John Harding - Florence and Giles and The Turn of the Screw

This last was spoken in a wheedling tone and I knew that, nose outjointed as she was by the new governess, Mrs Grouse wished to make me her ally. I circumspected, sensing this was a dangerous course to follow. For if I shared confidences with Mrs Grouse I would be vulnerable should relations between her and Miss Taylor take a turn for the better. I had not forgotten how she had confederated Miss Whitaker. I shook my head. ‘No, I like her fine. I was just curious, is all.’

We awkwarded a moment or so and then I heard the voices of Giles and Miss Taylor and excused myself and went off to eat.

Miss Taylor was all smiles. ‘I hope you are recovered from your adventure last night?’

I stalled at that word and the way she emphasised it. In one way she was acknowledging what we both knew, that I had not nightwalked but had been conscious and had seen what she was up to, and yet, at the same time, her smiles, her dismissal by her jocular tone of what had happened as not the manifestation of some deeper disturbance but a light thing of no account, signalled that there was to be some kind of truce between us in which the truth was let slumber.

‘Yes, miss. Thank you, miss.’ I concentrated hard on cutting up my chop.

‘And I slept through the whole thing,’ said Giles gaily.

‘Yes, my dear, you slept through the whole thing.’ Miss Taylor reached out and ruffled his hair. I wanted to protest, for no one else had ever so familiared with either of us, but how could I when Giles fond-puppied a look up at her? I near expected him to lick her hand. Had he already forgotten the incident at breakfast yesterday? But then, that was Giles all over. I well imagined how he had responded to those bullies at his school, not with resentment, but with gratitude when, during those intervals when they did not tease or hurt him, they showed him any little act of kindness, no matter how trivial or even unconscious on their part.

Miss Taylor turned to me. ‘I have some understanding of sleepwalking. I believe it to be the result of an idle brain, an imagination that has not enough to occupy it and so looks for things that are not there.’ This sounded like a warning of some kind. She paused and took a sip of her coffee, swilling it around her mouth awhile before swallowing and continuing. ‘You have been let run wild with nothing to keep you busy. It has done you no favours. I am going to rectify that.’

‘Miss Whitaker had me sewing, though I confess I wasn’t much use at it.’

‘Pah! Sewing.’ She looked angry, but then softened somewhat. ‘Well, of course there are things a young lady is expected to learn, but this is 1891. The days when ladies merely played the piano and painted a little – and badly – and embroidered useless things are on their way out. I am of the opinion that all women, and you’re no different, need a little more stimulation than that.’

She wiped her lips with her napkin and stood up. She expectanted us a look and Giles and I understood that this meant breakfast was over. We leapt to our feet too and she straightway marched off with us in her wake.

‘Where are we going?’ I called out as we hurried after her.

She flung her reply over her shoulder, words I had thought never to hear. ‘Why, where else? To the library!’

That night there was no wind howlery; nevertheless I restlessed in bed, not so much because I anxioused, although there was some of that – how could there not be after I had seen Miss Taylor greeding over Giles in his bed? – but rather for the reason that I could not help turning over and over the events of the day. Such a lot had happened; leastways for a girl who had spent most of her life mausoleumed in Blithe. There was something good and something bad, and though the bad thing was a rook in a snowdrift, the good thing was very good – our visit to the library. Giles and I had trailed behind Miss Taylor as she marched her way there, too out-breathed by her purposeful pace to speak but wideeyeing one another as we struggled to keep up. What did it mean, that she was taking us to the library? Did Mrs Grouse know? Did my uncle? I surely didn’t think he could or he would not have allowed it after forbidding it for so many years.

Our new governess stopped outside the library and let us catch up. Then she flung open the door and stepped aside and with a gentle shove at our backs ushered us into the room. We stood in the doorway, open-mouthing what met us, disbelieving our own eyes. The drapes had been pulled back and sunlight rushed into the room, filling the vacuum where it had been denied for so long. The accumulation of dust from many years had been swept from the floor, and Mary was even now at the windows, rubbing away at the glass with her cloth. A couple of the windows were open, although that regretted me somewhat, because, for all the late-summer freshness breezing in, I lacked the usual comforting fusty smell of ancient books.

‘All right, Mary, you can finish that later, if you please,’ brusqued Miss Taylor, and Mary at once straightened up, picked up her bucket of water, said ‘Yes, ma’am’ in such a way as to seem to make a curtsey of it, although she didn’t so much as bend a knee, and fled from the room.

As the door closed behind her Miss Taylor turned to us. Giles anxioused a few glances from her to me and I knew he was merely obviousing my own thought. What were we to do now? Should we butter-wouldn’t-melt it and act as if we had never seen the place before? Or should we assume she had figured it out and therefore just come clean?

Giles, as usual, so nervoused he blundered the whole thing. ‘Gee,’ he said, gazing around in a very theatrical way, ‘so many books. Who would have thought it?’

Miss Taylor watched him with just the twitch of a smile, but not without fondness; it seemed as if she couldn’t look at Giles without licking her lips, and I understood as I saw that smile that she knew all about my visits to the library. Still, I wasn’t about to come right out and admit it, so I turned away and strolled slowly around the room, spine-fingering a book or two here, touching the side of a bookshelf there. In this roundabout fashion, I made my way to the back of the room, toward the chaise longue behind which I secreted my blankets and candle. As I rounded the chaise, casual as you please, or at least so I hoped, Miss Taylor’s voice floated across the room to me, much as the motes of dust, stirred up by Mary no doubt, drifted in the beams of sunlight shafting through the long windows. ‘It’s not there, your little linen cupboard. I had it all taken away.’

I turned to brazen her. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’

She was across the room like a whiplash; her hand shot out faster than a cobra strike and gripped my wrist. She put her face close to mine and I got it then, a powerful blast of dead lilies. ‘Don’t play the clever one with me, young lady. Don’t you dare!’

She released me, and the hand that had held me went up to her head, tidying her hair, as though she regretted her action. I gulped. ‘I – I’m sorry.’ It was out before I could help it and I wished immediately I could call the words back. I would not kowtow to her. But as things turned out it was the right thing to say, for she seemed to soften, not with liking, but because I had done that which I hadn’t wished to, namely acknowledged her as the one who held the upper hand.

She swivelled and sphinxed Giles. ‘And you, I suppose you’ve never been here either?’

Giles squirmed. ‘Well, I – that is, Miss Wh—, I mean, Miss Taylor, I –’ He looked to me for rescue.

I went and stood beside him and slipped an arm around his waist.

Miss Taylor’s face suddenly relaxed, and she smiled, not unkindly. ‘They tell me you cannot read.’