by Paula Guran
“Yes, yes, splendid,” Merritt said.
Despite the porter’s apparent frailty, their luggage had already arrived by the time they climbed the two flights of stairs and located number thirty-two. Inside, they found a beautiful suite warmed by natural light from a window overlooking the front drive.
Merritt shucked off his shoes and collapsed into a chair while Anne explored the bedroom, dared to run her fingers across the silk bedspread. Someone had placed a vase of fresh roses atop the dresser with wet hands: A few droplets warped the pattern on the porcelain.
“Merritt?” Anne sidled up to the connecting doors. To his distracted, “Mm?” she said, “Can we afford this?”
He raised an eyebrow and smiled at her, his head tipped back against the chair exposing his unshaven throat. “Well, I wouldn’t say you should get used to it. We shan’t be off motoring and staying in hotels every week. But yes, I have a little put by for special occasions.” He sighed and tilted his head. “Tell me, do you like it?”
“Oh yes,” Anne gushed. “It’s lovely. I imagine it must be just like Monte Carlo.”
“Hah! You’d loathe Monte.”
“You shall have to take me, so I can decide for myself.”
Merritt fished out his cigarette case and patted his pockets. Anne had the matches. She struck one for him. “We’ll take a grand tour of Europe for our first anniversary, like the fashionable people do,” he said when his cigarette was lit, “and utterly bankrupt ourselves on the tables.”
“How foolish of us.”
“How foolish indeed.”
Merritt took her hand—only her fingers, really—stroked them with his thumb. He parted his lips, and Anne wondered if he meant to voice what she was already thinking: Look how foolish we’ve been already. Perhaps he wanted to kiss her. Isn’t that what married couples did when they reached their honeymoon suite? Was there something else he expected of her, something she didn’t know to do?
The bed lay empty behind them.
A knock at the door diffused the moment: their food, delivered on a rolling table. Finger sandwiches and small pastries, pots of tea and coffee, cheese and warm bread, slices of salty ham. They ate with their hands, dropping crumbs all over the upholstery, which felt terribly naughty. “And what would the young lady like to do with her afternoon?” Merritt teased, spreading pâté across a cracker.
“I don’t know. What is there to do?”
“Oh, we could go for a drive? I’m sure there’s cards downstairs, or a bar, if you’d like me to get you drunk.” His look turned wicked.
“You know I’d hate that. No, I’m sick of sitting down. I long to stretch my legs. Can we go for a walk? I’d like to see the grounds.”
He sucked pâté off his thumb. “Of course, darling.”
But even in that short time, the moor had transformed. Everything had taken on a queer blue quality, with the sun so low and obscured by fog. Moisture beaded in the warp and weft of Anne’s coat and darkened her unruly fringe. “Sun sets at six, sir,” called the porter from the front steps. Merritt raised his hand to show he’d heard.
“Perhaps we should stay inside after all?” Anne said, adjusting her collar and gazing out over that bleak hinterland.
“Don’t be silly,” Merritt said, holding out his arm. Together they wandered west around the side of the great house. Sodden pockets of moss squelched underfoot, expelling water like blood, and the cries of lonely pipits—juveniles that had yet to migrate south—pricked Anne’s mind. It had been easy, in the warm and dry, to forget about the shadow sliced beneath the train; now, she could think of nothing else.
“Tell me about Rannings,” she said, just for something to say, and Merritt obliged.
It had been built, he recalled, in the mid-eighteenth century by the Sixth Earl of Hythe who, like so many nobles with interests in the Caribbean, could think of nothing better to do than squander his wealth on a show home. The family estates in Barbados and Grenada, the dark bent backs of slaves, the foreman’s whip—all were well taxed to fund this venture. One by one, the red bricks settled into their mortar. Until the flow of money stopped.
“Oh,” Anne said. They’d reached the back of the house where the foundations and a few half-finished walls remained. Rannings was laid out like a horseshoe with two flanks that would have joined together at the rear to enclose an inner courtyard, but construction had ceased before the earl got his way. Someone had attempted to make a feature of the foundations by turning them into flower beds, but the cold and the wet, and exposure to the vicious Yorkshire wind, had made a mockery of that. “The slaves rebelled, burning hundreds of acres,” Merritt said. “The earl was ruined. He sold Rannings around, oh . . . 1810, 1812? But the new owners didn’t stay. I heard there was some legal trouble. The house lay empty right up till the turn of the century; a few tenants here and there, that’s all.” He nodded ahead, to the plume of smoke from a faraway train. “We used to see it from afar as boys, my brothers and I, and wonder what it was like inside. It was a barracks during the war. It’s been a hotel ever since.”
The petering walls, the weed-choked foundation stones and the gaping abyss between them: All of it pulled Anne’s nerves taut as wire. Reminded her of wounds, of weeping bedsores. Cold sweat slid down her back like dead finger trails. “Why don’t they finish what’s left of it?”
“Some clause in the freehold.” He shrugged, leading her away.
They walked in silence, and the further they went from Rannings, the easier Anne’s mind turned to other concerns. The revelation of Merritt’s having brothers, for example. He’d never mentioned them. They were, she thought, yet another thing to add to the long list of things she didn’t know about her husband. Suddenly, his arm felt alien under her hand, the scruff of growth along his jaw perilously male.
She’d happened to be at her father’s surgery the day they met. Merritt had brought in a friend who’d broken his ankle jumping a stile. With the man howling in pain and the doctor on his rounds two miles away, Anne had pushed up her sleeves and set and splinted the ankle herself. She’d seen her father do it enough times; had held down patients before, when there was no one else to be found.
Afterward, Merritt called in to praise her quick actions. He called in the next day, too, even when his friend had been sent home and he had no reason to stay. His graying temples betrayed his age and the townsfolk called him a fool, chasing after a girl so young. But Anne allowed their trysts. Encouraged them, despite her father’s protests. Penshaw was a confined place where everyone knew everyone else’s business, no matter how intimate, and the young people whose friendship she’d depended on as a child had married and moved away. She was desperately lonely.
And Merritt knew nothing about her other than what she chose to present to him. That fresh start—it was too intoxicating to resist.
Perhaps Merritt felt the same way.
He felt her stiffen and pressed his hand to her back, steadying her.
She tried not to balk at that steering touch. She had not escaped the grasp of one father only to fall into the hands of another.
They came upon a small village called Haxby three miles from the house, no more than a rough square overlooked by cottages and a church with a crooked spire. The old vicar was closing the door for the night. He waved cheerfully to them as if they’d worshipped there all their lives. Anne waved back shyly and leaned toward Merritt. “Is this your parish?”
“No, this is still part of the estate,” Merritt replied. “My family live north of here. We’ll stay at Rannings a few days more, then I suppose I should take you to meet them.”
He stopped at the sight of the memorial in the square. Newly erected and yet already stained with mildew, it listed the local war dead in cold iron letters.
“Will your brothers be there?”
Merritt’s lips thinned. “No. My brothers are here.” Anne’s eyes picked them out in the dark.
William Keene
20 December 1895 �
�� 2 August 1917
Clarence Henry Keene
4 July 1898 – 3 August 1917
“We’ve walked too far,” Merritt said coldly.
They returned to Rannings as the last of the light fled. Merritt said nothing to her over supper, throwing back brandy by the fire until late. And when he finally came to bed, just like their wedding night, the sheets lay quite flat and undisturbed in the space between them.
The wailing starts before I see the house and grows louder as we pick our way across the incomplete foundations. James raises the lamp and I catch sight of the walls, dark as dried blood. Almost every great house in England’s been built with sugar money. I burn at the thought of the lives that paid for these bricks, these window frames, the furnishings inside.
“What sort of doctor lets his patients cry like that?” I hiss.
James shudders beside me. “Who knows what he does to ’em first.” Then he passes me the lamp; it seems he’s reached his limit. “Look, I said I’d bring you and I have, but I won’t get no closer than this, miss. The house is touched.” He glances at the walls as if they might be listening and lowers his voice further. “The doctor took someone from us, too, a long time ago. You’re a braver lass than me, standing up to him. Be careful, miss.”
I nod solemnly. “Thank you.”
James melts into the darkness beyond the lamp’s reach, leaving me to climb the coiling steps and ring the bell alone. The housekeeper—or matron, I suppose she’d be better called—answers the door in her housecoat and slippers. She looks at me meanly. “We’re not hiring. Clear off!”
I push past her. “Actually, I’m here for Mister Benjamin Walchop. A year is quite long enough for someone who doesn’t even need treatment, don’t you think?”
The entrance hall’s Baltic, the limestone flags beneath my feet gritty with dirt. I’d expected to find rugs and hangings, perhaps a varnished sideboard lit by gas lamps like the ones Missus Whittock has in her drawing room, but the space is bare and lifeless, as are the dim rooms leading off from either side. In a far corner, a gleaming cockroach scuttles away from the lamplight and disappears through a hole in the skirting board.
A hospital, Benjamin had reassured me when he’d come to the Whittocks’ back stoop to say goodbye; he’d been warped with hunger, in body and sense. A sanatorium. Well, perhaps I’m ignorant, but to me, Rannings looks and sounds like an asylum taken wholesale from those silly novels my employer likes so much. I’d laugh if I wasn’t so angry.
I turn on the matron. “Where’s Benjamin?”
“You should’ve made an appointment.” She closes the door, trapping me inside.
“Oh yes,” I scoff, gesturing around, “this is clearly the sort of place where one must write ahead. You’re quite run off your feet, I’m sure. But, see, I’ve been asking after Benjamin for months now, with no response. Is the doctor in?”
She stiffens at my tone and narrows her eyes distrustfully. Looks over my attire and my hale figure beneath, evaluating where I’ve come from. Missus Whittock clothes and feeds me well; anything less would reflect badly on her husband’s income. The matron sniffs. “You’re in luck, Miss . . . ?”
“Wells,” I say.
She leads me to the right, through a high-ceilinged room with heavy drapes that mute the echoing clip of my boots. A few moths flicker around my lamp, casting erratic shadows on the walls. I shoo them away.
From behind me, I hear the rattle of dice in a cupped palm, the clatter as they land. I stop and turn, but there are no tables. I can’t imagine there ever having been any, though I suppose there must have been, once. And—is that the taste of champagne? It burns my tongue, sharp and painful. Yes, I’m sure it is. Missus Whittock let me have a sip last year. For a girl raised on beef scouse and farl, it’s a difficult flavor to forget.
The matron is staring at me. “Seen something interesting, Miss Wells?”
“No.”
Her lips tighten like they’re holding in a smile, and for the first time I’m afraid.
Cold, clammy hands pushed up between the floorboards like couch grass, splintering the wood. Anne recoiled from the edge of the mattress as fingers plucked at her through the sheets.
Help! Help us!
She started awake and then lay still, unsure; the pale morning light had left the room as spectral as the moor, and the ghost of a too-firm grip ached on the inside of her upper arm. The skin there was discolored, a bruise just forming. Her heart started to pound until she remembered that Merritt had marched them both back to Rannings last night, his hand like a vise.
He was awake, too, sitting by the open window with his head in his hands. His shins, exposed by shrunken pajamas, had pimpled with gooseflesh.
Anne curled up tight and tried to doze, but true sleep was long gone. She sighed. The floorboards were unmarked and cool against her soles as she padded over to the swelling curtains.
Merritt’s brandy-laced breath swirled like brume. He swallowed stickily. She reached past him and pulled down the sash. Placed a hesitant hand on his shoulder. “Merritt?”
He blinked and took her hand. “Sorry, darling. Bit of a shock, that’s all.”
“Your brothers.”
“I should’ve expected a memorial, of course. They’re setting them up all over.”
Anne sank into the seat beside him and together they looked out over the carriage sweep, the lawn, and the dale beyond. The sun was poised on the brink of the horizon, lightening the eastern sky like a spill of bleach. Rannings had been a barracks during the war, she remembered Merritt saying, and now that she looked, she fancied she could see the scars on the lawn where drills had churned the grass. “Did they train here?”
“Briefly—just long enough to learn how to hold a pistol. I was stationed in Scarborough. In 1917, we were sent to the front, to Belgium. . . .”
He looked at her blearily; he was still drunk. White sputum had collected in the corners of his mouth. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? You’ve never known wartime. Christ. When were you born?”
“1916.”
His eyes unfocused, and the little color left in his cheeks drained away. “You’re barely half my age. What must people think of me?”
Anne gave Merritt’s fingers a small, nervous squeeze. “I don’t see how that’s anyone’s business.”
“Then what must you think of me?” Merritt ran a shaking hand through his hair, still slick with yesterday’s oil. “I never got to be a young man, y’know. My youth died with my brothers, in the mud of Passchendaele. I thought I’d put it all behind me, but then I came to Penshaw and met you. You reminded me of everything I’d missed.” He dragged his hand down his face, peering at her through greasy fingers. “And now there’s talk of another bloody war in every newspaper, every morning. I can’t face it—I can’t bear it again!”
Anne’s breath caught. No one had ever been so honest with her, never bared themselves so raw, not even her parents; what did he want her to say?
She opened her mouth, but so did he, to retch. The vase of roses was still on the dresser nearby. She snatched out the flowers, thorns biting into her palm, and thrust the vase under Merritt’s chin in time to catch a dribble of bile.
“You need rest,” said Anne, back on familiar ground, “and plenty of water.” She poured out a tumbler and cupped the back of his head as he gulped it down, the sharp bulge in his neck bobbing grotesquely. With a groan and a lot of morose muttering, he returned to bed. Anne tucked him in. It felt too awkward to stay there in the semi-dark, serenaded by phlegmatic snores, so she dressed and went downstairs. Other guests nodded to her as they passed, all following the smell of frying bacon. The receptionist greeted each one in the detached, polite way Anne knew well from operating the telephone in her father’s surgery. “Good morning, Missus Keene. Breakfast is through here.”
“Thank you, yes,” Anne said, hovering by the desk. “Um, my husband is sleeping in. Could something plain be sent up to him in an hour
? Perhaps some toast?”
“Of course,” the receptionist said smoothly, noting it down. Her fingernails matched her red lipstick, her perfectly pinned hair that elusive shade of auburn no dye could replicate. Anne tucked a loose, wiry curl of her own hair behind her ear.
“How have you found your room, Missus Keene?”
“Oh, fine.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” The receptionist underlined her note and looked up to greet the next guest.
“That sounded rather dismissive, didn’t it?” Anne twisted her hands together, recapturing the receptionist’s attention. “It really is lovely. I’ve—I’ve never stayed anywhere like this before. I don’t know how to behave.”
The receptionist smiled at that—a real, warm smile, rather than the too-wide, toothy show she’d put on for their arrival yesterday. “You’d be surprised how many people say that. There’s nothing to it, honestly. I’d say you’re a natural.”
Anne blushed. “Well, anyway, I’d never guess it was a barracks, and empty before that.”
“Never empty for long,” she replied. “Rannings has had quite the history. It’s even been a hospital. Well, asylum.”
“An asylum?”
The receptionist inclined her head, misinterpreting Anne’s appalled expression. “A private institution. Shut down about a hundred years ago, but we keep that quiet. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t gossip.”
As Anne ate the breakfast she no longer had the appetite for, she wondered: Did Merritt know about that particular piece of Rannings history? Was he the sort of person to think it a talking point, an object of interest, like the lords and ladies who’d once paid to see the inmates of Bedlam?
Her father had considered sending her to one or two institutions when she was younger, before deciding to attempt treatment himself. She’d found the brochures in his desk drawer. Modern therapies were nothing like the crude ministrations of the previous century, they reassured their reader, but Anne couldn’t stop imagining the worst: manacled inmates, hair shorn for wigs, rolling in their own filth. Such wretched conditions were common before the reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. A privately run asylum in the 1830s must have been Hell on Earth.
