When I enter Courtenay Hall now, the house is in near darkness. Memory lets me pass through the maze of halls with ease, and soon I’m climbing the stairs to my destination.
Having seen the bright and cheery children’s bedrooms of twenty-first-century acquaintances, I now truly recognize how ghastly a place my husband grew up in. In Courtenay Hall—the hereditary seat of a family who would rank among modern billionaires—the nursery is the worst part of the house. The hallway is dark and narrow, and it smells of mildew and the stink of wet stone. Worse, in a grand manor house like this, the nursery is not merely where the children sleep. It is also where they eat and play and spend most of their indoor time.
I pause outside August’s old room, arguably the best in this wing and where I suspect my son sleeps. I’m tempted to peek in on him as I did when he was an infant, poking my head in his cradle nearly every hour just to watch him sleep. But there is a vast difference between a mother checking in on her baby and a governess checking on her charge, especially when they have not been formally introduced.
I continue walking down the hall.
It is only now, returning from the twenty-first century, that I can smile at the odd quirks of Victorian decorating. Rooms stuffed with furniture and bric-a-brac, all of it chosen for its individual attractions. Establishing a common decorating theme is hardly a concern, unless you want to be truly fancy and put all your Middle Eastern–themed items in one room, your Egyptian ones in another and your Asian ones in a third.
A house like Courtenay Hall will always be more austere, hearkening back to the Regency period, as if that is a sign of taste. Rather like the modern wealthy styling their homes Colonial or even faux Victorian.
Even with the pared-down decorating, Courtenay Hall is still far too full of “stuff” for my newly ascetic tastes, like the hallway I’d just passed through, lined with Greek and Roman busts on pedestals, the bane of staff forever terrified of knocking into one.
The governess’s room is another matter. It is austere. Empty. Even desolate. One would think, for a tiny room with a sloping roof, it’d be all too easy to cram it with basic furnishings. Instead, the narrow bed and single dresser look lost in the emptiness, and my two bags sit forlornly in the middle of a bare floor. The bed bears a coverlet so threadbare I wouldn’t donate it to charity.
“Well, Emma,” I murmur. “Let’s hope you packed blankets in that yellow bag.”
A throat clears behind me, and I spin to see Mrs. Landon in the doorway, holding a tray. I apologize and reach for it, but she keeps her hold on it.
“You did not speak to me when you came in,” she says.
“I did not wish to bother you, ma’am. I entered through the wrong door, and someone said Master Edmund was already abed, so I asked for directions to my room.” I nod at the tray. “It is very kind of you to bring me supper. I know I arrived late, and so I did not expect a meal.”
“I did not expect to be bringing it myself,” she says. “From now on, you will speak to me before retiring for the evening.”
I half curtsey and bow my head with murmured assent.
As she relinquishes the tray, I glance down at a gristly cut of beef and congealing gravy with a chunk of bread that looks as if it could hammer nails. Good thing I ate a hearty meal in Whitby.
I thank her, and she informs me that the young master rises at seven, and I shall join him in his rooms at seven-thirty, where we will dine together.
“I will be looking forward to it,” I say.
Her sniff calls me a fool, but she only lifts her skirts, as if to avoid trailing them on the dusty floor, and she leaves me to my cold supper.
I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. I am in Courtenay Hall, and my son—my son!—is in the next room. My bedchamber could be as dank as a debtor’s cell, and I would not trade it for a penthouse suite. I crawl under that scratchy coverlet, and my entire body collapses into the lump-riddled mattress.
I am home. I can rest.
Finally, I can rest.
And so I sleep until I’m woken by the scrape of branches against glass. I manage to prop open one eye long enough to peer at the deep-set window. Shadows shift over it as a tree sways in the wind. When the scratching comes again, I cover my head with my pillow and flip over to face the wall.
I’m halfway to sleep, caught in that sweet state of half slumber, when a voice whispers, “Leave.”
I go still, eyes opening in the darkness.
“Leave,” the voice whispers. “Leave or be lost.”
I leap up and reach for the bedside light, instead hitting an oil lamp. I steady it, the oil sloshing. Then I light it, and a sickly yellow glow fills the tiny room.
“Hello?” I say, already feeling foolish. The room is so small I can tell at a glance that I’m alone. Still, I gather my courage and say again, a little louder, “Hel—”
A gust of ice-cold air blows out the flickering lamp. I freeze, wide eyed in the darkness, before giving myself a shake and relighting the lamp. When the cold air hits, I quickly put the lamp on the far side of my bed. Then I turn.
The window is open.
It had not been open when I went to bed.
Another sharp shake of my head. I’m being foolish. The window has blown open. It’s a breezy night, and those branches scraping the window pushed it ajar.
As I rise from bed, I pause, looking down at my bare feet, scant inches from the pitch blackness that is “under the bed.” I laugh softly, but it’s a little ragged, and I do take the lantern and bend to peer under like a brave child checking for monsters. There are none.
I laugh again, more confident now, as I shake my head at my foolishness. What did I think it was? A ghost?
I should follow that by saying there are no such things as ghosts, but that would be a lie. The Second Sight runs in my family. My grandmother saw ghosts, and my sister Miranda does, too. I, however, do not, which means that voice whispering in my ear was the wind entangling with my imagination.
I cross to the window. The latch hangs unfastened and barely attached, the screws rusted. Mystery solved. A strong gust snapped it open. I could ask for a repair, but I don’t mind an open window at night, not when the breeze is so exquisitely scented with autumn. I may ask to have that tree outside trimmed. For now, I’ll snap off whatever twigs I can reach.
My hand extends through the opening, prepared to grab the offending tree branch. The nearest one is a good ten yards away.
I poke my head out and crane it around, looking for hanging vines that might explain the sound I’d heard. The stonework is immaculate, though, without so much as a rogue tendril of ivy.
Hmm. That’s odd.
Perhaps odd shouldn’t be the word. I woke hearing a scratching at my window, and there is nothing there to scratch it. Yet this is the advantage to knowing that ghosts walk our world. It normalizes what might otherwise induce horror. If you ignore ghosts, they don’t realize you can see them, and so they go about their business, flitting past, paying you no mind. As harmless as moths.
What happened to me here isn’t proof of a haunting. It’s proof of a brain that is at once exhausted and exhilarated. When Miranda had been about Edmund’s age, she’d spend all of Christmas Eve racing about, eating pastries and sugared almonds, and eventually she’d reach the point where her mind simply quit, and she started spouting nonsense, furious when no one could understand her. That’s what happened to me, my overtaxed brain spouting nonsense, imagining voices at my ear and scratching at the window.