Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [132]
“May I help you, Mr. Hawthorne?”
“Might Theron and I have some refreshment in the library?”
Miss Hobbs drew near, promising to bring us tea and scones on a tray.
“And if you or your grandmother have anything like a mirror in your possession—anything at all that might belong to the house—we would like to borrow it for a little.”
She gazed at me for a moment before giving a short nod.
“Does he know that I know? Mr. Theron Saxton, I mean,” she said in a low voice. “About the mirror, about the face of—”
“I believe not.”
“Though he is a kind, good-humored sort of man, I imagine that he would rather not find out,” she said. “The Mr. Saxtons were always very private gentlemen, even secretive about their affairs.” She pulled at a chain around her neck, and in an instant a locket lay shining on her palm. “The mirror inside”—she indicated the case—“might be said to belong to the house, though it is graven with my name and was given me by the late Mr. Edward. I have read the book and understand what you are doing and do not object, but I don’t want this necklace to go out of my possession because it is a memento of times that hardly were and cannot come again.”
I cleared my throat, unsure whether I ought to be embarrassed by her confession. “That looks to be much smaller than any other glass I have found. When the time comes, I will bring the next-to-last mirror to you, if that would be agreeable.”
And so, some time later as Theron was exulting in his freedom, his voice echoing in the library, I took the burnished bronze mirror to Miss Hobbs and tipped the blue-eyed image into her locket.
“Perhaps I should take it out into the yard where the melted and refrozen snow has formed in coarse crystals,” she said. “Perhaps I could slip the image into a single crystal, and the sun that is so bright this afternoon could call Edward Saxton’s face to ascend to the sky.”
“Yes,” I said, “you could do that.”
I watched from the front parlor as she crossed the buried lawn in a long black cloak and hood and knelt down in the snow with the locket in her hands. Sun flamed, firing the drops that plummeted from the eaves. The world seemed one crystal glory of broken and heaped chandeliers. Amid its sparkling, she glanced toward me but made no sign. Against the white ground, in the unrelieved black that might or might not have been a sign of mourning, she appeared dramatic, bewitching. Had she seemed so to Edward Saxton? She looked at the locket for a time, so long that I turned away, my eyes burning from too much light, feeling that I intruded. Mrs. Molebury rustled past in gray silk, hunched under a moth-eaten fur and mumbling a complaint as she rubbed her arthritic hands.
What might the dark imaginings of John Hathorne have made of these two women? Could it be from him that I had inherited my free-flowing fancy? I will not write all of the thoughts and questions that arose in my mind in my days at Saxton’s Folly, for it might make me too much like him. And, as Miss Hobbs asserted, the Saxtons were always reticent about their affairs.
When I swung back to the window, Patience Hobbs had already replaced the locket inside her dress and risen to her feet, so that even now I do not know whether she poured the image into the snow or kept it after gazing into those blue eyes.
In the library, Theron was scribbling a letter to Daphne Mathers, his big loose handwriting sprawled across the fine, hot-pressed sheets of stationery in loops and joyful slashes.
Soon I would be trudging down the cold lane, leaning on the coachman’s staff. I felt certain that it would not do to fancy shadow across a human face where there was no shade—to act the part of a darkly meditative man. In dreams of witchery and gloom that veiled their lives, better men than I had been