The Painted Bridge

by Wendy Wallace

  * * *

  The bell for luncheon ended Anna’s reverie. She unwrapped her arms from her knees and stood up, stretching her arms over her head, pushing back her escaping hair. Following the others into the dining room, she looked without enthusiasm at a tureen of stew, a crowd of drowning dumplings. She knew what she must do next.

  That night, once Lovely was prone under her blanket, Anna got out of bed and drew up the chair to the washstand. She would be defying Vincent’s wishes but she had to write the letter. She couldn’t think of any other course of action. She dipped the pen in the last drops of ink and inscribed on an envelope the name and address that were imprinted in her memory: Miss Maud Sulten, 59 Sebastopol Street, London SW.

  She put the envelope aside to dry and in a careful hand, making sure to avoid blots and smudges, began the letter.

  Dear Miss Sulten,

  You do not know me. You may not even know my name. But I am writing to plead for your help….

  She continued to the end in small, deliberate characters intended to ensure that not one word could be misread.

  NINE

  The great hall of the Bishop’s palace was lined with benches. The stone construction of the walls and the vaulted timber ceiling overhead gave the place an ecclesiastical atmosphere but the urgency of the muttered conversations underneath, the quick eyes of the clerk and the purposeful strides with which some men entered and departed, contradicted that holy air and gave the echoing hall the atmosphere of a marketplace.

  Vincent Palmer sat on one of the benches, disliking equally the warmth from the bodies of the men pressed up on each side of him and the chill in his kidneys from the stone wall at his back. Worse than the physical discomfort was the fact of having to look at the other petitioners, at the assorted crowd of clerics, politicians, parishioners and paupers. He wondered again why the Bishop wished to see him.

  The clerk emerged at intervals from behind the door to the private chambers, scanned the crowd and called people in according to a system of his own that had nothing to do with either rank or length of time served sitting on the bench. It was right, Vincent supposed, that as in Matthew, chapter 20, verse 16, the last shall be first, and the first last. Nonetheless, the fellow ought to acknowledge that some men had more pressing calls on their time than others. On top of which, he was hungry. He’d been there more than an hour already. He imagined himself walking through the Bishop’s door and allowed his mind to drift to thoughts of the hoped-for promotion.

  “Morning, Palmer.”

  Solomon Saville was standing in front of him.

  “Morning, Saville.”

  The clerk tapped Saville on the shoulder and hurried him away toward the door to the chamber. Saville disappeared through it. Vincent ran his little finger over the undulating stiffness that was the top of his moustache. The Canon had appointed Solomon Saville as Deputy Minor Canon—even though he had less experience than Vincent and no authority in the pulpit. The burning sensation in his guts intensified. Youth and an easy manner with the congregation were surely not the proper qualifications for advancement.

  Vincent wondered whether it would appear ungodly to sample the pork pie he had in his pocket. He’d left the Vicarage early and, in too much of a hurry to stop in a coffee shop, had bought the pie from a boy at the gates of the palace. He rejected the idea of taking a bite. He would fast until he had an audience with the Bishop, whatever hour of the day that might be. Vincent shifted on the wooden seat and cast his mind over the events of the last few days that had brought him here.

  On Monday, the Canon had called at the Vicarage. Some helpful soul had evidently alerted him to Anna’s absence.

  “Where’s the missus, Palmer?” Rosebury said, standing on the step.

  “Come in, Canon Rosebury,” Vincent replied, holding open the door. “Come in.” Rosebury raised both hands in front of him.

  “Can’t stop,” he said. “I’m in a hurry. What have you done with her?”

  “She has gone away. For a short stay. With friends,” Vincent said, in a tone meant to discourage further nosiness.

  “Had enough of you already, has she?” Rosebury chuckled.

  Vincent diverted him to the subject of the church roof and, despite some reluctance on the Canon’s part, took him into All Hallows to see for himself the deplorable state of the rafters. They said an affable enough good-bye, half an hour later; Rosebury hadn’t mentioned Anna again.

  Several people had inquired after her. It irritated Vincent. She was at the Vicarage as his wife. If she wasn’t there—no matter. Women did go to the country. Make long visits. Mother used to. It could not be allowed to emerge that his wife was suffering from nerves. It would have serious repercussions for his career. Anyway, Anna had been prying. Concerning herself with matters that didn’t concern her.

  He shifted on the bench. His palms were clammy, despite the deep frost outside and the chill at his back. The day after Rosebury’s call, he’d received a summons to the palace. There was no cause for worry. The Bishop was after all a blood relation although he had not pressed the point with the clerk when he presented himself, had simply mentioned it in passing. They had a great-grandfather in common, a connection tracked down by Mother while Vincent was still at university.

  The Bishop was obviously alert to the significance of the bond. It was he who a year ago had urged, through the medium of the Canon, that Vincent marry. He’d even penned a note. A charitable woman could add a good deal to parish duties and minister to wives, et cetera. Anna had seemed a good candidate, with her concern for the seamen so passionately expressed, when he first encountered her. Not that there were undue numbers of seamen in the congregation of All Hallows; he couldn’t think of any, offhand. But no one could call Anna worldly, even if she wasn’t properly pious either. Her notion of religiousness had turned out to be very unorthodox.

  A promotion might be the Bishop’s way of rewarding his prompt action in finding a suitable wife. The parish offered a poor living, only five hundred pounds a year, and his private means were limited and under pressure. Securing his familial tie with the Bishop, advancing their personal relationship, could only be advantageous.

  Vincent banged the silver tip of his cane on the stone flags. The room fell quiet, the clerk raised his pale face from his ledger. Vincent had had an idea. He would issue a personal invitation. On behalf not only of himself but of all members of the parish, inviting the Bishop to matins at All Hallows. Spring might be best. He didn’t want him to witness a leak, however powerfully it upheld his case. If the Bishop cared to take the pulpit, the honor would be all theirs. If he preferred simply to share in their humble proceedings, listen to his own inadequate preaching, they would be equally thankful.

  Vincent looked around him. The room had all but emptied. Only a handful of petitioners remained and most were elderly women. The clerk called his name and he got to his feet, stiff from the cold and feeling unprepared, despite the age he’d spent on the bench.

  “Please, God,” he murmured as he made his way across the smoothed and hollowed stone flags, stooped through the small door cut into one of the pair of larger, ceremonial doors. “Help me.”

  * * *

  “Reverend,” said the Bishop, holding out his hand. Vincent took the hand in both his own, bowed his head, kissed the ring.

  “Are you in health, Your Lordship?” he said, pushing the pie deeper into his pocket with a sudden, awful presentiment that the Bishop could smell it.

  The ring-bearing hand appeared to wave away a fly. Vincent felt his hopes intensify. He decided to issue the invitation before the Bishop had a chance to state his business. He would take the initiative.

  “I wanted to raise something with you, Bishop,” he said.

  “If it’s funds I can’t help you, Palmer. You will have to make your own arrangements. And if it is spiritual direction you’re after, apply to the Canon. If you wish to pursue our family connection, tenuous as it is, I have to advise you that thi
s is not the place to do so.”

  “None of these, Lordship. I come as the bearer of an invitation. From my flock.”

  The Bishop laughed. “Really?”

  “They wish for you to attend a service of worship with us at All Hallows and partake of refreshments afterward.”

  The Bishop seemed to sigh. It occurred to Vincent that he looked tired. The skin under his eyes drooped and the hem of his purple robe trailed on the stone floor in a way that made Vincent think of a too-large nightshirt he’d had as a boy.

  “As you know,” the Bishop said, “I wanted to see you. Rosebury is of the opinion that your wife has disappeared. Has she?”

  He had half expected it but the question caught Vincent off-guard.

  “Disappeared? She is visiting friends in the countryside, as I told the Canon.”

  “Well, bring her back from the countryside, Palmer. You need her.”

  “My wife is indisposed, Your Lordship. Female troubles.”

  “Look here, Palmer. You’ve been married less than a year. A clergyman is meant to set an example. Wife by his side, loyal helpmeet and all that. If you’ve made a mistake, my advice to you is to pack her off back to her family and make the fact public. If not, recall her from wherever she’s run away to. Expecting, is she?”

  “We thought perhaps Easter. … I do hope I shall not have to disappoint the congregation?”

  “If you disappoint the congregation, Palmer, it won’t be my doing. I might call on you and I might not. Either way, make haste and put your affairs in order. People are talking.”

  The ringed hand gestured toward the door and Vincent walked backward out of the chamber, his eyes fixed on the dusty hem of the Bishop’s robe.

  TEN

  Makepeace sat behind the same round table with her back to the window, a pince-nez perched like a small bird on the end of her nose.

  “I can’t understand why my sister hasn’t replied to me,” Anna said. “Nor my husband. Did you post the second batch of letters?”

  “They were dispatched immediately.”

  “And the third?”

  Makepeace nodded.

  “And nothing arrived for me with the letter carrier this morning? No one has called for me?”

  Makepeace shook her head and settled herself back on her chair, locked her fingers in an arch in front of her chin, her rings lined up in front of her knuckles. Only the wedding finger was bare.

  “Sometimes relatives don’t appreciate the true nature of a retreat such as this one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In a better world than this, families would understand the value of rest for the mind. But unfortunately some are …” She smiled at Anna, without warmth. “How can I put it?”

  “You mean they’re ashamed? To have a lunatic in their midst?”

  “We’re very blunt, aren’t we, Mrs. Palmer.”

  “Louisa would never think me a lunatic. So she could not feel embarrassed,” Anna said.

  She had a feeling every time she encountered Makepeace of struggle. As if in her company it was vital not to show weakness or even to feel it. She met the woman’s soft-edged eyes. Even looking straight into them she couldn’t say exactly what color they were. Not black nor blue nor brown nor quite gray. They were the color of money—the same shade as an old bun penny. Makepeace’s stare flickered away toward a dusty arrangement of everlasting flowers on the mantelpiece.

  “I daresay your sister’s letter will arrive shortly. She may even come and visit you.” Makepeace smiled again, more coldly, if it were possible, than the last time.

  “I wish she would. I so long to see her.”

  Anna was delaying what she had to do. She felt nervous. It was irrational, she told herself, to fear that Makepeace might inform Vincent whom she wrote to. She must hand over the letter without showing any anxiety. If Makepeace inquired, she would tell her that Maud Sulten was a former governess with whom she’d stayed friendly.

  “Oh! I almost forgot, Mrs. Makepeace. I have another letter here.”

  She pulled it out from her bodice and tossed it on the table. Maud Sulten’s name and address were written in a hand so careful and constrained Anna barely recognized it as her own. “I would like it posted immediately.”

  “Very well.”

  Makepeace’s buttons shivered and glittered as she took the envelope and unlocked the drawer on the other side of the table, placing the letter inside. She got up and went to the hearth.

  “The wind is in the wrong direction,” she said, stabbing at the coals with unnecessary force, her rounded back turned to Anna. Fragments of ash fell through the grate into the cinders, floated out over the fender. She clattered the poker down on the hearth tiles and straightened up. “This Miss Sulten is a friend of yours?”

  “Yes. A former governess. We correspond occasionally. Be sure to post it promptly, won’t you? I haven’t written to her for an age.”

  “Indeed, Mrs. Palmer. I will deal with it immediately.”

  Makepeace was looking at her again with an expression of malice that did not change as Anna thanked her and left.

  * * *

  Alone in the room, Frances Makepeace tipped back her head and poured the last drops of her cup of coffee down her throat. She enjoyed those final drops, thick and sweet, almost syrup, as much as she enjoyed the initial stinging sip. Makepeace made coffee every morning in her housekeeper’s room, pushing the rug up against the door to keep the smell of it from seeping into the corridor. It made patients restive if they caught a whiff of it on the way to the treatment room. It could create hysteria in the susceptible—their longing for coffee.

  She rinsed out the cup, dried it and replaced it on the mantelpiece. The cup and saucer were mismatched, oddly if inescapably paired. Like a husband and wife, she thought, bitterly. Her dislike of couples was extending beyond human beings to all paired things. She could tolerate items only in ones or threes. Not twos or fours. Like the animals, trooping into the ark.

  Returning to her table, she got out the letter, adjusted her pince-nez and slit open the top of the envelope with a paper knife. It was an affectation of Mr. Abse’s to keep the ramblings of patients with the same care he would apply to legal documents or his own extensive and unnecessary records and logs. The ledgers he thought so much of were infested with weevils and decomposing from within. She dealt with patients’ correspondence in her own way, keeping back any she found of interest or that made complaints about herself. As Lizzie Button was in the habit of doing.

  If she passed all the letters on to Abse as he’d instructed, the shelves in the study would have fallen from the walls by now with the weight of useless paperwork. She stood for a moment by the window contemplating the image of Lake House collapsing from the inside, falling in on itself with the weight of its own history like a vast failed cake.

  The wind had changed again and the fire was showing signs of life. The coal sent up a mustard-colored stream of smoke, the back draft forcing wisps of it down the chimney. She put her handkerchief over her mouth and nose as she pulled out Mrs. Palmer’s letter from the envelope. “Dear Miss Sulten,” she murmured aloud. “You do not know me. You may not even know my name.”

  She read the rest in silence, reached the end and remained motionless. She was back ten years and still married to Jack Makepeace. Back in all the fresh horror of his disappearance. She felt a sudden urge to weep as she clenched her fingers around the letter and then threw it down on the floor. It settled lightly on the wide boards, immune to the violence of her gesture.

  Makepeace permitted herself a rare moment of self-pity. She worked so hard at putting the past behind her, maintained a constant vigilance against its intrusion. It was unfair that it should ambush her like this. Picking up the poker again, she jabbed at the coals, trying to usher them toward the fireback and keep the smoke going up the chimney. Mrs. Palmer was disturbing everyone. She’d seduced Talitha with her pretended lack of guile. When she tried to warn Talitha th
at Palmer was a troublemaker if ever she’d seen one, Talitha just smiled.

  “I like her, Fanny,” she said. “That’s all there is to it. Anyway, people do make trouble. Everyone does sooner or later.”

  She was trying to wheedle her way into the Abse family. Makepeace had told Mrs. Abse that she’d seen Catherine talking with her. Emmeline Abse had frowned. Said she didn’t like the idea of her darling girl “tête-à-tête”—there was another one who gave herself airs and graces—with a patient.

  The clatter of clogs approaching along the corridor grew louder. Makepeace flung down the poker, picked up the letter from the floor and shoved it to the back of the drawer. She tried with a shaking hand to fit the key into the tiny lock but couldn’t see clearly. Her eyes were stinging as if they had soap in them. It was the smoke, she told herself. The smoke.

  Lovely made a spirited if unnecessary tap on the door.

  “What is it?” Makepeace shouted. “And can’t you stop your blasted singing, woman?”

  ELEVEN

  The air was filled with the scent of hyacinths; the winter sun threw a slanting rectangle over the dining table. Emmeline felt a sense of pleasure that they should be all together for breakfast, gathered round the table, even if Ben’s fingers were stained with ink and Catherine’s hair uncombed. Catherine had laid her knife across her book to keep the pages open and was picking at a piece of bread, giggling occasionally, taking sips from her water glass.

  “Don’t read at the table, Catty. It’s bad manners.”

  Catherine looked up and scowled at her.

  “Does Father know that? Why don’t you remind him?”

  Querios shook the pages of his newspaper into formation and folded it into one quarter of its size, smoothing and creasing it as if he might be able to subdue its contents at the same time.

  “The place at Colney Hatch is in the news again. They’ve got more patients than they know what to do with and the whole system is crumbling under the weight of numbers. They didn’t think about that, did they? When they built their monster asylums and put the little men out of business.”