The Night the Stockings Came Down

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The story

The governess describes a Victorian nursery where the hearth stockings are hung for the children, but one hangs lower each night. She stays up with a candle and sees the hooks loosen one by one.

How it begins

I was engaged to govern the three Harrowby children at Ashcombe Hall in the winter of eighteen seventy-one, and I will set down what happened there plainly, for I have been asked to repeat it too often by people who did not believe me, and I have grown tired of argument. The nursery occupied the top floor of the east wing. It was a long, low room with a fire that never quite warmed the far corner, and a row of iron hooks fixed beneath the mantelpiece, each one polished and bright. The Harrowby children hung their stockings there every Christmas Eve, as their mother had when she was a…