Fiercombe Manor (39 page)

Dr. Logan's stay and, before that, the Christmas after her release from his asylum both seemed a lifetime ago, but then so did the previous night's party. She remembered how she had lounged in the bath chair out on the lawn, under the sky—so different from the close atmosphere of the glasshouse. She found it hard to believe that had been less than twelve hours before.

The glasshouse now felt very different from that night. The sky above was now a soft blue, and—yes—she could hear the fountain stutter into life; someone had turned it on. It felt peaceful; what had happened in this very spot had not stained it. She tested her mind, very gently, by remembering how she had wished then that she could vanish under the surface of the lake, but it was just that—a memory—and there was not even a shadow of any inclination to do it. At the thought she felt nothing but fear—not only for herself, but for Isabel and for her unborn child.

As if he could hear her, a sharp pain lit up the underside of her abdomen, and she gasped aloud. The glasshouse suddenly felt airless, and when no more pain came, she got slowly, gingerly, to her feet. She had three weeks yet, so it could not be that, could it? No.
It was probably just the strain of his weight and the awkwardness of her position on the floor.

She walked slowly back towards the house, her arm underneath her stomach as if to support the child inside her. She moved as though another flutter could come, but the baby was as still again as he had been yesterday. Anxiety about that, and the thought of returning to the house and Edward, flooded her chest, and she began to breathlessly hum a tune—something Edith was always singing—to distract herself from it. She stopped to snap off the dead head of a rose and wondered if a little gardening could possibly make her feel better. Being outdoors so often did. It was much warmer now, the sun suddenly quite fierce, and she decided that she must fetch her wide-brimmed hat if she was going to stay outside.

Edith had been in to tidy her rooms, and Elizabeth allowed herself to sit a moment on the bed. The windows had been opened, and she could hear the fountain from here too. It was a soothing sound, and she considered lying back and going to sleep. She was just about to take off her shoes and do just that—just for half an hour or so—when Edward appeared at the doorway. He hesitated, apparently unsure whether to cross the threshold.

“I looked for you,” he said eventually, “but you'd gone.”

“Come in, Edward.” She gestured for him to sit on a small velvet chair next to her dressing table. His legs were too long for it, and he soon got up again, perhaps feeling at a disadvantage in it.

“You might like to know that our guests have left,” he said.

She clapped a hand to her mouth. “I forgot about them. I—I went to the—”

“It's no matter,” he said shortly. “They were fed, and now they have gone. I said you were exhausted after last night and couldn't be disturbed. No one noticed anything was amiss.”

“Thank you.”

“Where did you go?”

She paused and then looked up at him fearfully. “I went to the glasshouse.”

His countenance darkened immediately. “So you do remember then?”

“Oh, Edward, I do now, but never before this morning.” Her voice was strangled, and louder than she meant it to be.

He strode over to the door and closed it. “For god's sake, lower your voice. One of the servants will hear you.”

“I'm sorry,” she whispered.

He came closer but remained standing. “Do you understand now, finally, why I had to send for Dr. Logan the first time? Both times, in fact?” he asked.

She continued to look down at her clasped hands, but she could feel his gaze intently upon her.

“I would never have hurt Isabel,” she said.

“Elizabeth, if you say that, I cannot think you have recalled the episode accurately.”

“No, I remember everything. It has all come back. But I only took the baby, I only took
Isabel
, because if I'd left her in the nursery, she would have carried on crying and woken the nurserymaid. And she would have wondered what I was doing in the middle of the night and—”

“There were shards of glass in the folds of her blanket.”

“She was not injured, Edward. Not a hair on her head. Even in my—even though I was not myself—I made sure of that.”

He sat down heavily in the small chair, as if too fatigued to mind any longer that it was too low for him.

“I never dreamt, when we married, that something like this should happen. That there would be such a blight on our marriage.”

At this, she thought she might cry, from a strong blend of frustration and sadness, and so fixed her gaze on the nearest window. If she hadn't delayed, she might have been out in the garden by now, her hat on and the pruning scissors in her hand.

She dragged in her breath shakily. “I am sorry I have given you cause to regret,” she said. “But you must believe me when I say that if there had been anything I might have done to stay well after Isabel's birth, I wouldn't have hesitated. It wasn't me, Edward, it was something quite apart from me.”

He sighed. “Yes, I have read on the subject. Who has not, in the last ten years? The melancholy or mania that can follow the birth of a child. Even precede it in some cases. It seems that there is scarcely a village in the land that does not contain a new mother who has been similarly afflicted. Even in Stanwick and Painswick: it is practically an epidemic. There are many husbands, rich and poor, who have been in fear for their children's lives. I had no choice.” He hung his head.

“I asked you a question last night, do you remember?” she said softly.

He didn't reply, so she continued. “I asked you what you would do if it happened again, if I were to become . . . unsound . . . unbalanced in my mind again.”

“Yes,” he said, with great weariness.

“You said that you would do as you see fit. But I don't know what that means. I don't know if it means that I will have to go away again, or if I will be locked away in my own home. I must know, so that I can prepare for it. I think you might give me that.”

“I do not understand why you persist in this black way of thinking,” he shouted, his voice breaking on the last syllable. “Your very prophecies of doom make their realisation more likely.”

He stood again and began to pace in front of the fireplace.

She watched him as he did, feeling strangely detached from yet another frank conversation with her husband. How strange that two of them should come in such quick succession. Or not: perhaps the dam had been breached, and this was how it would be between them now. Perhaps it would be no worse than the silences.

“Edward, I think I must ring for Edith and ask her to bring me some food and perhaps a tonic. I feel quite faint.”

He crossed to her and picked up one of her hands. She thought he might hold it to his cheek, but he turned it over and pinched the wrist hard between his thumb and middle finger.

“Your pulse is far too rapid,” he said after half a minute. “Try and calm yourself, for the child's sake.”

She nodded meekly.

“Did it occur to you to eat something before you set off across the Great Mead this morning?”

She looked down, afraid to anger him further. In fact, she hadn't touched a thing since the previous day.

“No,” she admitted. “Isabel and I were going to have breakfast, but then you wanted to see me in the library, and—”

“Please do not blame me for your inability to look after yourself. You know very well that you have a marked tendency to hysteria, and yet you rush about without sustenance just a few weeks before you are due to give birth. I have been far too indulgent with you. I always have been. I should have insisted that your confinement begin weeks ago, with bed rest and none of this . . . wandering about. Well, I shall do so now, and you will not try to persuade me otherwise.”

During this speech he had grown quite red in the face.

“Edward, you are right. I have not been as careful as I should have been. But please, please do not bid me to stay in my bed with
that man watching me. You know how I . . . you know.” A great shuddering sob escaped her, taking her by surprise.

At this he dropped her hand, which he had distractedly been holding all the while.

“Elizabeth, you must calm yourself. I say again, you must think of the child. I can only hope that a son will take after—”

He stopped and coloured.

She looked up at him, the tears drying on her face.

“That a son will take after you rather than his mother? Is that what you were going to say?”

He raised his chin defiantly.

“I am not to be vilified for speaking of what is both true and desirable. Surely you, as his mother, would not wish any inherited affliction on your child, especially the taint of madness.”

“The taint of madness? Edward, you speak of me, your wife, your Elizabeth, as a kind of malign influence.”

“Is it not true,” he said, his voice rising again to a shout, full of mingled anger and fear, “is it not true that your mother's cousin was mad? That your mother herself was given to attacks of nerves and other . . . hysterical maladies? I do not blame you for it, but it is there nonetheless, a hereditary stain passed from woman to woman, down the female line. Isabel—”

“What of Isabel?” she said sharply.

He sighed and rubbed at his hair until it stood up in tufts at the back.

“You know I love our daughter. I have been her sole parent during your illnesses, and I have done my duty by her. But she is so much like you. Her hair, the shade of her eyes, they deceive no one—she is your daughter to her very marrow. She is not robust as I was at her age. She is fearful, fearful already, a tiny child.”

A noise then—something falling or being knocked over—made them both start.

“What was that?” said Edward. “Is someone at the door?”

He strode over and wrenched it back, but the hallway was empty.

“It is nothing,” said Elizabeth. “Perhaps something fell off one of the shelves in my dressing room.” Her mind was going over the words she suspected he had always wanted to say. Even so, it had wounded her, hearing them aloud.

Perhaps grateful for the interruption, the slight loosening of the brittle tension in the room, Edward continued to look for the source of the noise, peering out the window and then crossing to the hidden door of the dressing room, wallpapered to match the rest of the room. Inside hung Elizabeth's dresses, with shelves below and above them for slippers and boots and hats in their smart, cylindrical boxes.

As he turned the handle and pulled the door towards him, a rush of movement exploded through the gap. It was Isabel, who had evidently been there all along. She liked to play inside sometimes, amongst the lace and the raw silk, the taffeta and the muslin, all of it infused with the fading scent of her mother.

“Isabel! Come back here at once!” shouted Edward, as the little girl ran out of the bedroom and into the hallway. “Isabel!”

She had appeared and then vanished again so quickly that it was almost as if she had never been, the shining, rippling silk of her hair the only glimpse Elizabeth caught of her. She knew where her child would run to, though, and she would not tell her husband.

“That child,” he exclaimed, his face redder still, “has been spying on us.”

“She is not yet five,” Elizabeth replied curtly. “She probably fell asleep in there and then was too afraid to show herself.”

He was not listening. “I will go to Stanwick,” he said, almost to himself. “I said I would call on the colonel today or tomorrow.”

His tone was terse; she knew he was suddenly desperate to leave the valley. Perhaps he thought that one day, if only he rode away far and hard enough, he would return to a different sort of wife—someone who would ask nothing of him but that she be at his side.

“I will be back late this afternoon, so I will not want luncheon. Make sure that you eat some and remember what I said.”

“But Edward, before you go, you must tell me. You have not answered my question.”

“I must not do anything,” he replied coldly, his face now impassive. He is just like his name and just like his house, she thought. Stanton: place of stone.

“Elizabeth, are you even listening to me? I said, you are my wife, and you will do as I have asked. Do not let me find out that you have left your room against my express wishes.”

As he left, full of righteous indignation, she wondered what he would tell the colonel and what the colonel would say in return. She had faith that the old man would defend her, even if Edward didn't want to listen to it.

She decided to watch the clock on her mantel for twenty minutes, the amount of time she calculated it would take Edward to change into his riding clothes and call for his horse to be saddled up and brought round. After that, it would be only a matter of minutes before he had sped down the gravel drive and up through the beech woods to come out onto Fiery Lane. From there it was less than a mile up to the village that perched on the ridge of the combe.

As the time crawled by, she retraced the steps of her and Edward's conversation, hearing it anew as Isabel would have heard it. She thought of her little girl, hidden in the dressing room and hearing the ugly words Edward had uttered about her mother's family—madness,
hysteria, and inherited affliction—and thanked god that Isabel was too young to understand them. She would have understood enough, though. A sensitive child like Isabel would not have needed to know the precise definition of the words to have fully comprehended the fear and contempt in her father's voice as he spoke them.

Elizabeth's own father would never have said such things, and Edward knew it. The contrasts between the two men, during the half dozen occasions she had been able to observe them together, were marked. She had noticed it most the day they had all picnicked by the manor. Edward strode about, complaining first about the spot the servants had picked to lay out the rugs and then about the contents of the basket.