by Rumer Haven
“My dear sir,” the medium said with fresh indignation in his voice. “The likes of ‘such a thing’ are something that none of us can fully explain until we ourselves depart this plane. I am only the messenger. Raise not your sword at me.”
Mama had since miraculously roused from her swoon once it had become evident no one was paying her mind. “For shame, Hazel, playing this nasty trick on the people who love you, who are trying to help you. Wherever is your mind? Your decency?”
I took my drawing in hand and rose from the chair. “If you will all please excuse me. It has been amusing, but I must respectfully withdraw to retire for the evening. I do not think you will mind seeing yourselves out.” And with these last words, I parted company with my guests.
One day onward, I held my own private vigil inside our church. Kneeling in my pew, I contemplated the stained glass lit by the late afternoon sun and felt just as fragmented, wishing my pieces could fit together into as lovely a whole. I inspected the details of a saint’s face but could only see hers, the one I had begun to paint on a new canvas. Margaret, had he said? Yes, that was it, yet even he had not been sure; the planchette had communicated a scattering of letters close to such, with the recurrence of M at the beginning.
Before I could think on it more, the peace was shattered by a cry and the rumble of thunder. The cacophony grew louder, so I started to my feet and shuffled as quickly as my health would allow out the door—to nearly meet my death with horror.
No sooner had I approached the street when charging horses almost trampled my path as they rounded the corner of our square. The shrieks from within the brougham in tow were like nothing I had heard, yet I imagined them as wails on winds that swept the moors. I could hardly conceive the wretched sounds to be human until I saw the driver perform a last effort at steering the beasts to keep them to the square if they could not be tugged into submission. I eventually heard his shouts over the other screams, and it was not until the horses overcame their fright and tired to a slower pace that I recognized the man was my Victor!
He guided the beasts expertly to a stop and promptly relieved the carriage of its weeping cargo—none other than my Charlotte.
Abandoning the carriage to a concerned bystander’s charge, Victor aided our traumatized servant up the street and to our door. On noticing me standing there across the way, he frowned and lowered his eyes, then turned her back and his to me as they ascended the doorsteps, arm in arm.
I stood motionless. I ought to have been concerned for the welfare of my husband and my friend, so fatal these runaway incidents can be, yet I moved not a muscle for another minute. After this duration, I pivoted round to reenter my holy sanctuary.
Night had begun to fall when I finally returned to the house; it was hushed, with the servants dismissed until morning. Victor was seated in the drawing room, buried in his evening paper in a futile effort to conceal how visibly shaken he remained. I thought a glint of gold winked at me from his vest—yes, to be sure it was the gold chain of the watch I had given him, not the silver one he had been using to spite me, and had I not noticed it before? If so, it was what I had long hoped to see, but did it bear any meaning to me still?
He looked up to meet my eyes as I paused on the landing, but he said nothing as I continued my way up the stairs.
I found Charlotte reclining on my husband’s bed. At that, whatever degree of sympathy I had believed I might conjure at her fragile sight vanished behind a lens of red.
“What were you doing in that carriage? What are you doing in this room?”
“I am only resting after the afternoon’s fright. I have not been well and was too weak to climb all of the stairs again. For that same reason, Victor had offered me the ride home from market when he spied me along his route.”
“Do not lie to me.”
“It is the truth. And Victor wished me to lie on a bed more comfortable than my own besides.” Slowly, she sat up to rise.
“He is ‘Master’ to you. Mind that you remember your place.”
Appearing to ignore my slight, she gingerly stood and stepped toward me, taking my elbows gently into her hands as she always had done before. “Your bed would have been my preference, but for the chance it would become overly crowded when dignity again surrendered to attention.”
“Take your hands from me,” I seethed. “Am I really to believe you feared Victor coming to my bed now that you keep his own so warm?”
She did remove her hands, but not before she had gripped me tighter and thrust me aside—though small, toil had strengthened her—to exit his bedroom and enter my own. On recovering my balance, I rubbed my shoulder where it had bruised against the wall and joined her in time to rescue my jewelry case before she threw it into my mirror. She had proceeded to disrupt my bookshelves and the washbasin when she appeared to first notice my newest artistic endeavor, contemplating its subject with bewildered yet scalding eyes. Right then, she seized my inkwell from its stand—ah, perhaps Victor’s disgust that ever I brought ink into my chamber was justified after all!
“Charlotte, no! Must we endure this again?” I shouted, but my cries fell upon deaf ears. She had commenced smearing ink over the face that had so haunted me of late, blackening those piercing eyes I had instinctively rendered the color of my name.
“Must we endure this again?” I asked once more.
She hastened to complete her artwork before replacing the ink on its stand, the latter a peculiar act of decorum.
“Ah, but there is nothing to fill you with trepidation, my dear,” she goaded with false consolation. “Why, you will never be alone for as long as you have her.” She pointed toward my canvas with blackened fingertips. “What was her name again? Was your table-tipper ever able to determine letters to follow the mysterious M?”
From the banshee cries of her day’s accident to this, my evening’s nightmare as she howled; it was ugly, foul. I scarcely recognized in her the woman whom I loved and scarcely recognized in me the woman capable of such love.
“You ought to refine that laughter of yours.” I frowned in return with the only defense left to me. “It would be most unpleasant if you betrayed your breeding whilst enjoying one of the multitude of soirées upon which you must be so certain you shall encroach. It would be a pity indeed for some gracious benefactor to spoil your champagne when he tosses a shilling into your glass as alms.”
At this, she clenched her smile into a tight line and kicked one of the easel’s legs out from beneath. As it collapsed, she raised a fist and threw the object contained within it toward me; before I could observe precisely what it was, I felt it prick the forearm with which I shielded my face. I looked down to see the brooch, which she must have had opportunity to reclaim. My knees yielded and sank me to the floor.
Charlotte stepped over me to leave, but not before saying, “Do not fool yourself that he again carries that golden trinket on your account. It is a matter of practicality, his silver one having gone missing. He informed me of such one of our nights.”
As water seeped across the floorboards to soak my dress, I once again felt drowned in a circumstance beyond my control. Seeing Victor rescuing Charlotte from that carriage, our carriage… It appeared my husband had found someone more agreeable to him, someone who could pleasure him whilst paining me, and in so doing would pleasure him twofold. Threefold if she could bear him a healthy child.
Of only one thing was I certain as I fondled the blackened brooch and wept in my puddle on the floor: my options were unequivocally spent.
As a newborn cries when it exits its watery world for the one of air, so I gasped and sobbed in Victor’s arms when he lifted me from the bath.
It had happened that he could not avoid hearing the pounding and shouts overhead, and he had tarried in venturing to my side only because, as soon as he had deemed his interference necessary, Charlotte had already begun winding her way downstairs, clinging to the banister with all her weight upon it. He had been alarmed to see her thus afte
r the shock she had received earlier and started towards her to assist her back to bed. It was then he had observed the ink on her hands and flinched at the sight of a measure of blood—she must have clenched the brooch with all remaining strength before hurling it back at me, the one to whom she had once gifted it with such opposite passion.
He had known not else what to do but wrestle her from the banister, carry her to the top floor, and force her into her own bed. Her resistance conquered, she had collapsed and allowed her eyes to close.
He had not been prepared for the ravages he next beheld in my bedroom. In a panic, he then discovered me. I had only just submerged myself into the cool waters left from the previous soak, having had the opportunity to delight in my body’s airless anguish for but a few seconds.
And so, he cried with me as he wiped the hair from my eyes and kissed my scalp, rocking me as he would the infant I may never give him. Never could I have fathomed at that moment—then, when I should not have expected to escape Death’s icy embrace—that in a mere day thence I would be rocking in dreadful imitation of this with another in my arms.
Tick-tick-tick… The sound creeps into my eardrums as I remember how I heard the hands of Victor’s pocket watch—indeed the gold one, my gift to him—regulate my heartbeat the following evening, measuring out the time as he held me close and recited Wordsworth to me. He had earlier found the recent painting of Charlotte concealed behind the wardrobe and lauded the delicate shading and illumination that brought “household motion” to my subject’s clothes, whereas the “angelic light” he said he beheld in me.
He stood there and traced his hand down my spine, pressing my hips closer to his arousal; he had just returned from the canal, and I could smell his sweat and the hay of the horse stables. He then murmured Wordsworth’s poem softly as his lips brushed my forehead and moved down the bridge of my nose in slow succession until there it was—I belonged to him again, and everything prior passed before my closed eyelids like the dancing shadows of a magic lantern. From then, we were “no more twain, but one flesh,” as is writ in scripture, and no man nor woman would again put us asunder so long as he had anything to do with the matter.
Betwixt the ticking of his watch and the rhythm of our sighs, would there have been any way for us to notice her standing outside the door, listening when we had thought her asleep after granting her a day of seclusion and rest upstairs? Can we even now be certain she ever was?
But of course I can, when a sob that rose on the air and cut through my consciousness alerted me to the sash in time to see a stream of translucent white billow in the night wind. In that moment, the truth at last met with my recognition: it was never I who had no options. It had been Charlotte, always.
“No. No, no!” I cried when, by midnight, we finally found her in the riverbank, bobbing atop the current in her spoiled white muslin, the reeds and filth tangled in her curls.
“No!” she screamed as she woke with a jolt.
He pulled her back down and smoothed her hair. She stretched out her limbs and rested on her back, out of breath, and he wiped her eyes.
“You’re here,” she said. “Now.”
He grinned. “So I am. So are you.”
She saw the morning light peer around the window shade. Shoving her jaw into her clavicle, she looked down the length of her body. “Yes,” she said.
He drew the kicked-away covers back over her. Releasing her head back, she rolled it to watch him fall quickly to sleep. She had no concept of the time.
“You’re here,” she whispered, counting his breaths until she faded from consciousness once more.
They lay asleep, intertwined tightly, their eyelashes resealed with tears.
Ah! The price we have paid. The price she paid, rather, for we both.
She shall lie buried wearing that brooch, my Charlotte. I know this because I shall bury her. We shall, Victor and I.
The mirrors have all been covered, the clocks stopped. Not even Victor’s golden watch utters a tick, only points in stiff fright to that horrid midnight hour.
Perhaps we owe Charlotte nothing; perhaps we owe her everything. Perhaps we ought not ponder any longer what we owe at all.
We shall spare no expense, nevertheless, in securing our girl a proper grave and private ceremony in our cemetery. All we shall deny her is a proper formality such that our own lives can move forward without further dissection beneath a coroner’s eyes. “Leave it buried in this vault,” as I shall commission the stone to say.
She woke a few more times through the day to the sound of her sobs, her sweaty hair pasted across her forehead for him to wipe away and kiss time after time, just like she’d cradled his whimpers through the night.
It will never be what it could have been, or it will be what it could have only ever been…to live it over would be to live it the same.
Or perhaps it is true what some will say—whether the superstitions of our pastimes or the philosophies of all ages—that none of us ever really die, that we are all part of a much larger continuum than we can mortally comprehend.
As the sky once more dimmed into the purple haze of dusk, they still lay there stretched out on their backs, eyes on the ceiling. Staring at this blank canvas, she couldn’t get over how substantially the number of floaters in her eyes had decreased since the day before.
“So,” he started, breaking their long period of silence.
“Mm?”
“What happened between us, exactly?”
After mulling it over, she said, “It felt like grieving.”
“It did. But then…”
“Right, there’s something else now, isn’t there, something stronger, like…”
He turned to murmur the rest in her ear.
“Yes,” she whispered back, smiling at him.
After a little while, she propped up on her elbows and swung her feet restlessly.
“Anxious now?” he asked.
“No, just…light. I feel light. I can breathe again.” When he said nothing, she asked, “Really, though, are you all right?”
“Just as sodding confused as you are. It was a release, though, wasn’t it?”
“Like hitting bottom before rising again.”
He returned onto his back and laid his fingers at his chest. “‘When two souls are connected,’” he repeated, “‘what do you suppose happens when one of them dies?’”
She rolled to her side, the fingers of one hand playing at her lips while the others tickled at the buttons on his chest. She poked at them one by one, in steady rhythm with a new sound she heard behind her.
“They still carry on, I think,” she answered as she looked over at the silver pocket watch on the desk and realized it had just started ticking.
I recall from one of Mama’s séances an exotic man who professed our souls not only cycle through multiple lives, but that time itself also coils in such a way that our past, present, and future existences all occur at once, side by side. Relationships repeat themselves in some form or other until all possible iterations are exhausted as the wheel spins…a parent of someone in one life, a sibling, friend, or lover in the next…and our impact on any one of these lives is retroactive as well as proactive, as we simultaneously influence our past and future selves every time we err and redeem.
I cannot speak to this matter, running contrary as it does to the tenets with which I was raised, yet—well, if I could live it again, but differently…
Perhaps what Charlotte and I have lost in this time might then be found in another, spared the turbulence that has occurred so needlessly here and now. Perhaps if the woman I saw in the glass—“Margaret”—is me as much as I am she… Well, if anything worthy I have ever mustered in my life should manifest as a blessing in hers, then might she find my happiness and enjoy the fortune of falling asleep with a quiet mind at peace with the dark.
We shall begin by snuffing out the light.
Chapter 18
A New Soul
21st-
Century London
AND IN THAT INSTANT, Margot had never felt so present. Looking at the silver pocket watch on the desk, she sat up to observe the regulated movement of the second hand, tried to meet its equilibrium.
“You know,” she said, “a pint sounds fucking marvelous right now.”
“It’s not exactly as I may have described, you realize,” Rand began after passing Margot a cider at the corner pub.
She’d tried calling Chloé beforehand, but she wasn’t answering. Margot couldn’t blame her, only hoped that ignoring her calls was the worst her friend would do.
She saw clearly, now, the risk Chloé had taken in revealing herself to Rand and in turn revealing him to Margot. The risk of having such a gift that could make one look unstable or untrustworthy, an opportunist if not a thief. A risk she’d taken only to help them all find answers, who they really were—or once had been. No matter Chloé’s method, her sincerity of motive was no longer Margot’s to question, and she would have to tread her remorse delicately. But in the meantime…
“What’s not as you described?” she asked Rand.
They wove over to a booth tucked in the corner.
“What I’ve seen.”
“Ah, so you’re going to modify your story now, are you? I mean, besides that one critical detail of, ‘Oh wait, it wasn’t Gwen who saw the ghost, it was me!’” She face-palmed herself.
“Listen, cheeky, you can imagine where I was coming from, can’t you?”
He admitted that, other than the occasional blue vapor, Lady Grey wasn’t so much an image that he visibly saw as something he felt within, and so often when standing near his window. What he sensed was not merely the weeping but a femininity as diffused yet distinct as a spray of perfume into the air.