Mr Scarletti's Ghost

To

Auntie Marc

O
n a sparkling June day Mina Scarletti gazed out across the dipping waters of the Channel, thinking about ghosts. They were pirates and murderers with the coarse burn of the noose still on their sinewy throats, smugglers endlessly searching for lost cargoes, and lovers driven by grief or shame to seek cold peace below the waves. Their images, scored in wood and glistening with thick black ink on cheap paper, rolled and pocketed, torn and soiled, were, she thought with no trace of regret, the only children she would ever have.

Mina had awoken that morning to find that a narrow line of pain had drawn itself down the right side of her neck, darting over her shoulder and plunging into her back. She was usually free of pain but every so often it would return like an old friend needing to be soothed, and then she would go out and rest her palms on the railings of the King's Road esplanade, and lean there for a while, looking at the sea. Two worlds met and fought here, worlds where life in one meant death in the other, and hungry wavelets hissed as they scrambled for purchase on the pebbled beach where ribbons of black weed gave off a sour rank odour.

Stiffly, awkwardly, Mina turned for home, walking with her odd, limping, lurching gait, like a small dark bird with a broken wing. She was composing a new story about a haunted jewel that had been flung into the sea by a cursed and dying man, but was found again in the maw of a great ugly fish. Mina wondered, not for the first time, what her nervous mother would think if she knew that her daughter occupied her hours with writing not wholesome stories for children, as the family had been led to believe, but tales of almost unimaginable horror.

The quiet season was drawing to a close, and Brighton, freshly painted and varnished, its gardens invitingly in bloom, was awaiting its first flood of visitors. It was the best part of the year, when the town was bathed in a warm clear glowing light that glittered off the sea. In a few days the seafront would be crowded with noisy families; women in their gaudy holiday clothes, men chasing hats that had been whipped from their heads by the unaccustomed breeze, children scattered like frilly scuttling crabs over the shingled beach, while overhead from early to late, cliff-top bands boomed and blared under snapping flags. Vehicles of every size and kind would rattle back and forth along King's Road, which became a kind of Piccadilly-by-the-sea. Contemplative visitors, who read novels or simply wished to gaze at the sea in peace, turned to the old Chain Pier in the east, but fashionable promenaders, who had come to see and be seen, flocked to the bazaars, exhibitions and wide walking deck of the new West Pier.

Everywhere the smiling sunny faces of strangers would suddenly darken and turn away when they saw Mina. Sometimes a helpful gentleman, not seeing her face, would hurry up and offer his arm, and as she turned to smile at him he would recoil in alarm to see the head of a woman of twenty-five on what he had assumed to be the body of a shrivelled ancient.

If Mina Scarletti had not had a twisted back she would have stood just over five feet in height, but as it was, her spine, curving treacherously first one way and then the other like a bony snake, had crushed and shrunk her to the size of a child, tilted her hip, forced her shoulder blade and ribcage out of their proper places, and made her into a cruel parody of womanhood. Medical men, after their accustomed fashion, had given the affliction a Latin name,
scoliosis
.

Shock, pity and embarrassment were the landscape of Mina's daily life, but the one ghost she never thought of was the ghost of what she might have been.

Mina hobbled up the slope of Montpelier Road, a long narrow street prettily carved with the forms of seashells and ammonites, which lay on the western side of the town where the breezes were kinder than in the gusty east. The Scarlettis had moved there two years ago, when her father's declining health had forced him to retire from his business of publishing stories for the Scarletti Library of Romance, and leave the choking fogs of London. Brighton, he had been assured, was in itself a doctor, and his best hope of recovery. Their new home, with its gracefully curving bay windows that welcomed in the healing light, was – like everything that was best in Brighton – tall, like a plant reaching for the sun. It was hard enough for the maidservant, Rose, a strong young girl, who tackled the stairs from basement to attic with a permanent unspoken grumble on her lips, but for Mina, every step was a hill.

Henry Scarletti had not expected to die so soon, indeed he had rather expected to live, since the most successful doctors are those who only have good news for their patients. In his last few days, choking on the tumours in his swollen throat, he had been unable to eat or speak, but he knew that Mina was beside him. There were those who claimed to have seen the spirit of a dying person leave the body and rise up to Heaven like a soft transparent wisp of light, but at the moment of her father's passing, Mina saw nothing.

After Henry's death, Mina's mother Louisa retired into a state of melancholy and Mina took the entire management of the household upon herself. Her first act had been to engage Miss Simmons, a quiet, dutiful person, as a nurse companion to her mother, and the second was to let the upper-floor apartments to a fifty-year-old widow, Mrs Parchment, who had retired to Brighton for her health and pleasure. This energetic lady enjoyed brisk walks, sunshine and sea breezes, and thought nothing of basking in a cold east wind with a cliff-top picnic of bread and cheese or watching gales sweep in from the sea bringing heavy waves crashing on to the esplanade. Mina hoped that Mrs Parchment might do what she had failed to achieve; take her mother out into the light to breathe sea air and see the moving colours of fashionable visitors, but found to her disappointment that the lady was not disposed to enjoy any company other than her own.

There was a black iron railing by the side of the three tall steps to Mina's front door, which assisted her climb, and she energetically clutched and swayed herself to the top. Many people, seeing her ungainly rocking walk along a flat pavement, concluded that she was unable to use a staircase, either up or down, but there were few obstacles she could not negotiate unaided if she set her mind to it.

She was looking forward to a busy afternoon, composing her new story and writing letters to her brothers and sister. Her older brother Edward had been preoccupied with business in London since their father's death, and her sister Enid, the beauty of the family, had escaped the house of mourning to marry a Mr Inskip, the dullest solicitor in England, and became the mother of twins within a year. Enid had once confessed that marriage and motherhood were not all that she had expected them to be, and neither, it appeared, was Mr Inskip. There was always the hope that Mina's younger brother Richard would descend upon Brighton, as she had not seen him in several weeks. Richard, with a cheerful optimistic nature and confidence that the future would somehow take care of itself, was constantly about to make a great fortune in ventures which he was only able to describe in the vaguest terms. It was impossible not to like him, but every time he came home, lifting his mother's spirits with his extravagant promises, and borrowing money, Mina suspected that his generosity was chiefly benefitting his gambling friends.

As she took off her bonnet in the hallway Rose came up from the kitchen, carrying a laden tea tray, which she took into the parlour. No doubt, thought Mina, her mother was entertaining one of her church visitors, ladies whose sole occupation in life was to call on the sick and miserable, and make them even more painfully aware of just how sick and miserable they were. Mrs Bettinson was a particular connoisseur of misery in others – she fed on it and it made her fat. Her visits gave Louisa free rein to dwell on her many reasons for unhappiness, one of which Mina felt sure was herself. When Mrs Bettinson departed, leaving Louisa in an even more melancholy state than before, she always seemed a little fatter. Mina often found that lady, sitting like a mountain of black frills with an inhospitable summit, in command of the parlour. She was, like the queen, in a permanent state of mourning, although in her case it was not for one adored husband, but a series of relatives who had followed one another to the grave with such regularity that she had hardly been able to trim her gown with lilac before the next funeral plunged her once again into night. Unlike Mina's mother, however, Mrs Bettinson was able to manage her grief with equanimity, soothing herself by contemplating the distress of others. In particular she continued to assail Mina with stories of this or that wonderful doctor who had achieved the most marvellous cures. During the last ten years Mina had been subjected to every kind of treatment: deportment classes, shoulder bandages, a plaster of Paris waistcoat, and a steel brace, none of which had assisted her. She had been accused of causing the condition herself through bad habits of sitting and standing, accusations she had always denied even when threatened with surgery to cut or stretch her muscles. The final diagnosis, that the condition was incurable but would not get any worse, had come as a relief. She was four feet eight inches in height and there she would remain.

Louisa made no efforts to contradict Mrs Bettinson's implied and sometimes outright declaration that Mina's refusal to consult yet another medical man was only adding to her mother's unhappiness. Their visitor's latest enthusiasm was for a Dr Hamid, who she said was very handsome looking, and who had come all the way from India with some mysterious herbs and opened an establishment where he did something unusual with steam. His special baths had helped so many to regain their health that he had been dubbed ‘Dr Brighton'. Mina, who had had her fill of medical men, did not want to see Dr Hamid or Dr Brighton or any other doctor, even to please her mother, which it most probably would not, and informed Mrs Bettinson of this with a firmness that only just stopped short of insolence.

That afternoon, Mina, having no wish to spend time in the company of someone who found her defiant contentment so intolerable, decided to retire to her room and pursue her story of the jewel discovered in an ugly fish, a fish which, now she thought about it, was very fat with glossy black scales. The story had written itself a little further during her walk, and the jewel was now haunted by the ghost of a lovelorn lady, the dead betrothed of the cursed man who had thrown it away in a paroxysm of grief, but it would keep returning to him until he was able to break the curse, and be reunited with his beloved in death. Mina needed to commit the story to paper before she forgot the details, and started to work her way up the stairs.