The Death Mask by H D Everett

I returned to find my friend a widower of four year standing, and a good job too, I thought to myself when I heard of it, For I had no great liking for the late Gloriana, but probably the sentiment or want of sentiment, had been mutual. She did not smile on me, but I doubt if she smiled on any of poor Tom Enderby's bachelor cronies. The picture was certainly like her. She was a fine woman who with

aquiline features and a cold eye. The artist had done the features justice, and the eye, which seemed to keep a steely watch on all the comings and goings of the house out of which she had died. We had made only a brief pause before the portrait, and then went on. The smoking room was an apartment built out at the back of the house by a former owner and shut off by double doors to serve as a nursery.

Missus Enderby had no family, and she disliked the smell of tobacco, so the big room was made over to Tom's pipes and cigars. And if Tom's friends wanted to smoke, there must smoke there, or not at all. I remembered the room and the rule, but I was not prepared to find it still exist. I had expected to light my after dinner cigar over the dessert dishes. Now there was no presiding lady to consider. We were soon installed in a couple of deep cushioned chairs before a good fire.

I thought. Enderby breathed more freely when he closed the double doors behind us, shutting off the dull formal house at the staircase and the picture. But he was not looking well. There hung about him an unmistakable air of depression. Could he be fretting after Gloriana? Perhaps during their married years he had fallen into the way of depending on a woman to care for him. It is pleasant enough

when the woman is the right sort. But I shouldn't myself have fancied being cared for by the late missus Enderby. And if the fretting was a fact, it would be easy to find a remedy. Evelyn has a couple of pretty sisters, and we would have him over to stair at our place. You must run down and see us, I said, presently, pursuing this idea. I want to introduce you to my wife. Can you come next week? His face lit up with real pleasure. I should like it,

of all things, he said heartily. But a qualification came after the cloud settled back over him, and he sighed, that is, if I can get away, why what is there to hinder you. It may not seem much to stay for, but I've got into the way of stopping here to keep things together. He didn't look at me, but leaned over to the fender to knock the ash off his cigar. Tell you what, Tom, you are getting hipped living by yourself. Why don't you sell the house or let it off just as it is and try

a complete change. I can't sell it I'm only the tenant for life. It was my wife's. Well, I suppose there's nothing to prevent you letting it, or if you can't let it, you might shut it up. There's nothing legal to prevent me. The emphasis was too fine to track notice, but I remembered it after. Then, my dear fellow, why not knock about a bit and see the world. But to my thinking, the best thing you could do would be to marry again. He shook his head drearily.

Of course, it is a delicate matter to urge upon a widower. But you have paid the utmost ceremonial respect. But four years, you know, the greatest stickler for propriety would deem it ample. It isn't that, Dick. I've a great mind to tell you a rather queer story. He puffed hard at his smoke and stared into the red coals in the pauses. But I don't know what you think of it, or think of me. Try me, I said, I'll give you my opinion after, and you know I'm

safe to confide in. I sometimes think I should feel better if I told it. It's it's queer enough to be laughable, But it hasn't been any laughing matter to me. He threw the stump of his cigar into the fire and turned to me, and then I saw how pale he was, and that adieu of perspiration was breaking out on his white face. I was very much of your opinion, Dick. I thought I should be happier if I married again, and I went so far as to get engaged. But

the engagement was broken off. And I'm going to tell you why. My wife was sometime ailing before she died, and the doctors were in consultation, but I didn't know how serious a complaint was till the last. Then they told me there was no hope, as coma had set in, but it was possible, even probable, that there would be revival of consciousness before death. And for this I was to hold myself ready. I dare say, you'll write me

down a coward, but I dreaded the revival. I was ready to pray that she might pass away in her sleep. I knew she held exalted views about the marriage tie, and I felt sure if there were any last words, she would exact a pledge. I could not at such a moment refuse to promise, and I didn't want to be tied Hi. You will recollect that she was my senior. I was about to be left a widower in middle life, and in the natural course of things, I had a

good many years before me. You see, my dear fellow, I don't think a promise so exhorted or to bind you. It isn't fair. Wait and hear me. I was sitting here miserable enough, as you may suppose, when the doctor came to fetch me to her room. Missus Enderby was conscious and had asked for me, but he particularly begged me not to agitate her in any way lest pain should return. She was lying stretched out in the bed,

looking already like a corpse. Tom He said, they tell me I'm dying and there is something I want you to promise. I groaned in spirit. It was all up with my eye, thought, But she went on. But when I am dead and in my coffin, I want you to cover my face with your own hands. Promise me this. It was not in the very least what I expected, of course, I promised. I want you to cover my face with a particular handkerchief on which I set a value.

When the time comes, open the cabinet to the right of the window, and you will find it in the third drawer from the top. You cannot mistake it, for it is the only thing in the drawer. That was every word she said, if you believe me, Dick. She just sighed and shut her eyes as if she were going to sleep, and she never spoke again. Three or four days later they came again to ask me if I wished to take a last look, as the Undertaker's men were about to close the coffin. I felt a

great reluctance, but it was necessary I should go. She looked as if made of wax, and was colder than ice to the touch. I opened the cabinet, and there, just as she had said, was a large handkerchief for very fine cambric, lying by itself. It was embroidered with a monogram device in all four corners, and was not of a sort I had ever seen her used. I spread it out and laid it over the dead face,

and then what happened was rather curious. It seemed to draw down over the features and cling to them, to nose and mouths and forehead and the shut eyes, till it became a perfect mask. My nerves were shaken. I suppose I was seized with horror and flung back the covering sheet hastily quitting the room, and the coffin was closed that night. Well, she was buried, and I put

up a monument which the neighborhood considered handsome. As you see he I was bound by no pledge to abstain from marriage, and though I knew what would have been a wish, I saw no reason why I should regard it. And some months after a family of the name of Ashcroft came to live at the Lisso's, and they had a pretty daughter. I took a fancy to Lucy Ashcroft the first time I saw her, and it was soon

apparent that she was well inclined to me. She was a gentle, yielding little thing, not the superior style of woman, not at all like. I made no comment, but I could well understand that in his new matrimonial venture, Tom would prefer a contrast. But I thought I had a very good chance of happiness with her, and I grew fond of her, very fond of her. Indeed, her people were of the hospitable sort, and they encouraged me to go to the Liso's dropping in when I felt inclined.

He did not seem as if they would be likely to put obstacles in our way. Matters progressed, and I made up my mind one evening to walk over there and declare myself. I had been up to town the day before and came back with a ring in my pocket, rather a fanciful design of double hearts. But I thought Lucy would think it pretty and would let me put

it on her finger. I went up to change into dinner things, and making myself as spruce as possible, and coming to the conclusion before the glass that I was not such a bad figure of a man after all, and that there was not much gray in my hair. Ay, Dick, you may smile. It is a good bit grayer. Now I had taken out a clean handkerchief and thrown the one carried through the day crumpled on the floor. I don't know what made me turn to look there, but once it caught my eye, I stood staring at it

as if spell bound. The handkerchief was moving, Dick, I swear it rapidly, altering in shape, puffing up here and there, as if blown by wind, spreading and molding itself into the features of a face, And what face should it be but the death mask of Gloriana, which I had covered in the coffin eleven months before. To say I was horror stricken conveys little of the feeling that possessed me.

I snatched up the rag of cambric and flung it on the fire, and it was nothing but a rag in my hand, and in another moment, no more than a black and tinder on the bar of the grate. There was no face below, of course, not I said. It was a mere hallucination. You were cheated by an excited fancy, you may be sure. I told myself all that and more, and I went downstairs and tried to pull myself together with a dram But I was curiously upset, and for that night at least I found it impossible

to play the wooer. The recollection of the death mask was too vivid. It would have come between me and Lucy's lips. The effect wore off, however, that in a day or two I was bold again, and as much disposed to smile at my folly as you are at

this moment. I proposed, and Lucy accepted me, and I put on the ring Ashcroft pair was graciously pleased to approve of the settlements I offered an Ashcroft mayor promised to regard me as a sun and during the first forty eight hours of our engagement there was not a cloud to mar the blue. I proposed on a Monday, and on Wednesday I went again to dine and spend the evening with just their family party. Lucy and I found our way afterwards into the back drawing room, which

seemed to be made over to us by tacit. Understanding anyway, we had it to ourselves, and as Lucy sat on the settee busy with her work, I was privileged to sit beside her, close enough to watch the careful stitches she was setting under which the pattern grew. She was embroidering a square of fine linen to serve as a teacloth, and it was intended for a present for a friend. She was anxious. She told me to finish it in the next few days, ready for dispatch. But I was

somewhat impatient of her engrossment in the work. I wanted to look at me while we talk, and to be permitted to hold her hand. Plans for a tour we would take together after easter, arguing that eight weeks spent in preparation was enough for any reasonable bride. Lucy was easily entreated. She laid aside the linen square on the table at her elbow. I held her fingers captive, but her eyes wandered from my face, as she was still

deliciously shy. All at once she exclaimed her work was moving, that there was going to be a face in it? Did I not see? I saw? Indeed, it was the Gloriana death mask, forming there as it had formed in my handkerchief at home. The marked nose and chin, the severe mouth, the mold of forehead almost complete. I snatched it up and dropped it over the back of the couch. It did look like a face, I allowed, But never

mind it, darling. I want you to attend to me something of this sort, I said, I hardly know what for My blood was running cold. Lucy pouted she wanted to dwell on the marvel, and my impatient action had displeased her. I went on talking wildly, being afraid of pauses, but the psychological moment had gone by. I felt I did not carry her with me, as before she hesitated over my persuasions, the forecast of a Sicilian honeymoon had

ceased to charm. By and by she suggested that missus Ashcroft would expect us to rejoin the circle in the other room, and perhaps I would pick up her work for her. Still, with a slight error of offence, I walked round the settee to recover the luckless piece of linen. But she turned, also looking over the back. So the same instant we both saw there again was the face, rigid and severe, And now the corners of the cloth were tucked under, completing the form of the head. And

that was not all. Some white drapery had been improvised and extended beyond it on the floor, presenting the complete figure, laid out straight and stiff, ready for the grave. Lucy's alarm was excusable. She shrieked aloud, shriek upon shriek, and immediately an indignant family of Ashcroft rushed in through the half drawn potier which divided the two rooms, demanding the cause of her distress. Meanwhile, I had fallen upon the

puffed out form and destroyed it. Lucy's embroidery composed the head that the figure was ingeniously contrived out of a large Turkish bath sheet brought in from one of the bedrooms. No one knew how or when I held up the things, protesting their innocence, while the family were stabbing me through and through with looks of indignation, and Lucy was sobbing in her mother's arms. She might have been foolish. She allowed it did seem ridiculous now she saw what it was,

but at the moment it was too dreadful. It looked so like, so like, And here her fresh sob choked her into silence. Peace was restored at last, but plainly. The ashcroftstubted me, the genial father stiffened, and Missus Ashcroft administered indirect reproofs. She hated practical joking, so she informed me She might be wrong, and no doubt she was old fashioned, but she had been brought up to consider it the highest degree ill bred, and perhaps I had

not considered how sensitive Lucy was thow easily alarmed. She hoped I would take warning for the future, and that nothing of this kind would occur again. Practical joking, oh ye, gods, as if it was likely that I, alone with the girl of my heart, would waste the precious hour in building up effigies of sham corpses on the floor. And Lucy ought to have known that the accusation was absurd, as I had never for a moment left her side. She did take my part when more composed, but the

mystery remained beyond explanation of hers or mine. As for the future, I could not think of that without a failing heart. If the power arrayed against us were in truth what superstition feared, I might as well give up hope at once, for I knew there would be no relenting I could see the whole absurdity of the thing as well as you do now. But if you put yourself in my playtick, you will be forced to confess. But it was tragic too. I did not see Lucy the next day, and I was bound to go again

to town. But we had planned to meet and ride together on the Friday morning. I was to be at the Liso's at a certain hour, and you may be sure I was punctual. The horse had already been brought round, and the groom was leading it up and down. I had hardly dismounted when she came down the steps of the porch and I noticed at once a new look on her face, a harder set about the red mouth

of hers which was so soft and kissable. But she let me put her up on the saddle and settle her foot in the stirrup, and she was the bearer of a gracious message from her mother. I was expected to return to lunch, and missus Ashcroft begged us to be punctual, as a friend who had stayed the night with them would be leaving immediately after. You'll be pleased to meet her, I think, said Lucy, leaning forward to pat her horse. I find she knows you very well. It is miss Kingsworthy.

We were descending a steep hill and the groom was following at a discreet distance behind, far enough to be out of earshot. Lucie looked very pretty on horseback. But this is by the way. The manish hat suited her, and so did the habit, fitting closely to her shape. Tom, she said, and again I noticed that new hardness in her face. Tom. Miss Kingsworthy tells me your wife did not wish you to marry again, and she made you promise her that you would not. Miss Kingsworthy was quite

astonished to hear that you and I were engaged. Is this true? I was able to tell her that it was not. That my wife had never asked and I had never given her any such pledge. I allowed, as she disliked second marriages in certain cases, and perhaps she had made some remark to that effect. To Miss Kingsworthy, it was not unlikely. And then I appealed to her. Surely she would not let a mischief maker's tittle tattle

come between her and me. I thought her profile looked less, but she would not let her eyes meet mine, as she answered, of course not if that was all, and I doubt if I would have heeded it, only that it seemed to fit in with something else, Tom, it was very horrible what we saw on Wednesday evening. And don't be angry. But I asked miss Kingsworthy what your wife was like. I didn't tell her why. I wanted to know. What has that to do with it? I demanded,

stoutly enough, But alas I was too well aware. She told me missus Enderby was handsome, but she had very marked features and was severe looking when she did not smile at high forehead of roman nose and a decided chin. Tom, the face in the cloth was just like that. Did you not see? Of course? I protested, like, my darling, what nonsense? I saw? It looked a little like a face. But I pulled it to pieces at once because you were frightened. But why, Lucy, I shall have you turning

into a spiritualist if you take up these fancies. No, she said, I do not want to be anything foolish. I've thought it over, and if it happens only once, I've made up my mind to believe it a mistake and forget it. But if it comes again, if it goes on coming here, she shuddered and turned white. Oh, Tom, I could not, I could not. That was the ultimatum. She liked me as much as ever, she even owned a warmer feeling, but she was not going to marry a haunted man. Well, I suppose I can't blame her.

I might have given the same advice in another fellow's case, though in my own I've felt it hard. I'm close to the end now, so I shall need tax your patience very little longer. A single chance remained Gloriana's power, whatever its nature, and however derived, might have been so spent in the previous efforts that she could defect no more. I clung to this shred of hope and did my best to play the part of the lighthearted lover, the sort of companion Lucy expected who would shape himself to

her mood. But I was conscious that I played it ill. The ride was a lengthy business. Lucy's horse cast a shoe, and it was impossible to change the saddle onto the groom's hack or my own mare, as neither of them had been trained to the habit. We were bound to return at footpace, and didn't reach the Lisos until two o'clock. Lunch was over. Missus Ashcroft had set out for the station, driving Miss kingsworthy, but some cutlets were keeping hot for us,

so we were informed and could be served immediately. We went off at once into the dining room, as Lucy was hungry, and she took off her hat and laid it on a side table. You said the close fit of it made her headache. The cutlets had been misrepresented. They were lukewarm, but Lucy made a good meal of them, and the fruit tart which followed very much at a leisure. Heaven knows, I would not have grudged her so much as a mouthful, But that luncheon was an ordeal I

cannot readily forget. The servant absented himself, having seen us serve, and then my troubles began. The tablecloth seemed alive at the corner which was between us. He rose in waves, as if puffed up by wind, though the window was fast shut against any wandering airs. I tried to see him unconscious, try to talk as if no horror of apprehension was filling all my mind. While I was flattening out the bewitch the mask with a grasp by hardly dared relax. Lucy rose at last, saying she must change

her dress. Occupied with the cloth. It had not occurred to me to look round or keep watch on what might be going on in another part of the room. The hat on the side table had been tilted over sideways, and in that position that was made to crown another presentation of the face. But it was made of this time, I can't say, probably serviettes several lay about that The linen material of whatever sort was again molded into the perfect form. This time the mouth showed humor and appeared

to relax in a grim smile. Lucy shrieked and dropped into my arms in a swoon, a real genuine fainting fit, out of which she was brought round with difficulty. After I had summoned the help of doctors. I hung about miserably till her safety was assured, and then went as miserably home. Next morning I received a cutting little note from my mother in law elect in which she returned the ring and informed me the engagement must be considered at an end. Well, Dick, you now know why I

do not marry, and what have you to say? You know, if you go to my patreon www dot patreon dot com forward slash bar kid br cud, there are five hundred and many stories for you to listen to, and a link to my Google drive where you can download a whole lot completely add free. Good deal. I think, well, that was the death Mask by HD Everett. Now, when I began to read that, because it's written from a male point of view, I thought she was a bloke.

But she ain't the bloke. She's a lady. She's Henrietta Dorothy Everett, and I'm going to tell you something about her. I've just come back off my walk for thirteen days walking the Office Dyke, which is the dark age barrier built by King Offer of Mercier to keep the well shout, so it's still the boundary between England and Well. So walked about one hundred and twenty six Now. I've been keeping my patreons entertained with pictures and stories of from

my walk. But although if you're just listening to me on YouTube or on the podcast, you won't know any of that. I've been away and it's weird coming back because I'm a little bit disslocated. So now this is me getting back into the saddle. I had some videos and some podcast episodes queued up to go out while I was away and Imagen did a compilation on YouTube of my own stories, so people didn't know I was away, and people think I did the compilation, but I didn't,

young Imagen did. Thank you very much, image and anyway, back back to work. Now, enough of that enjoying yourself with the rain and the sheep and the horses and the red kites and everything. Let me tell you about Henrietta Dorothea Everett born eighteen fifty one, died in nineteen twenty three twenty three. Speak enunciate clearly tonally. I've just been talking to myself as I've been walking over these hills,

so I haven't had practice enunciating anyway. She was born Henrietta Dorothea Huskisson, it's a funny name, in Gillingham and Kent in early eighteen fifty one, and baptized there on the fourth of March that year, so she's probably born into February. Her father, John Huskison, was the first lieutenant in the Royal Marines. Now lieutenant Americans say lieutenant. The Royal Navy say something like lieutenant lieutenant. I don't know what they say, but they don't say it. But of

course it's placeholder in French. Lieutenant. It's French, isn't it. I wondered if the Royal Marines, being part of the Royal Navy, would go with the Army of the Navy. So I looked it up, and they go with the Army, as it turns out. So I'm told by my research if anybody's been in the Royal Marines to be able to tell me different. So there you go. So you've got middle class solidity and military discipline, and she becomes

a late Victorian respectable person. Her mother, Julia the Lovett, disappears into the record after the bare naming in parish and genealogical sources. So basically, mothers name there, that's the last we hearing. Mother of her early life and her days in Gillingham got not much in that gap. Critics

sometimes try to install a theory. The more honest conclusion is that she steps into view fully formed and adult woman of her time, for whom writing would become late both the profession and a way of thinking through the uncanny edges of that time. So basically what we've got is, and this happens a lot, you know, I find this.

I'm doing a lot of research on Dark Age of Britain, hence sort of offering offer and there'll be a basic sentence in the history of Brittonum or the Anglo Saxon chronicles or you know, Simin of Durham, and people will construct elaborate theories on the basis of you know, well this must mean and then you have a whole different theory. So where we lack information, we just make stuff up generally, and this is what happened to the people who attempted

the biography of Henrietta Dorothea Everett. She was married when she was eighteen, in eighteen sixty nine, to a man from Derby who was a solistic called which is kind of lawyer, Isaac Edward Everett. He died in nineteen oh four, and she had at least three children. The stuff we've got is vague. She had a son, Arthur Huskison Everett, and that was really common in those days if you ever done any family history, for the children to bear

the mother's maiden name as a second or third name. Anyway, Arthur Huskinson, her son, became her executor and principal heir. She has two daughters who we know very little about, but they appear in the census if you want to do the family research as part of the small, solid domestic unit. For several decades after her marriage, Everett appears to have lived a life expected a professional man's wife

in the late nineteenth century. Domestic responsibilities first intellectual life, if any, folded into private reading and the social duties of a provincial bourgeois family. Interesting because of this story touches on that after Isaac Everett's death in nineteen oh four,

she becomes a widow and the novelist. Now, the interesting thing about Victorian women was when they if they were single or if they were widows, they could operate as I want to say people they had rights they you know, but if they were just the wife, they had no rights really, And so being a widow actually was potentially better for women. They could invest, they could act as a man. Look, don't shoot me down, I'm not a Victorian.

So in the nineteen eleventh census she's marked as a widow and then novelist and a woman of private means, living independently herself. She died nineteen years later the old vicarage Western on Trent in Derbyshire, and she left in the state of around eight hundred and fifty pounds, which is not insignificant in those days to Isaac Arthur's son.

So she is a successful professional writer working not in London but out in the sticks as it were, in Derbyshire, very nice county, the literally life that lay behind between those. So we've got, as I was saying before, we have some bare information and a lot of the stuff is extrapolated from that rather than known. We do know some things. So she didn't publish fiction as far as we know, until eighteen ninety six, when she was forty four or forty five at that time. She started writing under a

male pseudonym, not uncommon. Again in line with the theories we've been talking about THEO Douglas and we know this from you know, George Elliott and the Brontes. I think originally wrote under male names. Somebody's gonna shoot me down if I got that wrong. But I've been shot down before. I've survived, So.

and Nowsley and others. The publishing pattern short runs with multiple houses is diagnostic of a solidly popular author of the period, reliable sales across different lists, but no single firm that sort of lock her in as a flagship property. So she isn't sort of the Jka rolling of her time. She's more like a jobbing writer who's doing all right. She's doing all right, she's doing better than most and

it's her living. And there are a lot of women like this at this time writing, and we've covered a lot of their work on the podcast. Of course, Elizabeth Gaskell is a big name, but thinking of you know, Charlotte Reddelle and people like that who produce lots of stuff, and Margaret Oliphanta, there's loads of them. So there we go. So her first book eras a Mystery eighteen ninety six under the name of Theo Douglas, issued by Blackwood. It's an Egyptological fantasy in which a revived mummy, a cult

ritual and hint of scientific method overlap. You could understand that this time there was a big fascination with ancient Egypt and archaeology, mummification and the poorest boundary between science and the occult, and we've talked about that at length and other podcasts. She would return to this borderland repeatedly. In nineteen hundred, she turns on hypnotism, spirit and an automaton animated by the displaced soul of a conjurer's daughter. Sounds good, doesn't it. One I haven't read it one

or two. Nineteen oh seven explorers spiritualism, and the splitting of identity under occult pressure. So I'm saying she's maybe interested in these themes, but these are kind of so is she writing to market? One thing that writers are encouraged to do to make money these days is to write to market. So if it's billionaire, were wolf, alpha romanticy, that's a polite word for it, mommy pawn they call it as well, then that's what you should write or lit.

RPG was a genre I did a bit of. I enjoyed writing, which is basically writing a book as if it's within a video game. I think it's probably still popular that I did all right from that At one point I've got a I used a pseudonym as well, galen Wolf, if you want to look him up, And I did the two or three series there anyway, writing to market. So the big issue with her, it's not a big issue, but just an observation is is she writing the market or is this actually what she's interested in?

Or do the two helpfully coincide? So in Malevela nineteen fourteen she has a mass there was also a psychic vampire draining her client's vitality under the guise of therapeutic touch. These are not occult romances in the melodramatic modern sense so much as found the Siecho thought experiments, in which the science room, the consulting room, and laboratory blur sounds great. The stuff she also wrote under Theodouglas strict historical fictions,

which you know historical. You could argue that, I mean, people do argue and probably right that Walter Scott invented the historical novel, although he was very much he's certainly the German the Schiller Ritter. German romances influenced me like them, although he backed away from them because he thought they were a bit vulgar by the end, because they were like they were like the Billionaire Alpha, but without the smut, and just a little bit of a suggestion of it.

This is popular fiction, you know, White Webs or Romance of Sussex. They're long a set against the Jacobite rebellion. So she did loads of stories. So they've all gone and where she has remained is her weird stories, her ghost stories. So in nineteen eighteen, The Pipe is a

Mallory as Theodouglas was reprinted in Uncanny Stones. Nineteen twenty, Philip Allen published The death Mask and Other Ghosts under the name of H. D. Everett a final valedictory collection of stories, drawing together work written across the war and post war years. The first ward that is the Death Mask with its widow or Haunted by It steadwise features appearing in Nearby Cloth is a small study in obsessive haunting. We're going to talk about that. And the next story

in the collection is Passing Clench. You can get these if you go on. I think I've got this on Guttenbergie the Guttenberg or the archive dot org library. No I didn't, that's not true. I've got a copy of it. I've got the words with copy. Hell what was I saying? Then there's a whole bunch of them and they disappeared.

collections of unknown authors. I've got a whole bunch of which I picked up as a job lot in a second hand bookshop in Aberystworth. So that was two thousand and six, The Crimson Blind and Other Stories. So I have got that's the book that I've got. I've got a bunch. And how I came to read this one was I've come back and I was thinking, oh, something's not too long, and there we are. Anyway, let's move to the story itself, The death Mask, first published in

nineteen twenty. In that book we talked of the death Mask and Other Ghosts, a collection of ten supernatural tales, actually issued under her own name, not THEO Douglas. So let's think about it. On the surface, it's a carefully constru detail of supernatural ambiguity in the tradition of Henry

James and Oliver Onions. A first person frame narrator reports the testimony of his friend Tom Enderby, whose courtship of a young woman named Lucy is systematically destroyed by the appearance of his dead wife's face in every piece of white linen that surrounds a new relationship. The story maintains with considerable technical skill and unresolved tension between supernatural fact

and psychological projection. This is why I mentioned Henry James Turn of the Screw and Oliver Onions The Beckoning fair One, whereby in both those stories you don't really know if the protagonist A is going mad or not. Turn of the Screw is formally a frame story, so it begins with a frame and ends with a frame. It's Christmas even somebody's telling the story of a woman he knew, who he wasn't in love with, but he knew. But the bulk of Turn of the Screw is portrayed first

person by the governess. As you know. I think the Fair Ones I recall is not a frame story, but the frame in this one is we don't know whether this is a hysteria or there is no proof of the ghost of the hauntings, and they could be it could equally be. So there is this late Victorian psychological

ghost stories. What was happening? We moved from the you know, the High Gothic ghosts and chains and revenance, and we haven't reached the twentieth century reality of ghosts again, where ghosts and monsters are real, and we go through a period, not in all stories from this period, but psychology. You know, Freud was starting to write and this idea that you know, that the world as we see it is filtered through our psychology rather than being objectively real, Yeah, is coming up.

And so I think I mentioned that because I think that's what's going on. So Dick, it's Tom and Dick, Tom, Dick, no Harry, and Dick is a returned friend who's been out of England for ten years. Often they are in it, so they haven't seen him for ten years. This is why he hasn't seen him. And he knew the wife and he didn't really like her. And she Gloriana, great name, the Queen of course, Queen Elizabeth first Gloriana, that's what

she was known as. She is not painted in particularly warm light really as she's not a very nice person, we don't think. And he doesn't seem to have missed the much. He didn't seem to have liked his wife. I think that's really important for the story. But you know, Tommy is like, oh, it's just a hallucination, you know, And that's sorry, Dick. That is to say, Dick. That's Dick's job. So this is this, as I was saying, this idea of psychology, is there a ghost or is

it insanity? Or you know, moper Son's story that hauler eighteen eighty seven is a similar story in that we're not sure whether as it goes through somebody going mad, although I think probably in the all of the hall it is somebody going mad. But you see, there is a sort of a genre, increasingly of its time, with an interest in psychology, our ghost real or the figments of our hysterical mind, the ambiguous ghost story. So it's a thing, you know, of course, if we go into psychology.

Psychology and I often talk about this and I don't want to labor it too much, is this idea of the return of the repressed. So Freud's theory is that we things that are too painful that we don't acknowledge, we don't want to live in our conscious mind. We put him in the cupboard of our unconscious and we hide it away. But his idea was that you can't you know, the pressure builds up, this hydraulic metaphor, the pressure builds up and we have to let it out again.

I remember when I was doing psychology, we would often talk about how we see the human mind according to the technology of the time. So in Freud's time, it was basically, there is a pressure building up. You can't do anything about it. You've got to let the pressure out. You let the pressure out through talking about it. You have a catharsis and everything's fine. That isn't true, as

it turns out. And then when I was studying psychology in the early two thousands, the metaphor then was the brain as a computer, and we had cognitive psychology, and it was basically looking at the brain as an information processing device. And I don't think we do that anymore. I think probably we're looking at it as AI or something now, which AI, of course llm's are just basically very clever, huge predictive text machines. And so basically I think the metaphor now for the brain will be some

kind of predictive text machine. So it's an interesting thought, isn't it. But so behind that slight digression is the mind is none of them those things, those are metaphors. And I think again old in McGilchrist stepping in here, the left brain likes to systemize you know, left hemisphere likes to systemize, and it mistakes it's its representation for the truth. So the danger is, of course, we Freud thought he was so convinced that the brain operated like

a steam engine that he was trapped by that. And so you know, in the two thousands, when they thought the brain was some kind of computer of its time, they really believed it was. And so the danger is if we come to believe that the brain is simply a very clever, predictive text or predictive bit machine, we will be trapped with that idea and we will come to take it as reality, when of course it's simply a model, and an imperfect model anyway.

knock the microphone. Take it with a pinch of salt, you know, because it could be that this is just me and I'm hung up on my own theories, you know. But I think I see the story as a man who's not being honest with himself. Okay, that's what's repressed. I stand. I'm absolutely prepared to be corrected on because I'm not one hundred percent convinced I'm right. But anyway, let's go on with the linen. I think the linen's

really interesting. So the most original and powerful element, remember she is a woman of Everett's story, is her choice of haunting medium. Gloriana's face does not appear in mirrors or windows, or the generic atmospherics of the ghostly. It appears exclusively in white linen, Tom's handkerchief, Lucy's embroidery. I mean, I think the handkerchief is hers. Actually I don't think it's Tom's. It was in a draw as he used it, I forget now, but it was hers. She's put it away.

The dining room tablecloth. The ghost appears in the Turkish bath sheet. It's not an aesthetic convenience. It's a precise material and social argument, and it is one that a woman writer of Everett's class and generation was equipped to make in a way that a male writer deploying the same imagery for atmospheric effect would not have been so. Linen in the Victorian and Wardian middle class household was

woman's work from the beginning to the end. The marking, making, even laundering, mending, and storing of household linen was a specifically female responsibility, part of what a wife brought to a marriage. In both literal and symbolic terms. The trousseau assembled over years the household stock. The embroidered initials marked ownership and transformed it. A man encountered linen as a finished product. It was a clean shirt, laid out, nicely ironed,

the table set, the beds made. A woman encountered it as a continuous management responsibility that began before marriage and ended only at her death, when the same category of cloth was used to wrap her body. The linen chest was one of the few domains of genuine female authority in a household where legal and financial authority resided entirely with the husband exercised through She exercises her contact with

linen through unceasing invisible labor. Of course, in a middle class houseld like this, much of the labor is carried by the servants, which is a class distinction, but they will be female servants. The shroud dimension compounds is the same material that makes the wedding dress, makes the winding sheet. Gloriana's deathbed request cover my face with the handkerchief is the gesture that initiates a whole mechanism and fuses a domestic and the mortuary in a single action. She's not

asking Tom to do something extraordinary. She's asking him to perform a ritual that falls entirely with the normal management of death, which was also in this period. Woman's work. Who lays you out? It's woman comes from the parish. Who lays you out often midwives and the laying out women with the same woman. Whatever it understands and encodes in the story's material texture is that the linen chests

and the coffin are not opposites. They are points on the same continuum of women's domestic labor and the ghost to haunts through cloth is haunting through the very substance of her own working life. I think that's an interesting point. I don't think it doesn't ring one hundred percent true. It's not the whole story with the story. There's another kind of issue about the whole genre of the dead

first wife stories. It's almost a subgenre that runs from the mid nineteenth century through to the late nineteen thirties. Very interesting. It's bounded in time like that. The story of the dead wife whose claim on her surviving husband prevents him from finding happiness with a second woman its founding instant. Is instance is Charlotte Bronte is Jane eighteen forty seven, where Bertha Mason is not dead but institutionally

prior locked in the attic legally indischargeable. So she's sort of effectively like the ghost of a woman, but haunting, you know, she haunts the relationship. The claim that cannot be canceled by ordinary means. Bertha establishes the pattern that was eighteen forty seven the first wife as the obstacle whose removal cannot be achieved through normal social negotiation, but

only through extraordinary and violent means. It develops in a later tradition where the living inconvenient wife is actually replaced with a dead one, intensifying the problem can siderably, a dead wife cannot be reasoned with, confronted, divorced, or outlasted. Also, she can't be killed in the supernatural variance. She is a quite precisely through death, a power she never possessed in life. This is where I think Gloriana seems to be in a very powerful woman. But we will go

with this argument. So we have Hugh Walpole's Snow, which I've read. Of course you can find it on the podcast. Nineteen ten is the earliest of these supernatural cases, and in some respects are most revealing. The dead wife returns not through any domestic object, but there's weather and encroaching elemental cold that draws the husband, Jacob Finch, away from his living second wife and out into the fatal exterior with the first wife, where she won't give him up.

Walpole's dead wife does not colonize the domestic interior as Gloriana does. She abolishes it, expanding her claim to the atmosphere itself. Jacob cannot flee snow, but Walpole's most disturbing insight is that Jacob does not particularly want to flee, So there are variance of theme here. He walks out into the cold. There's something that looks from outside like relief. The first marriage is inauthenticity included. Is it implied a

kind of cold emotional safety. I'm going to say that again because clearly the relationship with the first wife is not gone, and these men in these stories have different relationships to the first wife. With Jacob Finch, we don't know, and WAPAT doesn't say much about the previous relationships, so we surmise and very limited evidence, But it does appear that there's something comforting about the snow. It's almost like he's it's easier to to to relax into death with her.

There's something comforting about that. It's an app's so we may say it's a cold emotional safety. The absence of the demand for genuine feeling that the living second wife now makes on him. So she needs him as a man, as a person, and for some reason he can't give that, and he, you know, he needs to escape that demand to be a real person in life. Okay, so that may be what's inauthentic here. So I want to talk then about Edith Wharton's pomegranate seed, which divides people. I

love it. I see the comments. Some people really don't get it at all nineteen thirty one. So in this case, Charlotte Ashby, the dead first wife, communicates with her surviving husband, Kenneth through letters that arrive in handwriting his second wife Laura, and can see but never read. Kenneth reads and answers them, and is progressively drawn away from the living woman until

he disappears entirely. Wharton's title supplies the mythological key, the pomegranate seed, the persephone eight in the underworld, boundy to return, you know, the myth so Posephonie descends into the underworld. A mother Demeter is looking for her, but she's married to Hades, and in the endicome with this deal because because she's eaten the fruit of the underworld, she must return.

So it's something about the world of the dead, the world of those who have passed already that hooks these people something they can't These men cannot get away from this, you know. So Kenneth has consumed something of his first marriage that now operates inside himself as a compulsion indistinguishable from Will. We're even talking a little bit Arthur shopping out here. Won't go into that, but his shopping that is great. Actually, he's hard to read, so read him

through somebody else. I read him through BERNARDA. Castro. He's got a great book on chopping. Now helped me really understand it anyway. So in Wharton's story, going back the dead wives claiming Wharton requires the husband's participation. Again, Charlotte's letters must be opened, read and answered, and that participation is what makes the horror specifically psychological as well as supernatural.

Loauring the second wive watches with complete clarity and complete helplessness because she cannot do Kenneth's more men, how would he say that morning? And he will not do it from himself, So he he's unable to process of both of these men. So far are we're talking about, and I suppose to Jane Eyre as well, But Hugh wo Pole's character, Edith Wharton's character, they have not processed. They're not done with that first marriage, that first relationship. This

probably says something very much alive. This is a story, after all. So I imagine that the experience of many second not just women, but second husbands as well, is that their first partner is also somehow in the relationship. If he has not been able to let's say he, but it could be she as well has not been able to process this, then that relationship is not effectively dead, and we move on to definitely the Marie is Rebecca nineteen thirty eight. The fullest treatment of this the id

identical effect, without recourse to the supernatural at all. Although it almost feels like a go it should be a ghost story. Rebecca to Winter is dead before the novel begins and never appears. She is pure inscription, her monogram on the household linen, her personality in Missus Danver's devotion,

her reputation in the neighborhood's memory. The second Missus de Wint, who has no name of her own, which is the novel's central semiotic statement, finds every surface of her new life already covered with a prior text she cannot overwrite. The dead wife's power is the total power of total prior occupation. She's filled the role so completely that the woman attempting to succeed her, the second wife, finds no space in which to exist independently. So in this case

with the death mask. Of course, what we've got is that Lucy Young Lucy is a promise of happiness, but can never be fulfilled because Tom has not processed, has not been not honestly disposed of the first relationship. The dead wife prevents her husband from happy with the second woman, not because the dead are inherently more powerful than a living but because happiness in a second marriage requires an honest reckoning with the first one, and these men have

not performed that reckoning. The dead wife's power is not at root supernatural or psychological, it is ethical. Tom Enderby's situation makes this unusually legible because Everett in this story gives us key details without such telling, with such telling casualness. Gloriana was his senior, the house was hers. The marriage had the shape of an arrangement made for the reasons

for reasons other than love, property's, social settlement convenience. Tom endured it, and when Gloriana died, his first private thought was a good job too. That's what he says. That relief is never examined, never mourned, never atoned for. It is pocketed and set aside in favor of the pursuit

of lucy. He has never admitted to himself or to anyone else, that he spent years in a marriage he did not want, with a woman he did not love, and that Gloriana, whatever her faults as a companion, invested her entirely legal and social identity. She's just known as missus Enderby in lots of things in that same marriage,

with no equivalent exit available to her. Under the coverture system that shared her married life, she had no independent property rights, no career, no public existence outside her role as missus Enderby. The savage irony encoded in the story's property detail is that her own house survives her in a form that benefits him. He holds it as a tenant for life, administering her assets for his own comfort,

exactly as a law administered them during her lifetime. She cannot, even from beyond the grave, reclaim what was legally hers. Against that backdrop, the haunting is not supernatural excess. It is a logical necessity, the only channel left to a woman for whom every other instrument has been closed. The death mask returns because the admission of all this has never been made, The account has never been settled. And the ghost is not in the final analysis Gloriana enderby

at all. The ghost is the unlived authentic life that the first marriage foreclosed, returning at the moment when the possibility of living genuinely presents itself, demanding that the debt be acknowledged before the new beginning can be permitted. Gloriana's face in the linen is not revenge. It is an invoice.

But what we've got is the linen symbolizes that domestic arrangement in a sense almost it's about So the ethics are that he lived a lie for his own convenience with a woman he didn't really like, just so he could enjoy her money and property. And so it's ethical, isn't it that? And of course we've got to remember I went to see just before I went down to Wales. I was in Newcastle or the Royal Shakespeare Company's version of Hamlet. And of course it's all about ethics, isn't

The ghosts are all about ethics. And one of the oldest roles of a ghost in the story is to do right wrongs, to point out where there have been transgressions in how things should be and where people have actually been naughty. I can't think of the poshuath for that moment. So in every case of this, so okay, So let's go back to the pomegrancy briefly. It's more opaque, but the structure implies the same dynamic. His silence with

Lauring is not discretion. It is a continuation of inauthenticity that began in the first marriage and has transferred itself into the second. I would slays, I would kind of revise that slightly, you know, and say the inauthenticity now is with the second wife. You know. I suppose what we're saying about these is you have to if you're in a relationship with somebody, you can't use them. It's not ethical to use them. And so old Tom Enderby uses Gloriana in the set second issue, the second one

that polygrams seed. He's using lawing his second wife for emotional benefit, but he isn't honest whe her, He's not true to her. Yeah, I mean, if we look at Rebecca maximum de Winter, his inauthenticity having reached the point of actual vans that was a loveless marriage. It was so inauthentic the world thought it was going on. Finally, and he in some sense benefited from that. He wanted to project this image of the county couple very successful, but she wasn't very nice. But do you see what

I'm saying? Inauthentic And eventually he kills her and he gets away with it, ethics running right through this, but the other woman suffers. Okay, So the sorry asks what we owe to the dead and what it costs to carry an unexamined life forward into a future that demands Honestly, I think that is the central message here. The mascot forms in tom Enderby's handkerchief, in Lucy's embroidery, in the

tablecloth at luncheon. He's made of the same cloth as Gloriana's shroud and her trousseau and the household stock she managed without acknowledgment through servants for the duration of a marriage that was never what it pretended to be. Tom Enderby's tragedy is not that he's haunted. It is that he never learns what the haunting means. He never learns, does he. At the end of it, He's no further forward.

He's like, Oh, I can't marry. I can't get married because Gloriana he's the victim still of he's owing in authenticity. He doesn't seem to have any knowledge of why he should be published, published, publish, why he should be polished. What am I saying why he should be punished? Okay? He does never acknowledge that there's no honest reckoning with himself. He doesn't carry any guilt for what he did to Lucy, for what he did to Gloriana. For he's slimy backboneless corruption.

I mean, he's there's a decent sort of chap, but he's not at all. Okay. These husbands in all these stories are not simply men who contracted inauthentic first marriages and are now paying the price or in authentic second They are men who at some level preferred the inauthenticity. They don't there's maximum the Winter, you know, he gets away with a crime. And in the other two cases, the Snow and the Pomegrant, see the husband's disappear with

the wife. So they never they never make that moral reckoning. And you could argue that they suffer. But the second wife suffers or Lucy, you know, her hopes are dashed. She's been the subject of a broken engagement, which will will cast shade, as they say, on her. Anyway, there we go. So it's amazing what you can get out of a short a short piece, you know, an apparently simple ghost story. And this is why I think they

rewards study, because they're not just simple stuf worries. In many cases, they have actually something to say about the human condition, and in this case, I think it's an ethical story. So I think that's what it's about, more than Freud or anything like that. Anyway, Okay, I hope you enjoyed it. Take care by.