Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [137]
I was only on page one 157 the morning Mary woke up gasping. Although we asked and prodded, she would not tell us about her dream.
“I can’t,” she said. “We were in the bedroom again. He— I just can’t.”
We were sitting in our nightgowns on Eleanor’s bed, as we did every morning for our conferences.
“What was it like?” I asked. I think we all knew, even then, what had happened. Tollie and I had grown up in villages, near farms and animals. And Eleanor had heard the servants gossip.
“I’m sorry. I really don’t think I can talk about it.”
“Was it so frightening?” asked Tollie, leaning forward.
“Not frightening. Just— I can’t, all right?” And we could get nothing else out of her.
Later that day, I looked with dismay at The History of Collingswood House. I could not face another list of who had come to visit Collingswood in the Year of Our Lord blankety blank.
“Look, stupid book,” I said. “Just tell me what I want to know, all right?” I closed my eyes and opened the book at random. I looked down at the pages I had opened. There it was:
In the autumn of 1817, Lord Collingswood invited the poet Christopher Raven, whom he had met in London, to Collingswood House. Lady Collingswood was taken with the handsome youth, who was supposed to look like an English Adonis, although some critics asserted that he wrote like a second-rate Shelley. The Collingswood library, which was extensive, had fallen into a state of disarray, and Lord Collingswood hoped that Raven would catalogue it. However, the two men quarreled before the work got under way, and the poet left in the middle of the night to join Shelley and Byron in Switzerland. He was overtaken by the snows, and is supposed to have perished in the Alpine passes. Lady Collingswood, who had a tender heart, particularly for poets, artists, and small dogs, was said to have been inconsolable for weeks.
I had found a poet. And he sounded like the right poet. Adonis had been Greek. He would have had curling black hair, the kind they call hyacinthine.
“I think I’ve found him,” I told Eleanor, Mary, and Tollie that afternoon. “His name is Christopher Raven. He was a poet, and I think he was in love with Lady Collingswood. And maybe she was in love with him.”
“Why do you think we’re dreaming about him?” asked Tollie. “If someone had dreamed about him before, we would have known about it, wouldn’t we? I mean, he would be the Collingswood ghost or something. It would have been like calling the picture Old Nosey. Everyone would have known.”
“Maybe it’s because we’re in her room,” I said. “The book only says that she was taken with him, but I bet all the things he says to us are the things he said to her. I mean, seriously, none of us has a neck like a swan’s, do we? And hair like a forest fire—she had red hair. I bet no one else has slept in her room for a hundred years. That’s why we’re dreaming about him, when no other girls have.”
“The question is, what do we do now?” asked Eleanor. “He doesn’t scare me, but that dream Mary had—yes, I know you can’t talk about it, but we all know what it was about. If we’re dreaming about him and Lady Collingswood, where is this going?”
WHERE INDEED. I’LL give you this, Christopher Raven. I have known love since those days as a schoolgirl at Collingswood, and you loved her as passionately as any poet loves a woman. There is always some selfishness in such a love, always some inclination to turn your love into poetry. But when you walked with her down the garden paths, when you stood beside her on the tower and looked out over the countryside, when you called her the moon and said you were the tide, following her motions, you loved her as passionately as poets love, who are always thinking of the next line. We experienced it, the four of us—experienced that love when we were only schoolgirls and should have been attending to our lessons. We felt the kisses in the darkness, your hand on her shoulder, your fingers running along her