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

VII

She got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon as she could and fairly threw herself into the housekeeper’s arms. They know, she cried—they know, it’s too monstrous! Two hours ago, in the garden, Flora saw.

Mrs. Grose took it like a blow in the stomach. The child had not told her, had kept it entirely to herself. But the governess had been there; she had seen that Flora was perfectly aware. Not of a man this time. Of a woman. A woman in black, pale and dreadful, with an air and a face of unmistakable horror and evil, standing on the other side of the lake. The governess’s own predecessor, the one who had died. Miss Jessel.

Flora, the governess realized with mounting horror, did not want her to know. She would lie, if asked; she had decided that already, and even let it slip out in her distress. Mrs. Grose tried to keep up: but perhaps the child liked it—perhaps it was a proof of her blessed innocence? The governess seized on that hope, then abandoned it. The woman was a horror of horrors, and Flora was keeping silent not from kindness but from something deeper.

Mrs. Grose at last admitted that the figure sounded like Miss Jessel. They were both infamous, she said—Quint and Jessel alike. There had been everything between them, despite the difference in their rank and condition. She was a lady; he was dreadfully below. Quint had been a clever, good-looking, impudent, spoiled, depraved hound of a man. Miss Jessel had paid for it, whatever it had been. Mrs. Grose did not know exactly how she had died, but she knew the girl could not have stayed on as governess, not after that, and she had imagined—and still imagined—something dreadful. The governess, overwhelmed, burst into tears and sobbed against the housekeeper’s motherly breast that she could not save or shield them; they were lost.

VIII

In the days that followed, they met often to talk. The depths the governess had put before Mrs. Grose were ones she herself lacked the resolution to sound, but they agreed on the duty of keeping their heads. Mrs. Grose, late one night, went all the way with her in acknowledging that she had indeed seen what she had seen—the portraits she had drawn were too detailed to be invention. They took recurrence for granted and turned their attention to the question of the children’s strange complicity.

The governess returned to Flora and was almost luxuriously distracted by the child’s charm; the little girl accused her of having cried, which was so close to the truth that the governess could have wept again. But the deeper questions remained: by the lake, Flora had been perfectly aware, and had wanted to make her suppose she wasn’t, all the while guessing whether her governess herself did.

She turned back to Miles. Pressing Mrs. Grose with grim insistence, she extracted a final revelation. For several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually together—so much so that Mrs. Grose had once ventured to remonstrate, even approaching Miss Jessel, who told her sharply to mind her business. She had then spoken to Miles herself. She liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station. Miles had answered badly, and denied certain occasions when he had been off with Quint for hours. He had lied.

This, the governess realized with sinking horror, was what it showed—that Quint and Miss Jessel had, to that extent, succeeded in making of him. While he was with the man, Flora was with the woman. It had suited them all. And though Miles’s lies and impudence were less engaging than the governess had hoped, they made her feel more than ever that she must watch. Not accusing him yet, not without further evidence—but watching, and waiting, in the silence of the old house.

IX

Days at Bly passed in a strange kind of reprieve. The governess had braced herself for the worst, yet the house settled into a hush, and the absence of fresh apparitions began to wear at the edges of her dread like water smoothing a stone. She turned, almost desperately, to her pupils’ extraordinary charm — their grace, their cleverness, the way they seemed to shine with a preternatural sweetness. They were absurdly, extravagantly fond of her, reading her passages, telling her stories, popping out at her in disguises as tigers, Romans, Shakespeareans, navigators. Their facility was dazzling; their musical sense was sharp; they had a knack of catching and repeating that bordered on the marvelous. In the boy’s case, this cleverness became almost unbearable, for it was the very quality that made his expulsion from school a mystery she could not square. Was he being tutored by some unseen hand, some influence operating on his small life like a hidden incitement? She could not say; she could only watch, and tremble, and try not to betray the strangeness of her thoughts. The two children were at one, never quarrelling, never complaining, moving through the house in a cloud of music and theatricals, and she lived with them in a state of suspended alarm that only their sweetness could relieve. But the relief could not last. One night, sitting up late with Fielding’s Amelia by candlelight, she felt again that cold, undefinable stirring she had known on the night of her arrival. She listened, rose, took a candle, and walked the passage. At the tall window overlooking the staircase, her candle blew out, and in the faint grey of earliest morning she saw him: Peter Quint, on the landing, looking straight at her. He was there, alive, dangerous, a detestable presence. But what stunned her more than his appearance was the discovery that terror had left her. She stood her ground; she met his gaze; she felt a fierce, rigid confidence that he knew she was not afraid. In the dead silence of their encounter, the figure at last turned, hunch and all, and descended the staircase into the darkness below.