Fiercombe Manor (21 page)
Authors: Kate Riordan
Inside it was much darker, the windows set deep into the stone and not very large. When my eyes adjusted, I realised I was standing in a space that took up the entirety of that floor. At one end, I could see a narrow spiral staircase ascending out of sight. There was nothing in the room at all, and so I decided to try upstairs, holding tightly to a thick rope fastened to the wall at intervals by brass rings. I paused to listen, and through the thick stone I could only just make out the burble of the stream. Inside, it was deathly quiet.
The room on the next floor was empty too, though it smelt less like a damp church up there. I decided to carry on up to the top floor, and stopped short when I reached the last step. This room was furnished, if spartanly. A rose-pink chaise longue stood in the middle of it. There were curtains in a similar fabric at the window, though they had been pulled right back so they couldn't be seen from outside. A small covered stool was next to the chaise, as though someone had placed it there yesterday to rest their feet upon. I drew closer, and the illusion of recent occupation dissolved a little. The upholstery was faded and water-stained in places, and dust had gathered in the folds of the fabric.
I sat gingerly down. The narrow window behind me faced west, allowing the last of the sun to bathe the little room in a warm glow. I looked around, drinking it all in properly.
On one wall hung a few framed picturesâtwo pretty country scenes and a stormy seascape that didn't match. Other items were dotted about, too: a jug and chipped bowl on a console table, a dozen or so small volumes lining a shelf hung at eye level, and a sprig of long-ago dried flowers pinned to the beam above me. They were grey and desiccated, but I thought they might have been lavender
once. I crossed to the shelf and saw that the books' spines had faded in the sun: scarlet bleached to palest pink, teal to robin's egg. I pulled out one at random and heard something fall down behind it as I did. It was another volumeâthis one smaller, and bound in what would once have been fine calfskin. No title or author was marked on the spine, and the cut edges of the pages were speckled with damp and yellowed with age.
I took it with me back to the chaise and held it up to catch the last of the day's light. I knew I couldn't stay long, or I would be stranded in the dark, but I felt unwilling to go until I'd looked inside. I turned one and then another page before I realised they were not blank but written on with what must have been a hard pencil, the writing faint and pale silver where it hadn't faded away completely. I peered more closely, and eventually my eyes managed to pick up the thread of it, to distinguish the elaborate curls from the spiked downstrokes. I turned back to the beginning.
I have stolen away this afternoon to be alone. My husband does not like me to come here, to the old manorânot when such a fine house, full of everything I should ever need or want, is just on the other side of the Great Mead. He does not know about my secret room here in the old countinghouseâthe summerhouse, as we know it now. If he did, I'm sure he would insist that it be closed up. I am so big with child now that I can barely squeeze up the stairs, so perhaps he will soon have his way, and I will have to stay, confined in that big grey house he is so proud of.
I wonder if this child will be a boy, a son and heir for Edward? I haven't told him yet, but I believe it to be a
daughter, a daughter who will inherit his golden hair, his eyes of pale blue. I think he will not mind that too much this time; there is not much urgency in him yet. Only next time . . . next time I think I must produce a son.
Yesterday I found the strangest thing in Edward's desk. I had run out of ink, and instead of disturbing the servants for such a trifle, I went to the library myself. I looked for a new bottle in the drawers and found instead a dozen or so journals of the kind that Edward likes to read. He prides himself on reading widelyâboxes of pamphlets arrive here on every conceivable subject, from architecture to zoology, perhaps so no one in his London club can accuse him of being unsophisticated and provincialâso I didn't think anything of what seemed to be a new interest in medicine, not at first. But then I saw that each volume was concerned with a particular, narrow aspect of it: the asylum.
I haven't yet come to the strangest part of itâI feel reluctant even to write it down. In amongst the journals was a slim book, though quite expensively produced.
Portraits of an Oxfordshire Asylum
was the title stamped on the front. I imagined illustrations of a forbidding building, wards with rows of empty beds and bare cells, but I was quite wrong. Inside were perhaps twenty portrait photographs of the asylum's inmates, all of them women. They were accompanied by a short description of each woman's condition, her age, and the circumstances in which she had found herself before admittance. Many of the portraits were set out in pairsâtwo of the same womanâone captured in the throes of madness, the other a neat, unremarkable portrait that might have
been of anyone's daughter or mother. Some were quite unrecognisable after the madness had left them.
I pored over this book until it grew quite dark outside, and I feared Edward would return and find me there. But there was one page I couldn't help but turn to again before I left the library. A woman of my own age from a town on the border of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, not more than a day's travel from here. There was no second portrait of her; the book only showed her in a desperate condition. Her hair was dirty and tangled and half hacked off at the front, as though she had done it herself in a rage. The expression in her eyes was not wild but empty, the overall effect one of desolation.
They had seated her next to a window through which you could see nothing but brickâpresumably the walls of another of the asylum's buildings. The description next to it said her name was Emily and that she came from a good family, but that her neglect of her dress, particularly of her hair, had been the first signs of an insanity that had gradually worsened. It said that she had been there for two years already. I hope I am wrong, but I believe the lack of any other picture indicates that, at least at the time of publication, Emily was not recovered. I wonder what she is doing now, some forty miles to the east. Is she still there? Perhaps she is dead.
In the introduction to the book, the authorâa Dr. Iain Loganânoted that the taking of the portraits was viewed by the women of the asylum as a great privilege and reward for good behaviourâa pleasure to be anticipated and savoured. He wrote as though they were wayward children who only needed to be brushed and beribboned to forget
their melancholia or ignore the voices in their minds. Can this really be so? To me they all looked sad, so dreadfully sad and gloomy and hopelessâeven the most smartly turned out of them, a woman of sixty who wore a neat cap and a plain dress too big for her shrunken frame, a Bible in her hands as though she had been piously reading when the photographer came upon her, except that the book had been placed in her hands the wrong way up.
I must leave this soon and return to the house. I just turned to look out the window behind me and saw that the sun had sunk almost to the top of the valley's ridge, a great ball of crimson the tallest beeches are running their fingers through. I will be missed if I do not hurry. Edward returned from London two days ago and is more proprietorial than I remember him, his hands on my belly to see if the child had grown even before he removed his coat.
He came to me last night but wouldn't touch me, even though I wanted him to. He said we might damage the child inside. Instead he made me lie above the sheets while he examined me, even pulling up my nightgown until it was around my waist so that he could better see my swollen stomach. I felt shame instead of desire then, and wondered what medical books he had brought back with him from London. He said it must be a boy from the way it lies, but I do not think so.
Edith says that . . .
But that was all I could see. The light had dimmed until I could no longer make anything out. I looked up and saw it had grown quite black in the recesses in the room, deep shadows hiding whatever might lurk there. I tried to quell the animal fear that swelled
in me when I realised I had marooned myself, just as I had told myself I wouldn't, but I had always been afraid of the dark as a child and the old fear flooded through me then, shortening my breath and making my heart thud. I left the diary on the chaise and felt my way to the staircase, my hands flailing blindly for the rope.
Slowly, slowly, I picked my way downstairs and out along the lane until I felt the cold iron of the stile. From there it was easier, my hearing telling me where the stream was. When I came out from under the cover of the trees that lined the water's banks, I realised with the glad rush of seeing an old friend that the moon was riding high and bright. Compared to the underworld gloom of the summerhouse's stairs, my path through the Tudor garden and round to the kitchen door might as well have been broad daylight, such was the contrast.
I jumped as I turned from fastening the door quietly behind me, my breathing ragged with relief. Mrs. Jelphs stood there, her pallor stark against the gloom of her dress and the unlit kitchen behind her.
“Where have you been, Alice? I was very worried.”
Her voice shook, but with anger or fear I wasn't sure. I didn't think there was any way she could have seen me leave the summerhouse, so it could only be fear. It looked as though the simple cause of her anxietyâsomething I was learning could be as easily tripped as a faulty circuitâwas my being out alone in the dark. As oddly oversolicitous as she could be, and as hemmed in as that made me feel, I still didn't want her to be upset. Besides, I think I already knew that there was a great deal more to it than simple concern for a girl she still barely knew; it didn't add up otherwise. No, this fear I had woken in Mrs. Jelphs was an old one, just like my own fear of the dark, I knew it. Why it had latched on to me, however, remained a mystery.
“I'm sorry, Mrs. Jelphs,” I said, reaching forward to pat her arm awkwardly. “Really I am. I just went for a little walk, but then the night came down so suddenly. I'm sorry if you were worried.”
She stared at me so penetratingly then that I had to look away.
“If you're sure you're all right, then I think I will go to bed,” she said eventually, her voice quite wrung dry.
“I've made you anxious and kept you from your rest,” I said contritely, wishing I knew what memories were coalescing with the present in her mind. “I won't do it again, not so late. I'm really very sorry.”
“No, no, it's quite all right,” she said absently. “It's just that I mustn't . . . I worry, that's all.”
With a last fearful look at me, she turned and disappeared into the passage. The name in the diary came to me as I watched her retreating back: Edith. I hadn't taken it in immediately, but of course the diary had been referring to Mrs. Jelphs. A Mrs. Jelphs four decades younger. An Edward had been mentioned too. My instinct about the summerhouse had been right: the diary was surely Elizabeth's. I pictured the pale silver handwriting, fading to nothing in the dying light. It had been altered by the pencil she used, but yes, I thought it was probably the same hand I had seen on the note secreted away in the sewing box.
I wondered if the little room had never been cleared because no one else knew about it. But then what had Mrs. Jelphs said on our walk? That it had been something of a sanctuary or a refuge once upon a time? So
she
had known. Was it a shrine then, to a mistress gone from the valley but never straying far from her thoughts? I didn't know, and I didn't dare ask and upset her further. Perhaps the diary would tell me.
That night I dreamt not about Elizabeth but about James, waking in the first grey intimations of dawn and feeling bereft
when I realised I couldn't see him again. I hadn't dreamt about him at all since my arrival in the valley, and I'd thanked my subconscious mind for protecting me like that. He was just out of sight in the dream, but I knew it was him, and we were easy together as we walked through the Great Mead, where frost sparkled and crunched underfoot. There was a boy with us, our child, though I couldn't see him properly in the glare from the low winter sun. It was one of those potent dreams that throws you, and on waking I tried hard to return to that glistening meadow, squeezing my eyes shut and pulling the blankets over my headâuntil I did finally go back to sleep properly and dreamt of nothing.
When I woke from my dreamless second sleep, I knew it was hotter again. I sat up and pushed the covers away, feeling the sweat only slightly cool on my skin as I did. I remembered the diaryâwhat Elizabeth had said about being sure she was carrying a girlâand thought about my conviction that I was carrying a boy, something that had only been strengthened by my dream.
I could have drifted back to sleep, so soporific was the air, but I forced myself to get up so I didn't waste a day off, splashing water on my face until I felt awake. By the time I had finished my breakfast, taking my time because the whole day stretched out luxuriantly and I felt like I had forever, the temperature was 71 degrees. It was Sunday, another week gone. I had finished the polishing, and Mrs. Jelphs had been pleasantly surprised. In making it shine again, however pointlessly, I felt I had carved a small hollow for myself there in the valley.
Outside, the sky was already a deep, flawless blue, the clarity of light the painterly kind raved about by artists summering in the Mediterranean. In Gloucestershire it seemed too intense.
“Isn't it lovely again?” Mrs. Jelphs said to me as I returned to the kitchen from checking the thermometer. She seemed quite recovered from the previous evening.
“It can't last much longer, surely?” I said.
While Mrs. Jelphs was at church, I spent the morning reading a book, I forget what now, and trying to catch up with writing in my diary, though I was still strangely reluctant to write in it openly. I couldn't get comfortable wherever I sat; mindful of the glorious weather, I went with a cushion to the formal garden, though I would have felt more rested inside, in the small parlour. I lay back as far as I dared on the rotten old bench facing the house, my book resting on my swollen stomach, the hot skin stretched tight across it.