The Painted Bridge

by Wendy Wallace

  Lucas settled the plate back in the rack and set about mixing a solution of fresh collodion. Measuring out ammonium iodide, he mixed it with distilled water and watched it clump and cake in the bottom of the beaker. He liked the delicate tones of a solution higher in bromides. He added half the quantity of cadmium bromide, stirred it in with a glass rod, and held the container over a spirit lamp, keeping back from the rising fumes. Opening the collodion bottle, he trickled in the salts through a funnel. The mixture fizzed and subsided, turned cloudy inside the brown glass. He agitated the bottle and set it back on the shelf.

  He had decided to alter his approach—to experiment with larger images, from close up. It would enable him to see patients more clearly and read more accurately what was exhibited on their faces. It might, he hoped, answer the question of how a person could be captured by a camera at the same time as they escaped it.

  Lucas returned to his stool and drained his whisky. He sat nursing the empty glass until the church clock beyond his window chimed one. Timekeeping was the only use he had for the church; he did not resent its insistent message of the passing of the hours. He rose and left the room to prepare for bed. He would go to Lake House in the morning and request to photograph Mrs. Palmer again. He could see in every detail the picture he would make of her.

  * * *

  It took time to rope the carrying cases onto the seat of the cab, the stoppered bottles chinking against one another inside. The driver tried to insist that he strap the plate box on the luggage rack and looked disapproving when Lucas informed him that the box was of the greatest importance, that he would rather if necessary get rained on himself. The man thought he was a drunk, it occurred to him, as they lurched past the Angel and began the long ascent of the Hollow Way. He thought he carried his gin supply with him. He laughed and rested his head back on the worn leather. It was the first opportunity he’d had since Christmas to return to Lake House and he was impatient to arrive.

  * * *

  The maid’s face fell as she pulled open the great front door. She looked past him as if she expected someone else then met his eyes with an agitated expression.

  “It’s not my place to ask I know, but is there any news, sir?”

  “Nothing in particular. I’ve come for Mr. Abse.”

  Lucas smiled at her, passed through the dim hallway into the study to wait for Abse. He walked up and down the room, underneath the ledgers and leather-bound books on the shelves, threading a path between the curios that Abse seemed to be collecting, almost falling over a bowlegged ladder. A woman was wailing somewhere in the house.

  When the door at the far end of the room opened it wasn’t Abse but Makepeace who appeared. She had an air of triumph about her as she sailed toward him with one hand clutched over a ring of keys hanging from the device she always wore at her waist. It was a chatelaine. His grandmother used to have one and he’d always found it ominous. He disliked things being locked.

  “Morning, Makepeace. Tell Mr. Abse I am here, would you?”

  “Mr. Abse is engaged with a family matter, Dr. St. Clair.”

  He felt cheered by the prospect of avoiding an encounter with Abse. The fellow used up daylight with his ponderous conversation.

  “No need to trouble him, in that case. I shall set up in the Fernery. I intend to photograph Mrs. Palmer first.”

  “You’re too late.”

  He looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

  “It is certainly not too late, Makepeace.”

  She smirked. “I think you will find that it is, sir. Mrs. Palmer has absconded.”

  Lucas felt as if he had walked into a lamppost.

  “She can’t have.”

  “I’d say the same myself but she has. She’s gone, no one knows where, and she’s taken the daughter of the house with her.”

  If she wasn’t there, he couldn’t photograph her. He could not absorb it. He had thought so much about the picture he was about to make, had imagined it in such detail, that in his mind it already existed.

  “She was here last time I came.”

  Makepeace laughed and the buttons on her bodice rolled from side to side.

  “See for yourself. I was on my way up to the guests’ rooms. We’re all at sixes and sevens. They haven’t even had their breakfast yet.”

  He followed her up the elegant stairs from the ground floor, running his hand along the smooth, curved banister. Through the deserted dayroom and on across the dining room, where he consulted with patients over their photographs.

  They continued—up a narrow staircase of thin and splintered treads along a low-ceilinged corridor of numbered doors, each with an observation slot at eye level. His head just cleared the bowing ceiling and the air was foul; used chamber pots stood outside some doors, discarded trays of food by others. Lucas felt a creeping sense of shame at the conditions, at the compromises involved in using a private house as an asylum. He’d never been to the patients’ sleeping quarters before. It occurred to him that he really knew very little about Lake House.

  Makepeace stopped at door number 9.

  “See for yourself,” she said, unlocking it and swinging it open. The door banged against the wall. She let the key fall back among its companions and jerked her head toward the interior. “Good riddance, if you ask me. But it is awful that Catherine’s missing. Poor Mrs. Abse is beside herself.”

  Lucas took in a cold grate. A dormer window catching a reflected gleam of the morning’s light and a pair of worn slippers placed neatly by the bed. Just looking into the room made him feel constricted. It was a case history, he told himself. Nothing more. He could have no personal interest in her. Mrs. Palmer was not only a patient but a married woman. He would use the time to make another image of Mrs. Button or Miss Batt. The disappointment wasn’t lessened. He was flummoxed by his sense of loss. Spotting the photograph he’d made of her, on the mantelpiece, he ducked inside the room, picked it up, and took it to the window.

  The black fronds of the fern she held were turning rusty brown. He hadn’t washed the print for long enough. A fingerprint had bloomed in one corner. His own thumb made an illiterate signature on his work. The image intended to arrest time had changed even since he had presented it to her.

  The picture looked different, in other ways. Her eyes, the direct appeal they made, announced her desperation to be free, he could see now. Her face was alive with unexpressed emotions that he hadn’t been able to interpret but looked like a plea for help. He stopped, arrested by a thought that hadn’t occurred to him before but suddenly seemed obvious. Perhaps it was not only the photograph that might alter. The viewer could change too.

  As he went to replace the photograph on the mantelpiece, a scream came from outside the door followed by a heavy thump, a rattling of metal as if someone had hurled a handful of coins at the floor. He put back the photograph, took a last glance around the room, and stepped out into the corridor.

  Makepeace lay in a heap by the door to the next room, keys scattered all around her on the boards. Her skirts had risen to show men’s socks emerging from the tops of her Adelaide boots and a pair of thick white calves. She was moaning and his first thought was that her heart had failed. He kneeled beside her and felt for the pulse in her wrist. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

  “Not me, you fool,” she said, her voice choked and harsh. “It’s Talitha. Help her, Doctor. Help her.”

  He got to his feet with a sense of dread and put his eye to the observation slot.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Miniature smocks and pantaloons hung in neat lines on a clotheshorse by the side of the fire. Anna breathed in the pleasant, soapy smell of drying cotton and blinked at the light, strong against the nursery curtains. The sheet was fine and soft against her skin, the cotton pressed smooth. She reached for a flask of water on the bedside table and poured herself a glass. Catherine was still asleep, lying on her stomach in the other bed. The children and their nursemaid had gone.

&
nbsp; She remembered the dream she’d had, drifting in and out of sleep as the nursery fire subsided. Lucas St. Clair had been making a picture of her. It was a wedding photograph; Anna had her hair piled high on her head, threaded with country flowers. As well as being the photographer, Lucas St. Clair was the bridegroom. He stood beside her, his own dark hair loose on his shoulders. The two of them were naked as Adam and Eve, without even the fig leaves, but in the dream she’d felt no shame—only a deep, insistent pleasure. She felt a stirring of it again.

  The dream was so real, seemed more real than the morning she woke to. She wondered at the pictures her own mind could throw up as she got out of bed and walked in bare feet along a carpeted passageway to the bathroom. She filled the basin and washed herself all over with scented soap from a patterned dish. Letting the water run away through a brass grille at the bottom of the basin, she refilled it and splashed her face again and again with warm water. Then cleaned her teeth with clove-scented powder, combed her hair, and rubbed some of Louisa’s cold cream onto her face. Reluctantly, she put on the dress Louisa had left out for her.

  When she’d finished, she sat on the edge of the bath with the door still locked and put her head in her hands. She was ready, but she didn’t know for what. She was not married to Lucas St. Clair—the thought prompted a sad, sweet pang—she was married to Vincent Palmer. Morning had come and she still lacked a clear idea of what she should do; what she could do. She might beg Louisa to conceal her here while she searched for some employment and a place to stay. Some women did live alone in rented rooms. But she would not be able to hide indefinitely from Vincent. They would still be married. She could confront him with the injustice of her incarceration, perhaps with her brother-in-law at her side to make sure she wasn’t carted back to Lake House. She might even voice her suspicions that he had a mistress, if she dared. But then the best that could happen would be that she found herself back at the Vicarage.

  Blundell called out a good-bye to Louisa, somewhere down below in the house. He sounded impatient. Anna didn’t hear her sister’s reply. She wondered what it was like to be Louisa. She didn’t know, even wearing her clothes, using her toothbrush, her hairbrush, what Louisa’s life was. What she felt when she opened her eyes, what she dreamed about. She never had done. Anna opened her sister’s scent bottle, dabbed the glass rod on her wrists, and went down the stairs.

  The dining room was empty. She took a poached egg from a covered dish and slid it onto a plate decorated with painted insects. They were the plates that they’d had in the flint house, brought from Germany by their father. Even when the days came when they were living on rice pudding and sago, Amelia Newlove refused to let her sell them.

  Anna breathed in the smell of carnations on her wrist. It was the scent that their mother used to wear on what she called occasions—a powdery, musky smell. It reminded her of something that eluded her. Something that mattered. She had a sense that if she knew what it was, she would know what to do. She looked down at the bone handle of the knife resting on her palm and felt the familiar sensation of emptiness in her hands.

  “You look miles away.” Louisa was in the doorway.

  “Good morning, Lou.”

  Louisa poured herself a cup of tea and pulled her chair close.

  “Good morning, Anna. I only wish you were here in happier circumstances. Have you thought what you’re going to do?”

  “Not yet. Did you talk to Blundell?”

  “Yes.” Louisa averted her eyes. “You have to go to Vincent, Anna, and apologize. Plead with him to take you back. There’s nothing else for it.”

  “I can’t go back there.”

  “To bedlam?”

  “To the Vicarage.”

  She hadn’t told Louisa that she’d seen Vincent at the fair. Louisa wouldn’t believe it. Anna could hardly believe it herself.

  “You can’t stay here,” Louisa said, bluntly. “Blundell won’t allow it.”

  Without her corsets, her hair loose on her shoulders, Louisa looked different. Her body had grown wide and round; damp patches seeped through from her breasts on each side of her wrap. There were lines at the sides of her eyes and shadows underneath them. The new baby was the fourth. Once, Louisa had been bony and brown as a Gypsy girl. It was the despair of their governesses, the way her skin absorbed the sun. Anna had an image of a pair of bare feet flashing up the path in front of her, the heels white with chalk, calves narrow as daisy stems.

  “Can’t you persuade him to take pity on me, Lou? I need a few days to work things out and I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  Louisa put down her cup and stared into the tea leaves.

  “I’m sorry, Anastasia. He said he’d be obliged to inform Vincent tonight in person if you’re still here. Vincent has a case, he says. It was an eccentric thing to do—running off to a shipwreck.”

  Anna took a deep breath. She would have to explain more clearly to Louisa what had taken her on the mission. Get her to understand.

  “I know it might appear odd,” she said. “But I had to go, Lou. I saw something. I had a vision of a boy.”

  Louisa appeared not to have heard.

  “This tea’s cold,” she said and jangled the bell in the air between them. “I’ll get some more brought up. Where’s Catherine?”

  Anna paused.

  “Still asleep.”

  Louisa had never wanted to hear about the visions. Once, Anna saw a tree full of angels. The tree was growing on the shore, out of the sand, and the angels were male, naked apart from feathery wings, their legs curved behind them like fishtails. It was the first time she understood that angels could swim, could breathe underwater. Anna ran all the way up the path to the house to tell Louisa and when she did Louisa slapped her in the face, even though Anna was past the age for slapping.

  She’d stood in their bedroom doorway with one hand clutched stupidly to her cheek while Louisa went back to her book. She had the same sense now, that her sister could not or would not hear her. Anna shifted the plate in front of her, prodded at the egg. The yolk was congealed and her appetite gone. She put down her fork. She would tell Louisa about the other side of things. That at least she might be willing to understand.

  “I believe that Vincent has betrayed me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I found a letter, from a woman. And last night …”

  Louisa interrupted her.

  “He has a mistress, you mean? Most men do.”

  Children’s running feet thumped overhead and a wail went up.

  “Louisa, listen. I can’t trust him. When I spoke to him about the letter, he denied it. And taking me to Lake House, even if he meant it for the best—he tricked me. I have to stay away from the Vicarage at least until I can see some proper doctors and get the certificate to say that I’m well. Otherwise he could take me back there.”

  The maid came in and put a pot down on the table. Louisa got up and closed the door behind her, stood for a moment with her ear to the crack.

  “Blundell isn’t always understanding. He’s even questioned my own state of mind. Mother’s behavior at the end—it hasn’t been forgotten, you know. He threatened last night that I’d be joining you at your asylum if I kept up the séances.”

  “You still go to Mr. Hamilton’s?”

  “Yes.” Louisa poured the tea and they watched as steam rose from the wide, shallow cups. “I speak to Mother often, consult her. She’s perfectly alright now. Pa came through once. Before Christmas, I heard another voice. Not that he could say anything, of course, but I heard his voice, just like it used to be.”

  “What do you mean? Whose voice?”

  Louisa looked at her.

  “You could come with me, Anna, when things are back to normal. It would help you.”

  “Help me what?”

  Louisa ran both hands up over her face, into her hair. She tightened the wrap around her waist and stood up.

  “For God’s sake. Sometimes I think Blundell i
s right about our family.” She sat down again and leaned in toward Anna with eyes full of trouble. “I can’t go against his wishes, Anna. I don’t dare.”

  * * *

  Number 59 was the last in a new terrace, a small two-up, two-down that leaned against the public house on one side of it. The front door was narrow and sheltered by a porch. A laurel hedge sprouted behind the front wall, its broad leaves coated with soot that had been partly washed away by the morning’s shower.

  Anna stood in the road, looking at the house. She was alone; Catherine had woken with a fever, her eyes glazed, forehead burning. Anna had given her weak tea and left her in Louisa’s care, promising to be back by lunchtime.

  Anna made herself walk up the path. She was trembling, half expecting Vincent to lean his head out of the upper window. The knocker was in the shape of a woman’s hand and had an iron bracelet on its iron wrist, the beads picked out in green paint. She lifted it, brought it down hard. And again. Once more. She stood and waited, her back straight, head up.

  There was no sign of movement inside the hall, beyond the squares of violet-and-crimson colored glass in the door. Her fright began to lessen. Of course Vincent was not inside. No one was. She sat down on the low wall that separated the little front garden from the one next door. Men were rolling wooden barrels into the cellars of the public house and the boys she’d passed on her way had resumed their game; their shouts hung on the air. Her mouth was dry, her lips sore from the cold air.

  Anna had thought about Maud Sulten’s refusing to see her. She’d considered the possibility that they would quarrel or that Maud might deny all knowledge of Vincent. But she hadn’t thought of this: that the woman might not be at home. Anna found herself staring at a wooden spinning top lying capsized under the hedge. It was faded, the sides dented from being bowled along by an insistent stick. A feeling grew in her that she had been here, outside the closed door, before. That she had always known this place, with its smell of smoke and yeast and impending rain, the damp chill from the brickwork coming through her petticoats and the air, that rang with cries and echoes.