by Jack Dann
“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.
—MARLY YOUMANS
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.
THEODORA GOSS
Christopher Raven
WHY 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.
“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.”
TOLLIE 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.