Lost Among the Living (5 page)

“Do I have a choice?”

He gave me a smile at that. “I apologize. I'm a lawyer, and we like to ask questions. My days are usually very quiet. You are quite the most exciting thing to cross my threshold all week.”

The words hung in the air, suspended. My tea seemed to have congealed to paste in my stomach. I wondered if Dottie would dismiss me if I stood and left.

“You mustn't worry,” Mr. Wilde said into the silence. “My questions are not so very personal. I simply wondered if you plan to be a ladies' companion forever.”

“Forever?” I could not keep the dismay from my voice.

“Yes.” Mr. Wilde picked up the envelope with his good hand,
stood it idly on end. “You've never thought of it? You're an intelligent girl. Mrs. Forsyth is in the prime of health, but she will not live forever.”

I leaned over and set my teacup on a side table. “Are you asking,” I said slowly, “whether I expect Dottie to leave me something in her will?”

He did not answer that. “My job,” he said with a lawyer's evasiveness, “is to look after the family. To protect it from harm.”

“Is it?” I said. I was being impertinent, I knew, but I was stung and I could not help myself. “It seems to me the harm to the family has already been done.”

“Ah,” Mr. Wilde said. “I believe you're referring to Frances.”

“There are rumors in town.”

That made him smile. “Oh, yes. Mad girls in chains, killer hounds, ghosts. It's quite ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,' is it not? Such is the imagination of the English countryman. I admire the locals their creativity, but don't believe everything you hear. I'm part of the rumor, myself—I believe I play the role of Mrs. Forsyth's evil accomplice, helping to keep Frances in chains and cover up her murders at the inquest. I don't suppose you heard that part?”

It was the easy superiority, the cold condescension in his tone, that gave me a chill when he spoke to me. “No,” I said.

He nodded. “A man with a withered arm is born to play the
villain, you see. But since you're attached to the family now, would you like to know the truth?”

“I don't—”

“Frances was a sweet girl,” Mr. Wilde said. He looked at my expression and smiled. “Does that surprise you, after what you've heard? She was certainly intelligent, and I believe she never meant harm to anyone.”

“Yet she was mad,” I said.

He finally took up Dottie's letter and slid his finger under the flap, opening it. “She was . . . afflicted. There is no other way to describe it.” His gaze stayed on me and not on the letter in his hand. “The spells started in childhood. That was before my time with the family, but by the time Mrs. Forsyth engaged me as her man of business, Frances's spells had progressed.”

“What type of spells?” I asked.

“Hallucinations,” he replied. “She saw things that weren't there, spoke to people who weren't present. I witnessed it myself any number of times, and I questioned Frances—when she was capable of it—as well as the doctors Dottie had called in to treat her. Some of the things Frances thought she saw were benign, and some of them were terrible. But by the time she was thirteen, the hallucinations were pervasive and incredibly real to her. She claimed there was a door that the visions came through. She could describe it to the finest detail if you asked.” He gave me a small smile that was entirely sad. “It took some questioning before she trusted me enough to explain, but I finally understood that the things she saw coming through that imaginary door were dead.”

I gaped at him. My tea had grown cold on the table next to me. I could not think of a thing to say.

“You can imagine,” Mr. Wilde continued, “what a torment everyday life must be for someone so afflicted. Frances believed she saw the dead, waking and sleeping. She often had screaming fits that were
terrible to behold—her madness sometimes produced particularly gruesome visions. No doctor could help her, and eventually Dottie would not hear of her being examined yet again. So Frances lived at home instead, in privacy, plagued by her waking dreams.” He looked at me closely with his chilled gaze. “You have a look of pity in your eyes, Mrs. Manders, but not a look of great shock. According to my information, you are well acquainted with madness, are you not?”

I thought of the long, red scratches on Mother's neck, and the words sprang to my lips, defensive. “It is not the same, Mr. Wilde. Not at all.”

“If you say so. In any case, the rumors you hear are nothing but poison. Frances was never locked up or chained. There was no dog. The vagrant dying in the woods on the same day as Frances was a cruel and gruesome coincidence, that is all. Though something did strike me the day she died.”

“What was that?” I managed.

“I had known Frances for years by then. For all her torment, she had never been suicidal. She had never attempted to take her own life until that day. In fact, because of her hallucinations, she was terrified of dying. The last place she ever wanted to go was through that terrible door, to be with the things on the other side.” He shrugged. “Don't you find that strange?”

“Yes,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “I suppose it is.”

Mr. Wilde flipped open Dottie's letter at last and read the lines inside. He showed no reaction to whatever they said except for the faint tightening of his jaw. “If you will be so kind as to wait a moment, Mrs. Manders, I will write Mrs. Forsyth a reply.”

I sat in silence as he pulled out a creamy piece of paper and scratched on it with his pen, one brief line, two, three. There seemed to be no air in the room. I wondered if David Wilde had ever seen a strange girl in Wych Elm House sitting in a chair and staring at him.
But no, he couldn't have. The house had been empty since the Forsyths had left.

When he had finished, he sealed the letter and rose. I followed him to the door. “Mr. Wilde,” I said, “I have one question.”

“And what may that be?”

“Why do I feel like you have been assessing me for the past hour?”

He gave me his small smile again and placed the letter in my hand. “Don't worry about it, Mrs. Manders,” he said. “My duty to the family comes first. Good day to you.”

I
finished the rest of Dottie's errands in numb silence. I visited the dressmaker's and came away with two ready-made frocks in packages under my arm, as well as an order for two more to come in a week's time. I had barely looked at them, letting the dressmaker select what was best. I also bought new stockings, one pair of new shoes, and a new hat. I had paid for all of it on Dottie's credit; likely I'd have to work for her for years before we were even again.

Next to the dressmaker's was a photographer's studio. It was closed—the sign said the proprietor was in only on Mondays and Thursdays—but I paused and looked at the photographs in the window. One showed Anningley's own High Street, on a misty early morning, looking toward the gentle rise of a hill, which was crowned with a pretty church of old stone, its spire coming out of the mist above the roofs of the village houses. I thought of that same church, rising out of the same mist, two hundred or even three hundred years ago, patiently waiting for Sunday attendance by villagers now long dead, weathering storms long forgotten, just as it would do when I was dead and so was everyone around me. And I thought for the first time in months of Alex's camera in its case in my bedroom at Wych Elm House.

I turned and looked down High Street at the spire from the photograph. A church meant a graveyard.
She is buried in the churchyard, if you want to see her.

Still, I dawdled on my way to Frances's grave. I stopped at the
pharmacist's and the lending library, David Wilde's words turning over in my head. Finally I had no more errands, no more excuses, and I opened the churchyard gate with my gloved hands, listening to it creak in the peaceful stillness of the sunny afternoon.

The church was a snug building of buttery stone. I saw no sign of a vicar or a groundskeeper, though the grounds were immaculate; there were only the starlings crying at one another in the trees over the hill.

From the very first, I knew which monument I was meant to see.

It was a long block of shiny marble, raised and gleaming, overshadowing all of the graves around it—humble stones from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, planted by the good people of Anningley. Frances Forsyth's grave was slick and shiny, almost obscene. As I approached I could see the lettering—FRANCES FORSYTH
,
B
. 1902–
D
. 1917
—and an angel etched, weeping, into the marble above it. Beneath the dates was a single sentiment: ANGEL ON EARTH
.

I stared at the grave. It made my throat thick, made my heart beat slowly and sickly in my chest. This was Dottie's work, there was no doubt of it—Robert had had nothing to do with this monstrosity. She must have faced some objection to having Frances buried in the churchyard at all, as a suicide and a suspected murderer. She had not only prevailed, but she had raised her daughter's monument above the rest. It was a mother's act of love, of defiant and loyal belief.

But as David Wilde had intimated, I knew something of what it was like, caring for the mad. I knew how it drained you, how it ate at you, how your love for the mad person both fed you and consumed you. How you felt it was all your fault, or all theirs. I knew of the unspoken moments as you worried in the dark—as your own life sat frozen and forgotten—when you hated the mad person with all your heart, when the black part of you wished they would simply go away, that they would simply die. And I knew of the hideous wash of relief that overcame you when the burden of caring for that person was finally lifted.

Frances Forsyth's monument was an act of love. But I could see what it also was—an act of guilt, the kind that bows a person and alters them forever. This was what Dottie lived with, what no one could understand. No one but me, who had lived with Mother.

The last place she ever wanted to go was through that terrible door, to be with the things on the other side
. Some mad people wished for death, but others clung to life, even when that life was filled with pain. Yet Frances had, finally, decided to go through that door she so dreaded. Or had she? Was it possible her mother had helped her? That the final result was this monument to Dottie's own guilt?

I turned away and walked back to the motorcar in silence.

When I arrived in the front hall at Wych Elm House, all was quiet. I removed my hat and stood for a moment. I heard the ticking of the grandfather clock in the next room. I smelled furniture polish and dust. I looked at the sunlight coming interrupted through the glass door from the sitting room, sliced by the lines of a tree branch. At the quiet corridor, its floor gleaming.

This house shouldn't be sold; it should be burned.

A murmur of voices came from one of the rooms down the hall, and reluctantly I walked toward the sound. I found Dottie and Robert in the small parlor where I had seen the girl yesterday, sitting in the chairs in an awkward arrangement. A tray of tea sat on a spindle-
legged table, the steam no longer rising from the pot. Dottie's color was high, her posture straight, a teacup all but forgotten in her lap. Robert sat uncomfortably, looking pained. So Dottie had won some part of their argument after all, then.

A third person rose from his chair to greet me.

He was, unmistakably, the boy from the photograph Dottie carried in her book. I could see Dottie in the narrow, clean shape of his jaw, the shoulders that were not wide yet firm of line. I could see Robert in the set of his dark eyes, his long lashes, and the charming ease of his smile, which he flashed me on sight. But there the resemblance to either of his parents, and the photograph of years ago, ended. The man who stood before me had the painful thinness of the long-term patient: his cheeks hollowed, his tidy shirt and jacket hanging as if from a clothes hanger in a shop. He was in his early twenties, but the creases on his forehead and the lines bracketing his mouth aged him past thirty, and the soft shadows under his eyes hinted that the travel he'd just undergone had taken more out of him than he cared to let on.

“Manders.” Dottie's voice was tight with excitement, her gaze trained on the man as he turned to me. “This is my son, Martin.”

“Cousin!” Martin said, smiling at me. Despite the gauntness of his features, there was something compelling about the forced brightness in his eyes. “Cousin Jo! What a delight to finally meet you. Alex told me everything about you.”

I blinked at him, surprised. I glanced briefly at Dottie, remembering her injunction not to talk of Alex with her frail son. “Oh,” I said stupidly.

“Martin,” Dottie said, changing the subject on cue. “You must eat something. I imagine you are famished.”

“Don't harass the boy, Dottie,” Robert said.

Martin ignored them both and took one of my gloved hands in his. I still held my packages in the other. Dottie's comment hung in the air; Martin looked like he hadn't eaten in weeks. His gaze was fixed on me, and I returned the look, trying to read his expression. I
had interrupted a family conversation on some serious topic—I inferred it from the color in Dottie's cheeks and the way Robert's gaze roved around the room, as if he was waiting for the first chance to escape.

“You are lovely,” Martin said to me. His voice was not seductive, or even particularly inviting; the words were spoken more as a message, as if he were telling me something in code. He squeezed my hand once, briefly, reinforcing the feeling. “Just as I heard. I am so glad I came home.”

I stared back at him. I should know what he meant; I should know. And yet I racked my brain and came up with nothing. “Thank you,” I managed.

Dottie spoke again, something about Martin seeing the artworks she'd bought on the Continent. Robert countered that no young man would want to see such a dull thing, and instead they should go riding at the first opportunity. Martin agreed with both his parents without committing to anything. He seemed adept at navigating the treacherous territory between them, skipping past the many land mines with the agility of an adored son.

But I was only barely paying attention. I had figured out the subtle tension in the room with the sudden understanding of a thunderclap.
My son is coming home to get married.
Her dismissive wave of the hand when I had asked about his fiancée.
I'll take care of it.

Mr. Wilde's assessment of me, the exchange of notes between them.

Our chance for children, someone to leave our legacy to.

You are lovely. I am so glad I came home.

Martin must have seen understanding on my face. I stood transfixed as he stepped closer, dropped my hand, and pulled me to him in an embrace. My packages bumped between us awkwardly, but still Martin patted my back, his thin hands touching me coldly through my coat at my shoulder blades.

“Cousin Jo,” Martin said, his breath in my ear, his voice dark with understanding. “We are going to have
so much fun.
”