Fiercombe Manor (25 page)

He strode away, leaving Elizabeth alone. The words they'd exchanged had entirely blown away the soft gauze the champagne had laid over her. Though she was trembling with her own daring, she didn't regret them. They were the first truthful words they had spoken to each other for as long as she could remember, and she felt lighter for them.

Without Edward's body next to her, she realised that the last of the day's warmth had ebbed away. She was suddenly weak. Before anyone else could come and talk to her, she got slowly to her feet and walked away across the lawn, leaving behind a party that had diminished but was still hours from drawing to a complete close.

The stars and nearly new moon provided a surprising amount of light away from the torches and the part of the house that was open to guests and servants to-ing and fro-ing. Before she stepped through the unlocked double doors into the pitch-dark of the morning room, she looked back at the scene. Perhaps it was superstition, but in that moment, she felt convinced she would never see its like again.

She waited until the hallway was empty before starting up the stairs. The house felt like a warm bath after the cooling air of the
garden, the carpet runner on the stairs deep and soft under her shoes, which had begun to pinch. She slipped them off and closed her eyes with relief at the sensation of her swollen feet spreading, her toes sinking into the thick pile.

Instead of going along to her own rooms, she turned the other way at the top of the stairs, just as she had earlier. The large, light-filled nursery was a room that she had chosen for Isabel herself. Edward had wanted to keep it for guests, but she had insisted.

“Our child will be here with us every day,” she had said to him in the coaxing tone that she later seemed to lose the knack of. “A guest will stay, what, two or three nights, and it's they who enjoy these views and the best of the morning sun? I don't see the sense of that.” And she had got her way.

The nurserymaid slept in a smaller adjoining room, and no sound came from inside as Elizabeth put her ear to the door. It was not yet midnight, so she was unlikely to be asleep. She was probably downstairs again with the other servants, sneaking illicit sips of champagne and tucking into the poached salmon and slices of game terrine that the guests hadn't eaten.

Inside the nursery, Isabel's breathing was deep and regular, despite the hubbub of the party outside. The swell of its sound—a woman's abrupt shriek of laughter, a clash of glasses for a toast—was clearly audible through the window, which Isabel had opened as wide as it would go. Elizabeth imagined her little girl kneeling there in her nightgown, solemnly surveying the party from above. She wondered if Isabel had watched her, too. She would have been easy to find amongst the throng in her eau de nil dress.

She smoothed the child's hair back off her hot face. She could remember Isabel's first week in the world with pin-sharp clarity. The labour had been without complication: long and excruciating, certainly, but never dangerous. She remembered the shock she had
felt after waking from her first exhausted sleep as a mother; looking over and seeing a tiny creature swaddled in white, its eyes screwed shut and a deep furrow between almost invisible brows.

“That's your daughter there,” said Dr. Frith, Edward's old family doctor. She was glad he'd said it, because she couldn't quite believe she had produced such a miraculous thing.

“She's perfect,” he said. “And don't worry, a boy will come along soon enough.”

It wasn't until a week after the birth that something shifted inside her head, a cold iron bolt sliding into place. She concealed it at first, claiming a delayed fatigue that forced her to stay in bed most of the day. The baby was brought in to her, but she could no more rouse herself to comfort or feed Isabel than she could her feather bolster. In her mind the baby was no longer Isabel. She wasn't even a “she”; it was nothing to do with her.

Fathomless exhaustion turned to its opposite in the third week. She lay alone in the profound stillness of the hours before dawn, eyes open, unblinking and trained on the moon. If there was no moon, she stared at a slight warp in one of the glass panes of the window. She came to think of those nights like stretched dough, and saw again and again in her mind an image of Mrs. Wentworth rolling a fat lump of it out into a long, colourless snake, rolling and rolling, anointing it with flour all the while, until it was longer than the table was wide.

Then one day she found she couldn't bear to lie in one place for any length of time. She knew that if she did, then she would (and the phrase suddenly rang so loudly true) go out of her mind. Of course the behaviour this created—the pacing, the tapping of a foot if she had to sit, the old nursery rhymes and poems recited in an urgent whisper—made it seem as if she was already mad. They
did not understand that constant movement was the only thing that kept her from that.

She couldn't remember Edward in any of this. He must have been there; he must have been the one to call in a new doctor when Frith presumably admitted defeat. She couldn't even remember the second one's name, the one before Dr. Logan. He couldn't have lasted long.

Tonight, the party unspooling below, Isabel stirred in her sleep and muttered the tail end of a sentence Elizabeth didn't quite catch. She leant closer and breathed in her daughter's scent. She had lost the milky fragrance of babyhood, but she still smelt absolutely clean. Not just her skin and hair, which would have been bathed earlier, but the whole of her, inside and out. She was still so new. The others, if they had survived, would be newer still. Elizabeth folded that thought away.

She hoped more than anything that Isabel couldn't remember her first year. She prayed—and it was the only thing she'd ever truly prayed for—that her daughter's first week in the world, when Elizabeth was still well, had been the most important one to have got right. That those precious days rubbed out the ones that came after.

Whatever it was that she hadn't lately been able to recall, it had happened during that awful time, she suspected, and it was something much more important than Edward's absence. It wasn't the feelings she'd experienced then—indeed, she remembered those so clearly that her stomach often lurched in fear that it was not just a vivid memory but the madness itself, stealthily returned. The black well into which something enormous had fallen, so deeply that she couldn't even hear the echo of its splash—that was something else, something that had taken place outside her mind.

She rested her forehead on the pillow next to Isabel and strained to remember. She was certain it had something to do with her daughter. She thought it must be the reason that a letter had been written to Dr. Logan, who had come, had her husband sign his papers, and taken her away. Perhaps it was also the reason she'd been locked in her rooms two years later, when she was only grieving for a lost child. Whatever it was, it had changed things forever between Edward and her—even more than her illness had. Perhaps, if she could remember this event, it would begin to heal the complex rifts in their marriage. That, and the safe arrival of a baby boy.

L
eaving Mr. Morton's cottage and alone once more, I felt an inexplicable reluctance dragging in my belly as I descended towards Fiercombe. I hoped Mrs. Jelphs would be back by the time I got there, but the valley felt deserted, with nothing touched or moved since I'd left a few hours before. If only Tom would come back, I found myself thinking, and then tutted aloud at my own silliness. Feeling softly towards Thomas Stanton was hardly any better than feeling wistful about James.

I thought of taking a nap, but then remembered the summerhouse and its diary. As soon as I did, I felt a powerful pull and knew I would have to go. Having seen the photographs in Hugh Morton's book, I felt as though Elizabeth had edged just a little closer to me, her presence in the valley more tangible now.

The room when I got there was exactly as I had left it, and I wondered if anyone knew about it after all. Anyone still here, anyway. I turned back to the front of the little book and skimmed over the entry I had read before. What followed was a shopping list of sorts and then a competent but incomplete sketch of the view through the narrow window behind me. I kept turning pages at
random, but stopped when a longer entry jumped out at me. Unusually, it had been written in ink.

There was no date, but suddenly there was a little girl of a year old. Elizabeth had been right about carrying a girl, after all. I turned to the next entry, realising that time passed unevenly in the diary, with whole months frustratingly lost. Not that she had written it to be read, of course. Guilt stabbed me then, as I recalled the feeling that I was being watched in the manor, that eyes other than mine might have read my own private thoughts. It didn't stop me from reading on, though, as I had with the note in the sewing box. I couldn't help it.