myself, or somehow get outside and drown myself in the lake. When I woke, my first words were always the same: ‘Giles, Giles, I have to save Giles.’ And Mrs Grouse or John or Meg or Mary, whoever was there, would always say, ‘It’s all right, Miss Florence, it was only a dream. Master Giles is safe and sound asleep.’

Because I remembered virtually nothing of the walking part of the dream what I knew of my nightwalking came from the observations of other people. Often I liked to nightwalk in the long gallery, a windowed corridor on the second floor that stretched along the central part of the front of the house. John told me how, when he first came to work at Blithe, he had been to the tavern in the village one Saturday night and was returning home up the drive somewhat the worse for wear when he looked up at the house and saw a pale figure, all in white, moving slowly along the long corridor, now visible through one window, then disappearing to reappear a moment later in the next. At the time he knew nothing of my nocturnal habits. ‘I don’t mind telling you, miss,’ he told me many a time, ‘I ain’t no Catholic but I crossed myself there and then. Knowing as I do the reputation Blithe has for ghosts, how it has always attracted and pulled them in, I convinced myself it was some evil spectre I was seeing. I was sure I’d come in and find the whole household murdered in their beds.’

Mrs Grouse told me that I always walked slowly, not as sleepwalkers are usually depicted in books, with their arms outstretched in front of them as if they were blind and feared a collision, but with my arms hanging limply at my sides. My posture was always very erect and I seemed to glide, with none of the jerkiness of normal walking, but smoothly, as if, as she put it, ‘you were on wheels.’

It was true what John said about Blithe and ghosts. Mrs Grouse reckoned it all stuff and nonsense but Meg once told me the local people thought it a place ghouls loved, a favourite haunt, as it were, to which any restless spirit was attracted like iron filings to a magnet. And now, even though it was only I, Florence, sleepwalking, I seemed somehow to have added to this superstition.

Meg told me that when I woke from my walks it uselessed to speak to me for several minutes, that I seemed not to hear. Often, before I was myself, at the moment when I seemed to have emerged from the dream but had not yet returned to real life, I began to weep and was quite distraught, and if any should try to comfort me I pushed them away and said, ‘No, no, don’t worry yourself about me! It’s Giles who needs help. We must find him, we must!’ Or something like.

After I had nightwalked three or four times and it began to be a pattern, they called in Dr Bradley, the local doctor, who came and gave me a good going-over, shining lights in my eyes and poking about in my ears and listening to my heart and so on. He pronounced me fit and well and told them it was likely the manifestation of some anxiety disorder, which was only natural considering my orphan status and the upheavals of my early life. This was confirmed, he said, by my fears focusing upon Giles, who was, after all, the only consistent presence in my life. I read all this in a report I found on Mrs Grouse’s desk one day, when she had gone into town on some errand. I curioused over the words ‘upheavals of my early life’. I could not remember anything of my parents – my mother died in childbirth and my father some four years later with my stepmother, Giles’s mother, in a boating accident. I recalled nothing of any of them, and as the servants were only engaged after they were all dead, they could tell me nothing either. As far as my early life went, it was all a blank, a white field of snow, without even the mark of a rook.




7 (#ulink_47510528-821a-5810-aaef-f22f4f0a4322)


Before I set out to visit the Van Hoosiers next morning, John came back from town with a letter, a rare enough occurrence at Blithe, where Mrs Grouse received correspondence from my uncle maybe two or three times a year and little else. It was for me, and I reflected that from being completely unlettered but a few weeks ago I was now the most episto-latoried person for miles around. The letter was, of course, from Giles and I heart-in-mouthed as Mrs Grouse commenced to read it, after she had first sniffed and said, ‘Humpf, seems folks think I’ve nothing better to do all day than read letters to you.’

Dear Flo,

Thank you for your letter. I have read it ever so many times and it is tearing from so much folding and unfolding. I like the sound of your ice skating and cannot wait for the holidays. Do you think Theo Van Hoosier will be able to find any skates to fit me? Will the ice bear the weight of three of us? Or will we take turns? I am very slow at my lessons, but I don’t mind when the others laugh at me. It is better than being hit or pinched. But you are not to worry about it because it does not happen often. Not so very often, anyway. I hope you are well. I hope Mrs Grouse and John are well. I hope Meg and Mary are well.

Your loving brother

Giles

The letter from me Giles referred to was, of course, written by Mrs Grouse and so contained none of the things I would have liked to tell him, about the tower room, for instance (although I had not yet decided whether or no to let him in on that), and none of the anxious inquiries about himself I longed to make. His references to pinching and hitting shivered me quite, although it uncleared whether he had actually suffered physical abuse or if ‘you are not to worry about it because it does not happen often’ merely referred to the teasing, but I had no time to reflect upon it now. I was all done up ready to go visiting, so I took the letter from Mrs Grouse and slipped it into my overcoat pocket, where it heavied my spirit as if it had been a convict’s leg iron or a hunk of stolen bread down a schoolboy’s pants. I had wanted to walk to the Van Hoosier place but Mrs Grouse would have none of it. It was more than a mile and although the roads were clear of snow today, if it blizzarded again I might be stranded halfway, not to mention that even if that didn’t happen I would death-of-cold me. She neverminded that I had been out in the cold on the ice every afternoon anyway. So John was to horse-and-trap me there, which was fine by me, for once we out-of-sighted Blithe and Mrs Grouse’s prying eyes he handed me the reins and let me drive, as he often did when the housekeeper wasn’t around. The old horse we used on the trap, Bluebird, was so docile and knew all the local routes so well that in truth there was not much driving to be done, and even should it snow, it little dangered the horse leaving the road and wandering into a ditch.

I had never seen the Van Hoosier place; it was approached by a long driveway, and set in woodland so far back from the main road as to invisible all but its chimneys when we drove past. So I was surprised to find it smaller than Blithe, although in every other respect much grander. You could tell that from the moment you turned off the road and through the entrance gates, which were newly painted, in contrast to our own peeling and chipped portals. The edges of the drive were neatly manicured and the lawns either side trimmed to within an inch of their lives. The house itself sparkled and gleamed in the winter sun; it did not absorb the light like dull old Blithe. John dropped me at the front door. ‘I’ll drive the trap around the back and make myself comfortable in the servants’ kitchen, Miss Florence,’ he said as he handed me down. ‘Just have them send for me when you’re ready to leave.’

I anxioused as I reached for the bell pull. I was all best-frocked today and did not feel in my own skin. The door was opened (soundlessly, it did not creak like nearly all the doors at Blithe) by a uniformed footman. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, questioning an eyebrow.

‘I – I came to inquire after the health of Mr Van Hoosier,’ I mumbled. ‘That is, I mean, well, young Mr Van Hoosier.’

‘And you would be…?’

‘Florence, from Blithe House.’

He held open the door and bowed me in. I found myself in a grand hallway with a great sweeping staircase, chandeliered and crystalled to the nines, mirrors everywhere, so that I was surrounded by what seemed dozens of pale, gawky girls, staring at me from all directions. ‘If you’ll just wait one moment, miss, I’ll tell Mrs Van Hoosier you’re here.’

He went off, heels clicking the tiled floor. I gazed at myself in the mirrors some more then decided to concentrate on looking down at my boots, which I found far more comfortable. After what seemed an age – I figured he had a mighty long way to walk – the man clicked his way back and invited me to follow him. He led me down a long corridor, opened a door and insinuated me into a small sitting room, where Mrs Van Hoosier was seated at a walnut writing desk, evidently in the middle of penning a letter. She looked up and sugared me a smile. ‘Come in, my dear, come in and make yourself comfy. You must be frozen after your journey over here.’

She stood up, walked round the desk and shook my hand. I handed her the paper bag of pastries I had brought. ‘For Theo,’ I explained.

She opened the bag and peered at its contents and then, without comment, placed it on the desk and indicated a chair by the fire. ‘Melville, bring us some coffee and cake, would you?’ I heard the door close behind me. I sat down. I had met Mrs Van Hoosier but the once, the time they called at Blithe to introduce us to Theo. I had little attentioned her on that occasion, being much more taken with Theo and wondering how long it would be before he broke something. Observing her now, what struck me most was what a huge battleship of a woman she was. She was tall, and you could see that was where Theo got his height from, but she was also filled out, solid, not bendy like her boy. She was mantelpieced by a large bosom that cantilevered out in front of her; you could have stood things on it, a vase of flowers and a bust of Beethoven, and a family photograph or two, maybe. Her hair was all piled up on her head and that probably added another few inches. When I sat down she gianted over me, which didn’t help my nervousness.

She put one hand on the mantelpiece over the fire and leaned against it.

‘I – I came to inquire after Theo, I mean Mr Van Hoosier,’ I muttered. ‘I was hoping perhaps to visit with him and maybe cheer him up.’

She insincered me a smile. It felt like a grimace. ‘Ah yes, how kind of you, but I’m afraid that won’t be possible. He’s much too sick. The doctor has forbidden him any excitement.’

I smiled at the thought that I might constitute excitement.

‘You find that amusing?’

‘Oh, no, ma’am, not at all. It was just, well…’ My words died away.

The door opened and Melville reappeared with a tray. Mrs Van Hoosier sat down on the opposite side of the fireplace from me. Melville moved a side table next to her and set the tray on it. He placed another table beside me. ‘That’s all right, Melville, you can go.’

She poured the coffee and added milk and handed me a cup. ‘You have enjoyed Theo’s company, it seems.’

I nodded. ‘Oh, yes…’

‘Well, of course. He’s a fascinating boy.’

It wasn’t the word I’d have used for Theo.

‘And I thought it would be good for him to have some companionship here.’ I nervoused a sip of coffee. She raised her cup to her lips but then paused and lowered it slightly. ‘Though I wonder now, in the light of what’s happened, whether that wasn’t a mistake.’

‘A mistake?’

She proffered a plate of tiny tea cakes but I declined. She took one herself and popped it whole into her mouth and masticated slowly for a moment or two. The clock on the mantelpiece began to tick louder. She swallowed. ‘Yes, a mistake. All that skating and running around in the cold. I fear it has done his chest no favours.’

‘But, Mrs Van Hoosier, if I may make so bold –’

‘You may not.’ She inserted another cake into her mouth and chewed it so angrily I all but felt sorry for it. When it was finally dead she turned and fixed me a look, as though she were a scientist and I some kind of bug she was microscoping. ‘The problem is, Florence, that you have been left to run wild. I think your uncle should have kept a closer eye on you. There is more to being a guardian than providing a home and food.’

I eagered a question. ‘Do you know my uncle?’

‘No, I’m afraid I never had that pleasure, never even heard of the man until we bought this place, although I did meet your stepmother once.’

‘What was she like?’

She screwed up her eyes, as if shutting out the present and gazing at the long-distant past. Finally she opened them and picked up a bell from the table beside her. ‘Do you know, it was years ago, when she wasn’t much more than a girl. She was pretty, though not at all sophisticated, but other than that I don’t rightly remember her at all. Then I heard she’d married someone from these parts.’ She rang the bell.

‘That would be my father,’ I said.

‘So it would seem,’ she said.

‘And they died, in a boating accident, I believe.’

‘How tragic,’ said Mrs Van Hoosier as if it wasn’t at all. Melville appeared in the doorway. ‘Anyhow,’ she continued, ‘I think perhaps it would be a good idea if Theo were to visit you a little less. He has his lessons to learn and, what with his illness, his tutor fears he’s getting behind…’

‘Y-you’re stopping his visits?’ I shocked how this suddened to matter to me. I would not have thought to have cared.

‘No, my dear, I wouldn’t want to deprive my son of all amusement. I’m just reining back on them a little, is all. I think too much excitement is not good for him. Melville, ask for the young lady’s carriage to be brought round, would you?’




8 (#ulink_1d21e709-dfc2-5710-a86b-e7d19d2a2a2b)


That night was all toss-and-turn and longing for dawn; I was too mindfilled to sleep. From being a girl who had too much time on her hands, I now found myself fully occupied by all the things that were happening in my life. First there was poor Giles, and what I between-the-linesed from his letters. Other than that ambiguous phrase about the pinching and hitting, there was nothing I could actually put my finger on, no direct complaint, although I certained he would make one if he were really in trouble or upset. Then, at one of my many wakings, it came to me, wondering me why I hadn’t thought of it before. Of course, his letters would be censored; a teacher would read them before they were allowed to be sent home. Any bald statement of bullying would certainly be excised; the school would not want bad impressions being conveyed that might anxious parents; that would not do at all. As you may imagine, the thought did not comfort me one bit.

Next I was thinking about Theo Van Hoosier. Not just how I would miss his visits, odd fellow though he was, but also how Mrs Van Hoosier had in-betweened me with her ruling that he could still visit, but much less often. It would have been better if she had banned him altogether. As things stood, I would not be able to take to the library in the afternoons, but would still have to keep watch for Theo from the tower. Only now there would be a great deal more three-and-a-halfing, for there would be many more afternoons when Theo didn’t show at all, and the frustatory of it was that I would never know when he was coming and when not, so would have to do it for longer and, most of the time, for no reason at all. I cursed Theo that he had ever come into my life and inconvenienced me so, and at the same time I found myself missing him and wishing him here. It was the rook and the virgin snow all over again.

But by far the most wakery thing that night was not what Mrs Van Hoosier had said about her son, but the remarks she had carelessed about my uncle and my stepmother. Even when I was thinking about Theo, or worrying over Giles, whatever my thoughts, that undertowed them all.

Of course, I had not gotten myself so far through life without wondering about my parents. I had tried asking Mrs Grouse about them but she always stonewalled me. ‘I only know what I have been told. Your mother went out of the world as you came into it and your father died in a boating accident, along with Master Giles’s mother, when he was still a baby,’ was all she would say.

I attempted going at it another way, by questioning her about my lineage, putting it to her that since Giles and I bore the same surname as our uncle, then our father must have been his brother. ‘I have met your uncle only once, Miss Florence,’ she said, in the manner of someone ducking a question not because they subterfuged but rather to discount any possibility of making a mistake, ‘and that was in New York when he engaged me to come here and run the house and look after Master Giles and you. You were four years old then and that’s all I know. We didn’t discuss your family tree.’

Now I thought how I could maybe find out more if I wrote my uncle and simply asked him straight out to tell me who I was and all about my parents, but then of course it was not so simple. My uncle had given strict orders to illiterate me; he wouldn’t be best pleased to find my penmanship turning up in his morning mail.

It obvioused me it was no use putting the thing to Mrs Grouse again. She was a simple soul who transparented her feelings; she was like George Washington, she couldn’t tell a lie. If she’d been hiding anything, I would have guessed straightway. She told me nothing, not because she would not, but simply because she didn’t know. Asking her again about my mother and father would bring no information but simply alert her to my curiosity and any other action I might take.

Quite what that action would be conundrummed me quite. I spent a whole afternoon in the tower not reading but thinking about it, and dozing, of course, having sleeplessed the night. Every time I felt my head nodding and jerked back to waking, I had to make the mad dash down to the front door in case I’d missed Theo, even though in my heart of hearts I knew he wouldn’t be coming that day; I couldn’t take the risk. I wished he were there and, back in the tower after fruitlessing yet another front-dooring, I pretended he was and imagined us face-to-facing, me on the chaise, he on the captain’s chair, discussing my problem.

‘So that’s it,’ I told him, having nutshelled the whole thing for him. ‘What can I do?’

He stroked his chin and got up and paced about in a most businesslike way, purposefulling long strides, hands behind his back. Finally he stopped and looked down at me, cracking open a smile. ‘Documents,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

He came over to me and bent down on one knee, seizing my upper arms in his big bony hands. ‘Don’t you see, there must be documents relating to you. Everyone has documents. And likely they’re somewhere in Blithe House.’ He released me and stood looking at me, awaiting a reaction.

I eagered forward in my chair and then slumped back. ‘Unless my uncle took them with him to New York when he cleared out.’

My imaginary Theo shrugged, which had the look of a praying mantis trying to slough its skin. ‘Perhaps. But maybe he didn’t. It’s worth a try.’

I could have hugged him, except of course he wasn’t there, and because even if he had have been, it might have brought on another poem. Instead, I windowed the empty drive, void of his gangling figure, and in that way thanked him by missing him more.

Theo was right. Although my upbringing had unworldlied me, I knew from my reading that nobody goes through this life or even a part of it without something of them being somewhere written down. I must be documented like anybody else; all I had to do was a paper chase. Blithe was a big house, but there were not many places where papers would be kept.

I started next morning in the library since there was plenty of paper there. I was looking for anything that wasn’t an out-and-out book, a ledger perhaps, or some kind of file. You would think that in four years’ free run of the place I would have happened across such if it were there, but you have to remember that not only was this room immense (it rhymes with Florence), but also that until now it had been only books that interested me.

Well, I fruitlessed a whole week of library mornings. I upsidedowned the place, deshelving what seemed like every book, opening them and giving them a good shake to release any hidden document they might contain; there was none. I up-and-downed the ladders until I made myself dizzy; my nose stung and my head ached from an overdose of dust, but nothing did I find.

The afternoons I glummed away in my tower, too distracted to read, blinding myself by gazing out at the snow, as if hoping to see some clue writ there as to where the papers I sought might lie. At last it began to obvious me that although my uncle might not have had any use for books when he quit Blithe, he had certainly taken all his documents with him. I hopelessed finding any here.

Then, that afternoon, when I had all but given up on my quest and did not even think of it, chance threw a possible answer my way. I had torn my stocking on a nail on one of the library ladders and as it was my last pair, thought it might be a good excuse for a trip into town; we children hardly ever went there, perhaps only three or four times a year, but I thought Mrs Grouse might let John drive me. It would distraction me from the desperation of my lonely days.

So I knocked upon the door of her sitting room and, gaining no reply, and seeing the door not fastened but slightly ajar, pushed it open. The room was empty. She must be in the kitchen on some errand, or perhaps outside, in the barn, giving John some instruction or other. I idled about the room, glancing at the ornaments upon her mantel and the half-done embroidery basking upon her armchair. Eventually I came to her desk and, for want of anything better to do, found myself straightening her blotter, which was lying any which way on the desk top, and lining it up neatly with the inkwell and her pen. And then, feeling impish, I plumped myself down in her desk chair, thinking to experience what it might be like to be her. ‘Florence, where have you been?’ I sterned aloud to my imaginary self, contriting the other side of the desk, hands behind back, head hung low. ‘I have told you a hundred ti—’ but then I was interrupted, for before me I saw what I should have thought of when I first began my search.

The desk had two drawers, side by side. I upglanced the door to certain Mrs Grouse wasn’t about to return, and having coast-cleared, grabbed the brass handle of the right-hand drawer and slid it open. Inside lay Mrs Grouse’s fat account book, which I had seen upon her desk a thousand times. Having upglanced again, I lifted it out to see what other treasure the drawer might contain. It was full of pieces of paper, separated into little piles, all neatly clipped together with hairgrips. I picked them up one after another and disappointed straightway. They were nothing but bills, this pile from the grocer, that from the livery stable, that from the draper. There was nothing more. I replaced them and the account book and closed the drawer.

At that moment I heard voices outside in the passage. Mrs Grouse and Meg. She would be in the room any moment. There was no time to examine the second drawer without being red-handed, I had to get out of her chair fast and distance myself from the desk or face the consequences, but…well, I could not help myself, I had to see what that drawer contained. I heart-in-mouthed as I reached for the handle, for I could hear the approach of footsteps outside, Mrs Grouse about to enter. Nevertheless, I grasped the handle and tugged and…nothing happened. The drawer stuck fast, it was locked.

At that moment the door of the room began to open and I near cried out in alarm at being so caught when I heard again Meg’s voice from afar, the other end of the corridor, and Mrs Grouse – for it was she at the door – pause to answer. I upped the chair and skiptoed fast to the other side of the room and stood innocenting out the window when behind me the housekeeper entered the room.

‘Oh, there you are, Florence. Was there something you wanted?’

I told her about the stocking, which led to a discussion that I was growing fast and needed new clothes. ‘Let me have a look at the account book and see what we can manage,’ she said and I heart-in-mouthed again as she slid open the drawer, terrified she might notice some disarrangement of its contents. She did not, and, satisfied that Blithe could afford it, sanctioned a trip for the morrow, herself and I, into town.

The trip to our little town distracted me, though not in the welcome way of one who is bored, but rather by diverting me from my urgent task. The next few days I mooned around the house, unlibrarying in the morning, untowering the afternoons, for I could think of nothing but that locked drawer and how I might obtain the key.

I almost salivated every time Mrs Grouse passed me by, the jingle-jangle of her household keys upon the great iron ring she wore on her belt sounding as a dinner bell to a starving man. It impossibled I should steal them, for she would miss them the moment they were gone, even suppose I could magick the ring from around her belt, which, all my wishes notwithstanding, I could not.

My opportunity came one day as it darked and I saw her through the drawing-room window, outside, talking animatedly to John. Their discussion appeared somewhat heated, on her part, that is, for John never lost his temper. It evidented she was reprimanding him; no doubt he had wasted some little bit of something somewhere, for she was tasked by my uncle to keep all spending at Blithe on a tight rein. This was my chance. I dashed from the house and breathlessed up to her.

‘Mrs Grouse, Mrs Grouse!’ I shouted as I approached.

She annoyed me a look at the interruption. ‘Whatever is it now, child?’

‘Please, Mrs Grouse, I have dropped my needle on the floor of my bedroom and cannot look for it, for I haven’t a candle. Would you fetch me a new one, please?’

She exasperated a sigh. She had been full-flowing her complaint and did not want to be cut off. In a trice she unclipped the key ring from her belt and held it out to me by a particular key. ‘Here, Florence, unlock the large armoire in the storeroom and take one out – only one, mind – then lock the cupboard and bring the keys straight back here to me.’

I skipped off. Now, normally this would have been a rare chance to purloin an extra library candle or two, but I unheeded that. I straighted to the housekeeper’s sitting room and her desk. Then began an anxiety of trying keys. There must have been some thirty keys on that great jangling hoop and I knew I had but a minute or two at most to find the one I wanted. It obvioused that most were too big, great door keys that they were, so I concentrated on the dozen or so small keys that doubtlessed for cupboards and drawers. I lucked it the fourth one I tried. It slipped gratefully into the lock like a child into a warm bed on a cold night. It turned with a satisfying click.

I was tempted to open the drawer and it was all I could do to stop myself, but I knew that if I did and found something I would be powerless not to look at it and so would end up redhanding me. I left the drawer unlocked, which all along had been my strategy, and hastened back outside. There was no time now to visit the storeroom for the candle and so I had to hope that Mrs Grouse would not think of it or, if she did, assume it was in my pocket and not ask to see it.

As it was, it fortuned she was still so busy complaining John she simply took the keys from me without a word or even a glance and I awayed fast before she turned her attention to me. I made my way up to my room and from under my bed pulled out the box of old dolls and other such childish things that were long unplayed these days. This was where I kept my secrecy of bedtime books, for no one but me ever looked in it. It was also the hidery for my purloinery of candles, which I needed for the library and for reading in bed at night; I filched one whenever I could. For instance, whenever I aloned in the drawing room I would remove a candle from its holder, break off the bottom half, secrete it in my pocket and replace the top part; nobody ever noticed the candles were growing shorter. In the double candelabra I operated on both candles this way, to keep the appearance of them burning at the same rate.

Tonight I intended to open the drawer I had unlocked and inspect the contents, if any, and for that I would need my own candle. I could not risk lighting Mrs Grouse’s sitting-room candles. She might notice next day that they had mysteriously burned down overnight; and in the event of anyone hearing me and coming into the room, even if I heard them approach and managed to snuff the candles first, they might see them smoking or spot that the wax was warm and soft. My own candle I could snuff and then push under the rug next to Mrs Grouse’s desk, for retrieval in the morning.

My intention was to pretend to nightwalk, which I had often done before when I sleeplessed and wanted to library during the night. My nightwalks had been described often enough to me to know just how I should walk, as regards posture, pace, facial expression and so on, but there was an extra difficulty this time: because my nightgown was unpocketed, I could not carry candle and matches with me, for if caught it would obvious my trip was planned and not a nightwalk at all. So I took my candle and matches downstairs and hid them in the top of a plant pot in the hall. The plant was some bushy thing with leaves like a jungle, under which my lighting equipment would not be seen.

That night I lated awake in my bed listening to the sounds of the old house as it settled itself down for the night, the creakings and groanings as it relaxed after a hard day of containing all we people and all our hopes and fears and secrets. Now and then I heard the little girl in the attic above me, pirouetting across the boards. At last, somewhere a clock struck midnight and, satisfied that all human sounds had ceased, I slipped from my bed.

I downstairsed quick as I could in the dark, which was not fast, for having to careful not to bump into things and wake the house. I eventuallied the hall and felt about for the plant pot and, finding it, plunged my hands into its spidery leaves. I felt about on the soil, this way and that, and did not touch the candle or the matches. From somewhere above came the groan of a sleeper restlessing and turning over. My heart was a poundery of panic now. I alarmed that someone had found the candle and matches, perhaps Mary when she tended to the plants, the which meant that not only was my mission defeated but that tomorrow I would be exposed.

The picture of Mary watering the plants suddened me an inspiration. Of course, there was more than one plant! I was at the wrong pot. I blindmanned my hands before me and felt about and came upon another pot, the twin of my first encounter, and sure enough, there were my candle and matches. I paused and put my hand to my brow, which was slick with sweat, even though the night was cold and my feet frozen on the bare boards.

I struck a match and lit the candle, found the door to Mrs Grouse’s sitting room and swifted inside, closing the door quietly behind me. I stood and lofted the candle, surveying the room, to check it was empty, for my mind half expected to find Mrs Grouse sitting there, waiting and watching to catch me out, canny old fowl that she was. There was no one.

I overed to the desk, set my candle down carefully on top of it and sat in its owner’s chair. The brass handle of the left drawer was cold and forbidding to my touch. My big fear was that Mrs Grouse would have discovered its unlockery and locked it again. For I had no idea what she stored in there or how often she opened it. Why did she keep it locked in the first place? Perhaps because the household money was kept there. And if so, what if she had needed some today to pay a tradesman or the servants? I deep-breathed and pulled. The drawer yielded, although very stiff and unwilling. I slid it out slowly, gritting my teeth at its complaining rasp, feeling sure the whole household must be woken by it. But I could not wait to listen, for inside I saw a single object, a large, leather-bound book, its layer of dust testifying to its long undisturbery.

I swallowed and gingerlied it out, as if it were some holy relic, some saint’s bones that, roughly handled, might turn to dust. I placed the book on the desk and opened it and saw at once what it was, an album of photographs, such as the one Mary had once showed me, of all her family, going back years.

The first page held but one picture, a man in a business suit standing in front of Blithe House. I instanted who it was, for it was the same face as the painting on the turn of the stairs: my uncle. He had the same bold stare, the same slight play of amusement about his lips. I turned the page. Here he was again, but this time pictured in some photographer’s studio, next to a potted plant. Beside him stood a woman in a white dress, a beautiful woman, her arm linked in his, smiling too, but with a free and easy happiness, not at all like the man, who, looking again, I saw was pleased with himself, like an angler prouding it alongside some big fish he has landed.

I turned the page and found another picture of my uncle, again with a woman, but whether or not it was the same woman, I could not tell, for the photograph had been cut, a ragged square hole where the woman’s head should have been. This shivered me in the silent night and I over-my-shouldered, suddening a feeling of a man standing there with a knife as if to do to me what had been done to the woman in the picture. There was no one there, though already I began to see shapes in the shadowy corners of the room. I looked again at the photograph, at the decapitated woman, and calmed me a little, telling myself it was quite understandable, that someone had removed her head to place it in a locket or some such. It did not sinister in the least. Then I turned back to the first photograph and then once more to the second. The women were not the same person, for the first woman was taller, much taller than this one, which I could see despite the absence of the second’s head. She must have been shorter by half a foot.

I turned the page again. Once again my uncle and the second woman, and again she had no head. Then a third picture, this time with the woman holding a baby, a small baby by the look of it, swaddled and swamped in a long white shawl. Again the woman’s face had been cruelly cut. I turned the next page and there was another picture, the same as the last, except that now a small child, a girl, had joined the others. She stood beside them, tight-lipped and staring fiercely out at the photographer, as though ready to fly at anyone who took a step closer, and the look of her shivered me quite and I thought how I would not like to meet such a child, especially not now, in the dead of night. And then something familiared about her, about those defiant eyes, and it pennydropped: this scary child was me.

I turned the page and there were no more pictures. I franticked back. The family group. If the girl was I, then the baby must be Giles, and the woman without a face his mother, my stepmother, the woman who had drowned. But if so, then why were they with my uncle? It did not make sense.

I stared at the man for some time. From the pose, from their easy standing against one another, it certained he was the woman’s husband and the father of this family. But how could that be? How could my uncle also be my father? I peered at him closer. Perhaps, after all, he was not the man in the oil painting at the turn of the stairs. He was like, very like, but maybe not the same. And then it perfect-sensed me. It was not my uncle after all, but his brother, who family-resemblanced him. They were almost as alike as twins, it was so good a match. Having digested this, another thought came to me and I franticked back to the first page. The man was definitely the same one as in the other pictures, it doubtlessed that. And if so, then this other woman, this woman so happy and proud, must be my mother, who died before she could ever know her little girl.

I stared and stared and the more I looked, the more the woman’s features blurred, for my eyes had misted over, and I had to close the book for fear of drippery. I shut my eyes and deep-breathed. I opened the drawer, put back the book and reluctanted it closed. I picked up my candle and matches and made for the door. I had half-outed it when I suddened a decision. I turned and quicked back to the desk, tugged open the drawer, took out the book, opened it at the first page and snatched my mother’s picture. I replaced the album, closed the drawer and left the room, and upstairsed fast with my candle lighting the way. Taking the photograph was a rash act, for if I was caught with it I would be redhanded and could not pretend nightwalking. So I figured I might as well be sheeped as lambed and keep the candle to light my way too. But I uneventfulled my way back to my room and, after I know not how long spent gazing at my mother’s picture, at some point fell asleep.




9 (#ulink_b715e6f2-79b4-517a-8c66-f362f2a7c836)


Next day I took my precious photograph up to my tower, where I could gaze at it and talk to it without fear of discovery. And that was what I was doing a couple of days later when, purely by chance, I upglanced and familiared a lanky figure struggling through the snowdrifts along the drive. I overjoyed, for it had been a fortnight since I’d last seen him and I longed to tell him my great news.

But no sooner did I meet him at the front door than I hopedashed. He could but brief me a visit, he had not even time to skate, indeed had come to collect his skates, for he would need them in New York. ‘They’re shipping me back,’ he announced. ‘The doc says I’m better now and they’re putting me back in school for the last week before the holidays.’

I fetched my coat and his skates and we awkwarded down the drive together. I packed a rueful snowball and threw it at him, catching him in the face, causing him to cry out, and I gladded to have hurt him. ‘I am so lonely,’ I said. ‘You have no idea what it is like. And you rush off so blithely, you have not even time to hear my news and see what I have to show you.’

‘I’ll be back next year when the family come for the summer again. The time will soon pass. And Giles will be back for the Christmas holidays any day now.’

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a piece of paper and thrust it into my hand. Then, without another word, he turned and trudged off through the snow. I watched him until the last moment, when he made the turn into the main road and disappeared. Then I unfolded the paper he had given me and read:

I cannot speak, I cannot talk

For I am sent back to New York

But all of me will not go hence

My heart remains here with Florence

It was such a terrible poem that as I folded up the paper again I could not help but stifle a sob.

Theo had been right that at least I had the return of Giles to look forward to and I lonelied away the days, scarce able to read, my whole being an impatience of waiting. And at last the day came when John harnessed Bluebird to the trap and we set off to the railroad station, he and Mrs Grouse and I, to meet my darling brother. We stood by the track as the great iron dragon clanged and screeched to a halt beside us and belched out a cloud of steam that enveloped both it and us and then the fog of it began to clear and before us, on the platform, stood Giles, peering through the mist. We came together in a flingery of arms and a great huggery of kisses. My brother could not keep still but jumped up and down and danced from one foot to the other and gabbled an incomprehensible of nonsense. It was only when we were in the trap, leaving the town, in silence save for Bluebird’s steady clip-clop, that I understood what Giles was so excited about.

‘I’m not to go back, Flo, I’m not to go back!’

Mrs Grouse doubtfulled me one from behind his back. ‘Well, no, not for a while, Master Giles. Not until after Christmas, anyway.’

He rounded on her. ‘No, Mrs Grouse, you don’t understand. Not ever!’

It was true. When we reached Blithe, Giles opened his trunk and produced a letter. Of course, as I was not able to read, Mrs Grouse did not show it to me, nor did she read it aloud, except for one or two phrases, ‘a too timid and fragile disposition for the hurly-burly of a lively boys’ school’, ‘not sufficiently mature or academically advanced’, ‘one or two incidents which, although trivial in themselves, give cause for concern, given his somewhat vulnerable nature’, ‘suggest tutoring at home would be more appropriate for the time being, possibly with the gentler nature of a female instructor’. I had no need to see the whole thing, but gisted it from this. It obvioused that Giles’s simple nature had led to him being bullied. It was easier to remove him than deal with the bullies, and that was what the school had done.

Mrs Grouse all-concerned as she folded the letter and tucked it into her pocket. I slipped my hand into Giles’s and gave it a squeeze. I near cheered aloud. It was such wonderful news. My little brother was safe and sound and I would not lonely any more. All would be as it had always been.

Mrs Grouse bit her lip. ‘I shall have to write your uncle about this. He will have to engage someone, a governess, I guess.’ She looked up and seeing us smiling at her, beamed one herself. ‘But not now. I won’t write yet. It will need a lot of careful thought, a letter to your uncle, for I have strict instructions not to bother him, and I have not time this side of Christmas. Let’s get Christmas out of the way and I’ll write him then.’

Well, as you may imagine, we had a fine old time. I had asked Mrs Grouse to buy skates for Giles as his present and on Christmas morning we took to the ice and had a jollity of falling over and pulling one another over and generally returning to a time when we were small. As I watched Giles so happy and carefree upon the lake, so sweet that he laughed even when he was hurt, I thought how I would never again let him into the world where he would be evilled and tortured, but would utmost me to keep him always here by my side at Blithe, where I could protect him from all the bad things beyond.

I thought to show him the photograph of my mother, but then I knew that it would not do, eagering to though I was, because then I would have to explain about his own mother. The shocking vandalism that had been carried out on her image must never come to his attention. What would anyway be the use of showing him pictures of his mother without her face? What would he feel but that the desecration of her was a cruel attack upon himself? So I tonguebit and own-counselled. I would let nothing spoil our new happiness.

But, of course, something did. Or rather someone. A month later Miss Whitaker arrived.

Now, the least said about Whitaker, the better, at least in her first incarnation. She was a silly young woman who stood and besotted before the portrait of my uncle on the stairs and twittered about how handsome he was and how when he interviewed her he had seemed quite taken with her and had all but given her the post of Giles’s governess before she had spoke a word. I saw through this straightway; it obvioused our uncle, who had no time for us at all, could not be bothered to question the stupid woman, but wanted to not-more-ado the matter. It doubtlessed she was the only person he saw for the post, for anyone else must have been preferred.

Suffice it to say, I did not see the icy heart of this creature then or things might have worked out different. All I awared was that she neglected Giles, in whom she had less interest than in brushing her hair and mirroring her looks; I innocented her true nature and when she tragicked upon the lake I near drowned myself in a lake of my own tears, it so upset me. I thought her merely foolish and I guilted I had so despised her almost as much as I guilted that I did not save her, even though it impossibled me to do so, and kept thinking ‘if only I had this’ and ‘if only I had that’, even though all these things would nothing have availed. I reproached me, too, for the bad thoughts that were in my head when she went to her watery grave, for it was the very day after she unlibraried me and I had spoke the words over and over in my heart, ‘I wish she would die, I wish she would die’, but never meant them, and when my wish was granted I near died of grief myself that I could no way call them back.



PART TWO (#ulink_3d28fbcf-a777-56f4-93fe-96000855844a)




10 (#ulink_24eadad4-bb75-59c2-90d1-69687997a22b)


We were history-repeating-itselfing in front of the house, the three of us, Mrs Grouse, Giles and I, lined up to welcome the new governess just as we’d been for poor Miss Whitaker what seemed a lifetime ago (as indeed it was, her lifetime). Because our uncle was travelling in Europe and it difficulted to contact him, Giles and I had halcyoned it for four whole months, the time from when Miss Whitaker misfortuned until now, the day of the arrival of her replacement. It had been like the old pre-Whitaker, pre-school days, only better, because having twice lost our former life of just Giles and me feralling throughout the house and grounds, first for one reason, him awaying to school, then the other, Whitaker, I now precioused it all the more. I had forgotten how busy life with Giles could be, how he could December a July day, making it fly past so that dusk always seemed to come early. And when the Van Hoosiers arrived for the summer vacation, Theo had joined us in our games nearly every day and the three of us had run wild as if there was no tomorrow. But of course there was and it was here. School would be starting and Theo was returning to New York. And Miss Whitaker’s replacement would be here any moment.

All we had left of our golden summer was the time it took John to horse-and-trap the new woman from the railroad station in town, and that little was taken up by Mrs Grouse inspecting us for general cleanliness and tidiness. Giles was school-suited and I best-frocked, with a shining white pinafore thrown in for good measure. Satisfied that we were presentable, or at least as presentable as we were ever going to be, Mrs Grouse spent the last few minutes goodmannering us and attempting once again to teach me how to drop a curtsey (I had so half-hearted it with Miss Whitaker when she arrived as to make it unnoticeable). For some reason, although I was more than willing to courtesy the governess with a curtsey, my limbs reluctanted until finally Mrs Grouse exasperated. She regarded me critically and forlorned a sigh. ‘Well, it will have to do, I guess. At least Miss Taylor will be able to see the intention is there, even if the execution is somewhat lacking.’

So there we stood, in front of the house where the horse and cart would pull up, a little guard of honour, the three of us on parade. At last you could hear Bluebird’s hooves on the metalled main road and then the horse and trap hove into sight at the top of the drive and we all eagered to make out the person seated behind John.

Moments later she stood before us. She was much older than poor Miss Whitaker, her appearance hovering on the brink before middle age. Her skeletal figure was dressed all in black and I thought how strange that was, for Miss Whitaker had told me governesses always wore grey, but I noticed how well it matched the rooks which were even now circling above us, as though they too had turned out specially to welcome her. She was a handsome woman, with strong features, and dark eyes and black hair. As John handed her down from the trap her eye caught mine and there was something in her look, not familiarity exactly, but some kind of recognition of who I was, that all at once anxioused me, as though she could see clear through the me I pretended to be. This glance discomfited me and evidently her too, for no sooner did our eyes connect than she turned away and gifted Mrs Grouse a smile.

‘You must be Miss Taylor,’ unnecessaried Mrs Grouse; the new arrival unlikelied to be anyone else.

‘And you must be Mrs Grouse,’ returned Miss Taylor, with not quite enough mockery for Mrs Grouse to know it was there. She turned to Giles and me and – her eyes ready now and revealing nothing – larged us a smile. ‘And you of course are Florence and little Giles.’ I dropped her the curtsey when she cued my name, though it wasn’t a great success. ‘Pleased to meet you, ma’am,’ I muttered, trying to sound as if I meant it, but it somehow came out like Sunday-morninging the Lord’s Prayer.

‘Well, Giles,’ said Miss Taylor, ‘have you nothing to say to me?’

My brother nervoused and bit his lip.

‘Come now, Giles,’ urged Mrs Grouse, ‘don’t be rude, speak up.’

‘Well,’ said Giles, screwing his face up with genuine interest, ‘would you rather be boiled in oil and eaten by cannibals, or bayoneted by a Confederate soldier and watch him pull your guts out before your very own eyes?’

Miss Taylor stared at him a moment, then eyebrowed Mrs Grouse. ‘I fancy we have a little work to do here,’ she lighthearted in a manner that somehow managed to critical too.

Inside she didn’t look around much or say anything about the house; it was as though it weren’t any different from what she’d expected. It wasn’t exactly something you could have put your finger on, but it seemed as if she had no curiosity or interest in it, the way most people have in a new place. She turned to Mrs Grouse and brusqued, ‘Now, if you would have your manservant take my bags up to my room, I would like to freshen up and lie down after my journey. What time is dinner served?’

‘Well, we generally eat at six o’clock.’

‘Very well, I shall be down then.’ And so saying she followed John up the stairs. Behind her she left the scent of some flower, but try as it might, my mind could not clutch what it was. Mrs Grouse stood watching her until she disappeared, and then weaked a smile at Giles and me. She wasn’t used to being spoken to like that. And nobody had ever before used the word ‘servant’ about John.

It was at supper, or rather before it even got started, that the first difficulty asserted itself. Miss Taylor appeared just before the appointed time and Mrs Grouse showed her into the small breakfast room off the kitchen where we always ate. Miss Taylor stopped in the doorway and stared at the table.

‘Is there something wrong?’ anxioused Mrs Grouse, forced into a squeezery between the governess and the door to get into the room.

‘Why, yes. There are four places.’ She swung round to face Mrs Grouse, who coloured. Miss Taylor tigered her a smile. ‘Is there perhaps another child I don’t know about? Come, Giles, how is your math? You, Florence and me, how many does that make?’

‘The fourth place is for me,’ said Mrs Grouse. ‘I’ve always eaten with the children. You see, it was only we three for years and years until Master Giles went off to school, and when Miss Whitaker came she just joined in with the rest of us.’

‘That’s as maybe, but you see it’s not appropriate. You are the housekeeper and I am the governess. We must maintain the proprieties. For the sake of the children’s education, you understand.’

Mrs Grouse bridled. She was not one to be walked over. ‘Miss Whitaker was quite happy with the arrangement.’

Miss Taylor raised an eyebrow. ‘Ah yes, but I am not Miss Whitaker.’

Mrs Grouse left the room. The three of us sat down. A moment later a very red-faced Mary came in and began removing the crockery and cutlery from the fourth place. Miss Taylor smiled up at her. ‘You may serve the food now,’ she said.

That night I couldn’t sleep. Outside, the wind howled like a wild beast stalking round the house looking for a way in. And within me, too, there was a howling, one that I couldn’t block out by pillowing my ears. It feared me to sleep that I would dream again of poor Miss Whitaker and the day she died, but my waking anxiety was a shadowy thing I couldn’t quite see or put a name to, and all the worse for that. In the end I decided to do what I often did at such times, to sneak down to the library and read there for a couple of hours until I should be tired enough for sleep, though there was an increased risk that I would be caught now that Miss Taylor was here, of course. Although the wind huffed and puffed without, within the house was quiet as the grave, save for the ticking of the clocks and the occasional creaking of the joists as Blithe settled itself down for the night. But then, if I were caught, all I had to do was pretend to be on one of my nightwalks. It much more difficulted to reach the library in this fashion than it had to sneak down to Mrs Grouse’s sitting room. The library far-ended the house, whereas the housekeeper’s room bottomed the stairs, being almost directly below mine. My main problem, as always, lay in not being able to have a candle to light my way, for that I never had on my nightwalks. In the darkness I had to careful not to stumble against some piece of furniture, some random occasional table, for example, and so wake the whole household; also I must map in my mind where I was. It would be all too easy to wrongturn and so end up wandering the whole night until dawn showed me the way.

Still, as this was not a nightwalk, I was able at least to blindman my arms and so feel ahead of me for any obstruction. In this manner, slowly I reached the long corridor. There was no light coming in through the windows there because the night was unmooned, a fact which unlikelied, but not impossibled, a nightwalk, although I wasn’t concerned about that. It was when I penetrated a little further and was not far from the staircase that would take me down to the first floor that I heard something. I stood still and listened, all my senses alert. At first I took it for the wind blowing a tree branch against some part of the house, for it was exactly the sibilant sound of leaves brushing against something. But then I realised the noise was not fixed but in motion and that, moreover, it was coming toward me. A moment later I recognised it for what it was, the swishing of skirts against floorboards. Whoever it was was, like me, uncandled, but nevertheless able to move at a considerable pace, so that she – it could only be a woman, that noise – must soon be on top of me. It wondered me any normal woman could move so fast in this pitch black. What kind of creature could it be, other than a cat? She could be no more than ten feet away from me, and rushing toward me, so that we must at any moment collide. I instincted to flatten my back against the wall and, as luck would have it, found space behind me, a shallow alcove let into the wall. I pressed myself into it and held my breath. The woman was right on top of me now and, suddenly, the swishing stopped, and it was as if whatever creature this was had sensed my presence, or scented me, as a cat will a mouse or a dog a rat. All was quiet, even the wind seemed to have died down as though in league with this other nightwalker to enable her to better hear. I heard a small sound, a sharp intake of breath, followed by a lengthy pause as the breath was held while the breather listened, followed by a long, slow exhale. I sensed she was turning this way and that, sniffing the air like a predator seeking its prey. My lungs were near bursting from my own long breath-holdery but I dared not let it out, not only because of the noise but because my fellow nightwalker would then feel it on her face as I felt hers upon mine.

At last, just when I thought the game was up and I should have to breathe now or never would again, there abrupted a swish as if the woman had turned sharply and then the swishing resumed in the same direction as it had been headed in the first place, but now, thankfully, growing quieter and quieter until finally it whispered away. I gasped out my breath and sucked in air like a swimmer surfacing after a long dive. I had but one thought, namely to put as much distance as possible between me and this woman, if woman it were and not ghost, and so I felt my way along the corridor and down to the first floor and thence to the library. There I lit my candle and built my nest and curled up in it, although I was too disturbed now to have any hope of sleep and so fretted my way through the rest of the night until light began to finger its way around the edges of the drapes and I was able to fast my way back to my room.

I lay in my bed exhausted and troubled. Who had the woman been? The obvious answer was Miss Taylor, for I had encountered nothing like what had occurred last night ever before and it too much coincidented that she had just arrived in the house. As I recalled the incident now it seemed to me there had been something of her scent in the air, that scent I had noticed about her when we first met, and I all-at-onced what it was, the smell of lilies, which I remembered so well from Miss Whitaker’s funeral, their ugly beauty upon her coffin. But perhaps all this was simply now my imagination, that love of embroidery I have, the makery-up of my mind. Then again, if what had passed me in the passage last night was not the new governess, what was it? Could it have been a ghost or some other supernatural thing? For what woman, especially a stranger so newly arrived, could so swift the house in the dark? And if it were not of this world, if it were one of the Blithe ghosts, what was it seeking here? Ghosts I knew were often troubled spirits unable to make their way in the next world because of the manner in which they had left this one. I understood all too well then who such a being might be. For had not poor Miss Whitaker tragicked a sudden and early death with no opportunity to make her peace with her maker? Might she not be tossing and turning beneath the earth in the local cemetery because of the fashion in which she passed away? I so frighted myself with these thoughts that I worried for Giles and had to rise from my bed, exhausted though I was, and sneak the corridor to his room, where I found him blissfully, ignorantly asleep. I stretched myself out beside him, folded one arm over him, and fell straightway into a deep and heavy slumber.




11 (#ulink_08588ccf-67e6-501a-b153-6508c65fd65f)


In the morning, when Giles and I arrived downstairs for breakfast, the table in the breakfast room was once again set for three. As I sat down, I saw, through the open door to the kitchen, Mrs Grouse seated at the table there, over breakfast with Meg and Mary and John. When she heard me she wistfulled me such a look that I was near too guilty to eat. For all her faults, Mrs Grouse was at heart a kindly soul and also easy for a little finger twistery. Some part of me already knew Miss Taylor would not be at all like that.

Speaking of that devil (for such she was, as you shall see), at that moment she arrived. She good morninged Giles and me and walked to the kitchen door and good morninged all the servants and Mrs Grouse too. Meg and Mary flummoxed about, scraping their chairs to rise from their own meal and hithering and thithering to supply us with oatmeal and eggs and waffles and syrup. I wondered at this, for Miss Whitaker had been treated somewhat as a kind of servant, albeit on another level, along with Mrs Grouse. Miss Taylor occupied the same position and yet, already, by some force of will, had everyone behaving toward her as if she were royalty. How had that happened?

As we nervoused our food we did not speak and carefulled not to let a fork tinkle against a plate, and in the silent setting down of our milk glasses upon the table, for both Giles and I feared to draw attention to ourselves as if, by our very existence, we might somehow offend. It would have been a good time for pin droppery if you happened to have one you were having difficulty holding on to, because you would surely have heard it loud and clear. It was Miss Taylor who broke the silence. ‘Giles,’ she said, then took a swig of her coffee and set the cup back down, ‘Giles, we do not eat in that manner.’

Giles gulped. ‘What manner would that be, Miss Wh—, I mean, Miss Taylor?’

‘Why, taking all those bites without recourse to chewing or swallowing. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, after all.’ She beamed at me and I weaked her one back; it wasn’t a very good joke.

Giles got stuck into his waffle again, whereupon Miss Taylor’s hand shot out like a whipcrack and knocked it from his hand. ‘I told you,’ she hissed. ‘Not like that.’

Giles’s eyes started to tear up. ‘I – I’m sorry, miss, but I don’t understand. Like what?’

‘Why, like this!’ She snatched up the waffle and began a frenetic biting of it, like some demented bird pecking at it, one bite after another, without pause to chew or swallow, until the whole thing had disappeared. There was a long silence while Giles and I open-mouthed her, for her cheeks were packed out like a hamster’s, and then she finally gulped the whole lot down and said, ‘That’s how you don’t eat, my boy. Now do you see?’

Giles’s cheeks glistened and he brushed away the tears with the back of his hand. I had rarely seen Giles cry and yet this wiping of the tears was such an unconscious and therefore, I presumed, familiar action I wondered how much crying had occurred while he was away at school. We silenced our way through the rest of our breakfast.

After it was over, when we left the dining room, Giles and I turned toward the stairs to go up to the schoolroom and I heartsank at the thought of spending my day over some pointless needlepoint when I yearned to be in the library, but before we could begin to ascend, Miss Taylor called out to us. ‘Not that way, children. Look, the sun is shining. I suggest that as it’s such a lovely day and my first one here too, why don’t you show me the grounds?’

Giles, suddenly unbound from Latin and history, as hateful to him as embroidery was to me, broke into a smile that instanted her forgiveness for the slapping of the waffle from his hand. And I, I too, thought that maybe this wasn’t so bad, that perhaps this was a woman with a sharp temper, but nevertheless good-willed beneath. I little knew.

In the grounds, Giles and I ran before her, dodging behind bushes and leaping out upon one another. At first we cautioned, for we had no idea what restrictions we might be under, but as she did nothing but smile fondly at our actions and nod approval of them at us, we bolded and all but became our old selves as though no new governess had come at all.

Miss Taylor surveyed the shrubbery where we hide-and-seeked most because it was so overgrown it offered the best concealment, and shook her head. ‘It is all sadly neglected and unkempt,’ she murmured. ‘Why have they let it get into such a state?’

I paused in my play, not realising she was talking to herself, and answered, ‘Well, you see, miss, there is only John to look after everything and he has all the jobs about the house, and the feeding and rubbing down and exercising of the horses, as well as all the grounds, and it is too much for one man, especially one who is not getting any younger.’

She shot me a look.

‘I mean, that’s what he says, miss, about not getting any younger.’

She distanted a smile and surveyed the shrubbery again and shook her head in a weary way. She walked on and we followed, tagging one another in her wake. Eventually we reached the lake.

‘Ah, the lake,’ she obvioused.

‘Yes, miss,’ I polited back.

She began to walk around it and we followed her, past the old wooden jetty and the boathouse, and we were about halfway round when she stopped, and stared out over the water. It shivered me that she should pick out this particular spot. Just at that moment I happened to look down at the water’s edge and saw the lilies were in bloom and all at once I remembered their scent on the unseen woman who had passed me in the night, their icy whiteness on Miss Whitaker’s coffin. And I thought now, as I had on the day of the funeral, of Shakespeare’s line, of how ‘lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’, and it spinetingled me quite.

Before I had gotten hold of myself again I realised someone was speaking to me and then that it was Miss Taylor. ‘Pray tell me, where did it happen?’

I knew what she meant immediately. This after all was the very place. But I couldn’t say that. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The accident, of course. Weren’t you in the boat with her? I understood that you were.’ She stared at Giles, who wriggled around as though his collar was suddenly too tight.

‘I – I –’ he stammered.

‘Not Giles,’ I said. ‘Just me. He was in the schoolroom.’

Giles nodded. ‘Yes, I was in the schoolroom.’

‘Miss Whitaker had set him some Latin sentences to write out. It was only she and I in the boat.’

‘And what exactly happened?’

I turned my back on her. ‘I would rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind. I don’t like to think about that day.’

She didn’t reply, and when I decided it safed to face her again I found her not looking at me at all, even though I had felt sure of the weight of her eyes upon my back, but gazing out over the lake, at the very spot where the boat had been when poor Miss Whitaker was tragicked away.

Miss Taylor turned and shot me a knowing smile and then walked past me, back the way we had come, and at that moment a breeze got up and stirred the flimsy material of her blouse and there it was again, the death smell of lilies, but I did not know if it was from the actual lilies growing by the lake or the scent the new governess wore.

Afterward we wandered the grounds and rambled the woods and she would ask me questions about the place but not really listen to my replies, as if she already knew the answers or had no interest in them. It was only when we were in the woods and I explained that the footpath we were on led all the way to the Van Hoosier house, and that it was the way my special friend Theo took except when there was snow about, that her interest perked up and she questioned me some about him. I explained that with the summer nearly over he’d soon be going back to New York and school, at which she said, ‘Ah,’ as though that was all right, although then I added, ‘But with a bit of luck he’ll get ill again soon,’ which made her face a puzzle, so that I laughed and explained how Theo always came here when he had asthma and so I kind of hoped he’d have another bout before too long.

‘It’ll start turning cold and damp in a few weeks,’ I enthused, ‘and that’s really bad for his chest.’

It was past noon when we got back to the house, but she told us to wait outside and went into the house, where she asked Meg to set us up a picnic and Mary came and spread a big rug out on the lawn in back of the house and she and Meg brought our food out there, and afterward Miss Taylor sat with her back against a tree trunk and seemed to be dozing while Giles and I played tag, but whenever I looked at her it seemed she was watching us, her eyes strangely hooded, like a reptile’s, so I had this feeling she had swallowed a snake or a lizard, and that it was trapped inside her and had taken over her body and now gazed greedily out through her eyes.




12 (#ulink_c3471575-c6e9-5bc9-bd06-adcb4cde5c34)


That night I thought about pretending another nightwalk, but then I remembered that figure brushing against me in the dark, the scent of death lilies in my nostrils and most of all, Miss Taylor sitting watching us by the lake, with those hooded snake eyes, and I decided the risk of doing it a second night running was too great. Staying in bed, though, I samed as before: I restlessed and could not sleep. At one point, I’m sure it was long after midnight, I must have dropped off, for I began to have the dream, my nightwalking dream, but then it was interrupted and I awoke to find myself still in bed. I alarmed at the dream and anxioused about Giles. Who, after all, was this woman? How had she been employed? What did any of us know about her? She’d given nothing away.

The way our bedrooms were arranged, which had been carried out by Miss Whitaker, was that Giles and I each had our own room, betweened by the schooolroom, though that could only be reached from the corridor, not from our rooms. On the other side of Giles’s room was where Miss Whitaker, and now of course Miss Taylor, bedded, though in her case with not only a door onto the corridor, but also another into Giles’s room.

I realised that some sound alonged the corridor from that direction, a queer sound, almost like singing, but not quite, as if the woman – for it was a female voice, no doubt about that – could not make up her mind whether she was singing or something else, keening perhaps, for someone who had died. Now, if you had asked me before what sort of noise a ghost would make, I could not have answered because I had never given any thought to them having a sound, other perhaps than a clanking of chains or outright wailing or something of that sort, but I recognised now that if the spirits of the dead did indeed walk and were able to give voice to their unquiet feelings, this is how they would sound.

I instincted to over-my-head the blankets to hide myself away from whatever it should be that walked the night and to block out the noise it made, but then, how could I think of myself when Giles all-aloned and – even if the thing meant no harm – would be in mortal terror at that awful sound? I slipped from my bed, felt for my robe and drew it about me, as much for comfort as anything else, as it was a warm late summer night and there was no one, no one living, at least, to see me in my nightgown. I barefooted it to the door, listened at it awhile but heard only the vague whistling of the night wind and comforted myself that it must have been that I had heard all along. Be that as it might, I still had to proceed, for I knew I could never rest until I had satisfied myself my precious little brother was safe. I slowed open the door, checking myself for a moment when it creaked, and then, there being no change, slipped into the passage outside.

I had scarce one footed in front of the other when I caught it again, that low keening noise, sounding like nothing so much as the wind itself, but as though it had somehow learned music and was howling in tune. I found myself almost enchanted by it, so it was a few seconds before I realised whence the noise came. It was worse than I had thought, for it, the thing making the noise, whatever it was, was in Giles’s room. I pitter-pattered along the bare boards, unheeding the sound I made, indeed thinking by louding my approach to perhaps scare the thing off. But when I reached Giles’s door I knew that my presence was unnoticed for the singing still persisted as before, low and eerie like a funeral dirge. I gingerlied my hand upon the handle of the door and turned it slowly, fearing once again to make any noise. I pushed open the door and what I saw near took my breath away. I shook my head in disbelief, trying to clear it of the vision before me, then somehow had the presence of mind to pinch my arm, as I have heard tell a body should to ascertain whether she dreams or not. The scene before me did not vanish, nor did I wake up.

It was almost exactly as in my dream of all those years; the same woman was bent over Giles’s bed, singing softly, except now, instead of the black of my dream, she was dressed all in white, a lacy nightgown and robe. She reached out her hand toward my brother and stroked the hair from his eyes and then she said, ‘Ah, my dear, I could eat you!’

The woman was Miss Taylor. I dizzied and reached out a hand to grab hold of the doorpost to save myself, but too late. The last thing I think I heard, although I felt it not, was the thud of my body hitting the floor.

I awoke in my own bed with sunlight streaming through the gaps in the drapes. So after all it had merely been my dream again. But had I simply had the dream, or had I nightwalked as well? There was something queer about all of this and for a minute or two my groggy head could not figure it out. I sensed something different from the way things always were, but what? Then it came to me. Always, I began with the dream, that was how it started. I saw the woman hovering over Giles’s bed, and then I walked. But last night I had walked first, and then I had seen her. I had begun the dream, that’s true, but then I’d awoken, risen from my bed and walked fully conscious. Or at least it seemed to me now that that was how it had been. Normally when I nightwalked I had afterward no recollection of having walked at all. Gradually, I began to remember more and more, the strange ghostly singing that had led me from my bed in the first place, which was not like anything in my dream.

There was a knock at the door, followed by Mary coming in bearing a tray. ‘Good morning, Miss Florence, are you all right now? I’m glad to see you awake, you gave us quite a fright last night, but then your walks always do. Now sit yourself up, there’s a good girl, miss, and I’ll set your breakfast down in front of you.’

I obeyed her. ‘S-so it happened then, I had one of my nightwalks?’

She set down the tray on my lap, opened the drapes so sunlight flooded the room, and busied herself pouring me some tea and lifting the little cosy from a boiled egg. ‘Oh yes, miss, though you didn’t get far. Only to Master Giles’s room, where you fell down in a faint on the floor. Would you believe Master Giles slept right through the whole thing? Lucky for you Miss Taylor heard you hit the floor or you’d have been on it all night and you’d be waking up now stiff as a board.’

‘Miss Taylor heard, you say? But wasn’t she already there?’

Mary stared at me and chuckled. ‘Good gracious no, miss. It was one o’clock in the morning. What would she be doing there at that time? No, she heard you and she was quite put out as she’d not been told of your night pursuits. She woke the whole household and in the end we had John pick you up and put you back in your bed. Now, that’s enough talking for you, miss.’ (Though it was she who’d done all the talking.) ‘You get your breakfast down you and then snuggle down and get back to sleep. You know you’re always tired after one of your nocturnal adventures. Miss Taylor said you’re not to think of coming down before noon.’

After Mary had gone I ate my breakfast, for I hungered terribly, but as for the snuggling down and going back to sleep, I could not, for my mind was a beehive of thoughts. On the one hand, all seemed simple enough. I had had the dream and one of my walks. In the past it had often happened that I had collapsed somewhere and been carried back to my bed unconscious. But what troubled me here was the order of things. Always the dream started with me in the same room as Giles, as we had been when we were small, not in the separate rooms we had now. And I had always sensed that the walking began after the dream, not before.

And it hadn’t felt like the dream. For one thing there was the singing. There had never been any such sound in my dream before. In fact, there was normally no sound at all until the woman bending over the bed said, ‘Ah, my dear, I could eat you!’ Also I realised now that I was still wearing my robe; they had evidently picked me up in it and straighted me to bed, probably not wishing to wake me by trying to take it off me. But last night I had gone to bed nightgowned only. I certained I had not got into bed with my robe on, and when I nightwalked I always did so in what I was wearing in bed; just as I never stopped for a candle, I never put on my robe. The whole thing did not make sense but that it had been exactly as I first remembered. I had begun the dream, but had then been woken by the noise the woman – Miss Taylor – had been making and, anxiousing for Giles, had risen, slipped on my robe, gone to my brother’s room and had there been so shocked by the sight of my dream now come true before my very eyes that I fell into a faint.

If all that trued, and I certained of it, then so did something else, namely that Miss Taylor had lied when she said she heard me fall and had got up from her bed to investigate. And of course she would lie, because she wouldn’t want anyone to know she had middle-of-the-nighted in Giles’s room. And when they told her of my nightwalks, she had reckoned to fool me into accepting her version of the truth.

Even though I sat in bed, too terrified to move a muscle, indeed, unable to, like the man in ‘The Premature Burial’ by Edgar Allan Poe, my heart was racing as though I had just been running. What did it all signify? Only that the new governess meant to do us harm. Or if not us, perhaps, then certainly Giles.

In the course of a troubled morning more thoughts came to me. Principal among them was my dream. My dream had come true! Exactly as it had always happened, I had now seen it in real life. I realised at last why from the beginning there had been this feeling of familiarity with Miss Taylor, for since my early childhood I had seen her a score of times in the dream. It was not that she resembled Miss Whitaker after all, indeed she didn’t look anything like her, although, strangely, when I thought about that, there was something of her that was the first governess, a look, an expression, a something in the falseness of her smile.

But how could it be that I had dreamed her before I’d even met her? How could that happen? I arounded and arounded this in my mind and could come up with no rational explanation. Eventually my frustration got the better of my fear and I got up and paced the room. And the more I paced and thought, the more there seemed but one explanation, although the thing itself impossibled, except by supernatural means, and it was this: that I had premonitioned what was to come. I had forewarned me in my dream of this woman who would one day enter our lives, and my dream had purpose: to save my brother from whatever evil she had planned. I made no mistake that it was evil, from the way she enthused those words, ‘Ah, my dear, I could eat you!’; and from the way she looked at Giles I doubtlessed he was the object of her attentions, the reason for her being here. She meant to do him harm.

At noon I made my way down to the breakfast room, but Miss Taylor and Giles were not yet there so I casualled into Mrs Grouse’s sitting room, where I found her alone.

‘Ah, there you are, Miss Florence,’ she beamed me. ‘Feeling better, I hope?’

‘Yes, thank you. Quite well.’ I had thought to tell her all about the supposed nightwalk and how it had never been and of what I had seen, but, seeing her face now, dismissed the thought; she would never believe me. Oh, she would not think me to be untruthing, merely mistaken. For what person who suddenly awakes somewhere inappropriate for sleep, perhaps in a carriage or the theatre, does not insist he or she has not been asleep at all? I decided to try a different tack.

‘Mrs Grouse,’ I said, fiddling idly with the blotter upon her desk as though what I was saying had no significance at all for me, ‘Mrs Grouse, what do you know of Miss Taylor?’

‘Why, no more than you, miss, only what she has told us all.’ She drew herself up huffily and sniffed. ‘I am sure I receive no special confidences from her. She is the governess and I am merely the housekeeper, the person who keeps all this’ – she spread her arms out to indicate everything around her, meaning Blithe and the household – ‘running smoothly.’

‘Did not my uncle write you about her and tell you of her history? Would he not have had references from her, you know, of her family and previous employment?’

‘Your uncle had nothing to do with it.’ Mrs Grouse gave another sniff, always a sign of disapproval in her. It was the nearest she ever came to criticising my uncle, although I sured she considered him neglectful of us children, ignoring us and wanting to be as little troubled over us as possible. ‘He said he had only just had the inconvenience of interviewing Miss Whitaker and could not be bothered with having to interview one governess after another. Besides, he was abroad, so he appointed an educational agency to take care of the matter. The people there will have checked out her qualifications, you may be sure of that. You may depend she comes thoroughly recommended.’

I fiddled with the blotter some more, not knowing what to say. It seemed I had dead-ended. There was not another question I could think to ask. I looked up. Mrs Grouse was staring at me thoughtfully. ‘But why do you ask, miss? Is there something that bothers you about Miss Taylor?’ I didn’t answer. ‘Is it, well, is it perhaps, that you don’t like her?’

This last was spoken in a wheedling tone and I knew that, nose outjointed as she was by the new governess, Mrs Grouse wished to make me her ally. I circumspected, sensing this was a dangerous course to follow. For if I shared confidences with Mrs Grouse I would be vulnerable should relations between her and Miss Taylor take a turn for the better. I had not forgotten how she had confederated Miss Whitaker. I shook my head. ‘No, I like her fine. I was just curious, is all.’

We awkwarded a moment or so and then I heard the voices of Giles and Miss Taylor and excused myself and went off to eat.

Miss Taylor was all smiles. ‘I hope you are recovered from your adventure last night?’

I stalled at that word and the way she emphasised it. In one way she was acknowledging what we both knew, that I had not nightwalked but had been conscious and had seen what she was up to, and yet, at the same time, her smiles, her dismissal by her jocular tone of what had happened as not the manifestation of some deeper disturbance but a light thing of no account, signalled that there was to be some kind of truce between us in which the truth was let slumber.

‘Yes, miss. Thank you, miss.’ I concentrated hard on cutting up my chop.

‘And I slept through the whole thing,’ said Giles gaily.

‘Yes, my dear, you slept through the whole thing.’ Miss Taylor reached out and ruffled his hair. I wanted to protest, for no one else had ever so familiared with either of us, but how could I when Giles fond-puppied a look up at her? I near expected him to lick her hand. Had he already forgotten the incident at breakfast yesterday? But then, that was Giles all over. I well imagined how he had responded to those bullies at his school, not with resentment, but with gratitude when, during those intervals when they did not tease or hurt him, they showed him any little act of kindness, no matter how trivial or even unconscious on their part.

Miss Taylor turned to me. ‘I have some understanding of sleepwalking. I believe it to be the result of an idle brain, an imagination that has not enough to occupy it and so looks for things that are not there.’ This sounded like a warning of some kind. She paused and took a sip of her coffee, swilling it around her mouth awhile before swallowing and continuing. ‘You have been let run wild with nothing to keep you busy. It has done you no favours. I am going to rectify that.’

‘Miss Whitaker had me sewing, though I confess I wasn’t much use at it.’

‘Pah! Sewing.’ She looked angry, but then softened somewhat. ‘Well, of course there are things a young lady is expected to learn, but this is 1891. The days when ladies merely played the piano and painted a little – and badly – and embroidered useless things are on their way out. I am of the opinion that all women, and you’re no different, need a little more stimulation than that.’

She wiped her lips with her napkin and stood up. She expectanted us a look and Giles and I understood that this meant breakfast was over. We leapt to our feet too and she straightway marched off with us in her wake.

‘Where are we going?’ I called out as we hurried after her.

She flung her reply over her shoulder, words I had thought never to hear. ‘Why, where else? To the library!’




13 (#ulink_9dd1f3df-d062-522a-96fc-ab15e85e93b6)


That night there was no wind howlery; nevertheless I restlessed in bed, not so much because I anxioused, although there was some of that – how could there not be after I had seen Miss Taylor greeding over Giles in his bed? – but rather for the reason that I could not help turning over and over the events of the day. Such a lot had happened; leastways for a girl who had spent most of her life mausoleumed in Blithe. There was something good and something bad, and though the bad thing was a rook in a snowdrift, the good thing was very good – our visit to the library. Giles and I had trailed behind Miss Taylor as she marched her way there, too out-breathed by her purposeful pace to speak but wideeyeing one another as we struggled to keep up. What did it mean, that she was taking us to the library? Did Mrs Grouse know? Did my uncle? I surely didn’t think he could or he would not have allowed it after forbidding it for so many years.

Our new governess stopped outside the library and let us catch up. Then she flung open the door and stepped aside and with a gentle shove at our backs ushered us into the room. We stood in the doorway, open-mouthing what met us, disbelieving our own eyes. The drapes had been pulled back and sunlight rushed into the room, filling the vacuum where it had been denied for so long. The accumulation of dust from many years had been swept from the floor, and Mary was even now at the windows, rubbing away at the glass with her cloth. A couple of the windows were open, although that regretted me somewhat, because, for all the late-summer freshness breezing in, I lacked the usual comforting fusty smell of ancient books.

‘All right, Mary, you can finish that later, if you please,’ brusqued Miss Taylor, and Mary at once straightened up, picked up her bucket of water, said ‘Yes, ma’am’ in such a way as to seem to make a curtsey of it, although she didn’t so much as bend a knee, and fled from the room.

As the door closed behind her Miss Taylor turned to us. Giles anxioused a few glances from her to me and I knew he was merely obviousing my own thought. What were we to do now? Should we butter-wouldn’t-melt it and act as if we had never seen the place before? Or should we assume she had figured it out and therefore just come clean?

Giles, as usual, so nervoused he blundered the whole thing. ‘Gee,’ he said, gazing around in a very theatrical way, ‘so many books. Who would have thought it?’

Miss Taylor watched him with just the twitch of a smile, but not without fondness; it seemed as if she couldn’t look at Giles without licking her lips, and I understood as I saw that smile that she knew all about my visits to the library. Still, I wasn’t about to come right out and admit it, so I turned away and strolled slowly around the room, spine-fingering a book or two here, touching the side of a bookshelf there. In this roundabout fashion, I made my way to the back of the room, toward the chaise longue behind which I secreted my blankets and candle. As I rounded the chaise, casual as you please, or at least so I hoped, Miss Taylor’s voice floated across the room to me, much as the motes of dust, stirred up by Mary no doubt, drifted in the beams of sunlight shafting through the long windows. ‘It’s not there, your little linen cupboard. I had it all taken away.’

I turned to brazen her. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’

She was across the room like a whiplash; her hand shot out faster than a cobra strike and gripped my wrist. She put her face close to mine and I got it then, a powerful blast of dead lilies. ‘Don’t play the clever one with me, young lady. Don’t you dare!’

She released me, and the hand that had held me went up to her head, tidying her hair, as though she regretted her action. I gulped. ‘I – I’m sorry.’ It was out before I could help it and I wished immediately I could call the words back. I would not kowtow to her. But as things turned out it was the right thing to say, for she seemed to soften, not with liking, but because I had done that which I hadn’t wished to, namely acknowledged her as the one who held the upper hand.

She swivelled and sphinxed Giles. ‘And you, I suppose you’ve never been here either?’

Giles squirmed. ‘Well, I – that is, Miss Wh—, I mean, Miss Taylor, I –’ He looked to me for rescue.

I went and stood beside him and slipped an arm around his waist.

Miss Taylor’s face suddenly relaxed, and she smiled, not unkindly. ‘They tell me you cannot read.’

I defied her a look back.

‘Well, you and I both know that is nonsense, don’t we?’ Seeing me bewildering an answer, she went on, ‘I know your uncle has forbidden it, but that shows how ridiculously out of touch the man is. You might as well order the sun not to shine, or the tide not to come in.’

‘Like King Canute!’ exclaimed Giles, attempting to please her.

She condescended him a smile. ‘Yes, like King Canute.’ She turned and paced about the room a little, this way and that. Giles and I rooted to the spot. Finally she came back to where she’d started, standing before us. She addressed herself to me. ‘Now, listen carefully. This is what I propose. I cannot openly go against your uncle’s restrictions, ludicrous though they may be. But I see no sense in you sneaking about the place after books as you have been doing these many years, I’ve no doubt. Nor do I intend to waste my time trying to stop you. I suggest that when I bring Giles here with me to study, you accompany us with some piece of embroidery on which you are engaged. I suggest something quite large, bigger, say, than the average open book.’

I struggled to straight-face. I could not believe this. ‘If we are interrupted by one of the servants, you need simply to make sure the embroidery conceals anything – any object, you understand, I do not name what that object may be – that happens to be in your lap. You may also –’ she paused, ‘suggest books that you think Giles might like to look at later in the schoolroom and I will take them there. Perhaps I should point out that neither Mrs Grouse nor the servants are able to distinguish which books are appropriate for a boy of Giles’s age and which are beyond him. So they won’t question the presence of any book there. Well, what do you say?’

‘Yes, miss, thank you, miss.’

She turned toward the window and stared out at the sunlit lawns, as if lost in thought. I meantime gazed around the room. I had never before seen the books all at once and in all their glory. It near fainted me with overwhelming.

Miss Taylor turned abruptly. ‘There is just one thing.’ She looked at Giles. ‘You, I know, have kept your stepsister’s secret for many years and kept it well. You must continue to do so, for there will be difficulty for us all if you do not. And you, young lady, will have to learn not to be so interested in the affairs of others. You will not inquire about them, nor will you spy upon them by day or by night, or else I may begin to look what lies beneath your needlework. Is that clear.’

‘Yes, miss. Quite clear, miss.’

So there we were that afternoon, in the schoolroom, I at one end and Miss Taylor the other with Giles, teaching him his French verbs, all of which I, of course, already knew, although I silented in both that tongue and my native English, not wishing to do anything that might spoil a good thing. Opened on my lap I had the first volume of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. On the little occasional table at my elbow rested my embroidery, a cushion cover which I trusted would be like Penelope’s, that is, never finished but always there to help me in my quest to read every book in the library. How easily does the mind selfish! How readily do we put aside the prospect of future disaster for present pleasure! I ostriched for the sake of books. I put my little brother’s life at risk for my own guilty enjoyment, I do freely admit it now.

I halfwayed through the book’s second chapter when there was a knock at the door. I slammed the book shut and hastened the embroidery frame over it just as the door opened and Mrs Grouse walked in. She caught sight of me first and a smile lit up her face like a match a bonfire. ‘Why, Miss Florence, what a pleasure it is to see you so busily engaged upon your needlework. This is just what your uncle would want.’ She then evidently recalled what she had come for and the smile faded as she turned her attention to Miss Taylor, as though she recanted the compliment she had paid me because it complimented even more the teacher who had achieved the change. ‘Begging your pardon, Miss Taylor’ – she said this with a hint of mockery so understated and subtle that you could not openly have found offence in it without embarrassing yourself – ‘but we have visitors.’

Miss Taylor looked up, her face somewhat troubled. I took it at the time that she was annoyed at being disturbed in the middle of her work, but later realised that might not be the reason. ‘Oh, really?’

‘Yes, Mrs Van Hoosier and young master Theo. Come to pay their respects before they shut up the house and return to New York.’

Our new governess seemed discomforted for a moment. She fumbled the book she was holding and it fell to the floor and she bent hastily and picked it up. By this time she was almost her usual brusque self. ‘Well, now, children, we must not keep our visitors waiting, we must go and bid them farewell – or in my case hello and farewell – right away.’ She stood waiting for us and Giles gratefulled his book closed and stood up too. I waited a moment until Mrs Grouse’s back was turned so that I could slip The Woman in White from my lap and onto the side table, and then made to follow the housekeeper. Miss Taylor ushered us out the door after Mrs Grouse, and we had just stepped through it when there was a groan from behind us. We all three at once turned to see Miss Taylor leaning against the door jamb, one hand raised to her forehead as though in some kind of faint. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Oh, dear!’

Mrs Grouse instanted and caught her. She turned to us and hissed, ‘Go on, children. Run along to the drawing room and see Theo and his mama, while I attend to Miss Taylor.’

We did as we were told, glancing back to see Mrs Grouse supporting the governess with one arm around her waist and corridoring her in the direction of Miss Taylor’s room. Giles and I looked at one another and shrugged, but then, excited at the prospect of seeing Theo, even if only for the maudlin business of saying goodbye for who knew how many weeks, at least until his next asthma attack, we made our way downstairs.

At first it was hard to see Theo, for Mrs Van Hoosier took up most of the drawing room. We sidled into it and good-afternoon-ma’amed her. Giles, who hadn’t met her before, couldn’t avert his eyes from her bosom but stared at it as you might a famous landmark, like one of the pyramids, maybe, or perhaps more aptly in this case, a pair of them.

Mrs Van Hoosier put her spectacles, which she wore on a cord around her neck, up to her eyes and inspected my brother. ‘What’s the matter with you, boy?’ she inquired. ‘Never seen a lady before?’

‘Please, ma’am,’ burst out Giles, now completely overwhelmed by a combination of bust and bombast, ‘please, ma’am, would you prefer to be pegged down on the ground naked and covered with honey and left to killer ants to sting to death, slowly of course, or put in a barrel and sent over Niagara Falls and smashed to pieces quickly on the rocks below? Which do you think?’

Mrs Van Hoosier shifted her head back near enough a foot to signal her surprise at this manner of greeting but then broke into a smile. She turned to me. ‘Why, isn’t that just like a boy, to be preoccupied with things like that? I well remember when Theo was that age’ – at this she swivelled her head this way and that – ‘Theo, where are you, boy?’

Theo emerged from behind her, smiling his eyes. ‘Hello, Florence,’ he said. ‘Hello, Giles.’

Mrs Van Hoosier sank into an armchair. ‘I explained to that housekeeper person that we can’t stay long. We have to be on the six-fifteen to New York. We’ve just come to say goodbye and to take a look at your new governess.’

‘I – I don’t think that will be possible, ma’am,’ I said. ‘She was on the way here with us when she suddenly felt ill. Mrs Grouse is tending to her.’

‘How unfortunate that she should pick just this moment to be ill. Nothing catching, I hope?’ She waved a dismissive hand at us. ‘Anyhow, if you young people want to go outside for a bit I have no objection, but half an hour, Theo, no longer, and no running about; I don’t want you to bring on another asthma attack just as we’re going away. Oh, and Florence, be so kind as to have them send me some tea. I will have to take it alone if the wretched woman is unwell.’

Outside, Giles begged us to hide-and-seek and he ran off and hid, but Theo and I half-hearted the game. We went and sat on the stone wall behind the house so we could talk, although every five minutes or so Theo had to get up and find Giles just to keep him interested in the game and out of our hair.

‘So, Theo,’ I said, soon as we sat down the first time, ‘you’ll be going back to school.’

He looked down at his hands, those long bony fingers that seemed to have no flesh on them. He beetrooted. ‘That’s just what I came to tell you,’ he said. He raised his head and pained me a look. ‘I should have told you before. I’ve been putting it off because I couldn’t bear to. I’m not returning to school, leastways not yet awhile. We’re going away.’

My heart hopelessed a bird-in-a-cage flutter. ‘Away? What do you mean, away?’

He was still interested in his hands, which were interlocking and freeing themselves as though he had no control over them, like two strange beasts wrestling. ‘We’re all going to Europe, to make a tour of the place, mother, father and I. We sail on Friday week.’

‘Europe,’ I faltered. ‘For how long?’

He looked up at me plaintively. ‘Six months.’

I made no reply. Just then Giles called out so I said, ‘You better go seek him. He’s behind the rhododendron.’

‘I know it!’ said Theo and gangled away.

I tried to take in what he’d just told me. The news could not have come at a worse time. For what other ally but Theo did I have against Miss Taylor? Who else would there be to help me protect my little brother when she tried to steal him away, or worse, if such her intention was? Who else but Theo could I turn to in time of need?

Giles having been found and then told to get lost again, Theo returned and sadly plonked himself down next to me. He sat glumly contemplating the loveliness of the day. Eventually he spoke. ‘Florence, I was wondering…’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I was wondering, seeing as I’m going away and all and won’t be seeing you for half a year, if I might, well, you know, kiss you, perhaps? If you’re agreeable this time, that is.’ He anxioused a look at me.

I stared back at him. He had those great ball eyes and a girl just couldn’t romantic him. He was simply too lantern-jawed and long and bony everywhere. He would be a sharp and uncomfortable person to get into a hug with. Nevertheless, I was not inclined to send him away with a refusal.

‘Does it involve a poem?’ I said.

‘Why, I’m afraid not. Darn it, would you believe I haven’t got one today? I’m real sorry about that, truly I am.’

‘Well in that case, the answer is yes.’ And I inclined my head away from him, proffering him a cheek, but he ducked his head and snuck around the front and pinged me one on the lips.

‘Why, Theo,’ I said, ‘that was a sneaky thing to do to a girl.’

‘I know it,’ he said, somehow both bashful and boastful at once. We sat and contemplated the day some more. It didn’t seem right to feel so miserable on such a good day. A tear watermarked my cheek.

Theo reached up one of his oversized digits and gentled it away. ‘Why, Florence, it ain’t so bad. It’s only six months. It’ll soon pass.’

‘No, Theo, you don’t understand.’ And then I blurted him the whole thing, about Miss Taylor and how I had found her walking the house in the night without any light, something no human being but only a ghost or some such could manage, and how she had stood over the sleeping body of my little brother licking her chops and how I feared that at the very least she meant to steal him away from me.

‘Promise me, Theo, promise me that if you return from Europe and anything bad has happened to Giles or me, you won’t rest until that woman has been made to pay. Promise me that.’

‘Why, Florence, don’t talk so, it cannot be so bad as all that. I mean, ghosts! Come now, aren’t you imagining a bit strong here?’

‘Promise me, Theo.’

He shrugged and then, seeing how earnest I was, seized both my hands in his, making a little nest for them, and looked into my eyes and said, ‘I promise, Florence, I surely do.’




14 (#ulink_e47c263c-71ab-5994-844b-11dcf3fc0e4f)


The Van Hoosier carriage couldn’t have been more than halfway down the drive when Miss Taylor was behind us at the front door, from where Giles and I were watching Theo and his mother disappear from our lives for at least six months, and perhaps, I reflected bitterly, perhaps, for ever.

‘Oh! Have I missed them?’ she said in a way that made me think she ought to be in the same theatre company as Giles when he pretended never to have been in the library before, it so unconvinced. ‘Well, perhaps they will call again soon.’

Giles’s wave died in mid-air as the carriage finally turned into the main road and disappeared from view. ‘Oh, no, miss, not for a long time. Not for months and months.’

‘Oh, how so?’

She casualled as though uninterested, but did I detect just a hint of triumph on her lips, the ghost of a smile?

Giles looked up at her as she closed the door, drawing us back inside. ‘Theo is going to Italy and France and all those sorts of places. It’s the other side of the Atlantic, you know.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, yes, miss, you see those places are in Europe on one side of the ocean and we’re here in the Americas on the other side and it’s three thousand miles between.’

Our new governess let go Giles’s misunderstanding. ‘What a shame,’ she said, meaningfulling me a glance. ‘We shall just be on our own, then, shan’t we?’ She turned and started off toward the stairs and we followed her.

‘Are you feeling better, miss?’ puppied Giles, catching her up.

‘Oh, yes, thank you, Giles, I’m much better now.’

And the way she louded that last word, flinging it back over her shoulder, I knew it was meant just for me.

Afterward, lying in my bed, I thought of Theo and how I would miss him and how his enforced abandonment of me left me wholly in the clutches of this fiend, for such I believed her to be, and that led me on to considering the morning’s visit and how Miss Taylor had suddened her faint. Her quick recovery obvioused it to me that she had not been ill at all, but had feigned the whole thing, and there could be but one reason for that, namely that she had wished to avoid meeting Theo and his mother.

I puzzled me awhile over that. Why would she wish to avoid them? What could it mean? I tossed and turned, which was beginning to be my normal bedtime routine these nights, ever since she came.

I eventuallied several thoughts. What was it about Mrs Van Hoosier that made Miss Taylor shun her presence? The answer had to be that Mrs Van Hoosier was not a servant but gentlefolk, and therefore not under the same constraints as Mrs Grouse and Meg and Mary and the like. She would be at liberty to make inquiries to Miss Taylor, to question her about her birth and family and where else she had governessed before. A woman like Mrs Van Hoosier struck me as someone who would worm the secrets out of a stone – though, of course, Miss Taylor couldn’t know that. But no matter what Theo’s mother’s character might have been, it obvioused that our new governess wished to avoid any investigation into her past.

Other things struck me too. Mrs Grouse and Meg and John and Mary were simple folk who did not look beyond the obvious. Someone of a superior class likelied to be that much more observant. What if in future the police – my old friend the captain, perhaps – should be involved? What if Miss Taylor seized my brother and vanished, or – I hated even to think the word – murdered him and then disappeared? A woman of Mrs Van Hoosier’s station would be more likely to provide an accurate description of her, to be able to place her accent, identify her clothing and provide other clues that might lead to her eventual detection and arrest. All this Miss Taylor had sought to avoid.

If I were right (and what other motives could Miss Taylor have had for avoiding the Van Hoosiers?), then something else must also be true. That what Miss Taylor was planning was expected to be executed before the Van Hoosiers returned, or she would not have been so pleased by the news of their temporary absence. Whatever it was, it was going to happen in less than six months, it was going to happen soon.

Only one thing did not make sense to me. If her object was to harm Giles, then why not do it now? Unless, of course, she wanted to fake some accident to him so that she was not held responsible and was waiting only until she precised the means. If that were so then it might be at any time. Chance might sudden it and she advantage the opportunity on the spur of the moment. I would have to watch her like a hawk.

But if she meant simply to take Giles, and her seeming fondness for him seemed to suggest this, then why not simply act now? What on earth was she waiting for? At first this bothered me because it did not make sense, until I began to think about what might happen after she had taken him. Suppose it was for a ransom, then she would have to steal him away and keep him hidden and perhaps for some considerable time before the ransom was paid. To even take Giles away she would need his cooperation and before she could guarantee that she would have to gain his confidence, something not to be done in a minute. And if it were not for a ransom, if she intended to keep Giles for ever, then she would need first to gain a secure place in his affection.

That was it! That was surely it! She was merely waiting until Giles was sufficiently attached to her to swallow some story she would tell him about why he must steal away with her, and subsequently remain with her, and then she would be gone. It so obvioused I kicked myself that I hadn’t seen it before. And she had libraried me to keep me out of her hair while she practised her wiles on Giles, every day inching him further and further away from me. Why, already he had forgotten the incident at breakfast, her sudden terrifying outburst of anger, and fawned about her as though she were the most wonderful person who ever lived. I resolved to speak to Giles about it, to warn him of the danger he was running.

Next day, though, it far from easied to find a time when I could alone him. Miss Taylor fetched him from his room first thing and took him down to breakfast with her and from then on they togethered almost always. It was only now when I sought to speak to him that I realised how much she had already sequestered him from me, how rarely the two of us ever aloned together any more. Eventually we were let out to play in the gardens as a relief from lessons for Giles, and to fresh-air us both. Even then, Miss Taylor accompanied us outside and seated herself on a recliner on the terrace, from which she watchful-eyed us. At one point, when I moved close to Giles and began to whisper that I needed to talk to him urgently, I looked up to see her already outseated and heading toward us. I instanted away from him and shouted out, ‘Can’t catch me, can’t catch me!’ and took off into the shrubbery, Giles tumbling after me.




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