Alice: A Ghost Story by Mats Evensson

Author:Mats Evensson [Evensson, Mats]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent
Published: 2023-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Morning After

Alice barely got any sleep. Her mind was too unfocused, split in too many directions. When she closed her eyes, she saw the robed figure coming down the hallway after her. With her eyes open, all she could think about was Miss Poole.

Miss Poole with fire in her eyes.

She had felt that fire for a brief moment before they pulled apart and Miss Poole had escorted her back to her bedchamber. She wanted another taste. Her whole body hummed at the thought.

There had been a time when Alice feared and even hated her attraction to women. As a child, she had tried to bury emotions she had been told were unnatural and deviant. But they found their way to the surface, no matter what she did. She had tried to will herself into falling in love with boys, thinking that it was something every girl had to do but never talked about. She had spent countless nights tossing and turning, wondering why God, who had already taken so much, kept punishing her.

Everything changed when her father died. Something inside her revolted then. Against a cruel god, against a society that wanted nothing more than to shun her, against the walls she had built up around herself. She had quit resisting, quit denying herself. And as fate would have it, she had found a like mind in Mr Kipps’s raven-haired daughter Eleanor. What began as shared laughter and whispered secrets had escalated to stolen glances and timid explorations in the dark of night. With Eleanor, Alice had found herself.

But as exciting as it was to finally explore desires and feelings she had held back for so long, Alice also felt that she was taking advantage of Mr Kipps’s generosity. She couldn’t shake the nagging voice in the back of her head saying that he had taken her in, given her a seat at his family’s table—and that she had repaid his kindness by corrupting his daughter.

Whether it was true or not, Alice had to get away. Which was why she so readily had accepted the job at the Whitemoor Herald and moved into a tiny apartment in a rather shoddy neighbourhood shortly thereafter.

Alone in her room at Ashgate Abbey, a room so large her entire apartment could fit in it, she slept in starts and fits. When Miss Poole came to prepare the fireplace the next morning, Alice woke from her uneasy slumber and asked if they could talk.

“About what?” Miss Poole said, on her knees in front of the fireplace, her back toward Alice.

Alice exhaled. You know what about, Mary.

“There is nothing to talk about, Miss Reed.”

Whatever wall had come crumbling down last night, Mary Poole had apparently built back up again. Alice padded over the cold floor to the fireplace, where the maid busied herself with brushing up yesterday’s ashes, not looking her way. Alice wanted to reach down and sink her fingers into the golden curls sticking out from Miss Poole’s linen cap.

Instead she said, Could you please put the brush down? We shared a moment last night and I know I felt something.

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