Fiercombe Manor (12 page)

I'd forgotten that until this moment. Telling myself that now, just as then, the sensation was in my mind, I took up my diary and set to work writing a list in the back, just as I'd always done as a child when I was afraid at night. As many Christian names beginning with each letter of the alphabet as I could think of—though I hesitated to write “Edith” and “Elizabeth” when I reached
E.
When I ran out of those, I would list English monarchs, followed by counties and their principal towns.

Every fibre of my body was straining for more sounds and strange scents, even as another part of my brain sorted through its cache of names, but there was nothing but the profound silence of the deep countryside and the cloying smell of liquid wax. I prayed that dawn would come before the candle burned out.

T
he house, after the intensifying light and heat of the garden, felt as cool as a church. Edward made off towards his study without a good-bye, his mind trained once again on the numerous tasks he had to complete before the coming evening. Isabel was also gone, darting up the stairs to the nursery to resume a new game.

Elizabeth stood alone in the hallway and allowed the chill of the tiles to penetrate her thin-soled shoes. Unpinning her hat, she tossed it onto a nearby chair, dismissing the familiar twinge of guilt at the thought of one of the servants finding it and having to put it away for her. She had tried to be considerate when she first arrived in the valley, used as she was to her parents' house and the small staff she had grown up with: a cook and three maids who were almost family to her. At Stanton House, these small kindnesses earned her only bemusement, and from a few, contempt. “That's not how things are done here. You're embarrassing them,” Edward had taken her aside to tell her one day, his blunt words surely causing her much deeper shame than any she had inflicted on a parlourmaid or footman.

This was one of the reasons she had engaged Edith. She'd told the girl it was because she looked so presentable at the Painswick fair, but
it wasn't really that. It was because she looked kind. Elizabeth had seen her standing with a group of girls by the old iron stocks, and while the rest of them laughed at some poor boy who had tripped and made a fool of himself, Edith stood slightly apart, dreamy-eyed and serious, more comfortable on the periphery. Elizabeth knew that some people thought a French maid would be more proper, more fashionable, but she didn't care. Edith was her ally, perhaps her only one in the valley, apart from her small daughter.

With a last glance at her abandoned hat, Elizabeth crossed the hall and climbed the stairs slowly, deciding at the top to go not towards her own rooms but in the other direction, to the nursery. Some combination of this sudden decision and the medicinal smell of the passage in the nursery wing suddenly reminded her of . . . she didn't know what. She stopped and shook her head slightly, as if to loosen the memory. The not quite remembering was a peculiar sensation, one she had experienced before, when ordinary rooms and unremarkable corners of the grounds abruptly reared up at her, the same yet altered, like a familiar face lit from a new angle, darkly hinting at past associations she could not connect to her own memories.

The same thing had happened only a few days before, when she was walking in the gardens. The day's blustery winds had died off as abruptly as the dusk was overtaken by night, and she knew she must hurry, or Edward would know she had been out in the dark and think her eccentric. Even so, something made her stop short by the steps that led down to the lake, where the waters now lay like a bolt of dark silk, the last ripples smoothed away. The thought entered her mind quite clearly:
it was colder when I was here like this before
. But when she reached back through her memory to find out when and what
before
had been, she might as well have been grasping at smoke.

It was no good; she simply couldn't attach any extraordinary significance to either the lake or the passage that she now continued along towards the nursery door, which stood ajar. Tiptoeing closer, she could hear her daughter's high, clear voice, like silver bells. She was talking to herself, Elizabeth realised, the nurserymaid no doubt gossiping downstairs in the bowels of the house.

Putting her eye to the crack in the door, she could see a slice of her child, a creamy arm and then a flash of bright hair as she moved about. She was kneeling on the hearthrug, an old peg doll she had never much liked in her hand. At her feet were an old tin soldier that had once belonged to her father and the tiny velveteen hare that Elizabeth had sewn for the little girl herself last winter, straining her eyes over it in Stanton House's gloomy drawing room, where the dark green wallpaper absorbed most of the gaslight.

Leaning closer so she might catch all the words, Elizabeth realised that Isabel was talking to or as though she was the doll, the tiny red dress moving up and down like a warning flag as Isabel spoke. Elizabeth almost laughed aloud, clapping her hand over her mouth to stifle the noise, remembering how she had been lost in similar games at Isabel's age.

“If you don't stop being such a naughty girl, then you will make her ill again,” Isabel was almost chanting as she banged the doll down on the rug. “And then she will be sent away for ever so long.”

Despite the day's heat, which was beginning to creep up the stairs to the house's upper floors, Elizabeth went cold, gooseflesh rising on her skin.

“If you're not a good girl, then he will come again,” the little girl continued, her voice oddly expressionless. “The magician will come, and he'll lock her in her room, where you can't see her.”

Elizabeth couldn't bear to hear any more. Forcing herself to smile, she bustled noisily into the nursery, making Isabel start, surprised out of one reality and into another.

“Mama!” The little girl ran to her, the doll forgotten on the floor.

“What were you doing just now, my darling?” Elizabeth asked before she could stop herself.

“Oh, only playing with my doll,” Isabel said, the omission making Elizabeth want to weep. She had tried before to replace the nurserymaid, who she had never warmed to, but Edward wouldn't hear of it: the woman had come with an excellent character from a rather grand acquaintance in London, and he couldn't be seen to contradict their regard for her.

The little girl wanted a story read to her, so Elizabeth dragged the low wing chair over to the open window. Outside she could see that her husband had been drawn back outside and was now amongst the men on the lawn, his fair hair glinting under the high sun.

She had only reached the bottom of the second page when she felt Isabel, who had curled herself around the mound of the baby, slacken in her arms and sleep. Elizabeth allowed her own eyes to flutter closed and felt the book of fairy tales drop to the floor. Then she remembered what she had overheard, and her eyes opened wide again.

She had long feared that Isabel, always so alert, had seen and heard too much in her short life. The strange performance she had just enacted on the nursery floor was surely proof of that. Guilt flooded Elizabeth, and she found her free hand going to her stomach and the baby on whom so much rested. What would she do if . . . But she wouldn't allow herself to think about that, not now, when there was so much else to think of.

Of course the spiteful nurserymaid was only a symptom of a larger problem. Things would be different if only she and Edward could navigate their way back to how it had been when they were first married. No, she had not warmed to Stanton House, and no, she had not found some of the servants very easy to contend with, but things were at least simpler in those early days. What had made it bearable then was that whatever she thought of the house and whatever the servants thought of their new mistress, Edward himself had not yet found fault in her, the hairline cracks in her nature not yet visible to him.

Indeed, their first year in the valley had been a comparatively content one, especially once she had been able to tell him, shy but full of pride, that she was with child for the first time, having conceived just a few months after the wedding. The child turned out to be Isabel. While she was not a boy, she had been blessed with beauty enough for that not to matter, a pink-and-white girl who was the image of Edward and his little brother Charles at the same age. “We have all the time in the world for more children,” Edward said. Boys was what he meant, of course.

But before Isabel, before the wedding, what of then? What of the first time they met, at the Christmas ball held by her uncle? But the memory that came instead was a later one, inspired no doubt by the sun streaming through the window and warming her back. It had been hot that day, too.

It was the last day of June—the June after the Christmas ball—and just a month before Edward would propose, though she hadn't known that then. They were gathered in her uncle's garden, not just her and Edward but ten or twelve guests, her parents amongst them. As it was such an exceptionally beautiful day, tea had been served outside under a huge spreading cedar, though its feathery boughs were no match for the blazing sun.

She had set down this episode in the diary she kept hidden in the summerhouse by the old manor, describing the languid heat that had turned her to liquid, the intimacy of Edward watching her eat and drink, the combined embarrassment and thrill of knowing his eyes remained on her as she licked her sugar-dusted lips.

She hadn't written down the perfect, naked truth of it in the diary—some horror of it being read by someone else, one of the servants finding it, perhaps. Not that she was always so cautious—there were other times in the summerhouse when she had to let the words flow out of her as they came, for fear that if she didn't she would go out of her mind. Then she wrote in pencil, the soft lead so much easier than ink to cross out or erase altogether.

Her marriage's progression from desire to discord must have been incremental, a creeping rot setting in by degrees, for the diary recorded no obvious turning point. Perhaps that was the fate of all diaries, though: never to be accurate or objective. She hadn't just blushed when she recorded the tea party; she had also omitted what she couldn't bear other eyes to see. When her marriage began to unravel, she started omitting things for the sake of her own eyes, reading the entry back at a later date in a vulnerably hopeful mood.

She often left out incidents that reflected poorly on Edward, as well as some that reflected badly on herself—times when she had been made to feel tiresome or foolish. And if she were to be entirely honest with herself, those omissions had been necessary from the beginning.

In her first months of carrying Isabel, for instance, she, Edward, and a friend who had come to stay from London had set off for a walk in the beech woods that encircled the valley. It was early spring, and the bluebells were suddenly, miraculously out, their perfume clean and quenching, the haze of violet-blue both intense and cool against muted bark and leaf. She had woken that morning in a bright, rather frenetic
temper, and on the walk had been chattering on about the room the baby would occupy and the kind of nursemaid they would employ, deliberately making the friend laugh. Edward, she knew, found these displays of overt charm rather taxing. Next to other, more demure women it looked unfeminine; directed at men, it seemed like flirtation.

When the three of them came across a baby bird that had fallen from a nest, Elizabeth's high spirits vanished. It was still alive but had suffered a great gash in its neck, its tiny beak opening and closing soundlessly in what looked like agony.

Elizabeth knelt and swept the tiny mangled body gently onto her lap, dirt and blood staining the pale silk of her gown.

“The poor thing has fallen out of the nest,” she cried, tears already running down her cheeks to darken the front of her dress.

“If it's the weakest, it might well have been pushed,” said the friend, who had knelt beside her. “The parents probably don't have enough food to go round. Unfortunately there's nothing we can do for it, Lady Stanton.”

“Darling, he's right,” said Edward, and Elizabeth could hear the strain in his voice, though he was battling to be gentle. “Come on, now, you're spoiling your dress.”

He put his hands under her elbow and tried to raise her to her feet.

“Get off me, Edward!” she cried passionately. “Can't you see it's in terrible pain? Would you have me drop it and go back to the house for tea without a backward glance?”

He let her arm go as if it burned him and glanced at his friend, who looked away. Later, when they were alone again, he spoke harshly to her, in the jagged undertone he had taken to using in case the servants were close by.

“What a scene you had to make in the woods. There was no call for you to become so . . . shrill. It was just a dead bird. Your dress is
ruined, and Mr. Browning goes back to London in the belief that I have got me a hysteric for a wife.”

It was just a dead bird
. His words brought a forgotten episode from her childhood flooding back. She was a small girl of eight or nine, and a pigeon had flown into her high bedroom window with a sickening thud. It had dropped to the narrow garden below, and she had run pell-mell down the stairs to find it, her mind busy with torn-up handkerchiefs and pencils for bandages and splints. She found the bird splayed on the steps down to the lawn, its neck broken, its eyes dull, and the blood that clotted in the exposed fan of its pearl-grey feathers shockingly thick and red. Her father found her out there more than an hour later, tearstained and still cradling the pigeon in her arms, oblivious to the cold air that was turning her lips blue. He had carried her inside as though she had been the one to fall broken to the ground, not the bird.

In the nursery, Isabel stirred in her sleep and opened her eyes to look up at her mother. In the dazzling light from the window Elizabeth noticed for the first time that her daughter's left eye had a slightly different colour from that of her right, a driftwood sliver of gold in the sea of blue. She didn't think it had been there before, and instinctively she hoped Edward wouldn't notice.