by Nancy Holder
Edith found breath to speak. “Never. I would never forget you.”
She looked in his eyes and melted. This was happening. This was real, a dream after the nightmare.
He pulled her close, and kissed her. Her world became Sir Thomas Sharpe. His arms, his wild heartbeat. The softness of his lips as they brushed her mouth, then pressed harder. Edith closed her eyes, waltzing again, her wish come true.
She felt his restraint, as if holding back; she was about to open her eyes to assure him that there were liberties that he could take now. He had broken her heart, and only he could mend it. Then he relaxed against her and gathered her up, and all was right, so very right, with this beautiful new world, this shining, golden day. Perhaps Ogilvie had been right to insist upon a love story. The endings were so wonderful.
But this is not the end of our story, she thought. It is only the beginning. He declared himself in his letter. He has asked me to marry him.
Arm in arm they took their leave of the room, and Edith couldn’t even care where they went, or what they did next. She supposed he would present himself to her father and they could begin again, on better terms. Surely Papa’s consent would be given once he saw that an honorable man stood before him. A man who could not be bought, and who prized her, Edith Cushing, above the wealth he required to fulfill his mining plans. He could have kept the check and made his way back to England where any number of young ladies were no doubt waiting in line to become Lady Sharpe. But he loved his American commoner with his whole heart. What father would not wish such a man on his only daughter?
I am so incredibly happy.
But as they crossed the lobby, she saw her father’s lawyer, Mr. Ferguson. And her maid, Annie, stood with him, pointing at her. She and Thomas slowed and her heart thudded so hard she felt her pulse in the soles of her feet. The agonized looks on their faces, wrenched, horror-stricken… hollow eyes, speaking of tragedy. She had seen that same expression on her father’s face when he had come to tell her that her mother’s suffering had ended.
Of her death…
* * *
Of death.
Here was proof that a terrible mistake had been made: Her father, who so loved grandeur and elegance, could not possibly have been taken to such a filthy, disgusting place. The Buffalo City Morgue was more vile than a stable, anyone could see that. No one who knew him would have brought him here. And so… there had been an error and someone else’s poor father lay dead inside.
And though it would be a simple thing to enter and point out the blunder, she found she could not do it. Fear was drowning her denial: Mr. Ferguson would not make such an error; and in the lobby, Annie, who had been with them for three years, had burst into tears and embraced Edith as soon as she had come within arm’s length.
But this is my day of greatest happiness. It cannot be. It cannot.
Thomas and Mr. Ferguson stood with her, and she felt the warmth of Thomas’s body through the frozen block of terror encasing her.
There was a clatter of footsteps, someone catching up to the trio. It was Alan, quite out of breath, and his appearance gave weight to the reality she was fighting so hard against. She stared at him as if through a snowstorm, barely able to see. She couldn’t sense her feet on the ground. She began to feel as if she were dissolving, as insubstantial as one of the specters in Alan’s spirit photographs.
“I’m so sorry,” Alan said. “I came as soon as I heard.”
No, don’t say that, she silently begged him. And then Thomas’s hand gave her substance again, and some modicum of courage. She must be here for her father. If a mistake had been made—
—Please, please, please let it be a mistake. Oh, please.
She started holding her breath.
Alan faltered as the coroner opened the door to the morgue. Edith turned to follow the man.
“Wait,” Alan ordered. “Don’t look.”
Edith’s throat was so tight that it took a great effort to speak. “I am told that I have to.”
Alan appealed to the coroner. “No. Please. I’ll give you a positive identification. Don’t make her look. I was his physician.” He turned to the family lawyer for support. “Ferguson, you know that.”
That wasn’t the truth; perhaps Alan had fitted him for eyeglasses. He was trying to spare her.
Unless Father was ill and didn’t want anyone to know… and that is what has happened… some kind of seizure…
The renewed possibility that they were all supposed to be here squeezed her chest even tighter. She was afraid she was going to faint.
No. It is not he. Please, if it is not he, then I will do anything. I will give everything I have or want. I will not marry Thomas…
But her heart wailed in anguish at the thought of losing the man who was holding her up even then. Whose arm encircled her and protected her as she swayed forward.
Mr. Ferguson set his jaw and gave his head a little shake. “And I’m his lawyer, Dr. McMichael. I am sorry. It’s not just a legal formality. It’s obligatory, I’m afraid.”
I’m afraid. The words echoed in her mind. She was so very, very afraid.
Thomas was there, and he loved her.
Alan was there, and he was her dearest and oldest friend.
But in her fear, she was all alone.
Her knees wobbled. She couldn’t breathe enough to remain conscious. She could not draw sufficient air to hold body and soul together.
I am afraid.
She and the men walked across a tile floor that was slippery, pitted, and dirty. The room stank of blood. There were flies. An abattoir. Carter Cushing could not possibly lie beneath that stained winding sheet, on that steel table.
And yet, the profile was his.
Time stopped utterly. This moment must last forever. This must be where she existed for the rest of eternity, because right here, her father could still be alive. Right here, they were together, and Thomas too. In this ticking heartbeat, this strangled breath, this sunlight in amber. Her world hanging in the balance, teetering until the pendulum swung back the other way. Balanced on the head of a pin. This was where she must always be.
Then the coroner took hold of the sheet, pausing a moment as if he, too, wished that the earth would stop spinning. That he could spare her. Then he lifted the drape.
And everything stayed frozen, everything: heart, thought, breath. Edith only stared as Thomas’s hand tightened, tightened…
He did not look like her father.
He did not look human.
His face, destroyed. The bones crushed. Blood pooled and coagulated. The damage to the features beyond her ability to comprehend. A mistake, a mistake. This was not her father.
It is.
Oh, dear God, it is.
If she gave a sign that it was her father, she was unaware. But the tension in the room thickened; she felt a heavy weight pulling her downward as if she would sink through the floor, and the men grew even more somber as they shifted and someone cleared his throat, as if signaling that it was time to move to the next step in a hellish ritual. Was Thomas keeping her on her feet? She could not tell. The candle that they had held on the night they had waltzed… Night’s candles are burned out. Thomas… oh, Thomas, this cannot be happening.
What had she wished for when she had blown that candle out on the dance floor? Could she have not wished for long life for her father?
“How did it happen?” Alan asked hoarsely.
“An accident,” Mr. Ferguson said. “The floor was wet.”
Alan’s brow furrowed as he scrutinized the body… her father… Papa.
“May I, sir?” Alan said to the coroner. “Help me turn him.”
Edith watched numbly as Alan inspected the poor, ruined head. The head that could not be her father’s. Then, with the aid of the other man, he began to turn the deceased on his side and she saw shaving cream on his cheek. Shaving cream. An accident. A wet floor, like this one. Slipping. The porcelain sink.
The sheet b
egan to fall away, revealing—
This is my father. It is, it is!
“Stop it, stop!” she cried, rushing forward. “Don’t handle him like that, please don’t.”
Alan drew back. “Forgive me, I was trying to—”
She strangled on her tears as Thomas drew alongside, steadying her, though hardly steady himself. His face was stark white; he was as horrified as she was. But now she must act; she must shield her beloved father from their eyes and their poking and prodding. Cook and DeWitt had gossiped about her mother—
—Black as a charred lamb shank, she was. Sight of her is going to give me nightmares for years, I can tell you that. And the stink! They don’t pay me enough to lay her out; I told her lady’s maid to do it, and she up and quit and so I got the belowstairs to take it on. Master says the young lady is not to see and I’m all for that. One look and she’ll grow up in an asylum, sure as my family’s in Dublin. Are all the mirrors covered, DeWitt? Because you cannot be too sure. You certainly cannot. They hate the grave, the dead. And when you leave behind a sweet little girl like our Edith… well, you just don’t go.
“This is my father,” she said staunchly. She took possession of him. He was hers. She moved through the haze and took her stand as his daughter. “He—he is turning sixty next week, and he is afraid of looking his age, you see? That’s why he… dresses so well, why he loves taking long walks with me.” She cradled and kissed his hand. “It feels cold. Why is it so cold?”
They looked at her with such pity. And then as the horrible reality finally sank in—that he was truly dead—she crumbled.
CHAPTER NINE
THE CEMETERY, AGAIN. Fourteen years vanished like phantoms as Alan once again regarded his dearest friend lost in grief. It seemed only yesterday they had gathered to bury Edith’s mother, who had died horribly. And now her father, too. Alan could not support the coroner’s cause of death: There had been far too much damage, and at the wrong angle, for a fall.
But that was a matter for another day. Now he must be there for Edith. She should have never been forced to see that. Ferguson and his obligations be damned. There were things that once you saw them, you could not unsee. Such had it been when he had witnessed his first surgery upon a human eye, popped from the cadaver of a beggar woman in the operating theater in London. Only the certainty that by observation he might save the sight in others gave him the fortitude to remain at his place, although the fellow beside him had covered his mouth and excused himself, running for the door.
He remembered the way Edith had looked to him for comfort when she was but ten and he eleven. Even as a callow lad, he had known how her heart was aching, seen the tears that would not fall.
What had Conan Doyle said during his spiritualism lecture? “Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.” Alan had loved Edith Cushing all his life.
But today she wasn’t even looking at him. Too much a boy back then to think of marrying her, he was also here today to bury his hopes as a man. Upon her finger glittered the large red ring that had graced Lady Sharpe’s hand the night Edith had waltzed with Sir Thomas. A family heirloom, clearly; for Edith, a new acquisition, and it sucked in the watery light of the gloomy day, casting no reflection. Alan knew what it signified: She was engaged to be married to Sir Thomas Sharpe.
Sharpe, whose pale English face seemed to vanish into the sleeting rain as he sheltered her beneath an umbrella. In tribute to the man who would have become his father-in-law, the Englishman wore deep mourning, and Edith was likewise swathed in black from head to toe. Alan remembered her childhood story of seeing a woman in black in her nursery, likely her mother, and how Eunice had laughed at her and called her mad. Now Edith was a woman in black, and as she leaned against Sir Thomas’s chest, dazed and unfocused, Alan knew that she would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Sir Thomas’s arm was around her, which would have been a breach of propriety had they not been affianced. It was all too soon, under circumstances too horrible to comprehend, and perhaps he was looking through the prism of his jealousy, but when he regarded the way Sir Thomas held Edith, it seemed that the man was determined to keep her in his grasp rather than to ease her suffering. She looked trapped, not protected.
Then Sir Thomas noticed his gaze and held it, steadily. It was an unspoken duel. Edith saw none of it. Alan knew that he had already lost, and so he tipped his hat, as one would do under such a circumstance to salute a grieving relative of the deceased. Encumbered by umbrella and fiancée, Sir Thomas was unable to return the gesture, and so, inclined his head. Sharpe was the model of gravity and sorrow, and Alan wondered if he himself was being unfair because of his jealousy. Sir Thomas’s feelings for Edith could be pure. It was possible to fall in love deeply and quickly.
Just ask Eunice.
* * *
Three short weeks later, a few of the same guests who mourned my father’s passing would attend my wedding at Asbury-Delaware Church. It was a small affair, the details of which I now struggle to recall.
* * *
Edith the bride was dressed and veiled in white, like a phantom. The bouquet of red roses that she held as Ferguson walked her down the aisle reminded Alan of a beating heart, and of her father’s favorite song, “A Red, Red Rose,” which Cushing had listened to nearly every morning as he showered and shaved at his club. She looked dazed. Like every man present, Alan included, the groom wore a mourning band. It was macabre that they should marry now, and when the minister asked if there were any present who knew of any impediments to their union, Alan wanted to speak up. He wanted to say that it felt wrong, her father had not approved and Edith was making a terrible mistake, but he held his peace. He wished her well, he truly did.
But as Sir Thomas kissed his bride, her garnet ring cast a slash of red light against her pale, wan cheek, and it looked so much like a wound that Alan gasped. Heads turned his way, including Eunice’s, and she favored him with a sad, tight smile. She was sending him a signal: He must accept that the kiss sealed the two as husband and wife and the hopes of the McMichaels were dashed. Eunice would love again, of that he was sure, and he tried to convey confidence in her future happiness by taking her hand and giving it a squeeze.
And he was equally sure that he would never stop loving. He would go to his grave married in his heart to Edith Cushing, and perhaps, if there were such things as ghosts and the fates were kind, he would be able to watch over her, and her children, and her grandchildren and keep her free from danger.
Let her be happy, and I will be happy, he thought. It is all that I want out of this life.
“No ghost was ever seen by two pair of eyes.”
— THOMAS CARLYLE
CHAPTER TEN
CUMBERLAND, ENGLAND
THE HILLS WERE barren and the sky was clotted with fog. Warmed by blankets and her traveling coat with the magenta bow, Edith, who was dozing in the open carriage, got lost in a hazy dream that she was riding in a hearse toward a cemetery. Not so much riding as being conveyed to the graveyard, which signified that she was the one who had died. The last of the Cushings. But she was a Cushing no longer. She was Lady Sharpe.
Through the chill, she felt the warmth of her husband and knew that she was dreaming, and roused herself. Then Thomas said, “Edith, Edith, wake up. We are here.”
When her eyes opened, she saw Thomas. His dear face, the angles as keen-edged as the facets of her garnet ring, his eyes bluer than the exquisite cameo Wedgwood belt clasp she had eyed, then rejected, while shopping in London. Thomas had encouraged her to allow the purchase but she wanted all possible funds to be spent on developing his clay-harvesting machine. She had a wonderful trousseau that would stand her until his own fortune was restored.
If only her father could be there to see that.
The horse brought the carriage closer to the gates of the Sharpe family seat, and in some ways, the place matched the engravings she had studied in her book. The bones of the grounds and the house were st
ill there. Short columns supported an iron arch dominated by the family crest, which was often wrought in pictures in brilliant red as a nod to the crimson clay from the Sharpe mines, and included the image of a chained skull, very dark and Gothic, in her view. The crest had been impressed in the red wax seal on the back of Thomas’s desperate love letter. Below the crest wrought in iron were the words ALLERDALE HALL.
The bleak house stood at the end of a red clay path, surrounded by dead brown grass and skeletal trees and backed by a dark gray sky. Gone were the boulevards lined with trees and topiaries. No porte cochère to shelter aristocrats’ coaches as they disgorged visitors; indeed, no visitors. No servants, either, just one man, she had been told. Thomas and Lucille could no longer afford staff, and so had given up entertaining.
I will change all that. Upon the death of her father, control of the family fortune had passed to her. She would restore Allerdale Hall and its master to their former glory. The worry lines on her beloved’s dear face would disappear. They would waltz in their own home surrounded by friends and family. And children.
She blushed.
As to the hall itself, two Gothic spires of unequal height dominated the asymmetrical silhouette as it sat wedged between life-size versions of Thomas’s mining equipment. It had been built on over the centuries, in many styles of brick and stone; there were walkways, turrets and towers, numbers of which had deteriorated so badly as to fall. Glazed glass panes stared at her beneath eyebrows of arched brick. Allerdale Hall looked at once to be simultaneously unfinished and too tired to go on, as if it were alive and slowing dying. What was the saying? Giving up the ghost.
Thomas had prepared her, but the sight of the once-magnificent estate now fallen into such terrible ruin stunned and saddened her. There was a desperate dignity about her new husband as he gazed at her taking it in. Like his beautiful but dated clothing, his home spoke of a life begun in refinement and elegance, but without the means to maintain it. It spoke of loss. She remembered what he had told the captains of Buffalo industry: that he was possessed of an indomitable will. It seemed to her now that Allerdale Hall stood aboveground only through the sheer force of that will; that if owned by a lesser man, it would have disappeared into the fog like a mirage.
