Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (17 page)

“Frozen boots,” says Eldon. He looks across at Annie, suddenly so grateful that she knows this about Franklin, that she knows some of what he knows of the expeditions. Isabelle, in all their married life, has never once read the same books as he has, has never shown the slightest interest in doing so. “Did you know that when Franklin returned to London after that disastrous first expedition, he was known as the man who had eaten his boots. That’s what was said about him on the streets—‘There goes the man who ate his boots.’”

“Really?” says Annie. She feels a bit like giggling, but suppresses this urge. Mr. Dashell is eager to please. He is altogether easy. All Annie has to do is to sip her tea and say
frozen boots
and he will get wiggly with delight.

Isabelle is not easy. Later, when Annie is helping her pin up prints in the glasshouse, she thinks of this. Isabelle fusses and gets impatient. Isabelle is always convinced she is right. Isabelle is often short with Annie. “Oh, get out of my way,” she’ll say, even though it is she who has bumped into Annie. If that had been Mr. Dashell, he would have apologized and then, in his nervous regret, would have knocked something over.

But it is to Isabelle that Annie is drawn. Despite Eldon’s kindness, it is Isabelle that Annie truly admires, wants to be like. Isabelle can take charge of the world more capably than any novel’s heroine. Even being next to her in the glasshouse is happiness. Even when Isabelle bosses her around or complains about something, Annie can think of nowhere else she’d rather be. And when Isabelle holds up a print of Annie as Faith to the light, stammering through the glass window pane, and says, “Just look at you,” with real feeling in her voice, Annie can forgive her anything.

Just before Christmas, Cook decides, finally, to have her
carte de visite
done. Wilks is to drive her to a photographer in Tunbridge Wells. She models, one last time, for Annie and Tess in the kitchen as she waits for Wilks to hook up the fly and bring it round to the kitchen door.

In the end Cook has chosen to go as her Sunday-best self. It’s funny, thinks Annie, watching Cook adjust her bonnet for the umpteenth time, but what we think makes us more who we are sometimes makes us less. Cook is cautious in her good clothes, moves around the kitchen carefully, afraid to brush against something that will leave a mark on her.

“How do I look?” she asks one last time.

“Very good, missus,” says Tess. But Annie can only nod in agreement. Sadness has closed her throat. Cook has thought about this moment all summer and fall. She has prepared in a hundred different ways. And this ordinary, nervous, frumpy woman in good clothes that have been her good clothes for so long that they’re now out of fashion, this woman is not who she really wants to be. Annie thinks of the photograph in the Bible under her pillow upstairs. Isabelle as Sappho. That look on Isabelle’s face, that knowing, that certainty in the moment. This is what she wishes, standing by the table in the kitchen, this is what she wishes for Cook with all her heart.

There’s the sound of the horse and cart on the loose stones outside. Cook gives them a last nervous wave. “Well, I’m off, then,” she says, and opens the door.

When she comes back from town, Cook doesn’t talk much about the experience of having her likeness taken. “It was smooth enough,” she says of the process, and hurries off to change out of her good clothes.

Later, over a cup of tea in the kitchen, she confesses to Annie how disappointing it was at the photographer’s. “There was a queue,” she says. “Right out into the hall. I had to stand in the landing for ever so long.”

“Christmas,” says Annie. “It must be the most popular time for likenesses.”

“Well, I was almost there until Christmas,” says Cook. “And what’s worse is that once I finally made it into the studio, I was rushed through. The whole thing took only a few minutes from start to finish. He didn’t care how I posed. Wouldn’t advise me. He just wanted to get me out of there and be on to the next hapless soul in line.”

Not like Isabelle, thinks Annie. Perhaps Cook, although she’s always derisive about what takes place in the glasshouse, perhaps she had imagined that her likeness would be taken with as much care and attention as Isabelle lavishes on her models. As Isabelle lavishes on Annie.

Annie tilts her head up towards the kitchen ceiling. She can almost feel Isabelle’s hands on her chin, carefully moving her head into position. She has never felt rushed or abandoned. In the glasshouse it seems that time sways and stops.

When Cook gets the photographs back of herself she dutifully gives one to Tess and one to Annie as Christmas presents. But she is disappointed with her
carte,
disappointed with the stiff, sharp image of herself sitting straight-backed in the leather studio chair. “I look like an old fool,” she says when she hands Annie the
carte.
“But I have nothing else to give you for Christmas.”

“It’s beautiful, missus,” says Annie. This isn’t what she’d meant to say, but she feels badly for Cook and wants to help.

“It’s bad enough without you lying,” says Cook.

Annie doesn’t know what to do with the
carte.
It makes her feel sad to look at it. She takes it up to her room and buries it in the bottom of her drawer of underthings. She can always pretend it’s there for safe keeping.

For Christmas Annie gives Cook some sweets. She doesn’t know what to give Tess, wants to make something for the baby, but thinks that Tess would be annoyed by this. Finally, out of desperadon, she offers to help Tess with some of the laundry work for the remainder of her pregnancy, as bending over the mangle is work that Tess is finding it hard to do with her increasing girth.

She says this to Tess when they’re in their beds on Christmas Eve. At first she doesn’t think Tess has heard her, and clears her throat to say it again, more loudly. But Tess has heard. “Well,” she says, her voice light with surprise. “That is a gift I can use, Annie Phelan.”

Annie does not expect anything in return from Tess, knows that Tess doesn’t really like her. So it’s a sweet surprise to wake up Christmas morning and see that Tess has hung a wreath of holly at the foot of Annie’s bed.

On Christmas morning, after Tess has dressed and left the bedroom, Annie says hurried, furtive prayers in her nightgown, then dresses and goes down to the kitchen.

The Christmas box from the Dashells consists of material for a new morning dress, two shillings, and some sweets. Isabelle and Eldon have gone to the Hills’ for Christmas dinner so the servants have the day off. Cook roasts a small turkey and they have dinner in the kitchen, complete with gooseberry wine.

Wilks is there for dinner, and Annie notices that he and Tess aren’t really speaking. Tess looks miserable, keeps her head bent down over her plate throughout the meal. Once she tentatively lays her hand on top of Wilks’s but he shakes it off. Wilks bolts his food, takes an extra bottle of wine with him from the table, and leaves. Shortly afterwards Tess goes upstairs, saying she’s tired out and needs to rest.

When Annie comes to their room, after washing up for Cook, she can hear the snuffled sounds of Tess crying.

Annie undresses without a word, climbs into bed, and pulls the covers up to her chin. She can see the holly wreath, dimly, hanging from the foot of her bed. She thinks of the oily green of the leaves, the dark berries like drops of blood. “Thank you for the wreath,” she says. “It’s the best present.”

There’s a gulp as Tess tries to switch from crying to talking. “I pricked my fingers getting it,” she says. “It wasn’t easy.” She’s quiet for a moment. “I thought you might like it because it’s sort of holy. Isn’t it?” Her voice is small.

Annie imagines Tess cutting her fingers as she forced the sprigs of holly into a clumsy circle. The sharpness of the leaves sticking like the fine points of loss into her skin. Holy. “Yes,” says Annie. “I think it is.”

Annie borrows
The Vicar of Wakefield
from Eldon.

She is not expecting it to be such a catalogue of disaster. She had thought that because it was found in the boat with the two dead members of Franklin’s crew, it would be a complement to the Bible also found there. But no, it is not that at all.

The vicar himself is a rather pleasant man who lives, with his family, in a village in England. The family name is Primrose.The vicar is an ardent supporter of the institution of marriage. He is very encouraging towards those who are considering it, but he also believes that a man must never marry after his wife dies, that there are to be no second marriages. He publishes huge tracts concerning this. Many people don’t agree with him, and are annoyed by his constant reiteration of this subject.

Life seems good for the vicar, his wife, and their six children, until they suddenly fall upon hard times and have to move from their comfortable home into a small, cramped cottage.

Calamities always happen suddenly in
The Vicar of Wakefield.
The novel is like a bad storm and, at the end of it, Annie feels that she has been battered by the wind and rain, beaten down by all the disasters in the story, as sudden as weather. What were they thinking, those dying men on the ice, what were they thinking taking this book with them? Annie imagines them, hunkered down amidst their cargo of silver teaspoons and chocolate, reading to each other from
The Vicar of Wakefield.
Perhaps they would have marvelled at the terrible events that befell the Primrose family—
two
daughters stolen, all fortune lost—perhaps they would have, for a while anyway, felt lucky compared to them. For wouldn’t England exist for them as a safe, secure paradise? To imagine something happening there, something of the magnitude of their situation on the ice, would be to acknowledge that there was no safe place, that home was not a carefully preserved idyll, free from danger. And then perhaps, as they grew weaker, and their situation more obviously hopeless, then perhaps they would have relied a litde on the innate cheerfulness and optimism of the vicar—how he always tried to turn misfortune into reason for hope—how he forgave his enemies, forgave the cause of his troubles. He was an example of faith. And although, to Annie, he appeared a trifle foolish and pompous,and she skipped over most of his tedious sermons in the book, perhaps to these dying men his example provided comfort. And perhaps, too, they would not have thought the suddenness of the events in the book unlikely, for is that not what happened to them? A ship sunk, another crushed by ice, a journey across the ice, ice that was never solid ground, that shifted, that was unpredictable so that the very act of walking was dangerous. And now, huddled in the ribs of this boat, they were the living thing, the heartbeat. Around them all the comforts of an English parlour—silver service, a supply of tea that would outlast their lives here. Waiting to die or to be rescued. Were they able to do as the line in
The Vicar of Wakefield
said, the line that Annie stumbled over and then went back to again.
Read our anguish into patience.

They fastened their dying breath to words.

On Annie’s first day off in the new year she wakes before anyone in the house, lies in bed looking at the scratchings of frost on her attic window. She has slept well, the cold of the room stalling her usual dream of her parents on the road. She has woken with only the faintest sliver of that story in her head. Were there mornings as cold as this one where she came from?

Annie gets quietly out of bed and goes to the window to see if it has snowed during the night. Outside the world is still as held breath. Snow dusts the trees, the stone wall. Even the distant glasshouse looks suddenly white. And then, from the side of the house, a figure staggers down the garden path, staggers as though injured or dying.

Eldon Dashell.

Annie dresses quickly, careful not to wake Tess. Downstairs the house is cold. Her footsteps echo behind her as she crosses the stone floor of the kitchen, opens the door, and steps outside. Frost has sharpened the grass into small silver knives. Mist webs in the trees.

There is nothing to indicate that Mr. Dashell walked down the path. Perhaps Annie has imagined it? Perhaps it was a trick of the window frost and the light? Angles and shadows. She knows the power that light has. What it can make you see.

Annie hurries along the path towards the glasshouse. She thinks she sees the flash of a figure moving in the orchard, but by the time she catches up, it is gone.

She finally sees him at the far edge of the field behind the orchard. He is stumbling down the stream bank. She has to run to catch him up. “Sir,” she cries, as she hurries after him. But that seems wrong, is a word for indoors and her life there as his maid. She is closer now. “Mr. Dashell,” she cries, and he turns around and sees her, waits for her to reach him. He sways on his feet, reaches out to steady himself on her arm.

“Are you hurt?” asks Annie. Are you drunk? she thinks.

“First they burn, then they tingle, then they become blocks of stone,” says Eldon slowly.

“What do?”

“Feet. My feet.” They both look down at his feet, at the drops of water sponging out of his leather boots.

Annie suddenly understands what he is doing. “You froze your boots,” she says. “Just like Franklin.”

“I soaked them at the pump and left them there all night.”

“And what does it feel like?” asks Annie. She has imagined this so fully that she needs to know how right she has been about it.

Eldon is freezing. His lungs burn with the cold fog of morning. His feet are completely without sensation. He thinks that he has never felt happier than now, than this moment of walking across the frozen ground towards the river. “Phelan,” he says. “I’d call you Phelan if you were a member of the expedition. You would have to have been a man, then. There were no women on Franklin’s ships.”

“What is it like?” Annie has to know.

Eldon sways a litde. “It is exactly,” he says, “as you would imagine.” And they both smile at this.

They walk together down towards the stream. The world shimmers through the trees. Their footsteps fasten the grass to the ground.