3rd October, 1844
Something extraordinary has happened.
There was a woman — an older one, perhaps sixty, with the soft edges that means she has been gone some years — standing in the parlour this morning when I came downstairs. She did not want anything from me. She did not follow me or press her memories against my eyes. She simply stood near the window and when I looked at her she turned and walked toward the front door.
I followed her. I don't know why. Something about her felt — not threatening. Purposeful.
She led me to Kensington Gardens. I walked and walked and thought this journey would never end when she eventually came to a stop. Near a particular bench by the pond. And then she stood beside the bench and looked at me and then at the bench and then at me again, and then she dissolved in the way the older ones do — gradually, peacefully — and I sat down on the bench because my legs had gone rather unreliable.
A man sat down on the other end of the bench minutes later. He was reading a book. He had kind eyes and ink on his fingers and he did not notice me staring at him until I had been doing it for an embarrassingly long time.
His name is Thomas Peri. He is a junior barrister. He asked if I was quite all right and I said yes and then I said no and then I started to cry, which was not what I had intended at all.
He bought me tea from the park vendor. We talked for two hours. He did not once suggest my problem was located inside my imagination.
I think something rather important may have just happened.
Clara stopped reading.
She sat very still with the diary in her hands and thought about a wooden horse with the red worn off one side. About ink on a thumb. About a man buying tea without being asked because he had been paying close enough attention to know it was wanted.
She thought: the spirit led her to him.
Clara pressed the diary against her chest for a moment and looked at the dark window. She felt something move through her that was too large to name and too fragile to examine directly. She gave it a moment. Then she turned the page.
The entries that followed were warmer. Thomas Peri appeared in every third line — Thomas said, Thomas thinks, Thomas came to call again and Mother has started to approve of him which surprised us both. Eveline's handwriting changed too, Clara noticed — less pressed, more open, as though the person holding the pen had begun to take up more space.
In February of 1845, Eveline told Thomas about the spirits.
He was very quiet for a long time. I had prepared myself for Dr. Fielding's expression — the careful, tolerant blankness of a man deciding a woman's trouble lives only in her own mind. Instead, Thomas set down his teacup and looked at me properly and said:
"Have they always come to you?"
Just that. No performance of patience. No visible effort to believe me. Simply — the question of someone who had already decided the answer mattered.
I said yes.
He was quiet again for a moment. Then he said: "Then I suppose we had better learn to manage it together."
I did not know what to do with that. I put my teacup down because my hands had gone unreliable. I looked out the window at the street and tried to find the shape of what I was feeling and could not — it was too new, too unexpected, the particular disorientation of someone who has been bracing for a blow for so long that the absence of it feels like falling.
I think this is what it feels like when someone decides you are not too much. I have never known it before. I am still not entirely sure what to do with it.
But I think I should like to find out.
Clara set the diary down.
She did not reach for it again immediately. She sat back in her chair and looked at the candle flame and thought about her father — not the abstract idea of him she had carried for seventeen years, assembled from her uncle's occasional mentions and the portrait in the attic, but this man. This specific man who had sat down beside a frightened woman on a park bench and asked the right question without being taught how.
Then I suppose we had better learn to manage it together.
She pressed her fingers against her mouth.
She had his hands, she thought. She had noticed it in the portrait — the same length of finger, the same particular way of holding things carefully. She had spent twenty years not knowing where her hands had come from.
She knew now.
She read about the engagement in a single paragraph — he asked me in the garden on a Tuesday which is not a romantic day at all and I said yes before he had finished the sentence — and felt something loosen in her chest that she had not known was tight.
She read about the wedding — small, at the church on Aldgate Street, her mother's dress was cream not white because Eveline had always found white in the moon more perfect — and found herself smiling without meaning to.