Frail

by Susanna Ives

  She crossed to the door, paused, and ran her palm over the cool brass knob. The question that had been plaguing her since she and Mr. Mallory had danced burst forth. “Do you…do you think I’m a good person, Papa?”

  “I haven’t time for your nonsense, Helena!” he boomed. “Good God, you drive me to distraction with your foolishness.” He began to wave her off, but stopped. “Do fetch me that decanter on the shelf behind you.”

  She retrieved it and set the bottle beside him on his desk. “Good night,” she whispered and kissed his head. His coarse hair prickled her lips. “I love you.”

  He shooed her away with an annoyed, “Yes, yes,” and poured the brandy.

  ∞∞∞

  Mrs. Baines was pulling back the covers of the bed when Helena entered her room. She kicked off her shoes. “Toss away those hateful things.”

  There were holes at the tip of her stockings from dancing, and blisters had formed at the sides of her big toes. The housekeeper stifled a yawn, took a pair of scissors from the commode and popped the stitches holding her in the gown, while Helena yanked every pin from her hair. One-by-one, Mrs. Baines undid each lace on Helena’s corset and then untied her crinoline. A freed prisoner, Helena collapsed into the bed.

  “Will that be all, miss?” The housekeeper stood with Helena’s clothes folded over her arm.

  Helena didn’t want to be alone, but what else could she say but, “Yes, thank you.”

  She curled on her side. Her thoughts started to churn, turning over the events of the evening. Alone in the silence, she had no means to distract herself. She wasn’t ignorant and selfish, she told herself, and considered all the money her father had made for deserving families who trusted him with their savings. Jonathan was right—Mr. Mallory was demented.

  She rose, relit her lamp, and studied her dark reflection in the mirror. She tried to smile, composing her face as she wanted others to see her. Then her lips began to quiver. He had violated her somehow. Although he might be a lunatic, she had felt him look inside her, past the lovely clothes and witty conversation, into her heart and mind, and he disliked what he saw there. As much as she did.

  ∞∞∞

  Helena awoke with her emotions on edge from the previous evening. The heavy clouds, the color of tarnished silver, did little to lift her depressed mood. She sat alone in the breakfast room, breaking up her toast with her fingers as she revisited the previous night’s conversation. Mr. Mallory’s insults still stung. They burrowed into her thoughts, refusing to be quieted even as she reassured herself the man was mad and she shouldn’t believe anything he said. Yet, he appeared so scared and vulnerable. It almost broke her heart.

  At last, she arranged for the carriage to take her to Emmagard and Jonathan’s. She couldn’t stand being alone, drowning in her own thoughts, a moment longer. Emmagard’s parlor was crammed with callers. Helena, Emmagard, and several other young people elected to stroll around Hyde Park. There, even though their breaths misted before their faces, they could talk without censure about last evening’s notorious dance.

  Jonathan arrived on horseback as she and his sister were about to act out their own version of the scene for their audience.

  “I shall be Helena,” Emmagard exclaimed and turned to her friend. “Please, I beg you would dance with me, Mr. Mad Mallory.”

  They performed an exaggerated waltz on the grass, sweeping their skirts about as Helena hurled ridiculous insults in a dramatic voice, “How dare you flaunt yourself before Jonathan’s horse in your shiny walking dress. An entire stable of ponies could live off the price of your hideous bonnet. I have a good mind to feed it to the horse, you selfish, vain, silly, unfeeling lady.” Then the two broke into giggles as their group of admirers applauded.

  “I understand there are pleasant asylums available for people like Mr. Mallory,” one of the gentlemen remarked.

  “Lock him away!” Helena cried in mock horror. “But Mr. Mad Mallory is ever so amusing. I do wish he would attend more balls so I might ask him to dance again.” Laughter gurgled up from her throat. Belittling Mr. Mallory before friends quieted her anxious thoughts. He was a lunatic, a violent madman who had no right to call her ignorant and selfish.

  A tall man in a dark brown coat with the collar turned up and a hat worn low on his forehead cut across the lane and into the path of Jonathan’s horse. The beast reared up and Jonathan yanked the reigns to keep his mount from trampling the man.

  “Get your damn nag out of the way!” the man hissed. Several ladies in the group gasped. The stranger cocked his head so he could see below the brim of his hat and stared right at Helena with hostile, squinting eyes. “Are you Miss Gillingham?” he demanded

  Helena blinked, surprised to be addressed by the stranger. “Err…yes.”

  The man stepped towards her and shook his fist before her face. “May your father rot in hell!”

  “What?” Helena cried as Jonathan shouted, “Get away from her!” He bumped the man with his horse’s rear.

  “Don’t stand up for her!” the stranger growled. “Not after what her father’s done.”

  “I said get away!” Jonathan cracked his whip near the man’s ear.

  The man gave an unimpressed “Hmmp,” shot Helena another nasty glare, and began to stalk off at the same time she heard yet another voice calling. “Miss Gillingham! Miss Gillingham!” A hefty clerk from her father’s bank cut across the grass, waving a newspaper. He stopped before her, leaned down to rest his hands on his knees and tried to catch his breath. “Your father… you need to come… home… an emergency!”

  The sounds and voices around her combined into a loud buzz inside Helena’s head. “What has happened?”

  The man shook his head. “You must go home.”

  For a moment, Helena didn’t move, feeling again like the stunned little girl who had fallen from the castle in Wales. A loud roar filled her ears, and she broke into a run, her skirts cracking the air behind her.

  Jonathan galloped next to her. “Get on,” he ordered.

  She didn’t reply, but dove into the line of carriages jamming Park Lane and then hurried into the crisscrossing Mayfair streets. Outside her house, dozens of men swarmed by the iron railing and out into the street, halting traffic. Two uniformed policemen stood beside her door.

  A young boy hoisted up on the gas lamp swirled his hat above his head. “The West London Savings Bank has failed!” he bellowed, his voice echoing down the street. “The West London Savings Bank has failed!”

  Helena pressed her hand to her mouth. What was happening? Had they lost all their money? Blackness covered the edges of her vision, and she felt as though she was looking on the scene through a pinhole.

  “I want my bloody money!” a thick, gray man shouted at her. His face was so close to hers that his warm spittle sprayed her cheeks. “Do you understand?”

  “No,” she whispered. “I… I… no.”

  Then it seemed that the wave of human bodies crashed onto her, yanking at her sleeves and skirt, tearing her bonnet from her head.

  “Let go of me!” she screamed, jostling her elbows about her, trying to fend off the men.

  A strong, gloved hand grabbed her forearm and roughly jerked her. She slammed into the coat buttons of a police officer. His chest rumbled as he shouted, “Let her alone!” Keeping his tight grip, he pulled her through the mob.

  She broke free at the steps and rushed into the house. Inside, men in somber clothes with matching somber faces milled about, speaking in low, guarded voices. They watched her with nervous eyes, swaying on their feet, as if they didn’t know what to do or say.

  “My God, what has happened?” she whispered. Not waiting for a reply, she rushed up the stairs. More men packed the corridor leading to her father’s library. They stopped their conversations and bowed their heads to her.

  In the library, her father’s solicitor sat in the chair by the fire. His oiled hair was disheveled and he stared with vacant, red-rimmed eyes and nodded num
bly to several men standing over him holding notebooks. One of the men turned; he was a broad shouldered man with a hard nose and azure eyes that seemed to shoot out from his corrugated skin. His hair—the color of rust—spiked along his part and forehead. He waved his hand as he spoke. “She mustn’t see this. Someone remove her.”

  “This is my home. I shall do...” she faltered. On the shelf behind her father’s desk, a dark liquid had spattered over the leather books.

  The room became still as she slowly walked around the desk. On the floor, a man was sprawled backwards over his capsized leather chair, a small pistol gripped in his hand. He wore a neatly pressed gray coat adorned with a silver pin that glinted in the light from the desk lamp. She recognized the slight cleft of her father’s chin and his graying, coarse curls, but the center of his face was missing—just a deep red and black hole of blood and flapping flesh where his mouth, nose and eyes had been.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but all that came out was a tight, painful squeak. She fell to the floor by his side.

  “Oh, Papa,” she choked and laid her head across his chest, putting her cheek over his silenced heart. “No,” she whispered over and over.

  Three

  Spring 1861

  The day before, Theo had found the plateau on the small hill that rose from where the river snaked through his property. The small oval of land was lost in tangles of gray, gaunt tree limbs and nettles. He hadn’t any idea what kind of garden he wanted to grow on the spot, except that he thought in the summer evenings he would like to sit here, hidden in the foliage and study the phantom-like mountains of Snowdonia rising in the distance. But now his back muscles burned as he slammed his hoe into the ground, ripping through the thick roots and hitting yet another stone. He felt the reverberation in his bones.

  “Dammit,” he spat.

  He had been out here the entire morning and only managed to clear about four square feet.

  “You’re raging against God again,” his steward, Eli Gordon, said in his Irish lilt. He leaned against a tree, sipping brandy from a leather-covered flask. Straw-like blonde hair curled under the brim of the hat he wore low on his brow. He was a lean man with a hard belly and powerful shoulders that sloped down. His collar was open, revealing a network of scars that vined up his neck and across the flap of skin that covered the corner of his left eye. Two days before the final assault on Redan, he had been playing cards in the trench when a Russian sharpshooter hit him above his left cheekbone.

  “Raging against God, you say?” Theo wiped his wet brow and leaned against his hoe. “And I thought I was trying to make a garden.” Branwen, his black and white border collie, sensing her master was taking a rest, rolled onto her back for a good rub. He leaned down and scratched her belly. “There you go, old girl.”

  “Some land God doesn’t want tamed.” Gordon took another sip and gazed off at the mountains disappearing into the clouds.

  “It must be jolly fun to stand there and drink and philosophize while I work.”

  “Aye, the way I see it, one of us must do the thinking.” Gordon set his flask into the overturned earth and stretched his arms over his head, releasing a long groan. Then he took up his shovel and pushed the blade under the rock Theo had struck.

  The two had worked together for almost seven years now and Gordon remained as obstinate and unyielding as he had been when the men first met in that miserable summer of scorching heat and cholera at the camp in Varna, where the air reeked of shit and was dusted with lime. Gordon was recruited from the London taverns for a better pay than working for almost slave labor in the docks. He had fixed Theo with cool, challenging eyes that first day. Theo hadn’t trusted Gordon. But even as a brash, inexperienced officer, he knew to tread carefully around the man. Although Gordon had been shy of twenty-two when he arrived in Crimea, he was like a father to other young Irish soldiers, many of whom were not more than sixteen and sent their pay to their mothers.

  The two won each other’s grudging respect in the battle of Sandbag Battery. Theo was shouting for his troops to hold their line as Russian artillery was pounding their position. Down to a little over a hundred men, some of the young soldiers were fleeing, others were hunkered down, paralyzed with terror. “Keep firing, damn you!” Theo heard someone shout. “Don’t let them Russian buggers scare you!” Beside him in the haze of fog and gunfire, Gordon was staring down the sight of his Minié. He fired at a Russian soldier who appeared out of the fog, but missed. Gordon slammed the Russian on the head with his rifle barrel and then dragged him to the ground, beating him with his fists.

  Despite the years of working together, a distance remained between the loyal men. Theo would always be the commanding officer and Gordon the wise, seasoned soldier.

  Branwen whimpered, pawing the air with her right hind leg. Lost in his thoughts, Theo had stopped scratching the dog.

  “You’re still thinking about what happened in London,” Gordon said quietly.

  Theo lowered his head and rubbed the dog’s muscular stomach.

  Six months ago, he would walk back from the garden as the sun began to disappear behind the mountains, turning the landscape the lustrous orange and purple of dusk. His heart would fill with the beauty, and he would realize he hadn’t thought about Crimea for almost the entire day. But now this bad business with Gillingham had managed to trigger his old memories.

  “I killed Gillingham,” he said finally.

  “He knew they were going to hang him, and he took his own life.” Gordon used his heel to push the shovel deeper. “It was nothing you did.”

  Theo rose, crossed to Gordon’s flask, drank from it, and then wiped his lips with his coat sleeve. “I was too harsh on his daughter given what happened.”

  “She doesn’t know. You told me that Scotland Yard copper was keeping your name quiet.”

  “But the things I said to her—”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have danced with her like you did,” Gordon conceded.

  “Or shout insults at her in the middle of a ball—I probably shouldn’t have done that either.”

  Gordon scratched the tough skin on his chin. “From what I’ve heard, she needed a good setting down.”

  “For God’s sake man, her father killed himself because of me!” Theo barked. “How much more setting down does she require?” Branwen flinched, her brown eyes tensed with worry. She began licking her master’s hand.

  “You just talked to Scotland Yard,” Gordon continued, unmoved by his employer’s outburst. “They were the ones who determined he was guilty. Stop blaming yourself.”

  “She used to be society’s little wild darling. With her father dead, everyone is taking out their anger on her. In the newspapers, they are savaging her behavior, her clothes, her every move.”

  “There’s nothing clean in this world.” Gordon grunted as he flipped the stone from the soil with the shovel blade. “You did what you felt you had to do. Somebody’s always going to be hurt, whether they had it coming or not.”

  “How can you stand to think that way?”

  “I can’t change the truth.”

  “Mr. Mallory!” a young female called out.

  Branwen bolted down the slope, leaping over the nettles and rocks, then disappeared down the path running by the river.

  “Up here, Megan,” Theo said.

  Moments later Megan, Mrs. Emily Pengwern’s daughter, sprinted down the same path, her gray cloak sailing in the air behind her, the dog jumping at her heels. Theo considered Megan his adopted daughter. In his mind, she was still the wild, unfettered, and outspoken girl he adored. But every day her figure was becoming more and more that of a woman. Her breasts burgeoned and her waist thinned. He didn’t want her to grow up, but to remain in a childlike state, unencumbered by the needs of her maturing body.

  “Cymorth, Mr. Mallory!” she cried in Welsh. “Mama’s in the front garden.”

  “What?” Theo shouted. “She knows she’s not supposed to walk up here. You should
n’t have let her go.”

  “I tried!” the girl retorted. “She doesn’t listen to me.”

  “Oh, hell,” Theo whispered. The men edged down the steep incline, using their shovels for support. Then they sprinted behind Megan, down the path that led to the back of Theo’s home, through the stone arch running under the west wing and onto the drive.

  ∞∞∞

  Theo found Mrs. Emily Pengwern sitting on the edge of the stone fountain inside the oval of boxwoods in the front garden. She rose to greet them. Even beneath the weight of a heavy cloak and blue shawl, Theo could see her chest rising, laboring to breathe. Her face was waxy and pale with dark crescents carved beneath her brown eyes. Wet wisps of auburn hair stuck to her forehead below her straw bonnet.

  “Mr. Mallory,” she began in that formal English style of hers. Her voice was light and musical, but raspy around the edges.

  “Emily, sit back down!” Theo barked, too upset to do the pretty. “I’m vexed at you. You are the most stubborn woman in existence. You knew I would come down if you only asked. Why didn’t you send Betry?”

  “Since a miner put a baby in her, she doesn’t do anything but throw up all day,” explained Megan in Welsh.

  “We try not to speak of such matters,” Emily said, placing a calming hand on her daughter’s lap. Megan rolled her eyes. “And please remember to use your English in front of Mr. Mallory.”

  Emily Pengwern neé Douglas was the daughter of a London engineer who had journeyed to Wales to help construct Thomas Telford’s suspension bridge. His mother had been John Gillingham’s aunt, and his grandfather a London solicitor. While in Conwy, he fell in love with Emily’s mother and married her. He eked whatever living he could find working for the mines and coming railroads to support his small family, which included his wife’s mother and sister, both fishermen’s widows.

  Emily was a beautiful woman, even after the typhus fever that had killed her husband and young son and weakened her body. If anything, illness had exaggerated her delicate beauty, thinning her oval face, making her cheekbones more prominent and accenting huge eyes that glowed like brown embers.