Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “She moved to France. Eventually she became a painter, not a great one but there is a picture of hers in the National Gallery. She particularly liked painting flowers.” Miss Halloway was silent for a moment. “We’ll have to give him a proper burial,” she said. “I think the dreams will stop now.”

  The dreams did not stop, not as long as we stayed at Collingswood. But they changed character. For the rest of that year, we dreamed that we were with him—sitting by the fire in the parlor, browsing through books in the library and reading lines of poetry to one another, walking through the garden, where the roses were blooming, including the white rose called Lady Collingswood. He still murmured lines of poetry to us, we still felt kisses on our hands, even our shoulders, but the dreams no longer had the passion, the urgency, that we should not have experienced and that changed us, permanently. When we left Collingswood, Eleanor for a London season, Mary for her father’s parish, where she would teach Sunday school, Tollie for Newnham Teachers’ College, and me for Girton, we were no longer the girls who had glared at one another on the first day of term. We were older, we knew more about the joys and pains of the world, and we were friends.

  The remains of Christopher Raven were buried in the garden, and a stone was placed over him with the words “Here lies the poet Christopher Raven, lover of Lady Collingswood, 1797–1817” carved on it, followed by lines of his own poetry:

  Let her eyes guide me like bright stars, and bring

  Me to the birthing-place of poetry.

  I read some of his poetry later—he had published two books, called Aurora and Other Poems and Poems for the Rights of Man. He was good, and might have become great if he had lived, although he would never have been a Shelley or a Keats. But when I remembered his kisses in the dark, the whispered words, it did not matter. I do not think it mattered to her either. She loved the man, and the poet was part of the man. At least that is what I think now that I have learned something of love—the love one has for a poet, like my Louis.

  “WE CHANGED, ALL of us,” I said. “Eleanor became less high and mighty, for example.”

  “Well!” she said, laughing. “I think I’m still both high and mighty. You should see me destroy those pipsqueak MPs on the question of votes for women! They fear my political dinners.”

  “And Mary became more pious,” I added.

  “I suppose that’s true,” said Mary. “I was frightened for a long time. I thought life might be like that, all passion and darkness. My father’s faith was reassuring—it made me feel safe. I think I became more judgmental for a while. I went to London once, while Louis was alive, and never visited you, Lucy. I’m sorry about that. But after little Charles died, I think I became more accepting of human frailty. I started to realize that God is there too, in the darkness as well as the light.”

  We stared at her. “When did you get philosophical?” asked Eleanor.

  Mary blushed, the red suffusing her cheeks until she looked like a late apple. “I’m getting older, I suppose. As we all are.” She turned to me. “And losing what you love—you must have known how Lady Collingswood felt.”

  “Perhaps a little,” I said. “But I don’t think Louis is going to haunt anyone. Our love was an ordinary human love. Oh, he wrote me a poem or two, but I’m no Lady Collingswood. I went to visit his wife once, in France. You would think—insane asylum and all that. But it was perfectly ordinary, kind nurses looking after her. She had no idea who I was. What Christopher Raven and Lady Collingswood had—it was passion and poetry, and it had to end in violence. Could it have ended any other way? Can you imagine them in a cottage in the country, him chopping wood for the fire, her embroidering dish towels?”

  “Was he the ghost, or was she?” We looked at Tollie, startled by her question. “I mean, was he the one haunting us? Or was she the one, making us relive her experiences?”

  “I’ve never thought of it like that,” I said.

  “When I came back to Collingswood, I found something,” said Tollie. “It was summer and the school was almost empty. I came in here, and I don’t know why exactly, but I looked behind the painting of Lady Collingswood. There was something taped back there.”

  “What did you find?” I asked. We all leaned forward, curious schoolgirls once more.

  “Probably a letter of some sort,” said Eleanor.

  “No, not a letter,” said Tollie. “I’ll show you.” She walked over to one of the desks that we had used, so many years ago, and lifted a framed picture that had been lying on it. She held it up so we could see.

  Mary gasped, and Eleanor said, “That’s him. Exactly.”

  It was just a watercolor of the head and shoulders, but there was the curling black hair, the brown cheeks, the laughing, mischievous eyes. In the bottom right-hand corner was written, in pen, Adela Collingswood.

  “You can see that she loved him,” said Tollie. “If she was the ghost, she would have wanted him buried.”

  “But she didn’t know he was in the cellar,” I said. “Listen to me! Here I am talking about the habits of ghosts. For all we know, it was both of them together, reliving their lives through us.”

  “You changed too,” said Eleanor. “You’d been so focused on doing well. But after—that was when you started writing stories.”

  “She did inspire me in the end,” I said. “Just as Miss Halloway wanted.”

  “But Tollie didn’t change,” continued Eleanor. “Did you, Tollie? You’re the same old Tollie as you were back then. The Tollie who would have looked behind the painting. I would never have thought of that.”

  “I don’t know,” said Tollie. “I suppose I am the same. Although I think I’m getting lines on my forehead from frowning at students!”

  We heard a knock on the door. We had been so immersed in talking about the past that we all jumped.

  “Ladies, dinner in half an hour,” called Miss Halloway.

  “We’d better get dressed,” said Mary. “We don’t want to be late for dinner.”

  “Why not?” said Eleanor. “Let them wait for us. After all, we have the guest of honor. They’re not going to start the dinner without her. Is that high and mighty enough for you, Lucy?” But she was smiling as she said it.

  After that, the conversation turned to dresses. Eleanor lent Tollie the second-best dress she had brought, which must have cost as much as my entire wardrobe, although Tollie insisted that her gray merino was perfectly adequate. So even she looked sufficiently ladylike as we walked down the stairs, under the watchful eyes of Old Nosey, to the dining room.

  My speech, “The Necessity for the Rights of Women,” went well and was generally applauded, with Eleanor giving a loud “Hear, hear!” The food was better than we had eaten as schoolgirls—no cabbage! But it was strange seeing women, some of whom I remembered, some from other years, sitting around the dining room tables, their faces turned toward me. In some of them, I could see the girls they had once been, like echoes.

  It was a relief to be finished, to have fulfilled my duties and be free to go back up the stairs, undress, and lie down on the bed I had slept in so many years ago.

  “Maybe you’ll all dream of him tonight,” said Tollie.

  “I certainly hope not,” said Eleanor. “Once in a lifetime is enough of Christopher Raven, I think.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, Mary left early to catch the train, and Eleanor had a meeting with the Fundraising Committee. But I had time before I needed to be at the station, so Tollie and I walked through the garden, smelling the late roses and coming at last to his grave.

  “Christopher Raven,” I said. “I would not have minded dreaming about him again, just for old times’ sake.”

  “But you didn’t?” asked Tollie.

  “No, of course not,” I said. “But I’ve been thinking about my next book—my publisher keeps asking whether I’m working on it, and of course I need the money. He wants another Modern Diana, but I think I’m going to wri
te about Lady Collingswood. I think I’ll call it Adela; or Free Love. That ought to shock everyone.”

  “Lucy, do you think Eleanor’s right? Do you think I haven’t changed?”

  I looked at her carefully. “I think you’ve changed less than the three of us. Maybe it’s because you stayed at Collingswood.”

  “No, it’s not just that. It’s something else.”

  Something in her voice made me say, “Tollie, is everything all right?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s just that I didn’t want to tell the others. I still dream about him.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I still dream about him, every night. When I found that picture, I had it framed, and then I put it in my room, up on the third floor. And I started dreaming about him again. I thought if the three of you were here, sleeping in her room, under her picture, you would have the dreams too. But it was just me.” She paused for a moment, then knelt in front of the grave and traced the letters with her hand. “Maybe because I stayed here. I never married or had a child. I didn’t have the sort of life that you and Eleanor and Mary have. And the dreams came back. That’s what I have, a new set of students every year—and the dreams. Do you think that’s awful?”

  “Some of your hair’s come down in back. Let me fix it for you.” I pinned her bun up again. I looked at her, kneeling there, with both pity and understanding. After a moment of silence, I said, “No, Tollie. I don’t think that’s awful at all. I think we have to take love where we can find it. That’s what I learned with Louis.”

  “Thank you,” she said, standing again and feeling her hair, carefully. “I never can get it to stay up. You know, you always were my best friend.”

  “You could have fooled me, the way you mooned after Eleanor Prescott!” I said. But I put my arm around her and kissed her cheek.

  Later, as the cart bumped over the drive, I turned back to look at Collingswood House and waved to her, knowing that I might never see her again, knowing that I would probably never come back. I had a larger world to live in, a world that included grief and loss and loneliness, but also success and companionship. It included the cafés of London, and seeing my name on red leather in bookshop windows, and the Alps. I thought of Louie in Switzerland, coughing his lungs out and looking at me with the most beautiful eyes in the world, his father’s eyes. The world I lived in was more difficult, but I would not have traded it for hers.

  Sometimes I would think of Tollie in her world of perpetual girlhood, dreaming of Christopher Raven, of poetry and burning kisses in the dark. And sometimes I would wish for the dreams myself. But I had a life to live, a book to write. I would always remember her this way, standing in front of Collingswood House and waving to me, under the ancient oaks.

  Afterword to “Christopher Raven”

  The hardest thing about writing “Christopher Raven” was finding the right voice. Finally, I started channeling Daphne du Maurier in Rebecca, and it started coming out right.

  —THEODORA GOSS

  Lucius Shepard

  Lucius Shepard’s short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, among others, and has earned him Notable Book of the Year status from the New York Times. His acclaimed collections include The Jaguar Hunter, The Ends of the Earth, Two Trains Running, Trujillo, Dagger Key, The Best of Lucius Shepard, and Viator Plus; upcoming are two new books of novellas and the long-awaited gathering in one volume of all the Dragon Griaule tales, from Subterranean Press. Shepard lives in Portland, Oregon.

  LUCIUS SHEPARD

  Rose Street Attractors

  THOSE WHO KNEW Jeffrey Richmond, if anyone could be truly said to have known him, viewed him as an acquaintance merely, the sort of person one tolerates because he belongs to a certain circle, yet avoids due to his unpleasant character or dubious connections. He was a slight black-haired chap in his middle thirties, beardless and brown-eyed, sharp-featured and plain of dress, possessed of a subdued public manner, and whenever he chanced to visit the Inventors’ Club, his fellows hid themselves behind the pages of a newspaper or pretended to be engrossed in a conversation concerning a cricket match or a minor political issue, or else they bluntly ignored him. On most such visits he would sit in one of the club’s deep leather chairs and drink a glass or two of port and then take his leave, both entrance and exit unmarked by the least notice; but infrequently he would attach himself to a group of men engaged in a discussion concerning some aspect of science or mechanics, and even more infrequently he would interject a comment that another member might acknowledge in a distant tone, saying, “Ah, Richmond,” before turning away. Whereupon the group would close ranks against him and he would drift back to his chair. He had endured that state of affairs for the past three years, ever since joining the club, and when I inquired as to the reasons underlying this consistent display of contempt, I was told that Richmond, holder of a dozen patents relating to a diverse range of industries, from textile to armaments, and thus wealthy, had chosen to live in the pernicious slum of Saint Nichol and was thought to have family in the district—even if untrue, it was apparent to the discerning eye, so my informant claimed, that his exposure to the evils endemic to the place had thoroughly corrupted him.

  My own status at the club was hardly secure—although I came from a prominent Welsh family with business connections in London, I was but a probationary member and twenty-six years old (all the full members were at the least five years my senior), and otherwise suspect because, despite holding a medical patent, I was an alienist, a discipline not yet accorded the banner of respectability. I had joined the club in order to gain access to the upper classes through its membership, which counted a smattering of dukes and lords among their number, hoping that when one or another of their relations suffered an affliction for which medical science had no obvious remedy, they might call upon me. Indeed, I had already experienced a degree of success, having assisted in the treatment of Sir Thomas Winstone’s nephew, whose opium addiction was rooted in a childhood trauma. It was my hope that by attending the ills of parasites like Winstone’s nephew, I might garner sufficient wealth to establish clinics that would provide treatment of the mentally afflicted among the lower classes superior to that they received in hospitals such as Bedlam and Broadmoor. And so, while I felt something of an ideological kinship with Richmond, for the sake of my goals I became complicit in shunning him, addressing him with a reserve that verged on rudeness. I would have never done more than tip my hat and nod to the man had he not forced himself upon me.

  One foggy autumn evening, a fog so thick that the streetlamps were transformed into inexplicable glowing presences like those said to hover intermittently above the northern marshes, I was returning home from the club, keeping a hand on the clammy bricks to guide me through especially dense eddies, when I heard boot heels behind me. I paid them scant attention until, on rounding a corner onto a poorly lit lane, their pace quickened and, fearing a footpad, I darted ahead and secreted myself in the doorway of an apothecary shop, holding my shooting stick at the ready. Seconds later a man wearing a greatcoat emerged from the billowing fog and passed my hiding place. He stopped several yards farther along and peered about. I recognized Richmond, but did not show myself, hoping he would continue on his way. However, he turned back and, realizing that I would almost certainly be seen, I stepped forth from the doorway and said, “Are you following me, sir?”

  He did not seem in the least taken aback by my sudden appearance, but rather smiled and said in a high-pitched, nasal voice, like that of an Irish tenor with a cold, “There you are, Prothero. I thought you had eluded me.”

  “So you admit it—you were following me. May I ask why?”

  “I hoped it might prove less of an embarrassment if I pressed my business with you away from the confines of the club.”

  This shamed me, since I was a snob by association and not by nature; yet I maintained a cool manner. “I’m unaware of any business between us.”

  “T
hat remains to be seen. I require the services of an alienist for a day or two. If you come with me to Saint Nichol, I will double your usual fee.”

  My interest was piqued, but I had concerns. “Tonight? At this hour?”

  “If you fear for your safety, let me assure you that at no hour of day or night is Saint Nichol markedly less perilous.” A smile touched the corners of his mouth and I had the idea that it was a mocking smile. “While I cannot guarantee with absolute certainty that you will survive the experience,” he went on, “I swear that you will be as safe in my company in Saint Nichol as you would be on any other street in London.”

  I hesitated and, apparently attributing my hesitancy to greed, Richmond said, “Name your price, then. I will gladly pay it.”

  “Money is not at issue,” I told him. “Mental ailments—and I presume this is why you have sought me out, to treat such an ailment—are not easily corrected. I am no carpenter who can repair your steps or patch a hole in your roof in a few hours.”

  “I do not expect you to effect a cure, simply to give me your counsel.”

  “On what subject? Is there a patient you wish me to observe?”

  “Two. Myself and one other.”

  I started to speak, but he said, “You have questions for me. That I understand. And I intend to answer them. But my answers, insufficient as they are, will be far more revealing in light of what I have to show you.”

  Without waiting to learn whether or not I would accept his invitation (I fully intended to accept, seduced by the air of mystery attaching to it), he produced a silver whistle from his coat and sounded a blast. A coach and pair lurched into view at the end of the lane, wheels and hooves raising a clatter. At that distance, rendered featureless and distorted by the fog, it posed an indistinct black mass against the diffuse yellow light, and the coachman’s bulky figure, established in vague silhouette, seemed a projection of that blackness, the crude semblance of half a man. I climbed into the coach with no little trepidation, its aspect having brought to mind a Turner seascape I had long admired, not as regards its particulars, but relating to the sinister mood suggested by its depiction of a numinous fiery light smothered beneath lowering grim clouds.