Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [135]
“Lucy!” she said now. “How perfectly lovely to see you.” She kissed me on both cheeks. “I give copies of The Modern Diana to everyone I know. I tell them it’s a perfectly scandalous book, all about free love and professions for women.”
“Honestly, at first I was afraid to read it,” said Mary Davenport, smiling and giving me a hug. “But it really does have an important message. All about using the talents God gave us.” She was as short and plump as she had been, although her cheeks were redder from what she had called, in a letter to me, her “country life.” There were gray strands in her hair. She had married her father’s curate, who was now the Reverend Charles Beaumont, with a living near York. She had come back to visit “dear old Collingswood” while he attended an ecclesiastical conference in London.
Mary had three children living, and one buried. Eleanor had no children, which she did not seem to regret. “Laws to alleviate the oppression of man—and woman—are my children,” she had written to me. And Tollie had never married. All this I knew from letters I had received over the years—not many, but we had never entirely lost touch. I suppose what we experienced that last year had bound us together.
I had sent them letters about my own life, my relationship with Louis, his death from tuberculosis, my own efforts to raise little Louie, who had his father’s complaint. The Modern Diana had sold well enough that I had sent him to a sanatorium in Switzerland, but the money would not last forever. I was grateful that Collingswood had paid for my train ticket and offered me an honorarium for my speech at the Old Girls’ Dinner. Would I have come back otherwise?
It was Tollie, of course, who said what the rest of us were thinking but would not say. “I’m so glad we’re all here. Now we can talk about Christopher Raven.”
TOLLIE DREAMED OF him last, but of course she was the first to say anything.
“Lucy, wake up! I had the strangest dream.”
I opened my eyes, then closed them again. “Go away. Can’t you see it’s still dark?”
“But I dreamed of a man. Have you ever dreamed of a man? With curling black hair and a white blouse—at least it looked like a blouse, like something a woman would wear. Or a pirate. Maybe he was a pirate? Except that he was saying something—like poetry. I was sitting on the parlor sofa, except it was so much nicer than the sofa we have now, and he bowed to me and kissed my hand!”
“You’ve dreamed about him too!” said Eleanor, sitting up in bed. “Then I’m going to stop dreaming about him. I don’t want to share my dreams with Messy Millie.”
“Well, I’ve been dreaming about him for a week,” I said. “So you’ve been sharing your dream with the both of us. How common is that? And what about Mary? Maybe she’s been dreaming about him as well.”
Mary, who had just opened her eyes, pulled the blanket over her head.
“Have you been dreaming about him too?” asked Eleanor. “Mary, answer me!”
“Yes,” came the muffled answer. “For a week.”
“Did he kiss your hand?” asked Tollie.
Mary looked out from under the blanket. Her face was bright red. “No. We were in this room, but it had a big bed in it. And he kissed my shoulder.”
“He hasn’t kissed me,” I said. “He just takes me walking around the garden, and he says things—about my hair and eyes. Poetry, like Tollie said.”
“Well, he’s kissed me,” said Eleanor. “We were in the tower, looking out toward Collington, and he told me that I changed like the moon, or something like that, and he kissed me on the mouth.”
That day, for the first time, we sat together in the front parlor, which was reserved for the older girls, trying to figure it out.
“Maybe he’s a ghost, and we’re being haunted,” said Mary. Her father was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Eleanor. “There’s no such thing as a ghost.”
“Oh yes, there is,” said Tollie. “My aunt Harriet was haunted by my uncle, who had lost a leg at sea. She said