‘Perhaps it explains why you have come back here,’ Gosse said.

‘To England?’ Henry asked.

‘Close to the scene of where it happened. The lectures say that a child can take in everything, hold it but not absorb it in what they call the unconscious.’

‘Why is not William here then?’ Henry asked.

‘I do not know,’ Gosse said. ‘It is a mystery.’

‘Perhaps you will understand when I say that I do not wish to discuss it again,’ Henry said.

For several days he could not work and found when he woke in the morning that he suffered from a great regret at having told Gosse the story, until he put the episode out of his mind so that he might continue making his plans in peace.

SOME DAYS, Henry believed, he wrote too much and too quickly, working his Scot too hard. Once the stories were published, he paid little attention to them, revising them once for book publication and then forgetting about them. However, when his new collection Embarrassments appeared and Gosse had much to say about one of the stories, he read it over so that he could discuss it further with his friend. It was one of his ghost stories, called ‘The Way It Came’, and it seemed to him now too thin to survive even as a potboiler. Gosse wanted to discuss the technique of the first-person voice, how very difficult it was to make it convincing. He was, Henry thought, too polite and tactful to allow himself to stray from the general point to the particular story. But, as the conversation between them about the story proceeded over a few meetings and began to irritate him, a second matter raised by Gosse began to interest him profoundly. Gosse insisted that, since most readers did not fully believe in ghosts, then most ghost stories could not fully be credible. They needed, he said, both to be ghost stories and to have a rational explanation at the same time; they needed to be both frightening and within the bounds of the possible, he insisted.

Henry disagreed. He believed that a story should be able to suggest anything at all, including the most outlandish matter, but he was, nonetheless, interested in Gosse’s argument, although it was too vehement and too eager to impose rules on subjects which, in Henry’s opinion, required great latitude. Privately, Henry was appalled by ‘The Way It Came’ and regretted collecting it in a volume, knowing that it might have been better to let it sink. He quite resented Gosse for noticing it.

During one of those evenings with Gosse, he told him in passing how he had acquired Lamb House, mentioning the iron-monger Mr Milson as a ferryman waiting to take him across the water to ideal seclusion, managed happiness. He then told Gosse of Howells’s visit, and how his financial circumstances due to new possibilities for American publication had been transformed, as though he were being handed a coin by an old friend to put under his tongue and assist him on his journey to Hades.

‘ Rye,’ Gosse laughed, ‘is indeed a death, especially on weekdays in the winter, but I daresay at weekends as well.’

‘If I were Poe,’ Henry said, ‘I could write about one of those characters who is travelling to an unknown house whose door is a door into the grave.’

‘You will long for London, and that will settle it, and you will escape with the mere fright which rural life offers the unwary,’ Gosse said.

HENRY HAD promised Collier’s a new story as part of Howells’s interceding on his behalf, and, having consulted his notebooks and spoken more to Gosse about the problem of credibility in the modern ghost story but without telling him what his plans were, he set to work. This time he would frame the story, use the first-person voice as a narrative left behind by the protagonist and now retrieved to be read to a weekend party at a country house. He longed, as he dictated, to frighten the Scot, and watched him carefully as he began his tale so that he could note thereafter any shift in his countenance, any paling of his skin.

His narrator’s voice would be prim and factual; seeping gently from her tone would be a sort of goodness, a readiness to appreciate each new person and each new experience as a reward sent to her in exchange for her quick intelligence and sensitivity. He sought a tone of voice full of calm acceptance, resigned competence, mingling authority with a devotion to duty, an orderly attachment to making the best of things; someone who would not complain and for whom shrillness would be among the cardinal vices. He wanted a voice that every reader would automatically believe and trust, but also a literary style redolent of fifty years earlier – our heroine was an avid reader – broken intermittently by simple vivid sentences.

It was the story which had lain in his notebooks for more than two years, and had come to him over that time in flashes and moments, but nothing close to a form or a way to begin had inspired him until now, when he knew that he would need such a story, firm and frightening and dramatic, for his new editor at Collier’s, something that would grip the readers and make them want more. This was the vague tale told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury of two children in a large house left by their guardian in the care of a governess detailed not to contact the guardian under any circumstances.

It was easy to put flesh on these bare bones, have a hearty, trusty housekeeper, make the little girl gentle and beautiful, make the boy both charming and mysterious, and make the house itself, the strange old house, into a great adventure for our heroine, the governess. He wanted her to have no skills at reflection or self-examination, he wanted the reader to know her by what she noticed, and what sights, indeed, she used her narrative to gloss over. Thus the reader would see the world through her eyes, but somehow see her too, despite her efforts at self-concealment and self-suppression, in ways she could not see herself.

The house was all emptiness and echoing sounds. The governess’s two charges made nothing of their abandonment, they paraded themselves to the governess and the kind housekeeper as brimming vessels in need of nothing more than what was provided for them. All sound, both within and without, was ominous sound matched by ominous echo. He set down as soon as he could the moment when, on retiring for the night, the governess heard the faint distant cry of a child and then in front of her door the sound of a light footstep. These, he determined as he moved up and down the room dictating the words, should seem like nothing at the time and would only become significant in the light, or in the gloom, of what was to come.

He had begun the story as a potboiler, a way of fulfilling a contract, a tale likely to appeal to a wide audience, and he worked accordingly to have it completed by the end of the year. He did not know why it disturbed his waking life in the months in which he prepared his move to Lamb House. He did not know why the voice he had so thoughtfully created, and so carefully controlled and manipulated, seemed to have worked on him so that he allowed his governess a power and a freedom which he had never intended for her. He allowed her to fool herself, something he had never allowed anyone before; he gave her permission to wallow in the danger, to want it to come towards her, to motion it close, signal to it. He relished frightening her. He made her loneliness and her isolation into a longing to meet someone, for a face at the window, a figure in the distance.

This longing, he knew, would in time come to him too as the garden door creaked, or the branches of the trees beat against the window as he read by lamplight, or lay awake in that old house, and in one of those seconds before worthier thoughts could surface, the first thought would be to welcome what was coming now to break the sad, helpless monotony of the self, to feel a moment of desperate hope that it was come at last, whatever it was. Even in its darkest shape, it would offer the same moment of pure, sharp release as a flash of lightning offers to the brittle air in a dried-up landscape.