Fiercombe Manor (48 page)

When I handed it to Hugh, he stared at it for a long minute without saying a word. When he did speak, he sounded sad.

“They were a rum bunch in those days.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I believe it's one of those mourning pictures.
Memento mori
. They took them as a last keepsake. In poorer families it was probably the only time they could spare the expense.”

I took the picture of Isabel back from him and stared at it more closely. She was looking not quite at the camera but at some indistinct point in the distance.

“Surely not,” I said. “I've heard of those, but thought they were taken with the children lying down surrounded by flowers, as if they were asleep.”

“Her eyes look odd, don't they?” he said.

I nodded slowly, aware for the first time of the wind that had begun to keen in the highest branches of the beech trees.

“Sometimes they would paint eyes on the closed lids. It's macabre, to say the least. They would prop them up in chairs as though they were still alive, like this poor little one. It's said that they sometimes used metal stands to keep them upright, but I don't know how much truth there is in that.” He sighed. “I wonder what
did happen to her. This rather puts paid to my romantic notion of her disappearing abroad with a rich relative.”

That night I slept only fitfully, my dreams haunted by figures from the past as they hadn't been for many months. I woke with the old urge to go to the summerhouse and lose myself in Elizabeth's words, but then Joseph cried out for me, and I decided to put her away in the box again. It was easy enough to avoid the path that ran along the stream to the little summerhouse, and I no longer had to fight the temptation to look in the window seat of the old nursery: I had peered into it one night when Joseph couldn't settle, only to find it empty.

Besides, any lingering questions about Elizabeth and Isabel had retreated as soon as my mother left the valley without Joseph and me. I felt as though we had been saved. After she was safely on her way back to London, Tom sat Mrs. Jelphs and me down in the small parlour, and between us we thrashed out the finer details of the plan that Tom had scarcely managed to outline in his head before presenting it to my mother. Mrs. Jelphs hadn't been able to hide her delight at not being parted from the baby, though I saw her steal a few curious glances at Tom and me as we talked.

“I had no idea there would be so much work for you to do, Thomas,” she said at one point. “I didn't know your father was intending to step down so soon.”

“I'm not sure he was, in all honesty,” said Tom with a smile. “I wrote to him when I was in London. I said I was ready to take more on, if he was willing.”

“And was he?” I said, feeling Mrs. Jelphs's questioning eyes on me again.

Tom laughed. “Yes. In fact, he seemed rather pleased in his reply. He said it was about time I grew up and took the helm. I must say, I wasn't sure he would think me up to it.”

“Well, there you are,” I said.

When Mrs. Jelphs went to prepare the supper, I asked the questions I hadn't been able to in front of her: whether he really needed my help, if he was sure he didn't mind me staying on, whether he was regretting the impulse to rescue us, now that it was made real. There was only one question I didn't ask that night—a question that wouldn't be answered until deepest winter settled over the valley, the denuded trees and thick, blanketing snow oddly familiar from the photographs Henry and Tom had taken as boys.

One day, during the week before Christmas, we were outside in the Tudor garden: Tom, Joseph, and me. Ruck had shovelled a path past flower beds turned to square pillows of brilliant white by the snow, and we made our way carefully up to the highest terrace for the best view of the house. The weak wintry light was fading fast that afternoon. We turned to look back at the house, and I thought how different it looked from my first glimpse of it from the same vantage point. Fires and lamps had been lit in all the rooms, and the light that spilled out glowed warmly against the snow that lay in thick shelves on the sills. Even the usually sombre yews had been made festive, the snow covering the dark foliage like a layer of royal icing.

Tom swept the snow from the wooden bench, and we sat down to admire it all. All sound had been deadened by the deluge, and the valley, always quiet, was profoundly silent. Whatever it was that had been growing between Tom and me since the summer now seemed enormous in the heavy air. I heard him swallow and turned to look at his profile. A spot of colour had appeared on his cheek.

“Alice,” he began.

“Yes?” I quavered. All through autumn and into winter we had talked in the small parlour and taken long walks in the valley, and through it all I had wondered if there could ever be anything
between us. I had thought of his words about things being done in their own way at Fiercombe many, many times.

“Are you happy here?” he said.

“I don't think I've ever been happier,” I said honestly. “Are you, Tom?”

“I never thought I would be again, but I am, yes—for the first time since Henry and I were boys.”

“Boys taking photographs of the snow,” I said softly.

He turned to me and smiled. “Yes, since then.”

I shifted the baby onto my shoulder and then reached out to him with my free hand. “Tom, I know I've said it before, but—”

“You're not going to thank me for saving you from the workhouse again, are you?”

“You joke about it, but I—”

“Alice, I did it as much for me as for you.”

I tutted. “Oh, come on. I wasn't the only girl in Gloucestershire who could type.”

“I'm not talking about your typing.”

“No?” I looked him in the eye. They were very blue, even in the dying light.

“No,” he said, and reached out to cup my face in his hands. The kiss, when it came, was light and sweet, and everything after it was just as simple. We were married just as the valley welcomed the first green shoots of spring.

T
hree months ago I gave birth to our daughter. The event brought none of the drama that accompanied Joseph into the world: her arrival not early but a day late, the midwife and Mrs. Jelphs in steady attendance, Tom just outside the room, and the weather entirely unremarkable. During the new baby's first weeks
I did wonder if the darkness that had come for my grandmother, and for Elizabeth, might be summoned by the arrival of a Stanton child in the valley—if I was somehow pushing my luck with this second child, provoking something in Fiercombe's past and in my own blood. But as the days accumulated and nothing happened, I forgot to be afraid. I was well—that much was obvious when I looked in the mirror.

There was only one moment when I felt the cold finger of fear brush the nape of my neck, and that was when I told Mrs. Jelphs we had decided to name the baby Isabel. It was just a fleeting look, a flash of horror that briefly leached away all the colour and ease in her face. Later, when I went to the nursery to look at my tiny daughter's sleeping form and smoothe her silvery curls back off her forehead, I told myself it had been nothing more than a trick of the light.

In my heart, I knew, though: that whatever I thought had been switched off in the valley after Joseph's birth had only been turned down. It was still there, a heartbeat deep in the ancient earth beneath the Great Mead. It wasn't in my mind—I was perfectly well, I knew that to my very core—it was whatever had happened before. The past was clamouring to come in once again.

S
he had dressed herself that morning, sending away her maid because she couldn't bear anyone to see her body or touch her with gentle, pitying fingers. The flesh of her stomach was still stretched, but the taut mound the child had inhabited had a deflated, defeated look about it. She had been glad to cover it with the stiff black fabric they had made up into mourning for her. This was the first day she had found the strength to leave her bed and put it on.

Outside the rain fell like stair rods. She opened the window to hear it better, the hiss and clatter of it against grey stone and glass. It mingled with the sounds in her head, which were becoming ever clearer, ever more pressing. The murmurs of the children who'd died inside her, the last only a week before, had been joined by another voice, belonging to an older woman whose low, unhurried tones soothed her like a balm.

The rain had wrapped the valley floor in a grey cloak. She couldn't even see the lake; the world seemed to end at the top of the staircase that led down to the Italian gardens. Through the rain she thought she glimpsed the Styx's ferryman there on the steps, waiting patiently for his next fare, but then she peered harder and he dissolved into nothing.

As she pinned up her hair as best she could, she avoided looking into the glass. She thought that if she met her own gaze there, she would be distracted from what she had to do, from what the older woman had said would be best for everyone. The pins slid in easily, the coils of her hair complicit in her need to hurry. When she had finished, she hung an old shawl over the trio of mirrors, noticing her wedding band as she did. She slipped it off and let it roll under the shawl's folds.

She didn't meet anyone on her way to the nursery. That's not luck, said the older woman. They're staying out of your way. They know what's got to be done.

The door was ajar. The heavy oak swung back silently, too new to have warped in the damp valley. The child was kneeling on the ottoman, which she must have dragged from the end of her bed to the window, her small hands and nose pressed against the glass. The warmth of her skin and breath had made auras of mist on the glass.

“Isabel,” Elizabeth called gently. “Come to me.”

The little girl rushed in to her, and she kissed the top of her head.

“Quiet now, little one,” she said, crouching painfully so their faces were level. “All will be well soon.”

“Will you have to go away, Mama?” she whispered.

Elizabeth shook her head. “No, I will always be here with you.”

Isabel smiled at that: a vestige of a happier self.

Don't be too long
, the voice said in Elizabeth's head.
You're taking too long
.

“Isabel, you look so tired. Look at the shadows around your eyes.”

She led the little girl over to her bed and pulled the coverlet over her. She stroked her hair until she fell asleep, her breathing heavy and regular. The door closed behind Elizabeth with a well-oiled click.

I
sabel sat up when she was sure her mother had gone. She got out of bed and fetched her new button boots from their place under the desk. The leather was stiff, the buttons stoutly sewn to it, and her fingers wouldn't work quickly enough.

Her mother had not come out from behind her bedroom door—not since the men had carried her back to the house after the baby had come out of her dead and blue, choked on a rope that had got inside there somehow. Isabel had run as fast as she could, but she had not been able to find her father anywhere. Not in his rooms or in the stables. By the time she had decided to tell Edith, who was always kind to her, and they got back to the old nursery, it had been too late.

That morning she had gone to her mother's door, laying her hand flat on the thick wood that separated them. A noise behind her had made her jump, and she had turned to see the nurserymaid who hated her.

“Come away now,” she had said in a hard whisper. “You mustn't disturb your mother. You've been told that.”

The maid had grasped her arm tightly and started to drag her up the corridor. Isabel dug the fingernails of her other hand into the rough skin of the maid's, who took a sharp intake of breath.

“You've drawn blood, you wicked little thing,” she spat, her voice rising. “Do as you please then. Your precious mama will be gone soon anyway, without a thought of you. Dr. Logan has been sent for again, just as he always is when she's raving mad.”

Isabel had run back to her room and shut the door, where she sat still, thinking about the maid's warning, and about the magician's return.

The idea of being abandoned with the servants and her father sent white-hot spurts of terror through her. She had seen how her
father looked at her. She knew the baby was dead and her mother ill because of her. He hadn't needed to say so.

When the boots were finally fastened, she ran quickly out and down the stairs, as silent as a ghost. She knew where all the creaks were.

She looked around the hall, half-expecting to see her father standing at the library door, but there was no sign of him. She wondered where the tiny coffin was. It must be there somewhere: she had seen it arrive a few days earlier in a white carriage.

She reached the front door, which had been left open by her mother—she knew it must have been her—and looked back. Still nobody had come to stop her.

She had run all around the formal gardens, the ones her father had ordered to look like a famous one far away, when she saw her mother. She had stopped on the final step that led to the lake.

Isabel briefly turned her face up to the rain. Instead of the upturned bowl of blue that had greeted her almost every day that summer, the sky seemed to have lowered until it sealed off the valley. It reminded her of how the larder ceiling had looked last winter when there had been so much rain. It seemed to sag.

Isabel looked down and saw the rain running off her boots in urgent, shiny trails. The ribbon in her hair had drooped, one end dripping down her neck and under the collar of her dress. Below, her mother appeared to be listening to something, even nodding to herself as she took the last step.

Isabel followed closely, but her mother still didn't hear her.

The lake was full to the brim and would spill over into the grass of the Great Mead before long. Her mother bent and started gathering stones. The lake's bottom had been lined with rubble, Isabel's father had told her, to stop the water leaking away. Jagged
pieces always seemed to find their way out, though, to be scattered around the edges. Isabel watched her mother, suddenly apprehensive about approaching her.