Ghosts by Gaslight

by Jack Dann

  I did not like this intimation of his former relationship with Jane. “Jane had no reason to lie,” I said.

  “Whores need no reason. Lying is second nature to them. They invent reasons that might not appear reasonable to you or me, yet touch upon their innermost secrets.”

  Bridling at this, I said, “If such is to be the tenor of our conversation, let us end it now. I have no wish to hear you speak crudely of Jane.”

  “Did you find that statement crude? I thought I was being a realist.” Richmond took a seat behind the desk. “Samuel, you’re a young man. Younger than your years, I’d say. You are perceptive and, I believe, quite intuitive. But it’s obvious that you are in love, and love can blind one to great many painful truths.”

  “Jane loves me as well.”

  “Has she said as much?”

  “I have made no declaration, nor has she, but I know it to be true.”

  “Well, though it may be that Jane is in love, I can assure you of one thing. She is not blinded by it. She may be several years your junior, but she has a wide experience of the world. That she has changed since we were involved, I have no doubt—but she has not grown more foolish or less discerning.”

  “I don’t understand how this is relevant. My connection with Jane is my concern, and hers. If you have something to say about Dorothea’s lie or upon another subject, I will gladly listen. Otherwise there is no point to continuing.”

  Richmond cleared his throat and then said, “Is it lost on you that there is a third woman in the house?”

  I floundered for a moment. “Are you speaking of Christine?”

  “I have watched you with her these last weeks. I’ve . . .”

  “I haven’t seen you on the sixth floor since I began my study.”

  “I drilled a hole that permits observation if one stands in the space between the inner and outer walls. But that is not of moment.”

  “Oh, no? I find it unbelievably offensive. Are there peepholes elsewhere? In my bedroom, perhaps?”

  “Bear with me, I beg you. Hear me out and then I will accept the full brunt of your outrage.” Richmond clasped his head in his hands, staring down at the fawn-colored blotter. “I have never spoken of these events to any man, but I believe you have sniffed out a portion of my story. That makes it no easier to disclose, but now . . . now I find disclosure to be necessary.”

  He sighed and looked up from the desk. “I was sixteen when my mother died. Christine was less than two years younger. My mother fell ill in the spring of the year, and my father brought the family to our country estate near Caerphilly in hopes she might recover there. Within the week he was called away to the Continent on business, leaving my mother to be cared for by servants. He remained absent until a few days prior to her death. Why he did this . . .” He shook his head. “His motives were hidden from me and he has never talked about that summer. At the time I chose to believe he loved her and that his absence was due to an inability to watch her suffer. But now I think he became uninterested in her when she could no longer play the part of wife, and went off to find a new one in Europe. Which, ultimately, he did.

  “My mother’s decline was swift. After a month in Caerphilly she barely recognized us. The doctor told us she had weeks to live, no more, yet she lingered all that summer. Bedridden, racked by fevers, either in pain and heavily drugged. We did what we could, Christine and I, but the servants kept us from her, fearing the sight of our mother in her delirium and torment would damage our tender souls—they failed to comprehend that seeing her only rarely and then for a few minutes was a torment to us. I wrote my father, pleading with him to return, but he would not respond. And so Christine and I were virtually alone, with no authority to guide us but an elderly nanny whom we no longer heeded. I would read to her and she played the piano for me, but these pursuits soon bored us and we began to wander the estate, taking a picnic lunch and passing entire days in the woods and fields, talking about this and that. Prior to that summer we had been apart so much of the time, and now, thrown together in such a powerful emotional setting, relying upon each other for support, for conversation, for all else . . . it was an unhealthy situation. On occasion I would notice some feature of her beauty, and I would catch her looking at me, instances that caused her to blush and avert her eyes. I repressed these moments—I thrust them aside and refused to acknowledge what they portended.”

  Richmond gazed at the iron shutters. “There was a pond on the property, large enough to think of as a small lake. We often ate beside it. One afternoon in early June, feeling torpid following lunch, I fell asleep. When I awoke, Christine was gone. I heard a splashing from the direction of the pond and made my way through the bushes that grew alongside the bank. Christine stood in the shallows, completely unclothed, sluicing water over her body. I thought her the most beautiful thing in all of Creation. She saw me as well. Instead of covering herself, she turned full toward me, clasped her hands behind her head, and lifted her face to the sun. I raced back to the house, pierced by shame, but I had remained there long enough to imprint her image on my brain, and shame would not wash it away. That night she came into my bed. I was half asleep, yet I could have resisted her.”

  He wore such a morose expression, I felt sympathy for him and said, “You are not the first man to have made such an error in judgment.”

  “Oh, it was hardly that!” He laughed bitterly. “We were in love and love accepts no judgments. Our affair continued for months, even after my father’s return, and did not end until I returned to Eaton. Christine was always more aggressive than I. She forced the issue, yet I was equally culpable.”

  He pressed his hands together, the tips of his fingers touching his chin—a prayerful attitude. “Years later our nanny informed me that Christine had become pregnant and a stable boy let go. She had accused him in order to deflect blame from me. I don’t know what became of him . . . or the child.”

  “Christine never said anything?”

  “Not a word. I wrote to her, of course. I asked what had happened. She answered my letters, but not my questions. She had been sent away . . . to school, my father said. In France. I didn’t see her again for years. She married a gentleman farmer, or so she claimed. In one of her letters, she enclosed a wedding photograph that showed her with a man with oiled hair and a little mustache. A charade, I suppose. I never had a word from him, neither then nor following her death.

  “A year after her purported marriage, she asked me to meet her in Torquay. We spent a few days together and whenever I brought up our personal history, she insisted that we not dwell upon the past. Over the years we met in Margate, Ilfracombe, Ryde, Cardiff, Llandudno . . . in every benighted resort in Britain. Days, we strolled on the esplanade, we laughed and teased each other, we watched the Punch and Judy shows, rode donkeys on the beach, and attended concerts. Only once did she offer affection of the kind I desired. It must have been shortly after she moved to Saint Nichol. She melted into an embrace and kissed me, but apologized immediately and said the kiss was a mistake. I went to sleep that night as I had on all the previous nights, alone and frustrated. You see, I still held in mind the image of her face lit to white gold by the sun, the water beaded on her flesh. I hold it still.” His aggrieved expression and slumped posture gave evidence of a defeated attitude. “I hope you understand now why I have been so beastly toward you.”

  I allowed that, no, I did not.

  “Because I’m jealous,” he said. “She is returning to us and it is you with whom she speaks, with whom she flirts as she once did with me. She holds me in contempt. She blames me for everything that happened. And now she has come to you exactly as she came to me when we became lovers.”

  I had been about to suggest that he was reading far too much into the situation, but his last statement left me speechless. My shock must have been discernible, for he said, “Can you not see it? Jane has no reason to lie, as you say, and Dorothea’s complaint is easily verified, if you have the stomach for it. Un
less Constance Mellor followed you to Saint Nichol, who could it have been but Christine?”

  Disordered by this outburst, I took a moment in order to marshal a response. “Firstly, we do not know that Christine is, as you put it, returning. Her behavior and the quality of her materializations reflect a shift in amplitude, but there is nothing to indicate . . .”

  “If you were working on a jigsaw puzzle and, having completed it save for two or three pieces, you saw that it constituted the picture of a lion, do you believe that adding those few pieces would transform it into the picture of a giraffe?”

  “To use your metaphor, this particular puzzle is missing many more than two or three pieces. We can make no reasonable assumption based on what is known.”

  “As a scientist you must know that the making of assumptions, the construction of hypotheses, is essential to progress. Take, for example, Christine’s reaction to the song ‘Champagne Charlie.’ Are you aware that Christine had a client who wore a mask and whose identity she claimed not to know?”

  “Jane told me. What of it?”

  “When you referred to Constance Mellor in the kitchen, I thought instantly of Charles Mellor. When he was young, he had the reputation of being just such a man as the song describes. He enjoyed gadding about the slums, whoring and drinking in the gin shops of Saint Nichol. It’s possible that he was the masked client and, further, that he funded Christine’s purchase of this house. A sizable portion of his income is derived from the ownership of slum properties. This house may once have belonged to him. I intend to look into the matter. My assumption may be erroneous, but property issues, the change of titles, and so forth . . . it should be easy enough to prove. Now that . . .” He sat up straight, the movement appearing to reflect a sudden and unexpected reinvigoration. “That is merely an assumption. What we have in Christine’s case rises to the level of theory, wouldn’t you say?”

  “No, I would not. The leap one would have to make between an apparition and a revivification, even a temporary one, seems much more extensive than that between your assumption regarding Mellor and his actual guilt. As to that, I trust you will not act precipitately.”

  “When one takes into account your chosen field of study, you seem a strangely conservative thinker,” Richmond said, gazing at me with a ruminative air. “I find it dismaying that you are unable to reach for a height without availing yourself of a stepladder, so to speak.”

  I had no desire to engage in a running metaphorical battle with him and so I let the comment pass.

  “Well,” he said pertly. “You have been warned.”

  “Warned? As to what?”

  “Why . . . Christine.” He seemed baffled by my failure to grasp the obvious. “It is clear that she has designs on you and that you are in danger. I cannot but think that her ghost is in a perpetual state of torment. How can it be otherwise? Life calls to her and she feels the pull of old desires, yet she cannot answer that call. Now, presented with an opportunity to reinhabit the world of the senses, she must be desperate to taste and touch and feel. Christine was ever prone to abrupt shifts in mood and subject to whims and cravings. As they were when she was in love with me, these tendencies have become exaggerated since she made a connection with you. I foresee a time when those whims evolve into wild and erratic impulse, those cravings into compulsion, and she will let nothing stand in the way of her desires.”

  ALTHOUGH IT STRAINED credulity, had anyone aside from Richmond warned me against Christine, I might have taken the warning to heart; but I had detected in him an unsound quality, and our conversation had done nothing to ease my mind on that score. Then, too, I had a more enjoyable and distracting business to complete. The following afternoon I had Richmond’s coachman, Henry Bladge, a sturdy, balding fellow with pork chop whiskers and a round face as unremarkable as a muffin top, convey Jane and me to a tearoom on the edge of Bethnal Green, an establishment with a small garden at the rear that sought to counterfeit a pleasance, offering an air of relative seclusion amidst shrubbery, several young trees, and a pair of stone benches—yet it lay close enough to a gin shop that we could hear the squabbling of that establishment’s poorer patrons who, unable to afford a mug of their poison, stood at the door, holding gin-soaked handkerchiefs to their faces and inhaling the fumes. Snatches of music on occasion drowned out their clamor, testifying to the passage of street musicians. After tea we sat out on a sun-dappled bench, shaded by a thickly leaved elm, and there I told her (more bluntly than I had planned, for I was anxious) that I wished to marry her and make a home with her in Wales. She looked every inch the creature of fashion—under her cashmere shawl, she wore a dress cut from a tartan fabric of brown and green that complemented her eyes and hair, and also matched her sober mien. She did not give me her answer at once, but asked if I intended to complete my investigation.

  “I will do my best for Richmond,” I said, “if that is your concern.”

  “My concern is not only for him, but for Christine.”

  “I have no authority over the spirit world. Were I to promise a satisfactory conclusion in that regard, you would be within your rights to question my veracity.”

  She maintained her reserve. “I doubt myself, Samuel. I wonder if I can make you a suitable wife. Although Christine taught me how to play the lady, that veneer is thin, as you witnessed the other morning. I understand why you would wish to return to Wales with me. Here in London I would be no asset to your career.”

  I objected to this, but she took my hand and said, “Please, Samuel! We must be forthright with each other.”

  “It is true,” I said. “I was initially fearful that my career would be damaged by our union, but as my thoughts on the subject evolved, I feared mainly for you. I did not want you to suffer the scorn that would be heaped upon you by the doyennes of polite society should your past be revealed. Now that we have reached this pass, however, I realize your strength is sufficient to withstand such treatment. You have endured far worse. And I must not allow the course of my career to be dependent on the views of people who belong to a world that is fast disappearing. If you wish to remain in London, remain we shall.”

  “Perhaps that can be a subject for later discussion?”

  “Of course.”

  She glanced up into the elm leaves, as though attracted by some movement there. “Do you think you know me, Samuel? I have been honest with you concerning my past, but I have a great capacity for self-deception. I may have painted myself too much the victim so as to draw you in.”

  “No one is immune to self-deception,” I said. “I doubt the human race would survive without it. As for knowing you, I cannot imagine that any two people at this stage of their lives know each other completely. They can only anticipate learning about the woman or the man they love.”

  “I have one last question,” she said. “I know that your politics predisposes you to have an affection for the underprivileged. Am I to be, then, a kind of political proof, living evidence of that predisposition? A token of your political views, as it were?”

  “Were I a creature of the type who populates the rolls of the Inventors’ Club, I would never have looked at you as other than an object of lust,” I said. “To that extent, politics has played a part in this—it has assisted me in perceiving you for the woman you are. But I swear, that is the only part it played.”

  She drew a breath and released it slowly. “Then I will gladly be your wife, in London or in Wales. That is, if you still want me after all these quibbles and qualifications.”

  We embraced, albeit not for long—prying eyes peered at us through the rear windows of the tearoom—and then left that place, that bench, and its overshadowing elm. I told Henry Bladge to drive us round Hyde Park. It was a rare lovely day, a high, blue day accented by puffs of cloud, and warm for the first week in March, with flights of swallows banking above Kensington Gardens and people taking their ease on the green lawns; but Jane and I hid ourselves behind the curtains of the coach, kissing and conjuring
a future together that, for all its optimism and halcyon vision, had not the slightest chance of coming true.

  RICHMOND BEGAN TO install his new machine several days later and, as the two machines that cleansed the air had been shut down (the one that summoned Christine was not, its operation signaled by a throbbing hum, not the louder, steady rumbling of the others), I took the opportunity to climb up to the roof through a trapdoor accessible by means of a ladder and located in the ceiling close to the elevator. From my vantage on the western side of the roof, standing in a thick carpet of black dust, it seemed I was at the center of a choppy sea contrived of roof peaks and chimneys from which darkling smokes trickled upward to commingle with an overcast of much the same color. Four cylindrical sections had been cut out from the eastern side of the roof, and the machines had been set down in the holes thus created, approximately a third of their height hidden from the view of whoever might peer at then from the adjoining houses. The concentric silver rings (I say, silver, but that word refers merely to their color—I never ascertained the name of the metal from which they had been fashioned) that constituted their exterior rose some fifteen feet above the roof and were pitted and discolored; but the new machine was shiny and taller by half. Altogether they resembled Christmas trees of a futuristic design, three stubby and one attenuated, and appeared quite alien in contrast to the blackened bricks and tiles of their surround. I wondered why this bizarre construction atop Richmond’s house had not been paid more notice by the residents of Saint Nichol, especially considering the noise it produced; but then I recognized that most had little interest as to what happened in the heavens, their eyes being fixed upon the ground, their ears attuned to baser sounds.

  Crouched amidst a clutter of tools (awls, hammers, and so on), Richmond and several workmen were busy bolting down the new machine to an iron plate—I could see the tops of their heads from the edge of the hole. The machine itself differed from the other three not only in height, but also in that various dials and switches occupied the interstices between certain of the concentric rings. I poked around the rooftop for a few minutes more, finding nothing to hold my interest and then, as I prepared to go back down through the trapdoor, I caught sight of an opaque, oblong shape, roughly the size of a man, hovering close by the fourth machine. It trembled, fluttering as would a leaf in a strong wind, and subsequently was drawn out into a thinner, scarflike shape that clung to one of the concentric rings, gliding along it, fitting itself to the ring as though it were a sleeve . . . and then it vanished. I had grown accustomed to ghosts during my stay at Richmond’s house, even to the point of being on speaking terms with one, and their formal apparitions, the images, fragmentary and otherwise, of the men and women they had been in life had almost no effect upon me; but this glimpse of the raw stuff of the spirit—that was how I countenanced it—left me petrified, my heart squeezed and stilled for an instant by cold, steely fingers, and made me fully aware of the depths of the pit into which I had lowered myself.