The Painted Bridge

by Wendy Wallace

  “Vincent. You have come at last.”

  She came toward him and fell on her knees on the rug at his feet. He restrained himself with the greatest difficulty from using his cane to keep her at bay and looked around for Abse, who had left the room.

  “I don’t ask to come back to the Vicarage, Vincent,” she said. “All I ask is that you get me out of this place. You can turn me onto the streets—I’ll go to one of my other sisters, I’ll find some employment somewhere. But don’t leave me here.”

  Anna was rocking back and forth, begging him to have pity, making a display of herself. She prostrated herself in front of him.

  “Vincent, please. I implore you.”

  Vincent leapt off the chair, almost tripped on a curling rug, and retreated to the far end of the room, pressing his back against a row of soft, disintegrating spines. He seized the bell on the desk and began shouting for assistance. He’d made a mistake about Anna. He had thought her overwrought, nervy—but it was now apparent that she was disturbed to the point of mania. The mother could have let him know as much before she passed away, if she had chosen. The sisters must have been in on it too. Deceivers all. The muttered objections to her removal from certain of his parishioners, his household, were offensive.

  Abse returned, licked one finger and began riffling through papers at his desk.

  “There’s three months owing. Further amounts for the extra treatments. We are not a charity, Reverend.”

  Vincent felt in his pocket. He gripped the coins between his fingers to prevent any telltale chinking.

  “In my hurry to see my unfortunate wife, Dr. Abse, I find I have left the house without funds. I regret to say that I cannot remove Mrs. Palmer at present since I am unable to settle the bill.”

  Anna wailed again and as she left the room, escorted by an attendant, looked at him for the first time. Amid the ruined flesh of her face, her eyes were clear, their curious blue-green shade more vivid than he’d noticed since the first time he met her. An uncomfortable twinge of remorse, like heartburn, rippled through Vincent’s chest. He looked toward the heavens as he raised his hand in a gesture of farewell to her. He could not be expected to find words of comfort when she had distressed him so.

  Alone with Abse again, Vincent felt his composure returning. He ran a finger along the stiff, smooth curves of his moustache and assured the chap that if further treatments were needed, he had no objection. It was more than he could stand, he said, to think of dear Anna lost to him in this way. Crueler than if she had died.

  Abse appeared unconvinced by his display of solicitude.

  “I won’t keep you, Reverend. Your wife will remain here until you pay up. Not a day longer. Good day to you.”

  Vincent helped himself to his feet with his cane and settled his hat on his head as he settled the matter in his mind. Anna’s eyes had been cool. Almost contemptuous. She hadn’t lost her mind entirely and there was no knowing what she might do or say if released. He couldn’t allow the Bishop to see her, despite His Lordship’s pressing request.

  “It may be some time before I am at liberty to return, Dr. Abse,” he said. “It is Lent and I am much occupied with spiritual matters.”

  He departed down the hall, controlling a powerful urge to break into a run.

  Querios Abse, back at his desk in the study, reclined in his chair and sighed. He wished he had never admitted Mrs. Palmer. The credentials of the doctors who’d signed the papers had struck him as bogus. And he hadn’t liked the cut of Palmer’s jib from the start. Pompous ass.

  The thing with patients and their relatives, his father had drilled into him from as young as he could remember, was that it was business. It wasn’t personal. Just business. It had become personal, with Mrs. Palmer. She had enraged him, stealing away from Lake House under his very nose and taking Catherine with her. Bringing the child back with a headful of foolish ideas. Dangerous ones.

  Since her return, Querios hadn’t wanted to treat Mrs. Palmer, he admitted to himself. He’d wanted to punish her. Frighten her. That was the only purpose the chair had ever served. Terror. He’d had recurrent nightmares about it as a boy, hearing the cries of the patients rising from the cellar. As a man he’d sworn to himself it would never be employed in any establishment he controlled. Mrs. Palmer had turned him into a monster. And if the magistrates saw the chair, he’d have no chance.

  Querios pictured Reverend Palmer’s smug face, heard again the way he addressed him as “Doctor,” and a sharp ringing started up in his left ear. He was damned if he would discharge the Reverend’s wife without getting the money he was owed.

  He opened the study door and shouted for Fludd.

  “Dismantle the chair,” Querios said, when he arrived. “Put it back in the attic. On second thought, Fludd, burn the confounded thing.”

  * * *

  The light was ideal, white and abundant and diffuse. Holy, Lucas St. Clair might have thought, if God hadn’t shown himself at Balaclava not to exist. He put down his pipe on the bench and stepped into the dark cupboard. The silver bath was ready, the larger glass plates polished, free of dust or fingerprints. The new bottle of collodion had lost its milkiness and turned thin and translucent as whisky. It would pour clean and even over the glass. He pushed the cork back into the neck of the flask as the door to the fernery opened.

  A woman in a bonnet stepped over the threshold, looked around her and appeared to sniff the air. She didn’t see him behind the amber window of the cupboard. Walking to the far wall, she raised a hand and rubbed away a patch of condensation on the glass, peering out through a curtain of papery hydrangea heads on the other side. She straightened up and crossed the brick floor to the stove, hugging her arms around herself.

  Lucas knew he ought to announce his presence to Mrs. Palmer but he felt reluctant to move. He had a sensation of his eyes as a lens, of the dark cupboard as a camera, and his whole self the sensitized plate receiving an impression.

  He stepped out of the cupboard and her hands flew to her face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to alarm you. …”

  The woman lowered her hands. It wasn’t she. It was another person, disfigured by livid green and purple bruises and with numerous dark scabs at her temples. Her skin was gray, her lips cracked. They’d sent someone else. He felt again the flooding sense of disappointment at the absence of Mrs. Palmer.

  “I’m sorry. I was expecting another patient.”

  “Were you?”

  He looked again. Her eyes were the color of the sea, vivid and startling in the light that bathed them both. He cleared his throat.

  “I’m sorry. It’s a pleasure to see you again, Mrs. Palmer. How are you?”

  “My appearance shocks you, Dr. St. Clair.”

  “Yes. It does.”

  Abse had informed him that Mrs. Palmer had developed full-blown mania. Lucas hadn’t believed his account of violent attacks inflicted on her own flesh, resistance to treatment. Mrs. Palmer showed no indications of mania in the previous portrait, only of a mild hysteria, and in talking to her, he’d found her perfectly rational.

  It seemed that Abse might be right, for once. The injuries were dreadful. Could they really be the result of her own hand? He had a moment’s sickening suspicion that they might not be and put the thought out of his mind. He wanted to make images of the patient as she truly was, he reminded himself. If that was the challenge, how she appeared was immaterial.

  Mrs. Palmer was wandering around the walls of the old glasshouse, touching the tips of the new ferns that were beginning to curl their way out of the mortar.

  “Sailors,” she said, walking back toward him. “Sailors crave the sight of green things. The things of the earth. The world becomes more precious to those who are removed from it.”

  “Sailors may return,” he said. “Find land again.”

  “Yes.”

  She was standing in front of him, close enough for him to see the expression in her eyes. He could see
it but couldn’t read it. A twig scratched at the glass roof and they both looked up.

  “If you don’t wish to be photographed now, Mrs. Palmer, I understand.”

  “Dr. St. Clair, I am more sane than I have ever been in my life. And yet—I look like a madwoman.”

  “No,” he protested. “I don’t think you do.”

  “It’s alright. You needn’t try to spare my feelings. I have a mirror. I know that I look like someone from a battlefield. And I know that my mind is in full health.”

  She sat down in the posing chair looking at him straight and steady. He’d grown used to the bruises and scabs. All he saw were her eyes. The shape of her mouth. He had another jolt of feeling that this time was desire for her. She was still beautiful.

  “Make the picture. I have nothing to lose.”

  The light had shifted even since she arrived—become cooler and more blue.

  “Last time we met, Mrs. Palmer, you said that you couldn’t find yourself in the photograph I’d made of you.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “I wanted to make another attempt.”

  “Please do.”

  “In that case, with your agreement, I would like to make a more detailed study of your face. Closer in and using a larger plate.”

  “My face?”

  “Yes.”

  She untied the ribbon of her bonnet. Her head was covered with a plain white scarf; short locks of hair emerged at the sides and on her neck. The bruises and burns were more stark without the shade of the bonnet; his stomach lurched at the sight of them. Some looked indeed as if they might be the marks of his own profession. He resisted the urge to go to her, touch her. He was not a man in the company of a woman. He was a doctor testing a theory with a patient.

  “Are you sure, Mrs. Palmer? Shall we proceed?”

  She nodded, reached into her bodice and pulled a silver necklace over the high collar. It was a St. Christopher, small but solid-looking, the figure of the saint standing out in relief.

  “I am ready, Dr. St. Clair.”

  * * *

  The air was warmer under the camera’s cloth. A paleness swam on the ground glass, soft-edged and luminous. Lucas tracked the lens, felt its reliable, familiar mechanism, pulled it steadily toward him until the outlines of eyes and cheeks and chin took shape. She did not fill the frame. He shifted the tripod forward and forward again until he was closer than he had ever been to anybody before, behind a camera, until her face filled the glass.

  The crown of her head was resting on the bottom of it, the upward, even curve of her chin was at the top, with the silver medallion poised above like a full moon. He took his magnifying eyepiece to the ground glass. In her eyes, sections of the iris radiated from the pupils like the petals of a flower. Upside-down, he recognized in them the renewed appeal she was making to him. He wanted to respond to it. He wanted to help her. Tightening the focus knob, he emerged from the velvet tent and went into the dark cupboard to prepare the plate.

  His hand shook as he poured the collodion, nursing one sharp corner between thumb and forefinger. He drained the excess back into the neck of the flask, clumsily, slid the plate into the silver bath and watched impatiently as it turned opaque and was ready for use. The picture he was about to make was going to tell the truth about Mrs. Palmer.

  What it would be, he did not know.

  * * *

  The light dazzled Anna’s eyes and the sound of the gravel underfoot hurt her ears. The sky was bigger than she’d ever realized and the airing grounds, that had once seemed constricted, now appeared vast. One wall was covered with a tangle of stems festooned with silvery seed heads. In front of it, plump scarlet hips and haws stood on the naked, thorny stalks of a rosebush. Underneath, a clump of snowdrops had pushed their way through the black earth, shown their modest white heads. Anna stared at them, wondering why she had never before seen the beauty of the plants with such clarity.

  “It seems a little warmer,” Mrs. Button said. She was waiting on the path in front of Anna.

  “Yes.” Anna’s voice sounded rusty in her ear.

  She caught up with Lizzie Button and walked behind her. The paths between the beds of shrubs weren’t wide enough for two to walk comfortably together. Button’s hair was growing. A dark line of it emerged below her bonnet and brushed the collar of her cape.

  “I’m glad to see you regaining your strength, Mrs. Palmer,” she said, over her shoulder.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Button.”

  A robin was following them, bobbing from twig to twig. Button stopped and dug in her pocket, scattered crumbs on the ground. The bird landed on the gravel, claws splayed, and began to retrieve the scraps of bread with darting, nervous movements of its head.

  “I envy him,” said Button. “He can fly away.”

  “We will be free one day,” Anna said, with a sudden, strong sense that it was true. “You will and I will.”

  Button sighed.

  “You have your life ahead of you. Every day is a torment to me. Every minute of every day.”

  She resumed walking and Anna followed.

  “Mrs. Button, I’ve wanted for a long time to express my condolences.”

  Button’s back stiffened. “For what?”

  “The infant you lost.”

  Button groaned. “What do you mean, Mrs. Palmer? My son’s one year old, strong and well.”

  “I’m so sorry. You used to grieve so … I thought he must be lost.”

  Button turned to face Anna, looking unlike any Lizzie Button she had ever seen before. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining.

  “Of course I grieve. I was dragged from him when he was just two weeks old. They brought me here. I’ve got three other children. Girls. My oldest’s nearly seven. I miss her even more than the baby.”

  “I didn’t know,” Anna said. “Forgive me.”

  Button lifted her shoulders in the navy cape, lowered them, and shook her head.

  “I don’t like to speak of them. Not in here. They are the dearest and best girls you could imagine, Mrs. Palmer. My angels.”

  They carried on walking. Four children. The same as Louisa. She couldn’t have imagined Button had a family, people relying on her. She hadn’t seen her as a woman with a life before Lake House. A life after it. How could she have been so blind?

  “What is your son’s name, Mrs. Button?”

  “Albert.”

  They paused by a bush covered with pale starlike flowers while Mrs. Button bent to her bootlace. On the far side of the beds, Miss Todd stood like a statue, holding her palms toward the sky. Miss Little had gone, exiled by an uncle to Colney Hatch. A crow shrieked out of sight and Lizzie Button straightened up, snapped off a sprig from the bush, and tucked it into Anna’s buttonhole.

  “I always wondered about you, Mrs. Palmer. About why you were here.”

  Anna breathed in the intense sweetness of the buds. Sighed.

  “For a long time, all last year, I had a vision of a boy, drowning. After the great storm, I heard of a boy brought from the water still breathing. I went to the site of the wrecked ship, trying to find him. Offer assistance. My husband thought—he believed I must be in a disturbed state of mind.” The words sounded alien to Anna, as if someone else spoke them. Why was she here? She had never truly understood.

  “And did you? Find him?”

  “He wasn’t there. I still see him, Mrs. Button, but he’s alive now. Playing. Singing.”

  Anna smiled at her and Button nodded, her bonnet slipping back and forth on her head.

  “You appeared so disturbed when you arrived. You shunned company. Didn’t put two words together at table. We all thought you’d committed a crime.”

  “What kind of crime?”

  Button hesitated.

  “Murder, some of them said. Don’t take it too hard, Mrs. Palmer. I didn’t believe it, nor did the late Talitha.”

  Anna began to frame her objections, ask how they could possibly have imagined such things
, and stopped. She must have appeared strange, with her refusal to talk to anyone, her conviction that she was utterly unlike any other woman there. Her belief that her husband would see sense and come for her, or that her sister would rescue her, had been deluded. Anna felt a fleeting pity for the self that had first come to Lake House.

  It began to rain, a drizzly dampness settling on their bonnets and shoulders, and the gate on the other side of the airing grounds opened. Lovely waved, her shawl drawn up over her head. It was strange that Anna had thought Lovely plain when they first met. She wasn’t plain. She was vivid and strong and alive, standing in the rain, frowning and gesticulating.

  “Come along, my beauties. Yer’ll catch yer death.”

  Miss Todd and Mrs. Button went ahead and Lovely and Anna walked behind them. Heavy splashes began to fall as they hurried along the side of the house, soaking through Anna’s cotton scarf, wetting her cheeks, mixing with the tears that were falling again, onto the soaked gravel. Lovely took her arm. Everyone seemed to believe she needed an arm to lean on.

  “Alright, miss?”

  “When I get out of here, Lovely, will you come with me?”

  “To the Vicarage?”

  “No. I’m never going back there.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I don’t know, yet. I’ll know soon.” She would know soon, Anna felt sure. Things were changing in her as surely as they were changing in the winter garden. “Will you, Lovely?”

  “I might do. You’ve got visitors inside, miss. Gentlemen.”

  * * *

  Lovely helped her out of her cloak and up the stairs, then showed her into the dining room.

  The table looked naked without the oilcloth and two men were sitting at it with their backs to the sideboard. Both got to their feet as she closed the door behind her and reached out their hands to shake hers.

  “Mrs. Palmer?” said the older one.

  “Yes. I’m Anna Palmer.”

  “Dr. Frank Fairclough. This is my colleague Dr. Brewer. Mrs. Palmer, please accept our apologies. Your sister asked us some time ago to call on you but we understand from Mr. Abse that you have not been well enough to see visitors.”