The Ghost of Winn Peterson

16. Winn

5 October

As our move has been ushered in with the dawn of the new month, I am now at last given over to enough time to finish what I started, and continue my recollection of events as spelt out by Dr. Radcliffe (I will admit to having to read over what I already write, for this blur of time has not allowed me to be nearly half so consistent as I would like in jotting down my thoughts). 

Following the tragic demise of Georginia Thomas, whose funeral we were not permitted to attend, Evie and I were set to work at once in the matter of securing our belongings for travel. The entire time that we threw our dresses and socks into trunks and cases we whispered about what life would be like soon. Evie did not want to be married, but hardly has she supposed if it ever did happen, it would not be to a complete stranger! The idea of a good, kind, caring husband was all she had ever wanted from the prospect, as her mother often brought the topic up with her, or a husband who allowed her to do as she pleased (can you see it now, Evie wandering around her own attached garden, a man smiling from the door as his wife toils under her own work? I cannot say that I can, but at the very least, an image of my friend at her own work conjures easily in my mind). For nearly an hour straight it seemed, Evie spat and cursed about the poison having a man control her every movement would be.

"Can't you see, Winnifred? I'll become some crippled thing, a mute creature with a spine broken from the weight of his demands!" Still the only person to call me Winnifred, I could only sigh in sympathy for her. "Do you think he'll allow me my walks any longer? Not for fear of my running off! And of my trips out of town? Oh, it may just be a good thing he needs you to come along - I might kill myself now, if you weren't there!" As harsh as the statement was, I knew she meant it in every sense. While some women may view marriage as an establishment on health and prosperity and whatever else connects us to secure homes, Evie could only decline if not allowed to roam. She appeared to possess too many thoughts to contain to one place. At the very least, with my garden, she had been able to distract herself the burden of thinking. 

"The garden!" I cried, growing wet-eyed at the prospect of losing something so dear to the both of us. "What will become of our garden?"

"I shall build another," vowed Evie with a sudden sternness that terrified me.

"What if he refuses to let us out?" 

"I don't care. It will be done, be it by my hands or over my grave." I gasped and reached for her hands. 

"Evie! Don't say such things!"

"Even if I mean them with all of my heart?" She gave me a cold look, the sort I've only seen in contemptuous people with nothing to lose because they have already lost it all. Did Evie suspect I was gone? I wanted to tell her that I would follow her to the horrid doctor's home whether bidden to or not, but she stood up and threw the coat she'd been wrenching in her hands to the ground. "I... I need something to drink. I'll bring something up." She was gone in a moment, leaving me to myself with the looming threat of my best and only friend in all of England a corpse of her own doing. 

When Evie did return, she indeed carried a plate of warm and burning cups of tea, which we shared over the pile of clothes so carelessly abandoned to our tempers. As we sipped, I was reminded of the letters so long ago found in my attic and I questioned if we would bring them along with us, to have at least something to study in the misery of our imprisonment. "Why, what a brilliant idea!" Giving me a dramatic and tea-tinted kiss on the cheek (a much more welcome mood than her cold bitterness, which not even my overly-forgiving nature could hope to calm), Evie carefully set her tea down and produced the packet of letters from a chest under her bed. 

"It wouldn't do, to have someone... unsavoury, as you might put it, getting their hands on these." We huddled over the packet and bent our heads close together. Evie had already begun perusing their mysterious contents, but was silent so that I could reread the first letter. It was a strange this, to be sure, and appeared addressed to an Igor. Upon her questioning my knowledge of the previous owner of my house, I reminded her that it was my father who had done the purchasing.