The diary smelled of rosewater and seventeen years of silence.
She sat at her writing desk with her mother's diary open in front of her and her candle burning low.
Outside, the city was quiet. The house was quiet. Even the spirits, for once, left her alone — as though they understood, in whatever way the dead understand things, that tonight she needed the room to herself.
She turned to the third page and began properly.
14th March, 1843
I saw another one today. A man this time, standing at the corner of the east street near the apothecary, watching the carriages pass with an expression of tremendous sadness. He was wearing a coat I recognised as being twenty years out of fashion and he had no shadow.
I crossed to the other side of the road. I have learned that if I do not look directly at them they sometimes leave me alone. This one did not. He followed me for three streets before I turned into a church and sat in the front pew for an hour until he went away.
I am so tired of churches. But they are the only places they will not follow me inside.
Clara read this twice. The corner of her mouth moved — not quite a smile. She had learned the same thing at eleven, by accident, when she had ducked into St. Michael's to escape a weeping woman in grey who had followed her for an entire afternoon. She had never told anyone. She had assumed she was the only person who had ever needed to know it.
She turned the page.
2nd April, 1843
I have decided not to tell Mother. She will say it is nerves again and send for Dr. Fielding who will prescribe rest and chamomile and look at me with the expression men use when they have decided a woman's problem is located entirely inside her own imagination.
I am not imagining it. I have never imagined it. I have been seeing them since I was seven years old and if imagination were the cause I think it would have exhausted itself by now.
What I cannot understand is why me. What is it about me that they can find? I go to the same streets as everyone else. I sit in the same rooms. And yet they come to me and not to the woman beside me on the omnibus or the man reading his paper in the park. Why?
I have no answer. I suspect I will not have one for a long time.
Clara set the diary down for a moment and looked at the candle flame.
She had asked herself the same question at nine years old, sitting in this very house, in this very room. She had never found a satisfying answer either. She had simply decided, at some point, that the why mattered less than the what — less than what they needed, less than what she could do about it.
Her mother had been afraid. Clara understood, reading these pages, that Eveline had been genuinely, deeply afraid — not of the spirits themselves, exactly, but of what it meant to be a person who saw them. Of what it made her. Of what other people would decide it made her.
Clara had been afraid too, once. She remembered it distantly, the way one remembers an early winter — cold and formative and eventually past.
She picked the diary back up.
19th June, 1843
I have not left the house in eleven days.
Mrs. Hartwell next door had a funeral last week and since then, there has been a man in a blue hat standing at our garden gate every morning. I watch him from the upstairs window. He never moves. He simply stands and watches the house and I cannot go out while he is there because I know the moment I step outside he will follow me and I cannot — I cannot do it again. I cannot spend another afternoon in a church pretending to pray while a dead man stands two feet away from me wanting something I don't know how to give.
I am twenty-one years old and I am frightened of the street outside my own home.
This is not a life.
The handwriting was slightly less careful here — pressed harder into the page, the letters slightly uneven. She could see her mother's frustration in the ink itself.
She thought about her own mornings. The way she rose and dressed and went downstairs and simply — went about it. Followed spirits to villages. Sat in gardens and watched them pace. Let them show her their grey memories and filed the information away and did the next necessary thing.
She had never thought of herself as brave. She had thought of herself as practical.
Reading her mother's diary, she began to understand that perhaps those two things had always been the same.