Read Fiercombe Manor Online

Authors: Kate Riordan

Fiercombe Manor (25 page)

BOOK: Fiercombe Manor
7.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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.

[9] ALICE

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.

The season has changed in a single day, and I feel sharper for it. More returned to myself, after weeks of soporific weather that made one fight not to simply lie down and doze the day away. Outside I can smell woodsmoke and rotting leaves, and this little room is colder than I can remember it ever being.

Edward came to me last night. It was the first time in weeks, but still I was unaccountably nervous. He wore a determined expression, but there was something wounded in his eyes, and that made me kinder to him. If only he would allow me to see these chinks in his armour more often! We would get on better then, for I would like him more and be more willing to be the soft, pliant wife he wishes I was. It was over quickly, but he was easier with me afterwards, and we even laughed together over something he had overheard one of the maids say.

After he returned to his own rooms, I lay awake until the valley was entirely silent, the fountain switched off and the last servant retired. I opened the curtains, which are so heavy and long that no light can ever penetrate them, and the moonlight was bright and cold, a refreshing beam through the turbid air—the very dregs of the summer's heat, I realise now. I thought that if I kept very still, not only my physical body but my mind also, I might be more able to conceive a child. I put my hand—my left hand, the one that wears the gold band that once belonged to Edward's mother—on my stomach, and tried to keep the fearful thoughts from filling up as they do.

To keep my mind quiet, I made myself imagine a tap turning off until the last drop had fallen, and that did soothe me, at least for a half an hour or so. Of course I don't know yet if it worked. It has been almost a year now since I was last with child. I'm sure Edward has been aware of that fact, just as I have been, and today's sudden plunge into autumn will only have brought it into sharper relief. Our little girl will turn one next week. I know she must have a brother before long.

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.

I have come again to the little summerhouse. My pencil is still lost and I forgot to bring another, so I must write in ink once more. I wonder if someone has been here and moved things. But who would think to? Who knows that an old chaise longue was once stored here and then forgotten, abandoned in the topmost room? No one has seen me bring over some of my books, and a couple of small pictures filched from the walls of my rooms. I am so careful when I come.

And I felt I must come today, or else I would scream at the servants to leave me be. It was Ivy today. I came upon her
because it was so icy in the yellow parlour that I missed my wrap and went upstairs to fetch it. It is bitterly cold here in the valley, the sky iron grey—weather that has always made me despondent, but so much more so in this sequestered place.

When I got to my rooms, I could hear some noises within, but I presumed it was Edith. In fact I discovered Ivy, who of course had no business to be there at that hour. I caught her at my dressing table, rooting around in one of the small drawers. My brushes and combs had been moved and no doubt tested. I asked her what she was doing, but she only stammered something unintelligible and then went off in tears.

I rang for Edith, when I know it should have been Mrs. Thornbury, now that she has been promoted to housekeeper after Mrs. Drummond's blessed leaving, but I couldn't bear it somehow, not today. Edith believes the whole thing to be nothing more ominous than a housemaid having developed some sort of fascination with me—that she simply wished to touch my things. It is true that she seems harmless enough, a village girl who is not yet fifteen and whose great-aunt worked for the Stantons at the old manor for years.

Even so, I can't help but wonder if Edward has asked her to watch me. I confided as much to Edith, and she gave me a peculiar look before she could stop herself. She does not know my husband as I do, though. And yet . . . I look at it again with a more dispassionate eye and I see nothing but a village child playing at being a lady between blacking grates and sweeping ashes.

Perhaps I have simply grown delusional from being so closeted away: kept in because Edward believes it too cold or too wet or too icy for me to walk freely, when I must conceive another child and have already taken so long
to do so. I do think it a fine irony that it is this perpetual quiet and inactivity that will send me mad rather than some hidden defect in my mind.

If I were to tell Edward my fears about Ivy today—and thank the lord I cannot, because he is away in London—he would start talking about rest cures again. Truly, I can think of nothing worse. I was right not to bring Mrs. Thornbury's attention to it—she would have taken Edward aside on his return and told him in hushed tones, her face all concern, when really she would have been thrilling with her prize gossip, hardly able to wait to go downstairs and tell the other servants, shaking her head for poor Sir Edward, whose wife causes him so much worry. “Such a shame,” she would have said, “and her not even able to give him a son as compensation.”

I must try to be calm. My courses did not come yesterday, and that is why I am so unsettled by this trifling thing. I cannot feel the low ache that usually signals them, and it makes me hope . . . Could it be? I have counted the days, and if it is true that I am with child, then it will be safe to tell Edward at Christmas. What a gift that would be for him. I would be left alone then, untouchable once more, and my little girl too. My father was not like Edward—he loved me for my own sake. With Edward it is as if the simple adoration he wants to feel for our daughter is thwarted by her lack of a brother, making her an object of resentment instead.

BOOK: Fiercombe Manor
7.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

His Runaway Maiden by June Francis
I Didn't Do It for You by Michela Wrong
I'm the One That I Want by Margaret Cho
Rude Awakening by Sam Crescent, Natalie Dae
Leonardo's Lost Princess by Peter Silverman
Rough Justice by KyAnn Waters
I Own the Racecourse! by Patricia Wrightson