The Painted Bridge

by Wendy Wallace

  The other woman had been buried there too. The bird woman, who fell to earth. And the one with the little twins. Emmeline had almost forgotten about her. That was a terrible, terrible tragedy, the way she leapt from the old bridge. Taking the babies with her. There ought to be something to mark the burial ground. A stone cross or a shaped yew—some somber, lovely thing. It was disrespectful, burying people like stillborn lambs.

  Querios expected a scandal. There hadn’t been one. The newspapers missed the story beforehand and the coroner returned a verdict of state of mind unknown. Miss Batt could have been buried in a churchyard, by daylight. But the brother insisted on committal in the grounds, after dark, just as if she’d been found guilty of suicide, as they’d feared she must be. The coroner had showed mercy. Emmeline saw Mr. Batt in the hallway afterward, swiping soil off his trouser cuffs, slapping at them with his gloves by the light of the sconces in the hall.

  “As far as the family is concerned, my sister passed away a long time ago.”

  He boomed it out as if he was making an announcement to a great, invisible audience, even though it was only Querios standing there in front of him, in the shabby black jacket that he refused to replace. She’d been on the landing, on her way downstairs to bid the brother good-bye. She found she couldn’t breathe easily all of a sudden. She’d turned around and gone back upstairs, slowly.

  * * *

  Emmeline reached for her glass and took a sip of water as Hannah reappeared, carrying the large willow-pattern dish; the room filled with the smell of mutton and sherry. Hannah served the meat from the sideboard and put down the first plate in front of Benedict, the chop plump and pale on a bed of creamed spinach.

  “Thank you, Hannah,” he said, smiling up at her, tucking his napkin in under his chin.

  He took his philanthropy too far, thanking the servants, inquiring after their families, their health. Not that Hannah Smith had a family. Emmeline had taken her on from the workhouse, impressed by her serious, quiet demeanor. She’d wanted to give her a chance in life. Hannah was still standing next to Ben, ladling gravy. She had a flattened bulkiness about her at the front that was becoming impossible to mistake for weight gain or cumbersome clothing. Emmeline hadn’t yet spoken to her about it. The right moment hadn’t presented itself.

  Catherine was holding her napkin over her nose. Querios glared at her. Emmeline had begged Querios not to punish her, persuaded him to overlook the incident and put it behind them. They had been in the study earlier in the day, the three of them, for his formal rebuke to their daughter. Emmeline had had the feeling Catherine was barely listening to Querios’s admonishments and advice.

  “D’you think it’s right, Father?” she’d said, when he appeared to have finished. “Locking up women who are perfectly well? Depriving them of their liberty, for money?”

  Emmeline had hurried Catherine out of the room, almost before the words were out of her mouth. She’d hoped that Querios hadn’t been listening, but seeing his bloodshot eyes and air of scarcely suppressed rage this evening, she realized he probably had.

  She caught movement out of the corner of her eye. Catherine had pushed aside her plate, was putting something to her mouth. Emmeline raised her water glass and stole a look at her. Catherine looked like an angel; so narrow and white. So self-contained. In her right hand, held lightly to her nose, was a rosebud. The silence in the room thickened to something ominous.

  Querios banged his fist down on the table and the cutlery, the mustard pots and napkin rings and toothpick holders all jumped and rattled as if they were in a buffet car on a train.

  “What do you think you’re playing at, Catherine?”

  Catherine opened her eyes.

  “I’m not playing, Father. I am taking sustenance from a flower.”

  Her tone of voice was so sure, Emmeline felt a sudden ache in her heart. Catty was still a child. Still innocent.

  “If you don’t eat, Catherine, you’ll d … become ill.”

  “I won’t die, Father. Do we have any grapes?”

  Querios was scarlet, his mouth open.

  “Grapes! Why not pomegranates? Mangos? Why not …” He got out of his chair, grabbed the rose from Catherine’s hand and flung it on the cloth. “I’ll have you fed, if you don’t stop this nonsense. In the treatment room. You’ll soon get your appetite back then.”

  Benedict was on his feet at Querios’s side, towering over him.

  “You can’t f-force her to eat, Father. It’s wr-wr-wrong.”

  Catherine folded her arms over her chest and sat very straight, her face on fire. Before Querios could respond, there was a knock at the open door. Fludd stood there, dressed in a filthy old waistcoat made from moleskins, and grinning. Querios sat down. He lifted his tankard and took a long draft of beer before he spoke.

  “Fludd. I wanted to see you.”

  “Yes, Mr. Abse? What were it concerning?”

  Fludd had left Cornwall when he was a boy but his accent was so strong Emmeline could barely understand him, even though he must be forty now. He’d been taken on by old Mr. Abse and Querios refused to get rid of him even though just seeing him gave Emmeline the shudders. She took another sip of water, reached for Catherine’s hand under the table and squeezed it.

  “Fetch down the chair, Fludd. Put it back together, in the cellar. Just as it was.”

  Fludd nodded and left, his cap in his hands. Emmeline gripped the edge of the table, felt the immovability of the mahogany through the soft white linen. She waited until Fludd’s heavy tread died away. She needed to compose herself, would ration her determination, not spend it all immediately. She spoke quietly.

  “Querios, you cannot do that to our daughter. I am her mother and I will not allow it.”

  “What chair? What are you talking about?” Catherine said. She looked confused.

  Querios ignored her.

  “Not Catherine, Em. It’s for the Palmer woman. She’s a maniac.”

  “She’s not!” Catherine shouted. “She’s my friend.”

  Catherine leapt up and ran out of the room. Her feet pounded on the stairs and a door banged. Querios threw down his napkin and left without a word, heading for the study. Emmeline felt relieved that Querios was not intending to use the chair on Catherine. Nauseous, at the idea of its being brought back into service in the asylum.

  Ben threw her a concerned glance, got up and patted Emmeline’s shoulder. He didn’t know what the chair was, she thought dully. Even he hadn’t eaten his pudding. A dish of apple Charlotte lay untouched at his place.

  “Catty’ll be alright, Ma,” he said on his way out of the room. “Why don’t you take her away? It would do you both good.”

  Hannah cleared away the plates, the silver, the napkins, brushed off the bread crumbs; only the withered pink bud still lay on the white cloth.

  * * *

  The sound of hammering had been going on all morning, sending shudders through the floorboards, the walls, the soles of Anna’s feet. It was unsettling. In the dayroom, Anna pulled her legs up under her on the window seat, feeling her toe through a hole in the end of her stocking. Talitha’s green velvet chair remained empty, her embroidered shawl draped over its back. Featherstone was shouting that her husband was hiding outside in the shrubs, would shoot her if he caught a glimpse of her. She got down on her hands and knees, crawled from one end of the room to the other. Violet walked behind, clapping her hands and laughing.

  “Cuckoo,” she called. “Cuckoo.”

  Anna rested her forehead on her knees. She’d expected to be called in to see Abse before now, had wanted to ask Abse if she might attend Miss Batt’s funeral, but they’d buried her already, Lovely said. At night. Anna had never heard of a burial taking place at night.

  Catherine was on her mind. Anna wanted to know how the girl was. She held on to a slim hope that Abse would find it more difficult to call her a hysteric after she’d brought his daughter back to him. He might acknowledge her rationality, her moral sense
. Might even want to repay his debt to her, for caring for Catherine. It was possible, she insisted to herself.

  Anna felt underneath the cushion of the window seat for her workbag. She had resisted picking it up, it would confirm that she was back, that time stretched ahead of her with nothing to fill it except stitches, but there was nothing else to do. The inactivity was torment and the routine—breakfast, prayers, turns around the airing grounds, luncheon—had collapsed with Talitha’s death. Anna had barely seen Makepeace since the interview in her room.

  She pulled apart the long looped handles and took out the fabric. The silks lay curled and helpless in leggy skeins in the bottom of the bag. Cerulean and navy, rust, silver, and sage. Rethreading the needle, she began to push it through the cloth. The stitching soothed her, numbed her mind. It was a consolation, however clumsy her fingers. An image began to form itself over the hours that followed. It was not a letter V that was taking shape beneath her fingers. It was an outline of rocks. With a stiff cross-stitch, she began work on the sea that surrounded them.

  She hadn’t known she’d made choices from the bag of colors Makepeace had thrust in front of her. She had reached in blindly, taken the first that came to hand. But she must have selected them more carefully than she knew. They were the right shades for the picture she found herself making.

  * * *

  The summons came late that afternoon. Makepeace appeared in front of her, heavy-eyed, and nodded toward the door that led down the stairs to the office.

  “He wants you in the study.”

  Anna thrust the sewing back in the bag and left the room. On the landing, she paused and looked out the window at the old oak. Its steady, rooted presence reassured her. She took a deep breath and continued down the stairs.

  She knocked confidently and opened the door. Abse was on his feet, looking out the window toward the lake.

  “Mr. Abse?”

  Certain that they met on new terms, as if for the first time, she held out her hand to shake his. He continued to gaze out over the lawn with his own hands clasped behind his back. She couldn’t be sure if he had noticed her gesture.

  “I wanted to see you, Mrs. Palmer,” he said. “And for the purposes of this interview, I am speaking to you not as a guest but as a fellow human being.”

  She felt heady with relief.

  “I’m so glad, Mr. Abse. I feel the same. Everything has changed.”

  “Indeed it has.”

  “How is Catherine? I’d hoped to see her before now. We spent so much time together.”

  At last he turned toward her. His face was gray, his chin above the line of whiskers sprinkled with white stubble. All the cheer and confidence, all the bombast, had departed.

  “I suppose we must be grateful that you deigned to return her to us.”

  Anna felt herself falter inside at his sarcasm.

  “I don’t require gratitude.”

  “You don’t? How very gracious.” He paused, looked up at the ceiling. “Mrs. Palmer, you lured my daughter across the ice. Walked her for hours in the bitter cold—a tender, delicate girl, not an insensible lunatic who feels no pain. You imprisoned her in some unknown household before dragging her to an unsavory fairground.”

  Anna struggled to take in what she heard.

  “Did she say that?”

  “Catherine is young and impressionable. I was able to see beyond her account of events.”

  “I didn’t drag her anywhere. She … I brought her back to you, Mr. Abse. That’s what matters. She is safely back.”

  His face creased suddenly and he put his hands over his ears, began to rub them.

  “When your husband first brought you here, Mrs. Palmer, I believed that you might have fared better in your own home.” He laughed. “That you did not need a full retreat. How wrong I was. How utterly mistaken.”

  She opened her mouth to explain. Closed it again. She didn’t want to make things worse for Catherine. But she must defend herself.

  “Mr. Abse, that is not what happened.”

  “You believed that by abducting my daughter you could avenge yourself on me. It is as simple as that.” He turned his back on her once more. “She has come home changed. Her head is full of ideas. Do you know, Mrs. Palmer, that she believes she can live on the scent of flowers?”

  The lamps on the desk were still unlit. In the gloom, the towers of yellowing ledgers behind the desk resembled the chalk stacks out in the sea off the south coast.

  “May I see her, Mr. Abse? Perhaps I can talk to her, persuade …”

  “Enough,” he bellowed, shouting right into her face, blasting her with sour breath and rage. “My own daughter thinks her father a common jailer. My most esteemed and reliable patient is dead. And you dare to tell me you don’t want gratitude.”

  Anna took a step back. She felt more frightened than she had at any moment so far in Lake House.

  Abse picked up a pen from the desk and smoothed the trimmed feather between his fingers. His voice when he spoke again was controlled and he did not look at her.

  “I have written to your husband to request your transfer to another asylum. Until then, you will be treated for mania. We shall try every means at our disposal to help you. But moral insanity such as yours is most often beyond cure.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  “Come along, Palmer.”

  Makepeace’s voice was cheery despite the early hour, the bitter cold in the corridor. She walked in front of Anna, and Lovely came behind with the corner of her apron stuffed in her mouth. It was not yet light; the bell hadn’t rung for breakfast. They walked past the treatment room, past the shower room and on, to a set of steep, curved stone steps. Anna followed Makepeace down, holding a rope slung from the wall like a banister, and arrived in a cellar, its floor scattered with straw, an old brick oven on one wall.

  The room was filled with noise; a machine was running somewhere nearby. Fludd loomed out of the corner, dressed in a smith’s leather apron. Anna gasped at the sight of him. He was adjusting a strange contraption, festooned with straps and attached to a long wooden arm. It was a chair. A high-backed chair, attached to the end of a wooden beam.

  “What’s happening, Lovely?” Anna’s voice was a whisper.

  Lovely shook her head.

  “You’ll be alright, miss,” she whispered back. “It’s the chair. It don’t kill yer.”

  Makepeace cleared her throat. “This is the patient, Mr. Fludd. I think you recognize her.”

  Anna met his eyes, blue and intense, as he walked toward her. She shrank against Lovely, had time to feel the soft bulk of her, breathe in her smell of sweat and lye, before the man lifted her off the ground and with one movement thrust her into the chair. She kicked at him and tried to push him away with her fists. He laughed.

  “No funny business,” he said. “Not with Fludd.”

  He leaned his shoulder against her chest, pinning her in the chair while he tightened a belt around her waist, strapped her legs to the legs of the chair, her chest to its high back. His hair fell forward and Anna caught a glimpse of a scar on the back of his neck—a white circle that looked like teeth marks. Fludd stood up and the machine in the distance quietened. For a moment, everything was still.

  “Have a care, Mr. Fludd,” Lovely said.

  Lovely, Makepeace and Fludd all stood back behind a wooden partition, and Fludd bent over a wheel. As he turned it, the chair started to move. Anna felt herself traveling around the brick walls of the cellar in a circle as if she was in an open carriage, the air cooling her face, her neck. For some slow-moving seconds, she felt nothing more than loneliness, a sense of herself in motion while the others remained stationary. The chair gathered speed, the room became round. The walls disappeared; corners, individual stones lost their solidity. She tried to grip the arms of the chair but her fingers refused.

  Soon the chair was turning so fast she couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hold anything with her eyes. She tried to shout but nothing emerged; her mout
h was open, she realized, her head thrown back against the chair. The air had become solid. It slammed into her, choked her, battered her body and then her mind. She was struggling to breathe. She felt nausea rising, turning her body liquid, her bones as formless as the spinning walls. She summoned the last scraps of will, tried again to scream and as she did so she felt the chair slowing. It came to a halt.

  She heard Lovely crying, could feel something warm and wet on the seat. Anna was sitting in her own urine. She was sick, suddenly and violently. She half closed her eyes, waiting for the straps to be undone, the room to cease turning.

  “All right, Fludd.” It was Makepeace. “Get on with it.”

  The chair began to move again, in the other direction. She traveled backward. A panicked, choking wave rose in her chest but the chair turned so fast the sound was forced inward. It lodged in her head so she was the scream and the scream was she. Her head was thrown forward on her chest, the vomit gathered in her throat and choked her. She knew nothing but the impulse to fight, fight for air.

  * * *

  Anna was in bed. The walls were spinning around her, rotating in a way that made her sick. She reached out to still one as it passed by, saw a white hand appear in front of the blurred thistle heads of the wallpaper. The hand was moving too, it floated up to the ceiling; there was no still place. The thistles had turned to roses, green and thorny, each one different from the next.

  She heard a door closing, saw a tray spinning on the chest of drawers that tumbled in space. A hot hand held her wrist. She understood; her skin no longer contained her—she had left her body and was rolling weightless around the room. Her self had been driven out of her. Anna felt a pure, detached sorrow that this was her life. Her path had been leading her here from the very beginning and she hadn’t guessed. She had walked through the days in ignorance, without fear, and each one brought her closer to this one. Life had betrayed her.