“I’ve been—dreaming! Anthony dear!”

Ruth and Peter drew away quietly to the cutting. Just once they looked back, and the little lady was in Jermyn’s arms, her lips to his. One of her tiny white hands caressed his dark head, the other clung to the collar of his tweed coat. Silently Ruth and Peter went down the cutting. Not until they came out on to the road did Peter open his lips.

“We’re told that the age of miracles is past,” he remarked.

Ruth caught her breath on a sob.

“Oh, my dear! The poor little thing—and he! It’s—it’s a good world!”

“Not so bad,” agreed Peter, and kissed her.

THE END

READING “THE LITTLE LADY”

It is quite incredible to me, that if this story had ended with its first “chapter,” two thousand-some words in, it would stand as Georgette Heyer’s only paranormal work.

You come through that first encounter between the lovelorn Peter and ethereal Bride quite ready to be convinced that she is the ghost she claims to be – the atmosphere of the wood, from the outset, is deliberately eerie and otherworldly, as is the sprite-like Bride herself, and had the story concluded with her disappearance into the leaves, her work on this earthly plane complete when she convinces Peter to return to his fiancée Ruth and apologise for the fight that ended their engagement, then “The Little Lady” would have remained the vaguely supernatural fairy tale that it initially appeared.

But Heyer does not end it there, instead giving us Peter reunited with his Ruth, the two of them determined to return to that enchanted wood to thank Bride for her intercession in their relationship – and, no doubt, to check on her wellbeing. It is interesting that neither Peter nor Ruth believes for an instant that she might be other than mortal, as far as we can tell, despite her lachrymose words and the bell-like distant laughter and her anachronistic mode of dress—which is never explained, by the way. Instead, they are filled with pity over her plight, the desolate young woman left mad with grief after the Great War has taken away her one chance at lasting happiness.

Of course, it is estimated that upwards of 750 000 British soldiers died in that war, with a further quarter million dying as a result, which was something like 12% of the nation’s total population at the time. There were many young women similarly stricken with such losses – Heyer, too, lost those close to her; everyone did – so when the story takes a turn from the paranormal to the psychological, and we are told, with some relish, by the local hostelry’s landlady the tragic tale of Bride’s lost love, Captain Jermyn, we begin to understand that sweet, soulful Bride is not dead but dissociative, and the story becomes one of coping with trauma and a study in human behaviour, making it clear that real world demons – and ghosts – are even scarier than their fictional, sepulchral counterparts.