The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End

VIII

Clement Yule returns to the house, surprise twisting tight in his chest when he learns Mr. Prodmore has vanished without a trace. Mrs. Gracedew is flushed and breathless, the disturbed white of her bosom rising and falling as if she’s just run a hard, unplanned race, and she holds up a hand to stop him before he can voice his confusion, telling him he doesn’t need Prodmore anymore. Yule is mystified, and when she says he’ll need to deal with her now, he can’t follow: take what over? She smiles, offers a vague, playful substitute for a name, and says his debt. He’s even more bewildered—how can she assume that crushing burden without arranging it with him first? She turns his question playfully, says that’s exactly what she wants: for him to make all his new arrangements with her.

Yule’s thoughts move slower, earnest but tangled. If he sets terms with anyone, he asks, how does he fulfill the engagement he made to Prodmore? She laughs, bright and unburdened, and tells him he doesn’t have to perform that engagement at all. It takes him a full moment to process, then something like disbelieving relief leaps into his face: Prodmore is letting him off? She confirms it, ringing clear and triumphant, and for a second he soars—before dropping hard when the next thought lands: oh, he’s going to lose the house. She laughs that absurd fear off immediately, says he can arrange to keep it, with her.

He stares, trying to picture the impossible. With Prodmore, it had been so simple: marry Cora, and the debt, the house, the whole tangle of his troubles would be sorted. She gives him that soft, ironic smile he’s come to know, and asks if he really could have gone through with that marriage. He admits, awkward and rueful, that he’d never have been able to do it, not really—he’d just told himself he had to, felt a vague, unshakable delicacy about it. She says she didn’t know that back then, then adds, with a little spark of mischief, that Cora told her everything: Cora knew he couldn’t go through with it, and would have refused him anyway, so Prodmore had lied about his daughter’s willingness to the match.

Yule is stunned, then overwhelmed. You saved me, he says, quiet and awed. She jokes that it’s a pity she doesn’t have a daughter to make the arrangement official, then teases him about how he treated Miss Prodmore during their awkward courtship. He flushes bright red, protests he wasn’t cruel to her, and she calls him a delightful goose, says she didn’t do any of this for payment, she’s not on the make. When he asks why she did it, she says simply that she hated Prodmore, and she loves the house far too much to let him lose it. He asks how she managed to get rid of the stubborn, grasping moneylender, and she shrugs, says women have their ways, no cigarettes required to charm a man into compliance. He mutters under his breath that he could never have pulled that off, no matter how hard he tried.

He asks where Prodmore has gone, she says she has no idea, but she’ll run into him again soon enough, no doubt. Then he asks when he can come see her, and she says whenever he likes to call—but she has a train to catch, right now. Yule panics, tries to block her path to the door, says he has nothing to offer her but the house itself, the only thing he owns in the world. She laughs, says she already has the house, all of it stored in her head, that’s all she wants. He’s confused, says I thought you loved it! She says she loves it far too much to take it from him.

He’s still reeling, says his life is his own now, he can do whatever he wants with it. She says what he wants is the house, the path she first pointed him toward: marrying Cora to secure his ancestral home. He admits that’s what she’d suggested, but he can’t go through with it. She says she didn’t know he had those qualms back then, but Cora told her, and Cora would have turned him down anyway, so it was a dead end either way. Then Yule’s restraint breaks completely: he tells her she’s the most generous, noblest woman he’s ever known, he has nothing to give her but his hand and his life, will she marry him?

She’s silent for a long, stretched moment, her eyes soft, and just as she seems about to speak, Chivers appears to announce a new party of visitors. Four foreign tourists, heavy with spectacles, canvas satchels slung over their shoulders, well-worn guidebooks clutched in their hands, their thick wool shawls and odd, rounded German hats marking them as travelers passing through the countryside. The broad-faced one among them, silver rings glinting on both forefingers, immediately starts asking Chivers about the family portraits hung above the hallway tapestry. Chivers answers smoothly, naming Dame Dorothy Yule who lived to 101, then the central portrait of John Anthony Yule, who died in his youth. When one of the tourists points to the portrait in the archway, Mrs. Gracedew looks up—and sees Clement Yule standing right in the arch, framed by the painting’s edge as if he’s part of the family lineage.

She turns to the tourists, bright and warm as mid-afternoon sun, and says, Oh, that’s my future husband. Yule hears her, holds her gaze for a long, silent second, his face soft with shock and something like unsteady joy, then turns and slips out through the garden without a word. Mrs. Gracedew turns to Chivers, her voice giddy with uncontainable happiness, and tells him she gives the house right back to him, before the moment can break.