John Harding 2-Book Gothic Collection. John Harding
my dream again. But had I simply had the dream, or had I nightwalked as well? There was something queer about all of this and for a minute or two my groggy head could not figure it out. I sensed something different from the way things always were, but what? Then it came to me. Always, I began with the dream, that was how it started. I saw the woman hovering over Giles’s bed, and then I walked. But last night I had walked first, and then I had seen her. I had begun the dream, that’s true, but then I’d awoken, risen from my bed and walked fully conscious. Or at least it seemed to me now that that was how it had been. Normally when I nightwalked I had afterward no recollection of having walked at all. Gradually, I began to remember more and more, the strange ghostly singing that had led me from my bed in the first place, which was not like anything in my dream.
There was a knock at the door, followed by Mary coming in bearing a tray. ‘Good morning, Miss Florence, are you all right now? I’m glad to see you awake, you gave us quite a fright last night, but then your walks always do. Now sit yourself up, there’s a good girl, miss, and I’ll set your breakfast down in front of you.’
I obeyed her. ‘S-so it happened then, I had one of my nightwalks?’
She set down the tray on my lap, opened the drapes so sunlight flooded the room, and busied herself pouring me some tea and lifting the little cosy from a boiled egg. ‘Oh yes, miss, though you didn’t get far. Only to Master Giles’s room, where you fell down in a faint on the floor. Would you believe Master Giles slept right through the whole thing? Lucky for you Miss Taylor heard you hit the floor or you’d have been on it all night and you’d be waking up now stiff as a board.’
‘Miss Taylor heard, you say? But wasn’t she already there?’
Mary stared at me and chuckled. ‘Good gracious no, miss. It was one o’clock in the morning. What would she be doing there at that time? No, she heard you and she was quite put out as she’d not been told of your night pursuits. She woke the whole household and in the end we had John pick you up and put you back in your bed. Now, that’s enough talking for you, miss.’ (Though it was she who’d done all the talking.) ‘You get your breakfast down you and then snuggle down and get back to sleep. You know you’re always tired after one of your nocturnal adventures. Miss Taylor said you’re not to think of coming down before noon.’
After Mary had gone I ate my breakfast, for I hungered terribly, but as for the snuggling down and going back to sleep, I could not, for my mind was a beehive of thoughts. On the one hand, all seemed simple enough. I had had the dream and one of my walks. In the past it had often happened that I had collapsed somewhere and been carried back to my bed unconscious. But what troubled me here was the order of things. Always the dream started with me in the same room as Giles, as we had been when we were small, not in the separate rooms we had now. And I had always sensed that the walking began after the dream, not before.
And it hadn’t felt like the dream. For one thing there was the singing. There had never been any such sound in my dream before. In fact, there was normally no sound at all until the woman bending over the bed said, ‘Ah, my dear, I could eat you!’ Also I realised now that I was still wearing my robe; they had evidently picked me up in it and straighted me to bed, probably not wishing to wake me by trying to take it off me. But last night I had gone to bed nightgowned only. I certained I had not got into bed with my robe on, and when I nightwalked I always did so in what I was wearing in bed; just as I never stopped for a candle, I never put on my robe. The whole thing did not make sense but that it had been exactly as I first remembered. I had begun the dream, but had then been woken by the noise the woman – Miss Taylor – had been making and, anxiousing for Giles, had risen, slipped on my robe, gone to my brother’s room and had there been so shocked by the sight of my dream now come true before my very eyes that I fell into a faint.
If all that trued, and I certained of it, then so did something else, namely that Miss Taylor had lied when she said she heard me fall and had got up from her bed to investigate. And of course she would lie, because she wouldn’t want anyone to know she had middle-of-the-nighted in Giles’s room. And when they told her of my nightwalks, she had reckoned to fool me into accepting her version of the truth.
Even though I sat in bed, too terrified to move a muscle, indeed, unable to, like the man in ‘The Premature Burial’ by Edgar Allan Poe, my heart was racing as though I had just been running. What did it all signify? Only that the new governess meant to do us harm. Or if not us, perhaps, then certainly Giles.
In the course of a troubled morning more thoughts came to me. Principal among them was my dream. My dream had come true! Exactly as it had always happened, I had now seen it in real life. I realised at last why from the beginning there had been this feeling of familiarity with Miss Taylor, for since my early childhood I had seen her a score of times in the dream. It was not that she resembled Miss Whitaker after all, indeed she didn’t look anything like her, although, strangely, when I thought about that, there was something of her that was the first governess, a look, an expression, a something in the falseness of her smile.
But how could it be that I had dreamed her before I’d even met her? How could that happen? I arounded and arounded this in my mind and could come up with no rational explanation. Eventually my frustration got the better of my fear and I got up and paced the room. And the more I paced and thought, the more there seemed but one explanation, although the thing itself impossibled, except by supernatural means, and it was this: that I had premonitioned what was to come. I had forewarned me in my dream of this woman who would one day enter our lives, and my dream had purpose: to save my brother from whatever evil she had planned. I made no mistake that it was evil, from the way she enthused those words, ‘Ah, my dear, I could eat you!’; and from the way she looked at Giles I doubtlessed he was the object of her attentions, the reason for her being here. She meant to do him harm.
At noon I made my way down to the breakfast room, but Miss Taylor and Giles were not yet there so I casualled into Mrs Grouse’s sitting room, where I found her alone.
‘Ah, there you are, Miss Florence,’ she beamed me. ‘Feeling better, I hope?’
‘Yes, thank you. Quite well.’ I had thought to tell her all about the supposed nightwalk and how it had never been and of what I had seen, but, seeing her face now, dismissed the thought; she would never believe me. Oh, she would not think me to be untruthing, merely mistaken. For what person who suddenly awakes somewhere inappropriate for sleep, perhaps in a carriage or the theatre, does not insist he or she has not been asleep at all? I decided to try a different tack.
‘Mrs Grouse,’ I said, fiddling idly with the blotter upon her desk as though what I was saying had no significance at all for me, ‘Mrs Grouse, what do you know of Miss Taylor?’
‘Why, no more than you, miss, only what she has told us all.’ She drew herself up huffily and sniffed. ‘I am sure I receive no special confidences from her. She is the governess and I am merely the housekeeper, the person who keeps all this’ – she spread her arms out to indicate everything around her, meaning Blithe and the household – ‘running smoothly.’
‘Did not my uncle write you about her and tell you of her history? Would he not have had references from her, you know, of her family and previous employment?’
‘Your uncle had nothing to do with it.’ Mrs Grouse gave another sniff, always a sign of disapproval in her. It was the nearest she ever came to criticising my uncle, although I sured she considered him neglectful of us children, ignoring us and wanting to be as little troubled over us as possible. ‘He said he had only just had the inconvenience of interviewing Miss Whitaker and could not be bothered with having to interview one governess after another. Besides, he was abroad, so he appointed an educational agency to take care of the matter. The people there will have checked out her qualifications, you may be sure of that. You may depend she comes thoroughly recommended.’
I fiddled with the blotter some more, not knowing what to say. It seemed I had dead-ended. There was not another question I could think to ask. I looked up. Mrs Grouse was staring at me thoughtfully. ‘But why do you ask, miss? Is there something that bothers you about Miss Taylor?’ I didn’t answer. ‘Is it, well, is it perhaps, that you don’t like her?’
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