The Governess of White Stag Hall

Ghost Stories

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Edith had never had the occasion to travel very far from London. When she was young, she used to visit her aunts in Brighton, but that was all. Her father always claimed to hate traveling, but Edith wondered if this was just to accommodate Hugh's excesses.

Now that she was finally experiencing it for herself and watching the rolling green of the English landscape pass in a blur, like a watercolor painting, she did not know how to feel. She was neither enriched by the newness of the experience nor thrilled by the prospect of what was to come. Her heart was in Brighton with her sister and with Jack in the barracks where he laid his head at night and in the lonely cemetery with her parents' graves.

The journey to Newcastle would have taken days via coach. By rail, even with the stops and slowdowns, she arrived in the late afternoon.

The station itself was chaotic, to say the least. Between the push of bodies trying to find their way and the deafening hiss of the engines and shouting of conductors and attendants, it was almost impossible to hold a thought and not have swept away in the cacophony.

Mr. Pierce's arrangements included overnighting at an inn near the station as there was apparently no way to make it to the estate before nightfall and there were no villages along the way large enough to provide lodgings. Making the attempt that night would mean doing so in the dark along country roads and should anything happen along the way she would be quite hopelessly stranded.

So Edith turned her attention to locating the inn. The instructions she had been given seemed fairly straightforward and after asking one of the station workers for help, she was glad to find that it was quite a short walk indeed and she was glad for the chance to stretch her legs.

Upon arriving at the inn, she found it pleasant, if not a little rustic. It probably wasn't very long ago that it had seen a heyday as a coaching inn. At present, it seemed very quiet, but whatever was cooking in the kitchen smelled delicious and the portly woman who greeted Edith at the door was very welcome. "Hello, my dear," she said, with all the welcome warmth and brightness of a cheerfully burning hearth. "I'm Maureen Horn. Are you looking for a room?"

Edith couldn't help but smile back at the woman."Yes," she said. "I'm Edith Belle. My employer told me that he would reserve a room for me here"

Mrs. Horn crossed the room to the wide bar counter where a ledger lay open. She wiped her hands off on her apron as she leaned in over the book, skimming the pages with her eyes and clicking her tongue thoughtfully. She paused at one entry and her smile briefly faltered, before returning just as quickly "Just the one night?" she asked.

"Yes," Edith replied.

Mrs. Horn gave a curt nod. "First floor. Third door to the right of the stairs."

Edith nodded and thanked the woman, who answered by pointing her toward the stairs. It was a short climb to the first floor that felt much longer than it should, but Edith quickly found her room. It was small and the air was as stale inside as it was out, but it appeared clean and well-kept. She locked the door and then sank onto the bed with a heavy sigh.

London, her life, the house, Grace, and Aggie–everything already felt an entire world away. She felt untethered, like a boat cut free and left to drift. She barely felt a thing at all. But maybe that wasn't so bad. Logically, she should have been anticipating what was waiting for her in the morning. Instead, she felt as she did on the train: numb.

Her father had never quite been the same after his wife's death and Edith wondered if this was the culprit; this numbness. Was this grief? Edith had always thought of heartache as tears. But this was nothing. A void. A vacuum. She wondered if she would ever be the same, or if this was simply the way things would always be now, as they had been for her father. She almost hoped so.