The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

The water went down, leaving the grass all slicked with mud. Skeins of weeds, and straw, and here a twisted apron, and there a scrap of tatting, stretched out from snags in perfect parallel, as if still tugged by a phantom torrent. The spiders that had been driven by the flood into the trees spun them full of webs that sparkled like bridal veils in the morning, before the dew burned off.

I still had Dr. Peachie’s shirt but had stuffed it into a drawer in the Headmistress’s office that I knew she did not open. After a day or two I had the opportunity to take it out. It was still damp and smelled of cat. And a little of cadaver, I thought ghoulishly. I spread it out on the desk. There was something in the breast pocket, a handkerchief bound turban-like around some knobbly object that proved to be a small ectoplasmoglyph. Poked in beside it was a folded note, creased and inky, but still legible.

Elihu says he can get this to you and he will let me know you rec’d it. I will expect yr reply by same carrier in a week’s time.

Listen, my boy, I am not very easy in my mind. Just imagine how I felt when I saw that letter in the C.G.! I very nearly choked to death on a finger of toast. I gather everyone knows the letter-writer is a crank, but how could you let that happen? Please find the leak and stopper it. Do not doubt that I am firm in our great Purpose but one more piece of bad publicity and I will have no choice but to close the school. We must put the next phase into effect as fast as possible, the problem is to find our man, I am sounding out candidates as fast as can but must be circumspect. I do not know but that it would be better to take the helm myself as you have urged, still it would look bad.²⁵ Only something must be done instanter. That lunatic seems bound and determined to blacken the name of Cheesehill. She is shockingly careless with the misfortunate creatures. (What is going on there? Do they truly visit the Next World or is that moonshine?)

I threw it in the trash, alarmed and repulsed, along with the shirt and handkerchief. Then I pulled it out again, to hide away as evidence, in case “our man” should come. Perhaps Dr. Peachie’s death had upset the letter-writer’s plans, perhaps not. Close the school! That must not happen.

The mouth object was a little damaged, no doubt from being crushed against a tree branch in the flood; I smoothed away the scar, and filed it with all the others.

Later that day the Headmistress said, apropos of nothing, “We are free to imagine that he was carried by our balloon to the land of the dead, like a youthful Wizard of Oz.” Outside, a spade was ringing against stone as with rhythmic strokes the groundskeeper cleared the carriage house of mud. “If so, one might in theory fetch him back. It would be curious if it was death that saved his life.” She looked sharply at me. If I imagined that she cared, I would have thought that she was testing my reaction.

“It is a shame that Dr. Beede’s tutelage was wasted,” I only said. “I suppose he will have to put off his retirement a little longer.”

“He is quizzing the younger children about their studies again,” she said, turning away from the window, and, picking up a dry pen, drew it slowly across a blotter, its sharp point raising a series of parallel scars. “Finster is among them,” she added. Finster had stepped up her campaign lately, as if hurrying to have her vengeance before the Headmistress passed beyond her (or anyone’s) reach, and I took her meaning.

I set down the manuscript I was correcting and rose. “With your permission, I will see if I can draw him off,” I said.

She raised her head and regarded me mildly. “We have nothing to hide,” she said, her hand not relenting in its violence to the page.

“Of course not,” I said. “My motives are entirely selfish. I have been afflicted with the bloat, and wanted to coax a digestive from his black bag. That is, if you can spare my services.”

“I would be a sorry employer indeed to require my transcriptionist to forge on in despite of ‘the bloat.’” Smiling at the homely term, as I had intended, she set down her pen.

Having inveigled the doctor with tea and cakes into abandoning his inquiries, engaged him in trivial gossip, and ushered him firmly to his carriage, I returned. The spatter of gravel could be heard receding down the drive as I sealed the office door behind me. I took my place again, and we resumed our work.

A half hour later, “You are a smart girl,” she said, not lifting her head from her work. “Take a dollar from my bag and buy yourself a trinket.”

“I don’t want trinkets.”

She raised her head. “Buy whatever you do want, then, girl. Do you think I am interested in how you spend your money?” She put down her pen and shook the cramps out of her hand.

“What I want does not cost money,” I said. She raised her eyebrows. “I want more responsibility.”

“Do you indeed.”

I clenched my hands in my lap. “Yes, Headmistress.”

Unexpectedly, her voice deepened and rushed with winds. “The day is coming when you will have more responsibility, whether you want it or not.”

“What?” I said, inelegantly.

“What?” she said, and pressing a wad of gauze to her mouth, coughed a red flower. Smearing the spot gently with her thumb, she frowned, in a distracted and slightly impatient way, as if, compared to her other troubles, dying were a mere inconvenience.

At the clink of glass on glass, she reached out a hand without looking up, and I settled in it a snifter of paregoric.

The blanched fold of skin pinched between her brows was just softening when there was a knock. Miss Exiguous opened the door a crack, her eyebrows raised in apologetic obsequy, and threaded herself through it. (She could of course have opened the door all the way, but that would have spoken of self-regard.) Now she crossed the room in what was meant as a girlish swoop, knees cracking, drew an ivory fan out of her sleeve, and began furiously fanning the Headmistress. “I do wish we could forbid visitors. They tire you so!”

“The school requires patronage.”

“I know, I know, but what, what,” she said, “a shame! That someone doing such important, such necessary work, should be obliged to pander to—”

“I do not pander.” The telephone on her desk chimed softly with the jiggling of the Headmistress’s knee.

“Of course not! Of course not! I misspoke. The quintessence of dignity! But that you allow yourself to be wearied, and I know you are wearied, by the importunities of a boorish paterfamilias or, such presumption, a journalist, is”—the fan was closed to permit the extraction of a handkerchief from the other sleeve, which was applied to the outer corner of one eye—“beyond words magnanimous.” She dropped to her knees. “Allow me to unlace your boots and chafe your feet.”

The Headmistress leaned back in her chair and with one cold eye open on the aureole of thinning reddish hair within which her subordinate’s skull could be clearly seen, let my senses extend through narrow corridors, lofty galleries, narrow lightwells and plunging airshafts, dumbwaiters, crawl spaces, and attics. The school was settling down again. The evening noises rose. I took another sip of paregoric; I opened my throat to another world; a cold wind whistled through my teeth and fogged the glass.

I mean her teeth. What a very odd mistake to make. But as I said before, I have become very good at guessing her feelings. It is almost as though I felt them myself.