The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Author:  Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is another writer whose ghost stories are acknowledged as “landmarks in supernatural fiction”. She was a central practitioner of the genre in the Twentieth century, redefining the old Gothic melodrama into a new form combining supernatural dread with sexual tension and founding a school of female “Ghost-Feelers” who sensed rather than saw spirits. Growing up in a haunted house in New York that instilled in her a “chronic state of fear”, Wharton later confessed that she could not bear to even sleep in the same room as a book of ghost stories until she was 28. A loveless and repressed marriage made her seek escape in writing, creating novels about the morals and private passions of American society and ghost stories that described dark and mysterious events in unstable households. These began with “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”, written in 1904, which deeply moved readers in recounting a story of adultery and supernatural protection. There can be little doubt that Wharton drew on her own experiences for this groundbreaking tale, in particular the narrator, the maid Alice Hartley’s near-fatal attack of typhoid, which she had herself survived.

I

It was the autumn after I had the typhoid. I’d been three months in hospital, and when I came out I looked so weak and tottery that the two or three ladies I applied to were afraid to engage me. Most of my money was gone, and after I’d boarded for two months, hanging about the employment-agencies, and answering any advertisement that looked any way respectable, I pretty nearly lost heart, for fretting hadn’t made me fatter, and I didn’t see why my luck should ever turn. It did though – or I thought so at the time. A Mrs Railton, a friend of the lady that first brought me out to the States, met me one day and stopped to speak to me: she was one that had always a friendly way with her. She asked me what ailed me to look so white, and when I told her, “Why, Hartley,” says she, “I believe I’ve got the very place for you. Come in tomorrow and we’ll talk about it.”

The next day, when I called, she told me the lady she’d in mind was a niece of hers, a Mrs Brympton, a youngish lady, but something of an invalid, who lived all the year round at her country-place on the Hudson, owing to not being able to stand the fatigue of town life.

“Now, Hartley,” Mrs Railton said, in that cheery way that always made me feel things must be going to take a turn for the better – “now understand me; it’s not a cheerful place I’m sending you to. The house is big and gloomy; my niece is nervous, vapourish; her husband – well, he’s generally away; and the two children are dead. A year ago I would as soon have thought of shutting a rosy active girl like you into a vault; but you’re not particularly brisk yourself just now, are you? and a quiet place, with country air and wholesome food and early hours, ought to be the very thing for you. Don’t mistake me,” she added, for I suppose I looked a trifle downcast; “you may find it dull, but you won’t be unhappy. My niece is an angel. Her former maid, who died last spring, had been with her twenty years and worshipped the ground she walked on. She’s a kind mistress to all, and where the mistress is kind, as you know, the servants are generally good-humoured, so you’ll probably get on well enough with the rest of the household. And you’re the very woman I want for my niece: quiet, well-mannered, and educated above your station. You read aloud well, I think? That’s a good thing; my niece likes to be read to. She wants a maid that can be something of a companion: her last was, and I can’t say how she misses her. It’s a lonely life . . . Well, have you decided?”

“Why, ma’am,” I said, “I’m not afraid of solitude.”

“Well, then, go; my niece will take you on my recommendation. I’ll telegraph her at once and you can take the afternoon train. She has no one to wait on her at present, and I don’t want you to lose any time.”

I was ready enough to start, yet something in me hung back; and to gain time I asked, “And the gentleman, ma’am?”

“The gentleman’s almost always away, I tell you,” said Mrs Railton, quick-like — “and when he’s there,” says she suddenly, “you’ve only to keep out of his way.”

I took the afternoon train and got out at D——station at about four o’clock. A groom in a dogcart was waiting, and we drove off at a smart pace. It was a dull October day, with rain hanging close overhead, and by the time we turned into Brympton Place woods the daylight was almost gone. The drive wound through the woods for a mile or two, and came out on a gravel court shut in with thickets of tall black-looking shrubs. There were no lights in the windows and the house did look a bit gloomy.