I admit to having a weakness for gothic horror, though the overwrought emotionality of much of it makes me giggle when I take a step back. That made finding this story by Margaret Ronald all the better. It shares much of the sensibility of gothic horror without overselling anything.
Ibbotson’s record picks up the next morning, after two fathers came by hoping to help their daughters. Ibbotson’s uncle seems to have reassured them that Wilbraham was taking care of the girls, and given the state of the river at the time, it’s understandable that the fathers decided to wait it out. Ibbotson herself continued to watch through her telescope off and on as the rain continued.
I can certainly sympathize; even though the rain here is hardly as bad and the risk of flood practically nonexistent on the new fill, after a while one does start looking for any distraction. The sound of the rain is monotonous but not unpleasant; what is mildly disturbing is how the rain on the glass changes the quality of the light, turning it from gray to an undersea green. It is sometimes easy to believe that my entire apartment is beneath the water somewhere, submerged deep under sky and stone.
I find distraction in writing up my notes—as Ibbotson did, later on in life. I wonder if she, too, discovered inconsistencies as she went along, if she found the drumming of rain as conducive to a meditative state. Surely that would explain her time in Kansas; surely that would mark yet another similarity between us.
At the time, though, Ibbotson found a different sort of distraction in pointing her telescope at Wilbraham’s house, where despite the rain a strange game appeared to be in progress. As Ibbotson puts it:
Three or four girls stand at the doorway, then one runs outside. Sometimes the others run to catch her; sometimes they hold on to the doorframe as if it were an anchor, and it must be Mr. Wilbraham or Miss Farles who runs after. They or the girls catch their friend & pull her back into the house. First Cassie Garlin, then Beatrice Silber, then Victoria Bahn. And now Cassie again; she has nearly made it to the water, but Miss Farles has pulled her back, dragging her heels in the mud.
This has happened six times in the last hour. Once Miss Farles herself kept running past Sadie & Mr. Wilbraham had to grab her around the waist and carry both her and Sadie back to the house. I think if it had not been Sadie, who is the smallest at Braxton, he would have lost one of them.
It is as if they seek something in the water, but they fear to leave the house and fear to let their schoolmates leave.
