The Trespass (23 page)

‘I will make her well. Then she will be the mistress of my house.’ And he gave a brief, dismissive smile to his brother and his sister and said, ‘It is what I have always wanted.’

FIFTEEN

The moonlight shone across the bare, polished wooden boards; it glimmered in the mirror, caught the edge of the bed where Harriet slept.

Harriet, too, had been given a little ‘quietness’; the doctor had prescribed a mixture for her that made it certain she would fall asleep at night and somewhere in her jagged thoughts she sometimes remembered not Aunt Lucretia’s laudanum but Seamus’s sister Rosie, sleeping under the dirty blanket in the old barn, being given the Godfrey’s Cordial. Lucy had been told by Peters that there was no need for her to sleep there, in Harriet’s room. Sir Charles would guard his daughter. But sometimes Lucy crept down the servants’ staircase to satisfy herself that her beautiful, desperate mistress slept. Just once, on one of those visits, Harriet had started up in something like fear, had clung to her maid in despair: Lucy did not know if Harriet was awake or asleep, only that the tears were real.

Tonight the curtains were not quite closed: perhaps the maid had been careless, perhaps at some hour Harriet had woken, stared at the Square as she so often used to, but now the moonlight did not wake Harriet as it shone across the room.

The sound of the door did not wake Harriet as it opened gently and then closed again. Footsteps walked across the room. Someone was walking quietly but not able to stop the creaking of the polished floorboards near the bed. But Harriet did not wake.

The Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper, MP, sat down on a chair beside the bed and as his eyes got used to the darkness and the moonlight he made out the body of his daughter as she slept: one hand clenched beside her hair that lay about so wildly as if she had tossed and turned before she slept at last. The other hand lay over her bosom as if to protect it. The hand, and the breast beneath it, moved together as she breathed, very gently, up and down, up and down. The man stared as if mesmerised: the beautiful, sleeping face, the breast rising and falling with the hand upon it; it was the most touching, the most innocent sight he had ever seen. It was the innocence that trapped him: somewhere in his mind he was fevered by what she did not know. A thousand images churned his senses in the quiet, moonlit room; if anybody had been near, had been listening, they would have heard a kind of muffled groan. But there was nobody here near the room, Harriet’s room. Night after night since Mary’s death two weeks ago he had come in here, hurrying home from parliamentary duties, shouting at the cabmen to hasten the horses along Oxford Street, up towards Bryanston Square, his excitement almost uncontainable. His man Peters would be waiting, the whisky and the fire ready: Peters would disappear into the shadows, the whisky was quickly consumed. Then through the silent house of mourning the master walked.

Sometimes a scurrying maid late from the kitchen (or was it Lucy?) stifled a scream as she saw him walking, stalking, silent on the stairs.

Now, trying to control his breathing, he stood; leaned nearer. First, as always, he loosened the blankets to find the beautiful feet, to gently, gently hold them in his hands, gently, not wanting to wake his sleeping princess. This is what he did, back from the Palace of Westminster, night after night, his daughter never waking,
she need never know,
his tormented mind told him night after night,
she will never know.
(But her dreams: what of them? But he did not know of her dreams.) Then tonight a wilder vision had come upon him: a desolate distortion of the many nights he had paid for, elsewhere; it sprang suddenly into his mind because of the unruly way the body lay, the hand there, the innocent hand across her breast.
I want:
his mind finally articulated what he wanted:
I want her to offer it to me
(offer the breast to its master: he wanted the hand around the naked breast, offering it to him); he wanted her to offer her father her breast. Girls did it in the houses around St Martin’s Lane, smiling, to please him, to entice him. He wanted Harriet to please him. And all the time she was to be asleep and not know what she did, how she offered her breast to her father. And then when she looked at him with that blank look, he would
know:
his secret. She would be running his house, she would be there, always. The muffled groan again, he could not wait.
I have waited, all her life.

Gently, he pulled the quilt down. The moonlight fell across her body. She lay, quite still, in her white nightgown. The hand that had lain across her breast fell back across the bed, he saw the buttons. He was breathing so heavily now that he was more clumsy: he tried, fumbling, to undo the small buttons at the top of the nightdress. One button. Two. Her pale flesh glimmered where the light from the moon caught it. Then the girl stirred quietly, but he could not stop. When the last button was undone he took her hand, tried to place it inside the nightgown, under her breast, and Harriet opened her eyes and out of the mists of the laudanum and whatever else she had been given she
smelt
her father leaning over her: the whisky and the wine and the cigars and the smell of his skin.

Something, something made her close her eyes again as if this was the only way to protect herself. Breathing heavily her father cupped her breast in her own hand with his hand around it, then he ran his hand down her nightdress, down her body, his hand over her body, then suddenly he leaned back, away from her; she heard him doing something to his clothes, breathing faster and faster, making little groans. She did not understand: but, of course, she understood. She struggled violently to come out of her deep, drugged sleep; with all her strength she tried to come up through the mists in her head and her body and just then, was it in her head or was it real? she thought she heard a loud banging on a door somewhere, someone was urgently calling her father’s name.

When he had gone, for he had gone, Harriet half-walked, half-crawled across the room where she vomited into the basin on the washstand, over and over and over again. Her hair fell forward, touching the basin, there was vomit on her hair but she did not see that, in the shaft of moonlight that still shone across the room. What she saw, in the moonlight, was the shadow of her own face in the mirror. And what she heard in the silent room was the clock. The measured ticking went on still as though nothing had happened, beating its slow, unchanging time as if to say
Mary is gone, but you are here, and you will always be here, and it will always be this way, on other nights.

Suddenly Harriet Cooper seized the clock and hurled it wildly at the mirror and a thousand shards of glass glittered in the moonlight as they fell and the sound of the clock parts echoed and twanged as they rearranged themselves, at last, into silence.

*   *   *

Next morning at breakfast, after prayers attended by all the servants that asked for the hastening of Harriet’s health and well-being, Sir Charles announced tersely to his sons that he had to go urgently to Norfolk for three or four days.

‘Is it Aunt Lydia?’ asked Richard, surprised, for their father did not usually show sibling affection. ‘Was that what the messenger came for, in the night? A dreadful noise they made, sir, it woke me. I would have flogged the rascal if I hadn’t been so tired.’

‘He woke even me!’ said Walter, notorious in the family for his heavy sleeping.

‘No, it is not Lydia,’ Sir Charles answered ill-humouredly. ‘It is – parliamentary business that I cannot avoid.’ Sir Charles had been given an urgent, disturbing message in the night that there were secret plans to unseat him in his constituency: an unheard-of audacity that it was necessary for him to forestall at once; the seat had cost him a great deal of money and belonged to him alone. ‘I have instructed the servants to be with Harriet day and night, to give her anything that she may require. I will not be gone long. I expect you both to honour your sister and see her each day. The Doctor says she must get up for short periods every afternoon; he will come today and see that everything is provided for. Where is the
milk?
’ A new maid made old mistakes: she scurried now to Sir Charles’s aid: all three men would be glad of the time when a woman presided over their table again: when Harriet took her dutiful place.

At last Sir Charles rose and walked slowly up the stairs to the room of his daughter, Harriet’s room. He paused for a moment and his hand trembled as he knocked, but if any memory stayed with him of his moments in this room in the darkness nothing of this showed in his inscrutable face. Harriet’s new maid, Lucy, opened the door; he brushed past her unseeing into the bedroom.

Harriet looked somehow different in the dull, grey daylight that came in from the curtains that had now been opened. She was not in bed where she had been for so long: she was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room. He noticed at once that she was wearing a different nightdress under a dark shawl. (But he did not notice that the clock was gone, and the mirror from the wall.)

His heart beat to see her, his princess of the night, but his face did not change.

‘Harriet.’

She waited.

‘I must go to Norfolk for several days,’ and he saw her eyes widen as she looked up at him.

‘There is some urgent constituency business that must be attended to. It cannot be avoided, but I am most sorry to leave you when you are not yet well. The servants have full instructions to attend to anything you require and the Doctor will be here later this morning. Anything you want will be brought to you.’

She had spoken almost nothing since Mary’s death. Now she said, in a voice cracked from little use, ‘How long will you be away, Father?’

‘Try not to worry, my dear Harriet. It will only be three or four days. I will send a message. Everything, everything you want will be given to you. And the Doctor will give you more medicine so that your nights at least will be tranquil.’

Perhaps he should not have mentioned nights. It seemed to Lucy, sitting unnoticed with her sewing, that the girl’s hand caught upon the chair in a kind of wild blow, an extraordinary gesture. And then Harriet looked up at her father. He (nor Lucy) never forgot the look she gave him then: something so turbulent, so almost
savage
that his breath caught at his throat; he turned away at once, then, reminding himself that she was still ill, turned back. By the time he turned back her face was blank. He for the first time flicked a glance across at the maid but she was bent over her sewing. He shook his head a little, almost like an animal trying to free itself from something. Then he walked towards his daughter and bent and kissed her cheek the way he always did. And then he left the room.

Lucy saw that Harriet listened to the sound of his receding footsteps. And then she said quite matter-of-factly, as if she had not been so ill and so quiet and shed so many tears, ‘What day is today, Lucy?’

‘It is Tuesday, Miss Harriet.’

Harriet stood. Shaking off the proffered help she walked across to the window that looked over the Square. There she stayed motionless, waiting. Finally the sound of the larger carriage coming round from the mews was heard, the four horses stepping and jingling in the cold morning. Sir Charles Cooper was seen getting into his carriage; quickly the horses were on their way to Norfolk.

*   *   *

First Harriet asked for the bath to be brought up, and hot water.

Then Harriet asked for Quintus. The poor bereft dog, who thought he had lost both of his beloved mistresses, lay at her feet, not taking his eyes from her.

When the doctor arrived Harriet was dressed in a plain black crêpe dress and sitting beside the fire with the dog. Lucy had noticed, when she helped Harriet into her corset, that no matter how tightly she pulled the corset was of no use, so thin was Harriet now. The doctor too was surprised to see the figure by the fire, so thin and pale and black.

‘My dear. Are you feeling better at last?’

Harriet’s manner to him was impersonal and precise. He thought of her kneeling by the bed, the day of Mary’s death: the passion and the pain, and the fleeting smile when Mary at that last moment was still alive. There was something wayward about this girl, he had always recognised it, but he felt very sorry for her, he had known her all her life and thought the household sad, some element missing; he had attended her birth and remembered the laughing mother.

‘I do not need to see you again, Doctor.’

‘As you wish.’ He would come anyway, he was very used to dealing with hysteria.

‘But I would like some more laudanum, or whatever it is that you give me.’ He had given her opium as well but she did not need to know that: in some cases it was prudent.

He looked at the brown bottle beside the bed. ‘There is enough there, for the moment.’

‘I wake in the night. It needs to be stronger.’

‘I will give you a little more, and then we shall see.’ He fumbled in his bag for a moment, brought out another bottle.

‘But you must eat, my dear. I know you have not been eating. If I am not to call every day you must promise me, for this—’ he weighed the bottle in his hand, ‘is not – useful – unless you have eaten also.’ He did not think she would do anything foolish, she had more grace than that. But with hysterics you could never be certain.

Harriet stood up and held out her hand for the bottle.
Laudanum would be her last resort.
Quintus stood uncertainly, never taking his eyes from Harriet. His tail wagged slightly.

‘I will eat, Doctor Adams. Lucy, please bring me something now.’ The maid curtseyed and was gone. When the door closed behind her Harriet said abruptly, without any preamble or social niceties: ‘You knew my mother.’

‘Why yes, of course.’

Harriet’s whole manner changed, she moved towards him. ‘Doctor Adams, please. Tell me something about her. I keep thinking that now I have lost her too. My – sister was my only link and…’ She made a small, hopeless gesture with her hand and he saw that her eyes filled with tears at once and that she bit her lip with the effort of not breaking down.