The Pierced Heart: A Novel (13 page)

But that’s not what Charles is staring at. For there, on her neck, are two small round holes. White at the edges. And unhealed.

CHAPTER SIX
 

T
HE
N
ORTH OF
E
NGLAND
, 23 M
ARCH

I
T IS MANY
days since I have written in this journal, days in which we have travelled across Europe by train and carriage, and seen, once again, the cities that peopled my childhood. Prague, Leipzig, Heidelberg, Paris. I have felt so much better since we left Vienna—felt so much more myself—that I would have lingered far longer in Paris, in the hopes that my recovery might be supported by surroundings I always loved, but my father would not hear of it, saying that we had passages booked for England, and business to be conducted there, though what that business was he did not say, assuring me only that he had arranged no spectacle and planned no performance. It was the following day that we set out once more, north to Ostende, and the ship for England. Three days we were at sea, the water calm and the winds gentle, until the captain came to us one morning as we breakfasted, saying he believed the weather might be set to change, and though he hoped to make landfall before the storm came, we should secure our possessions as well as we might, and make ready to retire belowdecks should need demand it. I found it hard to believe
so great a tempest could be coming, seeing the white mares’ tails high in the pearly blue sky and the wide sweep of sea barely rippling in the breeze, but the man had some knowledge that I did not possess, for by sunset the clouds had amassed into great heaving battlements of every colour—red, violet, orange, and green, flaming at the west in the dying sun, and darkening behind us as the storm gathered pace. We could see, far ahead in the distance, the lights of the little town my father told me was our destination, and as the wind began to rise the captain rigged the ship as high as he dared, desperate to outrun the storm and make port before nightfall. But there was no time. There was a moment of deathly stillness, when the wind seemed to die in the sails, and then all at once we were struggling to descend the steps to our quarters, as the ship climbed and plummeted in waves twenty feet high, and water bucketed over the gunwales. I could hear sea-birds wailing like lost spirits above our heads, and the deafening
boom boom boom
as the prow thundered repeatedly against the sea. The captain had by then lashed himself to the helm, for fear of being swept overboard, and it must have taken a will of iron to remain there, at his post, as the ship raced madly towards shore. The entrance to the harbour was narrow and perilous, and I clung to my father as the wind threw us, again and again, towards a great flat reef on which so many past ships had foundered.

“There are people on the cliff!” cried my father then, looking from the porthole. “They have seen our plight—some have brought lamps to help signal our way!”

We both watched then, scarcely breathing, as the captain made one last desperate attempt to steer our passage, and suddenly, by what luck or skill I do not know, we were plunging forwards between the two piers of the little harbour and pitching, with a violent jolt and the scrape of wood against stone, as every spar and rope on the ship seemed to spring loose and crash about the deck, against the sea wall.

We were hurled, both of us, against the door of our cabin, and lay on the floor a few moments, scarcely believing we still breathed. And then there were shouts above, and numbers of townspeople started to
swarm over the ship, commending the captain for his courage, and helping us up the steps and along a strip of wood that had been laid by way of a makeshift drawbridge between the deck and the wall. The storm was passing fast now, and by the time our boxes were unloaded and a carriage commanded, the wind had dropped and the rain was hardly more than a thin drizzle. I could see little of the town in the gloom, and as the horses pulled away from the quayside my father told me that he had arranged for one of the local women to open up our house and lay in such provisions as we might need.

“I thought you should prefer that,” he said, somewhat distractedly, looking back to where a small crowd was still gathered about the man hauling our luggage onto a cart, and pressing close to read the labels, “to spending our first nights in a public inn or lodgings.”

I smiled at him, feeling suddenly a rush of hope. It would be a new commencement for us. A new life of peace and tranquillity, where I could be myself, and no longer bear the burden of being “
She who summons souls.
”

We crossed a bridge over the water towards the far side of town and turned towards the open sea, climbing all the time along narrow cobbled streets until we drew up outside a cottage with lights in every window and pots of flowers by the door. A bright fire was burning in the hearth as we stood in the vestibule taking off our coats and hats.

“It is but a small house,” my father said, and then, more softly, as if to himself, as he looked around, “rather smaller, indeed, than I recall.”

“It is perfect, Papa!” I said, but even as I smiled at him I suddenly felt a little faint, and my limbs began to tremble so that I had to put out my hand to steady myself.

“Come,” said my father quickly, “it is no wonder if you are tired, after the alarms of our arrival. Go and sit by the fire and I will make some tea. I believe Mrs Croft has left us milk.”

And so I sat, looking about me, realising slowly that my father, no doubt from a wish that I should feel at once at home, must have sent
some of our possessions ahead of us, for I recognised first one and then another—the little statuette on the mantelpiece, the wax roses under their glass dome, and there, on the low table, the scrapbook I have compiled since I was a child, year after year pasting into it the playbills and the newspaper cuttings and all the little mementos of my father’s success. It is a long time since I have added anything to its pages, and I wondered if by leaving it in view my father was encouraging me, in his delicate and discreet way, to take up the scissors once more and thereby find some useful employment to fill my hours. I took it onto my lap and turned back to the very beginning, and the daguerreotype of my mother with my seven-year-old self on her lap. It was a little blurred, where we had not sat quite so still as the artist had bid us, and time had so deepened the contrast of pale and dark that my mother looked a little severe, even forbidding, but it was in every other way so good a portrait, and so very like, that by the time my father returned with the tray, the tears were streaming silently down my face.

“Lucy, Lucy,” he said, as he saw what I was looking at. “There is no need to distress yourself so. You must think now of yourself. Of your own health. She would not wish to see you so. She would wish you to be happy.”

I smiled then, a little weakly, I own, and took a deep breath, then I sat up straight as my mother always taught me and took the teapot in my hand. “Shall I pour for you, Papa?”

I slept a deep and dreamless sleep that night, and woke to a flood of orange light as rich and strange as anything my father had ever magicked. I did not know where I was for a moment, and started up in my bed, my heart pounding, until I realised it was nothing but the dawn. I had never wakened by the sea before, and when I rose and went to the window the water was running like liquid gold under the huge and slowly rising sun, and the gulls wheeling dark like broken fragments of midnight. And when I looked back towards the town I saw the abandoned abbey standing high on the promontory, its ruined
arches black against the flaming sky. I remembered my memory then—how I had imagined that ruin, and the birds circling above it, and some impulse seized me to go outside, in all that glowing light. Not the false light of the
phantasmagoria
, kindled by artifice in the cavernous underground, but the pure bright light of an ordinary new day. I dressed myself quickly, then slipped out of the house as silently as I was able, and turned towards the harbour. The boats were just, at that hour, coming in from sea, and I watched as the fishermen hauled their catch onto the quayside and the fish slithered silver from the nets. The men eyed me curiously though without discourtesy, as I passed, one or two touching their caps, but aside from them, I saw scarce a living soul. It was like a doll’s town, all laid out for my own pleasure, and I slowed my pace, determined to be charmed by all I saw—the huddle of brightly painted houses rising above the quay, the neat little boats bobbing on the water, the lobster pots stacked like one vast honeycomb of basketwork, and the horde of hopeful local cats, milling about the landing boats.

It was only when I had crossed the bridge and commenced the long climb to the abbey that I began to doubt my own strength. But I told myself that this, too, would pass. That the sea, and the clean air, and my new life would wash my old troubles away, like flotsam from the white sand. As I drew nearer the abbey I saw that there was a smaller church before it, and a graveyard filled with ancient grey stones, some of them tilted like sails in the wind, as if the wizened mariners buried beneath had the rigging of their own tombs. I was smiling to myself at this idea when I suddenly came to a stop, my hand to my mouth. For there, by the wall where the stones were not so old, and not so lichened, I saw a name I knew.

It was my mother’s grave.

I had known; in some part of my mind, I must have known. We had brought her body home, and here, then, she must have been laid. But I did not know which cemetery had received her, and I had no recollection of ever seeing this stone. So moving in its sheer simplicity:
BELOVED MOTHER AND WIFE
. And the carving of an angel holding a little child. There were tendrils of ivy entwined about the base, and I bent down and removed my gloves so that I could strip the leaves away. I was so absorbed in my task, and in the cleaning of the letters with my handkerchief, that I did not notice there was a little wiry dog at my feet. I did not notice, in fact, until it stood up on its back legs and started to paw my dress, begging in the most insistent and winning fashion.

I looked round and saw that a young lady sat on a wooden bench some yards away, where the cemetery overlooked the town and the sea. A young lady dressed all in white. It came to me then how I had pictured a girl in white here, seated alone, and feared for a moment that my mind had once more betrayed me, and she was no more than an illusion conjured by my imagination, like the colours I had conjured in the
phantasmagoria
flame. But no. This young lady was as real as her dog, which by way of proof had by then left several muddy paw-prints on the hem of my gown.

“Jip! Jip!” I heard her cry then, perhaps surmising what had happened. “Come here, you naughty dog! The lady does not wish to be bothered by you!”

I hastened to reassure her that I was, on the contrary, quite charmed by her little companion, and led him back towards where his mistress had remained seated all the while. She was of the same age as me, with a face as pale as my own, but where my hair is thick and lustrous and curls to my waist, hers was dull and brown and cut short about her neck. I remembered how my own hair had been shorn after my mother died, and I was all those months confined to my bed and wondered if she, too, had perhaps been lately ill.

“It is an unusual name for a pet,” I remarked, as the dog settled down at his mistress’s feet.

She smiled. “It began as a joke. My brother bought me Jip as a gift for my last birthday, and my name being Dora, and the first instalments of Mr Dickens’s book having just then appeared, Tom thought
it a fine jest to name Jip after Dora Spenlow’s little dog. That jest has fallen a little flat since, of course.” She sighed, and caressed Jip’s rough head. “My pet does indeed resemble his namesake, but I am doing my best not to emulate mine.”

I did not know what she meant by this, not having read this book or even heard of it, so I was forced merely to smile and pet the dog, in the hopes of concealing my ignorance.

“I am forgetting my manners,” she said, holding out her hand. “My name is Dora—Dora Holman.”

I introduced myself, and she perceived then, I think, that my English, though perfect, had the ring here and there of my travels, and she asked if I was visiting the town.

“My father was born here,” I told her, “but left many years ago. We have travelled much on the Continent, and now we are returned to make this our home.”

“I have lived here all my life,” she said, smoothing her dress. “It was once so quiet, this place, but now it draws so many tourists—especially when the weather is bright and they gather in their dozens hoping to see the ghost of the nun who founded the abbey. They say you can see her, wrapped in her shroud, when the sun strikes the highest window at a certain time of day, and there are others who swear she walks here by night, clad all in white. It is all nonsense, of course, nothing more than a trick of the light, or an owl, caught in the corner of the eye, but it draws people from miles about. I confess I do not understand this new compulsion so many have to terrify themselves, whether it be by reading silly novels, or watching even sillier things performed onstage.” She sighed sadly. “I fear life brings terrors enough of its own, without one needing to seek them.”