Ghosts by Gaslight (37 page)

“Ah, go on with you. There were kitchen coals aplenty to heat a drop for the gentleman.” She handed me the drink and stood drowsily looking at the master of the house, the long crimson shawl over her nightgown like a vivid splotch of blood in the dark. “Poor Mr. Theron Saxton, he’s had a mort of trouble,” she said, “and it’s so hard to see him without Mr. Edward Saxton by his side.”

“Yes, that
is
a difficulty,” Saxton muttered. He met my eyes then, his expression elusive—an element of something like black humor playing in the midst of some unhappiness.

The toddy warmed me as the fire had not; I felt not sleepier but more wakeful and now looked about me. One thing struck me as strange: the mirrors were still covered in black cloth as though his brother had just died. I mentioned this peculiarity, and the housekeeper shook her head.

“It’s a queer freak of the younger Mr. Saxton,” she said softly. “He can’t bear the sight of his own face. Who can blame him? It must be like seeing his elder brother, the two were so alike.”

“We were,” Saxton said, “but no more. Now we are quite different, the inhabitants of several worlds. Thank you very much for taking pains with the hot drink, Mrs. Molebury. I can depend on your care no matter how wild the hour, it seems.”

She gave a bob of pleasure, smiling drowsily, and slipped away through the door. We could see the flare of candlelight wavering down the hall; then it vanished.

“Tell me,” I said, nodding at the hangings that shrouded the great mirror above the mantelpiece. “Some dread has captured you, I believe—some secret fear. Why these signs of our mortality that are more than mourning?”

He shook his head as if he would not answer.

“The cloth is no mere token,” he whispered, glancing toward the hall where Mrs. Molebury had shuffled away. “It is no outward and visible sign of my grief, though I am well acquainted with that constant article and need no black weavings to remind me. The fading of his life, the hectic fire in his cheeks, the heart’s blood on his lips: these things are never far away from my daily meditations. But it is something else.”

His hands were clenched in his lap, as if they had seized hold of a secret that they found difficult to disclose.

I waited, letting the drink restore me, gazing at him while my pulse flickered, as if my very blood already knew something fearsome that I did not.

At last he stood and leaned against the mantelpiece, his loose hair falling forward and half hiding the expressive face with its long crooked Saxton nose and the dark blue eyes.

“Can you not tell me?”

He turned his head slightly, staring intently at me as though he wished with all his heart to share a burden that oppressed its inmost chambers.

Then, looking up at the bound mirror, he said, “It’s a beautiful glass.”

“Shall we take away the pall? Let a little reflective light into the room?”

He gave me another glance freighted with unease. “You don’t know what you ask. And yet, we might as well.”

I helped him with the cloth, tugging it carefully from the oval mirror, and stood with my head cocked, the black spill in my arms, to examine the gilded and hand-carved souvenir of the Revolution, its massive wooden frame topped with a shrieking eagle, one taloned foot upraised, grasping a sheaf of arrows.

“What a fine piece of work,” I said, admiring the boldness of the carving.

Saxton stumbled, stepping back from the mantelpiece. I reached to help him and, as I saw the pallor of his face, swung round to gaze into the looking glass. Then I turned in confusion, not yet comprehending—searching for another mirror, perhaps, or for a portrait of one of the Saxton twins. I have long been prone to mild palpitations of the heart; and as I felt that temperamental organ jump a beat and then race to make up for the lost time, I pressed one hand hard against my chest.

“What do you see?” he said hoarsely.

“I see the two of us.” I hesitated to say more, the hair at my nape prickling. Like an animal in blackfly season, I gave a twitch and shivered to cast my biting fears away.

“And is that all? Is that all you see?”

The mug trembled in my hand, and I gripped it harder and with both hands. I drained the rest of the brandy and hard cider before I spoke.

“I see myself. I see you. But there is unmistakably something deeper in the mirror.” Coldness swirled around me, as though a key or twist of paper had been plucked from a lock and let in a piercing gust of air. I felt some reluctance to name the vision, as if it would somehow make real what could not be real, but at last I added these words, my voice unsteady: “A face. It resembles the features of Edward. Not as in life, it seems.”

Saxton slumped into a wing chair by the fire, shuttering his face in his hands as for some moments his shoulders shook with sobs. Then he recovered himself, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief.

“I fancied for a time that I might be mad,” he said. “I was afraid to be among company, fearful what they would detect. I could not bear to risk a confidence—what might have happened to my reputation in this place? You know I was to be married to Miss Mathers, my dear Daphne . . . That blissful date has been postponed indefinitely, perhaps until the end of time. I have told her only that the break from Edward was more grievous than I had foreseen, and that I need some months to recover. More than that her family does not know, and I cannot explain.”

His voice gathered power, rushing through the story. “As the days passed, I became demoralized. No longer was I sure which of us was genuine.” The fingers of his right hand plucked at the flame-weave fabric of the chair. “I would catch glimpses of his face everywhere, denying reason. I met him in the sides of polished bowls, in pools of water, in every mirror in the house. Even now, all I have to do is gaze into a reflective medium to summon up my dead. Each time, the face comes as a surprise. Sometimes it is the head of a new corpse, sometimes—less than fresh. I can hardly take away my gaze, commanded as it is by the horror of a most beloved brother’s dissolution. Some days he seems alive, tubercular roses planted high on his cheeks. Sometimes those crinkled eyelids unstick and flash open, and though they are as mild and blue as summer lakes, such eyes can shock. Who would have thought that I could be afraid, seeing my brother’s eyes?”

When Theron Saxton lapsed into silence, I laid a hand upon his shoulder, shuddering inwardly as I peered into the glass.

“Finally,” he said, reaching up to clasp my hand, “I bethought myself of our long friendship that no mystery could cloud and nothing break. And so I wrote in haste, and here you are.”

“Here I am, and here I shall stay until we penetrate this mystery and banish the ghost of glass.” Although I achieved the tone of heartiness for which I strove, my voice wavered.

He blotted his eyes again. “And now I know that others can discern the thing I fear, that I shall be forced to keep myself monastic in dread that others will glimpse this—this grotesquerie that haunts reflection. It harms my brother’s memory that elsewise would shine and be a comfort. But more, it means that I cannot be free until they shut my eyes and nail the coffin lid upon my face.”

“Come, Saxton,” I said gently, seating myself on the footstool by his chair; “you take the thing in true romantic style, desperate, lorn, and without hope. Surely we are beyond such raw panics in these modern days. The world grows quite rational. There may be a path out of this labyrinth.” My words were reasonable, but I trembled inwardly, feeling an awe that overmastered confidence.

“This tomb,” he murmured, “where lives no love, no bride, no child, nothing. Where I hide from pools and salvers, the least scrap of looking glass, the trough below the pump: I am buried alive, a condemned man!”

“No, you are no longer cut off from sympathy but have confessed your trouble. You have a very constant ghost, and yet not quite a ghost such as is told in tales,” I said, “not the sort of creature one can imagine subject to exorcism, or threatened by bell, book, and candle.” I bent toward the fire, ignoring the image in the looking glass but feeling the pressure of its face and the eyes under waxen eyelids.

Saxton slumped, head in hands.

“Yet there must be a solution,” I said, half to reassure myself.

When he made no reply, I got up and climbed onto the chair, cauling the mirror once more in black cloth.

Rather than sending me to slumber, Mrs. Molebury’s hot toddy seemed to have slapped awake my faculties, and I was eager to consider how I might be of assistance. I could not help but be compelled by the image in the mirror as I coaxed the fabric over the eagle’s wings. When I allowed my glance to drift to the half-shadowed head, I felt a jolt of raw fright that I credited to the horror of things in the wrong place, the simple source of so much terror.

“Let us survey the books recovered from your great-grandfather’s time and investigate. You cannot be singled out for persecution from all of humanity and history, I feel certain.”

“Surely you are too far gone for anything but sleep,” Saxton protested.

“I embarked on this journey at twilight and spent most of the evening and half the night snoring heartily under buffalo furs, so I am quite able to do a little archaeological digging.”

As the twins had taken no small degree of pride in Flavel Saxton’s collection of books and added to it considerably, augmenting their forebear’s work with volumes written over the past century, I had hope of finding a means of aid. Too, old Flavel Saxton had been alive during the Salem witch trials, when one of my own ancestors played a deadly part in judgment, and so he might have had some passing fascination with things preternatural or in the fate of those poor unfortunates who had caught the visionary eye of Tituba and her witch-haunted girls. Not that I do not believe in witchery and witches, for I believe just as much in the demonic world as I do a world of angelic powers. I have met and wrestled with demons disguised in human form, and I have known angels.

Although Saxton assured me that any delving could wait, he soon fetched a lantern and led me across the hall to a vast comfortable room with library tables and ladders, set about with wing chairs and so many birdcage Windsors that I suspected there must have been an indentured carpenter in the house at some time. Cabinets for books had been built into the walls, but all was higgledy-piggledy and in need of a librarian.
Magnalia Christi Americana
hulked uncomfortably between
The Rape of the Lock
and
The Travels of William Bartram,
and Samuel Johnson was forced to sulk in the shade cast by the preaching Mrs. Augusta Pennyfeather and her
Sermons in Brooks and Stones,
volumes I–IX.

For a long time Saxton and I scanned the shelves, the lantern fastened to a ladder, without finding much to our purpose. The light swung gently back and forth, and I found myself eyeing the polished brass to detect whether I could find a gleam of the third face on its surface. A mirror, mummied in blackness, loomed from the far wall. I felt a wash of ecstatic terror at the thought of Edward Saxton’s head locked behind the grid of the loose weave. Perhaps the eyes, the only living element in that face, were awakening.

“I have searched before, you know, without finding anything to help,” Saxton said in a low voice.

The first light of dawn had gradually infiltrated the room. I yawned heavily and sat down, overcome by sleepiness.

A young woman with a pan of coals entered the library, gave us a glance, and seemed as if about to retire.

“Come in, it’s all right.” Saxton waved her inside, and I noticed that she seemed not at all disconcerted by finding a stranger in the house. She dropped a little curtsey but with a roguish air that seemed to say that she knew very well we were equals.

“This is Mr. Hawthorne, Patience. He will be visiting for a few days . . . You must be as gracious to him as you were to my own brother, for he is a great friend of mine and has done me a kindness in attending me so quickly.”

Saxton informed me that Patience was Mrs. Molebury’s granddaughter, recently graduated from the Beadle Seminary for Young Ladies, where she had won several prizes for her needlework. She had on a loose muslin gown, topped by a short fitted jacket, no doubt a species of her handiwork. I thought privately that Patience must be famous for her beauty as well, for she was light-footed and tall with perfectly proportioned features, although there was a touch of sharpness to her nose and cheekbones that suggested that time might transform her into a bony-faced old woman. No doubt she was a village enchantress now, though, and I wondered whether she had cast the spell of allure on my friend. She wore no cap on her black hair, so that all the glory of its shining cat’s cradle of coils and twists was visible, knotted at her neck, a snare to catch a man’s gaze.

“Miss Hobbs is no maid but has come to help her grandmother. She was of much assistance to me in the last weeks of Edward’s life. Soon she will be away, and then Mrs. Molebury and I shall be as dull as before.”

Patience Hobbs was kneeling at the hearth as he spoke, her straight back toward us. In a very few moments, she sat back on her heels as the fire consumed the little palace of splinters she had raised and then caught on the logs. I would not have been surprised to learn that she was as quick at everything she did. When she stood, I thought her even lovelier, cheeks flushed from the fire.

“Are you going to town with your grandmother?” Theron was asking. Evidently the pair of women had the afternoon free.

“If you need me, I will be glad to stay—”

“Do not worry about us,” he said. “After a meal, I have no doubt that we shall sleep like a pair of tops, our minds spinning and humming with dreams. By the time you return, we may have crawled from our beds, but don’t expect much activity.”

Her eye traveled around the room, pausing to take in the tumbled shelves and the scattering of volumes on the table.

“Hawthorne is a man of books,” Theron said by way of explanation. “Being that most perilous of creatures, an author, he just couldn’t wait to pay homage to my grandfather’s collection.”