Haunted

by Lynn Carthage

  I was sixteen: I could’ve gone to the doctor alone if I’d taken responsibility for myself. I could’ve Googled fainting. Whatever. I could’ve tried harder.

  My first job had been to save Tabby’s life. Now that that was done, I wanted to figure out a way to tell Mom I was okay, that I didn’t blame her.

  I walked out of the nursery and nearly screamed at what I saw. Three maids stood in the hallway. One handed the other a stack of linens and the third was carrying a tray of tea. When they noticed me, they bobbed quick curtseys.

  If I’d killed Madame Arnaud, why weren’t these servants released?

  I drifted around the hallways of the west wing, looking at those obscenely happy murals, the flocks of sheep that filed across the meadow to lay their soft heads in ladies’ laps, the gentlemen crowning the duchesses with garlands of flowers they’d languidly woven themselves, as evidenced by the discarded blooms near their reclining legs. I wanted to make sure Madame Arnaud was gone, because the ghosts were still here. I was constantly sidestepping them: servants and children, as if nothing had happened.

  I found my way to the room I’d been in before, then penetrated into the inner chamber, her bedroom. I creaked open the door and saw an enormous carved wooden box that took up nearly the entire room—a cupboard bed, meant to conserve heat in the days when no furnaces brought warm air through the night. I walked over and placed my hand on the paneling that I knew could be pulled open.

  I slid open the panel. Dark tapestries covered the interior walls: hunters with their arrows still in the quiver but their faces aware of the prey before them, the deer who bent their tawny necks to survey the men behind them filing through the trees. A single candle rested on a shelf against the far wall, sending guttering light through the dimness and glinting off a brooch with the inscription of three x’s. Shadows marched the walls like toy soldiers.

  As my eyes adjusted, I saw feathers scattered everywhere; there were holes in the mattress.

  “Nice try, Eleanor,” I said, turning my head to address her. I’d felt from the tug in my chest that she had joined me.

  “I spent many years here serving her,” she said. “I haven’t been back since the night I did this.”

  I held up a feather on my palm and blew it at her. “I think she’s gone,” I said. “But why are all the ghosts here?”

  I thought about the toddler in the gardens. I especially wanted to deliver some peace to that poor tortured child. The servants didn’t need to feel guilt any longer; they had done their time. And the children? Hopefully there were loving arms somewhere for them to be folded into.

  “I don’t know,” said Eleanor. “I thought once Madame Arnaud was dead, everyone would be released.”

  “I thought so, too,” I said.

  I stared down at the snowy white feathers, mussed and erratic, as if a swan had gone through her death throes here. Whoever Madame Arnaud’s lady’s maid was, the one who replaced Eleanor, she hadn’t bothered to repair or replace the mattress.

  “Let’s find Miles,” I said. “We’ve got to figure something out.”

  We found him in the children’s cemetery, staring moodily at a gravestone in front of him.

  “There are still kids in the house,” he said hoarsely.

  “I know,” I murmured. “What can we do?”

  “I thought you did what we had to do,” he said. “And I didn’t expect to see this.” He pointed to the gravestone.

  LAVINIA WHITTLEBY

  ~

  A Loss We Cannot Measure

  A Cherub Called to the Stars

  ~

  b. Feb. 16, 1799

  d. Nov. 1, 1799

  “That’s my last name,” he said.

  I did the math, reluctantly. February to November— Lavinia hadn’t even been nine months old. She was one of the children, then, who didn’t realize she was dead. He would never have seen her here at the manor, which was, I suppose, a good thing.

  “Did your family ever speak of her?” Eleanor asked.

  It took Miles a while to answer, and I saw he was shaking. “Never.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “Seventeen ninety-nine,” he said. “How can I be sad about someone who died over two hundred years ago?”

  “Very easily,” I said. “Madame Arnaud is a monster. Of course you’re upset about your ancestor.”

  I felt a twinge of guilt. I had nothing to do with this. I had fought a valiant fight; I had done everything I could. But looking at Miles’s grim face, I realized that I was allied with the family that had caused this pain. I might even be an Arnaud, if his theory was right.

  Miles was just one of hundreds who had cried throughout the generations, cried bitterly for the lost children and the empty cradles. They had tried to comfort each other around the firesides and tramped outside in the chill air to spit toward the manor hidden by its duplicitous greenery. So much hatred, so much helplessness.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, but this time it was less about solace and more about feeling responsible to some degree.

  He looked at me with an expression I can describe only as cold. His gaze swung back down again to his ancestor’s stone. He seemed lost in some private reverie. Eleanor gave me a significant look and walked away slowly, reading the names off other stones.

  Below us, infant Lavinia tossed in her miniature pine box or whatever Madame Arnaud had deigned to pay for. Maybe nothing but dirt and leaves covered her. Maybe her burial had been nothing more than a hasty dig in the dirt by an aggrieved servant, who muttered the best prayers he could before Madame Arnaud summoned him back to more useful duties. Her parents had not had the chance to kneel here and say their good-byes … for all they knew, Madame Arnaud had tossed the small soul into the woods for the wolves to devour.

  Lavinia’s tiny fingers had never grown, never held anything of substance. Her skull remained a diminutive braincase. Odds are she’d never come to standing, merely lay helpless or crawled for the entirety of her short life. Although her mouth had issued cries and sounds, by nine months she’d never said a word, never been able to express to her family any semblance of the love she surely felt. She’d been deprived in the most profound way possible.

  I stared at her stone and tried to broadcast my love down to her through the sod and worms, past the white, fibrous weed roots that dangled above her like stalactites.

  I sent my love down through the beetles plodding past her bones or perching on them like they were skyscraper girders.

  “Grow up, Lavinia,” I said in my mind. “Come into your own.”

  Miles reached out a hand to touch her tombstone—and the instant his fingers touched the surface, the world changed.

  That undercurrent of hushed voices, of sadness, that Miles had taught me to listen to became a long, anticipatory inrush of breath …

  … then the deafening roar of a thousand voices shouting. I clapped my hands to my ears, and fell to my knees. The volume was so intense it felt like someone was hitting every one of my teeth with a hammer. The din washed through me and I could do nothing but open my own mouth in a silent howl to relieve the pressure in my ears.

  The sound went on and on, scorching my brain, letting no other stimuli enter my consciousness. It was like an old locomotive train, oversized and made of iron, scraping along the rails, carving them into slices as it went.

  Then, as if each of those shouting people realized how fiendish they sounded, a respectful quiet fell. I let my hands drop from my ears.

  A bundle of light rose from Lavinia’s grave and hung in the air, golden and fragile as a prince’s fairy-tale egg.

  As I watched, awestruck, the light gently morphed and stretched. It looked like a cocoon elongating as if a butterfly inside pushed. I squinted my eyes … what was blurry and light-dazzling became more clear. Hanging in midair was a baby slumbering under a blanket.

  The blanket rolled back as if by a mother’s loving fingers, and the infant’s limbs stretched and
fattened.

  The fingers lengthened … the spine stretched.

  I looked deep into the throb of light and found the child’s eyes. She was staring at Miles with a gentle admiration. But the babyish expression soon altered; she grew some understanding. Her eyes sharpened.

  She was twice the size now, growing and translucent. I could see her name on the tombstone through her shining body. She slid through toddlerhood and into girlhood. She lost her pudgy cheeks. I grabbed Miles’s hand.

  She continued growing older. Her face changed significantly, and lean legs surged down out of her body. Her clothing changed—no longer the short pinafore of a child, but the long skirts of a young woman. Her arms and legs became muscular.

  The scant curls that the eight-month-old had first shown us had grown from her head continuously the whole time, like a mechanical loom spitting out weave. The now thick, luxuriant hair pulled itself back tightly into a proper bun. Her feet nearly touched the ground, but she still hovered an inch or so above. She was our height, slightly older than Miles and me. She glimmered there, solid and sure of herself.

  A cap appeared on her head, and her dress instantly went black. She spread her arms and a bibbed apron tucked itself through them. “She would have been a maid if she lived,” whispered Miles.

  “We’ve been waiting so long,” said Lavinia in a voice like an old record, slightly warped. “We despaired that our families would ever come for us.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw golden light emerge from another grave. And another. Now, lights were everywhere, like a klatch of fireflies. Each grave was offering up its inhabitant. The shine of these children fought away the darkness.

  They all started at different ages—whenever they’d been killed, I guessed. It was like those time-lapse movies they showed us in grade school, where a seedling pokes from the soil, wavers toward the sky, thickens and produces a bud, then a bloom, all in ten seconds.

  The children cycled quickly through their would-be lives, from infant to toddler to child to teen with breathtaking speed, to land on what looked like their early twenties. Why? Why were they all roughly the same age?

  I surveyed the shining adults suspended over their graves, regarding us with serious faces. I kept watching until it dawned on me. They were all at their most vital stage, men with muscled forearms, women ready to step onto the ground with quick step. A few were quite old, which made me realize strength didn’t always have to do with age.

  “You can release them,” I said. “Miles, you’re the only one here connected to the children—to one of them.”

  Eleanor had crept back to us, and seized my hand. I stared up at the glowing people and an idea inserted itself into my mind. I had been able to vanquish Madame Arnaud because I was an Arnaud. I swallowed as I admitted this to myself.

  Miles could release the children because he was related to one of them. Lavinia had even said they’d been waiting for their families to come.

  Miles took a step backward until he could hold my other hand. We stood together, the three of us, firm and strong.

  “I release you,” he said. “I’m sorry your families couldn’t come for you. I’m here now. And I’m so sorry.”

  I closed my eyes in relief, thinking these were the words that mattered. The children would be gone when I opened them.

  And perhaps Eleanor could release the servants, because she had been a servant in this house. We were a mighty triumvirate. We each had a role to play, a specific part that required us to be united with one another. It had something to do with the good force around the house. It had sent me to Eleanor’s room to find her diary, but Madame Arnaud had interfered. It was the second time—with Miles—that we’d found our ally through her diary.

  Maybe once we’d each done our particular job, we would release ourselves.

  I would be so sad to say good-bye to Miles—and now to Eleanor, too. I would want one last glance at my mom, at Tabby … and at the man who was perhaps … no, who undoubtedly was my father.

  I opened my eyes. The children were still there. I looked at Miles’s face in profile. I saw a muscle in his jaw twitch: he was grinding his teeth. Frustrated.

  I heard Eleanor gasp and whipped my head around. Coming through the gates of the cemetery was a long parade of the servants. They came, hundreds of them, and formed in regimented lines facing the children. It reminded me of how servants would come outside the manor to greet important guests, arranging themselves in their obvious servitude.

  They were sobbing.

  Even the men, stoic, had tears running down their cheeks.

  “We need someone to speak for us,” said Maud Pike, the maid who had been looking for Cook for her orders. She pointed to Eleanor. “You’re the one to do it.”

  Eleanor bowed her head and I thought she was going to refuse. When she lifted her head, her face was streaked with tears.

  “I will,” she said. “I will humbly and with great remorse speak for the servants.” I squeezed her hand and she squeezed back.

  She pivoted her head around, giving eye contact to each of the grown children in turn, a long, silent passage of acknowledgment, flowing to and from them.

  “Children came into this household,” she said. “And better than the somber issue of the Arnauds, you village children knew how to laugh. That is, if you were old enough to. The high spirits you brought to the manor … well, at first we thought ’twas a fine and good thing. Who can ever hear a child chortling down a hallway and not get up to grinning oneself?

  “It took us a bit to understand what was truly going on. Rumblings among the servants who saw the feeding chamber firsthand. But it is difficult, almost impossible, to believe in such a vile and desperate bit of gossip.”

  The children watched her quietly.

  “By the time we fully grasped what was happening, we felt it was too late. Children were already dead. We didn’t know what to do. We would pass the word along to the new servants, thinking they might have the energy to do what we were too foolish to try … and so time passed. Children, I eventually got up my courage. I tried to kill Madame Arnaud—but I failed.”

  She ran her hands over her cap in a gesture of complete and utter disconsolation. “I failed at the only important thing I could have ever done.”

  “You tried,” cried slender Maud Pike, her face twisted in concern. “You tried and the saints bless ye for it!”

  “And ’twas your death that let me leave this hell-forsaken place,” said another servant, a man I hadn’t seen before. “After the day the village uprose, I returned to a simple honest life, as did most of us that had been in service here.”

  Eleanor turned to me and gave me a shocked look. How had her death helped?

  “What wretchedness has plagued the stones of this manor,” said Lavinia, before I could follow the line of reasoning. “It is a doomed place of much sadness.”

  She was as transparent as convent-made crystal, seemingly frail, but her voice carried. “I forgive you, all of you,” she said.

  The servants of one accord gave a raw moan.

  “Bless you, dear girl,” said Eleanor.

  “You’re my family,” said Miles to Lavinia. “I hope you find peace now.”

  Lavinia gave him a rueful smile, then disappeared. Not in the vapory slow way I would expect; she vanished as if someone had snapped his fingers.

  Another man cleared his throat. He was a plowman and held a bread-sized stone dislodged centuries ago. Its pitted surface still held soil from the Arnaud fields. “I forgive you, all of you,” he said. He gave a brief nod, as if for a job neatly completed, and disappeared.

  A laundress spoke up, holding her basket of washing to her tilted hip. “I forgive you, all of you,” she said. She winked out like a lamp.

  A seamstress, a chambermaid with her ash-filled bucket and brush, a blacksmith with his anvil lightly floating by his feet, a stablehand holding leather, a scullery maid with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, on and on. Ea
ch one took their turn with dignity.

  I saw the toddler from the back gardens; he had lost his feral look as he became an affable-looking gentleman who held a black medical bag.

  Miles and I shared a look. “Thank God,” he said.

  When the last glowing being had extinguished, I turned to look at the rank of servants. I could barely see them in the dark. I was aware of their shapes, grieving and yet exhilarated. One woman untied her apron and threw it to the side. It landed on one of the tombstones. It looked like one of the monuments in the family’s graveyard, where a sculpted mantle draped an urn.

  “Our work here is finally done,” said Eleanor to the gathered servants.

  Ice filled my gut as I watched all of them turn their gaze to me. Eleanor, too. She let go of my hand and went to stand with them.

  I understood this at the deepest level possible. They saw me as the mistress of the house.

  “I …” I faltered. Miles stepped closer to me so I could lean against his shoulder.

  “I release you all. I thank you for your years of good and faithful service.” I closed my eyes, moved beyond belief—and sickened to think I truly was an Arnaud.

  When I opened them, the servants were gone. Without a word, as they’d done all their lives, they’d withdrawn silently. Only Eleanor remained, looking frightened.

  But … what about us? We’d conquered Madame Arnaud, we’d released the children, freed the servants … wasn’t that the mission we had to accomplish, to be able to move on to whatever stage death held for us?

  “I don’t get it,” said Miles.

  “Why didn’t I go with them?” cried Eleanor. I let go of Miles’s hand and rushed to her, enfolding her in a fierce embrace.

  “Looks like we’re all still stuck together,” I said.

  Miles gave me a determined, cockeyed grin, but Eleanor could not be consoled. He and I had been dead only awhile. She’d spent over a century in that state, and she wanted release.

  “Eleanor, we’ll figure it out,” I pleaded with her. “There’s another step we’re missing. There’s something else we have to do.”