Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [130]
“Forgive me,” I said, half dizzy with weariness. “I can’t stay awake any longer.”
My host exclaimed, reproached himself, and hustled me out the door. In our haste, we left the cloth awry from the glass so that the face of Edward Saxton shone like a moon all night into the chamber where, for all I knew, the Saxton family ghosts trysted and held a confab over these late difficulties. I slept like the dead, except that I awakened sooner.
When a burst of dawn light invaded my room, I sat up, determined to settle Saxton’s difficulties before nightfall. Before he rose, I dressed and wandered through the house, meditating what had happened—or had not happened—the day before. I remembered the library mirror and went to check whether anything had changed in its depths.
I paused in the doorway: Patience Hobbs stood in a beam of light, gazing into the glass. She looked radiant, as if the figure of Aurora had stepped from her pedestal in the ancient world into ours. When she smiled, I realized that Edward Saxton’s eyes were now open. The floating image looked peaceful and gave the illusion of a living man caught up by daydream.
“You knew?”
“Yes, I knew,” she said, not turning her eyes toward mine. “And I was glad to see Mr. Edward’s face. I have never grasped why people thought the two Mr. Saxtons so hard to tell apart.”
“Perhaps you should read the words,” I said, struck by a sudden idea. “You were here when he died. Of course, we should have your grandmother do so as well—”
“No, I will not involve my grandmother. And I will not read any words.”
“You hid the book.”
“Yes.” At last she turned toward me, and the decisiveness I had heard in her voice seemed to dissolve. “I am sorry to refuse you, Mr. Hawthorne. But I will not be tied to anything so much like a witch’s conjuration.”
“I don’t believe there is any invocation of dark spirits or reproach to—”
“With my background, you can understand why I might choose to avoid even the appearance of uttering the words of a spell,” she said. “Our time is said to be beyond the baking of witch cakes or being swayed by ‘spectral evidence’ or the hanging of innocent men and women. So we believe. I would not like to test that faith.”
She had me: as the great-grandchild of John Hathorne, I wanted nothing to do with harming a member of the Hobbs family. The Court of Oyer and Terminer had made too many restless ghosts in New England for me to sanction hurt to a descendant of those who suffered the havoc of my self-righteous ancestor. Yet my unruly imagination instantly conjured up scenes of Patience Hobbs reciting a spell or stirring a potion over the kitchen fire and suggested that she was wrapped in darkness blacker than any shroud upon a mirror. I did my best to suppress these fancies, knowing that story weavers like me are prone to snatch and use our human material as mere material and can blaspheme against the soul in an instant! We are more likely candidates for the Dark Man and damnation than most, I fear . . .
I bowed, unable to divine what I ought to say, and she passed from the room.
The morning was spent in puzzling out more recipes for the banishment of the grave reflection and trying a few, each as absurd as the last, though I was loath to forgo any of them. I had suggested to Theron that he go for a ride, and I was glad to hear his horse clopping up the frozen lane in time for a midday meal. I had just transcribed—without the interesting spelling—the directions for a banishment that the book named “The Scouping; or, the Diminishmente by Poring.”
Over a cold collation, we talked indefatigably about where he had ridden, about the cooking of Mrs. Molebury, about turkey hunting and the fine points of setters and a thousand other things—any that did not touch on Mr. Edward Saxton. Outside, sun shattered against the diamonds of snow, lighting up the windowpanes and warming the roof until blazing teardrops plunged from the eaves. The world was beginning to thaw, and so why not this frozen state that had held