Feeling comes in aid of feeling

When Thomas died, he was greeted by several extremely archaic-looking people, and by one young lady who dressed like his grandmother.

“Oh!” she said, as his heart stopped and he found himself trying, confused, to disentangle his shade from his body. She reached down to give him a hand up. “Do stay! We’ll have such fun.”

It took a long time for him to settle. For months he spent most of his time hiding in nooks of the house, avoiding the sight of Isabelle, refusing to show his face at any family parties. Mary pointed out that ’twere his family doing the partying and he ought to appreciate it, as some of those as were present had no family left. Thomas pretended not to understand this. Every time he talked to Mary or Robin he tried to correct their English, and it never stuck. He might have got on all right with Annie, if not for the fact that she thought he was a snob, and a snob who ought to be nicer to Mary. Kitty often asked him questions about his life and about the world, and he sometimes managed to answer, although he often got distracted by personal grievances and forgot the question.

They had no schedule in those days, no clubs or lecture series; the rhythm of their days was shaped by the large and growing Button family and their staff. There were so many people in the household that it took some effort to avoid being walked through. Every time it happened to Thomas he cried. He cried a lot. When Isabelle had her first baby, he hung around the nursery weeping from a combination of loss, joy, and envy that set the child off terribly, and Annie came round to tell him he was acting a right pillock and didn’t he know better than to scream at a baby; whereupon he retired to an unoccupied cupboard with a comment about how unappreciated he was, in death as in life.

He wasn’t really called upon to act as an adult until Annie ascended, which was also the first time since his death that he considered there could be troubles in the house that weren’t Thomas’ troubles. “So have we yet, perhaps, a chance at Heaven?” he mused at Humphrey.

“Dunno, mate,” Humphrey said. “Could you stop holding me up and soliloquising like this? I’m not bleeding Yorick.”

“I was only asking a question,” Thomas said, but it was true that he was in rather a Hamlet-like pose, with one leg propped up on a footstool and holding Humphrey’s head aloft. He set Humphrey down and backed up to a conversational distance. “I could recite something for you?”

“I’d really rather you didn’t, if it’s all the same to you.”

It wasn’t, but the request was so clear that Thomas wandered off to see how the others were doing. The residents of the plague pit were sanguine about the whole situation, and less interested in talking to Thomas than in examining his wound. “You mean to say you’ve got miniature cannons now?” one of them asked, bending over and staring into the hole in his abdomen. “That you can hold in your hand?” He absented himself quickly from that conversation. The primitive man was off pursuing his own interests somewhere, but Mary and Kitty were sitting by the lake, talking in low voices.

“Oh, Thomas,” Kitty said when she saw him. “I hope you don’t mind, but I don’t think I can listen to a poem just now. And Mary…”

Thomas looked at Mary. She was worrying her apron between her fingers, looking out at the lake and talking to herself under her breath. It seemed like the same way she usually behaved, but Kitty said, “Mary and Annie were such good friends. It’s sad for her.”

Thomas settled himself on a rock near theirs. “Well, all right. No poems, then.” He tried to think of something else to talk about, but his mind drifted back helplessly toward Isabelle. Shaking off that thought as best he could, he reached for some notion of comfort and landed upon a memory of childhood: of his mother holding him after some youthful hurt and distracting him with a fairy tale.

“Shall I tell a story instead?” he asked, his voice coming out a little too cheerful, too effortfully bright; but both Kitty and Mary looked up with interested expressions, and he launched into the story of Tom Tit Tot.

Truth be told, he had forgotten a lot about this story, including how the poor girl ended up committed to spinning so much flax in the first place, and he ended up embroidering upon it rather boldly. It wasn’t until the king’s wife was departing, uncharacteristically, on a voyage on the high seas that Kitty said, “That’s not in the story as I heard it.”

Thomas stopped. “If you knew the story already, you might have said.”

“You didn’t ask,” Kitty said reasonably. “But of course I do. Everybody knows that story. I’ve never heard the part with the pirates, though. Have you, Mary?”

“I do like a good pie,” Mary said, but they soon sorted that out and resumed the story.

A good while later, the penny dropped and Thomas went in search of Humphrey to ask, “Did you actually see Hamlet? At the Globe Theatre?”

“Ah, no,” said Humphrey, “I was dead before I could see that one. Picked up the references just by listening to people talk here at the house. Not a lot of severed head characters in literature, you know, so I tend to notice them. I did have a fine time at Love’s Labours Won, though.”

“You’re joking,” said Thomas, delighted, and he insisted on gathering their little group together to listen while Humphrey tried his best to recall the plot of the lost play. It was a mess of confused identities and bed tricks and foolish love and wiser love, and Humphrey got all the character names mixed up, but Kitty enjoyed the romantic bits, and Mary the parts about the innocent being redeemed, and Robin seemed fascinated by the whole idea of the theatre. For his part Thomas was a little frustrated by all that Humphrey couldn’t remember, which seemed to be a lot; but then he started to contemplate the tragic, mostly lost nature of the text and the way this memory of it had been rescued from oblivion, but only barely, since no one alive could hear the story, and that put him into a more enjoyably poetic mood, even if no one else wanted to hear him rhapsodise about it.

They did more of that kind of thing after that. For Thomas it was a welcome distraction from watching Isabelle raise a family with Francis, or from the confused muddle of emotions he felt after visits to the house by his own mother and father. If no one perfectly understood each other’s stories, still they enjoyed the attempt. Kitty, for her part, didn’t usually tell stories, but her singing performances made up in enthusiasm what they may have lacked in sophistication.

&

History marched on and dragged them forward with it, but the afterlife goings-on at the house did not significantly change until long after Isabelle was gone, when her great-grandson George inherited the house. For a time there were secrets everywhere, and it was rather interesting watching to see if George’s wife would figure them out—until she got shoved out the window, and the company of ghosts was suddenly larger.

Fanny did not want to participate in story times or singing recitals. Fanny didn’t approve of anybody else holding them either. Fanny thought the ghosts were a dreadful bunch of hooligans and looky-loos. “Is she making those names up?” Kitty asked Thomas, distressed.

“I don’t think so,” Thomas said, dubious. “But the language is certainly changing from our day.”

“Our day” was new. Kitty no longer seemed to Thomas like someone who had raided his grandmother’s closet; she was the closest thing he had, now, to a contemporary. And with Lady Button here, Thomas and Kitty were no longer the youngest ghosts of the bunch. Despite Fanny’s matronly assumption of control over everything, her proximity to the living made Thomas feel old in comparison.

“Back in our day,” Kitty said, pleased, smiling at him a little conspiratorially, “there were such nice parties in this house, and it was all right to run and play and sing.”

Thomas sighed a bit at that, as he always did when thinking about parties at old Higham House. He was ready to go find a window to sit in while gazing at the garden and thinking about Isabelle, and the crimes of her descendants, but when his eyes started to go distant Kitty tugged on his sleeve and said, “Won’t you come play, Thomas? Outside? It’s so sad inside the house, and it’s a beautiful day.”

It was a middling day, actually, with clouds chasing the sun—no, clouds interrupting the countenance of the sun—no, conflict between clouds and sun which would soon enough be ended by nightfall—but Thomas did not succeed in finding a satisfactory description of the sunny intervals before Kitty started saying, “Please? Pleasepleaseplease?” and he shook off his poetic reverie and assented.

Hide and seek in the garden was a jolly enough time. George Button’s groundsman may not have approached his professional relationships with the keenest sense of decorum, but he was hired in the first place because of his fine mastery of landscape design, and it showed. Kitty wasn’t as good at hiding as she thought she was, but she did find a rather good spot around a corner of the house that Thomas had almost forgotten about, semi-enclosed by a hedge.

“I have espied you!” he shouted, getting more into the spirit of the thing than he had anticipated. “For although your hiding was artful, still I could not be—”

“Oh look!” cried Kitty, “It’s my favourite chaffinch.”

Thomas looked around. He didn’t know how Kitty chose favourites among the birds, or indeed how she distinguished different members of a species at all, but there was indeed a finch perched in the boxwood hedge.

“It has the nicest song of all its fellows,” Kitty said; “it sounds like this,” upon which a surprisingly complex whistle emerged from her lips. The bird cocked its head slightly. “Oh!” she said; “I think it can hear me!” She did it again, and Thomas was about to congratulate her on her performance when the unmistakable outraged shriek of Lady Button rang through the garden.

“Get off, get off, get off!” she yelled, striding into the plot where Kitty had hidden. “That’s my horse you’re standing on. Have you no respect for the dead?”

Kitty jumped back in confusion. “I’m sorry, Lady Button. I was only—”

“I said get back, you impossible girl!” Lady Button had reached them now. She glowered at the two of them with all the fury of a woman who had never liked or trusted a living person in this house and, having had those sentiments justified, was determined not to like or trust any of its ghosts either. She made a shooing gesture at Kitty. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you to behave properly?”

Kitty’s eyes were wide and starting to water as she backed further away from the offending spot of land she had stood on. Lady Button seemed to consider this an acceptable outcome, as she turned from Kitty toward Thomas and said, “As for you!”

“Madam,” Thomas said, hearing a resolve that had not been present in his own voice for a considerable time, “I must insist that you apologise to this lady.”

Lady Button frowned. “Both of you need to learn to respect—”

“No,” Thomas said, “I cannot agree. Miss Katherine is a daughter of this house. I have known her for nearly one hundred years, and she has never offered me discourtesy, which is a great deal more than I can say of you, a newcomer to our company, who presume you have the right to hurt her. Were you a man I would—I would feel honour-bound to fight you.” Thomas felt a twinge at that from either his gut or his wound—it was fortunate that Lady Button was not a man, and that he need not back up his assertion, but he was nevertheless pleased with himself for making it.

The lady whom he had just hypothetically threatened to fight looked shocked. She had a good face for it; she ever showed shock, scorn, and scandal plainly upon her features. “Well,” she said. “Well, I—I don’t think—” She hmphed. Thomas glared. Kitty sniffled. Lady Button closed her eyes and said, almost as if it were causing her pain, “I apologise for my outburst, Miss Kitty; it was unbecoming.” She turned on her heel and marched off in a random direction, not waiting for Kitty to reply.

Thomas gave her a moment to compose herself before turning around to face her. He wished that he had a handkerchief to offer her that wasn’t stained with his blood, but it looked like Kitty had made do wiping her eyes with her sleeves, and anyway she would revert to her usual state soon enough.

“Nobody ever defended me like that before,” Kitty said.

Thomas felt his outrage ebb and give way to some softer feeling. “Well,” he said awkwardly. “You merit the defence.”

“Only I’m glad you didn’t really fight her,” Kitty said, “because I don’t think you’re very good at it.”

“Yes, yes,” Thomas said, and the moment passed.

&

By the time Alison came to the house, Thomas had been dead so long that death seemed like the ordinary mode of existence, and life like an aberration. He was settled into his patterns, such as they were. The first time he saw Alison, it was as if he regained the use of a muscle that had been immobilised for decades—as if his heart had forgotten how to flutter, his head how to grow dizzy with ecstasy. All he had had of love, for decades, was a few passing fancies for women who visited the property. Alison stayed, and lived here, and was almost always at home; and rapture of raptures, she could see him! talk to him! Thomas was in bliss, and he was in agony; he was newly inspired to create poetry, and he was tongue-tied every time he attempted it; Alison made him feel alive again, and she made him unbearably aware that he was dead; Alison, after years of toleration, turned to him one day when he was pouring out his feelings and spoke to him in such decisively negative terms that she properly, finally, destroyed all hope of a more favourable response.

No one else took the occasion seriously. Of course he knew not to expect support from Julian; and Pat and the Captain both, in their way, believed in getting on with business as usual. Lady Button was, he knew by now, more pruriently interested in interpersonal drama than she admitted, but that interest was not exactly kind. Robin had a disgustingly pragmatic notion of love, and Humphrey—well, Humphrey was a good sort, and over the course of two hundred years Thomas had got better at remembering to go find his head sometimes, but he simply didn’t feel up to that kind of search when he was feeling wounded.

So of course it was Kitty who found him in the attic, curled into the space where the rafters sloped down to meet the façade of the house, his knees to his chest, rocking slightly back and forth. In life he had been told that motion, any motion, tended to divert the mind’s attention from pain; hence, presumably, the notion of walking things off. Either the advice did not hold true for ghosts, or the wound he had received was too severe for comfort.

Kitty showed up without ceremony and sat down in front of him, her skirts billowing around her. “I’m sorry, Thomas.”

He sniffled. “You’ve got nothing to apologise for.”

“I know that, silly. I’m just sorry you’re hurting. Nobody else seems to care—”

“No, of course they don’t.”

“—but I can tell you’re properly sad this time, and not just doing that thing that Lady Button calls—”

“I know what she says of me.”

Kitty blinked at him for a moment. “She’s still not very nice to you, is she? I could talk to her for you. You talked to her for me once, and I really think it made a difference.”

Thomas was taken aback. That had happened a hundred years ago; he had almost forgotten about it, although at the time he was proud of himself for his brave defence of his friend. “You’re sweet, Kitty, but I think her opinion of me is fixed. As is everyone’s.” His voice cracked a little.

Kitty shifted slightly—she was not so much seated as perched on a beam, the attic having no proper floor to speak of. “Why did you come all the way up here?”

Thomas put his hands over his face. “Alison hates the attics and she hates me. I should just be folded away up here along with every other relic of this house’s history. There’s nothing else I’m good for.”

“So you’re not hoping she’ll come find you?”

Thomas lowered his hands to look at her. She looked troubled, or something like it; she was chewing on her lower lip and frowning a little. He couldn’t tell what she was after. “No. As I said, she hates the attics. You’ve seen the way she sneezes and despairs when she comes up here and talks about how much work there is to do.”

“Also, she’s afraid of falling through the ceiling, like that actor did downstairs when they were making the film, only if she started from up here who knows how many floors she would fall through, and also she’s a little afraid of heights after the fall she took when she first came here.”

Thomas stared. “Yes. That too.”

Kitty sighed in apparent relief. “So you’re really going to stop? With Alison?”

Thomas let his head fall back. “Without hope of her regard, what have I to look forward to? Never leaving these grounds, stuck forever the way I died, miserable and unloved.”

“Oh, Thomas.” Kitty sounded a little impatient, as if she had been told that everyone had to sit through the Captain’s favourite war documentary before anyone could watch Drag Race. “We’ve talked about this! Isabelle loved you! And—” She snapped her mouth shut.

Thomas peered at her. He was suddenly aware that he had systematically thought through everybody else he might have gone to, to display his anguish and seek sympathy, and had rejected every idea except Kitty, whom he hadn’t even considered. Why not? Would it have been unkind—was some part of him worried that it would have hurt her?

“Back in our day,” he said slowly, waiting until he saw that she recognized their old conspiratorial phrase, “it would have meant something, you know, for us two to be alone together, in a place like this, the most remote corner of the house.”

Kitty said, as if he were being very dim, “I know that. I’ve thought about it.” She paused. “Have you, ever?”

Had he? Thomas was not sure, just then, what thoughts he had ever had or not had in the past. He was too distracted by the fact that Kitty had sought him out, Kitty whom he had defended, Kitty who had been his friend for all those long years with never a moment as plainly intimate as this one. “I think,” he said, his mouth feeling a little dry, “that I have been missing some opportunities to think about it.”

“Hmm,” Kitty said. “Do you think you could think about it now? Because I’m not actually worried about a scandal, you know, but if you need a really long time to think then I can go back downstairs before anyone notices I’m gone, and it will be like—no one ever has to know that I thought—”

The thought that she might leave was suddenly terrible. Thomas lunged forward awkwardly and caught her hands between his own. “No! No. I can think now. With you. Dearest Kitty, you’ve caught me on the back foot. I’ve never—started as friends before. How ill-prepared I am! I haven’t ever written you a single poem.”

Kitty smiled. She did have the loveliest smile; she looked a little timid just then, but already it reached her eyes and transformed the room into— “I have been transported,” he tried, “into the most gorgeous—into a space of—this dull attic is now—”

“Will you get up and dance with me?” Kitty interrupted.

“Well—gladly, but with no music?”

“Oh, I can sing us a song if you like, but I thought we would dance to that poem you’re in the middle of saying.”

Thomas felt the dawning of a fond, flattered delight. “Nobody’s ever danced to my poetry before.”

“Well, I think it’s high time someone did.” She boosted herself to her feet; and then she reached down to give him a hand up. “We’ll have such fun.”