Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [105]
“They went immediately abroad, where they remained for some months; and how different her letters, with their dutiful descriptions of scenery and formal professions of happiness, seemed from those I had once received! When we called upon them after their return to London, I knew immediately that she was unhappy, but she contrived, then and afterwards, never to be alone with me. Sir Lewis, furthermore, made it subtly plain to me that I would be a tolerated rather than a welcome visitor. His reptilian eyes seemed to draw out the very feelings I strove most desperately to conceal in his presence, and to flicker distrustfully from her to me.
“Her only child, a daughter, was born before the first anniversary of their wedding, and became the one source of light in the darkness closing upon her; that, and the knowledge that her mother and sisters were now securely provided for, though at a price they would never willingly have paid. We were all of us aware that Claire was deeply unhappy, and yet her manner of bearing it seemed to exact from us a vow of silence, not only in her presence, but between ourselves. We looked at one another and knew that we knew and could not speak of it. Or at least I could not, until the third year of her marriage was drawing to its close, when we began to see even less of her, and that only in the presence of her husband. His manner, formally speaking, remained perfectly polite, yet in his presence all conversation withered and died; you could feel the malevolent force of his personality raying out across the room.
“We had, however, an ally within his house: Claire’s maid Rosina, who had been with the family since she was scarcely more than a child. Rosina was quick, observant, and entirely devoted to her mistress, and it was through her eyes that we saw the final scenes of the tragedy unfold.
“Claire had written a great deal before her marriage; though she would always dismiss her work as ‘scribbling,’ she had shown me some chapters of a novel which I thought very fine. And it seems that in that last autumn, as she became more and more a prisoner, she turned once again to her pen for solace and began secretly to compose—we shall never know what, for despite her precautions he discovered, read, and then destroyed her manuscript. There followed a terrible scene, in which Claire turned at last upon her tormentor and declared her resolution to leave him. He swore that if she did so she would never see her child again, and that her mother and sisters would be turned out into the street. Coldly advising her to reconsider, he left the room.
“That same night, the child was stricken by a raging fever. Doctors were summoned, and every possible remedy tried, but in vain; less than twenty-four hours later, she was dead. Rosina, who had not left her mistress’s side throughout the long night and the dreadful day that followed, said that Sir Lewis did not once appear in the sickroom until the poor child’s ordeal had ceased. Claire’s grief had overwhelmed her, but as he appeared in the doorway, she ceased to weep, and a terrible stillness came over her. She took the dead child in her arms, and though she seemed not even to see her husband looming directly in her path, such was her expression that he fell back and spoke not a word as she bore her daughter’s body from the room and slowly descended