Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (6 page)

“I had two brothers, sir,” she says again. They have stopped walking. She can hear her words strike as clearly as the shovels of her parents on the road. “Their names were Connor and Michael. They worked with my parents on the road.” This is the truth as she has been told it, but in her dreams they are never working, are always beside her. They smell like grass. One of them coughs. They sometimes rock forward into their knees and sing soft songs to match the hammer of the road noise. They smell like earth. Their skin is warm from where they sit beside her, sometimes touching against her swaddled body with an arm or leg. She can lie there and they are huge above her, guarding her. She is safe with them, her brothers.

“What road?” asks Eldon.

Annie knows so little about where it is she comes from. She only has what Mrs. Cullen told her. She was born some time in 1845 in County Clare. In the summer of the next year the blight spread throughout Ireland and the potato crops blackened and rotted in the fields. The stench was apparently so great that one could smell the rot well before seeing it. In the fall of that year the English government implemented relief schemes. Public work relief schemes. Her parents and brothers worked building a road. In January her father died on the road. Her brothers were sick now, with fever, and Annie’s mother wanted the Cullens to take all her children with them when they went to England, but they wouldn’t take the boys because they were sick and couldn’t travel easily. Annie’s mother gave the Cullens what litde of worth she had to pay for Annie’s keep. A silver locket belonging to her mother. Her wedding ring. I had to sell them, Mrs. Cullen told Annie, several times over the years. For our survival. Annie does not blame Mrs. Cullen. Each time she was told of the locket and the ring, it was as if the telling itself was solid, was something she could turn over in her hands, hold up to the light to see it shine.

“Public works,” says Annie. “Relief. At first the roads were necessary ones. Ones that needed repair. New ones to connect places up. But there were too many people working and so they started to make other roads. My parents worked on a road that went nowhere. It was not for anything, did not tie this place to that. No one could ever walk down it expecting to get to the next village.” She looks ahead, at the road they’re on, how it turns the corner, funnelling ahead with great purpose, with the momentum of those who travelled upon it carrying it forward. “My father died on that road. I was sent to England with a family who were leaving for there. My brothers were sick with fever and I expect they died soon after I left. When we reached England the family sent word to my mother that we’d arrived, but she was already gone.”

“Gone?”

“Dead, sir. God took her.”

Annie’s mother is a story. Her mother is a far-off feeling that she sometimes falls out of when she wakes. She has nothing real left to her from that life. Only stories and the dream of her two brothers hovering above her like spent breath.

“I dream about the road,” she says. “It is torn up and noisy with people and carts and the hauling of stones. I never see my parents, don’t know what it is they would have looked like. But I do see the road. And when I dream about it, the road, it doesn’t look like this one. It doesn’t look like anything of this world.”

They continue walking. Annie cannot speak. She has told no one of her dreams before. She feels the words gone from her body. With the lightness of moths they fluttered out of her mouth and now they are lifted on the breeze, away from her. What she has said won’t come back to her, and be hers alone.

Eldon cannot speak. He feels the gravity of Annie’s words pushing him to ground. Any sympathetic response he might utter is not strong enough to stay her words. He cannot do anything except walk beside her along this road that will now, forever, be for him a road that has merged with the one of Annie’s dreams, a road that disappears into the past.

“If we were different people,” says Eldon, “I could take you for a meal.”

They have come to an inn. Beyond them is a small village, the sudden noise of people and horses.

Annie’s first thought is that he means she is Irish and he is English, that is the difference between them. She looks around at the dozen or so people sitting at the tables outside the inn. Coach drivers. Farmhands. No one so obviously gentry as Mr. Dashell. No one so obviously a servant as herself. Certainly never those two types of people together.

Annie has not been to a public house in a long time. She used to go sometimes with one of the Janes from Portman Square. One of the kind Janes. Annie divided the many cooks who passed through Mrs. Gilbey’s kitchen into kind Janes and mean Janes. Mean Janes seemed to stay longer. This kind Jane took Annie out several times. Her name was really Mary Ann. One night she drank too much and stood on a chair by the bar and sang a song about her underthings. Everyone had applauded and they were each given a free drink.

Mary Ann hadn’t lasted long at Mrs. Gilbey’s, and Annie missed her more than she ever would have suspected. She missed the unexpectedness of her, how Mary Ann could climb onto a chair in a crowd of loud, drinking patrons, and sing a bawdy song. Annie could be so shocked by Mary Ann that for one cool, delicious moment she would forget to judge her actions according to the higher authorities of Mrs. Gilbey and God.

“If we were different people, sir,” says Annie, “who is it we would be?” She has often thought how accidental her life has been in some regards. If Mrs. Gilbey hadn’t plucked her from the workhouse when she was a child, if she hadn’t been converted into a servant, would she have gone to work in the coal yards or in a factory? Would she perhaps have been working in a public house? If some woman had stood on a chair in the bar where she worked, and sung about her under-things in a voice loud with beer, would Annie have laughed along with the others? Would Annie have been the one to offer her a free drink?

Eldon looks at the patrons of the public house. The working men. What he wishes at this moment is that he were one of them, not that Annie was well bom like himself, but that he was her equal. “Let’s go back,” he says. “I should return to work.”

They walk back along the road. Around them the noise of summer, thin and insistent, like a whisper. Neither speaks.

“Thank you for venturing out with me,” says Eldon finally. “It is nice to have company on my afternoon outing.”

“Mrs. Dashell never walks with you?” asks Annie.

“Isabelle? No, she is too busy with her photography. She doesn’t like to break her day into pieces with other activities. I used to walk a lot more,” he tells Annie. “In my younger days. For my health. I had wanted to be a great adventurer.” He tries to say this lightly, as though it is silly, trivial, absurd even, but his voice falls and stumbles. “Not to be,” he says. “I was a sickly boy and a sickly young man. I couldn’t even lift a basket of apples, how would I have been at sea, or climbing some mountain? How would I have been tramping through the icy Arctic?” For this is where he had wanted to go. To the top of the world. To stand in the white bowl of heaven. He can remember, easily, how he wanted this, feel it as though it is an icy shard of grief sliding through him, slick and clean and all the way in. “That is the story of
my
life,” he says.

“Not all of it, sir,” says Annie.

“No. Not all of it.” Eldon already feels as though he’s said too much because he has told this stranger a truth about himself. But she is right. “Isabelle,” he says. He looks down at the ground, down at his hands. They are not the thick knotted hands of a climber or sailor. They are the clean, thin, weak hands of a man who reads books, a man who never had to work with his hands. “You have wondered why it is that we have no children?” Don’t say this, he thinks, but he is already saying it.

Annie guiltily remembers the room with the cradles and prams, the dusty stillness of it. “You have such a large house,” she says.

“Yes. A house large enough to be full of children.” Eldon looks over at her. There’s a steadiness to her gaze that soothes him. It is as though she has laid a cool hand on his burning skin. “It’s my wife’s house, you know. Her father was a Lord. He gave it to us when we married.”

“It is a fine house.”

“Yes, it is. A fine house.” Eldon thinks of his library, the cosiness of that room full of his books and maps. When it is cold outside and there is a roaring fire in the grate, he can think of no better place to be. “Isabelle,” he says again. “I gave her the camera. It was my idea. She has always been possessed of an artistic nature. She tried painting but the results did not satisfy her. I gave her the camera after the third.”

“The third?”

“The third baby.” Eldon spreads his fingers as though he is searching for a handhold in an outcrop of rock. “The third dead baby. Stillborn. All of them. Two boys and a girl. The first one, it was a girl. I never even held them.”

Two boys, Annie thinks, Connor and Michael. The merciful Lord will take care of them, she wants to say, to him, to herself, but she remembers, just in time, that Mr. Dashell doesn’t see the world her way. No God. Foolishness, Cook had called it. Annie looks down at Eldon’s hands, fingers spread. They are smooth and white, gendeman’s hands. Annie looks at her own hands. They are thick and red and the skin is cracked and rough as tree bark. They are working hands, the hands of a maid. How can she possibly know anything of his loss? His children are not the same as her brothers. His world is not the same as hers at all.

Annie and Tess he in their narrow beds at the top of the Dashell house. There is a wind tonight. A tree creaks outside their window, its thin upper branches brushing the glass, sounding like the scratch of a broom sweeping flagstones.

Annie lies on her back, listening to the wind. So quickly, she thinks, she has become used to having a room in the treetops. She wriggles down further under the covers, feels something sharp against the back of her head. Her Bible. She traces the contours of it with her fingers, hoping the words will leak out, swim into her body. What would Mrs. Gilbey say about the state of her soul?

Pray for your sinning ways, Mary.
The enormity of this imagined rebuke brings the first shaip stars of tears to her eyes.

“Annie,” Tess calls out from the other side of the room. “Are you still awake?”

“Yes.” Annie takes her hand out quickly, guiltily, from under her pillow. What has happened to her, she thinks, that she is now ashamed of the Lord?

“What do you think,” says Tess, “of Robert and Betsy?”

“Who?”

“Lord Robert Montagu,” says Tess. “The one what married his housemaid, Betsy. Did you not hear of them?”

“No. I led a quiet life in London.” Annie says this and, as she says it, thinks that it sounds as though she was convalescing from a serious illness. “I was not allowed out much,” she says, which sounds even worse.

“You poor wretch,” says Tess, who cannot conceive of a life spent in forced solitude.

Annie feels impatient with Tess’s pity. “What about Robert and Betsy?” she says.

“Well…” Tess stretches her body out, liking the feel of it pulling tight. This is her favourite game now: supposing. It feels delicious to lie in the warm dark and send her questions out across the room, floating away from her like big, coloured balloons. “He saw her washing steps and was so taken with her looks that he had to have her. Betsy already had a sweetheart, but she married Lord Robert without a thought to that. Would you do that, Annie? Would you toss your sweetheart for Robert?”

Annie knows how this game works. Tess is really asking the question of herself. Annie is only a way for Tess to think about the situation out loud. Still, there is pleasure in being included, and Annie, who has never really thought of such things before, tries to imagine both a sweetheart and an amorous Lord. “I don’t know,” she says. The thought of too much attention makes her feel uneasy. Having a sweetheart would be like the Lady Isabelle looking at her when she took that photograph. It would be that close, the scrutiny. She is not sure she wants this. In Mrs. Gilbey’s house she often felt invisible, and this, she thinks now, is sometimes a better thing.

“Well, I would,” says Tess, getting tired of waiting for a satisfactory answer from Annie. “I would get rid of my sweetheart quick as anything.” She says it with such force that Annie can almost believe it will happen, that Lord Montagu will swoop down out of nowhere and carry Tess off, away from the laundry and the Dashell household. Away from this night, from Annie and the whispery trees outside this window.

“Tess,” says Annie. “What are the Dashells like to work for? To live with?”

“They’re mad, aren’t they?” says Tess. “Mrs. Dashell dressing us up in bed sheets, making us stand around in that draughty henhouse. The Master and his mouldy old maps.”

“Mr. Dashell,” says Annie carefully. “He’s not interested in servants, is he?” She thinks of her walk with Eldon, how both wrong and pleasant it felt.

Tess is quiet for a moment. “Oh,” she says at last. “Has he been after me for a kiss? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes.”

“They’re mad,” says Tess, “but I think they’re harmless. But then I haven’t been here that long myself. Just got here before you.” She’s quiet for a moment. Annie can almost hear the slow tick of her thinking. “They aren’t out to bother us,” says Tess finally. “The Lady isn’t wanting to catch us up. The Master isn’t chasing after us. Not like my last position.” There’s the shuffling noise of Tess turning in her bed. “Shall I tell you about that?” she says.

“No,” says Annie quickly.

“Well,” says Tess, “you’ll know soon enough.”

“Why?”

“Thought you weren’t interested?”

“I just…” How to explain that listening to Tess’s story would make Annie judge her and that this is something Annie wants to avoid. “I’m not interested,” she says, and goes back to listening to the wind searching the trees outside the window.

Soon there is the shuddering noise of Tess’s sleep from across the room. Annie lies in the dark. She is afraid to fall asleep, afraid to fall into her dream of the road. The sound of the shovels and axes chipping at the hard ground is already playing in her head, a rattling, sombre tattoo, like the sound of bones knocking together.