Pale as the Dead

by Fiona Mountain

  At least Natasha would find out soon enough what information the British Library held on Lizzie. She’d been one step ahead there, which was a good feeling. Maybe she was on the right track after all.

  The pub was heaving with students and arty types blocking the narrow flagged hallways, pints of lager and gins in their hands. Natasha shouldered her way past the oak and glass partitions which divided the inn into its distinctive, Victorian parlour-like alcoves. She paid for a lager and vodka at the bar.

  Despite the crowds, Adam had found a seat in one of the alcoves by a cast iron fireplace. She squeezed in beside him.

  He nodded hello to a couple of girls who came to sit opposite by the curtained windows. They were dressed to look older then they were, painted children, with what looked like native American charms, feathers and bones and teeth, around their throats.

  ‘You come here often?’ Natasha gave Adam a wry smile.

  ‘My temporary local. I like it.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘I thought it was the kind of place you’d feel at home,’ Adam said.

  A lanky student came and sat down on a stool at the other side of Natasha, opened a tabloid newspaper, then, eyeing Adam’s lighter on the table, asked if he could borrow it. ‘Sure.’ Adam reached across Natasha to hold the flame to the man’s cigarette. She could feel his thigh pressing into hers, his arm against her breasts. He was doing it on purpose. There was a little round scar on his temple which looked like it might have been left over from a childhood bout of chicken pox.

  He flicked off the lighter and drew back, not quite the distance he’d been before. She could feel the warmth of his skin through her jeans and shirt.

  ‘Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to hang out here,’ she said. ‘Rossetti and Morris would no doubt have popped in a few times.’

  ‘Don’t you wish you lived a hundred years ago?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘I do.’ She half expected him to give the reasons everyone did, talk about technology and how busy people were and the break down of families. But instead he added, ‘It must change your whole outlook. Growing up with the words of Shakespeare and Lord Byron in your head rather than the lyrics of pop songs.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. “I Should Be So Lucky”. I can relate to that. Why did you want to become a photographer?’

  ‘Some grandiose idea of preserving beauty that otherwise would be lost forever.’ He turned to her. ‘My grandmother had this big round hat box full of crystals, all different shapes and sizes, that came from chandeliers. At Christmas she hung them from the tree instead of baubles. They looked amazing against the dark green branches, like huge snowflakes or raindrops that never fell. My grandfather was a painter and decorator, so it’s a mystery how she came by them. She told me she was a Fairy Grandmother, and she visited all the children, taking away their tears.’

  ‘That’s a lovely story.’

  He looked at her. ‘Except I never believed it.’

  A thought flickered through her mind, barely articulated but there none the less, and dangerous. Bethany must have been crazy to leave him. She didn’t deserve him, the efforts he had been prepared to go to to win her back. Natasha knew that the sudden upswelling of anger she felt for Bethany was irrational, fired by her own prejudices and exeriences. She quashed it firmly. She needed to go on liking Bethany, otherwise she’d never summon the energy and resolve to keep on trying to find her.

  ‘When I was about seven,’ Adam went on, ‘I borrowed my father’s camera, tried, over and over again, to take a photograph of that tree, but I couldn’t quite get it right. My grandmother said that it just went to show how clever God was. That all the brilliant scientists in the world couldn’t create a camera as good as the human eye. I was sure I could make the world look more beautiful than the way we see it. Or different at least.’

  He reached out and with his finger brushed a tendril of her hair that lay against her shoulder. ‘Rossetti was obsessed with hair,’ he said. ‘To him it was the most sensual, erotic thing. But it’s faces that fascinate me. Eyes and lips, skin. Why did you come tonight?’

  ‘I didn’t want to go home.’

  ‘There’s no one waiting for you there?’

  ‘Only Boris.’ She felt suddenly vulnerable, picked up the vodka for something to do.

  Adam ran a finger down his beer bottle, tracing a drop of moisture. ‘My flat’s just round the corner.’

  She drained her drink. ‘I should get going.’

  ‘I wasn’t inviting you. Just passing a comment.’

  She felt a flush of anger that she very much hoped wouldn’t look like a blush. ‘I don’t think so.’ She picked up her bag.

  ‘What’s the hurry anyway? No one’s going to miss you.’

  No one’s going to miss you. Something about his choice of words, just the truth of them, perhaps, angered her even more. Also frightened her. The implication: who’d come looking for you?

  ‘I’ve an early start tomorrow. Train to catch.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘To visit the Queen?’

  She looked at him. ‘A contact. I asked him to research the Marshalls.’

  ‘And has he found anything?’

  ‘I’ll be able to answer that tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll walk you to your car.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I can take care of myself.’

  They were outside the pub. ‘Thanks for showing me the pictures. Goodnight.’ She set off to walk.

  He fell in step beside her.

  She resisted the urge to shout, ‘Leave me alone’, remembered the voice on the answering machine. Why can’t you leave her alone?

  They were walking along a dark passageway by Merton College. Adam pulled her against him.

  ‘What are you—?’

  His hand was over her mouth. Then his lips. She felt his arm go round her, his hand cradling the back of her head. Her muscles seemed to soften, turn to water. He kissed her, pressed his leg hard up between hers, rubbed himself against her, took each of her hands in his, trapped them down at her sides, interlaced his fingers with hers. Then he slipped one hand underneath her coat, untucked her shirt and slide his palm across her back and under her bra, the caress soft and dry. She put her arms up around him, the unfamiliar leanness of his body.

  The alley was deserted.

  She pulled back, turned and walked away, forced herself not to look over her shoulder.

  She couldn’t have said if she was leaving on the grounds of common sense or out of some instinct for self preservation, or because she knew how wretched she would feel tomorrow if she let things go any further. She ignored the other voice inside her head, the one saying tomorrow may never come. And if it did, to let it take care of itself.

  * * *

  She’d set the alarm for seven-thirty and had just dropped off to sleep when the telephone rang. She rubbed at her eyes. The clock on the chest of drawers said it was just after five.

  ‘Did I wake you?’ It was Adam.

  ‘Course not,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I’ve been up ages.’

  ‘So have I.’

  ‘This is getting to be a habit.’

  ‘I warned you I had an addictive personality. What train did you say you were catching?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘There’s something I haven’t told you.’ She waited. ‘I need to see you again.’

  ‘I’m leaving for the station at seven,’ she lied.

  ‘Call me when you’re on your way.’ He gave her the number of the flat in Oxford.

  She watched the fingers on the clock, turned on the radio and heard the early morning shipping forecast. Gale warnings.

  Twenty-Eight

  THE RINGING AT the other end of the phone was competing with the rattle of the train, the tinny hiss and thump of a personal stereo and the conversation that was going on at the table across the carriage between a young bespectacled man in a sharp pinstriped suit
and a middle-aged woman with lots of blue eye-shadow and a briefcase.

  Five, six, eight, ten times the phone had rung. Why was she holding on so long? Adam obviously wasn’t at home.

  The train had passed Reading, so she guessed it was around half past nine. Maybe he’d left for the studio already. She had her finger on the off button when the ringing stopped. ‘Hello.’ He sounded annoyed. She heard a female voice in the background. It sounded like Angie.

  ‘It’s Natasha. I’m sorry if I disturbed you. But you said…’

  ‘You’re on the train?’ His tone had changed, was warm now. ‘I was planning on coming up to town too, need to pick up some clean clothes.’

  Of course you do!

  ‘When are you free?’

  ‘I’m meeting someone at eleven. I should be done by one.’

  Silence for a moment. ‘Meet me outside the Tate at two.’

  * * *

  She knew that Toby would be waiting for her in the restaurant of the British Library, having ordered a pot of tea and warm scones with melted butter.

  In many ways the Library was the perfect environment for him, like an extension of his personality, a juxtaposition of the new and the old.

  Strangely tranquil, a modern cathedral to knowledge, you could sense the weight of the important material held within it. The great rooms, all white pillars, pale burnished wood and muted carpets, with rows of flickering computer screens sitting on desks inlaid with green leather. The foyers and corridors were open plan, structured like enormous balconies, so you could stand on the top floor and look down on the wide hall with its sweeping staircase. And through the centre of the building, dominating all floors, a column of smoky glass, holding old books, incongruously antiquated symbols of the library’s purpose.

  Not everything was sleek and computerised though. Sometimes it was necessary to cross reference in the original catalogues, a painstaking task, and you also needed special permission to see some of the more valuable documents. Which was why Toby, who knew his way around blindfold and had been granted access to almost everything, often did the legwork for Natasha.

  He was sitting in the café area on the second floor, amid chrome furniture and subdued lighting, the tables decorated with vases of single, long-stemmed red roses.

  He beamed when he saw her, kissed her on both cheeks and pulled out a chair.

  ‘You look wonderful,’ he said, and she felt guilty because she’d chosen her outfit with someone else in mind. Beneath a leather jacket she was wearing a fishtail skirt in deep purple and an embroidered black muslin shirt. She had a black feather boa flung around her neck.

  She was keen for him to tell her what he’d found but he had a way of dispelling impatience. He ordered tea, placed a pat of butter and small plate of toasted teacakes in front of her. ‘Eat up,’ he said, sounding like someone’s dad.

  ‘Well,’ she said through a mouthful of teacake, ‘what’s up?’

  ‘Your Jeanette and John Marshall were interesting characters,’ he began, heaving his bulging briefcase onto the table. It was made of battered tan leather with straps and buckles, like an old-fashioned school satchel. He pulled out a wad of papers, a laptop and a large red and black notebook, the sort with small feint squares covering the pages. Natasha watched with fondness as he hit a few buttons on the keyboard, fumbled through his papers. He always seemed disorganized but had never once failed to come up with the goods.

  ‘There’s a collection, called the Ashley Library, which contains letters to and from Rossetti and his circle,’ he said. ‘They were gathered by a fellow called Thomas Wise who was interested in the Pre-Raphaelites but also had a reputation as a bit of a forger. He supposedly managed to get hold of an actual leaf from the notebook that was exhumed from Lizzie Siddal’s grave, but that’s by the by. Dr Marshall features rather prominently in the papers. He was Rossetti’s medical adviser for many years, was also friendly with Ford Maddox Brown and Rossetti’s brother, William. Rossetti seems to have been a difficult and demanding patient, and never settled his bills on time. Same old story. Struggling artist who only found real fame and fortune after his death.’

  ‘Must be a real pain that,’ Natasha commented.

  ‘Knowing you’ll be worth more dead than alive? Enough to make you top yourself.’

  She swallowed hard. ‘But the thing is, you never know if it’s glory or obscurity that awaits you.’

  ‘Whereas the rest of us mere mortals know it’s just obscurity. Maybe poor old Dr Marshall would have been quite happy to be forgotten.’ Toby grinned. ‘Anyway. There seems to have been a mutual respect between him and his esteemed patient. There’s a letter from Rossetti to Marshall, consoling him after the death of his daughter, Ada, and there’s another in which Rossetti offers his support to Marshall’s application for the chair of anatomy at the Royal Academy. The application must have been successful as there’s another letter congratulating him.’ Toby leant forward a little. ‘Marshall was the doctor summoned by Ford Maddox Brown on the night of Lizzie Siddal’s death.’ He looked up. ‘Know that?’ Natasha shook her head, wanting him to go on. ‘Marshall was called back two days after Lizzie died to examine her body, because Rossetti had got it into his head that she wasn’t dead at all, only in an unconscious stupor due to the drugs … poor guy. I’ve always thought it really gruesome, how they used to leave corpses lying about the house for days.’

  Natasha agreed. ‘Did Dr Marshall give any verdict on the cause of death.’

  ‘Can’t find it, unfortunately. His opinions on Lizzie’s state of health beforehand are well recorded though. He wrote to Rossetti telling him that there appeared to be nothing physically wrong with her, said her weakness was due to what we’d now call stress, I suppose. He packed her off to the Riviera and to the spa in Matlock for recuperation. There’s a letter from Georgina Burne-Jones saying that she wondered how it was possible for Lizzie to suffer so much without developing a specific disease. She was diagnosed by another doctor as having curvature of the spine and I came across a suggestion that she had a Victorian form of anorexia. Seems to me that Marshall was probably right about a mental or psychosomatic illness though. It would make sense that her stress or depression or whatever was made worse when her baby was stillborn, wouldn’t it?’ Natasha nodded. ‘Enter Dr Marshall again. He attended the birth and then was called out by Rossetti when Lizzie was distressed afterwards. There’s a letter from Georgina Burne-Jones saying how Lizzie would sit rocking an empty cradle by the fire, saying “Hush, you’ll wake it”. All in all, it seems pretty conclusive that she did commit suicide. Evelyn Waugh, Violet Hunt, Hall Caine, they all agreed, though they’re all novelists with an eye to a story, aren’t they? The consensus is that Lizzie had become so paranoid that every time Rossetti left her she imagined him with another woman, and if she was in a depression after the baby … There are also claims she left a note, either pinned to her nightgown or beside her bed.’

  Here Toby paused to take a bite of teacake, chewed it slowly. Natasha’s mind went into overdrive. Is this what Bethany had found out during that call to the British Library? Had someone told her what was in the Ashley Papers? Natasha didn’t want Lizzie to have killed herself, let alone left a note. Moreover she didn’t want to think Bethany knew that Lizzie might have left a note. A note was the one way you’d know an overdose wasn’t accidental.

  A note was also one parallel too many.

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘No one seems sure, which I suppose you could say is proof nobody ever saw anything. She either condemned Rossetti, or asked him to care for her brother. Hall Caine described a train journey when Rossetti said the note had left a scar on his heart that would never be healed.’

  Natasha realised Toby was watching her, waiting for a reaction. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. ‘You’re a star. I can’t believe you managed to find so much in such a short time.’

  She was touched by the way his face lit up at her praise, then
turned to a worried frown. ‘I can’t see how it brings you any nearer to this girl you’re trying to find.’

  She sighed. ‘Not immediately, no. But I’ll tell you something interesting. If I believed for a second that Bethany was a direct descendant of Marshall, I’d almost believe something else.’

  Because she was enlisting his professional help she’d felt obliged to brief him on the details of the investigation. Now she repeated the story Bethany had told Adam, recited to her by her grandmother, about the picture of Beata Beatrix being drawn from Lizzie’s corpse.

  Toby pulled a face. ‘I’ve never heard that one. How grisly.’

  ‘It would explain things though, wouldn’t it? Marshall was there on the night Lizzie died. You said yourself that two days later Rossetti didn’t believe she was really dead at all. And more to the point, that Marshall was called back then. He could have seen something. Rossetti in the process of painting her, deludedly thinking her still alive. If Bethany was related to Jeanette Marshall, it would be easy to assume that the tale had been handed down through the generations, from someone who was actually there. Maybe Rossetti had Lizzie embalmed or something. That would explain how she came to be beautiful six years later, when her coffin was opened.

  She’d been talking quickly, her imagination running away with itself, and Toby was looking at her dubiously. He made a bridge with his fingers. ‘I do wonder if insanity is infectious.’ He grinned. ‘Seriously. I mean, Rossetti himself suffered a kind of derangement after Lizzie died. Dr Marshall prescribed him the same drugs Lizzie took, and died from, chloral and laudanum.’ He started rummaging in his papers again. ‘See what I mean?’ Toby said. ‘There’s a letter from Rossetti to Marshall forgiving him for bringing him back to life after he’d tried to kill himself.’ Toby paused, glanced at Natasha. ‘Perhaps suicide is contagious too.’