The Painted Bridge (35 page)

“I wanted to come and see you before but I wasn’t permitted.”

Mrs. Abse retreated toward the door.

“I’ll leave you girls to talk.”

Catherine and Anna looked at each other, Catherine’s eyes glistening with unshed tears.

“What has my father done to you, Mrs. Palmer?”

“I’m alright, Catherine. The treatments are over now, you needn’t worry about me. But what’s happened to you? Have you been ill?”

Catherine averted her eyes. Her ears poked through her hair; her white skin was dry.

“Nothing’s
happened
to me. I’m conquering my appetites, Mrs. Palmer.”

She held out the plate of grapes. “Have some. I had to promise to finish these.”

Anna took one and felt its cool, moist plumpness between her fingers.

“You look ill.”

“I am so tired of being talked to about myself. Where’s your hair? You were so pretty before.”

Anna put her hands to her head again and felt the bristles through the cotton scarf.

“My hair will grow back. It’s already starting to.”

She ate the grape and handed a stem of them to Catherine. Catherine picked one off, began to peel it in irregular strips, licking her fingers as she went.

“Have you finished ‘Aurora Leigh’?” Anna said. “Would you like me to read aloud to you?”

“Not really. I don’t want to finish it.” Catherine put the peeled grape down on the plate and they sat in silence. Catherine’s face was wistful, lit on one side by the light from the parlor windows. Anna felt a twinge of guilt. She hadn’t thought much about Catherine since they returned and the girl was so altered it was as if months, not weeks, had passed.

“Catherine, please. Tell me what’s the matter.”

“You might as well go now if you only want to bully me.”

“I don’t. I want to help you if I possibly can. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Catherine giggled and for a moment she looked girlish, like herself again.

“We were sisters for three days. I wish it had been longer. You’re the only sister I ever had.”

Anna lifted her hand and kissed it. Catherine sighed.

“Talk to me, Mrs. Palmer. I have never known the truth about another human being.”

“I haven’t either.”

“You must have done. Having all those sisters. A husband.”

“No. I don’t think I ever have. I never really had a husband. And my sisters were much older than me. I’ve always felt alone, especially when I was a child.”

“You could take up reading. The people in books never desert you.”

“Catherine?”

“Yes?”

“Was it the Fasting Girl? What happened, when you saw her? Did she speak to you?”

Catherine nodded, twisting her ring, pushing the pearl to the back of her finger and around to the front again. “There was a man there most of the time but I was alone with her for a minute at the end. She spoke to me then.”

“What did she say?”

Catherine stared down at her hands, her face a deepening pink.

“She asked if I had any food. She said she was starving. I went out and bought a baked potato for her. When I came back, the man wouldn’t let me in. I tried to get past him, I told him she only wanted to warm her hands on it, but he chased me away. He threatened to call the police.”

“The poor woman. She looked half dead, in that picture we saw.”

“She is dead. I read about her in my father’s newspaper. She died on the boat on the way back to America.”

A clock somewhere out of sight chimed gently as Catherine sat back in the chair and looked at Anna defiantly. Anna felt a surge of frustration with her and checked it. She made her voice neutral.

“Why are you trying to be like her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fasting isn’t living, Catherine. It’s more like dying. What happened to all the adventures you planned?”

*   *   *

Emmeline, passing the time in the sewing room while Mrs. Palmer was with Catherine, couldn’t settle. She went to the window, sat down, rose again. She couldn’t take up her mending or close her eyes for a doze. A door banged farther down the passage and she jumped up and put her head round the door to make sure Querios hadn’t returned early. The corridor was empty—she saw only Hannah’s skirts sailing around the landing and down the stairs.

She returned to the sewing room window. She half expected the gray sky outside to come collapsing down on all their heads. The old
oak tree, the line of waving willows by the lake, seemed unaware of her transgression, unaware that on this ordinary day the world had turned upside-down. She reached into her sewing bag and took a drop of laudanum, squeezing the pipette over her open mouth. Querios would not be back until suppertime. There was nothing to fear.

Catty had left her book balanced on top of the chest. Emmeline picked it up and felt the weight of the thick pages in her hands, the soft binding. The pages were falling away from the spine. It was Catherine’s favorite, “Aurora Leigh.”

She opened it at random and began to read.

For he, a boy still, had been told the tale

Of how a fairy bride from Italy

With smells of oleanders in her hair

Was coming through the vines to touch his hand.

She put down the book. Ben was right. Catherine needed to travel. She would take her, herself. They would go to Italy. The thought made Emmeline feel tall and straight. Just to think it changed something inside as if already she had traveled to a strange land and become a more intrepid version of herself.

They would go on a tour. If she had to defy Querios’s wishes, so be it. She was past the age where it befitted a woman to obey her husband’s every wish. She had that advantage at least.

From the dark garden, Emmeline saw a light burning in the study. Querios was still in there.

He was demoralized by the death of the bird. He had come back late from his appointment with the accountant and found the silver peacock lying on the ground in the run. He came indoors with it, holding it in his hands, brought it right into the bedroom as Emmeline was getting dressed for dinner, gazing at it, shaking his head and repeating that it was still warm, that he didn’t understand. There were no marks on it—nothing at all appeared to be wrong with it.

He’d cursed the fox all through dinner, reached again and again to have his tankard refilled by Hannah Smith, despite the looks Emmeline shot him from the other end of the table. She’d wanted to raise the trip with him before the meal, must inform him of her plan before speaking of it to Catherine—but she couldn’t.

Catty looked fragile at the supper table, like a creature newly born that had not yet grown its skin or fur, the layer it needed to be able to live in the world. She’d rallied after the visit from Mrs. Palmer but eating her own supper Emmeline had been certain she saw Catherine’s hand move to her sleeve. She suspected it concealed slices of ham.

Now, at close to midnight, Emmeline pulled her cloak tighter around herself and crept around the wall of the house, walking on the compromised ground where the grass met the gravel in a messy scatter, feeling the stones through the soles of her satin slippers. She’d hardly known what she pulled onto her feet but she recognized them by the narrow fit, could see their gleam in the starlight.

Until five minutes ago, she’d been in bed—listening for the creak of the floorboard, the squeak of the sash window, the muffled thump as it slid back down the runners. She was praying that she would not hear them, tonight. When they came, she got out of bed in the dark almost as if she sleepwalked and made her way down to the side door, turned the key.

Catherine’s window was on the south side of the house. Emmeline crouched down and began to feel around on the ground, moving her fingers underneath fallen leaves, tracing the sinewy roots of the magnolia. She felt something clammy and jumped with fright as it leapt out from under her hand. A frog. She wiped her fingers on her cloak, trying to rid her skin of the memory of the cold, moist contact. She resumed the search and found nothing. No ham. No biscuits or bones. Only stones.

Her knees hurt. She stood up and stooped down to rub them, glanced up at the window. She felt as if someone was watching her. It was impossible. Catty would have had to be leaning right out of the upper window in order to see her underneath. Turning to go back indoors, she heard a rustling in the shrubbery. Had Catherine thrown something over there? Emmeline stepped over the grass and parted the stiff architecture of the rhododendrons with her hands, feeling a branch catch at her hair.

She got down on all fours again and crawled underneath the canopy, reading the damp, soft earth with her fingertips. She inched onward, absorbing the chill into her hands and breathing in the smell of decay and life mixed. The shoes, her best ones, were pinching her toes. She kicked them off and sat back on her heels with a perverse satisfaction at the idea of the oyster satin smeared with leaf mold, the rosettes from the Paris atelier unraveled.

The explosion startled her—the noise so close by it seemed almost upon her. She couldn’t immediately think what it was. In the silence that followed, it came to her. Querios was out with his gun. He was drunk. Could hurt himself. She grabbed hold of a branch over her head and began to pull herself to her feet but the branch bowed under her weight, shook and bent to the ground. The gunshot came again like a series of sharp, coordinated fireworks and she lurched over on
her side, sprawling on the ground. She heard her own scream, harsh as the cry of the fox. Reaching into the darkness, she put her hand to her leg and found it sticky and hot. The pain was so extraordinary, so unbounded, it brought the same awe as she’d felt in childbirth, that a human body could contain such agony.

The explosions had ceased and been replaced by the sound of feet running on gravel. Someone shouted her name and she became aware of a disturbance, close by, of the branches. A swinging lamp. Querios’s face loomed over hers, close enough to kiss. She reached up and touched him. Her fingers left a bloody mark on his cheek.

“Q,” she said as she passed out. “It’s you.”

*   *   *

Anna sat at the breakfast table, daydreaming about the clifftop at Dover, in spring. Covered in wildflowers, a tangle of scarlet poppies, of bee orchids, daisies, celandines, mallow. She felt the upward spring of the ground underfoot and sniffed in the strong, earthy fragrance. Heard the sea far down below, hushed and tamed by distance, mixed with the human-sounding agitation of the curlews. Saw herself, walking toward the lighthouse. With Lucas St. Clair.

She looked up. Makepeace was watching her from the far door, which led along the treatment corridor. It was late. The sounds from downstairs—china being stacked in a stone sink, brooms banging on the skirting boards, the clink of cinders in dustpans—had ceased. The voices had fallen quiet too; the others were gone, departed for the airing grounds. The two of them were alone, surrounded by silence and sunlight.

Querios Abse hadn’t been seen for three days. There had been comings and goings downstairs, raised voices and hushed ones. Anna had been worried about Catherine but Lovely shook her head when she asked. It was Mrs. Abse, she said. She’d had an accident. She was confined to the Abse quarters, being waited on by her daughter. Mr. Abse had ordered fresh beef tea made every morning. He was hanging around in the parlor, the dining room. Calling Dr. Higgins out to her every day. He hadn’t set foot in his office. None of them had been paid, come Friday. Mrs. Makepeace was in charge, as far as they knew.

Lovely had brought Anna a different dress that morning. It had a heavy black skirt and bodice that looked as if it might once have belonged to Makepeace herself. She could put it on or stay in her room, was the message that came with it. Anna was wearing it now. She shuddered again at the feeling of it, the fabric coarse and greasy against her skin.

Makepeace approached her.

“What are you doing, still here? You ought to have gone out with the others.”

Makepeace was standing so close behind her that Anna could feel the woman’s breath on the back of her neck. Her spine prickled.

“I’m just sitting here. Thinking.”

Makepeace laughed a scornful laugh.

“Well, Mrs. Palmer, I’m sure you’ve got plenty to think about.”

Anna turned around to face her.

“Why do you hate me?”

“I don’t hate you. I don’t feel anything at all about you. Guests come and go. We remain. The staff and the family.”

Anna pushed her plate away. The kidney had grown cold; it sat there, rubbery and dead-looking, on the crazed china.

“Mrs. Makepeace, I’d like to have my own dress to wear. The old velvet one that I had when I first came here. Could you send it up for me? I can launder it myself if necessary.”

“Mr. Abse doesn’t buy good food just to have it fed to the pigs, Mrs. Palmer. Eat your breakfast and forget about your pretty dresses.”

“It’s not a question of it being a pretty dress. Don’t you understand? It’s just that it’s mine, Makepeace, and I feel better when I wear my own clothes. I want it back.”