Gwendolyn wanted to be very like Cindy with her know-it-all attitude and her keen sense of how to get on with things. Soon enough the boyfriend back in New York had disappeared entirely, replaced by one from Oxford or Cambridge—she couldn’t remember which, only that his college was one of the better ones, one of the rich ones. Cindy didn’t shed a tear. “What’s the point?” Cindy asked. “He’s back home. No use crying over what’s not here.”
Gwendolyn liked that as well, and she said it over in her mind many times, “No use crying.” This was some relief in and of itself, for the mascara made crying a sticky, abysmal business. No one in London cried. You couldn’t pull off THE LONDON LOOK unless you kept your eyes bone dry. Soon Gwendolyn could pass rose bushes without ever thinking about the flowers on the south wall, the ones that grew straighter and brighter than any other in the garden. The roses in London were much smaller anyway, cramped into the gardens of townhouses or clinging to what light they could in the cracks between stones. They weren’t proper roses, but sickly little things with barely any color at all. No, it was very rarely now that Cindy would pull Gwendolyn aside, squinting, and tell her to fix up her face, the mascara was running.
The duchess paid for her education, discreetly of course, and Gwendolyn promised herself she would write in thanks, but she never did. She started with a major in French, but Cindy advised against that—“Don’t trust the French here, do they?”—so she switched over to Psychology.
It wasn’t until graduation (in Art History, not Psychology after all) several years later that Gwendolyn received a letter from the post. Cindy was preparing to move back to Chicago where she would be engaged to a fellow with an MBA from Harvard (not the Oxford fellow, after all) and had invited Gwendolyn to come with her and try out the Second City—for that’s what they called Chicago in America. London had been Gwendolyn’s first city, and if Cindy taught her anything it was that you could never stay with your first, could you? Not with cities. Not with men.
That sounded like a fine enough plan to Gwendolyn, and Chicago seemed like a fine enough place with its aboveground rail service and broad city sidewalks and gleaming steel towers, a place even newer than London. But then the letter came with its rich, velvety paper and the four stamped eglantine roses on the envelope. Gwendolyn felt her fingers shaking as she opened it.
It regretted to inform her of the passing of Lady Sirith of Hardwick Hall, twentieth Duchess of Shrewsbury, Patron of the Silver Garter, and a list of other titles that Gwendolyn only half-remembered. It was customary for a member of the family to sit in mourning at the manor and as she had no living family, the duchess requested that Gwendolyn do the necessary duties. Of course, continued the letter in a quite majestic manner, the terms of her bequest were quite clear and should Gwendolyn not arrive in three days’ time, she would be required to pay back the sum spent on her education.
Cindy pooh-poohed and turned up her tiny mouth in a moue when Gwendolyn shared the news. “What an old bitch,” she said, “threatening to make you pay all that money. It’s just as well she’s in the worm trough.”
Gwendolyn nodded her head, but kept silent. The four roses had sparked a long-neglected sense of familial obligation in her, and she thought that maybe it was proper to visit her mum’s grave one last time, to say a proper goodbye, before the government claimed the old manor for a fully renovated heritage center.
Her bags were already packed, so she saw Cindy off to the airport and then rode the Tube (still cramped, still noisy, still flush with warm bodies crowding up against one another) to King’s Cross Station where she boarded a train heading to Derbyshire.
Gwendolyn stared out the window, fidgeting sometimes, watching the rolling hills and quilted landscape with increasing apprehension, and asking all the kinds of questions young people ask when they go home again. Would Damien still be there, carrying toffee in his pocket for all those long years, just in case she returned? Would she still know the stones, the places to avoid on the stairs, the tricky bumps on the floor? Would the air smell the same, the sun cast its light just so, the tourists still flash their cameras and chatter on with noisy, Yankee excitement? But most of all, would the roses still grow straighter and brighter on the south wall than anywhere else in the garden? They were warm thoughts, sad thoughts, and when her mascara began to run, Gwendolyn wiped her face raw.
When she pulled into the station, Damien met her with a car from the estate. He looked nervous, picked at the dirt on his clothes with broad, flat fingers and smiled hastily, before averting his eyes away from her. He spoke a little on the ride to the manor house of inconsequential things, little threads that wound around Gwendolyn, picking out her absence, not with cruelty, but with a thousand stories resumed midway whose characters were no longer familiar.
“And the ghosts?” Gwendolyn asked at one point. Damien only looked at her queerly and pursed his lips.
Finally, the car turned past the property fence, sped past the visitor car park, and arrived at the gates. “Your dress looks quite pretty.” He smiled almost shyly. “New London fashion, I’d be guessing.” Then he was tipping his hat ever so slightly, as if he couldn’t decide if she were family or royalty, before disappearing entirely.
Gwendolyn walked the grounds like a nervous cat, feet delicately treading the path. She tiptoed past the lavender and lilac, remarked at the blush of poppies that had sprouted at odd intervals along the sides of the path, and finally turned the corner, past the old wrought-iron bench where honeymooners liked to get their picture taken, towards the south wall.
She was relieved to see that Damien had spent most of his efforts there. Even if the rest of the gardens looked a little shabbier, a little wilder than she had last seen them, the roses on the south wall still bloomed like giant, delicate clouds in hues that ranged from pink to orange-edged cream and yellow. They were beautiful, and looking at them, Gwendolyn felt tears welling up and she was glad the mascara was gone, that it couldn’t make a dark muddle of her face.
And at last, Damien returned to take her to see the duchess.
The light was just starting to fade from the Blue Room, best beloved, leaving half- glimmers of turquoise and aquamarine like seashells on a beach. The air was warm from the afternoon sun, but there the duchess sat, unaffected, in her favorite seat, threadbare skin revealing the gnarls and whorls of ancient bones in her hands as she worked with a needle and thread at the stitching she always kept with her.
“My lady?” Gwendolyn asked softly, waiting at the door to be acknowledged as she’d been taught once, a long time ago, the proper forms of address feeling as odd as the unlearned French in her mouth.
The old woman’s head nodded, and Gwendolyn approached, her feet already beginning to remember the soft give of the rush matting. But then those sad, milky eyes turned on her with a long, terrible stare and she said in a drawn-out, lisping voice that Gwendolyn barely recognized: “Who are you?”
I know, love, this is one of the sadder parts. So you may hold my hand if you wish, if that might make it easier for you to hear.
So. The duchess. She demanded of Damien in her lisping, stranger voice: “I don’t know who this woman is. Why is she here?” The hands continued to work at the cloth, and Gwendolyn looked down to watch the threads unraveling, yes, just so, one by one, as she pulled at them, leaving only little holes in the silk where the needle had bound them in.
“My children lay unborn in a dead woman’s womb, my brother’s children unburied in the North Sea, at Normandy, on the banks. I asked for my blood, my bones, the children of my ancestors. Who is this one?”
And Damien replied: “It’s Gwendolyn, my lady. I’m sorry.”
At hearing her name, Gwendolyn turned behind her, but her gaze was blinded by a bolt of blue, the last light of the dying sun. She couldn’t see the old cowherd’s face.
“She is nothing. She wears strange clothes, speaks with a strange tongue. She is none of mine.”
And, oh, best beloved, pick, pi
ck, pick went her fingers until the cloth practically fell apart in her hands.
Gwendolyn felt something unraveling inside her, and though she knew it was she who had made herself the stranger, it hurt terribly to be recognized as such. She fled the room, stumbling past Damien and down the uneven stairs, half tripping, half leaping until her toes touched gravel, and beyond that, the soft grass of the gardens. And there, she stood, by the south wall, sobbing, while the roses quavered around her in the breeze.
She wasn’t alone then, no, Damien stood beside her. “The dead are a hard lot,” he said. His face looked sad. “They’ve been picking the place apart like vultures since you left.”
But in that moment he was neither father nor grandfather enough to comfort her. “There aren’t any ghosts in London,” Gwendolyn whispered. And then: “I don’t want any more ghosts.”
“I know, love.” He said softly, and his hands were as cold and chilly as any dead man’s when he touched her.
Afterward: “You’ll be leaving in the morning then?”
“Yes. But I must sit my vigil first. Blood or no blood.”
Vultures, Damien had called them, best beloved, picking apart the seams of things. Gwendolyn saw it everywhere. The tables lay in pieces in the games room, the joints torn out, the curtains frayed to rags and trailing threads where they brushed the floor, the library littered with pages, paper from the new books—the history ones Duchess Hardwick collected from the Folio Society—and parchment from the very old ones, which had not been sent off to the Bodleian to pay the death duties over the last generations. The place smelt musty, and the flakes of gilt and paint glittered in the air.
This was what the ghosts had done. This was what ghosts were, my love—decay, ruination, things falling apart, coming undone, the terrible passage of time.
Gwendolyn felt an awful longing for the city, the ache that comes into the heart of all young people who leave and come home and wish they could leave again. But Gwendolyn could not leave. There was duty still to be done. The vigil.
And so, with a heavy heart, she took up the old duties once again—to clean, to mend, to care for—and Gwendolyn began to pick up the pages, to shuffle them back into the correct sequence, often squinting at the pencil folio notes in the corners made by visiting scholars to make sure she got it as correct as possible. She set the pages between the wooden boards in which they had originally been bound. She tried to forgive the ghosts for the destruction of her home and the bright, wondrous things she had loved as a child. She tried not to hate them.
It was only when she found the body of poor, dead Montague—flies crawling around the place where his stomach had been ripped open—that she began to recognize the queer feeling in the pit of her stomach as fear.
Ghosts could be something else, she remembered. They were not always kind.
Gwendolyn knelt beside the poor beast—hush now, darling, I know, I know, but it is how it happened in the story—and she stroked his once-silky coat, and said gentle things to him about loyalty and love. She unbuckled the collar from around his neck, and carried his body out to the garden to bury.
There was a spade lying by the south wall, where the roses grew straight and bright, as if one among them at least had known what ought to be done. She had not done much physical labor during her time in London, and her arms had forgotten much of their strength. By the end, her back ached, and dirt lined the insides of her fingernails. But, there, in front of her, was a hole approximately three feet by three feet. She feared digging deeper. She did not want to disturb the roses.
She laid Montague’s limp body in the ground, and scattered the petals of four roses over top. It hurt her to pluck them, but she thought there ought to be something beautiful to mark the grave, even if he was just a dog.
The ghosts had gathered to watch. They wore silks and velvets, jewels in their hair and some of them had weapons buckled to their sides. They were beautiful and aristocratic, with faces that bore some resemblance to the duchess, but, their fingers—oh, my darling!—their fingers were red, and there was something wild in their eyes.
They parted, albeit angrily and with brooding looks, when she started on the path back into the manor, but part they did for she was sitting vigil and they knew she was not too be touched.
That night, Gwendolyn labored at putting right all the things in the house. There was much she could not do, but she did as she could. And the ghosts watched. And they muttered. And when they did not mutter they stared at her with their grim eyes and their red, red fingers, until finally Gwendolyn felt something hot and bright flash through her, and it was anger.
“You did this, all of you! You loved this place, protected it for hundreds of years and then you tore it apart. Why? Why?”
At first, there was a long silence.
And then one answered: “We have no kin. We are alone, so very alone.”
And another: “To pass the time.”
And a third: “There was no one to tell us not to.”
And, at last, the duchess spoke: “Because this is a place for the dead. We do not want strangers sleeping in the beds our children slept in, touching our things. I wish this place were dust, and we were dust in our graves, and all the forests of the world rotted down to skeleton leaves.”
“You were a kinder person when you were alive,” Gwendolyn replied at last.
“You were my closest-to-kin, and you left. It is not for you to judge.”
Gwendolyn nodded slowly. Her hands were filthy from mending books, collecting strands of silk for repair, and from digging one lonely grave in the garden. They were servants’ hands, calloused, scoured now of polish and perfection; and Gwendolyn knew they were her mother’s hands, best beloved, hands that had been bound in service—and love—to this household. And Gwendolyn looked at her hands, and she looked at the hands of the ghosts—red, still, with Montague’s blood—and she began to speak:
“In London, there are no ghosts.”
Angry stares at that, and bloody fingers twitching. Gwendolyn did not care though. She hated their self-loathing, their spoiled faces, and the cold indifference that had settled into their expressions. Once, they had been a kind of family, familiar, comforting when her mum died. But these were different people, and Gwendolyn hated them. “In London, the dead are buried and gone in a fortnight, and the people ride the Tube every morning to work and every evening home, and they cannot breathe but for the press of bodies around them. In London they eat their dead. They burn them up in cigarettes and automobile crashes and pipe bombs. They screw them away with perfect strangers they despise the next day. They sniff the dead, snort them, inject them into veins. In London, they use up the dead. They feed their bodies to the city that neither loves them nor remembers them. I was happy there. In London. Where they carry around their ghosts inside, and the only harm they can do is to themselves.”
And she looked at them, and her gaze was as terrible as theirs.
“I’m going home now.”
That was what she said to them, best beloved, to all those dead sons, murdered lovers, and aged monarchs, and she turned away from them and she began to walk. Slowly, carefully, but proudly. Only when she stood last of all before the ghost of Duchess Hardwick—powerful, fierce as a lioness, the way the portraits showed her back before age had bent her spine back in on its self like an old coat hanger—did she stop.
“He loved you,” Gwendolyn said. “He loved you without question, and you tore him apart.” And there was no ghost for that little dog and Gwendolyn was glad of it. She met the duchess’s eyes and they were hard and they were cold—the kind of eyes, best beloved, that command obedience and fear, the kind of eyes that order death, the kind of eyes that are death’s ally—and she stared down those eyes until, at last, it was the duchess who turned away.
“Take us back to the city,” she said. “Let the city devour us.”
And Gwendolyn nodded.
The ghosts murmured, shook their gory fingers, but th
e duchess raised her hand and there was nothing more to be said, for she was, perhaps, the greatest of them and also, perhaps, the most terrible.
Then they began to file past Gwendolyn, one by one, the dead sons, the murdered lovers, faces that had comforted her at her mother’s funeral, faces she had known from her childhood, faces that had loved her once, in their own way, and she had loved as well. Last came crinkle-eyed Damien, and his fingers were red too, but he kept them hidden in shame.
“Not you,” she said, but he shook his head sadly.
“These grounds are no longer mine to keep,” he told her. Gently. In the voices of a father, and a grandfather. “And I would like to see the city.”
“You wouldn’t like it,” Gwendolyn said softly. “It’s a cruel place for the dead.”
“Aye,” he said. “Most places are.” He made a move to join the others, but stopped. “Care for your mother’s grave, love. It is a hard thing to be dead and alone.”
Then Gwendolyn really did cry, and they were large, proper tears, the kind you can only cry when family is around. And she sobbed until her nose was red, and her face was a road map of dust trails.
The ghosts took the morning train back to London, and as it snaked its way amongst the hills and clumped villages of the English countryside, Gwendolyn found them on their best behavior. They chatted amiably about the city in their days, meeting Queen Elizabeth and that firebrand Mary, Queen of Scots. How it might have changed, what they had heard about the smog. They seemed happy almost. Excited. Like children going to the fair.
Gwendolyn listened a little, but mostly she sat with Damien and told him all about her life at university. She left out the parts about snogging, because, my darling, that is the way of these things, and besides she thought that maybe he knew all about what growing up meant.
Finally, best beloved—and I know you must be tired, my girl, you have held on for such a long time and you have listened well—they alighted at King’s Cross, and one by one the dead sons, and the murdered lovers, and the aged duchess disappeared into the press of people boarding the Tube for work. It would be quick, Gwendolyn knew. The city was a cold, indifferent place. It had eaten all of its own ghosts long ago, and would be hungry for more.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 2
