Damien, the crinkle-eyed cowherd who minded the animals of the estate and drove the big tractor, the kind of man who was father and grandfather rolled into one, insisted that such things could not be forced. “Ghosts are an unruly lot,” he would say to her. “Can’t shift too much around at once. They’ll take a shine yet, bless.”
Shyly, Gwendolyn asked, “Will she ever . . . ?”
But she did not finish and Damien looked away as men do when they are sad and do not want to show it. Then he took her hand very carefully, as if it were one of the fine porcelain figures the duchess kept in her study. “I do not think so, love. Their kind”—meaning the ghosts, of course—“they stay for fear, or for anger, or for loneliness. Your mum, bless, she had none of that in her bones and too much of the other stuff. She’d have found somewhere better to rest herself, never you fear.”
Gwendolyn smiled a little, and she got on about the business of managing the place as best she could. But after a particularly bad day, when mad old William, the former count of Shrewsbury, had given her such a nasty shock that she had twisted her ankle on the uneven stairs, Gwendolyn decided enough was enough. It was one thing to have to deal with the tourists that filtered in every summer—they were strangers—but the ghosts were something closer to family. She missed her mum badly, but it was just too hard to shut herself away from a world glimpsed in strange accents and half-snatched conversations, a world enticing as any unknown thing is to a girl who lives among the dead, only to face the scorn and distemper of the closest thing to relatives she still had.
“I can’t abide it,” she confessed in a whisper to Damien as she cast her sad gaze over the roses clinging to the south wall of the garden where she had scattered her mother’s ashes. “They never acted up like this for mum.”
“Your mum, bless, she had more iron in her blood than the fifth cavalry had on their backs. Even those roses grow straighter and bloom brighter for fear of disappointing her.”
“I wish she were here,” Gwendolyn said.
“I know, love, I know.”
And so Gwendolyn packed her belongings into an old steamer trunk her mum had bought but never used, and she bid the duchess goodbye in the afternoon, as the sun slanted through the window into the blue room and lit up the silk trimmings so that they shone. Montague lay curled in a corner, breathlessly twitching in sleep, his tongue lolling like the edge of a bright pink ribbon. The duchess plucked at the needlework, fingers mindlessly unpicking what she had done, her only sign of agitation as she smiled a soft smile and bid Gwendolyn go. Then she cast her sad, milky eyes downwards, and patted Montague on the head with a kind of familiarity and gentleness that Gwendolyn never saw in the hurried, boisterous jostling of the tourists.
Gwendolyn did not look away then, though she desperately wanted to, because when you love someone, best beloved, and you know you will not see them again then, in the way of these things, you have to look.
Gwendolyn gritted her teeth and she looked until she couldn’t bear the weight of that ancient gaze any longer. Then she bent over, and kissed the old woman’s forehead, skin as light as brown paper wrapping, so that she could feel the hard bone of the skull underneath.
Then Gwendolyn turned, and in her turning something heavy seemed to fall away from her: the afternoon sun slanting through the window seemed full of hope and promise and if, here, it fell on only the aged, the dying and the dead and there, somewhere, it might also be falling upon things that glittered with their own newness. If she had been listening, Gwendolyn might have heard a whispered goodbye, and: “Please, my darling, do not come back.” But with the sorry task of farewells done, Gwendolyn’s mind was already ten miles ahead of her feet.
London was the place she had seen in that afternoon-sun vision, a city sharp with hope, glass and steel glittering above streets paved with crisp-wrappers and concrete. She loved the cramped and smelly Tube ride, the tangle of lines that ran beneath the city, the curved cramped space where she would be crowded against men in clean-cut jackets, some slumped over so their backs curved along with the frame, girls dressed in leather, or chiffon, sitting demurely or hurling insults at one another with complete abandon. She loved the cluttered streets, the brown brick walls and white-trimmed windows. Everything was pressed so closely together she could put out both arms and touch the walls on either side of her dormitory room.
There were no ghosts in London, best beloved, not where the living took up so much space. Her roommate, Cindy—you wouldn’t like her, she was a lithe, long-legged girl from America who liked to wear heavy perfume and talk to her boyfriend in New York until ungodly hours of the morning—looked at her oddly when she spoke of them.
“We don’t have anything like that back home,” she’d say in a thick accent that seemed to misplace all the vowels and leave only the consonants in place. “In America, we like to get on with it, you know, lose the baggage.”
Gwendolyn liked the idea of getting on with it. Losing the baggage. She liked living without ghosts. She was a city girl now, a Londoner, a girl from London, and she gave herself to the city, let the city transform her the way all cities transform the people who inhabit them. She started wearing heavy perfume and putting on thick, black mascara that promised to give her THE LONDON LOOK, make her eyelashes—formerly stubby and mouse-brown like mine, yes, just like that—long and curving with 14X the volume. Like a movie star, Gwendolyn thought, staring at the fringe of it, the way it curled up away from her eyes in an altogether pleasing manner. She got herself a boyfriend, learned something about snogging, got herself another and learned something about the things that come after snogging.
Gwendolyn wanted to be very like Cindy with her know-it-all attitude and her keen sense of how to get on with things. Soon enough the boyfriend back in New York had disappeared entirely, replaced by one from Oxford or Cambridge—she couldn’t remember which, only that his college was one of the better ones, one of the rich ones. Cindy didn’t shed a tear. “What’s the point?” Cindy asked. “He’s back home. No use crying over what’s not here.”
Gwendolyn liked that as well, and she said it over in her mind many times, “No use crying.” This was some relief in and of itself, for the mascara made crying a sticky, abysmal business. No one in London cried. You couldn’t pull off THE LONDON LOOK unless you kept your eyes bone dry. Soon Gwendolyn could pass rose bushes without ever thinking about the flowers on the south wall, the ones that grew straighter and brighter than any other in the garden. The roses in London were much smaller anyway, cramped into the gardens of townhouses or clinging to what light they could in the cracks between stones. They weren’t proper roses, but sickly little things with barely any colour at all. No, it was very rarely now that Cindy would pull Gwendolyn aside, squinting, and tell her to fix up her face, the mascara was running.
The duchess paid for her education, discreetly of course, and Gwendolyn promised herself she would write in thanks, but she never did. She started with a major in French, but Cindy advised against that—“Don’t trust the French here, do they?”—so she switched over to Psychology.
It wasn’t until graduation (in Art History, not Psychology after all) several years later that Gwendolyn received a letter from the post. Cindy was preparing to move back to Chicago where she would be engaged to a fellow with an MBA from Harvard (not the Oxford fellow, after all) and had invited Gwendolyn to come with her and try out the Second City—for that’s what they called Chicago in America. London had been Gwendolyn’s first city, and if Cindy taught her anything it was that you could never stay with your first, could you? Not with cities. Not with men.
That sounded like a fine enough plan to Gwendolyn, and Chicago seemed like a fine enough place with its aboveground rail service and broad city sidewalks and gleaming steel towers, a place even newer than London. But then the letter came with its rich, velvety paper and the four stamped eglantine roses on the envelope. Gwendolyn felt her fingers shaking as she opened it.
It regretted to inform her of the passing of Lady Sirith of Hardwick Hall, twentieth Duchess of Shrewsbury, Patron of the Silver Garter, and a list of other titles that Gwendolyn only half-remembered. It was customary for a member of the family to sit in mourning at the manor and as she had no living family, the duchess requested that Gwendolyn do the necessary duties. Of course, continued the letter in a quite majestic manner, the terms of her bequest were quite clear and should Gwendolyn not arrive in three days’ time, she would be required to pay back the sum spent on her education.
Cindy pooh-poohed and turned up her tiny mouth in a moue when Gwendolyn shared the news. “What an old bitch,” she said, “threatening to make you pay all that money. It’s just as well she’s in the worm trough.”
Gwendolyn nodded her head, but kept silent. The four roses had sparked a long-neglected sense of familial obligation in her, and she thought that maybe it was proper to visit her mum’s grave one last time, to say a proper goodbye, before the government claimed the old manor for a fully renovated heritage centre.
Her bags were already packed, so she saw Cindy off to the airport and then rode the Tube (still cramped, still noisy, still flush with warm bodies crowding up against one another) to King’s Cross Station where she boarded a train heading to Derbyshire.
Gwendolyn stared out the window, fidgeting sometimes, watching the rolling hills and quilted landscape with increasing apprehension, and asking all the kinds of questions young people ask when they go home again. Would Damien still be there, carrying toffee in his pocket for all those long years, just in case she returned? Would she still know the stones, the places to avoid on the stairs, the tricky bumps on the floor? Would the air smell the same, the sun cast its light just so, the tourists still flash their cameras and chatter on with noisy, Yankee excitement? But most of all, would the roses still grow straighter and brighter on the south wall than anywhere else in the garden? They were warm thoughts, sad thoughts, and when her mascara began to run, Gwendolyn wiped her face raw.
When she pulled into the station, Damien met her with a car from the estate. He looked nervous, picked at the dirt on his clothes with broad, flat fingers and smiled hastily, before averting his eyes away from her. He spoke a little on the ride to the manor house of inconsequential things, little threads that wound around Gwendolyn, picking out her absence, not with cruelty, but with a thousand stories resumed midway whose characters were no longer familiar.
“And the ghosts?” Gwendolyn asked at one point. Damien only looked at her queerly and pursed her lips. Finally, the car turned past the property fence, sped past the visitor car park, and arrived at the gates. “Your dress looks quite pretty.” He smiled almost shyly. “New London fashion, I’d be guessing.” Then he was tipping his hat ever so slightly, as if he couldn’t decide if she were family or royalty, before disappearing entirely.
Gwendolyn walked the grounds like a nervous cat, feet delicately treading the path. She tiptoed past the lavender and lilac, remarked at the blush of poppies that had sprouted at odd intervals along the sides of the path, and finally turned the corner, past the old wrought-iron bench where honeymooners liked to get their picture taken, towards the south wall.
She was relieved to see that Damien had spent most of his efforts there. Even if the rest of the gardens looked a little shabbier, a little wilder than she had last seen them, the roses on the south wall still bloomed like giant, delicate clouds in hues that ranged from pink to orange-edged cream and yellow. They were beautiful, and looking at them, Gwendolyn felt tears welling up and she was glad the mascara was gone, that it couldn’t make a dark muddle of her face.
And at last, Damien returned to take her to see the duchess.
The light was just starting to fade from the Blue Room, best beloved, leaving half- glimmers of turquoise and aquamarine like seashells on a beach. The air was warm from the afternoon sun, but there the duchess sat, unaffected, in her favourite seat, threadbare skin revealing the gnarls and whorls of ancient bones in her hands as she worked with a needle and thread at the stitching she always kept with her.
“My lady?” Gwendolyn asked softly, waiting at the door to be acknowledged as she’d been taught once, a long time ago, the proper forms of address feeling as odd as the unlearned French in her mouth.
The old woman’s head nodded, and Gwendolyn approached, her feet already beginning to remember the soft give of the rush matting. But then those sad, milky eyes turned on her with a long, terrible stare and she said in a drawn-out, lisping voice that Gwendolyn barely recognized: “Who are you?”
I know, love, this is one of the sadder parts. So you may hold my hand if you wish, if that might make it easier for you to hear.
So. The duchess. She demanded of Damien in her lisping, stranger voice: “I don’t know who this woman is. Why is she here?” The hands continued to work at the cloth, and Gwendolyn looked down to watch the threads unravelling, yes, just so, one by one, as she pulled at them, leaving only little holes in the silk where the needle had bound them in.
“My children lay unborn in a dead woman’s womb, my brother’s children unburied in the North Sea, at Normandy, on the banks. I asked for my blood, my bones, the children of my ancestors. Who is this one?”
And Damien replied: “It’s Gwendolyn, my lady. I’m sorry.”
At hearing her name, Gwendolyn turned behind her, but her gaze was blinded by a bolt of blue, the last light of the dying sun. She couldn’t see the old cowherd’s face.
“She is nothing. She wears strange clothes, speaks with a strange tongue. She is none of mine.”
And, oh, best beloved, pick, pick, pick went her fingers until the cloth practically fell apart in her hands.
Gwendolyn felt something unravelling inside her, and though she knew it was she who had made herself the stranger, it hurt terribly to be recognized as such. She fled the room, stumbling past Damien and down the uneven stairs, half tripping, half leaping until her toes touched gravel, and beyond that, the soft grass of the gardens. And there, she stood, by the south wall, sobbing, while the roses quavered around her in the breeze.
She wasn’t alone then, no, Damien stood beside her. “The dead are a hard lot,” he said. His face looked sad. “They’ve been picking the place apart like vultures since you left.”
But in that moment he was neither father nor grandfather enough to comfort her. “There aren’t any ghosts in London,” Gwendolyn whispered. And then: “I don’t want any more ghosts.”
“I know, love.” He said softly, and his hands were as cold and chilly as any dead man’s when he touched her.
Afterward: “You’ll be leaving in the morning then?”
“Yes. But I must sit my vigil first. Blood or no blood.”
Vultures, Damien had called them, best beloved, picking apart the seams of things. Gwendolyn saw it everywhere. The tables lay in pieces in the games room, the joints torn out, the curtains frayed to rags and trailing threads where they brushed the floor, the library littered with pages, paper from the new books—the history ones Duchess Hardwick collected from the Folio Society—and parchment from the very old ones, which had not been sent off to the Bodleian to pay the death duties over the last generations. The place smelt musty, and the flakes of gilt and paint glittered in the air.
This was what the ghosts had done. This was what ghosts were, my love—decay, ruination, things falling apart, coming undone, the terrible passage of time.
Gwendolyn felt an awful longing for the city, the ache that comes into the heart of all young people who leave and come home and wish they could leave again. But Gwendolyn could not leave. There was duty still to be done. The vigil.
And so, with a heavy heart, she took up the old duties once again—to clean, to mend, to care for—and Gwendolyn began to pick up the pages, to shuffle them back into the correct sequence, often squinting at the pencil folio notes in the corners made by visiting scholars to make sure she got it as correct as possibl
e. She set the pages between the wooden boards in which they had originally been bound. She tried to forgive the ghosts for the destruction of her home and the bright, wondrous things she had loved as a child. She tried not to hate them.
It was only when she found the body of poor, dead Montague—flies crawling around the place where his stomach had been ripped open—that she began to recognize the queer feeling in the pit of her stomach as fear.
Ghosts could be something else, she remembered. They were not always kind.
Gwendolyn knelt beside the poor beast—hush now, darling, I know, I know, but it is how it happened in the story—and she stroked his once-silky coat, and said gentle things to him about loyalty and love. She unbuckled the collar from around his neck, and carried his body out to the garden to bury.
There was a spade lying by the south wall, where the roses grew straight and bright, as if one among them at least had known what ought to be done. She had not done much physical labour during her time in London, and her arms had forgotten much of their strength. By the end, her back ached, and dirt lined the insides of her fingernails. But, there, in front of her, was a hole approximately three feet by three feet. She feared digging deeper. She did not want to disturb the roses.
She laid Montague’s limp body in the ground, and scattered the petals of four roses over top. It hurt her to pluck them, but she thought there ought to be something beautiful to mark the grave, even if he was just a dog.
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