Florence and Giles and The Turn of the Screw. John Harding
only a door onto the corridor, but also another into Giles’s room.
I realised that some sound alonged the corridor from that direction, a queer sound, almost like singing, but not quite, as if the woman – for it was a female voice, no doubt about that – could not make up her mind whether she was singing or something else, keening perhaps, for someone who had died. Now, if you had asked me before what sort of noise a ghost would make, I could not have answered because I had never given any thought to them having a sound, other perhaps than a clanking of chains or outright wailing or something of that sort, but I recognised now that if the spirits of the dead did indeed walk and were able to give voice to their unquiet feelings, this is how they would sound.
I instincted to over-my-head the blankets to hide myself away from whatever it should be that walked the night and to block out the noise it made, but then, how could I think of myself when Giles all-aloned and – even if the thing meant no harm – would be in mortal terror at that awful sound? I slipped from my bed, felt for my robe and drew it about me, as much for comfort as anything else, as it was a warm late summer night and there was no one, no one living, at least, to see me in my nightgown. I barefooted it to the door, listened at it awhile but heard only the vague whistling of the night wind and comforted myself that it must have been that I had heard all along. Be that as it might, I still had to proceed, for I knew I could never rest until I had satisfied myself my precious little brother was safe. I slowed open the door, checking myself for a moment when it creaked, and then, there being no change, slipped into the passage outside.
I had scarce one footed in front of the other when I caught it again, that low keening noise, sounding like nothing so much as the wind itself, but as though it had somehow learned music and was howling in tune. I found myself almost enchanted by it, so it was a few seconds before I realised whence the noise came. It was worse than I had thought, for it, the thing making the noise, whatever it was, was in Giles’s room. I pitter-pattered along the bare boards, unheeding the sound I made, indeed thinking by louding my approach to perhaps scare the thing off. But when I reached Giles’s door I knew that my presence was unnoticed for the singing still persisted as before, low and eerie like a funeral dirge. I gingerlied my hand upon the handle of the door and turned it slowly, fearing once again to make any noise. I pushed open the door and what I saw near took my breath away. I shook my head in disbelief, trying to clear it of the vision before me, then somehow had the presence of mind to pinch my arm, as I have heard tell a body should to ascertain whether she dreams or not. The scene before me did not vanish, nor did I wake up.
It was almost exactly as in my dream of all those years; the same woman was bent over Giles’s bed, singing softly, except now, instead of the black of my dream, she was dressed all in white, a lacy nightgown and robe. She reached out her hand toward my brother and stroked the hair from his eyes and then she said, ‘Ah, my dear, I could eat you!’
The woman was Miss Taylor. I dizzied and reached out a hand to grab hold of the doorpost to save myself, but too late. The last thing I think I heard, although I felt it not, was the thud of my body hitting the floor.
I awoke in my own bed with sunlight streaming through the gaps in the drapes. So after all it had merely been 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