John Harding 2-Book Gothic Collection

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_cdff7d29-a951-5c7a-a3cc-faaaa6306027)

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?’