John Harding - Florence and Giles

I would make to follow but it was as though I were bound to the bed. My body was leaded and it was only with a superhuman effort that I was finally able to lift my arms and legs. I would sit up and try to scream, to wake the household, but nothing would come, save for the merest sparrow squawk that died as soon as it touched my lips. I would put my feet to the floor, steady myself and walk slowly – my limbs would still not function as I wished them to, in spite of the urgency of the situation – to the doorway. There I would look in either direction along the corridor but have no clue which way the woman had gone. It was no good trying to reason things, she was as likely to have gone left as right and I was wasting valuable time prevaricating. And so I would choose right, it was always right, and begin to walk, urging my weighted legs to move. And then…and then…I would wake up, sitting on the piano stool in the drawing room, perhaps, or in Meg’s chair in the kitchen, sometimes alone but like as not surrounded by the servants, who would be watching me, making sure I did not have some accident and harm myself, or somehow get outside and drown myself in the lake. When I woke, my first words were always the same: ‘Giles, Giles, I have to save Giles.’ And Mrs Grouse or John or Meg or Mary, whoever was there, would always say, ‘It’s all right, Miss Florence, it was only a dream. Master Giles is safe and sound asleep.’

Because I remembered virtually nothing of the walking part of the dream what I knew of my nightwalking came from the observations of other people. Often I liked to nightwalk in the long gallery, a windowed corridor on the second floor that stretched along the central part of the front of the house. John told me how, when he first came to work at Blithe, he had been to the tavern in the village one Saturday night and was returning home up the drive somewhat the worse for wear when he looked up at the house and saw a pale figure, all in white, moving slowly along the long corridor, now visible through one window, then disappearing to reappear a moment later in the next. At the time he knew nothing of my nocturnal habits. ‘I don’t mind telling you, miss,’ he told me many a time, ‘I ain’t no Catholic but I crossed myself there and then. Knowing as I do the reputation Blithe has for ghosts, how it has always attracted and pulled them in, I convinced myself it was some evil spectre I was seeing. I was sure I’d come in and find the whole household murdered in their beds.’

Mrs Grouse told me that I always walked slowly, not as sleepwalkers are usually depicted in books, with their arms outstretched in front of them as if they were blind and feared a collision, but with my arms hanging limply at my sides. My posture was always very erect and I seemed to glide, with none of the jerkiness of normal walking, but smoothly, as if, as she put it, ‘you were on wheels.’

It was true what John said about Blithe and ghosts. Mrs Grouse reckoned it all stuff and nonsense but Meg once told me the local people thought it a place ghouls loved, a favourite haunt, as it were, to which any restless spirit was attracted like iron filings to a magnet. And now, even though it was only I, Florence, sleepwalking, I seemed somehow to have added to this superstition.

Meg told me that when I woke from my walks it uselessed to speak to me for several minutes, that I seemed not to hear. Often, before I was myself, at the moment when I seemed to have emerged from the dream but had not yet returned to real life, I began to weep and was quite distraught, and if any should try to comfort me I pushed them away and said, ‘No, no, don’t worry yourself about me! It’s Giles who needs help. We must find him, we must!’ Or something like.

After I had nightwalked three or four times and it began to be a pattern, they called in Dr Bradley, the local doctor, who came and gave me a good going-over, shining lights in my eyes and poking about in my ears and listening to my heart and so on. He pronounced me fit and well and told them it was likely the manifestation of some anxiety disorder, which was only natural considering my orphan status and the upheavals of my early life. This was confirmed, he said, by my fears focusing upon Giles, who was, after all, the only consistent presence in my life. I read all this in a report I found on Mrs Grouse’s desk one day, when she had gone into town on some errand. I curioused over the words ‘upheavals of my early life’. I could not remember anything of my parents – my mother died in childbirth and my father some four years later with my stepmother, Giles’s mother, in a boating accident. I recalled nothing of any of them, and as the servants were only engaged after they were all dead, they could tell me nothing either. As far as my early life went, it was all a blank, a white field of snow, without even the mark of a rook.

Before I set out to visit the Van Hoosiers next morning, John came back from town with a letter, a rare enough occurrence at Blithe, where Mrs Grouse received correspondence from my uncle maybe two or three times a year and little else. It was for me, and I reflected that from being completely unlettered but a few weeks ago I was now the most episto-latoried person for miles around. The letter was, of course, from Giles and I heart-in-mouthed as Mrs Grouse commenced to read it, after she had first sniffed and said, ‘Humpf, seems folks think I’ve nothing better to do all day than read letters to you.’

Dear Flo,

Thank you for your letter. I have read it ever so many times and it is tearing from so much folding and unfolding. I like the sound of your ice skating and cannot wait for the holidays. Do you think Theo Van Hoosier will be able to find any skates to fit me? Will the ice bear the weight of three of us? Or will we take turns? I am very slow at my lessons, but I don’t mind when the others laugh at me. It is better than being hit or pinched. But you are not to worry about it because it does not happen often. Not so very often, anyway. I hope you are well. I hope Mrs Grouse and John are well. I hope Meg and Mary are well.

Your loving brother

Giles

The letter from me Giles referred to was, of course, written by Mrs Grouse and so contained none of the things I would have liked to tell him, about the tower room, for instance (although I had not yet decided whether or no to let him in on that), and none of the anxious inquiries about himself I longed to make. His references to pinching and hitting shivered me quite, although it uncleared whether he had actually suffered physical abuse or if ‘you are not to worry about it because it does not happen often’ merely referred to the teasing, but I had no time to reflect upon it now. I was all done up ready to go visiting, so I took the letter from Mrs Grouse and slipped it into my overcoat pocket, where it heavied my spirit as if it had been a convict’s leg iron or a hunk of stolen bread down a schoolboy’s pants. I had wanted to walk to the Van Hoosier place but Mrs Grouse would have none of it. It was more than a mile and although the roads were clear of snow today, if it blizzarded again I might be stranded halfway, not to mention that even if that didn’t happen I would death-of-cold me. She neverminded that I had been out in the cold on the ice every afternoon anyway. So John was to horse-and-trap me there, which was fine by me, for once we out-of-sighted Blithe and Mrs Grouse’s prying eyes he handed me the reins and let me drive, as he often did when the housekeeper wasn’t around. The old horse we used on the trap, Bluebird, was so docile and knew all the local routes so well that in truth there was not much driving to be done, and even should it snow, it little dangered the horse leaving the road and wandering into a ditch.