Florence and Giles
A sinister Gothic tale in the tradition of The Woman in Black and The Fall of the House of Usher1891. In a remote and crumbling New England mansion, 12-year-old orphan Florence is neglected by her guardian uncle and banned from reading. Left to her own devices she devours books in secret and talks to herself – and narrates this, her story – in a unique language of her own invention. By night, she sleepwalks the corridors like one of the old house's many ghosts and is troubled by a recurrent dream in which a mysterious woman appears to threaten her younger brother Giles. Sometimes Florence doesn't sleepwalk at all, but simply pretends to so she can roam at will and search the house for clues to her own baffling past.After the sudden violent death of the children's first governess, a second teacher, Miss Taylor, arrives, and immediately strange phenomena begin to occur. Florence becomes convinced that the new governess is a vengeful and malevolent spirit who means to do Giles harm. Against this powerful supernatural enemy, and without any adult to whom she can turn for help, Florence must use all her intelligence and ingenuity to both protect her little brother and preserve her private world.Inspired by and in the tradition of Henry James' s The Turn of the Screw, Florence & Giles is a gripping gothic page-turner told in a startlingly different and wonderfully captivating narrative voice.
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Florence & Giles
John Harding
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Blue Door
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published by Blue Door in 2010
Copyright © John Harding 2010
John Harding asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007315031
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2010 ISBN: 9780007315062 Version: 2016-09-15
For Norah
Contents
It was April, I remember, though my spirit was December,
When a broken bird was lifted from the darkness of the lake,
In the sun white feathers gleaming, from her mouth black water streaming,
While within my voice was screaming until I thought my heart would break;
It was I who watched her dying, drifting, drifting, waiting in her wake
For God her soul to take.
It is a curious story I have to tell, one not easily absorbed and understood, so it is fortunate I have the words for the task. If I say so myself, who probably shouldn’t, for a girl my age I am very well worded. Exceeding well worded, to speak plain. But because of the strict views of my uncle regarding the education of females, I have hidden my eloquence, under-a-bushelled it, and kept any but the simplest forms of expression bridewelled within my brain. Such concealment has become my habit and began on account of my fear, my very great fear, that were I to speak as I think, it would be obvious I had been at the books and the library would be banned. And, as I explained to poor Miss Whitaker (it was shortly before she tragicked upon the lake), that was a thing I did not think I could bear.
Blithe House is a great barn, a crusty stone mansion of many rooms, so immense it takes my little brother, Giles, who is as fast of limb as he is not of wit, three minutes and more to run through its length, a house uncomfortabled and shabbied by prudence, a neglect of a place, tightly pursed (my absent uncle having lost interest in it), leaked and rotted and mothed and rusted, coldly draughted, dim lit and crawled with dark corners, so that, even though I have lived here all of my life that I can remember, sometimes, especially on a winter’s eve in the fadery of twilight, it shivers me quite.
Blithe is two-hearted, one warm, one cold; one bright, the other shadowy even on the sunniest of days. The kitchen, where the stove is always burny hot, is jollied by fat Meg, our cook, smiley and elbowed in flour, often to be found flirted by John, the manservant, who seeks a kiss but is happy to make do with a floury smack. Next door, with a roaring fire nine months of the year, is the housekeeper’s sitting room, where you may find Mrs Grouse either armchaired and sewing or desked with a puzzlery of papers, trying, as she says, to ‘make head nor tail’ of things and – what seems to me contradictory – to make their ends meet. These two rooms together make one heart, the warm.
The cold heart (but not for me! Ah, not for me!) beats at the other end of the house. Unloved and unvisited, save by me, the library could not be more unlike the kitchen: unfired, cool even in the burnery of summer, freezing in winter, windows darked by never-opened thick drapes, so I have to steal candles to read there and afterward scrape their guilty drippery from the floor. From one end to the other is one hundred and four of my shoed feet, and thirty-seven wide. Three men could stand one upon the other and scarce touch the ceiling. Every inch of wall, aside from the door, the draped windows and their window seats, is wooden shelving, from floor to ceiling, all fully booked.
No maid ever ventures here; the floors are left unbroomed, for unfootfalled as they are, what would be the point? The shelves go unfingerprinted, the wheeled ladders to the upper ones unmoved, the books upon them yearning for an opening, the whole place a dustery of disregard.
