Florence and Giles

by John Harding

  ‘You know what, Miss Taylor, my tooth seems much better,’ he said, weaking her a smile. ‘Yes, it truly is.’

  ‘No, Giles.’ She patronised him one back. ‘It is but the laudanum starting to work. Once it wears off, you’ll be in as much pain as before. Believe me, that tooth needs treatment.’

  ‘No, miss, I promise you, I don’t have toothache. I really don’t. It was all a jape, honest it was. Wasn’t it, Flo? Tell her, Flo, won’t you?’ He pleaded me a look, but at that moment there was a sudden groan from within the dentist’s surgery which provided me the perfect opportunity to effect the next part of my plan. I put a hand to my brow and began to wobble. I sighed and made as if to fall from my chair.

  ‘Oh, miss!’ exclaimed Mrs Field, catching me, as she thought, just in time.

  ‘What is it?’ said Miss Taylor, who had all her attention on Giles and had not seen.

  ‘The young lady, miss,’ said Mrs Field. ‘I thought she was going to faint.’

  ‘It’s so hot, so very hot in here,’ I mumbled. It was easier to put in a more convincing performance than my brother’s, for truth to tell it was hot and the overpowering sickly smell made me genuinely feel ill.

  ‘I fear she was alarmed by the sound of my husband’s patient,’ said Mrs Field. ‘It takes some people that way, especially the young ladies.’

  ‘I need air,’ I said.

  ‘But Flo,’ screamed Giles, ‘you can’t go. Not now.’ The stupid boy had forgotten that this was the very point of my being here.

  ‘I’ll see her outside, if you like, ma’am,’ said Mrs Field, at which Miss Taylor, distracted totally by Giles, merely nodded. The dentist’s wife helped me to my feet and outed me to the sidewalk. I relieved to see John sitting on the trap, having a smoke of his pipe and looking quite the other way. After a moment or two I assured Mrs Field that I was now well enough to stand unsupported and would be all right on my own.

  ‘Well, if you’re quite sure, miss…’ she said. ‘I do have things to do.’ And she ducked back inside the dentist’s office.

  The moment the door closed behind her I gathered up my skirts and commenced to run. It fortuned that the police station was in the opposite direction from the way John was facing. Ours is a one-horse town, with only one main street, on which are situated all the shops and houses, saloons and hotels. I tore along the sidewalk and breathlessed a pause outside the police station to gather myself together. I knocked and opened the door and walked in. A young policeman at a desk half rose as I entered. Without giving him time to speak I said, ‘I must see Captain Hadleigh immediately; is he in?’

  ‘Why yes, miss, but I’ll have to announce you first, for he’s very busy just now and may not have the time to see you on the hoof without an appointment.’

  I could see that arguing would only use up more valuable time, so gave him my name. I ignored his offer of a seat, being too restlessed, and to-and-froed all the while he was gone into the inner office. There was a large clock on the wall and its hands seemed to be racing round, the pendulum tick-tocking like a demented woodpecker, pecking away at my remaining valuable time.

  The desk clerk reappeared. ‘The captain will see you now, miss.’ He showed me into the room I remembered so well from all those months ago. Hadleigh upped from his chair behind his desk, walked around it and shook my hand. ‘This is a surprise,’ he said and indicated the customer chair on this side of the desk and then arounded it again and sat back down in his own.

  He steepled his hands, like before. ‘Well, and what brings you here? Have you something to tell me? Something perhaps that you forgot before?’ There was a long silence. I could still hear the clock from the anteroom. Its ticking seemed now to have slowed to a melancholy heartbeat.

  I swallowed. ‘It’s about our governess.’

  ‘Miss Whitaker, yes of course, what else?’

  ‘No, no, sir, you don’t understand. Not Miss Whitaker. Our new governess. Miss Taylor.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Nothing has happened to her, I trust? If so, I despair of your ever getting an education.’

  I ignored his cynicism. ‘No sir. It’s nothing like that. It’s that, well…’ My voice died away like the sad cry of a whippoorwill fading on a winter wind.

  ‘Yes?’

  But what was I to tell him? Suddenly it all seemed so crazy. I sured he would think me mad. What exactly was there to say? That she had a snake inside her? That she could walk on water, that she had the night vision of a blind man? There was in truth nothing to tell.

  ‘Well, sir, it is hard to explain. It’s just that there is something about her that frightens me, that I feel sure she means to do us harm, or rather that she will do my brother harm, or if not that, then kidnap him and take him far away.’

  He stared at me as he always had before, as if trying to make sense of me, to figure out what was really going on inside. ‘Has she done anything harmful to you? Has she hurt Giles?’

  ‘Well, no sir, not that you could say so.’

  ‘Has she threatened to do anything? Has she said she will take him away?’

  ‘No sir, but there is something so…so…well, peculiar about her. She has this strange look about her, sir, as if she has swallowed a snake and it sits inside her looking out through her eyes. And yet, at the same time, even though she looks nothing like her, I sometimes catch her face in an aspect that reminds me of, well, of Miss Whitaker, sir, and makes me think she is her.’

  ‘But Miss Whitaker is dead, as you well know.’

  I sniffed. I could feel tears brimming in my eyes. ‘I – I meant…’ My voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I meant her ghost.’

  I decided then and there not to tell him about the incident on the lake, that I had seen her walking on the water, for I knew it would serve only to incredible everything else. He stared at me the longest time. The clock outside woodpeckered slow as someone banging nails into a coffin.

  ‘Have you seen a doctor lately?’

  I sniffed and brushed away a tear. ‘No sir, I –’ I could say no more, for my throat choked up so.

  He got up and walked around the desk and sat down on it. He reached out and put a hand upon my shoulder. ‘Have you ever read Macbeth?’

  I puzzled him a look.

  ‘Do you remember the scene at the feast, when Banquo’s ghost appears to Macbeth?’

  ‘Yes.’ It came out as but a squeak.

  ‘There is no ghost. It is only Macbeth’s guilt.’

  I bit my lip and then pulled myself upright. ‘I have nothing to feel guilty about, sir. Except perhaps that I was not able to save Miss Whitaker, that I could not think more clearly or act faster.’

  ‘That is what I meant, of course.’

  The clock outside began to strike the hour. It was noon. I returned to the present. ‘Sir, I have to go. If she misses me it will suspicion her.’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  I realised I had so upsetted I had forgot myself and spoken in my private language. ‘I mean, it will make her suspicious, sir.’

  I got up and made for the door. He was round the desk and had his hand on the handle before I reached it. ‘Listen, I can see you’re upset,’ he said. His face was close to mine. His breath smelt of milk and cinnamon, which somehow comforted me. ‘I’ll take a ride out your way when I have a spare moment and have a look at this woman. If there’s anything wrong, you can depend on me to spot it.’

  I wiped away an errant tear and gratefulled him a smile. ‘Thank you, sir, thank you so very much.’ And then the clock reached eleven and I was out the door – as though not to leave before the twelfth note would bring some awful doom down upon me – through the outer office, past the surprised clerk and flying down the street.

  I reached the dentist’s just in time. At the moment I breathlessed my way up, the door opened and Giles emerged supported on one side by Mrs Field and on the other by Miss Taylor. He was sobbing, his head bent and face buried in a handkerchief that I saw was covered in blood. W
hen Miss Taylor looked up at me, I could not see her expression, because of the veil, and had no inkling of whether or no she had noticed my absence.

  Seeing me, Mrs Field, in that deferential way she had, let go of Giles, relinquishing her hold on him to me. I put my arm around him. ‘Why Giles,’ I whispered, ‘whatever happened?’

  He bittered me a look. ‘The dentist took out all my back teeth,’ he spluttered, bubbles of red spittle on his lips. ‘He couldn’t find one that was rotten, so he took them all out just to be safe.’

  19

  Have you ever thought what it will be like to be dead? Sometimes I think I know so well that I must have died already and be walking abroad, another ghost, to keep Miss Taylor née Whitaker company. Often at night I make my bed tight, and then slide in under the covers and lie with my arms stiff by my sides as though snug within my coffin. I hold my breath and imagine the blackness of my room is the dark inside my grave. I imagine the coffin lid over me. I think of my funeral, of everyone I know, Mrs Grouse, Giles, my uncle perhaps, although of course I can’t really be said to know him, Meg and Mary and John, standing over this deep dark slot in the ground, watching me lowered into it, and then flinching at the sound of the first shovelful of earth hitting the coffin lid, and then that sound gradually dulling as my grave fills up and it is only soil upon soil. I think of the mourners returning home in the last of a winter day’s sunlight and cosying themselves round the fire, where their talk gradually turns to other matters than me as the comfort of forgetting begins. I imagine that every so often one of them will remember how earlier they left me alone in the cold earth, how the light is fading and I am starting my new existence there, in my new home, in my hole in the ground. And, my thoughts returning to my supposed dead body, I remember Poe’s ‘Premature Burial’ and imagine myself alive still and screaming that I want to get out, clawing my nails away on the coffin lid, and that with six feet of earth above me no one can hear and I listen to myself screaming and screaming until first my voice dies to a whimper and then to nothing and I lie and listen to my own breathing until all the air is used up and then there is no more breathing or listening because there is no more anything at all.

  I aloned much now, for Giles still angered with me for his lost molars, although they were only milk teeth and would have soon dropped out anyway. He protested because he was mainly able to eat only soup, which of course he suddened a great aversion to, and when he had finished blaming me, shunned me quite. I gratefulled him for the sacrifice of his teeth, for it had opportunitied me to see Hadleigh, however unsatisfactory that meeting was, and for not revealing my plan, although from the word or two I heard Miss Taylor let slip to Mrs Grouse I understood that when he was in the chair he had screamed ‘all sorts of nonsense’ about not having the toothache at all and how it had all been a big pretend.

  ‘If that was pretending,’ said Mrs Grouse, ‘then the child is a very great actor indeed.’ Which made me suspect that, like me, the woman had never been inside a theatre in her life.

  So, although I had alerted Hadleigh, it was at no little cost, for Giles now so avoided me that he clung instead to our new governess, regarding her as his protectress although, as I tried to point out, it had been she who had aquiesced with the dentist in the taking out of the teeth. I would often find Miss Taylor with Giles at her side, hugging him to her in a way I sured was unprofessional. Certainly Miss Whitaker never did such a thing and to me it didn’t seem right. All this meant that while I had Hadleigh on my side, I had so thrown Giles into Miss Taylor’s arms, quite literally, that I had unintentionally speeded the progress of what I believed to be her plan to make him her accomplice in his own kidnap.

  It was the day after our trip to the dentist when another incident occurred that feared me quite. It was after luncheon and I had just left the dining room. I paused in the hall at a large mirror that hangs there and stood staring at myself. I saw a tall, gangling crane of a girl, all long limbs and extended neck, with a complexion so pale as to not look well. My eyes were marooned in great saucers of black, my white frock and apron hung from my bones as if I were getting smaller, not growing, and all in all I scarce recognised myself, I looked so ill. There suddened a movement behind me and Miss Taylor appeared in the mirror, staring over my shoulder at me.

  ‘You are not pretty, Florence,’ she informed me and inside me a white dove fluttered and dropped injured to the ground. ‘But you have a certain attractiveness that is much more important than mere prettiness.’ We both stood and stared at my reflection.

  There was a rustle of silk and I turned and watched as, without another word, she awayed back down the hall. I turned again to the mirror and what I saw there made my blood run cold. For standing behind me, smiling in a triumphant, mocking way, stood Miss Taylor still. I instanted a glance over my shoulder but she herself was gone. I turned back to the mirror and there remained her reflection, laughing soundlessly, still gazing over the shoulders of my own image. I felt myself dizzy, I blinked, but when I opened my eyes, there she stayed. I shook my image free from her grasp and ran off down the corridor, after the real Miss Taylor, but could not help myself from stopping and looking back at the mirror one last time. And there it was still, her reflection trapped in the glass, head back, laughing a terrible, silent laugh.

  That afternoon in the library I unconcentrated on ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, wonderful tale though it is. I could think of nothing but that awful duplicate of my enemy, trapped like a lark in aspic, in that looking glass. I feared me to see it again, and yet at the same time I could not wait to return to it, to see if it were still there.

  It so happened that as we were about to enter the breakfast room for dinner Miss Taylor recollected something she had left in her room. She told Giles and me to sit down at table and not wait for her or else our food would go cold. This was something that had happened a time or two before and I had decided it was but an excuse to avoid eating, for in truth, although she had been here no more than a few of weeks, our new governess had grown thinner by the hour. Now it seemed to me the very skin of her face was stretched across the bones of her skull, and below her chin her neck, empty of flesh, hung down like a plucked chicken’s.

  Giles and I dutifulled toward the breakfast room, but the moment Miss Taylor rounded the turn of the stairs and out-of-sighted I grabbed Giles by the hand and tugged him down the hall the opposite way.

  ‘Flo, what are you doing? This isn’t the way to dinner! Let go, I’m hungry!’

  ‘Shh, Giles, she’ll hear you. Come, it will take but a moment. There’s something I want you to look at.’

  I near fainted when we got to the looking glass. I could not raise my eyes to look at it, so much I feared what I would see, but with Giles tugging at my hand, impatienting to be away, I slowly raised my eyes and saw my other self, that fearful lonely crane, before which stood my brother, puzzling his twin a half-hearted look and, dreadful thing, behind me, as I had always known it would be, stood the duplicate of my tormentor, looking straight out into my eyes, smugging me a smile.

  Giles looked away and tried to pull me back toward the breakfast room. ‘Come on, Flo, old girl, I’m starving!’

  ‘Giles, wait, just a second, please!’ I dragged him back and, seizing his shoulders from behind, steered him to look into the mirror. ‘Look! Tell me, what do you see?’

  He stood staring into the mirror, this time not at himself but up, at me, and surely at the woman behind me. A heartbeat or two. I held my breath.

  ‘What do you see?’ I said again.

  ‘A witch,’ he said at last. ‘An ugly fright of a witch.’

  I turned him around and hugged him to me, unable to contain my relief. ‘So you see her too! You really see her!’

  He pushed me away and askanced me a look. ‘I see you, Flo, that’s who I see. Only you aren’t really ugly or a witch, I was just teasing when I said that.’

  I shook his shoulders. ‘No, Giles, don’t go back on it now. Don’t fearful and
pretend you didn’t see. You saw her, didn’t you? Didn’t you?’

  Giles stranged me one. ‘Who, Flo, who are you talking about?’

  ‘Why, Giles, you know who. You know very well. Miss Taylor, of course.’

  He turned again to the mirror and looked at it and then looked back at me. ‘Don’t be silly, Flo, how could I see her when she’s upstairs? You saw her go yourself.’

  I turned him back to the mirror once more and stabbed my finger at the accursed image which even now grinned out at me. ‘She is upstairs, yes, but her double is here, trapped in the glass, do you not see? Do you not see!’

  Giles stared at the glass a moment or two, and the expression on his image staring back at us was blank. I released my hold on him and he shrugged. ‘I don’t want to play this game, Flo,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it. Anyway, we’ll be late for supper.’ And he turned and set off toward the breakfast room, leaving me looking after him, wondering if he had seen what I had seen, and if so, why he should pretend he had not.

  I troubled all through supper. At first I doubtlessed that Giles had seen the hideous reflection trapped in the glass, for it had been as plain as his own face there. I asked myself why he should insist he had not and the only answer I could provide was that he was scared. He did not want to admit the truth. It even possibled that he genuinely believed he had seen nothing, because the alternative was too terrible to accept. But if that were indeed the case then why was Giles so calm now, laughing and joking with Miss Taylor throughout our meal, and only occasionally anxious when he happened to glance across the table at me? Miss Taylor herself ignored me, apart from one knowing look when she entered the room and sat herself down. But in that look I knew that everything of our delay in coming to supper was known to her, that she had seen us with the eyes of her image in the mirror, that she had left her reflection there as a spy. I felt as though I had swallowed a flock of restless starlings; I pushed my food about my plate, unable to manage more than a morsel or two.