That was it! That was surely it! She was merely waiting until Giles was sufficiently attached to her to swallow some story she would tell him about why he must steal away with her, and subsequently remain with her, and then she would be gone. It so obvioused I kicked myself that I hadn’t seen it before. And she had libraried me to keep me out of her hair while she practised her wiles on Giles, every day inching him further and further away from me. Why, already he had forgotten the incident at breakfast, her sudden terrifying outburst of anger, and fawned about her as though she were the most wonderful person who ever lived. I resolved to speak to Giles about it, to warn him of the danger he was running.
Next day, though, it far from easied to find a time when I could alone him. Miss Taylor fetched him from his room first thing and took him down to breakfast with her and from then on they togethered almost always. It was only now when I sought to speak to him that I realised how much she had already sequestered him from me, how rarely the two of us ever aloned together any more. Eventually we were let out to play in the gardens as a relief from lessons for Giles, and to fresh-air us both. Even then, Miss Taylor accompanied us outside and seated herself on a recliner on the terrace, from which she watchful-eyed us. At one point, when I moved close to Giles and began to whisper that I needed to talk to him urgently, I looked up to see her already outseated and heading toward us. I instanted away from him and shouted out, ‘Can’t catch me, can’t catch me!’ and took off into the shrubbery, Giles tumbling after me.
As you will remember, the shrubbery was neglected and overgrown. I sped through it, following a path that Giles and I knew well but a newcomer would have difficulty in discerning, my brother at my heels. Somewhere I could hear Miss Taylor threshing around in the uncontrolled jungle, blundering after us. I hid myself in a rhododendron bush and listened for Giles’s footsteps. As he passed by, I reached out an arm, grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him into the bush, my other hand clamping his mouth before he had a chance to cry out. I silent-fingered him to keep quiet and we lay like that, hardly breathing, until we heard Miss Taylor go crashing past. When I was quite sure she was gone, I whispered to him, ‘Giles, I have to talk to you.’
He squirmed under my grip. ‘I don’t want to talk. We can talk any time. This isn’t the time for talking, it’s the time for play.’
‘You don’t understand,’ I hissed. ‘We don’t ever have time to talk like we used to. We’re never alone any more. I can’t talk to you without Miss Taylor hearing everything. Have you not noticed?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose. But then, what does it matter if she hears? Why should we care?’
‘Because I am sure she is not who she pretends to be. I think she has come here for some evil purpose of her own. I am half convinced she isn’t human, that she is some kind of being from the spirit world, some sort of ghost.’
Giles excited at this, although I could see he was more than a little afraid, too. ‘A ghost? But why should she come here if she has no connection to Blithe? Whose ghost could she be?’
I bit my lip. ‘I don’t know, I haven’t figured that bit out yet.’
He thought too, a process that never lasted very long with Giles, wrinkling his brow. After perhaps half a minute his face suddened alight. ‘I know! It’s obvious, Flo, truly it is. She must be the ghost of Miss Whitaker, come back to the place where she met her untimely death…’
‘Oh Giles,’ I despaired, ‘don’t be silly. She’s nothing like Miss Whitaker. They don’t even have the same kind of hair.’
‘You can’t know that, Flo. Who says ghosts keep the same appearance as they had when they were alive? Maybe they disguise themselves to fool the people who are still living.’
Giles was building this up into a great game, a big pretend that he no more believed than I did, which was not at all serving my purpose. ‘Giles, you have to listen to me. You have to take care. You must not let her steal her way into your affections. She wants to gain your trust so that she can trick you into going away with her.’
Giles stared at me, amazed. Then he chuckled. ‘But why should she do that, Flo?’ He looked at me as though at a stranger. ‘Flo, you do say the oddest things.’ His brow wrinkled again. ‘Anyway, if she is Miss Whitaker, why should she want to harm me, or you, come to that? Perhaps she just wants to haunt the last place she knew when she was alive. Perhaps she liked being our governess and wanted to do it again. Perhaps –’
At that moment there was a rustling nearby and before I could say another word to my brother, the leaves of the rhododendron parted, revealing in the gap Miss Taylor’s face. ‘Ah, there you are,’ she said, falsing a smile, ‘my two lost chickens. Come now, children, you’ve had long enough for play. It’s time to get back to our books.’
The following day we took a picnic down to the lake. Again Miss Taylor walked around it until she came to the spot on the shore nearest the place where Miss Whitaker had tragicked. On the way she hadn’t spoken, but pulled ahead of us; it seemed she couldn’t wait to get there, as if tugged by some invisible force. We spread out our food and Giles and I ate heartily, our appetites stimulated by the fresh air, but Miss Taylor so picked at her food that it made me watch her in a way I never had before at a meal and notice that she made no attempt to eat anything. The day was hot and after we had finished, Giles, who had brought his fishing pole, settled himself down on the bank to fish. Miss Taylor outed a book from her reticule and began to read.
I suddenly felt exhausted. The intensity of the sun, the oppressiveness of the air, its closeness presaging a thunderstorm, difficulted it to breathe. I tireded and headached; my limbs heavied and I lay back on the picnic rug and, no matter how I tried to fight it, could not prevent my eyelids from drooping and then shutting. I thought that if I closed them for only one minute, that’s all, a single paltry minute, I should recover my senses.
I know not how long I slept. At some point I heard the drone of a bee, the whine of mosquitoes, the gentle disturbance of the lake’s surface as a fish stirred, and then such a silence, such a stillness in the air, that something icy fingered my spine and tickled my neck. I instanted something was wrong and bolt-uprighted and eye-opened all in one movement.
I frighted naturally for Giles; he was my first thought, but there he was, down by the shore, sitting over his pole just as he had been before I slept, so that I did not know whether I had unconscioused for a mere minute or for an hour or even longer; there was no way of telling. I looked around for Miss Taylor but could see no sign of her. Her book lay open and face down upon the picnic rug, but she was nowhere to be found. Then something in that stillness, something in the icy tiptoe up and down my spine, said to me to look at the lake, not down at the shore where Giles sat, but at the lake itself, across to the middle, at the spot I never wanted to look at, the place where Miss Whitaker had misfortuned, and there I saw her, Miss Taylor, out upon the water, the most amazing sight, so that I thought I dreamed or hallucinated, except that it was all so real. She was on the surface of the water, but without any boat. She was standing there, in the very centre of the lake, the water lapping about her shoes, although, as I had good reason to know, there was nothing there to stand upon, no submerged jetty, no little island or sand bar. She was gazing down at the water with a melancholy expression, or rather something of that in her posture, for I could not discern her features from so great a distance, and then, sensing my eyes upon her, she looked up and stared right at me and, it felt, through me, so that I