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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.
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