Fiercombe Manor (18 page)

There was no one to watch her descend the staircase, and for that she was grateful. They were all in the garden, where the sky's blue was fading to palest primrose. There were no stars yet, only a wafer-thin sliver of moon suspended by an invisible silken thread. She almost tripped on the last stair; the bulk of the baby had altered her centre of gravity. Her heeled shoe landed too heavily on the tiles of the enormous hallway, but no one was there to hear it. She had drunk down two eye-watering gulps of brandy from the decanter in the library before she dressed, for courage. Edward rarely went in there and so was unlikely to have caught her; the library's bound volumes were principally for show.

When she stepped out onto the terrace, placing her feet more carefully now, the scene was so like the one she had imagined for weeks that she experienced the cool detachment of a dream, and her nerves receded. At least forty people were there already, and she could tell from the murmur of sounds coming from the house behind her that more were arriving, greeting each other on the carriage sweep and taking their time to cross the threshold because the whole evening was ahead of them.

She noticed Edward a beat before he saw her. He was talking to a woman who might have been his sister in colouring, though her cheeks and lips were subtly pinker than was natural. Perhaps this was how Isabel would look when she was a woman, but then Elizabeth got closer and saw that the woman's face was harder, more ambitious, than sensitive Isabel's could ever be.

“My darling wife, we were just talking about you,” called Edward, slightly too loudly. “Come and meet Adelaide March. Her father owns Clayford Park near Hereford. Do you remember I went to shoot there once, when you weren't well? When Isabel was tiny?”

She was stunned that he had mentioned that time so casually, and to a stranger, and found she couldn't think of anything to say. It didn't seem to matter. Edward reached out a pale gold hand and pulled her gently towards him.

“We have only another few weeks to wait,” he said to Adelaide. “Doesn't his mother look wonderful?” He gazed at Elizabeth with an adoration that felt almost violent. “We are all hoping he's as beautiful as his mama.”

“Or as handsome as his papa,” said Adelaide, and her voice was light and fluid like mercury. She was eighteen at most, a slender thing of narrow hips and small, high breasts. She was too young to hide her desire for a husband like Edward, or perhaps Edward himself, her china-blue eyes glassy with it—and with the champagne that she now sloshed onto her glove.

Edith came by at that moment, carrying a silver tray crammed with crystal saucers that tinkled and chimed against each other melodically.

“You haven't got a drink yet, my lady,” she said to Elizabeth.

“Thank you, Edith.” She took a glass that was only half full, unsure whether this was for Edward's benefit or her own.

Edith moved smartly off then, even though Edward and Adelaide both needed new drinks. Elizabeth smiled at Edith's ramrod back as it disappeared into the marquee. She understands much more than I realise, she thought.

“Well,” she said after her first sip of the champagne, dry and delicious, “I must leave you in my husband's capable hands, Miss
March. I should really see to our other guests—it wouldn't do to spend the whole evening with the man I see every day. Edward, see if one of the maids can do something about Miss March's glove; it's stained with champagne.”

As the younger girl coloured, Elizabeth walked away with deliberate confidence and made for Colonel Waters, who was their nearest neighbour, his sprawling Georgian rectory at the top of the valley Stanwick village's largest house. The colonel pretended deafness and bluffness, but his mind was needle-sharp, and he had always been kind to Elizabeth. When he spotted her, his face lit up.

“Good lord, Lady Stanton, you look splendid tonight. No. Resplendent is a better word. I haven't seen you look so well since . . . actually, I haven't seen you look so well ever. Isn't she a sight to behold, Mrs. Bell?”

Mrs. Bell, whose husband owned one of the last large cloth mills in Stroud, turned at his voice. She was larger than Elizabeth remembered her, her enormous bosom seemingly in danger of being pricked and deflated by the beetle-shaped brooch she had pinned there. Her small eyes widened.

“Lady Stanton, it really is wonderful to see you looking so well, and for Stanton House to be hosting a proper celebration at last. We feared we had seen the last of them. Of course, it is understandable, given the circumstances . . .”

She tailed off, and the colonel looked down into his glass. He cleared his throat pointedly, but Mrs. Bell soldiered on.

“Of course we have seen you occasionally at other events, but as I have kept saying to Mr. Bell, you couldn't be considered quite recovered until you were hostess once more at one of Stanton House's parties.”

She stopped to take a breath and beamed round at Elizabeth, the colonel, and the others who had drawn closer as they realised who Mrs. Bell was talking to.

“Thank you for your concern,” Elizabeth replied. The short silence that followed felt just like the sensation on the stairs, when she had momentarily lost her balance. Six or seven faces looked expectantly at her, and in them she thought she could read a mixture of genuine concern, glee, and inquisitiveness shot through with scorn. Farther off, two young men she knew only slightly—William somebody and Hugh Morton, down from Cheltenham—were looking over at her in quite a different way, with the very opposite of pity. Hugh nodded and smiled warmly, and she found she had regained her footing.

“As you can see,” she said, raising her voice, “I am perfectly well. I do not know what you have all heard. Perhaps that Edward only lets me out occasionally, and otherwise keeps me locked in the attic like the first Mrs. Rochester.” She smiled wickedly and glanced over towards William and Hugh again, who were still looking over with frank admiration.

“Don't believe everything that you hear, Mrs. Bell,” she said, the merest hint of admonishment making the older woman drop her eyes. “Most of it is servants' gossip, and who can blame them in this beautiful but rather uneventful corner of the countryside?” She held out her hand, which was gloveless and delicate, the skin as white as lilies, the nails shaped like almonds. Someone put a fresh glass into it.

“To my health,” she said, “and to all of you for coming to bear witness to it.”

As they drank, she put her arm through the colonel's and led him away from the small crowd that had gathered. She was trembling.

“What a woman you are,” he said quietly. “That's held their tongues.”

On the far side of the lawn she could see that Edward was still talking to Adelaide, who had grown more flushed and was now pulling at his sleeve as she talked up at him. Elizabeth squeezed the colonel's arm.

“Edward will be furious when he hears I've made an exhibition of myself.”

“Let me talk to Sir Edward. I'll head him off at the pass. I think you've been exceptionally brave, not just now but since the last time we were all gathered here. What he did, he believed he did for the best—at least I think so. We are often hardest on the people we love most. It's fear that makes us ruthless.”

“Perhaps you're right,” she said sadly. “You understand him better than I do. He cannot bear weakness in me, or Isabel. I hope this little one is strong for him.”

She placed her hand on her stomach. The hot skin was stretched as taut as a drum. The pale green silk of her dress had been gathered under her bust with the intention that it would drape gracefully over her stomach, obscuring or at least minimising it. In fact, the baby had grown so outlandishly in the weeks since the dress had been ordered that it now had the opposite effect. Beneath her petticoats she could even feel the raised blister of her navel against the slippery fabric, and hoped such an intimate part of her couldn't be seen.

At that moment someone dropped a glass on the unforgiving stone of the terrace, where it shattered like ice in the syrupy air. Everyone turned to look—everyone except Elizabeth, who stared blindly at the grass at her feet. The sound of smashing glass—she knew it. And when she had heard it before, it had been so much louder, so much nearer. Reaching out in her mind, she tried to
catch the tail of the memory, but it flicked away, returning to the shadows where it silently mocked her.

The colonel, turning back to his companion, must have seen that her triumph during the toast was fast ebbing away.

“You!” He gestured at one of the younger footmen, who was self-conscious in his best for the occasion, dark hair shiny with too much oil. “Fetch Lady Stanton a chair. Not one of those!” he cried, when the boy ran for one of the hard chairs they had hired for the evening. “A proper chair, with cushions. Bring one from the house.”

When he returned, a shout of laughter went up. He was dragging a gigantic bath chair across the terrace, its castors squealing in protest. The gardener's boy, Ruck, ran to help him, and they carried it over the grass to the waiting colonel.

“This is more like it,” he said, helping Elizabeth lower herself into it and then fetching her glass from a nearby table. She sighed theatrically with contentment for the benefit of the clusters of guests nearest to them, and they broke obediently into applause. In fact, it was blissful to be off her feet, the child inside her a still but leaden weight, like the movement of a stopped clock.

Another memory crept like a traitor into her mind then, and unlike the shattering glass, this one lingered. In it she wore a dress of peacock blue, and Edith was brushing out her hair. Inside her was the tiny boy she had lost three years ago and he was moving, the watered silk of her dress rippling as he turned and weaved. That in turn brought back the awful morning last year, when she had woken with blood on her sheets and metal in the air, just three weeks after she'd realised that she was with child again.
But it will be different this time
. She took in a long, shaky breath.

Forcing herself to think, instead, of Isabel, who she had borne with perfect ease, she realised she didn't know what frightened her more: the possibility of a third miscarried baby or another attack
of the prolonged and crushing melancholy that had followed Isabel's deceptively simple birth. She had taken to her bed after the miscarriages too, but that had been caused as much by grief—the sorrow any mother would have felt—as the strange, inexplicable state that had gripped her after Isabel.

It was precisely the sort of feminine superstition that her faultlessly logical husband so despised, but part of her was convinced—horribly convinced—that her destiny as a mother had already been written, and would now only repeat itself. She would never bear a living son, and another baby daughter would only take her down and down, back into the black depths. Perhaps it was sinful to think it, but she didn't know which she dreaded more.

She looked across the lawn towards Edward, who was holding court amid a small group of people she hardly knew, Adelaide amongst them. Lit by the dying sun in his beautiful suit, he looked as intensely happy as she'd ever seen him. She envied him his mental strength; the way he took his fear and transformed it into implacable resolve, conviction that all would be well this time. Another lost son was unthinkable, and so he had, at least in his own head, made it so. She fancied she could almost see the determination roll off him in waves. If she was to fail again, she couldn't imagine him forgiving her this time.

I
felt a little apprehensive about going to bed on that second night, and so made sure Mrs. Jelphs fetched me a new lightbulb before I went up. The candlestick was still on my bedside table, but it reminded me of my strange experience, so I shut it back in the wardrobe. As it was, the night passed uneventfully. My dreams were a confusion of the glasshouse I had once seen on a visit to Kew and the striped emerald lawns my father tended back at home, but I didn't wake, and nothing woke me.

When I did gradually come to, it was still early enough for the air to feel chilly. I got dressed as quickly as I could, deciding from the angle of the sun that I had time for a walk before breakfast. The clock on the mantelpiece had stopped again.

Since I'd heard about Stanton House and its ignominious fall, the old manor had lost some of its unsettling atmosphere for me, and I felt intrigued and almost excited, as though a mystery had presented itself to be solved. Delving into the past was just the sort of distraction I needed to take me away from my own present.

There was a great deal more to the story of the Victorian baronet—not to mention his wife—and I felt compelled to seek it out. It was only a few more days until the weekend, and then
I thought I would walk up to the village and seek out Nan's Mr. Morton. Gambling, drunkenness, and prolific spending had surely been the causes of such a dramatic reversal of fortune, and he sounded like the man to tell me about it in all its colourful detail. I couldn't imagine I would have to tread as carefully with him as with Mrs. Jelphs.

The kitchen was deserted when I got there, and according to the clock above the large fireplace, it was still before seven. Outside, the gravel crunched loudly underfoot in the undisturbed morning air. I half tiptoed back to the path Ruck and I had come down a few days before and then struck off in the opposite direction. Soon I was under the canopy of the beech trees, where the sunlight was still too weak to penetrate. Apart from the odd flurry of birdsong, there wasn't a sound to be heard. Though I had missed the spectacle of the bluebells, it was still beautiful here. Just as it had said in the library book, the path meandered around ancient trees that had been here long before the manor house and any of its inhabitants.

I walked on and on and was just beginning to think I had missed a turn when the trees abruptly opened out, the path widening to a clearing. Ahead of me were the remains of two cottages. Low-slung and built on one level, both were now missing their roofs. One was more tumbledown than the other, and, remembering Ruck's words, I saw it had offered itself up to the weeds. Just as he had said, the nettles were in rude health: thick and springy, each stem a finger's girth and covered in spines. As I got closer I recognised a clump of deadly nightshade growing amongst them. My father had shown me how to spot belladonna when I was small, and this was a beautiful specimen, though it was too early in the season for its berries to have darkened until they shone like beetles' backs.