Ghosts by Gaslight (39 page)

She had me: as the great-grandchild of John Hathorne, I wanted nothing to do with harming a member of the Hobbs family. The Court of Oyer and Terminer had made too many restless ghosts in New England for me to sanction hurt to a descendant of those who suffered the havoc of my self-righteous ancestor. Yet my unruly imagination instantly conjured up scenes of Patience Hobbs reciting a spell or stirring a potion over the kitchen fire and suggested that she was wrapped in darkness blacker than any shroud upon a mirror. I did my best to suppress these fancies, knowing that story weavers like me are prone to snatch and use our human material as mere material and can blaspheme against the soul in an instant! We are more likely candidates for the Dark Man and damnation than most, I fear . . .

I bowed, unable to divine what I ought to say, and she passed from the room.

The morning was spent in puzzling out more recipes for the banishment of the grave reflection and trying a few, each as absurd as the last, though I was loath to forgo any of them. I had suggested to Theron that he go for a ride, and I was glad to hear his horse clopping up the frozen lane in time for a midday meal. I had just transcribed—without the interesting spelling—the directions for a banishment that the book named “The Scouping; or, the Diminishmente by Poring.”

Over a cold collation, we talked indefatigably about where he had ridden, about the cooking of Mrs. Molebury, about turkey hunting and the fine points of setters and a thousand other things—any that did not touch on Mr. Edward Saxton. Outside, sun shattered against the diamonds of snow, lighting up the windowpanes and warming the roof until blazing teardrops plunged from the eaves. The world was beginning to thaw, and so why not this frozen state that had held my friend through a winter of grief and despair?

Afterward we adjourned to the library for a glass of wine. Having taken down the two great mirrors and brought in the eagle-topped looking glass in which I had first glimpsed the reflected death’s head of Edward Saxton, I was prepared for our next effort.

“Help me, Saxton—hold one of the mirrors slanted toward me.”

Looking first at the directions, I tilted the big eagle mirror, rocking it back and forth. “Begone, grave face of reflection; join your kin,” I murmured. The face loosened, flexed, and seemed to float more easily in the depths. When I tried to pour the face into the other mirror, it flew into an unexpected corner.

“What in Heaven’s name are we doing?” Theron Saxton stared at the image quivering faintly in the depths.

“The pouring diminishment. A cheerful little activity for two madmen in a library. Don’t look so revolted; it’s probably as harmless as the rest.”

I rocked the mirror back and forth as though panning for gold. Once again the face wobbled and shot off in a surprising direction as I brought the frame close to the other glass. Then suddenly the image darted from one smooth surface to the other with the slipperiness and celerity of yolk and white sliding from one saucer to another, and, when I checked, the face of Edward Saxton had gone from the eagle-crowned mirror.

We bent over the first glass, unsure whether a tiny mask might not swim up from the depths.

“Victory?” The word was a whisper, barely caught.

The mirrors being weighty, I had begun to sweat from exertion. I stripped off my waistcoat and collar and began the whole procedure again.

“We’ll have to collect the mirrors in the house and move from large to small,” I told him.

“What about dishes? Bowls and porringers and teapots and spoons!” For the first time, excitement seemed to touch Theron’s features and make them gleam. “Should I have Mrs. Molebury polish the silver, burnish the old pewter? What about still water and puddles and pools?”

The mirror wobbled in my grasp and spilled its forbidden content. One face vanished into its twin. I smiled at Theron Saxton, elated at this confirmation of success.

“Mirrors are the king and queen of images and govern reflection, or so the book claims—when the household mirrors are emptied, the final glass will fuse duplicate images as one. One can then bury the last looking glass. Or drop it down a deep well—”

“Or grind it into powder,” Theron murmured, “for the devil’s snuffbox.”

For the next hour, we scoured the house from top to bottom, gathering a few shaving mirrors, a pair of lady’s hand mirrors, an ancient-looking concave mirror framed in wood that we rummaged from a chest in the attic, and another pair of parlor mirrors.

“You certainly have more of the things than most people,” I said to Theron, encountering him on the third floor. He had gone to fetch a tiny bronze mirror that his great-great-grandmother was said to have discovered in a funerary mound somewhere in England.

“I hardly know why,” he said. “Flavel Saxton must have liked the cut of his own mug and pigtail.”

Abruptly he swung a leg over the stair rail and slid whooping to the next floor and on to the wide center hall. Though I laughed to see him lighthearted as I clattered down the steps after him, my mind still ran on the uncanny. “Perhaps it has something to do with the prevalence of twins in your family line. People feared duplication in the Old Country, but plenty of Saxtons could discover their own looks in a twin.”

“People were frightened for good reason. Often enough, the mothers of twins died. Still do,” he added, no doubt thinking of his mother’s death from childbed fever, three days after the birth of the twins.

We bore our treasures into the library, sorting them by size . . .

“Let me ask Mrs. Molebury to bring us tea,” I suggested.

“And a bite to eat,” Theron added, picking up one of the mirrors.

Pausing at the kitchen door, I peered in and spied Patience Hobbs seated at a board table. Mrs. Molebury hunkered by the fire, rocking on her stool and humming tunelessly. As I watched, she leaned forward to stir the bubbling kettle hanging on a crane over the fire. Meanwhile her granddaughter was stitching at some piece of millinery—a stiff hat with a wide curved brim. Spying me, she laid the work in her bag and stood up, brushing threads from her lap.

“May I help you, Mr. Hawthorne?”

“Might Theron and I have some refreshment in the library?”

Miss Hobbs drew near, promising to bring us tea and scones on a tray.

“And if you or your grandmother have anything like a mirror in your possession—anything at all that might belong to the house—we would like to borrow it for a little.”

She gazed at me for a moment before giving a short nod.

“Does he know that I know? Mr. Theron Saxton, I mean,” she said in a low voice. “About the mirror, about the face of—”

“I believe not.”

“Though he is a kind, good-humored sort of man, I imagine that he would rather not find out,” she said. “The Mr. Saxtons were always very private gentlemen, even secretive about their affairs.” She pulled at a chain around her neck, and in an instant a locket lay shining on her palm. “The mirror inside”—she indicated the case—“might be said to belong to the house, though it is graven with my name and was given me by the late Mr. Edward. I have read the book and understand what you are doing and do not object, but I don’t want this necklace to go out of my possession because it is a memento of times that hardly were and cannot come again.”

I cleared my throat, unsure whether I ought to be embarrassed by her confession. “That looks to be much smaller than any other glass I have found. When the time comes, I will bring the next-to-last mirror to you, if that would be agreeable.”

And so, some time later as Theron was exulting in his freedom, his voice echoing in the library, I took the burnished bronze mirror to Miss Hobbs and tipped the blue-eyed image into her locket.

“Perhaps I should take it out into the yard where the melted and refrozen snow has formed in coarse crystals,” she said. “Perhaps I could slip the image into a single crystal, and the sun that is so bright this afternoon could call Edward Saxton’s face to ascend to the sky.”

“Yes,” I said, “you could do that.”

I watched from the front parlor as she crossed the buried lawn in a long black cloak and hood and knelt down in the snow with the locket in her hands. Sun flamed, firing the drops that plummeted from the eaves. The world seemed one crystal glory of broken and heaped chandeliers. Amid its sparkling, she glanced toward me but made no sign. Against the white ground, in the unrelieved black that might or might not have been a sign of mourning, she appeared dramatic, bewitching. Had she seemed so to Edward Saxton? She looked at the locket for a time, so long that I turned away, my eyes burning from too much light, feeling that I intruded. Mrs. Molebury rustled past in gray silk, hunched under a moth-eaten fur and mumbling a complaint as she rubbed her arthritic hands.

What might the dark imaginings of John Hathorne have made of these two women? Could it be from him that I had inherited my free-flowing fancy?
I will not write all of the thoughts and questions that arose in my mind in my days at Saxton’s Folly, for it might make me too much like him. And, as Miss Hobbs asserted, the Saxtons were always reticent about their affairs.

When I swung back to the window, Patience Hobbs had already replaced the locket inside her dress and risen to her feet, so that even now I do not know whether she poured the image into the snow or kept it after gazing into those blue eyes.

In the library, Theron was scribbling a letter to Daphne Mathers, his big loose handwriting sprawled across the fine, hot-pressed sheets of stationery in loops and joyful slashes.

Soon I would be trudging down the cold lane, leaning on the coachman’s staff. I felt certain that it would not do to fancy shadow across a human face where there was no shade—to act the part of a darkly meditative man. In dreams of witchery and gloom that veiled their lives, better men than I had been destroyed. Nor was it right to pry and uncover what, if any, silken bonds might have fettered the black-haired young woman to the dying man, Edward Saxton. Consumption has long worn a cloak of romance and horror, and I would not venture to raise its hood and look upon the face within. Some truths should remain secluded in chambers of privacy far beyond the touch of art. Yet the chiaroscuro of a black cloak against the snow would haunt my imaginings forever, I feared, along with that spellbinding rose blossom of a face, and last of all the hands held together but open like a book I was not permitted to read, the curled fingers cupping the locket with its mirror seizing and possessing the blue-eyed face of death.

Afterword to
“The Grave Reflection”

The dark, jeweled stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne have long appealed to me. My life is not so very different from his—three children, a house in a village, days spent twisting words into a shape, a childhood lived in the guilt and shadow of the past (in my case, “the giant’s dead body” was not Puritan but Southern history).

“The Grave Reflection” borrows my dim image of him, a figure caught in a distant mirror. Hawthorne governs many of the threads in the story as well. Like some magpie of Romanticism, I have plucked and used some of his favorite ideas. The ghostly reflection enforces solitude. It creates a Hawthornean risk that its presence will isolate and transform a human being, barring him from ordinary life and “the magnetic chain of humanity.” Opposed to this danger is the character Hawthorne, the family man and friend who knows the necessity of human affections.

As in much of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work, the past dyes the present with shadows from events both recent and faraway in time. If they grow too black, the present and future will be trapped and dark. The setting of Saxton’s Folly serves as one of Hawthorne’s dream houses that are vessels for both past time and present psychological difficulty.

—M
ARLY
Y
OUMANS

Theodora Goss

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection
In the Forest of Forgetting;
Interfictions,
a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; and
Voices from Fairyland,
a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Mythopoeic, and Crawford Awards and has been on the Tiptree Award Honor List. She has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards. Visit her website at
www.theodoragoss.com.

T
HEODORA
G
OSS
Christopher Raven

W
HY HAD I
come back to Collingswood? That was what I asked myself, standing on the path that led to the main school building, a structure built of gray stone and shadowed by oaks that had stood for a hundred years. I had ridden the cart from the train station, just as I had so many years ago at the beginning of each term. Then, I had been accompanied by a trunk almost as large as I was, filled with clothes and books. Now I carried only a small suitcase. It contained another walking suit, a dress suitable for dinner, and toiletries. I would be here for only one night. Why had I come back? Because I had been invited to give a speech. Surely that was all.

“Lucy!” It was Millicent Tolliver, walking down the path toward me.

“Hello, Tollie!” I called, then wondered if she would mind the schoolgirl nickname. She looked very much like the schoolgirl she had been, with an untidy blouse and, I could see when she gave me an enthusiastic hug, an ink stain on one cheek. Only the length of her skirt and the bun of hair at the back of her head, which threatened to come down at any moment, marked her as not a schoolgirl any longer, but one of the teachers. I had wondered how many of the girls I knew would be coming back for Old Girls’ Day, but I knew Tollie would be here. Unlike the rest of us, she had remained at Collingswood.