Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [165]
“Jane told me. What of it?”
“When you referred to Constance Mellor in the kitchen, I thought instantly of Charles Mellor. When he was young, he had the reputation of being just such a man as the song describes. He enjoyed gadding about the slums, whoring and drinking in the gin shops of Saint Nichol. It’s possible that he was the masked client and, further, that he funded Christine’s purchase of this house. A sizable portion of his income is derived from the ownership of slum properties. This house may once have belonged to him. I intend to look into the matter. My assumption may be erroneous, but property issues, the change of titles, and so forth . . . it should be easy enough to prove. Now that . . .” He sat up straight, the movement appearing to reflect a sudden and unexpected reinvigoration. “That is merely an assumption. What we have in Christine’s case rises to the level of theory, wouldn’t you say?”
“No, I would not. The leap one would have to make between an apparition and a revivification, even a temporary one, seems much more extensive than that between your assumption regarding Mellor and his actual guilt. As to that, I trust you will not act precipitately.”
“When one takes into account your chosen field of study, you seem a strangely conservative thinker,” Richmond said, gazing at me with a ruminative air. “I find it dismaying that you are unable to reach for a height without availing yourself of a stepladder, so to speak.”
I had no desire to engage in a running metaphorical battle with him and so I let the comment pass.
“Well,” he said pertly. “You have been warned.”
“Warned? As to what?”
“Why . . . Christine.” He seemed baffled by my failure to grasp the obvious. “It is clear that she has designs on you and that you are in danger. I cannot but think that her ghost is in a perpetual state of torment. How can it be otherwise? Life calls to her and she feels the pull of old desires, yet she cannot answer that call. Now, presented with an opportunity to reinhabit the world of the senses, she must be desperate to taste and touch and feel. Christine was ever prone to abrupt shifts in mood and subject to whims and cravings. As they were when she was in love with me, these tendencies have become exaggerated since she made a connection with you. I foresee a time when those whims evolve into wild and erratic impulse, those cravings into compulsion, and she will let nothing stand in the way of her desires.”
ALTHOUGH IT STRAINED credulity, had anyone aside from Richmond warned me against Christine, I might have taken the warning to heart; but I had detected in him an unsound quality, and our conversation had done nothing to ease my mind on that score. Then, too, I had a more enjoyable and distracting business to complete. The following afternoon I had Richmond’s coachman, Henry Bladge, a sturdy, balding fellow with pork chop whiskers and a round face as unremarkable as a muffin top, convey Jane and me to a tearoom on the edge of Bethnal Green, an establishment with a small garden at the rear that sought to counterfeit a pleasance, offering an air of relative seclusion amidst shrubbery, several young trees, and a pair of stone benches—yet it lay close enough to a gin shop that we could hear the squabbling of that establishment’s poorer patrons who, unable to afford a mug of their poison, stood at the door, holding gin-soaked handkerchiefs to their faces and inhaling the fumes. Snatches of music on occasion drowned out their clamor, testifying to the passage of street musicians. After tea we sat out on a sun-dappled bench, shaded by a thickly leaved elm, and there I told her (more bluntly than I had planned, for I was anxious) that I wished to marry her and make a home with her in Wales. She looked every inch the creature of fashion—under her cashmere shawl, she wore