If Anna and I had been of a better class, it would have been unthinkable for us to accept an invitation anywhere so soon after our mother’s death. As things stood, it was dubious for all sorts of reasons. But Anna was excited by the prospect of flowers and cakes, and I couldn’t resist seeing her happy again, if only for a few hours.
I had been watching her small face bowed in the corners, her movements limp and void of childish energy. Her grief weighed terribly on my heart. I would have done anything to lighten it, and I was grateful for the opportunity.
Still: much as I liked the Reverend, I was wary. He was a committed Spiritualist, after all, even if I didn’t understand quite how that sorted with his Christianity. I knew he was too good a man to coerce me into letting myself be tied to a chair for his friends’ entertainment, but I feared some subtler attempt to coax me back. My impressions of the séance had not improved on reflection. Instead the images had only grown more horrifying, like some phosphorescent growth on the darkness. And when I thought of the twittering little voice that had perched in my mouth, my insides went slick with dread.
I didn’t understand that I had met with a man who accepted my refusal wholly, graciously, and with no secret reservations. Nor did I know how very much I would come to love him; that in my hidden heart I would honor him as my truest father. If spirits could return to the living and speak to them, be assured that I would have done my best to comfort him after my murder! Though, of course, my apparition is something less than comforting.
In any case, we went. Two days later we tugged on our mourning dresses—Anna’s, like mine, a well-worn hand-me-down—and walked the three miles to the farmhouse the Skelleys had rented while the new Universalist church and rectory were completed. It was small, old, and isolated at the edge of a beech wood, though in good repair. Thomas met us in front and led us through a side gate and into a magnificent rose garden in full bloom. We were the only guests apart from a pair of doddering old sisters whose names escape me now, there I suppose to protect our reputations. Since they mostly smiled vaguely at the roses and sometimes muttered to each other, we soon forgot about them. The cakes and sandwiches and imported candies were lavish enough to suggest that Reverend Skelley had some sort of private income, and Anna was shyly delighted.
Even cake and tea can only cover awkwardness for so long. I asked after his injuries, he asked after mine, both of us skirting the question of just where our bruises had come from. I’d lied to my family, of course, and said my swollen cheek was the result of a fall; I could hardly tell my father that Gertrude Farrow had hit me. Thomas watched us sidelong, unspeaking while he sipped his tea. I could tell from the bend of the air that the Reverend had something specific to say to me, but the odd freedom that had formed between us on our moonlit ride was gone. The roses’ fragrance rose in billows so dense that they seemed to stop up my throat.
We were saved by a flash of green on Thomas’s sleeve. “Tiger beetle!” he exclaimed—the first words out of his mouth beyond a murmured hello and the garden’s this way. He swallowed his tea at a gulp and gently knocked the beetle into the empty cup, then trapped it with his saucer. “We’ll look at it later under the microscope.”
A microscope! “Can I look too?” I asked before I could check myself. “That is—I’ve never had the chance—”
Reverend Skelley beamed at me. “Of course you would seek truth in nature! How could we deny you?” Soon Thomas and I had abandoned propriety to huddle together over the instrument, and he was showing me how to focus the lenses. I still recall that iridescent carapace revealed as a gleaming green net, dotted with round protrusions. Here, I thought, was the veil truly torn away; here was the proof that all the wonders of sorcery were tawdry, tinsel things compared to those wonders that were, that had no thought of showmanship, that were animated by no egotism.
Please recall, my artificial reader, that you belong squarely in the former category. A made thing, with no life but what magic grants you.
Please recall that I pitied you as long as I could, until you left me no choice other than hatred.
Thomas brought out his other specimens. His usual shrinking, halting manner became far more open when he was discussing the morphology of mandibles.
The afternoon was waning. There was a rustling as the Misses Whoever rose to take their leave, which meant that we must as well—and Anna and I had left chores undone—and yet I didn’t want to go.
“Miss Bildstein?” It was Reverend Skelley; he’d appeared beside me, soft-footed, his voice like falling dust. “I hope you’ll excuse my presumption, which I admit is inordinate. I’ve heard reports that you hoped to study at a high school, and found it impracticable.” He was couching my failure in these terms to shield me from embarrassment, of course, but he didn’t wholly succeed. “I only wished to say that I’m tutoring Thomas so that he can take his college entrance exams, and we would be honored if you joined us whenever you found it convenient.”
I didn’t immediately respond to this unexpected offer, and he misinterpreted my silence.
“Of course, Thomas is older than you—sixteen—and can already read some Latin. But if you liked—”
“So can I!” I burst out. “Read some Latin, I mean. And I’ve started a bit on Greek.”
I saw his moustache twist with the effort to suppress his amusement, and realized how vain I’d sounded. Anna stood close by, looking on, with roses of all colors spilling from her arms. She was already stealthily arranging those colors into lovely patterns, shifting a rose here and there until the chaos of petals slipped into unexpected harmony.
Then I saw Thomas observing her work, and how he smiled to himself.
“I don’t imagine Miss Gryson’s school taught those subjects?”
“No,” I said. How I’d exposed myself! If Gus’s parents discovered what had happened to his missing books—well. My love of truth was not always as uncompromising as the dear Reverend believed. “Gus lets me look at his lessons sometimes.”
“Gus Farrow,” Thomas said, apparently to his knees. But he must have known whom I’d meant.
“We’ve been close friends since we were small,” I said, a little defensively. “I know no one understands, but it isn’t—it’s a pure friendship, whatever the gossips try to make of it! I don’t see why—”
Here it was again, my inability to contain myself when Reverend Skelley was listening. I broke off, boiling with shame and, to my horror, tears. Though of course they would attribute my weeping to my mother’s death—and was that the reason? I couldn’t tell why I had burst my boundaries, only that I could not stop the flow. Anna dropped her roses in a heap and began sobbing too, and we clung to each other while the Skelleys stayed mercifully quiet. Now that my tears were undammed, grief shook me like hammer blows. I felt my mother cut out of me, felt the awful enormity where she had been: a broken place that could never be made whole.
You may have observed that I had now received three offers of mentorship, of varying kinds, in close succession. The first had tried to bully me, the second to appropriate me, and neither had regarded my consent, or the lack thereof, as anything more than an inconvenience. But as in a fairy tale it was the third, the lightest, the shyest, the least assuming, that would show itself true.
Reverend Skelley wrote to my father. Precisely what he said I never knew, only that as long as I kept house in the mornings and returned in time to have supper ready, I was allowed to spend a few hours in the afternoons in a battered wooden armchair, discussing Euclid and Lyell and beginning my first painful efforts to read Ovid—my Latin was not quite so good as I’d supposed. Gus lied when he told Asterion I was entirely self-taught, probably because he didn’t like to admit how greatly the Reverend influenced me. With the Skelleys’ arrival in my life, my debt to Gus sharply decreased, after all. And soon enough their presence would goad him in a new way.
Both the Skelleys must be long dead. So must Anna, my father, my little brothers. I know it, but perhaps because I died before them I have never been able to feel it.
Usually it falls to the living to cherish the dead. To preserve the past’s immediacy. But in me, long since dead myself, they remain as vital as ever, down to the sunlight wrinkling on the Reverend’s jacket, the wet heat of Anna’s tearful face on my neck.
If I succeed in extinguishing myself I will have this regret: that those I loved must go with me. Ghosts within ghosts, a dream as recursive as a nautilus’s shell.