by Janet Todd
Ann dragged herself into the present. Her mother was not there. She was dead – or at least this woman before her thought so – and her body had left the house. There was no point in going upstairs into the suffocating room with its closed pink curtains, even if she were invited.
‘Why did she die?’ asked Ann.
‘As to that, Mademoiselle Ann, when a time has come. She was ill for long. I write to tell you so. And you took much weeks to come.’
‘No,’ interrupted Ann, for she dreaded another silence, ‘what did she die of?’
‘Her ’eart, of course. She tell you.’
Her brain was still sluggish. The maid’s English when she used the language was hard to understand. She heard the word ‘art’. She thought of her mother’s sketches on the wall of the bedchamber. Surely they had been just a habit to pass the time, of no merit. Even Caroline could not have put store on these.
‘Her art?’
‘Mademoiselle,’ said the servant impatiently. ‘She has told you. She has weak ‘eart. She tell you many times. She tell me.’
Ann understood at last. She spoke on impulse. ‘Yes, often, but I never . . .’
‘No,’ barked the maid with sudden assertion, returning to French to interrupt, ‘Madame Caroline said you never – jamais.’
‘Jamais.’ The word hung in the gloomy air flecked with dust.
Ann stared at the maid, startled at what she was seeing. She had never believed in the loyal affection of servants – it was a trope of story-telling, nothing more, though Martha had cuddled her when she was small. But, then, as Sarah had said, everyone loved a little child, it meant nothing particular. For people of their class like her mother, no aristocrats with generations of faithful retainers, there was only resentment from those forced to serve them. What was happening here, then?
The maid’s fierceness could not easily be explained except by affection – unless of course she always faced the world with such scowling hostility.
Whatever its cause, the sudden emotion cracked something inside Ann. She felt overwhelmed by the drama she was in: the dead mother, the estranged daughter, the dingy lodgings, the loneliness of both of them. Tears welled up. She had rarely cried except in self-pity in these years when Robert had taken over her life, and then not in front of strangers. She had little idea how to control her face for social tears.
The maid looked at her, then muttered, ‘Trop tard, Mademoiselle Ann.’
‘But when?’ The question hung in the air. ‘When did she write it, the letter?’
‘She wrote most of it not so long ago, when she began to be very ill. I was to send it to you when she was dead through the office in London which knows where you are.’
‘Why didn’t you send it before then?’
‘She wasn’t dead.’
‘But you wrote to me all the same.’
The maid said nothing.
Ann stared at the letter. What could her mother be saying to her? What could be said only when Caroline was dead? When had the letter really been written? She looked in horror at it as if it were a living thing, part of the wicked old woman who’d been on the bed, only just alive.
Old age was so ghastly, so ugly, it should not speak. The dead should go away when they died.
She must take the letter and leave, but something restrained her. This maid, this scowling old servant, was the last link, the last to know Caroline. Perhaps there was more than could be put into the letter.
‘Is it about me, about Gilbert, my father?’ she said, knowing how selfish she must sound. But her mother had already given her a character; the portrait could not be further blackened.
For the first time the maid gave a smile, so wintry that Ann found she preferred the scowl.
‘No Gilbert, Mademoiselle Ann.’
Again the maid looked her in the face with those weirdly shrewd eyes.
‘What do you mean? What?’
‘As I say, Ann.’
The name had been used without any title, just as Aksel Stamer had used it. Here it was done with such familiarity she was even more startled. But before she could ask more the maid had put the letter down on the table, leaving Ann to pick it up. Then she turned on her heels, mounted the stairs, and left the room.
Ann was alone to find her own way out.
She waited a moment in the stillness, knowing full well the woman would not come back. She dreaded above all things following her up to that awful room. Was the maid sitting there alone by the empty bed?
She collected her wits as best she could and, avoiding any image of herself that might appear in that silver-edged mirror that hung on the wall here as it had hung in Putney, stumbled her way down the stairs and along the dark corridor, her eyes still hazy from tears. She felt with her hand the rough wall of the hallway while with the other she clutched the box and letter.
As she opened the door holding her precious things in one hand, some tears fell on the paper.
When she was in the street, the door not quite closed behind her, she drooped the letter from one hand and flapped it to dry the paper and prevent tears seeping in to the words. Tears might destroy part of the message.
For surely this was a message. Surely this was her life. It must be the life of Gilbert and Caroline and Ann, whatever the maid said, whatever Caroline mumbled. Although she feared to read the contents, she must not smudge the words.
Would they explain what had happened to Gilbert? His death was so confused in time and place and manner. She even wondered briefly whether perhaps Caroline had murdered her idol and was here confessing.
But this was too close to her own sordid experience, to those cheap tales in which she’d dealt.
No, no. She knew with the speed of lightning, so shocking that she nearly dropped both box and letter and fell to her knees. Only with difficulty did she refuse to allow the thought to conquer her whole mind and body and knock her right down there on the Paris pavement.
She knew that what the servant had said was truth, surely and absolutely. Gilbert was not dead because he had never existed.
30
She returned to the inn; there was nowhere else to be. After telling the young maid she would order dinner later, she went up to her chamber. It had been aired and put to rights: beyond some bottles of green and black medicine there was no evidence it had held a fevered patient. She would have it only for that night as a convalescent; after that she would – and the stout older woman was all apologies, for she’d obviously been paid well – have to move to a much smaller room or share with a respectable widow from Grenoble.
She was not fit for company; she would take the small room.
She didn’t know how long she’d need to make arrangements for travelling to England. She had no wish to be anywhere in particular. Nowhere was home. But she would go back soon. She would follow the instructions Aksel Stamer had left.
She sat for some minutes on the bed with the silver box and letter on her lap, collecting up the rags of herself.
The box was easy to open, its pitiful contents as simple to decipher. They were just what one might have expected. First there was the locket Ann had always thought depicted Gilbert. Even now she believed she’d seen his picture there, but memory was duplicitous. She knew that. She pressed the locket’s catch. It clicked smoothly and sprang open, indicating that its mechanism had been often used and oiled.
The face of a woman in early middle age stared out at her. Surely it could not be Caroline herself when young, for no one wore a locket of her own features, did she? For a wild moment Ann wondered if it could be herself, the daughter so neglected. Common sense returned. Caroline hadn’t seen her in her present age and there was no resemblance in colouring or shape of head. How ridiculous to entertain such a notion, even fleetingly.
Curiously, it looked most like the maid from the apartment. Or rather the artist had caught something in the eyes of this younger woman that reminded Ann of the old one she’d just seen, that shrewd look, part cu
nning, part wise. Strange.
She was quite sure this female image had not been there when her mother had had the locket in Putney so many years ago, the locket she’d assumed held the image of Gilbert. She remembered now a detail: she’d not seen the image clearly for it was dimmed, unclear. Caroline had said it had become blurred with tears. Of whom could this clear female portrait be? Some relative of Caroline’s she knew nothing of?
Apart from that there were some earrings made of enamel and silver, the necklace of red and indigo glass beads which Ann remembered Caroline wearing, a few insignificant rings, and the crazy peacock-feathered brooch that she used to put in her hair or on a turban when other mothers had taken to a laced cap long before they reached her age.
She opened the locket again and gazed at the portrait. Foreign, she was now sure, but Italian or French? Surely if they had had exotic relatives Caroline would have made something of them. Perhaps it was a connection of Gilbert’s. But there was no Gilbert.
The more she gazed, the more she became sure it was a younger version of the unfriendly servant who’d just directed her to a mortuary which she would not visit. The servant who had tended her mother in what for once had proved to be a real illness, and closed her eyes when she achieved the death so frequently announced.
She did not even know the woman’s name.
Evidently she was not just a servant. She’d been a friend doing the duty of a servant, a companion to that thing in the bed, part Caroline, part monster of old age, part another incubus of Ann’s own making.
Again she’d got it wrong. Even in death Caroline had the power to fool her. Or was she so wilfully blind that no one had to take any trouble to impress what they wanted on her mind? Did she always meet any deceiver halfway, even three quarters?
Perhaps it was bodily weakness, not feebleness of intellect on this occasion, that made her almost see and yet never quite see. After all, by the time she visited her mother, she’d been running a fever. That must count for something.
But wearily she knew this was not the first time, and she doubted it would be the last.
Gilbert and Robert, all hints and mirrors and smoke, adding up to nothing – or next to nothing.
She got up, went to the window, looked out on a small dingy courtyard where someone had placed a plant with spiked green leaves. A piece of paper printed with large bold writing was being blown lazily by the breeze along the ground against a wall. It might have been used to wrap flowers, more likely a pastry sold on the streets, before being discarded. Possibly it was a playbill or notice for a travelling circus that every footman and maidservant had read, then maybe attended, before the paper was torn and dirtied and used elsewhere.
Why be observant of the inanimate, so blind to the animate?
She sat down again on the bed. She could delay no further. She must read the letter.
There were several scrawled pages within the folded outer sheet. They were numbered, otherwise there was nothing to indicate when they were written or in what order they should be read. Yes, she could delay after all. Though this writing might contain the riddle of her life, it was not inviting. She didn’t want to read it.
She went down the stairs until she met the young maid who’d first spoken to her when she’d been recovering in bed. She remembered her now as the girl who’d helped her with her hair and dress when she and Aksel Stamer had first arrived from their long journey. It seemed so very far in the past.
She ordered coffee and a baguette to be brought to her room. Napoleon had standardised shapes of bread – it was necessary to declare what size she wanted. This took time. Then she had to wait for the order to arrive before she could begin on the letter.
Would it contain the destruction of Gilbert and did she fear it? She doubted that. His words had always delivered Caroline’s infuriating complacency or a reproach to herself. Something else was troubling her. She tried not to let it be heard – but it was insistent.
Why would a strange man seek her out in Venice and save her from the dreadful fate of being apprehended by the authorities and perhaps condemned to death or a life in prison? Why would he struggle with intermittent kindness to carry her across Europe and deposit her here by the woman whom she’d once thought might be his goal but who was perhaps simply a cover for what he’d wanted all along?
Would this letter mention a very young Danish man who had visited a Herefordshire rectory more than thirty years before?
The coffee and baguette arrived after a long half-hour during which she’d simply watched the torn paper take its erratic path around the courtyard to be trapped by the dusty spiked plant. A weak sun formed a weak shadow on the top of the far wall.
Sarah had once said she should learn to do nothing. Was this the nothing urged on her? It did not feel good.
She opened the package and read the first words. The beginning was abrupt. ‘Ann: when you read this I shall be dead. You will be rid of me and I shall be at peace.’
Blood rushed to her face. Was this to be an embittered document, pouring hot coals on the head of a daughter who had not been dutiful because, in her view, a mother had failed first? It was quite possible. Caroline always had an acute sense of what a child owed a parent, nothing of the reverse. She knew her Bible: children must honour parents, it was a commandment. There was nothing, nothing, she’d once said – while jabbing a finger on a black embossed book she showed no other sign of respecting – about parents honouring children.
The letter continued, ‘For the last years I have suffered, it is hard to describe how much I have suffered. First there was . . .’
Ann read on, skipped a little, then more, read with mounting disbelief and dismay. For it proceeded as it had begun, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, almost a kind of diary of symptoms and pain and physical decay.
It was not the document to explain all, indeed anything of what a daughter wanted.
Ann had to drink her coffee and order more to push herself through what she’d begun by skipping, only to find that the whole simply varied a single note. Caroline said almost nothing of their shared past. Instead she gave details of a body and mind rotting. Perhaps to describe such disintegration had been comforting, even enjoyable. Why else write this stuff? It could give pleasure to no one else, not even malicious enjoyment to an enemy.
The letter assumed in the reader – and Ann could have been the only one intended – an extraordinary interest in the minutiae of a last illness. Caroline must have begun writing as she realised that this time she was indeed dying of something nasty in her nether regions, some growth or decay causing symptoms Ann would rather not have known about. Much of blood, phlegm, regurgitated food, bleeding bowels, diarrhoea, vomiting after purging, leeches and cuppings, moments of delirium, of the rise and fall of pain from obstructed organs, even of failing continence, of all the nostrums and medicines tried from different apothecaries. And through it all the efforts that the maid – no, the companion – Madame Renée had made to find a cure; then, when nothing served, to ease the symptoms and calm the patient. All this translated into a dignified failing of the ‘heart’.
What a document! Who would want to expose themselves like this? Caroline apparently.
Ann remembered being ordered to look up Buchan for diagnoses and remedies when her mother had declared her headaches or belly pain worthy of more consideration. The volume had often been open in the house; though, when it came to treatment, it was usually Martha who provided simple relief.
The corpse-like body on the bed and the Caroline she once knew were coalescing, so that she could now see the skull beneath a living face, the dying beneath the living mother. She felt disgusted and dirtied. As if she’d taken down that dripping hanging body in Venice and embraced it after all.
The last few words were written in disordered hand. They mentioned Madame Renée but were hardly legible. These must have been the sentences Caroline had struggled to write from bed. With her own decaying
hand. There’d been no amanuensis.
It would be a long while before she could erase the details from her mind, such vile expulsion of humours from phlegm to bile. How utterly unsuitable for a daughter. Had Madame Renée seen this letter? Caroline had set such store by her and she’d been fond: for how else explain her scorn of Ann? If she’d read all this, what would it have done to her feelings for her friend?
Perhaps nothing at all – for she must have heard the details and seen the proof. Caroline was not someone to keep complaint within or for her paper.
The two of them would have talked often of this and other things, shut up alone in the gloomy house. Indeed now, with sudden illumination, Ann understood the preposterous query of her mother’s about the Princess Caroline.
The two old women were gossips. For all the sternness of countenance she’d shown to Ann, Madame Renée was simply someone who enjoyed living with Caroline and talking with her as Mrs Graves and Mrs Pugh had done so many years before in Putney. And the ridiculous royal family of England was still the best story going in Europe. With the consonance of names it was irresistible.
Through Ann her mother had wanted to give something special to her devoted friend and carer, a kind of gift. With a child there could not be adult gossip, just make-believe. But, with another adult, it was the very stuff of intimacy.
To this woman she’d told what she could never quite bring herself to tell her daughter, even when close to death: of the deflation of Gilbert the marvellous.
It remained startling. For surely after all that time and so much loving detail Caroline had made Gilbert live – not just for his supposed child but for herself. She must have known this image so well he could enter her dreams in every shape. She had no reason to murder him like this.
What a torture it must have been! Ann would never know how it came about. Had she arrived suddenly in her right mind after a lifetime of deception and fantasy, then asked Madame Renée to tell her daughter the ludicrous truth?
