Miles and Flora Read online

  MILES AND FLORA

  A sequel to Henry James’

  THE TURN OF THE SCREW

  HILARY BAILEY

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  A Note on the Author

  One

  Marguerite Selsden, a pale, grave young woman of twenty-eight, sits writing a letter in the window of a little sitting room with faded rose-sprigged wallpaper, where a bright fire burns in the hearth. Sometimes she pauses, gazing down from the window into a misty garden, old and settled, behind a high wall. There is a lawn, trees and flowerbeds, then another wall, behind which is the kitchen garden. To Marguerite’s right, cobbled Mermaid Street stretches down into the town. To her left is a crossing where another street goes uphill. Further on, the bulk of Strand Castle can be seen over rooftops.

  It is a raw December day and gulls from the sea two miles away, swoop over streets and gardens. Marguerite, in her dress of dark wool, with a cameo at her collar, her light-brown hair dressed plainly in a chignon at her neck, writes on …

  12 Mermaid Street,

  Strand,

  Sussex

  December 19th, 1913

  My dear Mrs Grose,

  I thank you so very much for your letter to my sister, containing such kind enquiries about her health. I apologise for this belated reply and hope the delay has caused you no anxiety. Your letter was forwarded, but not quickly, from the home of the Bretts, my sister’s previous employers in Edinburgh. And let me hastily assure you the reason why I reply rather than Elaine is not that her health is much worse. Agreed, she has a little cold, brought on most probably by the fatigues of the journey to this pleasant Sussex town, where we are now living. On the medical advice of our landlady’s doctor, Dr Prothero, she has been put to bed until she is better. And she will recover, of that I assure you! Recover fully. Her lungs are not badly affected. All she requires, I have been told by more than one doctor, is rest, quiet and peace of mind, and these I am determined she shall receive.

  When your letter arrived she was all for replying immediately, but I insisted she remain in bed and allow me to reply on her behalf. It will disappoint you no doubt that this is not in her own hand but I expect you will agree that in this instance the younger sister’s will should prevail! Rest assured, Mrs Grose, Elaine is as well as she could be and happy, or so she tells me – and I believe her.

  Let me tell you where we are and how we live. We are in the house of a good lady, Mrs Martha Constantine. She is a lady in her fifties, very active, the widow of a merchant captain. Her house stands in a street beside the steep hill leading up from the High Street. It is a grey house, not beautiful as to the exterior, though Mrs Constantine has a fine wisteria growing up the front of the building, which will not doubt be delightful when summer comes. At the rear lies a small garden, with a large, old Mulberry tree. There are three storeys. Elaine and I occupy the top three rooms. If Mrs Constantine’s servants lived indoors these would be theirs, but she prefers her maid and cook to live out. Though small, our rooms are very charming, freshly painted, though the wallpaper is old, charmingly faded, which I love more than any bright newness. The rooms have good grates, which we shall need now that the weather has become so cold. Our little sitting room, is quite charming, though so far the view is limited by mist and rain. Fine days are few and far between now but I am sure that one day, when it is brighter, we will be able to crane from Elaine’s window and glimpse, beyond the garden and the houses beyond, the glimmer of the harbour. As I write, the gulls are crying round the house.

  How pleased we are with our accommodation. From our other sister Harriet I have, with some persistence, gained items from our old house – a writing desk, a pretty, low armchair and some china. Hitherto neither Elaine nor I have ever been in a position to possess these things, for as you will know, a governess does not take possessions to her employer’s house. No, indeed, she does not. Alas, I say bitterly to myself, all too often she takes, only one thing to her employer’s home: her health and strength – and sometimes leaves without even these, as our poor Elaine has done. She has told me little of what passed at the Bretts’. I believe she prefers not to speak of the experience. Nevertheless, I have the impression that they ignored the symptoms of her illness and persuaded her to do the same until she collapsed. Only then, when matters had become serious and unignorable did they seek outside help and call a doctor who, of course, confirmed that Elaine’s case was grave. They appear then to have packed her off swiftly, with little thought of what would become of her. I wish I were not so indignant when I think of what took place in Edinburgh – I cannot deny that I am. Only you, I gather, had the sympathy and plain sense to urge her repeatedly in your letters to seek medical advice, when she told you of her symptoms. Alas that she did not heed you. And you two have not met for a dozen years! While the Bretts were with her every day and night!

  Imagine how dreadful it would have been if her letter to me had not arrived! You will not find it hard to believe the post in Russia is not as reliable as it is here. What would have happened then, after they shot her so unceremoniously from their door, ill and confused as she was, if I had not been in St Petersburg when the letter arrived? I might have been with my employers on their country estate five hundred miles from the city. That letter, I can tell you, would have sat on a great untidied desk in a vast room full of books and might have stayed there for many months, until our return, perhaps, or until some friend or member of the household decided to bring it with him to the country. The thought is terrifying. Mercifully this did not occur, so Elaine spent only a month in miserable lodgings in London and I was able to reach her without undue delay. My employer was happily most kind and allowed me leave to come home as soon as Elaine’s letter arrived. She was even good enough to tell me she would regard the governess she appointed to care for the young princes and princesses in my absence as a temporary replacement – in other words, that she would be pleased if I were able to return to my post. This, though, I was forced to tell her, might not be possible. I do
not think Elaine will be truly well for a year and Dr Prothero a man in whom I have all confidence has hinted as much. But that is of no moment – if only she gets well. But I am sure she will. Living tranquilly here in this healthy spot, seeing no one (for there is no one here that we know), she will soon begin to mend.

  But this long letter, from a stranger, must be wearying you! With all thanks for your kind letter to Elaine, who will reply as soon as she can – and I allow her! – and my own best wishes I am, Mrs Grose,

  Yours most sincerely,

  Marguerite Selsden

  Two

  In the tall grey house at Strand, surrounded at that time by white salty sea mist, Marguerite Selsden signed her name, took an envelope from her desk and addressed it and put down her pen. She stood up, a tall, slim figure in her plain dress, and went out into a white-painted passageway. Not far along was her sister’s bedroom. She went in and smiled at Elaine, who was propped up against her pillows in the brass-knobbed bedstead, a thick quilt over the lower part of her body. She wore a white bedjacket and her long pale hair, the colour of butter cream, was loose on her shoulders. She put down her book and said, ‘How idle I feel, lying here for over a week with no excuse but a little cold.’

  ‘Dr Prothero insists,’ Marguerite said. ‘So you must obey. I see Jenny has been up to tend the fire.’

  She gazed, attempting to conceal her anxiety, at her sister’s face. She was thin, so thin, Marguerite thought. Small wonder, for when she had found her alone in a London lodging house she had been very ill and almost without money, certainly too poor to cause much food to be brought in by a hostile landlady. Even now, Elaine’s blue eyes were too bright, Marguerite considered, and there was a worrying red patch on each cheek, in a face otherwise very pale. Elaine lay back on her pillow, ‘I shall be able to get up tomorrow.’

  Marguerite said diplomatically, ‘When the doctor says you may rise, you may rise. I will get my sewing and sit with you.’

  ‘There’s no need to trouble yourself with a tedious invalid,’ said Elaine.

  ‘If you would prefer to be alone—’ Marguerite suggested.

  ‘Consult your own wishes, not mine, I beg you,’ responded Elaine.

  Marguerite gazed at her helplessly. It was hard to know what Elaine wanted. She was ill, and captious, and unhappy with herself for being ill. And it had been so many years since they had met. Then they had been barely out of their teens, two of three daughters of a country parson. Elaine, the eldest, had gone off to be a governess – all the girls would have to earn a living unless they married. Marguerite had been the next to find a post – in Yorkshire – and leave home. And during the following year Harriet, the youngest sister, had married John Dawkins, a local solicitor, and moved to London – but that was the year in which both Mr and Mrs Selsden had died, first she of pneumonia then he, it was said, of grief. The long years of childhood and growing up had ended so swiftly. Within four years all the girls had left home, their parents had died, the vicarage, of course, was surrendered to the next incumbent. Too suddenly, there was no family home and no parents to unite the sisters. The separation became greater. She, Marguerite, after a year with a family in Yorkshire, had gone to Russia because her employer in Yorkshire, the father of the children she was tending, had begun to pursue her. Marguerite had known she must leave when she began to respond to him and realised she was on the verge of embarking on a love affair bound to end in misery. It was this that made her answer an advertisement in The Times and leave England for the home of the Prince and Princess Kleber in St Petersburg. She had returned to London only once in nine years, with the Princess and her daughters. Then, she had met neither of her sisters. Harriet, meanwhile, had four children and those cares cut her off from her governess sisters. Now, all three had spent as much time apart as they had together.

  Marguerite remembered the old Elaine, her big sister, rosy and active, breasting the long grass of the watermeadows down to the river with her two smaller sisters, coming after her like two ducklings following their mother. They all wore white dresses with straw hats. The sky had been blue, so blue, as she had trodden the path of crushed grass made by Elaine. Overhead, larks had sung. She remembered Elaine sitting astride a thick, sturdy branch, high up in the big oak tree on the village green (where she should not have been) calling down, ‘Look at me – look at me!’ And Elaine in charge when her father had gone to see the Bishop, taking Mother with him, making a pudding in the kitchen for their lunch, against Cook’s will. And Elaine running, running, black-stockinged legs flying out, down lanes, through orchards.

  The spirited, long-legged girl had grown up, and at just nineteen had gone off to her first post, to be governess to two orphaned children in Essex. There had been few letters from there and an anxiety about her the parents tried to conceal from Elaine’s sisters. To a request that she return home for a holiday came the mysterious reply, ‘I cannot come – I am needed here too much.’ And then she had gone to the Bretts in Scotland, and ended in shattered health.

  Marguerite regarded the wasted face of her sister and turned, to disguise her feelings, to give the fire an unnecessary stir with the poker. How quickly their youth had ended, with all of them like small ships cut loose from the dock suddenly facing the wild open sea. How quickly those ten years had passed for all of them, it seemed, as they made their adult lives – until the arrival of that frightening note, brief and shaky. In it Elaine told her she was ill in lodgings in London and looking forward to recovering and gaining a post, she hoped, in a pleasant home where her duties would be light. A brave lie, Marguerite thought, but also a plea for help.

  That was how they came, now, to be in the little town of Strand, thirteen years after their paths had separated so drastically, forever, as it seemed. Elaine was thirty, she twenty-eight and each, she thought, very familiar to the other and, at the same time, very strange.

  She turned from the fire. ‘I will let you read and comment on my letter to your friend Mrs Grose. You may add a few words, not more.’

  Three

  In the large staid house in Bedford Square Flora Bennett was pinning up her hair. She sat at the dressing table in her bedroom on the second floor, peering into the old gold-framed mirror. On either side of it two candles burned. Flora preferred this, rather than the gas lights, though she worried, as ever, that this beautiful mirror with its elaborate gilt cherubs and flowers, was not clear enough for proper dressing – and the candles made it even dimmer. She might have a spot on her nose and not know it, wisps of rich auburn hair might be straying from the elaborate coils at the nape of her neck. But the mirror made her, made all, so beautiful. She proudly tipped up her small head, crowned with reddish brown, glowing hair, gazed on her own long, white throat, her perfect, slender, white shoulders, raised her long pale arms and combed stray tendrils of hair into position. In this mirror, he thought, without vanity, I look like some Italian lady of the Renaissance, off to dance a formal dance on great marble floors, in a high painted room with pillars. Her head filled with pictures of gold and flickering silver vessels, of gallants in bright clothes with swords at their sides, of tapestries, broken columns, torches, groves of cypress. A couple whispered in the cloisters of a church, a boat sailed in state up a river, musicians playing. Artists of every kind cut marble, carved, gilded, painted, worked in silver and gold. There was such colour – such richness – to such events. If only life here could be like that, mourned Flora. And yet it might be, when she was married.

  She gazed again at the flickering, vibrant image of herself in the glass. She sighed, half in fear, half in excitement. She knew Justin Kilmoyne would ask her to marry him tonight at the ball at his parents’ house in Grosvenor Square.

  Would he? Perhaps at the last moment he would hesitate. Perhaps, even last night, he had met a young lady at his parents’ dinner table and fallen in love – such things could happen. But no, it could not be – could not. But, merciful heavens, if it did … Her arms dropped; she sat befo
re the glass with her hands in her lap. She saw Justin’s face, lean and fair, before her eyes, pictured his smile. She saw his long body and quick movements, remembered the tennis party at which they had met, while she was staying with a schoolfriend. She saw his face again, his expression, firm, yet open, yielding, sympathetic. She heard his laugh. How lucky she was. How lucky that he loved her. Yet suppose that after a year of meetings he suddenly decided he did not wish to marry. Silly girl, Flora, she told herself, looking in the glass. Silly girl. Cast off fear. ‘Flora is oversensitive. Flora is a little over-imaginative.’ That was what they had said of her from her childhood on. They had protected her, her aunt and uncle, had always been gentle with her. Now, Flora, she thought, you must be brave.

  She bent her head to see the strand of pearls she would wear that night, picked up the necklace, softly glowing in the candlelight, straightened. Then she gave a gasp. There was a face, long, dark, rather thin, the eyebrows strongly marked, the nose long and narrow, beside hers in the mirror. It was as if he bent down, joining his face with hers in the mirror, to surprise her. The expression on the young man’s face was quizzical, jokey. She turned, peering into the darkened room. He had moved away, and now stood a few feet off, near the curtained window, outlined against the stiff folds of material falling to the floor. He wore khaki, a jacket and trousers, and a peaked cap of some kind was tucked under his arm. Flora’s first thought was that she recognised him. But she could not remember his name. He must, of course, he some friend of Justin’s for Justin and his brother were both officers in the same Guards’ regiment. Perhaps he had come upstairs with a message. And she was a little late.

  ‘I am ready,’ she assured him, standing up. Why couldn’t she remember his name?

  He smiled, showing white, even teeth. She was following him from the room, necklace in hand – she would ask Aunt to do up the clasp for her – when she remembered the candles still burning on her dressing table. ‘Go down,’ she called at his back as he left the room. ‘I’ll snuff the candles.’ She did so. Then, picking up her cloak and gloves from where they lay across the bed, she followed him.