Fiercombe Manor (38 page)

I
n the potent air of the glasshouse, Elizabeth was still remembering: not just what had until that morning been a void in her memory, but other times in her past that she habitually hid from herself.

She had spent almost three months in the costly confinement of Dr. Logan's private asylum after Isabel's birth. That autumn had been lost to her altogether, but then, quite suddenly, she was allowed home in time for Christmas. She presumed Dr. Logan had seen some sign in her that signalled her complete recovery. She herself wasn't at all certain. She didn't believe and trust in anything then, not even the conclusions and instincts of her own mind. Especially those.

Edward had had the staff go to an enormous amount of effort. A huge tree had been placed in the hallway and decorated, each branch laden with gold-leafed fruit and nuts, slender tapers, and tiny, painstaking replicas of Stanton House's furniture—from the drawing room's convex mirror to the grandfather clock. Sprigs of holly studded with bloodred berries had been tucked behind the gilt frames of every one of the Stanton family portraits that lined the main staircase, the dour countenances that Edward believed
lent the new house an air of permanence made a little less stern by their gaudy adornment.

As she came in through the door, afraid that the tears would come, and Edward would think that she had not been cured after all, she detected the smells of cloves and cinnamon. Underneath the spice, more subtly, was the comforting waft of a baking cake, warming orange peel and vanilla, rising from Mrs. Wentworth's domain. It was a fitting aroma for her return, redolent of home and hearth and family—all the things that were supposed to make a woman content—but she found herself wondering if it was just a facade behind which there was nothing, no better than a circus tent's illusion bought for a penny.

High above them, unnoticed by Elizabeth at first, a kissing bough had been suspended from the chandelier. The mistletoe, its berries gleaming like pearls, was entwined with ivy—a rustic touch compared to the faceted crystal confection it hung from.

“Will you let me have a kiss, then?” said Edward, as the last servant melted away. “To mark your return to us.”

Hesitantly she nodded and went to him, tilting her face up as his arms encircled her waist. The embrace was awkward, all that had happened since their last one making them strangers. She was just raising her hand to his cheek so that they might try again when a small cough made them spring apart. It was the nurserymaid—a girl who in Elizabeth's absence seemed to have grown in confidence. Once barely able to raise her eyes to meet those of anyone who addressed her, she now met her mistress's gaze with bold curiosity. Elizabeth dimly remembered that the ancient nanny—the same nanny who had once looked after Edward and his brother Charles—had retired, her eyesight having finally failed her. This girl must have taken over sole responsibility of the nursery.

“Where is my child?” Elizabeth said eagerly. The maternal instinct she had briefly lost in the grip of despair had returned with renewed strength. She had dreamt of Isabel every night in the asylum, not only her tiny, unformed face but her miraculous scent.

“Miss Isabel is asleep and should not be woken,” the maid replied. “She has had a cold these past days, and it wouldn't do for her to be downstairs, where it's draughty.”

Elizabeth knew she should say that she would see her own child when she pleased, but she wasn't sure that Edward wouldn't side against her. That would be too mortifying in front of the young nurserymaid with the newly impertinent gaze. Perhaps she could creep up later, when she had given Edward enough attention.

“Of course no one must wake her if she's asleep,” she said. “I will see her later.” Her voice to herself sounded meek, insubstantial.

The girl bobbed cursorily and nodded at Edward as she made for the stairs.

Once she had gone, he turned to Elizabeth.

“So, do you like it?”

“Do I like what?” she said, feeling far away. No one at the asylum had demanded answers of her. It was a strange sensation to have her opinions sought again.

“The house,” he said, a nick of irritation in his voice. “Everyone has made such an effort.”

His words immediately made her feel as though the entire household, led by her husband, was on the other side of some unbridgeable chasm. She was outside, tapping on the window and imploring them to let her in, but no one would look up and see her there. She tried to quell the thought as soon as it surfaced in her mind, and painted a weak smile on her face.

“Edward, it's beautiful. You shouldn't have all gone to so much trouble.”

“Nonsense. You are home, and everything will be well again now. It has been the most distressing time, but we must put it behind us. For Isabel's sake even more than our own. Fortunately she is probably too young to remember.”

“Edward.”

He waved his hand as if warding off a persistent fly. “Let us not talk of it, not tonight.”

“But . . .”

“No, wait. Perhaps we should never talk of it. Perhaps it is better like that. I don't believe in raking over past ills. Nothing can be done about it now. You are yourself once more, Isabel thrives, and barely a soul outside the valley knows what happened. It is already forgotten. Look, I have a present for you. Why don't you open it now, early, while we are alone? It better says what I am trying to.”

It was a box, and for a terrible moment she thought it was a medicine chest that, if she lifted the lid, would be crammed with a dozen bottles of tonics and tablets designed to blunt the edges of her darker thoughts. But when she did, she saw it was only a sewing case, the padded satin that lined the underside of the lid the same blue as the Stanton eyes.

“Did you see the engraving on top?”

She shook her head. The mirror shine of the brass plate in the candlelight had obscured it. She looked again and traced her own initial with a finger. Only then did she notice the Latin inscription:
Post tenebras, lux.

“Do you understand?” he said.

“After darkness, light,” she said slowly, mechanically.

“Yes, my darling. We mustn't look back.”

He had smiled then, and she had done her best to return it.

And that was how they had gone on for the next year or so, Edward coming to her bed a couple of times a month until she discovered that she was with child again. There had never been any question of her taking measures not to have more children. While Isabel was enough for her, Edward wanted a whole brood, a son in his own image amongst them.

Dr. Logan's opinion was that Elizabeth's physical health would likely not be jeopardised by another birth. In fact, as the doctor had pointed out in a letter Elizabeth found in Edward's desk, there was no reason to presume that each pregnancy would have the same deleterious effect on her mental health. The chances were possibly increased, especially if the patient was naturally inclined to introspection, but not inevitable.

And he had been right in believing that she might be spared the next time, though he was apparently unable to recognise that when, after her second pregnancy failed, Edward prematurely summoned him again. On the contrary, Dr. Logan examined her for no more than five minutes before declaring that she was suffering from puerperal insanity again. She was too distraught to argue, afraid that whatever she said would be turned against her and offered up as further proof of her madness. Later she wondered if it was Edward's money that had precluded an accurate diagnosis, or her own cursed charms. Whichever it was, a decision was swiftly made behind the library door, without her consultation. Dr. Logan was to return with a nurse in a day or so, and this time he would stay at Stanton House until she was better.

Elizabeth never discovered how much it cost Edward to lure the doctor away from his duties at the private asylum. He seemed willing enough, though, and returned to the valley by the next evening. She heard his arrival—the tumult of the approaching carriage and the slam of the great oak door as he was admitted—and
put her hand flat on the glass of her bedroom window. There was a little low-lying mist that night, but she could make out the point where ridge met sky, beyond which lay the rest of the world, impossibly distant to her.

At first Dr. Logan's ministrations took much the same form as they had at the asylum. The nurse was not Mrs. Blackiston this time, but a younger though no less severe woman whose eyes, hair, and puckered mouth were all peculiarly colourless, as though she had rejected anything so vivid as vanity. She was a constant and ever-vigilant presence in Elizabeth's room during the early days of her confinement, proving herself particularly hawk-eyed when her patient sought even the mildest form of diversion. Edith of course was forbidden to attend her mistress; Elizabeth had no idea if she'd been dismissed from the valley altogether.

Gradually, as the days became a week and then a second, Dr. Logan began to send the nurse on errands, or to get fresh air for her own health. Elizabeth watched this unfold with dread, understanding that she would soon be alone with him. Sure enough, one morning brought the asylum carriage, come to take the nurse back to that dismal place. Behind the bedroom door they thought muffled their voices, Elizabeth heard the doctor tell Edward that the nurse's return was unavoidable after an outbreak of influenza had laid low much of the asylum staff. He, Dr. Logan, would remain and assume sole responsibility for Lady Stanton.

During her time at the asylum Elizabeth had taken scant notice of the doctor's physical appearance. It had not signified then. Now she found herself aware of his every feature, and all repelled her. Aside from his pale, fluttering, clammy hands, there was a patchy moustache of ginger that did not match his tea-coloured hair. His teeth, though straight enough, had an unfortunate grey tinge that put her in mind of the grave.

He never went so far as to kiss her on the mouth, let alone force himself upon her, though the unspoken threat of the latter hung like a suspended blade over her bed. What he did instead was more insidious, and much more difficult to protest against.

It began innocuously enough: his tremulous but persistent hands holding hers while she lay prone under the sheets, his soft monotone reiterating her infirmity of mind and feminine frailty. Only her total submission to his proven rest cure would set her on the slow road to recovery and eventual release, he said.

One day he brought the palm of her hand to his wet lips, his eyes closed in a sort of ecstasy of healing or bald desire, she couldn't tell which. As he finally drew away, she felt the flick of his tongue. The next day he stroked her arm for an hour or more, peeling back the sleeve of her nightgown, inch by terrible inch, until the pale flesh of her entire inner arm was exposed. She couldn't see his fingers shake as they traced a line up and down—she turned her face to the window—but she felt it well enough.

After these episodes, she was desperate enough to try and reason with him.

“Dr. Logan,” she said one day, as calmly as she could manage, careful to keep her voice low, “I am grateful for your treatment and believe it to be working already. Do I not appear different to you? Surely you can see that I am not as I was during my stay at the asylum?”

He smiled indulgently at her. “Lady Stanton, I am flattered by your confidence in my treatment, but you must know that, despite my experience in treating hundreds of women like yourself, no two individuals have yet displayed identical symptoms. Maladies of the female mind take many forms, each more cunning and adept at deceit and trickery than the last. I have learnt—I don't mind admitting, to my cost, on occasion—that even the most sincere
declaration of sanity is more usually symptomatic of its dark opposite.”

She felt something in her break then. She began retreating into sleep, waking only at night, when the doctor had finally retired to his own room. What she contemplated in those silent hours, after pulling back the curtains and watching the moonlight turn everything to dull, unpolished pewter, she never wanted to think about again.

One night, when she had taken up her usual station at the window, the glinting eye of the lake visible beyond the black lawn, something pale and gliding made her heart beat loudly in her chest. For an instant she thought it was a ghost, but it was one of the servants, a young boy she couldn't identify from her upstairs window, his pale shirt like something floating and unearthly. Though she didn't recognise him, she knew he had seen her, too, for he stopped and tipped his face up towards her. Perhaps, like her, he thought he had witnessed something spectral. And perhaps he had, she thought, as she caught sight of what he must have seen in her dressing table mirrors: an apparition of loose hair and hollow eyes, clad in the filmy glow of a white nightgown.

After five weeks, Dr. Logan finally deemed her cured. When he informed her of this, naturally after Edward had been told, she nodded mutely, unable to meet his eyes in case he saw the anger simmering in hers. It wasn't worth risking a confrontation, not when he seemed to wield so much influence over her husband, who could at any time put pen to paper and consign her to another spell in the asylum. Not that it was better in her own home; she thought it was probably worse. She heard Isabel at the door a few times before the nurserymaid dragged her away, and the subsequent guilt wrapped itself around Elizabeth like a dank shroud.

After Dr. Logan had gone, she and Edward retreated back into distant politeness. Later, when she mourned another lost child, he
didn't even notice her silence, or the shadows that circled her eyes again.

N
ow, sitting on the hard floor of the glasshouse, Elizabeth reflected that it was quite astounding how far that sort of habitual restraint could take you. Until that morning's revelation in the library, of course. How strange that such a little thing, such an innocent thing as leaving behind her shoes in her child's nursery, could unpick all their steadfast work to draw a veil over past events. All it had taken was the tug of a memory, and like a loose thread, the sum of it had been unwound into nothing.