The Pierced Heart: A Novel (14 page)

I turned away, towards the water, a little ashamed. Nothing in the world would have induced me to tell this girl my past; I wished to leave all that life behind me, on the farther side of the sea.

“That is one reason I come here so early,” she continued. “When the weather is good my maid will bring me up here in our donkey-cart, and I can sit here with Jip and watch the sun rise, and see scarcely
anyone until she comes again to bring me home. The air is so clear and restorative in the early morning. Or it is usually so.”

She coughed then for some moments, and held her handkerchief to her face, and when her hand dropped to her lap I saw there were two spots of blood on the white linen. And then I was sorry, for I knew what that meant, and I saw in her eyes that she, too, knew it, and yet was reconciled to it.

She folded the handkerchief calmly, though her breath was becoming every moment more laboured. “If you will forgive me, I think I should return. It is no doubt the effect of last night’s storm. I do not know if you were abroad, but I am told the vessel that came in was all but given up for lost. My father said that one of the old sailors claimed only the devil could have brought that ship home.”

She was by then coughing so wretchedly that I feared we could not possibly return to the town without some assistance, and looked about anxiously for someone I might call to. But there being no-one nigh and her maid not expected for more than an hour, I had no choice but to offer her my arm and hope we could descend the steps in time. She leaned heavily against me as we slowly traced the long path back down towards the town, pausing more and more frequently to catch her breath, and it was half an hour more before we reached the tall and handsome house by the harbour that she told me was her home. The maid who answered my ring looked at Miss Holman in alarm, calling out at once for her master, and the last thing I saw before the door closed was a tall handsome man in a formal coat rushing down the passage towards Dora and shouting for the footman to go for the doctor.

My own father was scarcely less distressed when he opened the door of our own cottage.

“Where have you been?” he cried, seizing me by the shoulder. “I have been half-frantic with worry—I thought you had walked again in your sleep and I have been combing the streets for hours, fearing I might turn the next corner and find you as I found you once before—or
the victim of some even worse fate. You are
ill
, Lucy, how could you leave the house without informing me?”

I thought then, too late, that I might have left him a note.

“I am sorry, Papa. I woke at dawn and the sunrise was so beautiful. I have only been walking in the town.”

He turned and went back into the sitting-room and sat down heavily on the sopha, and when I followed him I saw that he had his head in his hands. “You owe it to me to be more careful. Remember what I promised your mother on her death-bed. That I would not allow you out of my sight. All these years, I have kept that promise.”

I sat down next to him and took his hand. “And all these years I have needed that loving care, but now I am a grown woman. I know my mother feared what might befall me alone in the crowds of Vienna, but what harm could come to me here? Indeed, it seems to be entirely the opposite, for I have found myself a friend.”

“A friend?” said my father abruptly, looking up. “But you know no-one here. Who is this
friend
?”

I hastened to reassure him, describing my encounter with Miss Holman, and the house where I had returned with her, and he seemed a little appeased, saying he knew of the family, and her father was a widower and a man of some repute in the neighbourhood. He said at last that he would have a lock affixed at once to my bedroom door, and gave me his permission to call the next day and enquire after Miss Holman’s health, and then we changed the subject, by silent consent, and I went to make the breakfast.

7 A
PRIL

It has been two weeks now, and my Dora and I have met every day. When she has been well enough we have walked a little together and she has shown me the town, the shops selling the pretty ammonites that stud the cliffs hereabouts, and the jewellery of jet that is another of this district’s claims to renown. We bought each other gifts that day, matching brooches of intricate carved flowers, and I have mine on the desk before me as I write these words. But she has been too
wearied to walk much, and as a consequence we have spent our hours sitting on that bench I now think of as our own. I have laid new flowers every day on my mother’s grave, and I have thrown a little ball for Jip, but mostly we have simply sat together in a comfortable silence, looking down at the harbour and the town, and the changing character of the sea, as the wind and the clouds and the water blur and separate into all the colours of the sky.

I do not think I will ever tire of that view, and Dora laughed at me yesterday, saying that I had not even explored the abbey yet, and if I wished, she felt strong enough in the pale new sunshine, to show it to me herself. And so we walked at her slow pace up to the broken salt-bitten cloisters where the monks once prayed, and worked, and sang, and now lie sleeping beneath the thin dry grass. It was a cold day, and there were few visitors wandering the desolate nave, save one or two hardy young men, one of whom tipped his hat to us as we passed, in the most serious fashion. And once or twice I glimpsed the figure of an older, taller man striding ahead of us, followed—or at least so I thought—by a large black dog. I think Jip saw it, too, because he retreated suddenly to his mistress’s side, growling and snarling.

“Jip, Jip!” she cried gaily, “I do declare you grow more like Dora Spenlow’s bad-tempered pug every day!”

I hastened to excuse her pet, saying I believed Jip was only seeking to protect her, but by then the man and the dog were nowhere to be seen and she teased me, saying I was seeing ghosts. I laughed, then, in my turn, but I could not smile, and I think she guessed I was troubled in some way by her words, for she laid her hand kindly on my arm and said that Alice would be waiting with the cart, and it was time to return for luncheon.

“And you are to eat with us today! Papa has expressly asked me to invite you.” And as I opened my mouth in demurral, “Do not worry. We will send a message to your father so he will not be concerned.”

There was a little colour in her cheeks as she said this, and it struck me that her breathing had likewise been less strained, despite the exertions of our excursion. I have never had a friend of my own before—never had someone my own age I could talk with, and laugh
with—but I am sure that the improvement in my own spirits these last days is in no small measure due to my Dora’s companionship, so perhaps it may have been the same for her. I know only that I have dreamed no dream since we came to this town, and neither waked nor walked by night.

And just as I have never had a friend of my own, I have never dined in a house not my home, and I confess I was a little daunted by the prospect of meeting Dora’s family. But my fears were groundless. They were so very kind, so very energetic, so very lively, I had no time to feel gauche or in the way, and by the time the roast mutton was being carved by Mr Holman it seemed as if I had known them half my life. Dora has a sister some five years younger than herself, and a brother two years older, who has unruly brown hair, and inky fingernails, and a ready smile. He is training to be a lawyer, like his father, which I suppose must explain the ink, but he confided in me that if left to his own inclination he would far rather be a poet. He has written one part of a most ambitious work on the subject of the sack of Rome by the Vandals which he promised to show me, though I noticed his sisters seemed not to take his literary ambitions very seriously, and ragged him mercilessly upon his lofty choice of subject, saying he had written several hundred lines and yet still not concluded even his prolegomena.

Ever since I learned that Dora had no mother, I have kept studiously from that subject, knowing how much it pains me to talk of my own, but there was no such reticence in Bourne House—the late Mrs Holman smiled down benignly upon us from her portrait over the mantelpiece, and was talked of by them all without the slightest awkwardness. It was as if they kept her alive by the simple expedient of treating her as though she were still among them, and it seemed to me that the house was the happier for it. And when they told tales of their many elderly and eccentric relations, it struck me that I knew hardly anything of my own wider family, and resolved to ask my father
of them when I returned. After our meal, young Mr Holman offered to escort me back to the cottage, and I found myself blushing in quite the silliest way, and I know I must have looked very stupid as I assured him that I was quite happy to walk the few yards home alone.

I was still preoccupied by this exchange—going through it again in my mind and wishing I had the saying of it over again and more sensibly—when I turned my key in our own lock, and heard the sound of voices. My father’s voice and another man’s, speaking low, so that I could not hear what it was he said. I closed the door silently behind me and went towards the sitting-room. The door was ajar and I could see my father standing by the fire, and opposite him, on a hard-backed chair, a tall man in a dark coat with thin grey strands of hair and a blotched and haggard face. I took a step back then, hardly knowing what I did, and my father looked up.

“Lucy? Are you there?”

I did not move—could not move.

“Lucy?” my father said again, coming to open the door. “It is unlike you to skulk in the passage like a housemaid. Come and meet our distinguished visitor.”

I looked at Father in sudden apprehension—if I was behaving in an uncharacteristic fashion then he, too, was speaking in a way I had never heard before. He took my hand—I might almost say roughly—and drew me after him into the room, and stood me before the man in black.

“This is my daughter, sir. This is Lucy.”

I have sat here now, for near half an hour, my pen in my hand, trying to find the words to express the effect that man’s presence had upon me. His appearance was unprepossessing, of that there is no doubt, but I am not so easily disquieted by the surfaces of things, knowing from experience how deceptive they can be. There was something repellent about him, but even that repellence had in it a quality of compulsion. I knew at once that this man had the power to compel
the gaze—draw it and hold it until he himself chose the moment of dismissal, and I thought, for the first time since we left Vienna, of that spinning glass ball and how it would seize tiny pieces of metal in its invisible grasp, and hold them so hard they could not be torn away.

I stood there, staring at the floor, as my father introduced the man by some grand title that I did not catch, and explained to me, slowly and deliberately, that he had come expressly to see me—that we were fortunate that His Excellency was in England, having disembarked at Grimsby only a few days before. That he was an eminent scientist and had made a study of cases such as mine and might hold the key to my recovery—

“But I am already recovered,” I said quickly, looking up at my father. “I am quite well now—I have no need of another doctor—”

“I am not a doctor, Miss Lucy,” said the man, in a low rasping voice.

“It was our new spectacle,” I continued, still staring at my father, “the ball of glass—that was what ailed me—I have not walked in my sleep once since we left it behind—and now I no longer need perform ever again—”

“I’m afraid you are mistaken,” said my father quietly. “I brought you here to convalesce and recoup your spirits, but there will come a time not far hence when we will return to our former life. When we will
have
to return.”

“But
why
?” I cried. “I am happy here—I am
well
here.”

“Now you are being self-indulgent. And, indeed, selfish. Where do you think the money comes from to pay for this house? For your clothes? The food on the table? We have to earn our bread, Lucy, and the only way we may do that is by the exercise of our craft. You have a duty to yourself, and to
me
, to return in due course to Vienna and play your full part—your full and
usual
part—in the success of our enterprise. I invited our visitor here with that end in mind, and I expect you to give him whatever assistance he needs to effect it.”

He had never spoken to me so sternly before. It was as if some
monster had taken my darling father’s place, some monster with no care for my feelings—no interest in my happiness. As if someone else was giving voice to my father’s words, just as we gave sound to our counterfeits of the dead.

“What must I do?” I said at last, my voice small.

“It is not so very daunting, my dear young lady,” said the man. “We will start with questions only.”

“What questions?” I said, looking for the first time into those strange silver eyes, and feeling my heart begin to beat harder.

“About yourself. About the nature of your indisposition. When it occurs and the form it takes. What seems to exacerbate it. Questions such as these. That is not so very distressing, I believe?”

I looked away. I did not want to talk to this man about myself, knowing by some instinct that he had the strength to prise from me all my secrets—that he could force into words those hidden fears I have striven so hard to suppress, and which, once uttered, I might no longer have the capacity to quell.

“I will try,” I said, a little sullenly.

“Good,” he replied. “Now we may hope to make some progress.”

He told my father, then, that he must absent himself from the room and draw all the curtains close. I saw my father start a little anxiously at this, but the man insisted that these preparations were indispensable to the success of his method, and my father eventually nodded and did as he was bidden.

The man then drew one of the hard-backed chairs to the centre of the room and had me sit upon it. I hesitated a moment and then complied, whereupon he drew a matching chair, set it close before me, and sat down. He said nothing for some moments and I did not raise my head, and then suddenly he reached out and took my fingers in his own. I gasped at the touch of his dry and scaly skin and attempted to draw back, but his grip was strong, and he began to press his thumbs hard into the palms of my hands.