Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (21 page)

“What is it?” asks Annie when Cook has gone. Isabelle is just staring at the letter on top of the camera, making no move to open the envelope.

“You do it,” says Isabelle. “You open it. And don’t read it out. Just tell me what it says.”

Annie takes the letter. It is heavy. There’s something inside it. She carefully slits along the top edge with her finger and tips the envelope. A round metal disc falls into her palm. She unfolds the letter and reads it over to herself. When she looks up, Isabelle is standing by the camera, one hand on the top of it. She has her eyes closed.

Annie holds the medal out in her hand. It flashes bright even in the dull light of the studio. “Ma’am,” she says. “Look. It’s from the Dublin Exposition. Your photographs have won the gold medal.”

Isabelle opens her eyes.

Isabelle decides to have a party in order to celebrate her victory. A dinner party.

“I will invite both those who have encouraged and those who have maligned me,” she says to Annie. “I will reward and punish, all with the same event.”

They are in Isabelle’s bedroom, sifting through her closet, picking out dresses for Annie to try on. Isabelle has insisted that Annie attend the party as a guest, not as a servant. “After all,” she said, “it’s the photographs of you that won the prize. This is all because of you.” It is the series on the virtues that has taken the gold medal. Annie as Grace, as Humility, as Faith.

“Try this on,” says Isabelle, hauling from the wardrobe the dress she wore to supper at the Hills’. “I think green would go nicely with your natural colouring.”

“I don’t know, ma’am. It’s so fancy. I might ruin it.”

“How could you ruin it by wearing it?” Isabelle holds the dress in front of Annie. “You would do it an honour by wearing it. Here. Let me help you.” She puts the dress down, moves behind Annie, and unfastens her black dress. “And take off that infernal cap. I think they are the most ugly things imaginable.” She taps the white maid’s cap with her finger. “It really is your gold medal, you know. I will have you come to this party as the guest of honour. As a Lady.”

Annie unpins her cap and hands it to Isabelle, who tosses it in the direction of a chair. Annie steps out of her uniform, struggles into the corset Isabelle proffers, and then carefully steps into the circle of the green dress. She stands motionless as Isabelle does up the hooks in the back and then steps round in front of Annie to assess her.

“Lovely!” she says. “You look lovely.”

Annie walks over to the looking-glass and surveys herself. She seems nothing like the self she used to be. A dress instead of a uniform. A colour instead of the washed-out lilac morning dress and the black afternoon dress. She doesn’t look like herself at all and it unsettles her a litde.

Annie is still not sure how she feels about the photographs of her winning the medal at the Dublin Exposition. She finds it hard to imagine them as a public thing, they seemed so much to be something she and Mrs. Dashell did, something private just between themselves. Scores of people will have seen the photographs of her in Dublin. They will have walked right up to the images, studying her as though she were a specimen of a butterfly, pinned out on the wall with an explanatory label attached.

“What if,” she says, “I can’t do things properly?”

“What things?”

Annie turns in front of the mirror to get a better look at the back of the dress and stumbles on the hem. “Walking,” she says. “And talking. Knowing what to say.”

“You always know what to say.”

“Well, how to say it, then.” Annie looks beseechingly at Isabelle. “I am scared to death at the thought of this.”

Isabelle takes Annie’s hand. “Could you not have been me?” she asks. “If our lives were different, could I not have been you?” For this is what she has always believed about Ellen, that they were the same.

No, thinks Annie. You could not have been me. Isabelle squeezes her hand and then drops it. Annie practises walking, over to the window and back again. The dress makes soft scratchy noises as she walks, like someone whispering to her. Don’t forget me. Don’t forget me.

“Everything looks right on you,” says Isabelle, watching Annie move across the room, the dress gliding along with her. “You can be anyone.”

At that moment Annie turns from the window. The sun,cast out from the clouds, hooks a finger into the room, creates a thin band of light for her to walk through. The room seems suspended in this light, floats here before her. She lifts her arm and twirls around in the sunlight. Isabelle’s laughter from across the room is warm and buoyant.

I can be anyone.

Annie walks up and down in the hallway outside Isabelle’s room in the green dress, to practise for the party. Isabelle has left for the studio, to print out the photographs she took yesterday of the Madonna.

Annie walks up and down the hallway, turning hard at the end so that the dress spins out from her body. She enjoys the sound of it, the weight of it, the way it reaches out and then slithers down, heavy against her legs.

Tess comes puffing up the stairs with an armload of clean linen.

“Hello,” says Annie, performing one of her twirls for Tess’s benefit.

“I heard there’s to be a party,” says Tess. She’s still panting a litde from her climb up the stairs. “I’ve always loved that dress,” she says. She remembers how she had seen herself in that dress, being helped down from her carriage by Wilks. The casual wave of her hand as the driver is dismissed for the evening and she and Wilks walk up the front steps of the Hill house, to be announced to all at the party there. She slumps against the banister, the bundle of linen resting on her huge, pregnant stomach. “I would look such a fat cow in that dress,” she says.

Annie turns again, slowly, and the dress sparkles in the sunlight, like a piece of glass underwater. The glittering green of it. “Don’t say that,” she says. “It could just as easily be you wearing this, going to the dinner.”

Tess smiles sadly at Annie. “No,” she says. “It could never be me.” She hugs the linen tighter to her chest, brushes past Annie and continues on down the hall.

A few days later Annie steps from the shadows of Isabelle’s room and begins her slow descent down the main staircase into the uncertain world of the dinner party. Isabelle, who has dressed Annie and done her hair, and who was supposed to wait and escort her downstairs, has instead flown on ahead and is lost down there somewhere amidst the tangle of guests in the front hall.

Annie walks slowly in her borrowed dress. It is heavier than the thin cotton she is used to, makes her feel as though she is being dragged to earth. It is an effort to walk, to keep her head up and not worry about tripping over her hem. She is barely down the stairs and already she feels defeated.

Cook, Wilks, and Tess have been hard at work all day, preparing the house for visitors. Annie had been undertaking the lengthy business of getting dressed as a Lady, all the time hearing footsteps up and down the staircase, the opening and closing of the kitchen door. This constant activity had made her feel guilty for not being able to help set the table or polish the silver.

The guests have been ushered into the drawing room for a glass of claret before dinner is served. When Annie walks into the room, a dozen people look up. She hears someone say, “That’s her. That’s the maid.” The talk stops. People lean forward, staring at Annie over their glasses of wine. She backs herself into a corner by the piano.

“Miss?” Tess is in front of her with a tray of drinks. Annie takes one and Tess does a curtsy.

“Don’t,” says Annie.

Tess gives her a half smirk, half smile as she moves away.

Annie drinks her wine too fast and then doesn’t know what to do with the empty glass. Around her the buzz of voices lifts and falls. Every time she looks up, someone else is staring straight at her, unabashedly, as though she herself was a photograph, a portrait and not a living person at all.

“We have been offered a proposal of marriage,” whispers Isabelle. She is suddenly beside Annie, leans into her.

“We have?” says Annie, so grateful Isabelle has finally rescued her that she almost doesn’t pay attention to what she is saying.

“Shhh,” whispers Isabelle, her voice close to Annie’s ear. “He’s over there. See. Between Letitia Hill and that man with the gold watch-chain.”

Annie sees an elderly man with curly white hair and an unusually large head. He has his hands on his knees and is staring intently at Annie and Isabelle.

“He’s staring at me,” Annie says. “And he must be ninety years old.”

“Well, he probably can’t even see you then.”

“Are you serious?” says Annie. Surely Isabelle wouldn’t marry her off to that old man? He looks as if he can barely stand. “Did he actually propose?”

“What would you like to say in response?”

“No,” says Annie, a bit too loudly. A woman to the left of her turns her head at the sound of Annie’s vehement refusal.

“Shhh,” whispers Isabelle again. Her breath is warm on Annie’s cheek. “Of course it’s no. I’ll go and tell him. He’s Archibald Stanford. One of
the
Stanfords. He collects portraits. He says he saw your image in the photograph of Humility and he fell in love with you, right then.” Isabelle looks across at Archibald Stanford, who is winking at Annie Phelan from the other side of the room. “It will give me great pleasure to kindly, but firmly, decline his generous offer of marriage. He has never thought me worth collecting before.”

“Don’t leave me,” says Annie, in a panic. “Don’t go. They’re all staring at me.”

Isabelle puts her arm around Annie’s shoulders. “Well, then,” she says. “Don’t take your eyes from me.”

Annie watches Isabelle cross the room to Mr. Stanford. She walks slowly, has such poise doing something as simple as moving across a room. That is part of being a Lady, thinks Annie. The luxury of moving slowly. A Lady is not meant to have any worries, none that require her to hurry. It doesn’t matter if the beds need changing or Cook wants help. A Lady always leaves these small concerns to others. That’s what servants are for, the small concerns.

Isabelle is talking to Archibald Stanford. Annie watches the graceful nod of Isabelle’s head. She sees Mr. Stanford slap the arm of his chair, as if he’s killing an insect. Then Isabelle lifts her head and stares straight at Annie. Don’t take your eyes from me. She’s making sure, thinks Annie, that this is what I’m doing, that I’m watching her.

At dinner Annie finds herself seated between Robert Hill and a Mr. Drake. This is even worse than drinks in the drawing room. Now she is trapped, wedged in on either side, facing a confusing puzzle of cutlery.

There are eight courses to dinner and Annie feels full right at the beginning, after the clear soup. She pokes at the main dish of roast pork, occasionally pops a boiled carrot into her mouth to keep up the pretence of eating.

Cook serves the dinner. She is wearing a maid’s uniform for this duty, something Annie has never seen before. Tess is too pregnant to help serve. Annie can imagine Isabelle thinking that the puffy, stumbling pregnant figure of Tess would put everyone off their food.

When Cook leans in to ladle Annie the turnips, she accidentally knocks Annie’s plate and sends a small rivulet of gravy down Annie’s borrowed dress. “Sorry Miss,” she says, her voice hard and flat. When Annie looks into her eyes she sees that Cook is closed to her. It is as if they’ve never known each other. It is as if Cook hates her now.

“The Irish,” says a voice beside her. “It’s all the fault of the Irish.”

Annie looks over at Robert Hill. What is he talking about? Luckily Eldon asks the question she is thinking.

“What is the fault of the Irish?”

“Everything,” says Robert Hill. “The great mass of them coming here and taking the jobs of Englishmen, relying on our benevolence. Even the cattle plague.”

“What about the cattle plague?” says Eldon, his voice low and quiet.

“I think the cows caught that plague from the Irish.”

“The Irish died of starvation.”

“How do we know that?” Robert Hill leans forward over his dinner plate. “Perhaps their sickness wasn’t caused by hunger, but was an epidemic. We were told it was hunger so we wouldn’t worry. And now the cows have caught it.”

“What nonsense,” says Eldon. He looks at Annie and she stares back at him.

“And who’s to say,” says Robert, getting carried away with his enthusiasm for his theory of the rinderpest, “that as many Irish died as we were told. Perhaps hardly any died. Perhaps none at all.”

“My family died,” says Annie. She hadn’t meant to speak at all during this dinner, had meant to sit and be the living photograph Isabelle wanted her to be. But Isabelle, despite all her earlier promises never to leave Annie’s side during the evening, seems to have abandoned her completely during dinner. Robert Hill’s remark is the last thing she can bear. “My family died building a road for your government,” she says. “A road that went nowhere. A useless scheme for which they weren’t even paid.”

The dinner guests are suddenly silent. Annie can hear the loud sounds of her own breathing, reeling in, reeling out. “Excuse me,” she says, and rising from her chair with some dignity, rushes from the dining room with none.

She runs through the drawing room and out the doors to the garden. The cold air is balm to her nerves as she hurries round the side of the house. Laughter rises, like the scent of flowers, from the sunken windows of the dining room. How could she have agreed to attend the dinner? How could she have let herself be put on display like that? Did Isabelle really have the right to expect such things from her?

“Phelan.” It is Eldon, rushing after her. “Phelan.” He is slightly out of breath when he catches her up.

“Sir,” says Annie, “you didn’t have to leave the party on my account.”

“I know,” he says.

They’re standing by the lit window of the dining room. Outside their breath is cloudy in the cold night air. Inside, the charlotte russe is being served. Isabelle waves her arms, conducting the tempo of her dinner party.

“Sometimes I think I married Isabelle because I wanted to be her.” Eldon watches the ease with which his wife draws all the attention to herself, sews up the space around her, the absence of himself and Annie. “Do you want that? To be like her?”