Fiercombe Manor (34 page)

“Hello again, Ruck,” I said levelly, no longer so cowed now I thought I understood his motives better.

He flinched and turned awkwardly round to face me, raising his arm against the sun, which was sinking slowly behind me. His rheumy eyes searched my face for a long moment.

“Didn't know you then, miss,” he said finally.

I wondered if my hair had confused him.

“I'm sorry if I made you jump,” I said, unable to resist the slight barb; he was forever making me jump. He didn't answer.

We walked slowly down the lane together in the direction of the house. The perfume swirling around us was intense.

“The flowers smell beautiful here,” I said, to make conversation. I wasn't sure I meant it; the fragrance was heady and made my head spin.

“It's the pale ones what smell strongest,” he replied. “Them bright ones hardly smell't'all.”

When we reached the end of the lane, Ruck stopped and turned to look back. The bushes rose high on both sides to meet a sky that was turning a soft shade of apricot.

“I can't recall the last time I saw 'em out like this, and come so late,” he said, as much to himself as to me. He shook his head. “It's too hot for 'em, and yet here they is, in all their glory.”

“They're not like this every summer?”

He shook his head more vigorously. “I was a young lad in his prime when they was last like this. I thought never to see it again.”

He stumped off then, presumably to return to his cottage close to Ruin Wood, and left me alone in the lane. I stayed where I was for a time, watching the sky deepen to an orange that clashed with all that pink and purple. Compared to Ruck and my father, I knew little about flowers and plants, but I knew enough to know that it didn't make sense. It hadn't rained for weeks.

Mrs. Jelphs was in the kitchen when I got there. She looked up when I came in, and I saw her eyes take in my hair.

“You look . . . well, you look better now,” she said in the end. “Perhaps you were right about not calling out the doctor. I must say, you have some real colour in your cheeks.”

“I know the baby's all right now, so you really mustn't worry. It was just a false alarm. I felt something about half an hour ago. It was hardly anything, just a flutter really, but I feel so relieved.” I smiled shyly at her.

Mrs. Jelphs's face cleared, and she put a hand to her heart. “Oh, I'm so glad. I've been worrying about you all afternoon, but I didn't like to interfere too much.”

“Thank you for looking after me earlier. It did do me good by the stream, you were right. I'm starving now though, I haven't eaten a thing all day. Do you need some help?”

She was preparing a salad. Thick slices of cold beef had already been fanned out on a plate. She shook her head.

“It's nothing much. I thought it would be too warm for a cooked dinner.” She gestured towards the door. “Tom is back—did you hear him? Why don't you go and tell him it will be ready in a few minutes.”

My heart leapt at her words before I could help it. I hadn't even heard his arrival—he had probably come back when I was hidden away inside the thick walls of the summerhouse. When I got outside, he was leaning up against his car and smoking a cigarette. He mock-saluted when he caught sight of me.

“Good evening, Alice. Do you want one?” He held a battered packet out towards me.

I shook my head.

“That's a pretty dress.” He looked back out towards the Great Mead, where the grass had turned purple in the fading light. I was glad it would conceal the colour of my warm cheeks.

“Thank you,” I said as carelessly as I could manage. “Mrs. Jelphs helped me take it out in some places and in in others, so I didn't look quite so ridiculous in it.”

“I can't imagine you looking ridiculous in anything,” he said simply.

In my self-consciousness I put my hand out to touch the hot bonnet of his little motorcar. We stood in silence together for a minute, and I realised I hadn't felt so awake in months. A pair of tiny bats swooped low and fast over us, and we watched them until they disappeared. I thought then for the first time that I loved the valley; that I didn't want to be anywhere else.

“Here, what's happened to your arm?” he said, breaking into my thoughts as he reached out and got hold of my wrist.

At his touch I started and then twisted round to see what he meant. A dark bruise bloomed upwards from my elbow. I knew I had a livid purple mark on one of my thighs, thankfully covered by my dress, but I hadn't noticed this one. I hadn't planned to tell anyone about the fall, but now I'd felt the baby's flutter it didn't seem to matter.

“Actually, I tripped down the stairs. I'm all right, though. I thought . . . well, the baby's all right too.”

“You don't have much luck, do you? Poor old thing.”

He was still holding my wrist gently.

“I'm just clumsy. Don't tell Mrs. Jelphs, will you? She'll only worry.”

He was looking at me properly now, his eyes searching my face.

“That's all it was, a fall?”

“Yes, of course. What else? That I threw myself down them? Hardly.”

He smiled uncertainly and flicked ash onto the gravel.

“Come on,” I said. “Let's go in and have some supper. That's what I came out to tell you.”

He smiled more openly at that. “Did you wait for me?”

“Not intentionally, I'm afraid. I wasn't hungry all day, but now I'm ravenous. Come on, Mrs. Jelphs is putting some things out.”

I walked towards the house. When I looked back to see if he was following, I saw that he hadn't moved. Instead, he was watching me.

E
lizabeth and Edward sat at opposite ends of the library without speaking, a lingering vibration in the air that had so recently rung with his anger. After almost half an hour had passed, he abruptly got up and strode from the room. Elizabeth scarcely noticed. Instead, her mind whirred on—travelling back through time until she found something that might have caused Edward's distress and fury. She knew he wouldn't tell her; he hated to talk of that time. Whatever it had been, it must have been significant to cause such an extreme reaction.

She marked off the aspects of it that must have combined so dramatically in his head on that gentle morning. Their conversation last night, perhaps. Isabel gone from the nursery, certainly. She, Elizabeth, also disappeared. And the most curious: her shoes left behind in Isabel's room. It was that last, apparently innocuous detail that seemed to have disturbed him the most. After all, she had been for many walks with Isabel before.

A clear series of possibilities glided to the front of her thoughts. What if the nurserymaid hadn't checked on Isabel last night because it was late and she had been drinking? What if, finding her charge gone that morning, and seeing the discarded shoes that may have also
chimed in her memory, she had gone to Edward and admitted that she had not seen Isabel since putting her to bed the night before?

In the muffled stillness of the library, Elizabeth struggled to remember. The child inside her was quiet again, and for a time she forgot the constant discomfort of his heft at the front of her. Her left foot, turned in under the right at an awkward angle, had gone to sleep, but she did not notice that either. Fragments of memory had started to flit through her mind. They came so fast, bats across a darkening sky, that she hadn't yet been able to grasp one and examine it.

She began again. She could remember Isabel's birth and the easy week that followed it. She could also, with a suppressed shudder, remember the arrival of Dr. Logan and his nurse, the jaundiced-looking Mrs. Blackiston. She could remember that although she kept her eyes tightly closed when they left the valley, she could feel the ground beneath them slope upwards. She sensed the strain on the horses as the weight of the carriage tried to pull them all back down towards Stanton House.

So what of the days before? A blurred picture flashed through her mind again, but this time it brought with it a smell. In the library she sniffed the air but could detect only leather and beeswax and paper seamed with dust. It came again, and she didn't try to chase it this time. It hovered and settled. She saw reflections, she smelt something rich, almost sweet but not. A moon like last night's, but not the same one; this one hung with ragged clouds. A baby's cry, tentative at first and then rising to a thin wail. Grit under her bare feet.

The sentence arrived fully formed.
I was in the glasshouse.

She knew instantly. The smell she hadn't been able to identify was warm soil, stale air, and ripening tomatoes. Almost sweet, but not.

A sound shook her from her reverie. Isabel peeped around the library door.

“Mama, will you come and have breakfast now? Mrs. Wentworth made our eggs a long time ago.”

“Do you know, my darling, I don't think I can. The baby has made me feel quite queasy. That's why I am sitting quietly in here.”

Isabel's face fell. “Shall I fetch you something, Mama?”

“No, my sweet. I think what I need is a little more air. I felt wonderful when we were walking in the garden.”

“Shall I come?” Her small face was hopeful, but Elizabeth shook her head.

“You must eat your eggs. Go on, now. I won't be very long. Later, when our guests have left, you and I shall do something together. Would that be nice?”

The little girl nodded slowly, weighing up whether this was better than the breakfast.

“Can we take our sketchbooks somewhere?” she said, her head on one side.

“Yes, that's a good idea,” said Elizabeth. “We can sit on the terrace, in the sun.”

“And may we have tea there afterwards, just you and me?” Isabel wheedled.

Elizabeth attempted a smile. “You are driving a hard bargain, Isabel Stanton. Off you go now. We shall see about tea.”

When the little girl's light steps had died away, Elizabeth sat a moment more, gathering herself. She was sure now that something had happened in the glasshouse, something that had made Edward send her to the asylum. A comfortable sort of asylum, to be sure; a place for ladies of substantial means and high rank. But still a place for the mad and unwanted.

In some ways, it hadn't been so different from Stanton House. She was given her own room, which was small but quite comfortably furnished, and little more was expected of her during waking hours than that she lie there quietly. It was better for hysterics to be prone as much as possible, Dr. Logan said, without anything that might overexcite their minds. Perhaps, when she had improved, she could take a turn in the garden or compose a letter to be sent home. She was fed nursery food for the first weeks: milky and scarcely warm, nothing that didn't slide easily down her throat.

It was at night that the illusion of civility lifted, and the crying and shrieking began. Their doors were locked from the outside, the mechanisms kept well oiled so that the sound of each key turning was less intrusive—less like the screech and clang of the prison's nightly round.

She got to her feet and left the library, retracing her steps across the terrace and through the Italian garden. At the steps to the lake she paused. The shadow of the folly reached a third of the way across it; it was still quite early. One of the gardeners would be along to turn the fountain on shortly. When it was on, the water could be heard from the house: the hiss of it when the wind was blowing across the valley floor, the heavy patter of it when the air was still. It was also audible from the terrace, from the croquet lawn on the other side of the house, and from the paths buried deep amongst the beech trees. So it could certainly be heard from the glasshouse, even with the door closed.

She thought hard. There was no sound like that in the memory fragments she had managed to salvage; only the crying. The fountain was turned off late: Edward liked it on when he went for a walk before he retired, which was never before midnight. She could see
the moon quite clearly in what she had recalled. Whatever happened must have done so in the coldest, emptiest hours of the night.

This morning there was no one in the glasshouse or the kitchen garden that adjoined it. She stepped inside and breathed in the smell. It was even richer and headier than she remembered, and with the door shut, the atmosphere was close. None of the glass panels in the roof were open. She remembered the mechanism that one of the gardeners had once pointed out to her. He had been proud of it and had wanted to show her how ingenious it was. She looked for the pole that connected to its mate in the roof, and it was there, propped up in one corner where it was supposed to be. She was hot now, beads of sweat at her brow and under her dress.

It was as she began turning the handles of the pole as she had been shown, one hand over the other, the large pane above her starting to lift, that it came back to her. The physical motion had allowed the rest of it to slide into place. She let the pole swing free and sat down heavily, her skirts spread out around her in the dust and soil. There was a bench behind her, and she rested her aching back against it, her hands clasping the mound of her belly. She wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn't come higher than her chest, where they swelled into a painful wall.

Now she remembered, she remembered it all.

It happens at the beginning of the fourth week after the birth. She has been in the midst of one of the everlasting nights that has come to punctuate her formless, anxiety-sown days. When the solution to everything occurs to her, she feels a sense of imminent relief that is close to excitement. It seems such an obvious answer, once she has thought of it.

She waits until the gilt clock strikes three and then gets quietly dressed in a thick wool dress that she had made up for winter walks
but has barely worn because it makes her itch. It hardly needs to stretch over her still-swollen stomach, but then she can't remember the last thing she ate.