Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [164]
He wore such a morose expression, I felt sympathy for him and said, “You are not the first man to have made such an error in judgment.”
“Oh, it was hardly that!” He laughed bitterly. “We were in love and love accepts no judgments. Our affair continued for months, even after my father’s return, and did not end until I returned to Eaton. Christine was always more aggressive than I. She forced the issue, yet I was equally culpable.”
He pressed his hands together, the tips of his fingers touching his chin—a prayerful attitude. “Years later our nanny informed me that Christine had become pregnant and a stable boy let go. She had accused him in order to deflect blame from me. I don’t know what became of him . . . or the child.”
“Christine never said anything?”
“Not a word. I wrote to her, of course. I asked what had happened. She answered my letters, but not my questions. She had been sent away . . . to school, my father said. In France. I didn’t see her again for years. She married a gentleman farmer, or so she claimed. In one of her letters, she enclosed a wedding photograph that showed her with a man with oiled hair and a little mustache. A charade, I suppose. I never had a word from him, neither then nor following her death.
“A year after her purported marriage, she asked me to meet her in Torquay. We spent a few days together and whenever I brought up our personal history, she insisted that we not dwell upon the past. Over the years we met in Margate, Ilfracombe, Ryde, Cardiff, Llandudno . . . in every benighted resort in Britain. Days, we strolled on the esplanade, we laughed and teased each other, we watched the Punch and Judy shows, rode donkeys on the beach, and attended concerts. Only once did she offer affection of the kind I desired. It must have been shortly after she moved to Saint Nichol. She melted into an embrace and kissed me, but apologized immediately and said the kiss was a mistake. I went to sleep that night as I had on all the previous nights, alone and frustrated. You see, I still held in mind the image of her face lit to white gold by the sun, the water beaded on her flesh. I hold it still.” His aggrieved expression and slumped posture gave evidence of a defeated attitude. “I hope you understand now why I have been so beastly toward you.”
I allowed that, no, I did not.
“Because I’m jealous,” he said. “She is returning to us and it is you with whom she speaks, with whom she flirts as she once did with me. She holds me in contempt. She blames me for everything that happened. And now she has come to you exactly as she came to me when we became lovers.”
I had been about to suggest that he was reading far too much into the situation, but his last statement left me speechless. My shock must have been discernible, for he said, “Can you not see it? Jane has no reason to lie, as you say, and Dorothea’s complaint is easily verified, if you have the stomach for it. Unless Constance Mellor followed you to Saint Nichol, who could it have been but Christine?”
Disordered by this outburst, I took a moment in order to marshal a response. “Firstly, we do not know that Christine is, as you put it, returning. Her behavior and the quality of her materializations reflect a shift in amplitude, but there is nothing to indicate . . .”
“If you were working on a jigsaw puzzle and, having completed it save for two or three pieces, you saw that it constituted the picture of a lion, do you believe that adding those few pieces would transform it into the picture of a giraffe?”
“To use your metaphor, this particular puzzle is missing many more than two or three pieces. We can make no reasonable assumption based on what is known.”
“As a scientist you must know that the making