Ghosts by Gaslight (40 page)

“Eleanor Prescott is here, and you won’t believe who else—Mary Davenport.” She grabbed my suitcase from me and said, “We’re upstairs, in our old room, all four of us.”

“Why did they put us up there?” I followed her across the front hall and up the staircase. I remembered it echoing with boots. We used to run down it, almost late for French or geography lessons on the first floor. The school felt so empty, without the noise of girls chattering and whispering, without the smell of cabbage that used to float, like a vague miasma, through the halls. I kept expecting the old sounds, the old smells, but there was only the silence of summer vacation, and beeswax.

But there, at the top of the stairs, was a familiar sight: the portrait of Lord Collingswood in his riding jacket, with a horse and hound at his side, holding a riding whip as though to show who was master. He stared down over his long nose, no doubt shocked by the sight of generations of schoolgirls running through his halls. We had inherited the tradition of calling him Old Nosey.

“Oh, I asked for our old room. When I found out that all of you would be here, I asked Miss Halloway if we could share, and of course she said yes. She was the one who first put us together, remember?”

How well I remembered! The four of us glaring at one another. It was our final year at Collingswood, and we were assigned to room with our mortal enemies. I hated Eleanor Prescott, with her French dresses and stuck-up ways, and despised Mary Davenport for her timidity, her tendency to start every sentence with “Well, I don’t really know, but . . .” And I had no use for Millicent Tolliver, who was a scholarship girl like me, but enthusiastically tried to curry favor with Eleanor Prescott and her circle.

Miss Halloway herself had greeted us. She was the new headmistress and was said to have advanced educational ideas. “This will be quite a treat for you, girls,” she said. “I’ve put you in the room Lady Collingswood herself slept in, one hundred years ago. It was used for storage under Miss Temple, but we have so many girls this term that we needed all the available space, and it cleaned up quite beautifully. I even found a portrait of Lady Collingswood while we were inventorying the attic and brought it down for you. You know she was the one who founded Collingswood school. I thought she might inspire you to greater academic achievements.” She looked particularly at Eleanor, who preferred outdoor games to studying and cared more about tennis than Latin.

We looked at Lady Collingswood doubtfully. She had clear, pale skin and auburn ringlets cascading over her shoulders. Her eyes were grayish blue, and she wore a dress of the same color with lace at the sleeves. She was smiling at the painter and playing with a small dog in her lap. I would not have called her beautiful, exactly. Her face was too particular, too individual, for that. But she looked intelligent, and much nicer than Old Nosey out in the hall.

“She was a patroness of the arts and painted and wrote poetry herself. Also an excellent gardener—the Lady Collingswood rose is named after her. I found a book on the history of Collingswood in the attic. Perhaps you would like to look at it?”

We murmured politely. We had no interest in the history of Collingswood. Despite our enmity, we all knew what the others were thinking. Wasn’t it almost time for tea?

Despite her advanced ideas, Miss Halloway evidently understood schoolgirls and their stomachs. “It will be in my office when you’re interested. Tea is in the dining hall in half an hour. Come down when you’ve finished unpacking. I’ll see you there, girls.”

“When did you say tea was?” asked Eleanor Prescott. I stepped back, startled. I had been absorbed in memories, but this Eleanor was not the girl I had known. She was Lady Thornton-Smythe, the Terror of the Tories. She looked even more formidable than she had as a schoolgirl, tall and elegant, with elaborate loops of blond hair. I could see a feathered hat on the bed, and I recognized her dress as a model from Worth. It must have cost a small fortune.

“Lucy!” she said now. “How perfectly lovely to see you.” She kissed me on both cheeks. “I give copies of
The Modern Diana
to everyone I know. I tell them it’s a perfectly scandalous book, all about free love and professions for women.”

“Honestly, at first I was afraid to read it,” said Mary Davenport, smiling and giving me a hug. “But it really does have an important message. All about using the talents God gave us.” She was as short and plump as she had been, although her cheeks were redder from what she had called, in a letter to me, her “country life.” There were gray strands in her hair. She had married her father’s curate, who was now the Reverend Charles Beaumont, with a living near York. She had come back to visit “dear old Collingswood” while he attended an ecclesiastical conference in London.

Mary had three children living, and one buried. Eleanor had no children, which she did not seem to regret. “Laws to alleviate the oppression of man—and woman—are my children,” she had written to me. And Tollie had never married. All this I knew from letters I had received over the years—not many, but we had never entirely lost touch. I suppose what we experienced that last year had bound us together.

I had sent them letters about my own life, my relationship with Louis, his death from tuberculosis, my own efforts to raise little Louie, who had his father’s complaint.
The Modern Diana
had sold well enough that I had sent him to a sanatorium in Switzerland, but the money would not last forever. I was grateful that Collingswood had paid for my train ticket and offered me an honorarium for my speech at the Old Girls’ Dinner. Would I have come back otherwise?

It was Tollie, of course, who said what the rest of us were thinking but would not say. “I’m so glad we’re all here. Now we can talk about Christopher Raven.”

T
OLLIE DREAMED OF
him last, but of course she was the first to say anything.

“Lucy, wake up! I had the strangest dream.”

I opened my eyes, then closed them again. “Go away. Can’t you see it’s still dark?”

“But I dreamed of a man. Have you ever dreamed of a man? With curling black hair and a white blouse—at least it looked like a blouse, like something a woman would wear. Or a pirate. Maybe he was a pirate? Except that he was saying something—like poetry. I was sitting on the parlor sofa, except it was so much nicer than the sofa we have now, and he bowed to me and kissed my hand!”

“You’ve dreamed about him too!” said Eleanor, sitting up in bed. “Then I’m going to stop dreaming about him. I don’t want to share my dreams with Messy Millie.”

“Well, I’ve been dreaming about him for a week,” I said. “So you’ve been sharing your dream with the both of us. How common is that? And what about Mary? Maybe she’s been dreaming about him as well.”

Mary, who had just opened her eyes, pulled the blanket over her head.

“Have you been dreaming about him too?” asked Eleanor. “Mary, answer me!”

“Yes,” came the muffled answer. “For a week.”

“Did he kiss your hand?” asked Tollie.

Mary looked out from under the blanket. Her face was bright red. “No. We were in this room, but it had a big bed in it. And he kissed my shoulder.”

“He hasn’t kissed me,” I said. “He just takes me walking around the garden, and he says things—about my hair and eyes. Poetry, like Tollie said.”

“Well, he’s kissed me,” said Eleanor. “We were in the tower, looking out toward Collington, and he told me that I changed like the moon, or something like that, and he kissed me on the
mouth
.”

That day, for the first time, we sat together in the front parlor, which was reserved for the older girls, trying to figure it out.

“Maybe he’s a ghost, and we’re being haunted,” said Mary. Her father was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Eleanor. “There’s no such thing as a ghost.”

“Oh yes, there is,” said Tollie. “My aunt Harriet was haunted by my uncle, who had lost a leg at sea. She said the ghost went
thump, thump, thump
on its wooden leg, up and down the hallways at night.”

“Ugh,” said Mary. “You’re making me shiver!”

“But even if he is a ghost,” I said, “whose ghost is he? And why is he haunting the four of us?”

“We don’t know that he is,” said Eleanor. “Maybe the other girls have had dreams as well, and they’re just not talking about it.”

So we went around asking the other girls about what they had dreamed the night before. None of them had dreamed of a man with curling black hair, or brown skin that made him look like a foreigner, or black eyes that looked as though they were laughing at you, although one of them had dreamed of her brother who was in India.

No, it was just us four.

We made a pact. Each morning we would compare notes. We would tell each other what we had dreamed, all the details, no matter how embarrassing. And we would try to remember what the man had said, those poetic words that seemed to slip out of our heads on waking, like water.

“H
E TOLD ME
that my eyes are like bright stars,” said Tollie.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” said Eleanor. “Your eyes are like eyes. He told me that my hair was like a fire burning down a forest, except he used different words. And they rhymed with something, but I don’t remember what.”

“You have to try to remember,” I said. “I wish all of you had Mary’s memory.”

In my notebook, I had written down what we dreamed each night, and the fragments of what we thought must be poetry:

Eleanor: tower, dark but moonlight

     “the cascade of your gown”

      something about “sweet surrender” and “sweetly die”

Mary: in front of fireplace, kissed neck “like a swan’s,” “proud and fair”

 “luxuriance of your hair”

Tollie: passed in hallway and dropped letter

  “hide it in your bosom, sweetheart”

  “the moon’s a secret lover, as am I”

Lucy: kissed several times, passionately

 “elements of love” (but hard to hear, could be “dalliance of love”?)

By this time, we had all been kissed, and we blushed as we told each other.

“It was—soft,” said Mary. “This is wrong, isn’t it? Even if it’s just a dream.”

“Forceful,” said Eleanor. “I don’t think he would have stopped if I’d wanted him to. How can it be wrong if it’s only a dream?”

“Is that what it’s like, when boys kiss?” asked Tollie.

“No, it’s nothing like that,” said Eleanor, who had boy cousins. “That’s disgusting.”

“I don’t think we’re any closer to working out who he is,” I said. “We know he’s a poet, because of what he’s saying. I mean, neck proud and fair, and all that. So, if he is a ghost, we need to find out if there were any poets who died at Collingswood.”

“There’s no such thing as a ghost,” said Eleanor.

“What about Miss Halloway’s book?” asked Tollie.

I was sent to ask Miss Halloway for the book, as the one most likely to, as Eleanor said, “read boring stuff.”

“Of course, Lucy,” she said. “I’m glad you’re interested in the history of the school. Some of the other girls, well, they’ll graduate and get married. But I think you are capable of doing something different, some sort of intellectual work. I hope you’ll think about that. There are so many opportunities for women nowadays that did not exist when I was your age.”

“Yes, Miss Halloway,” I said, hoping to escape a lecture. Miss Halloway’s advanced educational theories, we had discovered, involved teaching girls the subjects boys were usually taught, and she had a tendency to lecture us about the advancement of women. I did not quite escape one, but it was not as long as I had feared. I closed the door of her office with “and you really should think about a university education, Lucy,” in my ears.

“And who’s going to read that?” asked Eleanor, when I had brought
The History of Collingswood House, from the Crusades to the Present Day
to our room. The book had been covered with dust, and now I was covered with it as well.

“How many pages is it?” asked Mary.

I had already looked. “Seven hundred and ninety-two. And there’s no index.”

By the way they all looked at me, it was obvious who was going to read
The History of Collingswood House
. After all, I was the one who won the prizes in composition, who was at the top of the English class.

I was only on page one 157 the morning Mary woke up gasping. Although we asked and prodded, she would not tell us about her dream.

“I can’t,” she said. “We were in the bedroom again. He— I just can’t.”

We were sitting in our nightgowns on Eleanor’s bed, as we did every morning for our conferences.

“What was it like?” I asked. I think we all knew, even then, what had happened. Tollie and I had grown up in villages, near farms and animals. And Eleanor had heard the servants gossip.

“I’m sorry. I really don’t think I can talk about it.”

“Was it so frightening?” asked Tollie, leaning forward.

“Not frightening. Just— I can’t, all right?” And we could get nothing else out of her.

Later that day, I looked with dismay at
The History of Collingswood House
. I could not face another list of who had come to visit Collingswood in the Year of Our Lord blankety blank.