Beneath a Waning Moon
Page 7

I long, my friend, though I dare not hope. You know that for which I have always wished. Perhaps fate is just cruel enough to see me madly in love before I die.
For I will die. You and Mrs. Porter will accuse me of consorting with the fairies, but I know it. I feel it in the night. I can feel Death’s footsteps stalking me at the edges of the wild, and more and more, I find I do not want to run. I hope I will welcome him when he comes. Perhaps, in that pale lover, I will find the satisfaction that has so long eluded me in life.
Of course, I could also fling myself from the tower window in the midst of a violent thunderstorm. That would have more dramatic impact.
Your faithful (and sadly doomed) friend,
Josephine Shaw
SHE couldn’t sleep, but then, did she ever sleep? Except for some lazy afternoons, Josephine had always been a restless creature, especially at night. By her calculations, if she slept only half as long as the average person, her life would not be cut in half. Merely… a third at the most.
She took an oil lamp to the garden and hid in the small glass house their gardener, Mr. Connelly, had built for her when she had returned from school. It was supposed to be for delicate plants, but it had become, much to no one’s surprise, her own private study. Josephine didn’t store her manuscripts in the glass house because she worried about the damp. But she often wrote there late into the night, the reflection of the lamp on the glass casting eerie shadows around her writing desk.
Josephine had never needed sleep to dream.
That night, she was neglecting her pen in favor of rereading one of the most-favored books in her library. It was a small volume that had appeared mysteriously when she was only fifteen. Josephine still had no idea who had gifted her the lovely horror of Carmilla, but she owed her nameless benefactor an enormous debt. Her personal guess was a briefly employed footman who had seen her reading her mother’s well-worn copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho and confessed his own forbidden love of Poe.
The slim volume of Le Fanu’s Gothic horror stories had been hidden well into adulthood. As it wasn’t her father’s habit to investigate her reading choices, concealment might have been more for dramatic effect than real fear of discovery.
Josephine read by lamplight, curled into an old chaise and basking in the sweet isolation of darkness as she mouthed well-loved passages from her favorite vampire tale.
“For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me.”
She slammed the book shut.
How had she turned so morbid?
For while Josephine had long known she would not live to old age, she thought she had resigned herself to it. She made a point of fighting the melancholy that threatened her. If she had any regret, it was that she would not live long enough to write all the stories she wanted. Sometimes she felt a longing to shout them into the night, offering them up to any wandering soul that they might be heard so they could live.
So many voices beating in her chest. So many tales to write and whisper and shout. Her eyes fell to the book she’d slammed shut.
‘“You are afraid to die?”
“Yes, everyone is.”
Josephine stood and pushed her way out of the glass house, into the garden where the mist enveloped her. She lifted her face to the moon and felt the tears cold on her cheeks.
“‘Girls are caterpillars,” she whispered, “‘when they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don’t you see?’”
But the summer would never come for Josephine. She beat back the despair that threatened to envelop her.
You are afraid to die?
Yes, everyone is.
She lifted her face and opened her eyes to the starry night, speaking her secret longing into the night. “‘But to die as lovers may—to die together, so that they may live together.’”
How she longed for love! For passion. How she ached to be seen. To be cherished. To be known.
She could pour her soul onto the page and still find loneliness in the dark. She strangled her heart to keep it alive, knowing it was only a matter of time until the palest lover took her to his bosom. Already, she could feel the tightness in her chest.
Tomorrow would not be a good day.
Nevertheless, she lifted her arms like an offering to a pagan god. “‘Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace,’” she said, lifting her voice in defiance of the darkness. “‘But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please…’” She smiled. “‘And laugh at locksmiths…’ because they are clever dreams.”
The sound of quiet laughter drifted through the garden.
She spun and glared into the darkness. “Who is there?” Josephine gathered her dressing gown, wrapping it closer around her body. “Who are you?”
Surely only a neighbor’s servant, gawking at her foolishness. She should have been embarrassed, but she wasn’t. She knew the neighbors considered her eccentric. It was the privilege of the dying.
“If you’re going to spy on me”—Josephine stepped toward the bushes—“you will only see folly.”