The Governess and the Spinning Tree

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The story

The governess recounts her first Christmas at a Yorkshire manor, where the children insisted the tree in the hall turned slowly in the night when no one watched. She laid a watch on the floor to count the turns, and found the watch had been wound backwards.

How it begins

I was engaged as governess to the Ashcombe children in the winter of eighteen seventy-one, and I arrived at Thornhollow Manor on the twentieth of December with one trunk, two good dresses, and a firm resolve to be unshakeable. I am not a woman who believes in nonsense. I have always said so, and I said so to Mrs. Pell, the housekeeper, on my very first evening, when she set down my tea and glanced at the great fir standing in the hall. It was a tall tree, nearly to the gallery rail, hung with glass birds and tinsel gone soft with age. Its lowest boughs swept the flagstones. Someone…