Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [140]
“And Lord Collingswood must have told everyone that they’d had a fight, and Raven had left for Switzerland,” I said.
“But she must have been here doing all sorts of things—getting dressed and walking in the garden, and eating her dinner—while he was dying below!” said Mary. She started to gasp and sob, and Miss Halloway waved the sal volatile under her nose again.
“Last summer, after I was hired as headmistress here,” she said, “I read that book Lucy thought was so dull, The History of Collingswood House. If you’d read a little farther, girls, you would have known that Lord Collingswood died in 1818, just a year later. He was said to have died of heart problems, but there was a rumor that he might have been poisoned—digitalis, which comes from foxgloves, is toxic in a high enough dose. Lady Collingswood created this school and specified that Lord Collingswood’s portrait was to be hung over the main staircase in perpetuity. I wonder, now, if that was her idea of a joke?”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“She moved to France. Eventually she became a painter, not a great one but there is a picture of hers in the National Gallery. She particularly liked painting flowers.” Miss Halloway was silent for a moment. “We’ll have to give him a proper burial,” she said. “I think the dreams will stop now.”
The dreams did not stop, not as long as we stayed at Collingswood. But they changed character. For the rest of that year, we dreamed that we were with him—sitting by the fire in the parlor, browsing through books in the library and reading lines of poetry to one another, walking through the garden, where the roses were blooming, including the white rose called Lady Collingswood. He still murmured lines of poetry to us, we still felt kisses on our hands, even our shoulders, but the dreams no longer had the passion, the urgency, that we should not have experienced and that changed us, permanently. When we left Collingswood, Eleanor for a London season, Mary for her father’s parish, where she would teach Sunday school, Tollie for Newnham Teachers’ College, and me for Girton, we were no longer the girls who had glared at one another on the first day of term. We were older, we knew more about the joys and pains of the world, and we were friends.
The remains of Christopher Raven were buried in the garden, and a stone was placed over him with the words “Here lies the poet Christopher Raven, lover of Lady Collingswood, 1797–1817” carved on it, followed by lines of his own poetry:
Let her eyes guide me like bright stars, and bring
Me to the birthing-place of poetry.
I read some of his poetry later—he had published two books, called Aurora and Other Poems and Poems for the Rights of Man. He was good, and might have become great if he had lived, although he would never have been a Shelley or a Keats. But when I remembered his kisses in the dark, the whispered words, it did not matter. I do not think it mattered to her either. She loved the man, and the poet was part of the man. At least that is what I think now that I have learned something of love—the love one has for a poet, like my Louis.
“WE CHANGED, ALL of us,” I said. “Eleanor became less high and mighty, for example.”
“Well!” she said, laughing. “I think I’m still both high and mighty. You should see me destroy those pipsqueak MPs on the question of votes for women! They fear my political dinners.”
“And Mary became more pious,” I added.
“I suppose that’s true,” said Mary. “I was frightened for a long time. I thought life might be like that, all passion and darkness. My father’s faith was reassuring—it made me feel safe. I think I became more judgmental for a while. I went to London once, while Louis was alive, and never visited you, Lucy. I’m sorry about that. But after little Charles died, I think I became more accepting of human frailty. I started to realize that God is there too, in the darkness as well as the light.”
We stared at her. “When did you get philosophical?” asked Eleanor.
Mary blushed, the red suffusing her cheeks until