Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (23 page)

“My life.”

“What about your life?” Isabelle jigs the pram up and down.

“How it might have been different,” says Annie. “Sometimes I think about that.”

They look at one another.

“Yes,” says Isabelle. “I think about that too.”

The springs of the pram make sharp squeaks. If Annie closes her eyes she can hear it as birdsong, imagine it is a summer’s day and she and Isabelle are walking in the square in London.

The moving springs of the pram remind Isabelle of birdsong. It could be dusk on a summer’s day. She could be rushing out to meet Ellen in the woods behind the house. “Sometimes,” she says, “I think that you’re the only person in the world who truly cares for me.” She stops pushing the pram.

Annie doesn’t know why she does what she does next. Later, when she is lying in her bed in the attic room, she tries to locate the exact point at which she decided something that she didn’t even tell herself at the time. The exact moment her body acted by itself. All she can think, lying on her back in the dark, listening to Tess snore from across the room, is that it was the words. The words slid under her skin so surely and cleanly that she didn’t even feel them until they’d lodged in her heart.

You’re the only person in the world who truly cares for me.

It is easier than Annie would have ever imagined. Easy to lean into Isabelle, put an arm around her. Easy to kiss her. And there is that one moment when Isabelle kisses her back that Annie feels an overwhelming sense of arrival, feels that there is nothing else to want. Time, the room, her life, all of it still and stop in this kiss that takes as long as a full breathing moment.

And then the candle sets Annie’s hair on fire.

There is the acrid stink of it burning. Isabelle pulls away quickly, watches Annie swat the singe out. The sound of their breathing, the overlap of it, fills the room.

“This didn’t happen,” says Isabelle. “Remember that.”

The moon shakes light through the trees outside the window and into the small attic room. The shadows of branches sway against the wall.

Annie lies awake. The branches bow and glide across the wall opposite the window.

When is the moment she crossed over and became, not someone who took orders, who reacted to what was happening, but someone who acted? Why did she do it, and why, even with that admonishment from Isabelle to undo the entire event, is Annie not sorry about that kiss?

Because she acted entirely on feeling.

Because the words loosened her skin.

Because she was not afraid, was not behaving as a servant, but as an equal.

Because she and Eldon had stood outside the house together, looking into the lit dining room, watching Isabelle cloak their absence with her voice, the fluid way she gestured, an arc of description; because, despite her anger with Robert Hill, Annie had been so taken with Isabelle’s beauty that she had forgotten her reason for standing there watching the dinner go on without her.

Because God was gone from her.

Because God was suddenly back.

Because she had no past, no history, and every day Isabelle Dashell gave her a new story to believe in.

Because the body doesn’t lie.

Because it was her body.

Because she has wanted to live and not known what it was she even meant by that.

Because no one has looked at her as Isabelle does.

Because it was what she wanted to happen.

Because Isabelle Dashell kissed her back.

“We have children,” says Isabelle the next morning. “Real children. Not those annoying sons of my cousin. A baby and a boy. I’ve hired them from the bell-ringer and his wife. We’ll pay them a crown a day. Baby this week. Boy the next.”

“I thought I wasn’t to have a child?” says Annie uneasily. “I thought we were concentrating on the state of my hands?”

“Oh, we’re long finished with that.” Isabelle rushes round the studio, in great spirits. She is spreading straw on the floor to simulate the stable where the baby Jesus was born. She kicks it around with her feet, as though she’s playing football. “I woke up so invigorated this morning,” she says. “It was such a good idea I had about the children. Doesn’t it fill you with happiness, Annie?” She drop kicks a chunk of straw into the corner. It scatters into the air and floats down.

Happy
isn’t the word that springs foremost to Annie’s mind today. She is tired from lying awake rethinking the kiss all last night. She can’t believe that Isabelle has slept, that Isabelle has woken up invigorated. That Isabelle really is pretending the kiss between them never happened. And now Annie is being expected to mother a living Christ, something she swore Isabelle had promised she would not have to do.

“About last night,” she says. She can’t help herself.

“Stop,” says Isabelle. “I thought you understood what I said.” She’s down on her hands and knees now, spreading the straw around. “Go and wait for the baby. The bell-ringer is meant to deliver it any minute now. And put on the cloak. You might as well be the Madonna from the moment it arrives.”

Annie pulls on the heavy grey cloak and reluctantly trudges out to the front of the house to wait for the baby Jesus.

The baby Jesus is a girl. Her name is Adeline. The bellringer, whose name is William, hands her over hesitantly to Annie.

“She will not meet with any harm?” he says.

“She is only being photographed,” says Annie.

“And that will not harm her?”

“No, no. It is as if she were being painted,” explains Annie, realizing that he has no clear notion of what it means to be photographed. “She will be lying peacefully in my arms and Mrs. Dashell will be taking our photograph. Like a
carte,”
she says.

“Well, I’ll be back for her at teatime,” says the bell-ringer, leaning over to kiss his daughter on the forehead. “Mind you take good care of her, miss.”

“I will,” promises Annie. The weight of Adeline is a pleasant one in her arms. She walks slowly away with the baby, feeling the father watch them until they turn past the kitchen door.

“The bell-ringer’s nervous,” says Annie, when she’s back in the studio. “He thinks you’re using his daughter as a sacrifice or something.”

“Well, I’ll give him an extra crown, then.” Isabelle is still on her hands and knees, shaping the straw. She has made quite a pleasing hillock by the glass wall. “It will be easier when Tess has her baby. We won’t have to pay her. What do you think?”

“Very nice, ma’am. A very nice stable.”

“Don’t mock me, Annie. We’ll put the muslin on the wall so the light from the side is soft and the light from above is strong and direct,” says Isabelle. “Like God. The light from above will look like God. That holy light that happens sometimes at sunset.” She leans back on her heels and surveys her handiwork with satisfaction. “Yes, this will do nicely.”

“This is the baby,” says Annie, kneeling down beside Isabelle in the straw and passing over Adeline.

Isabelle holds the baby awkwardly. It looks up at her and gurgles approvingly. Isabelle hands Adeline quickly back to Annie. “Swaddle it,” she says. “There’s an old sheet over there by the camera.”

Adeline doesn’t like being swaddled. She cries when Annie wraps the sheet tightly around her body. “Shhh,” says Annie. She rocks the baby close in her arms, whispering to it reassuringly. “You’re fine. I’ve got you.”

Isabelle watches Annie calm the baby. She does it so effortlessly. It looks as if she has always had the baby. She is the perfect Madonna. This is all she must think. The perfect Madonna. She mustn’t dwell at all on what happened last night. What didn’t happen last night.

“Kneel down with Rose and let me have a look at that,” she says.

“Pardon?” Annie looks up at Isabelle. “What did you say?”

“I need to get a look at the scene,” says Isabelle, moving over to her camera.

“You said
Rose.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Annie kneels down with the hot cocoon of Adeline in her arms. The sun is strong from above. The baby closes her eyes.

Isabelle looks through the camera at Mary and the baby Jesus. Rose. “Did I really say ‘Rose’?” she asks, from behind her camera.

“Yes.”

Isabelle is quiet for a moment. The baby looks so peaceful sleeping. The Madonna looks wise and forgiving. “When Rose was born,” she says finally, “there was so much blood. I just kept bleeding. They couldn’t get it to stop. And the strange thing was that I couldn’t feel it coming out of me. That scared me more than anything. There was no pain. It was my body and it was as if I was just tethered to it and it floated free of me.” Isabelle remembers the terrible panic when she’d raised herself up on the pillows and was able to see down the length of her body, see that the bed sheets were drenched in her blood. “At that moment,” she says, “I didn’t care about the baby. I was afraid for my life. I cared only that I would not lose it. I cared only for myself. Maybe that is why she died.”

Annie sees the unfamiliar look of despair on Isabelle’s face. “It’s all right,” she says. “Look.” She raises the baby gently in her arms and it’s as though it’s being lifted by the sun itself, up from the straw into the pure rain of light from heaven. “The baby’s fine.”

Isabelle finds it easier than she’d thought to persuade herself that she never kissed Annie Phelan. There are a lot of reasons for why it happened, each one strong enough to cancel the actuality of it, make it shift from light to shadow in her mind.

Because I was upset by the earlier events of the evening.

Because I was in the room with the carriages and that always unsettles me.

Because, when I first saw her, there in the dark, she looked like Ellen. It seemed like all those years ago and I stumbled into that old moment without thinking. She stepped out from the trees, and I had arrived.

Because I didn’t plan for it to happen.

Because Annie Phelan is my maid.

Because it could easily have been a dream, could have been some imagined continuation of my act as Sappho.

Because I would never allow myself to want that. Again.

Because I am dead inside now.

Because I am dead inside.

Adeline is a good baby Jesus. As long as she is well-fed she doesn’t mind lying in the straw, or being coddled by Annie. She seems to like the glasshouse, the bits of sun that circle around her head like bright planets. She bats her hands at them and makes noises like a bird.

Baby Jesus lies in Mary’s lap. She gazes down at him in wonder. No, in shock. No, with love. She cups one hand behind his tiny head and turns it slightly towards the camera. Her other hand she tucks in against his ribs, each one as slender and small as a chicken bone.

Mary has the hood of the cloak up so that her body and the cloak are a cave for her infant son to shelter in. Mary has the hood of the cloak folded down so that her hair spills out, partially covers the baby Jesus, reminding the viewer that they were once of the same flesh. He did come from her. He is not just the child of the Lord.

Baby Jesus lies on the straw and Mary kneels beside him, an open hand at each end of his body, so that he is the base of a visual triangle that ends in the peak of her hood.

“This looks as if I just dropped him,” says Annie. “As if I dropped him on the ground and now he’s dead.” She feels faint, she is that undone by the posing and the heat inside the glasshouse.

Isabelle looks at the scene through the camera. “You’re exclaiming in wonder at the Christ child,” she says.

“Yes,” says Annie. “Because I dropped him and now his neck’s broken. I’m sorry.” She sits back on her heels and the laughter she’s been suppressing bubbles out of her. Adeline wakes up and starts to cry.

“All right, all right,” says Isabelle. “We’ll have a litde break then.” She reluctantly steps back from the camera.

Annie pulls the hood from her head. She is baking inside her cloak. “Let’s go outside,” she says.

They walk down to the coolness of the orchard, baby Adeline held up against Annie’s shoulder so that she has a perfect view of where they’ve come from.

The dead apples smell like melancholy—sweet, with a hint of decay under the sweetness. Isabelle puts out her hands and touches each tree as they pass. She remembers how she hurried down here to collect the fruit for a still life that was, well, lifeless. That seems to have taken place in another life altogether. A still life.

They walk through the orchard, not speaking, breathing in the scent of the aging apples. Annie watches Isabelle stretch her arms between two apple trees, like some graceful, slender bird. She shifts the warm weight of Adeline to her other shoulder. The Lord. Do I still love the Lord? What does she, Annie Phelan, know of love anyway? Does Tess truly love Wilks?Those stopped stolen nights rocking against his body, standing up at the laundry wall. Is all love merely a hunger of the flesh?

Annie gently squeezes the baby Jesus and she lets out a litde pop of air.

Do I love you? Annie stands under an apple tree and watches Isabelle walk on ahead. What is gratitude? What is love? Is love just a willingness to call feelings back by that name?

Isabelle is walking back towards Annie and Adeline. “What’s the matter?” she says. “Why did you stop?”

“The baby’s heavy. I want you to take her.” Annie holds out the bundle of Adeline.

“No,” says Isabelle. “I can’t do that.”

A single frozen apple falls from a tree beside them, the thunk of it hitting the ground exactly like the sound of Annie’s heart in her chest.

Perhaps she could be the mother of the Lord. Perhaps part of faith is being able to become what you believe in. What you love.

“Ma’am,” she says. “I want you to take the baby.” She feels such poise in this moment, such a still point of certainty that this is the right thing to do.

The Lord’s Will. My Will.

Without a word, Isabelle takes the small weight of the child into her arms.

Eldon watches Annie and Isabelle walk down the path from the studio to the orchard. Annie is wearing the grey cloak of the Madonna and carries a baby.

Eldon watches his wife and his housemaid enter the orchard. The last he sees, before they pass from view into the trees, is the small blank face of the baby over Annie’s shoulder. He turns from the window, goes back to his desk and a stack of letters that all begin the same way.