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She is now a widow of means.
The thought occurs to Edith in the midst of her grief and shock. It is days after she and Alan had staggered out of the cursed house into the arms of the townsmen who had come to help. She had repeated her story over and over again while doctors worked on Alan, while pale faced women with pinched faces tried to clean the blood from her hands and pressed mugs of tea into them.
Tea. She was never going to drink tea again.
Alan almost dies. It is a very near thing. It’s luck as much as skill that saves his life. That, and knowing exactly where to stab.
They go to London. He needs time to heal before they can sail for home. She isn’t ready for the whispers and stares that will come when she returns home. The gossip.
It is in London that her new status as widow finally sinks in, along with the realization that it has been several weeks since her monthlies. Too many weeks.
She tells herself it is stress, or after effects of the poison Lucille gave her. But she knows better. In her heart she knows what the midwife her maid sends her to confirms. She is with child. Thomas’s child.
The news hovers over her like a cloud. Not just a widow, but a pregnant widow. Pregnant by the monster who had loved her. In the end she believed he really had loved her. Perhaps, in a different world they would have been happy. Perhaps he would have loved their child.
She waits till they are back in New York to tell Alan. He offers to marry her and she says no. She doesn’t love him, not in that way, and gratitude is not enough. Besides, marrying Alan would mean his sister and mother as in-laws and she has had her fill of nasty in-laws.
It is her lawyer, in one of their many meetings, who points out that if it’s a boy he will be the heir to Allerdale. The thought churns her already unsettled stomach, though she knows no son of hers will set foot on that awful red ground.
Still, she convinces herself it will be a girl. No new baronet for Allerdale to taint. She will have a daughter who will play with dolls and read fairy tales and never know a moment of grief or loneliness. Her name will be Hope or Grace or Lily and she will be a child of love, one perfect night in the middle of her father’s pain.
The labor is painful, but Edith has suffered far worse. It is mercifully brief and in the end she is handed a healthy baby boy with a mop of black curls and bright blue eyes and no name, so sure was she of her miraculous daughter.
He is not entirely his father’s son. She sees herself in the pert little nose and her father in his high brow and stocky body. He is nameless far too long as she, with the discerning taste of a writer with too many demons, selects and discards name after name.
She cannot bring herself to call him Thomas, nor does naming him for her father seem right. She settles on Theodore Cushing Sharpe, honoring both men from a slight angle, and calls him Teddy. From the moment he is born, he is her light and joy. A child of love, the only good thing to come from those awful days spent in England.
Teddy is a quiet child, rarely fussing, never tantrums. He loves blocks and music and running through the park in the sunshine.
When he is three Edith begins to write her story. The manuscript of her youth is long forgotten, gathering dust in a deep drawer somewhere. This new story is rooted in truth, though few would believe it, but it has echoes of the old. The ghosts are still a metaphor. It still needs a love story.
Teddy is five when she finishes the manuscript. The words march across the pages in thick black ink, though it might as well be written with her blood. Or the heavy red clay that still sits under the ruins of Allerdale. She is told that locals looted and burned the house years ago and she doesn’t begrudge the vandals. If ever there was land that deserved to be scorched and salted, it was that. Someday she will look into mining the clay, her only way of honoring Thomas’s memory and one of many of securing Teddy’s future. For now the whole mess sits fallow, out of sight and out of mind for as long as possible. Her father’s company still chugs along happily and she lives modestly on the checks she receives. When the manuscript sells she adds those checks to the others and it is a very good Christmas indeed.
That is the year she walks in on Teddy in the parlor, her favorite mantle clock disassembled and spread before him on the carpet. He looks guilty when she catches him, but tries to head off her anger with promises. “Don’t worry, Mama. I’ll put it back together better than it was.”
It is one of those moments every parent has, when she must walk away before her anger over takes her. When she is calm enough to return to the parlor the clock is gone, tidied up by their maid and she makes an effort to put it out of her mind.
Until two days later, when Teddy brings her the clock after breakfast, polished and ticking merrily, keeping far better time than it had beforehand.
“How did you know how to fix it?” she asks, marveling.
“The man taught me.”
The words turn her skin cold and clammy but she forces herself to ask, “What man?”
“The filmy one, with the red on his cheek. He always looks sad, but he’s ever so clever.”
Breathing is hard, but Edith forces air in and out, putting the clock down before her shaking hands can drop it. “Yes,” she says softly. “He is very clever.”
Teddy smiles widely. “You’ve seen him too, Mama?”
“I have.” Grief she’d long thought buried pierced her. “A very long time ago.” She looks down at her son, who inherited his father’s sharp mind and her ghosts, and she manages to smile. “He was the cleverest man I knew.”
Her son doesn’t ask for the normal Christmas toys. He wants broken clocks and watchmaker tools. He wants things he can take apart and fix and learn from. And Edith loves him and can’t deny him and so she buys him tools and wanders antique shops for things with moving parts that no longer move.
He builds her a music box and and a bank with a toy cat that snatches the coin off the top. As he grows his room becomes cluttered with springs and coils until she cleans out a rarely used parlor to make him a workshop. He mentions the sad man a few more times, though Edith never sees him. She hasn’t seen a ghost at all since that awful day on Crimson Peak. She wonders sometimes if the gift (or curse) has passed on completely to her son. Perhaps that’s for the best. For a little boy who grew up learning from a ghost he is never scary, always welcome.
The night before Teddy’s twelfth birthday (the same age Thomas was when his mother died, though she doesn’t think about that, it was a lifetime ago, she refuses to think on it) Edith is up late wrapping presents and baking treats. She creeps up to her room well after midnight and stops at Teddy’s door, listening to the quiet snore on the other side. Her heart is so full it should burst and she smiles to herself.
She feels the change in the air before she turns and isn’t even surprised to see him standing behind her. He’s exactly as he was the last time, black hair gone pale, one eye shot dark, ethereal blood trickling from his cheek before disappearing into the air. He does look sad, she realizes, and even after all this time and all he did to her, that makes her heart ache.
”You said you loved me.
”I do.”
He doesn’t speak, but only her mother ever spoke to her and then only a few words. Teddy seems to understand him, though it occurs to her she’s never asked him if his sad man teaches him with words or gestures. Perhaps it’s for the best. What would he say to her now? What could they possibly chat about?
Still, he’s here now for a reason and she doesn’t think it’s warning or threat. “Our son is a good man,” she says softly, for lack of anything better. “Thank you for teaching him.”
He inclines his head and for a moment she thinks he looks a little less sad. She reaches up to touch his cheek as she did that last time and just as then he leans into the touch. His skin is cold and damp like clay and tears well up in her eyes despite herself.
“I wish it had been different, Thomas.” Swallowing hard, she adds, “I miss you.”
His head turns and he brushes a cool kiss against her palm. And she hears or feels or hopes she does, “I love you, Edith.” Then he begins to melt away and she lets her hand drop, watching the spot where he stood long after there’s no sight of him.
Ghosts need something to hold them. Edith had always thought it was pain or sorrow or the need for justice. But maybe it’s just love, in all its varied and twisted forms that keep them grounded.
Perhaps he just wanted to make sure she was all right. Perhaps he wanted to raise his son, the best that he could.
She dreams of Thomas that night, and their waltz. The way the room seem to spin and glitter around them. The frothy, effervescent feeling of new love bubbling in her chest. She wakes, crying for him and for the life they might have had.
***
Teddy Sharpe goes to Allerdale Hall once and only once, as a grown man. He doesn’t tell his mother. He drives there in a motor car his father would have loved to poke at and take apart, bought with money earned by the clay of his lands. Teddy’s mother had told him, when he was old enough, the truth of his father and aunt and the awful few days she spent here. Teddy has read her book and the articles and seen the old newspaper photos. But it doesn’t prepare him for the grim, gothic horror of the house’s ruins.
His mother hadn’t liked the idea of him coming the England for graduate school, though she’d hid it well. She never told him not to go, and he loved her for that. He had always had his freedom to fly, safe in the knowledge she’d be there if he needed her.
It is spring, no sign of snow, but the ground is wet with melt and thick with melt as he parks and climbs out of the car. The house burned years ago, remnants of his father’s clay digging machine rotten and crumbling. Teddy circles the ruins, sees something dark and shrouded lurking in the depths and has a sudden, mad urge to call out, though he’s no idea what to say. The red clay stains his pant cuffs and sucks at his shoes.
There is a small family cemetery a dozen yards from the house and he makes his way to it. The stones are old and crumbling, untended, engravings faded with weather and age. Two sit separate from the rest. He imagines that was the townsfolk, doing their minimal best to honor the dead. His mother would never have buried them together.
Thomas Sharpe and Lucille Sharpe sit side by side, no dates, no honorifics. There is no stately oak to shade them, no verdant grass to blanket. Teddy looks down at the graves of his father and aunt and tries to decide what to feel.
He has brought no flowers but is struck with the urge to leave something, to honor the man who is half of him. There is nothing in his pockets but a handkerchief, his wallet and a hodgepodge of springs and gears and bibs and bobs, tucked there in his distraction while working. Together they’d make very little, but that’s all right.
Crouching, he peels off his glove and digs a little hole at the base of Thomas’s gravestone. He drops the parts into the hole and covers it with a pat. “Thanks, Dad,” he says quietly, to the sad man who crossed worlds in an effort to know his son.
A breeze stirs his hair and he smells rust and oil and candle smoke. Teddy straightens, content that the sad man is at peace, if such a thing exists. He looks at his aunt’s grave, thinks of the mad, trapped, monstrous woman his mother described and suddenly knows what to say. “Aunt Lucille. . . I forgive you.”
There is no clap of thunder or rending of earth. The bright spring day remains exactly as it was. He nods to himself and heads back down the hill towards the car. In the distance, as he passes the house, he hears music. It’s soft and haunting and beautiful. It tugs at his heart, wraps around his limbs. Tempting, seductive. For a moment, he half turns, catches another glimpse of shrouded darkness. The music softens the edges and he thinks of taking a step back to the house.
But there is a girl in London waiting for him. She has blue eyes and red in her brown hair and laughs at his jokes and wipes grease from his nose when he forgets. They’re going dancing tonight with friends when he gets home. He loves her, he thinks, and would like to marry her. He thinks she might even say yes, if he ever gets the nerve to ask her.
So he turns back to the car and climbs in, cranking the engine. For an awful moment he thinks it might stick in the mud. If it does he will climb out and walk, though it’ll ruin his shoes and probably his feet. He’ll walk all the way back to London if he has to. The clay of this place might run in his veins but it’s claimed its last Sharpe. He has a girl and a date. Maybe he’ll teach her to waltz.
The car lurches free and rolls forward and Teddy nods in satisfaction, driving away.