Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [155]
A blank mask aligned with her features and she put a hand to the sash of her dressing gown.
“I want you to stay, not because you feel compelled to do so,” I said. “But because it is your choice. Because . . .”
I began to sputter, blurting out the history of my day, the oppressive mood engendered by my encounter with Christine. I suggested that Jane stay until I fell asleep and that nothing more need happen—I did not want to take advantage of her. A lie. I wanted to take complete advantage, but I didn’t want her to believe that was my aim . . . and I may have told her as much. So eager was I to have her good opinion that honesty seemed the only course, unprecedented honesty, honesty divested of the slightest hint of subterfuge. Fortunately I do not recall every idiotic thing I said. While I was speaking she went to the bed, removed her dressing gown and bonnet, shook out her hair, and climbed beneath the covers, clad in her chemise. I made no immediate move to join her, immobilized by desire in conflict with an assortment of anxieties, amongst them the fear of looking more the fool than I already had. I might have stood there forever, but she released me from the thrall of my anxieties with the perfect counterspell.
“If you please,” she said, turning on her side, facing away from me. “Leave the lamp on when you come to bed.”
IN THE MORNING I went to stand in the entranceway of the house to take the air, cold and noxious though it was, perfumed by the ripe scents of Rose Street. A cart passed me by, raising a clatter like an enormous sack of bones and pulled by a moribund horse, its ribs showing through its loose skin, urged along by a driver so muffled in rags that I saw of him nothing apart from steaming breath and reddened cheeks and tufted white eyebrows. Urchins screeched and squealed and whistled to one another, running pell-mell, their flights as erratic as those of birds frightened from their roosts. Ungainly wives lumbered from doorways to empty basins of slops into the gray, gluey mud of the street, disappearing back into the many-eyed oblivions of their black brick homes. Yet all this was given a gloss by the glorious night I had spent with Jane and had for me the quaint charm of a scene from one of Mr. Dickens’s gentler tales. I allowed myself to entertain fantasies about a life with Jane, imagining a cottage on the sea, a child or two who would appear only after a ten-year honeymoon, sojourns in the Italian Alps and the like.
Giddy with these delusions, I headed to the kitchen, intending to cut a slab of cheese and some bread to take upstairs with me, and discovered Richmond eating his breakfast. His face was drawn, the lines around his eyes deepened by fatigue. I wished him a good morning—he gave a curt nod, muttered something I could not make out, and attacked his eggs and sausage with ferocity.
“How goes your work?” I asked, dragging up a stool. “Well, I hope.”
He swallowed, nodded.
“May I inquire what it is that you are working on?”
He sucked at a particle of food trapped between his teeth—his poor table manners were often made the butt of jokes at the Inventors’ Club.
“I am completing a fifth machine,” he said. “I intend to install it soon.”
I started to speak but he held up a hand to stay me.
“I recognize that your investigation will be of some duration,” he said. “I do not plan to replace the machine that summons Christine. Not yet. If I finish before your work is done, I will forbear replacing it or else replace another machine.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “I have left you a check with Dorothea that should suffice for your immediate expenses. Let me know if you need more. I will be busy at the factory for two weeks—I doubt we will see much of each other during that time. If you have business elsewhere, patients to treat, the coach will be at your disposal. And, of course, the house is yours to use as you see fit.”
I must admit