Ghosts by Gaslight (18 page)

It was not that Mr. Beecham’s house was not perfectly safe in the daytime, and full of distractions—even, on occasion, amusements, even for a boy so timid and easily mortified as Smoll. But nighttime always loomed again. Always the glad morning (the darkness easing, the clop of the passing milk-horse giving him heart) was followed—no, rushed upon, hurried out of mind, pounced on and briskly swept aside as of no account—by oncoming evening. However much Smoll lingered over the boots in the evening (
See your face in ’em yet?
Ridley would say, passing behind him with the last slop pail from the kitchen), there would come a point where they were done, when they were placed each pair outside the doors: Mister’s and Missus’s, Miss Edwina’s, Miss Pargeter’s, Miss Annabelle’s, Master Howard’s, Mr. Pinkney’s—and sometimes Mr. Rossiter the coachman’s as well, those wonderful long boots with all their mud that Smoll was always so grateful for. And Smoll having placed them must proceed up his flight of tiny stairs, through the hole in his floor, through the door not much larger than a coalhole cover. He must shut himself away behind that door, shake off his clothes and shrug on his chilled nightshirt and leap abed, blow out the candle and wrap himself tightly in the clean patched sheet and the blanket—as if tonight of all nights that wrapping, that tightness, might be effective against her, when every previous night, since first Smoll had been elevated from country scamp to Beecham’s boot boy, it had utterly failed to protect him.

“S
MOLL, ARE YOU
well?”

“Quite well, thank you, Mr. Pinkney.”

“It is only that you have . . . well, rather a
burdened
look about you.”

Smoll felt it and unrounded his shoulders. “Oh no, sir. I am nothing like so burdened as I was at home, carrying water and wood.”

“That is better, Smoll. It behooves a young man to maintain a good posture, whether he be in the public gaze or no, do you not think?”

“Yes, sir.”

S
HE WAS NEITHER
old nor young, the dream-lady; she was neither beautiful nor monstrous to look upon. She was
difficult
to look upon; though her presence was so sudden and so strong in the sensations it produced, her actual shape was indistinct against the surrounding darkness, except in the middle, where it resembled an hourglass. Above and below the narrow waist, she was corseted into a shape that even Smoll, whose eyes were so often cast down in the presence of ladies, or indeed of anyone taller or more important than himself, recognized as old-fashioned. Below this shape she gave to skirts that faded to nothingness, although their rustlings pressed most forcefully upon his ear. Above it, her flat-bound bosom and hunched shoulders supported a head all the more terrible for being entirely without features, except for the impression of a wealth of hair, pulled and piled and pinned into place with the same energy of compression that had been exerted on the body below. Tightness, tightness was all, about this body and about the personage that was borne about in it—tightness and a little madness, which the tightness held in check.

She carried her faceless head with an intent tilt, and it was in this tiltedness that Smoll’s fear formed, for she was intent on
him;
she tilted her head at
him
. He would scramble upright in the bed, his back pressed to the wall, the back of his head hard against the frame of the little uncurtained window, which, admitting as it might the fullest moonlight or the strongest effusions of a clear night’s stars, never showed him what he needed to see of the woman, never illuminated her brightly enough to convince him that he had seen all the evil there was to see of her, that he now knew what she was, that he could begin to bring some measure of rationality to his encounters with her. Instead he only underwent yet again this deep abjection, this wholesale shrinking of body and being from whatever she was, whatever she wanted.

For she did want something; she made the same demand of him night after night. She rattled the beads in her hands and pushed them at Smoll, pushed them
into
him sometimes. Did her touch itself, her thrusting at his middle, produce those pond ripples of horror up and down him, or was only the
idea
of her touch, in his appalled mind, sufficient to generate them?

The beads themselves were grotesque, bulbous; her handfuls of them reminded him of Arthur Cleal at Hobson’s farm, gathering up innards after the butchering, the slippery tubes and organs overflowing the bowl of his hands.

Take it,
she hissed, and shook the thing and pushed it at him again.
Take it; I don’t want it.
Her voice was muddied—from having crossed time to reach him, perhaps, or from the invisibility of her mouth. She was hurried and guilty; she crouched at him.
’Tis not as if I can ever wear it. Take it!

He might say
No.
He might say
I don’t want it either.
He might ask her who she was and why she plagued him. Whatever he said, fear crawled and shook in his voice. And she always answered the same, angrily:
Take it!,
bobbing at him, bobbing into him a little, bobbing back. There might be the flash of an eye, fixing on him with horrible inexactitude, as if she were blind; there might be something of a mouth, a ghost of teeth, momentarily, against the hollow attic room behind her, which resounded with the muddied sounds of ghost steps.
What would I do with it, for heaven’s sake? Take it! Take it, before Mistress comes!

A
T FIRST HE
felt only faint pains, here and there about his neck, a slight heat in the skin of his chest where the locket lay. Sometimes these were itches and no more, and if he lifted the neck of his shirt to search for signs of them, he saw no mark—the first few times, the pains themselves eased utterly, he was so reassured by the sight of his clear skin.

Then a redness began to grow and to glow in the flesh there, visible in the light of a bright day outdoors but not by candlelight or lamp. The reddened skin was sensitive to the touch of a finger or the rubbing of shirt cloth; if he scratched it absentmindedly it would sting and burn, and the pain of that would linger.

There rose blisters, then, pepperings of them where each bead had lain in the night, and a flowering on his breast from the locket’s weight. They burst and itched and wept, and the skin stayed raw; sometimes by nightfall it had healed dry, but the dream-lady’s visit would inflame it again, when she forced the unnatural burden of the ghost beads on him.

The wounds never quite bled; at worst they leaked a watery fluid that stained Smoll’s shirt and nightshirt yellow. “What have you spilt on yourself?” Cook might scold him, but it was less a question than a lament at the general carelessness of boys, and she did not pursue him for an explanation.

T
HE DREAM-LADY WOULD
thrust the beads one last nervous time at Smoll, her shining, rattling handfuls of them. His own hands would turn palm up to take them. He was an obedient boy, and before he had left to live here his mother had kissed him and instructed him to do exactly as he was told by all at Mr. Beecham’s house. Also, he was afraid that the beads, if he did not catch them, would slither and crash to the floor. The noise they would make terrified him enough; the consequences of such a concussion, he could not begin to imagine.

And once she had poured the beads into his hands, their weight and coldness compelled him; he understood himself to have made some kind of pledge in accepting them. There was no handing the necklace back, however much it pained him to hold it, the weight like a load of polished river stones. They chilled his hands, and the dragging of the overspilt ones made his whole arms shake. She had pushed them out of her time into his, and by taking them he had taken them
on,
somehow; he had become responsible for them.
That’s right—
you
have it!
she now exulted, and she had an eye again, a jagged gleam on the darkness as she nodded.
It’s beautiful, isn’t it?

He might say
Yes
. He might creak out the truth:
It is the ugliest thing I have ever seen.
He might gather the spills of beads or leave them depending from the fat gold locket for which the whole embarrassment of ivory, amber, and jet had been assembled. No matter what he chose to do—if choice, indeed, played any part in it—she would nod and gleam in the same way; the same impression of her tight smile would hang there in the night before him.
Put it on,
she now said; they were only partway through whatever bewitchment she was working. Her voice issued not from her tensed lips but from the fearful air all around; it rose at Smoll from inside him, from the marrow of his own small bones.

Always he put the necklace on, although it was cold, and painfully heavy. The sooner he put it on, the sooner this trial would end.

You see?
The woman melted into relief. Her head tilted more. Her smile flickered, then became more distinct; for an appalling moment it was too large for her face, the next instant it shrank too small, then the mouth was extinguished altogether.
It suits you,
she said unctuously, mouthlessly. Then she leaned forward and hissed,
Hide it under your clothes, before Mistress comes and sees.

He did as she bid him, covering the noose of beads and locket with his nightshirt. Each time they made him gasp, the cold striking through his breastbone, the sudden weight straining at his neck.

Yes, that’s right,
the lady would say—she was not a lady, of course; she was a servant like himself. She leaned at him; she had eyes and teeth. Her words caught up with her mouth, and some nights he would feel not only the ice-burden of the beads but also feathers of her historical breath against his face and front. By now he was fixed and imprisoned, by the beads and by his fear, by her face tilted forward, her forehead white and broad, the eyes wide and drinking up the sight of the hidden necklace.

Then she would be gone. But the necklace would stay, coldly burning. And the horror of her presence stayed too, the boxed-in attic air crawling with it as a street-dog’s coat crawls with vermin. All Smoll’s skin crawled too, and his ears still heard her hisses, and his spine still jolted with the ghost noises behind her, the ghost steps climbing the nonexistent stairs.

When the steps ceased, and the fear loosened its hold on him sufficiently, he lay back down, crushed to his little bed by the beads and locket, collared and chained down. To breathe, to lift the locket weight on his chest and let in air underneath, he must summon some force and determination. He lay entirely imprisoned, hauling himself from breath to breath, and whether he failed in that effort for want of air, or the task of breathing exhausted him, eventually he would sleep.

“W
HY, LOOK HERE!
A letter has come for a Master Smollett Standforth.”

Smoll looked up from his porridge. Mr. Pinkney placed the note before him. “Posture, boy!” Smoll straightened, and the raw skin of the sores crinkled and burned beneath his shirt.

“That’s a nice hand,” said Cook, passing behind him with her own bowl.

“The priest will have written it,” he said, “for my ma.”

Cook sat all bustle across the table corner from him. “Shall I read it to you?”

“Please, if you would.” He pushed it towards her. He did not want it near. It promised nothing but complications, and he had not the energy to accommodate them.

“I hope it is not bad news.” Cook gave him a kind and serious look through her porridge steam. She examined the glossy seal with approval before breaking it, then she labored through some of the writing within. “She hopes you are well,” she said, “and she sends you her love. They are all well there—no bad news, then.” Cook patted Smoll’s hand before toiling on. “Only Biss has been laid low with a fever. That has broken. All is well. She is coming good. Biss is your sister?”

“She is my cousin. But she lives with us, as good as a sister.” And Smoll lost his good posture again, thinking of Biss waving him off in the carriage that day, a little weeping to lose him; of Biss laughing too much sometimes and having to be sat and calmed; of Biss ill and subdued, lying abed (unimaginable!), and how he had not been there to help Ma care for her or to share in the worrying.

“Ah, here is the business. ‘Your brother Dravitt has come into the good fortune of being apprenticed to Nape’s uncle George Paste down at Caunterbury, and he will be coming through London on the twenty-ninth of January—’ ” Cook read on, frowning, crouched over the letter. If he had not known her, by her expression right now he would have thought her a most bad-tempered person.

“Your porridge will get cold,” said Smoll. His own porridge was all spooned up and eaten, fast and nervously, he had been rendered so self-conscious by the letter, and by his home life being brought out around the breakfast table, here in his new life. It pained him, the thought of Ma relaying to the priest all she wanted Smoll to know, and the way the priest had corrected and embroidered her words with priest language, putting himself and his education between Smoll and his ma.

“She hopes Mr. Beecham will permit young Dravitt to stay here a night on his journey, is the sense of it, boiled down.”

They both looked to Mr. Pinkney, at the far end of the table with his tea and thin toast, his braces and his white, white shirtfront on which never a drop was spilt, never a crumb was deposited.

Pinkney tipped his head, sipped his tea. “I am sure Mr. Beecham will have no objection. Dravitt, is it?, should be no trouble to us, sharing your little eyrie for a night.” He took another sip and glanced along the table, a glint in his eye. “Unless he is of a much different make from yourself, Smoll. Is he a wild boy, your brother?”

“Oh no, sir. Drav would be timider than me, by far.”

“Oh, Smoll.” Cook laughed a little at Smoll’s earnestness and gave his hand a brisk rub where it lay there on the table.

He barely noticed, he was so occupied with the warring emotions inside him. He felt a stab of missing Dravitt and all the littlies, and Biss and Ma, and the house, and all around it, the village he knew, so humdrum, every stone and weed of it, every codger and kid. This keen distress was cut through by the relief it would be to see Drav again and show his new life to him—yet it would be pain, too, for it would agitate Smoll’s homesickness, which until now had been thoroughly obscured by the novelty of his new duties and worries. And all these complexities were in turn flattened by the stark dread, the absolute impossibility of Drav’s visiting, the intractable necessity for Mr. Pinkney and Mr. Beecham to forbid it.
Sharing your little eyrie for a night—
that must not happen. Drav must never endure a night with Smoll in the attic room! Clearly Cook and Pinkney knew nothing of what happened up there, once the household slept. Smoll gathered up his posture again, lifted his chin, and the necklace of raw patches stretched and twinged.