Florence and Giles and The Turn of the Screw

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.

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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.’