‘My dear, I have been trying to cross it myself these past thirty years.’
Eliza sighed. Considered once more the clouds over her head. ‘Someone very dear to you?’
The old man did not reply, but there it was, plainly written on his face, everything that ought to be read about it. His wife was still alive—someone much younger then. A boy. Or a daughter, more likely. ‘I am so sorry for your loss,’ she said, realising that she had used the formal mode of consoling the relative of a deceased. But then again, just as the meanings of the old man’s stories were unfixed, she couldn’t really tell if they were talking about a death in the family or a disappearance to the other side; or perhaps it was both things at once.
‘There is only one thing I can advise you, and it is this: in my experience, as indeterminate as thresholds are, it is clear that there are moments in which we ourselves generate that indeterminacy as human beings. In those moments we are closer to it than in others.’
‘Which moments?’
‘Death. I don’t mean your death, particularly. But the death of somebody. When death is present in the room. It is only between life and death that It has power over us mortals, and can carry us away.’
She smiled. This knowledge was more than she had expected to obtain.
‘You may remember one more thing.’
‘Yes? What is it?’
‘That, sometimes, the way of finding the way is to lose oneself.’
‘I truly thank you, sir.’
‘But, my dear, that is only going there… Even if you succeed, how on earth are you planning to come back?’
Eliza didn’t reply, for she didn’t have an answer for this.
‘Ah! I see our tea is coming… I hope that you will humour an old man like myself and have the tea out here, now that the sun has finally graced us with his presence.’
‘It will be my pleasure.’
The old man looked pensively at her. When tea came, he asked the maid to bring something back. The young girl returned with a book in her hand. The older man opened it and started reading.
There was a boy who used to sit in the twilight and listen to his great-aunt’s stories. She told him that if he could reach the place where the end of the rainbow stands he would find there a golden key. ‘And what is the key for?’ the boy would ask. ‘What is it the key of? What will it open?’ ‘That nobody knows,’ his aunt would reply. ‘He has to find that out.’
* * *
The house was entirely surrounded by followers of Madame Florence, sporting banners claiming her innocence, wielding huge bouquets, halfway between funeral wreath and distorted, enormous offerings. The women were also wearing elaborate flower garlands on their heads, and were dancing in circles. The police were present. Some of the banners declared that Willimina was the female Messiah they had all been waiting for, and implored her to save them.
That kind of demonstration unnerved Helena a great deal. They reminded her of another one, a few years back in Cambridge, that still brought an unsavoury taste to her mouth: male students protesting against the campaign to allow women to be awarded a degree, a campaign that had started a decade earlier, when a young girl called Philippa Fawcett topped the exam results in the university. There had not been progress in ten whole years, when Helena, already a student, witnessed the ugly scene. It was a hot day. Some male students had gathered outside Senate House, where a committee voted on the issue. The students threw eggs, rockets, and even burnt the effigy of a female cyclist in Market Square, an oversized doll that was meant to represent all female students, that was meant to represent her. Perhaps Willimina was not the female Messiah all those people were waiting for, but Helena really hoped she would arrive one day.
Miss Collins had requested Helena’s help. She intended to take Willimina somewhere to be safe. She looked shocked, upset. The revelations about Madame Florence seemed to have affected her a great deal. Miss Collins had not been found at fault, unlike Mr Bunthorne, who had accompanied the medium for decades. She had no idea that Madame Florence wasn’t who she thought she was. She had trusted her implicitly.
‘I could not believe it. Madame Florence is only a name, can you imagine? Different people have been Madame Florence. How could nobody realise the trick earlier?’
‘Oh, but they did at the end,’ said Helena sadly. But inside herself she thought of the young woman called Willimina, and her lucky escape; and of other young women throughout the years who had ‘received’ Madame Florence’s soul, if that was what had happened. She could not confide in Miss Collins any of this, but Helena offered her sympathies for what she was going through. Miss Collins was an intelligent woman; perhaps she had worked it out by herself. She smiled bravely back, she was a professional after all, and Helena did not doubt she would land on her feet.
The living room was full of half-made cases and bundles of linen, hatboxes and a couple of expensive-looking travel trunks. Everything was imbued with a manic urgency. Helena followed Miss Collins upstairs. Willimina was lying in a canopy bed in a bedroom overlooking the garden, perfectly coiffured and with rosy cheeks.
‘What is wrong with her?’
‘I am afraid she has been in this comatose state ever since our last séance for Lady Matthews.’
Helena could not believe it. Still, Willimina was the very image of good health, and simply looked as if she was sleeping.
Then she saw it, something moving on the other side of the window in the corner of her vision. Willimina was outside, in the garden, looking back at her, leaning against a birch tree. Helena took a deep breath, and turned slowly to look at the bed.
Willimina was also lying on the bed, peacefully sleeping.
Helena looked back at the window.
The second Willimina said hello with her hand, and indicated that Helena should come and meet her.
Helena excused herself and went out into the garden. The girl, or her shadow, spirit, projectal matter, whatever she may be, was waiting for her.
‘Hello,’ the second Willimina said.
‘Hello. Are you well?’ answered Helena.
‘I am perfectly well, thank you very much.’
‘You are… the real thing.’
‘I do not feign my Spiritualist trances, if that is what you mean,’ the girl said, with a charming and proud smile. ‘Madame Florence thinks I am some kind of Messiah… She is wrong, of course. I am not that important.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘I have to talk to you, explain things. The girls have asked me to.’
Helena did not have to ask to know she meant Maud, Alice, Flora. Willimina continued:
‘I am the key, at least for now. Like Sam was the key, is the key. Come on! I will wake soon; there is not a moment to lose.’
Willimina took her by the hand, and they started walking to the bottom of the garden. The light changed suddenly; but instead of night falling like a curtain dropping it settled into what seemed to be an eternal dusk, as if they had entered a realm in which the sun was forever setting. This reminded her of the meadow with the Tudor house. It was a country of shadows, all of a sudden.
Helena did not know if she was now dreaming. Perhaps she was. Perhaps she was awake.
Willimina took her towards a tunnel made of trees, which got narrower and narrower, until they had to crawl down, and eventually they came upon a little door; she opened the door, still holding Helena’s hand, and what was on the other side of the door was a staircase spiralling down, and down and down they went… It looked to Helena as if the tunnel was never going to end.
Some birds flew around them. Although they were not birds, she noticed, but winged fish.
It was a landscape from a dream, made by the mist itself, an invented scenario put together by the gathering dusk. And then they came upon it, the little copse of birches she recognised, and behind it, the Tudor manor.
‘Here we are! The country whence the shadows fall,’ announced Willimina. ‘I hope you recognise this
place,’ she said. ‘You are meant to always enter by the first place in which you traversed between. From here you can access the rest. I did not realise immediately. Do you understand, Helena?’ she insisted.
‘Understand what?’
‘That no mortal or immortal being can tell where one place begins, and the other ends.’
Willimina let go of her hand, smiling, with such longing that Helena thought for a second that she was saying goodbye.
‘Wait! How do I get back?’
Willimina seemed to consider this, but she didn’t reply.
Helena continued walking, firmly into the other world. Or so she thought; she was sleeping in an armchair in Miss Collins’s house, next to Willimina.
In the dream world, eventually, Willimina vanished from view.
* * *
Lady Matthews arrived at the abbey later that night. She had read several times the short, final report sent by Helena Walton. She had never felt so tired. It was the report of a lunatic. If she thought she would get the agreed fee after these raving propositions… Lady Matthews did not finish her train of thought; she punctuated it by an action that surprised even herself: she took the delicate china mug she had been served tea in, and smashed it on the floor of her room.
She was panting, eyes wide open, amazed at how relieved she felt after the futile gesture. If Miss Walton was right, Maud had been trying to get back to the house all those years and had been rebuked; whereas the other two children were, presumably, lost for all eternity. But she knew it well; she had always known it, what those horrid pages said.
Oh yes. She had known all along. She had always known. But she could not admit it to herself. She needed someone else to show her the truth.
That wretched place by the coast, its poison reaching out into the ruins, and into the eerie countryside. And into her home, into their lives. She was to blame. Charles was to blame. To even imagine that they could have succeeded; what fools had they been.
She took the saucer and smashed it with sudden fury. She took the milk jar and smashed it next. She grabbed with both hands the teapot, considering whether she would dare to do it; after all, it was a much bigger object. She let it drop; and, after that, there was no stopping her.
Lady Matthews suffered an apoplexy while smashing the third row of framed photographs. By then she was full of cuts, bruised, slightly manic, her perfect coiffured bun out of place, her face distorted, amazed and full of grief. In her last effort, an oil bedside lamp crashed against the floor with her.
No one heard her when she herself fell on the carpet as the flames spread.
EPILOGUE
The Reverend Harry Cecil-St John was an exile in a strange land. He had been sent to that dismal stretch of coast by his bishop six months back, and still had not got used to the wretched place. During the trip there, his heart had contracted slightly while considering the never-ending blackness, expanding queerly. Those big open fields, the still regularity of their tired greens, and then the dark soil, darker and darker as you got deeper into the county. The Fens had always looked to him exactly what they were: a made landscape; or rather, one could say, ‘made-up’, giving the impression that someone had just dreamed it. It was an impossible thing; even in the blackness of the night the sense of land without end was palpable, forcing one to reflect on one’s own insignificance. And then it hit him: nothingness was what truly stretched between oneself and the horizon, so distant that it looked like a thin indeterminate line dreamed up by the overwrought brain, a mirage of sorts. The light was also something improvised by a mind that needed to impose shapes and forms in order to stay sane, when truly, really, the eyes were incapable of elucidating any object or gradient or slope, for there were none.
A deceitful landscape, dishonest. It spoke of clean lines, its man-made angles reassuring the viewer of its symmetry, its order; but its ditches were cut out of the mud with so much sorrow, so much suffering. Whatever poor soul was caught poaching, or had committed an even minor infraction, was sent to remove the sand, clay, gravel, until the fatigue was too much and they ended up underneath the land themselves. And here, in this bitter, awful land, was where he had been put, in a parish by that uncanny coast, with its monstrous tides and collapsed churches. True, he could have fared much worse; for he ruled over a Norman church with a pretty little tower, and the proud air of a fortress, an atmospheric miniature vestry of dark wood, and a couple of treasures paid for by the wool trade, all those centuries back: a little Nottingham alabaster panel representing the virgin saints (Katherine, Ursula, Helena, Barbara), and a quaint panelled window overlooking the marshes, depicting Etheldreda herself, the Saxon princess, presenting a treasure to those who would lay the foundations of what would in time become Ely’s cathedral. At least he had not been ordered into a phantom parish by his bishop, he thought—small triumph! But he saw them in the distance, in his wanderings—for what was there to do here but rambling and bird-spotting and daydreaming?—and he knew all their stories by now. St Agnes’s was still visible, its tower a beacon in the mist, the pole of a ship in the middle of water when the tide covered it all. The shoreline had shifted here, all those centuries back; and now the little building had been abandoned to the capricious movements of the sea, neither here nor there. The life around it had gone with the transformed landscape dreamed by reclamation, and its parishioners had vanished, as forcefully as if the fairies had taken them. The marsh dwellers had insisted on staying for a while, but at the end the ghosts had been too much, and they had been forced to move a stretch inland, all the way to his parish. This had happened generations ago, and still he could sense their bitterness.
On windy, bleak mornings like that one, they said that the tolling of a bell could be heard coming from St Agnes’s direction. These were mornings when ghosts went out to air themselves, protest their existence. For it was a haunting, no doubt; it had been a long time since there was a bell perched there. High tides and strong winds had crashed with the force of a mighty gale against its crumbling walls, and the little construction had finally collapsed, forever sinking into the marshes. Other churches had collapsed, and were still collapsing, as the waves were intent on recovering their kingdom. Only six years ago Eccles Church had disappeared, swallowed up by the sea.
And so, this was his final domain: vast dark-soiled fields, wide never-ending skies, sea mist, wet, marshy ground, and howling winds; birds to watch and sermons to write, and absolutely nothing else. Unless one were to write about the disquiet of the soul on certain mornings, the eeriness of the ruined churches standing in the midst of the tide, the unusual quietness, the unbroken, hellish landscape. The unwholesomeness of it all. Even the beach nearby felt oppressive, claustrophobic, with its leaden sky and its furious gales, pushing the birds higher into the clouds. The knowledge that the ancient buildings that now stood proud could be gone at any time and without warning.
* * *
The church of Wicken Far End had suffered a different fate, for the storms of the 1870s had finished it off completely, scattering around all its stones. And there it had remained, for a very long time. Until the Green Flood, that was. Now, there was nothing. The water seemed to have changed the shape of everything, and even now, many weeks on, it was still possible to see the destruction that it had brought with it. For one thing was clear: the paths had been altered somehow, the usual landmarks were all wrong, even more than they normally were.
In the past, the reverend had got not exactly lost, but somehow disorientated in those fields. Now, he looked again around him, and realised the copse he was in.
‘Oh dear,’ he said out loud, as much to himself as to the trees and the leaves and the bushes. It was oddly quiet, and he could not see any birds, or anything that indicated the presence of some other living creature.
He came out of the copse, and found himself there, in that place which he had avoided since his arrival. He would not have been able to explain why, he did not know why he did it, although he knew th
at the ruins were unwholesome, unholy: his instinctive reaction when he found himself there was to take his hand to the cross that he carried in his pocket.
A woman appeared out of nowhere. She was suddenly at the door of the ruined Tudor manor. Next to her, a green light was gaining weight, consistency, forming a small cloud which seemed to advance next to her. The face was familiar… Yes, he had seen her before, in Old John’s cottage the morning after he died.
‘Miss!’ he called, but she didn’t reply. She looked behind her for a second, directed her gaze to the place where he was, but, oddly, she seemed not to see him. Surely he, a priest, wasn’t invisible; something felt queer.
The woman wasn’t from these parts. He wanted to tell her at once to run away, to leave that place. He thought that he could direct her safely back away from the meadow.
He was gasping for air now. The light had become more leaden, greyish. And suddenly he could not breathe.
‘Miss!’ he called again. To his horror, the woman entered the house.
This would not do. That place was better left alone. Muttering a few words unseemly to a clergyman, he advanced towards the building. He would have to go and fetch her. And what could she possibly be doing in that place?
He hadn’t been inside before, and was surprised at the amount of rubble and stones; he was surprised at the whole bricks that had become dislodged from the walls. What no one could understand was why the flood had not taken this place forever. It was almost as if the waters had taken a conscious turn here. It made so little sense. A shadow moved, and he saw the woman had made her way into the very last room.
Something started pulling him now, and something else was urging him to go. The two forces were equally powerful, and for a few seconds the reverend stayed, unmoving, on the spot. Then, shaking his head, he took a step into the unknown. It was only with a profound effort that he managed to get to the last room. Everything was covered in mould, and, worried, he took a handkerchief to his nose.
‘Miss!’ he tried again.
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