“A Terrible Vengeance” was written by Charlotte Riddell and first appeared in Princess Sunshine and Other Stories (1889). Charlotte Riddell, née Charlotte Cowan (1832-1906), was a novelist, noted for her tales of the City, and was a successful and well-regarded ghost story writer. “A Terrible Vengeance” is a dark little chestnut.

One late summer day Paul Murray and Dick Savill are enjoying some time on the Thames. Paul, who is hamstrung by a lack of money and his dependence on his grandmother for his yearly allowance, is about to propose to the woman his grandmother has arranged for him to marry. Both Paul and Dick see, walking by them, a young couple. The young man, Walter Grantley, is of a good family. The young woman, Lucy Heath, is not. She is beautiful, but is also a flirt, a tease, and a coquette, and as she walks by Paul and Dick she sends Paul “one arch, piquant, inviting glance, of which many would instantly availed themselves.” Lucy and Walter continue on, and Paul and Dick go their separate ways. That night Paul has an awful nightmare. When he is awakened by his man Davis the pair find a series of wet footprints, as if made by a small foot, all around Paul’s bed. But the footprints quickly disappear. The previous night Lucy did not return home, and Mrs. Heath first quizzes Walter about it (he knows nothing, having dropped her off on a landing after quarreling with her and then breaking up with her) and then goes to see her sister and her brother-in-law, the heartless, smug bourgeois Mr. and Mrs. Pointer. But Lucy hadn’t stayed with them that night, either. Meanwhile Davis, on the train with Paul Murray, notices the wet footprints have followed them there. Davis talks with Gage, a friend who serves a general as his valet. The pair speak of supernatural warnings, with Gage jovially mentioning the number of families who have individual and varied figures which warn of impending death, and Davis drawing his own conclusions about what the wet footprints might be and from whom. Paul is feeling poorly and goes to stay with his grandmother. The wet footprints follow Paul off the train and into his grandmother’s house. Davis decides that whatever the footprints omen, some large change will be in store, so it is in his own best interests to act the perfect servant to Paul.

That night Paul has another nightmare, one in which he meets, along the shores a river, a ghostly woman who tells him “So you’ve come at last.” Davis also has a dream, one which ends with him hearing the words, “Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me!” Davis wakes up and hears the words again, this time coming from Paul’s room. The voice changes to “You won’t? And yet, as we are never to meet again, you might kiss me once, only once more.” Davis then hears the sounds of struggling and Paul’s cry, “Unloose me, tigress, devil!” Davis hurries in and sees Paul and an unseen assailant struggling. Paul throws the phantom off him and then goes limp. Davis hurries to his master and finds that he is fast asleep. The floor of the room is wet, “as though buckets of water had been thrown over it, while the prints of little feet were everywhere.” Meanwhile Lucy’s body is discovered, drowned in a river, and an inquest is held. Walter is questioned closely, but a witness saw Lucy after Walter left her, and Walter is exonerated. No cause for Lucy’s drowning is determined. Paul and his-bride-to-be, Miss Ketterick, are quickly engaged and the date of the marriage set. The week before the marriage Davis approaches Paul and tells him, “I know all” and hints at a nice settlement in exchange for his continued silence. Paul has no money and gives Davis nothing, not even a written promise. At the wedding itself the wet feet follow Paul and his bride, step by step, up to the altar itself, and though Paul does not notice the feet Davis, the clerk, and the verger all do. From that time forward Paul knows no peace. The feet follow him everywhere and are with him always. He gets little sleep and feels himself cursed, not just for himself but because his innocent, sweet bride has been dragged into a whirlpool of horror. He leaves her for days on end, wandering in the wilderness, but the feet follow him even there. He goes home to confess all to Mr. Ketterick, but before he does he changes his mind and decides to flee to the lone lands beyond the sea, where no one else would have to suffer from his burden. “...even as he so decided, the brightness of the day seemed to be clouded over, warmth was exchanged for a deadly chill, a horror of darkness seemed thrown like a pall over him, and a rushing sound as of many waters filled his ears.” Paul is found dying, the ground around him “wet and trampled, as though by hundreds of little feet.” Davis gets nothing from Paul’s will and is dismissed without character by Paul’s grandmother.

“A Terrible Vengeance” is well-told, with especially good characterization. Riddell has a fine eye for the small, telling detail. The reoccurring wet footprints are not frightening, but they do provide an occasional pleasant chill, as when they keep step with the bride and groom on their way up to the altar. If anything, Riddell’s savage send-up of nearly everyone is the most frightening element of the story. Davis is shown to be mercenary and calculating, Murray well-meaning but weak, and Lucy a nasty tease. Riddell’s strongest ammunition is saved for Mrs. Heath’s sister and brother-in-law, the Pointers, who are ghastly examples of smug, pompous, callous, greedy lumpenbourgeoisie.

Riddell’s contemporaries, Rosa Mulholland (see: “Not to be Taken at Bed Time”) and Amelia B. Edwards (see: “How The Third Floor Knew The Potteries”), wrote stories set in unsentimental universes where bad things happened to both good and bad people and punishment drops as the gentle rain from heaven upon the just and the unjust alike. “A Terrible Vengeance” takes a more traditional approach. By implication, and Riddell is good at hinting at things rather than spelling them out: Paul Murray murdered Lucy Heath, and the vengeance visited upon him is deserved.

Riddell, Mulholland, and Edwards are fine examples of British women ghost writers who did not write sentimental or bittersweet ghost stories (see: “A Pair of Hands”) but went for the throat. Some horror critics–S.T. Joshi, for example, in his Unutterable Horror (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2014)–are scornful and dismissive of the Victorian women ghost writers. Joshi says that Riddell’s work has “an unimaginative emphasis upon the ghost as her sole vehicle for supernatural terror”¹ and that “the poverty of her imagination fails to raise her work to any level of distinction.”² These diktats are the result not of clear-eyed critical judgment, but purely of the writer’s sexism. Riddell, Mulholland, and Edwards were fine Victorian horror writers, and “A Terrible Vengeance” is a good example of what they were capable of, and why “contemporary reviewers placed her on the same level as Sheridan Le Fanu.”³

Print: Michael Cox, ed., Twelve Tales of the Supernatural (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

¹ S.T. Joshi, Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (New York, NY: Hippocampus Press, 2014), 247.

² Joshi, Unutterable Horror, 248.

³ David Stuart Davies, “Introduction,” in David Stuart Davies, ed., Irish Ghost Stories (New York: Pan Macmillan, 2016), vi.