Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [163]
“I don’t understand how this is relevant. My connection with Jane is my concern, and hers. If you have something to say about Dorothea’s lie or upon another subject, I will gladly listen. Otherwise there is no point to continuing.”
Richmond cleared his throat and then said, “Is it lost on you that there is a third woman in the house?”
I floundered for a moment. “Are you speaking of Christine?”
“I have watched you with her these last weeks. I’ve . . .”
“I haven’t seen you on the sixth floor since I began my study.”
“I drilled a hole that permits observation if one stands in the space between the inner and outer walls. But that is not of moment.”
“Oh, no? I find it unbelievably offensive. Are there peepholes elsewhere? In my bedroom, perhaps?”
“Bear with me, I beg you. Hear me out and then I will accept the full brunt of your outrage.” Richmond clasped his head in his hands, staring down at the fawn-colored blotter. “I have never spoken of these events to any man, but I believe you have sniffed out a portion of my story. That makes it no easier to disclose, but now . . . now I find disclosure to be necessary.”
He sighed and looked up from the desk. “I was sixteen when my mother died. Christine was less than two years younger. My mother fell ill in the spring of the year, and my father brought the family to our country estate near Caerphilly in hopes she might recover there. Within the week he was called away to the Continent on business, leaving my mother to be cared for by servants. He remained absent until a few days prior to her death. Why he did this . . .” He shook his head. “His motives were hidden from me and he has never talked about that summer. At the time I chose to believe he loved her and that his absence was due to an inability to watch her suffer. But now I think he became uninterested in her when she could no longer play the part of wife, and went off to find a new one in Europe. Which, ultimately, he did.
“My mother’s decline was swift. After a month in Caerphilly she barely recognized us. The doctor told us she had weeks to live, no more, yet she lingered all that summer. Bedridden, racked by fevers, either in pain and heavily drugged. We did what we could, Christine and I, but the servants kept us from her, fearing the sight of our mother in her delirium and torment would damage our tender souls—they failed to comprehend that seeing her only rarely and then for a few minutes was a torment to us. I wrote my father, pleading with him to return, but he would not respond. And so Christine and I were virtually alone, with no authority to guide us but an elderly nanny whom we no longer heeded. I would read to her and she played the piano for me, but these pursuits soon bored us and we began to wander the estate, taking a picnic lunch and passing entire days in the woods and fields, talking about this and that. Prior to that summer we had been apart so much of the time, and now, thrown together in such a powerful emotional setting, relying upon each other for support, for conversation, for all else . . . it was an unhealthy situation. On occasion I would notice some feature of her beauty, and I would catch her looking at me, instances that caused her to blush and avert her eyes. I repressed these moments—I thrust them aside and refused to acknowledge what they portended.”
Richmond gazed at the iron shutters. “There was a pond on the property, large enough to think of as a small lake. We often ate beside it. One afternoon in early June, feeling torpid following lunch, I fell asleep. When I awoke, Christine was gone. I heard a splashing from the direction of the pond and made my way through the bushes that grew alongside the bank. Christine stood in the shallows, completely unclothed, sluicing water over her body. I thought her the most beautiful thing in all of Creation. She saw me as well.