The Painted Bridge (6 page)

“There’s a whole section here on damsons,” she announced. “Damson cheese. Damson jelly. Damson wine.”

Catherine made a noise of disgust as she brought her own book parallel to her face.

“I hate damsons. Listen to this!

“‘She had lived we’ll say, / A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, / A quiet life, which was not life at all.’” Catherine closed her book with a soft, hollow slap. “Did you ever have an adventure, Mother? Before you were married?”

“Marriage is an adventure.”

“Not with Father it isn’t.”

“Catherine. It isn’t good for you.”

“I know …” Catherine swung her feet to the floor and jumped up. “Burying myself like this in books.”

She had an angular look; her bones were the fastest-growing part of her and her flesh struggled to keep pace with the hard fact of them. Her stockings were wrinkled around the ankles with one heel twisted to the front. She stood before Emmeline, looking down on her. Her complexion was so white most of the time that it could appear almost blue. But in a passion, as she was now, she turned crimson. Like a sheet of watercolor paper, thought Emmeline, flooded with rose madder.

“I’d die without books, Mother. Can’t you see that?”

Catherine turned and rushed from the room, stooping to pick up the poetry book, catching the claw-footed table with her own long foot as she passed, sending a glass case crashing to the floor.

Ringing the bell with short, emphatic swings of her wrist, Emmeline let the frown invade the whole of her face. She had paid too little attention to Catherine’s constitution when she was a small child. She’d loved sweet things. Milk and honey, crystallized pears, sugarplums. Emmeline had allowed her to carry on eating pap long after the age the boys had given it up. She hadn’t thought it mattered. Catherine had been like some edible delicacy herself, her breath like violets, her limbs marzipan. She used to sit beside her when she slept, wondering at her, inhaling her, raising a plump, cool fist to her lips for worship. It had spoiled her. She’d grown willful on love and sugar.

No sign of Hannah Smith. Emmeline maneuvered herself down to the floor, one knee at a time and felt the rough press of the rug against the palms of her hands. The glass dome had cracked. Close up, the flowers looked scarcely worthy of display, the petals melted out of shape, their pinks and apricots and mauves bleached almost white. It wasn’t right that wax flowers should fade. That was the point of
immortelles.
That they should remain beautiful.

She lifted the case onto Querios’s chair, hoisted herself back to her feet, and as she straightened up caught sight of a woman she half-recognized, in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Her hair had begun to show silver strands not long after Catherine was born. This year, the two white streaks at the front had become broad stripes. A portent of things to come. On bad days, she thought she looked as if she’d been struck by lightning. On better ones, she tried to consider it distinguished.

Emmeline felt sometimes that something inside had faded with her hair, some quality of imagination that had once been vivid. At Catherine’s age, she too had been a dreamy girl, with a head full of longings for
la belle France
inspired by her brothers’ language tutor, Monsieur Pierre.

Replacing the flowers on the table, she turned the crack toward the wall, slowly rubbing off the fingerprints with her cuff. It made her uncomfortable, her own daughter thinking that she knew more of life
than Emmeline did. And Catherine appeared determined to help herself to more of it even as she became increasingly contrary about what she ate. Emmeline was worried about her. She must talk to Querios.

She rang the bell again and added her own voice.

“Hannah Smith! Where are you?”

“Doctor’s attending today, miss,” Lovely said, escorting Anna back to the bedroom after breakfast. “Mrs. Makepeace says you’re to wait here. I’ll be up for yer soon as he’s ready.”

“Thank you, Lovely. I’m hoping he’ll help me.”

Lovely sniffed and wiped her nose on her cuff.

“Daresay you are,” she said, pulling the bedroom door closed behind her and locking it.

Anna felt too impatient to sit down. She had been in Lake House for one week and felt she could not tolerate another day. Another hour. She pulled one of the rough brown blankets off the bed, wrapped it around herself and went to the window, leaning her elbows on the sill, feeling the cold air streaming in around the edges of the frame.

The view was the only comfort the room offered. In front of her was a spacious downward sweep of grass with an ancient oak that stood to the right of her window. The tree’s shedding leaves created the impression of a rich, golden shadow in a circle underneath it. Beyond the lawn, marked off by iron rails, was a sheep field and at its boundary a row of breeze-tossed willows leaned out over the fringes of a body of water. It could have been a river but from its stillness she took it to be a lake, a cool reflective eye staring up at the sky, filled with it. On the other side of the lake were woods and open land and on the far horizon, beyond everything, the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, small and softly round, as if fashioned from cloud.

Anna’s eye was drawn again to the bridge beyond a thicket of trees farther along the shore of the lake. It was a white bridge, stretching
from one side of the lake to the other, delicate and ethereal, its three shallow arches a row of half-moons that seemed to float on the surface of the water. The bridge was the most beautiful she’d ever seen, like something from a painting or an illustration for a fairy tale.

As she stared out, a girl in a red cloak appeared from the direction of the house. She wove a path across the grass, her head bowed, moving in an erratic line. She was about to collide with the railings when she stopped and raised her head. As she turned toward the gate, Anna saw the reason for her strange progress. The girl was reading a book.

She passed into the field and continued her meandering way to the edge of the water. A line of ducks swam to meet her and she began to throw scraps to them, swinging her arm again and again. She reopened the book and walked back toward the house, still reading, oblivious to the sheep that followed her through the open gate.

On impulse, Anna tapped on the glass and lifted her hand in a wave. The girl stopped and looked up, pressing the open pages against her chest. Anna saw a still, pointed face, thin fair hair. Suddenly, as if she heard someone call her, the girl thrust the book under her cloak and darted out of sight.

*   *   *

A minute later, Lovely arrived and led Anna down the stairs to Abse’s study.

Anna paused in the doorway, casting her eyes over the cliffs of books, the fox in its glass cabinet. It seemed wrong to her that she should be entering the room from inside Lake House, from the patients’ quarters, instead of from the outside like the accidental visitor she felt herself to be. A man sat writing behind Abse’s desk.

“Best o’ luck,” Lovely muttered from behind her. “I’ll be back to collect yer in ten minutes.” Lovely departed, closing the door behind her.

Anna reminded herself that this was her chance to get out. She might even be free today if the physician gave her a fair hearing. Digging her nails into the palms of her hands, she readied herself to tell the whole story, calmly, from the beginning.

“Good morning, Doctor.”

He raised his head, looked her up and down as she walked toward him.

“Come in, come in. I won’t bite.”

“You are Dr. Higgins?”

“Indeed I am. Sit yourself down.”

He rose and took hold of her hand, two fingers pressed to her wrist while looking at his watch. She smiled at him.

“I am not ill, you know. I need to explain to you what has happened.”

“Open your mouth.”

“Doctor, I’m perfectly well. If I could just recount to you …”

He bent his face close to hers and opened his own mouth to reveal a white-coated tongue. She averted her eyes as he flattened her tongue with a spoon, peered into her throat. He was old, fifty or more, to judge by the slump of his shoulders, the corrugated skin of his forehead, but he had the hair of a boy, glinting chestnut, smooth and shining on his head.

“Throat looks normal.”

“My throat isn’t important,” she said when he removed the spoon. “But I must talk to you.”

“Now, Mrs.—Mrs.?”

“Palmer.”

“I believe the doctor is generally considered the one who knows what’s important. Eh? Do you know what year it is?”

The wind was gusting outside; she could see what might have been leaves or birds whirling through the sky on the other side of the glass. The globe stood on the floor by the window, tilting on its stand, swaths of pink glowing in the gloom.

“It is 1859, sir. The first of December. But Mrs. Makepeace said I would only have a few minutes with you and I want—”

He interrupted with more questions. Anna supplied the name of the monarch and the Prime Minister, told him how many fingers she had. How many toes.

“There was distress, on admission, according to the notes,” he said.

“Distress?”

“You were out of control. Hysterical. Have you any recollection of it?”

“It wasn’t hysteria, Doctor. I was alarmed to be locked in a room by two strangers. Frightened. I was angry too. Wouldn’t you be?”

“It is you that is under discussion. Not I.”

He put a trumpet against her chest, leaned his ear against the end of it. His head was so close she could feel its warmth under her chin, see the hairs growing out of his ears, the line of grime on the inside of his collar.

“Rapid heart rate,” he said, straightening up. “Not unexpected.”

She took a deep breath.

“Dr. Higgins, I am here only because my husband didn’t understand why I acted as I did.”

He resumed his seat, scanned a piece of paper in front of him.

“Says here he’s a man of the cloth. A vicar must know something of human nature even if he knows more of God. Eh?”

He looked at her, pleased. She felt a sense of disbelief that the interview should be going so awry. She must make him hear her.

“Listen! There were hundreds drowned that night, all around the coast. I still believe it was right for me to try to help.”

He shook his head, held up a finger to his lips.

“A young woman has no reason to think about death. A young woman should contemplate life. Increased life in the case of a married woman like yourself.”

His gaze shifted to her breasts.

“When did you last have your monthly bleeding? Do you recall?”

It had added to her difficulties on the journey back to London. She’d felt the usual relief, despite the jolting pains in her belly, echoing the jolting of the carriage, mile after mile. She somehow couldn’t imagine having Vincent’s child. The eyes looking up at her from the crib, hard and opaque as black marbles. Vincent never mentioned children, which she found odd. Anna shook her head. She didn’t want to talk to this man about it.

“I see. Suppressed catamenia. Uterine disturbance.”

“I am well, Doctor. In all respects.”

“On the contrary. You are suffering from hysteria. Most of your sex do, at some time in their lives.”

He crushed a blue pill on a scrap of paper with the back of a spoon,
mixed it in a tumbler of water. The solution flew round and round, grains descending to the bottom in a slow fall.

“Oh no, Doctor. I don’t want any medicine,” she said, her hand rising to her mouth. “I never …”

“Emetics are helpful in cooling the blood, restoring the proper balance.”

He had stood up, was pressing the tumbler to her lips, holding back her head with the other hand as he tipped the contents of the glass into her mouth. “Count yourself lucky,” he said, addressing the ceiling, ignoring her choking. “Abse believes in restraint from within. There are no shackles here, no bridles. The tea isn’t laced with antimony and you won’t find yourself in the strait waistcoat, unless strictly necessary.”

She spat out what she could, then swallowed and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. The liquid was bitter on her tongue, undissolved fragments catching in her throat. Higgins sat down again, picked up his pencil and focused on the sheet of foolscap in front of him.

Anna thought of their doctor at Dover, his kindly prescriptions of syrups and tonics. Morphine,
in extremis.
Words, sometimes. She pictured his quiet nodding, as his patients told him what ailed them. She had never known a doctor could be a brute. She felt as if the world had spun upside-down, as if she had failed to understand something important.

Curbing the urge to reach across the desk and grab his lapels, demand to know how this man dared call himself a physician and disgrace an honorable profession. She took a deep breath. Swallowed again.

“You haven’t given me a chance to explain.”

The pencil scratched its way across the rough weave of the paper; Higgins’s stomach rumbled.

“I’ve heard all I need. Good day, Mrs. Farmer.”

“I told you, my name is Anna Pa—”

Lovely was back. She pulled Anna from the room, hurrying her up the stairs to the bedroom. When they got there, she said she’d be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail and left again, banging the door shut, running down the corridor in her heavy clogs.