Fiercombe Manor (44 page)

I hadn't consciously intended to go to the graveyard, but that was where I found myself. I suppose I'd long meant to see who was buried there, but had never quite got round to going. It was deserted as usual, the cheek-pink cherry blossom that should have fallen in May only now beginning to flutter to the grass as the wind tore through it.

I went from stone to stone with a feigned purposefulness, but the panic didn't subside as I moved around; instead it only grew with the pitch of the wind. To me, every grave seemed to belong to a woman, though that couldn't have been the case. Some of them must have been old, too, but all I could see were women who had died when they were young—them and their tiny infants. I couldn't see Elizabeth, though, nor Isabel. I went from stone to stone, my hair whipping around me and getting in my eyes, until I had inspected them all twice. Only a dozen were too old or too encrusted with lichen to read, those that were unevenly propped in a row against the walls of the chapel, like badly aligned teeth.

Then I saw it, so much bigger than the stones that my eyes had skimmed over it. Perhaps seven feet by four, it was a great hunk of stone set in its own corner of the graveyard, away from the rest. Surrounded by metal railings a foot high, the stone was grey
and impervious to weather, its edges as sharp as the day the stonemason had cut it. A marble plaque confirmed what I would have guessed: that I had found the final resting place of Edward Stanton and his newborn son, also Edward.

As abruptly as I'd wanted to leave my room, I now wanted to leave the graveyard. I stumbled away down the lane, the rhododendrons bobbing wildly as the gusts thrust amongst them. The only place I could think to go was the summerhouse, but before going inside, I stopped and took out the pieces of grey rubble I'd brought with me. I wanted rid of them. Raising my arm, I threw them into the stream, intending that they should be carried away by the fast-moving current. Instead they sank heavily to the bottom, incongruously jagged amongst the smooth pebbles.

It was like a tomb inside the summerhouse after the tearing, howling wind. I half ran up the stairs to get to the diary, though I don't know what I expected to find in it. If I'd hoped to find an entry about a new gown or a small kindness of Edward's—something that would reassure me, calm me—it wasn't to be. Unusually, the page I started reading was dated. Elizabeth had written in ink, and it was blurred in places, just as the doctor's notes had been after I'd had them so close to my skin and then wept over them. The date was June 1898. Midsummer, I realised, remembering Hugh Morton's words.

There it broke off, leaving the rest of the page blank.

I didn't want to read any more: I was afraid of what else I might find. I tucked the little book back into its hiding place and went back down the stairs before I could change my mind and find myself irresistibly drawn back to Elizabeth's words.

Still not wanting to return to the manor, I veered off Fiery Lane and entered the tall grasses at the far end of the Great Mead. It was at that moment that the thunder began to roll in slowly from the west, like the approach of a huge army. I kept going, my feet catching all the while, until the first drops of rain stopped me in my tracks. I had not felt rain on me for months, and those months felt like years. I looked at my arm, where a heavy drop had splashed, and instinctively put it to my lips. It tasted as my tears had, when I'd thought about my grandmother.

T
he long hand of the clock hesitated and then relented, finally marking the twenty minutes she had made herself wait for Edward to leave the valley. She rose and felt a pain like the one in the glasshouse earlier, except that this one was stronger, a shudder deep within. It was more than a cramp; it was a clutching right in the depths of her, and she put her hand out to the cabinet next to the bed to brace against it.

It could not be the baby yet: it was too early. A little less than five years ago, Isabel, reluctant to leave the dark, muffled sanctuary of her mother, as though she already had some intuition of what would happen once she did, had arrived late. It flashed across Elizabeth's mind that this baby wasn't just early, there was something wrong; but with all her might, she flung the thought away. An image of Isabel took its place. She mustn't forget Isabel. She had to find her.

Crossing the Great Mead took far longer than when she had crossed it that morning. The tall meadow grass, thick and lustrous from the recent rain, seemed intent on tripping her feet. It was past midday now, and the sun rode high, the early morning's gentle touch turned savage. After all that had passed between her and Edward,
she had forgotten her hat. Absurdly, she thought about the freckles that would scatter across her cheeks and how, when she had returned to the house, she would ask Edith to go to the kitchens and squeeze a lemon, so that the pursed-mouth juice would fade them.

It was just as she felt shame for this vanity when Isabel was hiding somewhere, tear-streaked and frightened, that a new wave of pain gripped her. She wondered if she could continue, looking back towards the grey house beyond the lake and gardens. But she was fractionally closer to the old manor now; she could already hear the bright burble of the stream. If she could reach Isabel, she could rest in the shade of the yew parlour. Isabel could fetch one of the old rugs or coverlets that had been abandoned in the cupboards and chests of the manor, dust incrementally turning them to rags. They could sit quietly together until the strange spasms of pain had passed.

She would be glad to see Ruck now, she thought, as she retraced the steps she had made so lightly this morning. The undulations of pain were now such that she would no longer care about his embarrassment at seeing his mistress so exposed and unseemly. But he was nowhere: the passage of rhododendrons, when she finally reached it, lay deserted. The blooms tangled over her, their beauty almost monstrous, their scent in the hot air enough to make her stagger. It was only the thought of Isabel that stopped her from lying down in the dirt and closing her eyes.

“Isabel!” she called. “Bel, where are you? Please come out.” Her voice was weak, echoing feebly off the walls of the chapel as she passed it. She wouldn't look at the gravestones marking the Stanton women lying underneath the luxuriant grass, dead from consumption, from tropical diseases contracted in the Indies, from childbirth.

“Isabel, please!” she cried, trying to hurry faster towards the manor as the pain receded briefly.

There was no one in the Tudor garden, though she felt, as she had here before, a finger's brush on the bare skin of her neck as she stumbled over the shadow line drawn by the yews. She knew it was her own fancy, a feminine notion that she would never dream of telling Edward, though once she might have done, right at the beginning. Perhaps he would have been charmed then.

Some photographs had been taken here in those early days, when they had picnicked here. She had asked for another of the manor by itself, catching it unawares as it slumbered peacefully in the afternoon sunshine. She had been entranced by the ancient house from her first glimpse of its golden stone. Where was that picture now? She had looked for it many times.

The pain came again as she pushed back the silvered wood of the broad door and stepped inside. Even after the shade of the yew parlour, she was blinded by the dark of the house's interior. She waited as her eyes adjusted and the spasms lowered in pitch, noticing for the first time how the fabric of her dress was sewn too tightly under her arms, chafing and pinching. She could smell herself—not almond oil or violets or rosewater but her own animal body, dark and sweet, sweat and blood. But it could not be blood, not yet.

“Isabel.” It was almost a whisper now.

A noise, a gentle creaking, spurred her on. Of course she would be in the nursery. Elizabeth pulled herself up each stair, knowing her waters must have broken. She could feel her silk undergarments rubbing the tender, scarred skin of her inner thighs as she lifted each leg.

When she reached the doorway, the little girl had her back to it, arms clamped around the neck of the beloved old rocking horse—so careworn compared to her new one, ordered from
London. She rocked him gently like an elderly pet, and the soft creaks were strangely comforting to Elizabeth too.

When Isabel turned, Elizabeth could see that the little girl's face was marked with trails of tears and grime. Shock entered her small face when she took in the sight of her mother, clutching the doorway as the pain reared up again to rage through her.

“Mama!” she cried and rushed towards Elizabeth, who gave in to the spasm and went down on her knees. Somewhere in the midst of the boiling pain, she had a clear instinct she had dreaded feeling again: knowledge that something was very wrong. She waited until the pain had eased enough to speak.

“My darling, you must listen to me carefully now,” she said, gripping the girl's narrow wrist. “You must be very brave. I know you will be, for me.”

“My father thinks I am not brave,” Isabel said, her voice high with terror.

“He is wrong about that, Bel. I know that you are as brave as anyone, as brave as a little lioness.

“Now, the baby is coming early. You must run as fast as you can and find your father. You must tell him where I am. Tell him to send one of the grooms for the doctor because the baby is coming too quickly. Do you understand, Bel?”

The little girl nodded as another wave of pain nearly toppled Elizabeth onto her side. She bit the inside of her cheek so she wouldn't scream and scare Isabel into senselessness. It lessened, just a little.

“Go now, my darling. Run the way you ran earlier. Do you remember, when you were looking for me?”

Isabel nodded again. “Shall I go past the lake or through the kitchen garden, Mama?”

“Whichever you think is fastest—I know you will choose the right one. But go now, as fast as the wind. Just remember to tell your father: the baby is coming too fast.”

It was only as Isabel's footsteps faded into nothing that Elizabeth remembered that Edward was gone from the valley, galloped away in anger and fear. She gave in and let herself collapse onto her side, barely registering the impact as her cheek met the dusty floorboards.

H
ow much time had passed was unclear. She had been hurled in and out of consciousness, the pain so bad that she prayed to die. Such agony could drive a woman out of her wits, she knew that. Whenever it descended a degree, she'd gratefully drifted away, feeling herself floating along a dark river, a cavernous gloom above her instead of the sky. She thought it must be the river Styx, deep in the underworld.

Something made her open her eyes. She looked up and saw the pale oval of Edith's face framed in the nursery doorway, her mouth a round O, her dark blue eyes black with fear. Behind her, gripping the maid's skirts with grimy fingers, was Isabel.

Elizabeth looked down and saw that she had stained the bare boards with her blood. It was thick in places, clotting on the surface rather than sinking darkly into the wood. She couldn't rouse herself to move her skirts so they lay more modestly. The pain had dulled to a low but powerful ache, the rhythm of the waves that had rocked her still discernible. She might have been alone for minutes or days.

“Oh, my lady,” whispered Edith, finally moving forward as if released from a spell. “The baby's come.”

Elizabeth couldn't hear anything after that, besides the rustle of stiff skirts as Edith crouched beside her and a high keening sound that escaped from Isabel as she flitted from wall to wall, too disturbed to be still. Lying there, Elizabeth registered only the silence, the air cold and viscous and resolutely unpierced by the tentative newborn cries that ought to have risen by then.

“He's dead, isn't he?”

She was unsure whether she had spoken aloud. There was no answer, and so she let go, feeling herself drift away again, away from the stench of the nursery and the horror etched into the faces that stared back at her.

F
rom that first heavy drop on my arm, the rain seemed to pause, gather its strength, and then throw itself down, like something from the tropics. In minutes I was soaked through, my blouse and skirt plastered to me, my hair streaming as though I'd just emerged from a river.

It was then that I felt it, a clench of pain in my abdomen that made me forget where I was for an instant, all my focus turned abruptly inward. This is it, I thought. This is the delayed result of my fall. I was losing the baby, and I would do so alone in the Great Mead, the earth beneath me inexorably saturated with rain.

I looked back towards the gable of the manor that I could just make out, a warm glimmer through the sheeting rain and beyond the dark holly bushes that seemed to crowd it from this angle. I didn't know what had drawn me to that still corner of the Great Mead, but I didn't want to be there now.