Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  THE FOLLOWING morning, first thing, Lady Hallowhulme arrived in the sickroom with the maid, Jenny. Jenny bore a garment in her arms. A dress had been made up for Billie on the pattern of her own. It was of fine black wool, fitted, shaped by row after row of tiny vertical tucks. It buttoned at the back, and the buttons were real jet – warm and weightless. Lady Clara stayed a minute to explain her gift. She explained it as respectable and well suited to the weather, without mentioning the occasion of its appearance. Then she left her maid to coax Billie out of her borrowed clothes, and to wash Billie’s hands, arms, and throat with warm water and soap.

  Billie’s hair was dirty, dark at its crown, but Jenny simply sat her down at the mirror and brushed it, then plaited and pinned the plaits up into a winding crown on Billie’s head. Then the maid helped Billie lift the new dress over her head. They settled it, and Jenny hooked all the buttons closed.

  ‘Your waist isn’t so small,’ Jenny said, ‘but you don’t really need a corset.’

  Billie couldn’t tell if this was criticism or praise. She felt the woman touch the muscle over her shoulder blade before fastening the last fifteen buttons. The touch wasn’t a caress, but a push, a firm push, as though she were being tested for ripeness.

  A movement in the garden caught Billie’s eye. It was a gardener and the painter girl. The girl was directing the gardener to cut the stand of irises she’d attempted to paint. She discovered her paint box, flicked its lid closed, and carried it indoors, held out from her black clothes and oozing red and yellow and blue across her fingers and onto the flagstones.

  There was a knock on the sickroom door. It was the first time Billie had noticed someone knocking for admission. Maybe they hadn’t before and the knock was for Jenny, not her or Henry – who at the moment could no more be knocked for than the dead. Billie watched Jenny in the big oval glass in front of which she’d been stood. Jenny gave Billie’s reflection a last, long, assessing look, and wet her finger to smooth the hair about Billie’s ears. Then she went to the door.

  It was Clara again, this time accompanied by a dark, well-built man, who stopped in the doorway and frowned at the window. Jenny bustled past Billie and opened two sections in its broad bow. Cool air came in, and the smell of rain.

  Clara introduced her husband. He came in and, taking his wife by the arm, repositioned her in the room. ‘In attending sick persons,’ he said, ‘it is best to stand where the air passes from door to window, never, Clara, between the invalid and the fire, for the fire will draw any infectious vapour toward it.’ He sniffed, looked at Jenny, and inquired, ‘Acetate of lead?’

  ‘Yes, Lord Hallowhulme,’ said Jenny.

  Hallowhulme finally looked at Billie. He coloured up, a blush as sudden as a change in the light. She was reminded of someone – then, rather confused, realised that it was Murdo Hesketh. In the church Hesketh’s turned face had worn the same shade of rosy blush on a clenched jaw muscle like the convex side of a dent in otherwise smooth metal.

  ‘Are you ready, my dear?’ James Hallow said. ‘You’re to come with us.’

  Lady Hallowhulme shook open the shawl she carried and wrapped it around Billie. Then she pinned a square of beaded black net on Billie’s hair. Billie could feel a bead tapping her brow as she walked. Lord Hallowhulme linked her arm with his and closed her hand in both his very warm ones.

  THERE WAS a scarcity of hearses, or even right-sized carts to serve. The island was rich only in two-wheeled traps – the ends of which any adult’s coffin would overhang. Apparently, Murdo said to Geordie Betler, no one had had the sense to borrow one of the big drays from the construction site at Scouse Beach.

  The coffins were carried from the church to the new graveyard above the town. Murdo walked with Geordie Betler behind Ian’s coffin, which was borne by the four big men from Kiss Castle’s gatehouse. Before and behind Ian in the procession were two of the drowned stokers. One was a mainlander and had his wife in attendance, the other, a Swede, had to make do with Mrs Mulberry and a knot of Stolnsay parishioners.

  When Murdo and Geordie reached the stepping-stones over the small burn just before the new graveyard, Geordie remarked that this wasn’t very satisfactory. The stones were wet, and Geordie had placed his foot a little too far forward on one so that the water backed up in several glassy ridges around the toe of his shoe. He got to the far side and shook his feet, as if his shoes weren’t protected by rubber galoshes. Murdo looked at this sidelong. Ian’s elder brother was something of an old woman, fastidious and spinsterish, and coaxingly fishy in some of his conversation.

  Nothing could be done about the slope of the new cemetery. What little flat land there was behind the town was cow pasture. Higher up, where the slopes levelled off, began the vast peat bogs that made up most of Kissack. The graveyard was on a strip of heath – and a twenty-degree incline. Murdo reached its wall, looked at the heath rising before him, and saw that the fresh graves, in their two rows, appeared as neat in shape as the slots in a baking pan.

  They went on up. Rory Skilling and the others set Ian down beside his grave. All the mourners drew back, leaving the ground between the rows empty. Only Mr Mulberry ventured there, passing slowly up between the graves in his white surplice. The rain had stopped, all umbrellas were closed and stowed under arms. Nobody stood near the excavations themselves, which looked unstable, for there was water at the bottom of each and water oozing out of their earthy walls. Mr Mulberry’s surplice snapped and fluttered above the more dulcet rustle of wool skirts and shawls and coat-tails. Murdo for once couldn’t hear that sound he hated – the island’s one ceaseless noise – of heath hissing, like someone cooling a burned tongue by straining air through their teeth.

  Mr Mulberry read to the gathering – the order of service. Then a piper beside the minister resuscitated his bag and wound them all up into a hymn. Murdo looked down at the raindrops elongated on the lid of Ian’s coffin, seeping into the grain of the undressed wood. He remembered Ian starting a fire with wood shavings, a resinous smoke, coffee, Ian’s clever iron pot with its clawed feet that could sit in the embers of an open fire …

  Murdo didn’t know the words of the hymn.

  Wilhelmina Paxton stood across from him. James and Clara Hallow were behind her, with their son Rixon, his friend Elov, and the newly arrived Tegners behind that. Of all the colours on that slope, mostly mossy plaid, the Kiss Castle family was the only concentration of deep black. Ostentatiously solemn and purposeful, their black was like time stopped – time stopped with a will, and with wealth. These people could afford to sit still, fold their hands, lay down real life to mourn. They had taken Miss Paxton in, and dressed her as one of them. Murdo stared at her. The hem of her skirt was sopping wet – she had neglected to lift it as she crossed the burn, or she’d missed the stones and blundered through the water – he could imagine that. Her young face was shut. Stubborn. Murdo supposed she was trying not to cry. Murdo then saw that his cousin James’s eyes were fastened on the back of Miss Paxton’s neck and, as he sang, they darted from side to side, as if he were reading words there.

  Minnie Hallow, separate from her family but accompanied by a Kiss Castle groom and two gardeners, came up the slope between the rows of graves, stopping now and then to place a handful of pink mallow, or irises, on the bare coffins. Minnie must have stripped Kiss Castle’s garden. Minnie liked plays and pageantry and, aware of this, Murdo watched her with suspicion. He watched for signs of pious self-consciousness. He tried to see Minnie’s father in Minnie. But, placing her flowers, Minnie seemed completely unselfconscious. She had no point to make. There was no challenge, no reproach, no pride in her action. It was simply right, graceful, and good.

  Murdo held his breath and sank back into a fizzing orange mist. He felt Geordie Betler seize his arm and steady him, then he was walking past the sexton’s spades and wheelbarrow on the downhill slope, guided by Betler, behind his family in their dazzling black, and looking at Miss Paxton’s white neck below her crown of p
laits, her glowing corona.

  At the stream James Hallow, who didn’t usually think to do those things, turned around, waited for Miss Paxton, and lifted her over the water. Despite himself, Murdo caught them up, and was in time to take Minnie’s arm as she teetered on the slippery stepping-stones. ‘Did you ever?’ she said, her face shining up at him as if he was someone quite different, someone to share a joke with. Then she gripped his arm and pointed out Rory Skilling’s young son. ‘I found Alan again, Murdo. He’s got the same coat on he wore all last year, though its sleeves are halfway to his elbows. I’ve employed him, as you suggested, at a penny a day.’

  It had been Rory’s son behind one of those armloads of cut flowers.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be glad of your patronage,’ Murdo said, and, having seen her safely across, he went on after the elder Betler.

  THEY WERE in Ian’s room. Ian’s salvaged bag was in the middle of the floor, damp with drained seawater, its leather sunk into the shape of its contents. Geordie Betler was sleeping in Ian’s room. ‘I did have to insist,’ Geordie said to Murdo. ‘Lord Hallowhulme pointed out that it was – in fact – only your dressing room. He said he thought I might not be pleased by the proximity. He reminded me that I was a guest, and that there were a number of guest rooms empty despite the seasonal, and unseasonal, influx.’

  Mr Betler managed to be both delicate and confiding – but Murdo wasn’t about to be involved.

  ‘What do you think?’ Betler asked. Murdo could feel eyes, feel himself peered up at. Geordie Betler went on, ‘I think Lord Hallowhulme is concerned I’ll simply fall into the habit of seeing to you.’ Betler’s voice was blithe and polite. From the corner of his eye Murdo saw the spread hands, a gesture of helpless concession. ‘I reassured him, of course. It would be no trouble to me, I said, in the short term. And that you’d be in need of – ah – if not a friend, at least an ally –’

  Despite himself Murdo met Geordie Betler’s eyes. And he didn’t see deference or fussiness, but shrewdness, compassion, and patience. It pulled him up short; he felt himself bridle, like a horse checked at the very moment it takes fright.

  ‘I’ve made a start,’ Geordie Betler went on – on another subject already. ‘Ian had so very little.’ He got down on his knees, gingerly, to open the sodden bag. Murdo, who had spent too much time in the past days walking about a room paved with corpses, flinched at the sight of the clear mucus that seemed to cover all of Ian’s clothes. But its source was only a burst container of foot powder.

  For a while Geordie Betler delved among folded shirts and other necessities of travel. He found a few ink-mottled papers, carefully peeled them apart to lay them out to dry. He made to get up, and Murdo went to help him. ‘Thank you,’ Geordie said, and gave Murdo’s hand a couple of firm, friendly pats.

  ‘I’ll leave you to your sorting,’ Murdo said. But Geordie retained his hand, tightened his grip, said, ‘Wait.’ He released Murdo, then opened a drawer, and took out a worn chamois, grey with oil. Geordie carried the bundle to Murdo, unwrapped the chamois, and put a revolver into Murdo’s hands. ‘This is yours, I believe?’

  Murdo couldn’t remember when he’d last seen the gun. But he did remember the moments, the hours, when he’d been aware of its absence and, in pain, his mind would act out what he wasn’t able to do. He might be sitting on the edge of his bed in his room in Kiss Castle, immersed in a tank of night. His hands would have no object to act on, but in his mind he’d break open the gun’s chamber to load it, slowly. He could feel the machine-tooled concentric circles in the brass at the bullets’ blunt ends like fingerprints against his fingertips. He’d smell the gun oil, sweet in the open works, the six empty slots, would hear the small click as each hole was plugged, and feel each little increment of weight as the gun filled. Only a rake‚ a show-off, would spin the chamber of a pistol they knew to be in good working order – so, in his trance, Murdo never set the chamber spinning. He would come back to himself, his hands empty. His imagination had to go back and do it over – press bullets into bullet-sized blanknesses again and again.

  ‘Yes, I believe it is mine,’ Murdo said.

  AFTER THE funeral Billie returned to the sickroom. But Lord and Lady Hallowhulme pursued her up the stairs and, after a moment when she was sure they were only speaking to each other and that she must pick up her pace and hurry out of earshot, she realised that they hadn’t finished with her. They pursued her into the sickroom. Lord Hallowhulme hesitated a moment on the threshold, but only to set the door back deliberately against the wall.

  ‘Miss Paxton,’ Lady Hallowhulme began. Then she paused, frowning, as her husband crossed the room and pushed one window wide.

  The doctor was with Henry, Henry’s wrist limp in his hand, checking Henry’s pulse against the circuit of his watch’s second hand. Because he was figuring he ignored their entry, their precipitation.

  ‘Miss Paxton – we have another room ready for you. This really isn’t at all satisfactory –’ Clara began, and gestured at the mashed cocoon of white silk quilts that was Billie’s nest on the daybed. Lord Hallowhulme, by the window, put his hands down into the cushiony billows and stood absorbed.

  ‘James,’ said Clara, sharply.

  The doctor replaced Henry’s hand under the covers. ‘Miss Paxton,’ he said, ‘it’s my opinion that you haven’t the stamina to be a sick nurse. You’ve suffered a terrible shock. You’re entitled to care yourself, and to rest.’

  ‘You must trust us a little more, Wilhelmina,’ said Clara.

  ‘Billie,’ Billie corrected her.

  James Hallow withdrew his hand from the bedding and looked up at her. ‘Billie,’ he said, ‘The doctor and my wife are quite right. Mr Maslen will be better off in the care of a round-the-clock, trained nurse. I have acquired that nurse. I propose you come downstairs and meet that nurse. You are reduced, dear girl. And you are my guest, not a refugee.’

  Minnie Hallow barged, panting, into the sickroom. The door was open after all. She skidded to a stop, her heavy black skirts catching up with her and carrying on, swinging forward under their own momentum then settling with a rush that was like her breathing. Minnie glared at her father. She’d been deceived by the open door perhaps and hadn’t thought to find him there. ‘I just wanted to say –’ she began.

  ‘Minnie! Moderate your voice!’ her mother chided.

  ‘Minnie, are you aware that it isn’t advisable to enter the room of a sick person in a violent perspiration? The moment your body cools it will absorb the sickness.’ James Hallow delivered this little rebuke in a mild, toneless voice.

  ‘Oh, I’m going directly.’ Minnie was impatient.

  ‘What did you come about?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Minnie. She glanced at her father, then frowned at her mother.

  ‘Minnie,’ said Lord Hallowhulme, ‘could you please show Miss Paxton to her room?’

  Clara touched Billie’s arm and said she’d send Jenny along to see if there was anything else Billie required.

  Billie stooped over the bed and kissed Henry’s forehead. She whispered to him that they were taking her away from him. There was sun in the room, and his skin glistened, dewy and yielding.

  When she stood back up Billie felt time start. It was as though she jumped from something in motion onto something firm, from a ship onto the pier. Time was starting again for her – or, at least, a period of time in which certain things would happen, like the twelve days and nights of Christmas, a time apart, but with events in sequence. After the sequestered timelessness of the sickroom, the thought of events made Billie dizzy – motion sick.

  She heard Minnie say to her parents, ‘I do know which room you mean.’ Reproachful. The girl came up to Billie and took her arm. ‘Come along, Miss Paxton.’

  The passage was intersected by one of those strange short flights of steps, four down then up again, where two passages met and one cut through the other like a dried streambed. They turned a corner, and ther
e was a view of the water from the window at the end of the hall. Minnie walked with her head inclined, so that all Billie could see was the back of her thin neck and the knuckly ridge of her cervical vertebrae. Minnie was slight, slope-shouldered, and had her father’s frizzy mid-brown hair – Minnie’s was pinned into a beaded snood. Billie heard her say, ‘After all – they already have you in her shoes.’

  Billie’s new room was redolent with fresh beeswax polish. Stacked coal glowed in the shallow grate. The fireguard wasn’t yet replaced, and the water in a glass ewer was still moving, seesawing faintly. Whoever had made the room ready had only just left it. The bed was made, the wardrobe open and empty, the mantelpiece without ornament but dressed in a red velvet drape, with scalloped edges embroidered with swans made of mother-of-pearl, and lilies and bulrushes of silk. Only one thing in the room seemed stale, and that was a shawl, once very fine, now a withered skin of yellow silk draped across the glass of a full-length mirror on the far side of the room.

  Minnie strode over and pulled the shawl from the glass. A plume of dust hung in the air between fabric and mirror. Minnie went out past Billie, pausing to smile, a knowing, clever smile. She was fingering the embroidery along the shawl’s hem – once red roses in bud, and daisies with yellow hearts, now scabs of faded silk in the shape of flowers. ‘I do hope you’ll be comfortable,’ Minnie Hallow said.

  6

  Billie Is Examined Again

  BILLIE, IN tears, sitting on a chair in the passage outside the sickroom, was only consoled by the familiar sight of the toes of her own boots peeping out from under the hem of her own grey wool dress. The doctor and Lady Hallowhulme had just left her, Lady Hallowhulme to see the doctor out herself, to hand him his hat and have a private word. He’d made a point of reassuring the patient’s sister-in-law that the patient was making progress. Perhaps Clara meant to ask what Billie hadn’t – was Henry making the expected progress? He hadn’t come back to himself, not far enough fully to understand his loss. The night before, when Billie arrived in his room, she found him awake, his face relaxed under a condensation of sweat. She took his hand, and he asked her, ‘Is Edith dead?’ Then, to account for his question, ‘She hasn’t been here.’ Billie nodded – he echoed her nod and turned his face away, his cheeks drying, tearless. But in the morning the fever was back, and he was asking again for Edith.