Dark hair and silk stream behind her in the wind from the wheels. A shadow on the road, she sees but is unseen while her successor, the new governess (parson’s daughter, all of twenty) is transported over the lonely countryside toward her first appointment.
Yes, Miss Jessel is as invisible to this world as she is deceased. This vantage point affords her a simple luxury: inventorying her replacement at leisure. She traces the cameo profile of the young woman peering anxiously through the window at the approaching estate. Lake, summerhouse, statuaries in the hedge maze….
The governess (Miss Jessel notes) possesses the nervous habit of pulling at her pocketbook tassels. Worrying the strands, turning and un-turning the fraying threads.
Miss Jessel is practised in these arts. She measures equal degrees apprehension and expectation in the young woman’s eyes.
Drops from a water-clock, she thinks–
And time stops.
Thunder cracks; rain falls like a curtain. Wind shivers the crape myrtle. There’s a silver brightness to the wet landscape, an exhilarating charge in the atmosphere. And then the house itself rises from the surrounding hills: an imposing manor enclosed by the drenched old growth that seems to consume it.
The driver snaps his whip; horses whinny and rear. When the coach turns onto the avenue a vision of dark yews rushes at the young woman and throws her off balance. A hollow note is struck and yes, here it comes: the quickening pulse in her veins, an almost imperceptible tightening of the vocal chords.
Rendered speechless!
Miss Jessel laughs to herself as she soars above the coach on gleaming black wings.
(I’ve been ever so far, the boy had confided once. Miles and miles. I’ve never known such freedom as I do here!)
Meanwhile, the new governess’s hands are flower stems entwining the valise.
And:
I will watch over you, little dove, with your wings so easily broken.
Like paving stones in a garden, moss crumbling through the cracks, I will grow
in the spaces
between
your
bones.
Slow and green, like a pond filling in.
#
Round the bend I catch an updraft to the rain-swept tower overlooking the ancestral holdings.
There I settle my wings. Perch on a crenulated turret.
I know exactly what sort of disposition this New One has.
Don’t think I don’t.
I know, too, about the cancerous creep of loneliness. The afflictions of character veiled beneath layers of serviceable gabardine, not once hinting at the secret diseases of the heart.
I know about inaccuracies in judgement, the limitations of practical experience, the faux finishing-school façade that is as impressive here as High Street bonnet-strings.
Which is to say, not at all.
The New One is the youngest daughter of a Hampshire parson: to date her most celebrated accomplishment is having taught the vicarage pony to canter in circles. I nearly succumb to pity. What effect could her specially purchased finery have on the denizens of this remote Essex estate?
Little Lord, little Lady.
Mrs. Grose, the uneducated housekeeper with a complexion like bacon fat.
Scant staff of servants blending into the scenery.
An old groundskeeper with a limp dating from the time the Master’s valet mistook him for a rabbit in the hedgerows and filled his leg with buckshot. The poor man lost so much blood on that occasion (so claims Mrs. Grose), one might have sopped it up with dipper and tureen. Such a fuss and bother he made! He mended well enough but never spoke a word to Peter Quint again, turned a cold shoulder whenever they passed in the stable-yard. But Quint didn’t mind a bit:
Run, rabbit, run! as the indignant fellow limped past the stable-wall, creaked through the gate on his gimpy leg.
Hobbledy Hoy, Hobbledy Hoy!
He used to make me laugh so, did Peter Quint. Hair red as flame, the wayward valet, and all decked up in his Master’s smartest waistcoats. They were two of a kind: King and Knave. One high-bred, one low; opposite sides of the same card.
Quint is long gone now. But his eyes still burn in the dining-room window where young Master Miles’ heart stopped beating all those years ago. Frightened to death, is the word in the village.
I search for our faces in the glass: King and Knave; the wards of the court.
My successor, her predecessor: Ladies-in-Waiting.
Six turns on a staircase…leading nowhere.
I think, sometimes, it’s like watching embers burning down in the grate when you’re too sleepy to rouse yourself. All that’s visible in the glass at first is a view of the world outside: terrace, lawns, trees beyond. A window away, but a world between. Then when the sun dips behind the tower the glass becomes a mirror.
Night shrouds the hills.
And you realise there are no faces looking askance at all, never have been: it’s only your own reflection, and the fire gone cold and dead.
#
To continue the tale: The coach has drawn up to the end of the avenue. It halts at the arched entrance to the country estate. The courtyard–and here you attempt, so nobly, to mask your disappointment–is empty of an audience.
The self-conscious gracefulness that governs your movements as you descend from the coach is so studied that I imagine you must have whiled away your journey in dress-rehearsal: composing the image you wished to project upon your arrival; the impression you would make, must make, hours from now, miles from where you began, alone and unloved in a place you never could have envisioned except in dream… yet described to you by that casually charismatic, oh-so-persuasive gentleman with impeccable style and the glint in his eye.
As if he would be awaiting you here, little church-mouse! A roguish Rochester replete with mad wife in the attic, gnawing ferret-quick through her bondages in hopes of an exit…? (Most circumspect, this nineteenth-century precaution, and quite sensible in my view.)
So: The shadow of the house presses down on our modern-day heroine, a psychic weight on her bosom. Her internal temperature drops beneath the frozen glare of all that stone and her whalebone corset shuts off her air. A corked bottle, she very nearly swoons. But she realises (in the nick of time) that it would not, perhaps, be convenient for the Lord of the Manor to prevent her from knocking herself silly on the rain-slicked pavement. He’s busy banking investments continents away–Sandwich Islands, Cape Town, Constantinople, Hong Kong. Around the world in eighty days!
And so–very practically, I concede her that–she elects not to swoon at this critical juncture in our story. Instead, she lists only slightly as she steps out of the coach. Water rolls steadily from the brim of the silk bonnet with the aforementioned ribbons purchased expressly for this occasion.
The huffing coachman and sopping servants pass down the trunk, almost dropping it splash! on the cobbles.
Raindrops cling to urns filled with lilacs; their ephemeral charms will fade by twilight. Cloaked in shadow on the portico, a haunting fragrance scents the air like a promise made in darkness but never kept.
A moment later the doublewide funeral doors burst open and an angel emerges from a rectangle of darkness the dimensions of a grave.
I knew you’d come, I knew you’d come! The child claps her hands, but decorum is called for, so: How do you do, Miss? Proper little lady she, with eyes like sky and hair like sunlight.
And here comes the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, stirring herself at last from elevenses in the kitchen to come meet the new governess. Rough old cabbage of a woman, she has not improved with the passage of time. You hear the odious whistling to her respirations, don’t you? Like a heaving bellows wheezing its way down the steps. Apron pulled over her head like an umbrella, she seizes our startled dove by the wing joint. The housekeeper’s fingers are overcooked capons, nails digging in like meat-hooks.
Panic strikes; our bewildered heroine nearly bolts.
But the housekeeper half-drags her toward the house before you catch your death, Miss!
She recovers from the shock before she can discomfit herself. Shakes rain from her cape and responds, in the civilest of tones: I’m so pleased to meet you, Mrs. Grose. And this must be little Flora. How precious you are!
Will you stay with us always?
Always, always.
The front doors close from within.
Blackbird no more, I view the proceedings from the coach-house door.
Eavestroughs drip silently in the rain.
I am alone in the courtyard: one forgot, cold as the tomb, eyes blank as mirrors. If you consider the two of us–governesses then and now, side by side in that metaphorical mirror–you might find yourself struck more by our similarities than our differences: the same oval faces, with eyes and hearts that wander hill and dale.
Both predecessor and successor so easily influenced by appearances.
And I realise, all at once–how can I have forgotten, has time so passed me by?–that it had not been she who arrived at Bly on that dismal cold day in June, with rain soaking her High Street bonnet and expectations to match.
It was I.
#
Sometimes I stand at the foot of her bed and watch the New One dream. Her eyelids twitch like wings. Which way do her fancies dart tonight, I wonder? Down which passage will she turn on these nocturnal ramblings, hair flowing behind her like the lake at midnight?
Her lips are white as death. Cheeks red as blood, red as the brocade curtains in the Master’s bedchamber. She is predictable as a metronome.
I trust you implicitly with the welfare of my niece and nephew, he’d assured her (he’d assured us all!). Their parents died in India and I am all they have in the world. The little girl was inconsolable following the loss of the governess and I was obliged to send the boy away to school. He’ll be returning to Bly for the holidays; you’ll meet him then.
Oh, he was charming. Awfully so. That was the attraction of him. The devil’s own conceit.
There are several servants to run things: The cook, the groom, the gardener. My old housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. Very respectable. She was my mother’s maid when I was a boy. But the children require… a more refined influence. A guiding hand. I haven’t the time nor the disposition to provide either. I prefer the town life. You do understand how I need you, don’t you?
The glazed eyes of his trophies observe impassively from the library walls. I can almost hear the call of the huntsman’s horn now, the pursuit through field and forest!
What became of the children’s previous governess? She left your employ?
It was awkward, he admitted. A terrible misfortune. I was in Calcutta at the time.
Misfortune?
She died, I’m afraid.
At the conclusion of their London interview he held her trembling hand briefly in his. Fire roared in his veins.
I remember the spark of that touch. The shock of its withdrawal as the door closed and I found myself on the bustling London street, colour rising in my cheeks.
#
Barefoot, the children shiver deliciously behind the door. They take turns spying on the new governess, stifling titters as she glides along the corridor by candlelight.
She’s the very image of the Other. The girl’s nightdress sways in the breeze from the open window. The same style of hair. See how she wears it when she thinks she’s alone?
The boy nods. This one’s prettier, though, and:
Yes, the girl agrees. Isn’t she?
The boy, suddenly solemn: He likes them young and pretty
.
They hold their breaths in anticipation as she ascends, like a sleepwalker, the staircase that leads to the Master’s empty chamber.
#
Next morning, dilute sunlight streams through the leaded mullions of the breakfast-room window, where I overhear your conversation with the detestable Mrs. Grose. (I confess I am balanced on the crockery-closet shelf. Next to a pot of blackberry jam into which young Master Miles so wickedly has been known to dip his fingers. Punish kittens.)
You look pale this morning, Miss.
What secrets we share betwixt us! Your cheeks are pink as the peonies nodding outside the kitchen door. Your neatly pinned hair glows softly in the early sunlight as you inquire tentatively about–
The late governess? Ah, Miss Jessel. What a scandal that was, she–
(fell mysteriously ill and died of some undisclosed ailment, &tc. &tc.)
And: I wonder, Mrs. Grose, would you tell me what it was she died of?
Couldn’t say, Miss.
A stupid, superstitious woman. She could not wait to be rid of me.
Was she sent home to convalesce before…?
Before what, Miss?
My replacement is persistent. Exhibits potential.
Was it here at Bly that she…?
Too polite to euphemise. Very courteous of her.
The housekeeper narrows her piggish eyes. What do you want to know about her for, Miss? I can see she seesaws on the brink of a good gossip.
I only wondered…about her relationship with the children. Was she a good governess?
Such a winning smile you have, even for the hired help. You must have used it to great effect in the house on Harley Street.
Good! The housekeeper laughs. Her!
What an insufferable old sowbelly she is.
I daresay the children were attached to her. Especially little Flora.
And the Master’s valet….
You mean Peter Quint. Mrs. Grose presses her speckled sausage tongue between molars yellowed like kernels of corn.
Would you say he spent a great deal of time alone with young Miles?
A change of subject is in order. You look tired Miss, the housekeeper tells her. She eyes my successor up and down. Didn’t you sleep well?
I was too excited to sleep. And I thought I heard….
Mrs. Grose won’t meet her eyes. Jabs the fire with an old poker she might have found buried by the gatehouse where Quint was known to have beat the horses lame.
The housekeeper cocks her head when she hears a squeak from my hidey-hole.
Did you hear that? you say. One of the servants? Moving about?
Knees clenched on the scullery shelf, I’m shuddering with laughter, just like the children. We’re a merry lot.
Must be a mouse, the housekeeper mutters. She backs away from the door. Her calves are ham-hocks larded in their casings. Or perhaps a bird, caught in the chimney.
Don’t you believe it! I laugh out loud.
You’ll have to let me be about my work now, Miss. But I’ll make you a spot of tea first, if you like.
Thank you, Mrs. Grose. I’d like that. And the new governess, too, moves ever so inconspicuously away from the crockery-cupboard. One might believe her to be fearful of mice. Her own shadow.
Whoever waits by the garden gate.
#
They say that I took ill and died at the seaside. Committed suicide by throwing myself off a cliff. Met my end during a botched procedure in a shuttered room. All of which are false.
I never left here. They only thought I did. So clever was I, hiding myself in the wallpaper while the village surgeon–palsied bungler!–ineptly attempted to locate my pulse.
I offered no assistance. Let my arm lie limp as a yard of eyelet. He bobbled his stethoscope up and down my chest but heard only rain thrumming the sill like a cornered moth.
#
How like the uncle is the nephew, sent home from school with a letter from the headmaster ordering him not to return! He is a corruption, an injury to the other boys…. Indeed, I saw in the light-hearted sternness of the younger something of the elder’s demeanour: the condescending airs and boyish pout, the disarming affection. How he teased her, my successor: pressed his lips to hers a moment longer than etiquette allowed… enough to leave her breathless with perplexed wonder in the garden.
I knew how to make him love me. And he knew how to make me love him back. He lay in my lap twining roses in my hair and whispered the things he’d said to the other boys at boarding school.
But only the ones I liked, he amended.
He wouldn’t tell her but he told me. They didn’t understand him at school, he said. But I understand him, yes I do! And he told me why they sent him packing before term was up. Expelled by the headmaster. At only ten years of age! Still a baby, really, his childish frame lost in Quint’s old tweeds.
Dug ‘em up in the shed, Miles said. Someone must have buried ‘em.
There’s dried blood on the sleeve, says I.
Is there? says he. I wonder whose?
What a delight, my playmate: a sweetmeat, a joy, a treasure-box toy solider, to give such commands and I so obligingly to comply!
What does this key unlock? he demands, twisting the stout one on the end of the waist-chain cinched tight as a chastity belt.
Key to my heart.
To the Master’s chambers! The little imp laughs.
To the tower, I tell him. To the madwoman’s dressing-room.
#
The little girl has a face like a pearl, and so aptly named she is: Flora. A rosebud, a doll’s teacup, porcelain perfection. Her expression is carefully cultivated. There is a triviality to her conversations, such contradictions in assertions and discrepancies in accounts that she seems a ray of light bent through a prism: not illuminating but deflecting truth. She vexed me so with her inconstancies and vexes me still, the way she withholds her heart.
The new governess soon learns my poppet speaks astonishingly perfect French but embroiders atrocious scenes on her samplers. Only once she pricked herself with the needle.
Look, Miss, she announced. I’ve spoilt the muslin. She revealed the ruby drop poised on her thumb and looked so distressed I hid my smile.
That is where we will sew Death’s Bride, I told her gravely. With a heart of true-love’s blood.
#
In the school-room the new governess writes letters to unknown admirers past and present while the children dawdle over lessons. They make a cosy party of three.
I stand unseen behind the Turkish screen.
It seems Flora had been awoken the night before by some disturbance. A strange black bird beating its wings outside the window.
Or perhaps, the girl muses, it wasn’t a bird?
Something large, something dreaming….
It might have been my shadow projecting on the pane. My fears collecting outside the window like wet dark feathers, brushing against the glass, night-moth to lamplight.
The things we dream when we’re half asleep, her brother says indifferently, drawing idly in his book.
Like gas seeping into a room and suddenly it’s too late to wake:
Whatever Miss J
dreams
turns into Miss J.
#
They say in the village ’twas Quint what done me in, mud and blood on his boots and the stink of horses and whiskey, riding crops flecked with the flesh of whores. (A passing labourer found him one winter morning at the bottom of an icy embankment with his head staved in.)
Old hen’s talk in the village but what do they know about the course of true love?
#
The new governess tours the house unescorted.
Counts hours between chimes while out on the terrace her charges fashion paper chains from scripture pages. The boy yanks his sister’s hair. He pulls harder when she shrieks and looks to see if the new governess is supervising from the French doors.
But my successor seems to have forgotten her station. She’s pretending at Mistress of the Manor, trailing her hands along the polished pianoforte, the fleur-de-lis-patterned divan….
She lately has acquired an air of propriety most unbecoming to her situation: All this belongs to her, she imagines. And she to it. Has she not been placed in command of the troops, been awarded supreme authority in matters great and small?
A golden ringlet twirls to the parquet. Why you vicious prick! screams the girl, rubbing her crimson scalp.
The boy dances round her. You like it, you know you like it, you syphilitic little tart!
….And is she not the acting head of the household during his prolonged absence?
Round and round the satin-papered walls we go.
Has she not been entrusted unequivocally with the children’s welfare?
Ah, the children….
If only they would desist these games and confess to her those long summers spent under the tutelage of the notorious Quint and the infamous Jessel! If only, if only….
But the limits of our governess’s world encompass the drawing-room tour which now draws to a close. Her heart winds tightly in her breast. Breaks a spring, like the mantelpiece clock.
Possession, they say, is nine-tenths of the law.
All roads lead to Rome.
#
I have learned something of the nature of labyrinths from one of the books the Master keeps locked in the library. (Unbeknownst to him, my keychain opens all doors.) I have perused pictures of the Queen’s hedge-maze and I might present formal instruction, should you inquire, on how to
find
your
way
out.
I might also tell you how you must never, ever leave go of the right-hand wall. How you must follow its every turn to the bitter end where Coach and Freedom await. Once you have ventured within the maze (and I have this on authority) you must never trust to your own judgement as to which way to turn. For once you do: then you are truly lost.
That’s the beauty of it. He’s been so clever, you see. So very discreet. How many advertisements do you think he has placed in the Times for a governess? Did you really believe yourself the first to visit the Big Game room on Harley Street?
The truth of it is this: You will never find your way out.
There is no escape, not even from above, when in desperate confusion you transform yourself to a dark bird and smash straight through a pane of glass, frightening the little girl reflected on the other side, breaking your bones and your spirits with the inevitability of it all when you realise you never really found your way out of the maze, that you have only made another wrong turn.
#
Here is how I picture it:
She is resplendent in black taffeta. The tonal qualities of the fabric vary in the mutable light of afternoon, in the diffused rays through the hall windows, in the staircase where she thinks she sees a handsome, broad-shouldered man disappear behind the next turn.
Next:
She opens her eyes and finds herself holding one end of a spool of thread. She stands outside the moonlit scullery where a filthy pair of men’s riding boots sit on a square of butcher paper. The mud on the boots is ancient, the horses long dead, boiled down to cartilage and glue. But the young woman’s thread holds taut as reins between her fingers. Pulling, pulling….
On to the next:
The thread leads her on to the Master’s disused bedchamber (his last letters were posted from abroad: Timbuktu, Byzantium, St. Petersburg, Piccadilly Circus).
She lies completely still on his great mahogany four-poster and stares at the ceiling.
Four floors below the housekeeper, pallid as oiled dough rising in a bowl, pops down to the village for bread and eggs, brewed ale and old wives’ tales about what the Master’s about when he’s not receiving visitors.
Sometimes I imagine I had the good sense to unreel the spool of thread behind me as I plotted the course of my demise.
Sometimes I do not.
#
There’s a summerhouse by the lake: a birthday-cake pavilion whose sides have collapsed like a ribcage lain long in the rain.
The lake today is dark as wet satin now that the sun is lowering in the sky. Thunder rolls. Lightning flashes. Rain patters the pond.
My successor glares at me with eyes of iron: pointing at me furiously, twisting the girl’s resisting arm, tightening the screw, defying her to lie.
You know you see her! Tell me you see her!
I don’t! I don’t!
The child wails to high heaven and the agitated Mrs. Grose hurries out from the house in a sodden shawl, duck-walking across the muddy grass in her haste and I almost laugh.
Perhaps I laugh.
I do laugh from the summerhouse. The sound rings so shrill against that brittle sky it might shatter glass.
Laughing still, I spread my wings and whirl in endless circles, close my eyes until I dare open them.
When I do the apparition has departed at last.
She and the housekeeper and the girl all have departed, the latter’s dropped sunhat an iced cake dissolving in the pond.
#
I have been taking great pains of late to escape the notice of my detestable young persecutor. She cannot find me when I do not wish to be seen.
A horror, she called me, that day at the summerhouse. That woman is a horror of horrors.
How afraid she is, how brutally determined are her searches on the stair, her pressures on the children. Little Flora has been known to burst into hysterics at the mention of her, insists she be taken to her uncle at once. Young Master Miles roams the wooded grounds for hours; when he returns his clothes reek of saddle leather and something sweetly rotten.
But she intercepted me by surprise in the school-room one interminable Sunday. Apparently–so I had it from the children–she’d made a madcap dash from church service that morning; intending, I presume, to make a hasty exit from the house and all contained within it. So silent she was when she opened the door I might have mistaken her for a breath of air from the open window.
I’d been seated at her desk–my desk–reading her diary:
I see my predecessor’s reflection in mirrors and windows; the surface of my tea or the andirons in the great hall; the spoons in the drawer and the harnesses in the coach-house; the head of the Master’s walking cane, the birdbath in the garden where I find myself swirling to the centre, all wet feathers and gleaming eyes
Can I have no privacy?
At that moment in her disclosure I chanced to look up. Materialising before me at the schoolroom door was a vision of myself: haggard beauty in black silk.
Perhaps we are the same (reads the diary) perhaps this is some fragment of a future self re-enacting what happened in the past?
Interesting supposition.
Mrs. Grose thinks me mad. But if I am mad, it is a madness borne of righteousness.
#
You may believe me unaware of my madness, but I am.
I experienced intervals of dreadful clarity during my tenure at Bly House when I began to be intensely afraid. Moments when I wished I’d never laid eyes on their damnable faces.
Sometimes…I recall the sickness that descended upon me by degree. It was like water heating in a kettle, a method whereby one might poach a toad: lulling it into a false sleep while its innards slowly steam. Pan uncovered, it might leap to safety at any moment. But secure in its complacency, it never does.
An easy enough trick. Young Master Miles has demonstrated it to me more than once.
But pan or no pan, I remember how I was finally sent away. Driven away. My lips had turned to sallow lemons, concavities of my eye-sockets the colour of old beeswax. The surgeon counted the knobs of my spine through my chemise. It clung to me like a cataract.
Mrs. Grose supervised the proceedings at a distance, though close enough to satisfy her curiosity, I might add! Her handkerchief was raised to her mouth. Asinine woman. As if what I had were catching, this fever that twisted my sheets like the pounding fist of my heart or the sweat of my nape, so intimate a perspiration even Old Sawbones seemed chastened.
The children were not allowed in the sickroom. I heard the boy’s muffled, hateful sobs down the corridor. The surgeon thumped my chest and listened to the rattle of catarrh. He examined the dilation of my eyes and the burning shells of my ears. He gauged the glands at the base of my throat, lumps swollen as wren’s eggs.
Finally he pronounced me ill, so ill I must be bundled off without delay. He would not hear my feeble protests.
Will you stay with us always?
Always, always.
I raged at them in my fever. Though they might lock me in the coach, strike the whip to the horse’s flanks until it raised welts, roll me in tapestries from the Master’s bedchamber….
I would pull the heavy folds close to my mouth and breathe in his odour, trapped in the brocade: cherry-wood pipe and hair tonic, the heat of his clavicle when we danced in those airless hallways, echoing with laughter and dizzying staircases, turning, turning, and the surgeon waved the coach off at a gallop as the housekeeper retreated behind me like a bloated tic–
I really daren’t say what she died of, Miss.
Come, now, there was something between them, wasn’t there?
I summoned the strength to tumble my spool of thread out the window of the coach.
My fingers were wishbone-thin by that time. But the spool bounced behind the coach as it dashed down the yew walk. Yews for death, yews for loss and life eternal. The girl-child ran alongside, bowling a hoop with a stick. (The boy had shut himself up in the tower with a broken-necked rook he’d exhumed from its garden grave.)
But I will not lose my presence of mind or my situation. He is not a King of England, and I am no Anne Boleyn to so be discarded and replaced on a whim. Some part of me will find its way back to the centre though I were gone from this world.
We must never speak of her to the new governess, now that she’s gone, the brother whispered to the sister.
And so he betrayed me in the end, my little Master. He proffered his heart to another.
But I have forgiven all.
#
Now that he’s dead and a permanent member of the household (and she called us monstrous!) Miles hides and seeks in the nursery. We cook dead toads from the lake in Mrs. Grose’s pudding: bulging eyes, belly-up and floating in the cup. When she sups it up the toad-balloon smacks her teeth and webbed feet bump her palate. Or Miles knots the horses’ tails and burrs their tack. Shies them when he leaps from behind the shrubbery so the coachman is thrown and cracks his skull like Quint and threatens to give notice. Such fun we have!
But his uncle is ill, I hear. My dashing Master.
The roving blade, returned from his travels to exotic climes, has contracted an ailment on his trips abroad and lies wasting in his old town residence on Harley Street. He is now almost too infirm to be moved. Crippled beneath the weight of his horsehair blanket, his once admirable frame sunken into the bedsprings. Dear me.
But they have brought him home now. I watch as the servants lift him onto the chaise. He appears light as an empty portmanteau. His hair is silver-white as trees in winter, greyed overnight by fright or something else.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, say I!
They transport him to his chamber and position him on the bed. She waits for him in an ecstasy of anticipation. Arranges cushions beneath his damp head with a nurse’s devotion. Serves him coddled eggs with a spoon.
She tucks the counterpane around him. His thighs are withered roots. His skin flakes like the aged keys of a piano. His moustache is dull with the wax the undertaker uses to fill in hollow contours. He looks at her oddly, trying to place her face. Clutches the tumbler she holds to his lips as if she would give his life back anew.
As if she could!
I eye him from behind the brocade curtain. Red as roses, red as blood.
How soon we are forgotten, I whisper in his ear. How soon we are cast out from each others’ affections.
His nurse-maid wipes dribbles of albumin from his chin. But he no longer recognises her.
#
I visit the tower while he dozes fitfully.
He was once a striking man and I say this from a dispassionate distance–with great broad shoulders and a fine straight back and a voice that poured over the female sex like warm brandy. Now his life essence seeps into the carpet like a spilled drink. The hearth glows too hot; he prefers it cold as Hades. He’s propped on the settee, windows flung open so he can see the ruins of the garden.
I close my lips over his. I breathe in the air he exhales. And he breathes in the nothingness I exhale, until the last breath is drawn from his lungs as if through a flue. A flame needs oxygen to burn, so they say.
I think little of him now.
#
The marble fauns on the lawn below are broken. Like young Miles that night. The last thing the terrified child saw before he collapsed in his governess’s arms was his own panicked face, reflected not in Quint’s window, but in her own triumphant eyes.
I have you now, she told him, covering his fevered brow with kisses.
I have you.
So you see, it was not I who stopped the boy’s heart, though my name was on his anguished lips when he died: Miss Jessel! Miss Jessel!
The author of our woe.
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Oh yes, there are times when I wish I had never come here.
Times when I wish I’d set my letter of appointment adrift in a stream and walked away in sunlight: the governess incognita, a woman alone in the world but whole.
The boat of lies courses through the rapids, ink bleeding to blank paper to nothing that can be detected by the human eye, and my drowning conscience runs clear and true as the sky.
There are times….
When the thread breaks, and the window opens, and the bird has no need of wings.