Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [141]
“Perhaps a little,” I said. “But I don’t think Louis is going to haunt anyone. Our love was an ordinary human love. Oh, he wrote me a poem or two, but I’m no Lady Collingswood. I went to visit his wife once, in France. You would think—insane asylum and all that. But it was perfectly ordinary, kind nurses looking after her. She had no idea who I was. What Christopher Raven and Lady Collingswood had—it was passion and poetry, and it had to end in violence. Could it have ended any other way? Can you imagine them in a cottage in the country, him chopping wood for the fire, her embroidering dish towels?”
“Was he the ghost, or was she?” We looked at Tollie, startled by her question. “I mean, was he the one haunting us? Or was she the one, making us relive her experiences?”
“I’ve never thought of it like that,” I said.
“When I came back to Collingswood, I found something,” said Tollie. “It was summer and the school was almost empty. I came in here, and I don’t know why exactly, but I looked behind the painting of Lady Collingswood. There was something taped back there.”
“What did you find?” I asked. We all leaned forward, curious schoolgirls once more.
“Probably a letter of some sort,” said Eleanor.
“No, not a letter,” said Tollie. “I’ll show you.” She walked over to one of the desks that we had used, so many years ago, and lifted a framed picture that had been lying on it. She held it up so we could see.
Mary gasped, and Eleanor said, “That’s him. Exactly.”
It was just a watercolor of the head and shoulders, but there was the curling black hair, the brown cheeks, the laughing, mischievous eyes. In the bottom right-hand corner was written, in pen, Adela Collingswood.
“You can see that she loved him,” said Tollie. “If she was the ghost, she would have wanted him buried.”
“But she didn’t know he was in the cellar,” I said. “Listen to me! Here I am talking about the habits of ghosts. For all we know, it was both of them together, reliving their lives through us.”
“You changed too,” said Eleanor. “You’d been so focused on doing well. But after—that was when you started writing stories.”
“She did inspire me in the end,” I said. “Just as Miss Halloway wanted.”
“But Tollie didn’t change,” continued Eleanor. “Did you, Tollie? You’re the same old Tollie as you were back then. The Tollie who would have looked behind the painting. I would never have thought of that.”
“I don’t know,” said Tollie. “I suppose I am the same. Although I think I’m getting lines on my forehead from frowning at students!”
We heard a knock on the door. We had been so immersed in talking about the past that we all jumped.
“Ladies, dinner in half an hour,” called Miss Halloway.
“We’d better get dressed,” said Mary. “We don’t want to be late for dinner.”
“Why not?” said Eleanor. “Let them wait for us. After all, we have the guest of honor. They’re not going to start the dinner without her. Is that high and mighty enough for you, Lucy?” But she was smiling as she said it.
After that, the conversation turned to dresses. Eleanor lent Tollie the second-best dress she had brought, which must have cost as much as my entire wardrobe, although Tollie insisted that her gray merino was perfectly adequate. So even she looked sufficiently ladylike as we walked down the stairs, under the watchful eyes of Old Nosey, to the dining room.
My speech, “The Necessity for the Rights of Women,” went well and was generally applauded, with Eleanor giving a loud “Hear, hear!” The food was better than we had eaten as schoolgirls—no cabbage! But it was strange seeing women, some of whom I remembered, some from other years, sitting around the dining room tables, their faces turned toward me. In some of them, I could see the girls they had once been, like echoes.
It was a relief to be finished, to have fulfilled my duties and be free to go back up the stairs, undress, and lie down on the bed I had slept in