The Woman In the Mirror

by Rebecca James

  I am amazed that the furnace catches in the downpour but it does, as if these things have all these years been waiting to burn, the mere switch of a match enough to ignite them. Smoke billows into the night and Jonathan looks on, drenched and dripping to the bone, as the final relics of his lost wife blaze up to meet the stars.

  *

  I can still smell smoke on Mrs Rackstile as she escorts me back to my room. ‘The captain instructed me to keep you safe,’ she says. ‘I am sorry, Alice, but this is for your own good. We cannot have you doing damage to yourself or to others.’

  ‘Damage? What kind of damage?’

  ‘You are not well.’

  ‘You know nothing about me. You have hated me since you arrived.’

  The housekeeper is surprised. ‘I rather think it is you who have hated me, my dear. I have only tried to ease your burden at Winterbourne and to help the captain. It is you who have let your illusions get the better of you. Why, I mean you no harm.’

  ‘You mean to take this family away from me.’

  ‘It is not your family, Miss Miller. You ought never to cross that line. That is the first rule of housekeeping. We are workers, nothing more.’

  ‘I must speak with the captain privately. It is important. Please—’

  ‘You must do no such thing. All you must do is rest.’

  ‘But he has to know, he has to be told!’

  Mrs Rackstile draws me to a stop at the head of the stairs. ‘Told what?’ she asks.

  I have the urge to push her back. She is close to the descent – one push and I could end it here. Jonathan and I. Alice and Jonathan. Only us.

  ‘Speak, child,’ says Mrs Rackstile. ‘What is this urgent message of yours?’

  I could push her, or I could tell her the truth. Maybe they are both the same.

  ‘I am carrying his baby.’

  There follows a sliver of a moment in which she believes me – and then her face sags with pity. ‘My dear girl,’ she says, and all at once I am back at that Sunday table telling my father and hearing his contempt. ‘You are even more deluded than I feared. Can you expect me to give such a claim any kind of credence after what I witnessed tonight? Dressing up as his dead wife then purporting to be having his baby?’ She shakes her head. ‘They should have warned you about this when you accepted employment. You are not used to residing in houses such as Winterbourne. You need a stronger constitution. The remoteness and isolation, it has addled your brain. Next you’ll be telling me you’re in the midst of a love affair with him!’

  ‘He does love me.’

  Mrs Rackstile deposits me in my room. I drop to the floor. I feel weak, defeated, inexorably tired. What few possessions I own she scrapes from their ledges and bundles into a sack, before she checks the wardrobe. She is leaving no trace of me here. Just Laura’s mirror with me inside it, crouched on the floor, eyes wide and full of fear. The blanket covering me slips from my shoulders.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask.

  ‘I am keeping you safe from yourself, Miss Miller,’ she says, taking in my scars. ‘You cannot be trusted. I will organise a permanent solution in the morning.’

  ‘You haven’t been listening to me.’

  ‘I have, child, and that is why this is necessary. Look at yourself.’

  ‘I’m telling the truth.’

  She looks sorry for me. She, for me!

  ‘It might be your truth,’ she says softly, ‘but it is nobody else’s.’

  ‘I wanted to see how it felt,’ I cry, ‘to wear her for a while. That was all, Mrs Rackstile!’ The housekeeper stands in front of the forest mural. I imagine the creepers reaching out and drawing her in until only her outstretched hand is left for me to hold on to. I will it to do this, its creepers starting to slip and writhe – but then she moves.

  ‘I will check on you after breakfast.’ She removes a key from her pocket.

  ‘Do you mean to lock me in?’

  ‘If you are a danger to yourself then you are a danger to the children.’

  ‘The children?’ I cry. ‘You could not possibly think—’

  ‘Couldn’t I? Edmund and Constance are afraid of you. They told me as much. They said you had lost your mind and were no longer capable of caring for them. They said you had become obsessed with the captain to the detriment of all else.’

  ‘They’re lying.’

  ‘Liars, the twins?’ She baulks. ‘I think not.’

  ‘Just as I didn’t when I first came here, but I soon learned.’

  ‘And to what a place that learning has brought you.’ Mrs Rackstile surveys my bruised, shaking limbs. She speaks to me sympathetically, and there is horror in her sympathy because it makes me doubt myself, what I think is true. ‘You are not made for this life, Alice,’ she says gently. ‘You have ideas above your station and they are causing you pain. Tell me, what is wrong with being the help? Is it not good enough for you?’

  ‘Please,’ I beg, ‘please don’t leave me here.’

  ‘It is all I can do,’ Mrs Rackstile says, closing the door. The heavy key switches in the lock and I hear her footsteps march purposefully away.

  Chapter 33

  Cornwall, present day

  Rachel cancelled her flight back to America. Aaron was shocked.

  ‘What? Rachel, come on, we’ve got this—’

  ‘I have to stay,’ she explained. ‘I will come back, just not now.’

  ‘It’s him, isn’t it. That Jack guy.’

  Rachel couldn’t think of Jack. She would probably never see him again and that was fine by her. ‘He gave me something I have to check out,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t go into it.’

  ‘I’ll help you. It’ll be quicker.’

  ‘No.’

  Aaron bit down his frustration. She saw him consider his options, before taking her hands and saying calmly, ‘Why can’t we just get rid of the place and you can find all this out afterwards? Everything’s sorted, Rachel. We’re ready to go.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. Go home. I’ve appreciated your being here, Aaron, but I didn’t ask you to come and I don’t ask you to stay. It’ll be a few days.’

  ‘But I don’t understand—’

  She lost her patience. ‘Do you know what?’ she said. ‘I don’t understand either. What’s any of this to you anyway? Why’s it so important?’

  He didn’t answer. Just watched her, and she had never seen him look so tired and so broken. ‘I’ll see you in New York.’ He climbed in and gunned the engine.

  *

  She read the rest of the diaries that afternoon. Just as she had peeled back the paper covering that forest mural, so the full picture was revealed. Winterbourne’s history disclosed itself in a series of giddying revelations. At times Rachel could not accept what she read. Should she accept it? Her aunt’s account was all she had, a little girl to an old woman who had lived her life in fear. Yet honesty was sewn into every sentence. Even if it weren’t the truth, it was certainly what Constance had believed.

  She learned how Christine, the children’s first governess, had died.

  ‘Both of us saw how she looked at Father,’ Constance wrote. ‘She blushed from head to toe when he spoke to her. She wanted to marry him. When I think back, I wish I had been kinder to Christine. I would make Edmund be kinder. He was never kind. He played games. I told him not to. He said that the house had told him to, and that if he didn’t we’d both get into trouble. He said, “Do you want Christine to take Father away from us, Connie? Because that’s what she’ll do. She’ll marry him and be our mother and then we shall have to call her Mummy. Do you want that, Connie?”’

  Rachel thought about the twin beds in her aunt’s room. How Edmund had eventually lost his mind and Constance had stayed behind to care for him, putting her own life on hold. Constance wrote on: ‘Then Edmund did a terrible thing. He told Christine that Father loved her back. He told her that Father wanted to be her husband and she
only had to ask. I’ll never forget her face when she heard it, so full of hope. She wanted to trust it and so, against what must have been her wiser judgement, she did. I scolded Edmund. He said he’d had no choice. He was made to do it. A woman had come to our beds and whispered in his ear that he had to do it.’

  Rachel pictured Christine gently knocking at the captain’s study, waiting for permission to enter. She’d have stammered and stuttered, wrung her hands as she tried to communicate the emotion she felt, waiting for him to put her out of her misery.

  But Rachel didn’t need to be told what happened next. Jonathan de Grey would have rejected the poor woman straight out, possibly even mocked her, possibly shouted at her, possibly dismissed her with immediate effect. How Christine’s hopes were shattered – by sadness, by disappointment, by humiliation.

  ‘When she died, it didn’t surprise me. I saw her love and for all my childish ignorance I recognised it as true. The way she did it was horrible, though, leaping from the cliffs and crawling, half dead, to the water. When they found her she was battered and bruised; everyone kept it from us but I overheard Tom describing it to Cook. He said she was “covered top to toe” in red marks. Some people said Father had done it, and he’d done it to Mummy too. But Edmund and I knew better.’

  The clock on the mantle ticked solemnly. Part of her didn’t want to continue; part of her was compelled. Constance was on a roll now; her scrawl flooded the pages as if whatever was inside her had to get out. Just as Rachel was forced to read on…

  ‘I know now, and it’s taken fifty years, that whatever lived here with us – whatever still lives here – took the women from us one by one. It took my mother. It took Christine. It took Alice. It used us to wreak its plans. Before us, it would have used something else, for it has always been here, this thing, at Winterbourne, tempting the women into horrible games then destroying them one by one. I remember a shadow at our door and footsteps on the stairs, murmurs at night, and a hand holding mine… Sometimes it would be kind to us, soothe us when we were sick or wipe away our tears. Sometimes it would be angry, if we did not do as it said, and Father’s leg would get worse or a chill would strike us down. Sometimes it played with us, giggling in the dark, hide and seek or ring-a-roses. But always it was there, as known to us as these walls and gardens, as much a part of this house as we are.

  ‘Who, and why? I know not. All these years I have wondered. As we grew, its spirit became quieter. There were no more women, after Alice. Just me, and it had me where it wanted with Edmund, unable to have a family of my own, no hope of getting married. It’s how she got me. Winterbourne is hers. Occasionally I would hear her, mostly at dawn when the sun came up and the morning breeze blew through the trees. I would hear her singing, quiet and sad, of a man she’d loved and a broken heart…’

  Rachel shivered. She wished she were not alone. The sky outside was darkening. She could hear the sea thrashing against the cliffs, sucking sand tangled with brown weed. A sliding anxiety gripped her, thinking of Alice, who had died at St Josephine’s asylum for the insane; then of Sarah, her mother, who had died at the car wheel in a storm; then of herself, herself, the third in that line, by blood a de Grey, here, miles from anyone, unearthing secrets and jumping at every snap of the fire…

  ‘Stop it,’ she said out loud. Sarah’s accident had been freak. Alice’s madness had been borne of her love for Jonathan de Grey, as had Christine’s. Laura had been in the grip of postnatal depression, misunderstood in those days. It ended there.

  ‘Even now,’ Constance wrote, ‘close to the end, I think about Alice. She is the one I think about most – more than my mother, more than Christine, more than anyone. I think of Alice in the snow when we got lost and she was calling our names. I think of her arms around me when I used to sleepwalk, and sometimes I’d cry and I was afraid. I think of the smell of her nightgown, soft like talcum powder, and her telling me stories until I fell asleep. I think of her laughter. I think of her encouragement. She would have made a fine mother. I’m sure she did make a fine mother, eventually, in the short time between her baby being born and the end of her life.’

  Rachel closed her eyes. It was too painful. She forced herself to carry on.

  ‘I don’t know why I kept Alice’s letters from my father at first. I was confused and frightened, frightened of change, of Winterbourne, frightened that we had drawn something evil out of Alice that could never be expelled. Perhaps the evil had always been inside her. What decay had we dragged to the surface? What had she done that she couldn’t forget, and wouldn’t forget her? I console myself with this, but there is little consolation to be found. By the end we were fearful of Alice and wished her gone, like children baiting an animal only to recoil when it bares its teeth. We’d had enough of the game, by then. It lost its fun. But it was our fault she ended up like that. We drove her to it. Did she really lose her mind? Or did we steal it from her?

  ‘I was afraid that if Alice came back with her child then something bad would happen to them – to us all. Only now I understand my mistake. Father should have known sooner. It wasn’t enough to tell him after Alice had died. I was punishing him for his distance, for the love he couldn’t show. But it wasn’t my decision to make and I regret it every day. What sadness it is that youth does not know wisdom.

  ‘When I confessed, and he read the letters, he shut himself away for days. He would not eat, or sleep, or talk to anyone. I believed that part of him died then, too.

  ‘When the baby, Sarah, was taken away to live with another family, Father said it was for the best. I didn’t know then what he meant, but now I do. Of course I do. The further Sarah was from Winterbourne, the safer she’d be.

  ‘But I’ll never forget how he watched her grow, from afar, unwilling, though it saddened him, to intervene in her stable, happy life, wishing instead for her to be free. I even discovered after his death that he sent money to fund her learning, an anonymous donor. He found clippings from her school sports day, a poem she’d written for the local paper, a picture of her with her new family, and he pinned these up on his walls. By the time my father died, his study was covered. Affection for the daughter he never knew, yes – but also, though he never admitted it to me or to anyone, affection for Alice. I think he loved Alice. I think he loved her with his heart and soul and this was his way of making things right.’

  Rachel kept her finger over the final line until she was ready to read it.

  ‘I hear Alice in my dreams, some nights. She is behind a locked door, calling for my help, begging to be released. She calls to me: “Constance, I have a daughter, and my daughter has a daughter. Find that girl for me – and protect her.”’

  Chapter 34

  Cornwall, 1947

  I have discovered that if I peer close enough into the forest, I can see the women inside it. It has taken hours of solitude. I think it has taken days but I cannot be sure, because the light outside is so faded and drab that evening might just as well be the small hours of the dawn. Hours. Days. Weeks. Who cares for time passing? It has no bearing on me. Now I see their eyes, the curl of their fingers, and it is only a matter of time before one pushes through. Who will she be? Will she be like me? Laura painted the forest, I feel sure. Then she took one of the loops and she hanged herself with it.

  I have the impression that other women have escaped the pattern. I feel them surround me. I hear them whisper when I lie on the boards, my cheek pressed against cold wood, wondering at the difference between that surface and the cool plump flesh that touches it. At the same time as they escape, they invite me in. The mural is not a flat pattern; it has depth, like a glass aperture breaking on to woods far darker and more plural than I know. New shoots grow from branches that are already there and I try to count them but I keep losing count. Why must they make themselves so innumerable? Repeat, repeat, they keep repeating, confusing me, trapping me, toying with me! Just as soon as I believe I am in control of it, it surprises me again, making me turn back to see th
e fresh buds that have caught me from behind.

  It is like the seaweed on the beach below the Landogger Bluff. And the woman I see most, the woman who crawls from the pattern and cradles my head in her crooked arms is like the woman I saw on the sand, crawling and creeping towards the water. Her hair is black, matted and lank, and she reminds me of the little girl in my painting, moving by the day, made of oil and blood. She calls to me, Come in, come in, and I hear her, I do! I want to follow but I cannot risk my baby.

  Whirls and spirals and coils and whorls, it is a miracle I hear anything above the din. Occasionally, though, I do. I hear the children, those devil-sent children, siding with my tormentor. Sometimes I cry over them. I failed them, just as I have failed my whole life, at love, at happiness, at becoming a mother. Laura tells me this is how she felt. The twins decided they did not like her. What was she to do?

  I hear running footsteps and clattering laughter. I hear the hectic ringing of the bell box in the cellar. There are more children here than two. I attempt to reckon their steps and where or on what floor they hurry but it is just like the mural, just like that; it keeps multiplying until I meet myself again, not knowing which way is up and which is down. The horror of it! They are all around, these hurrying people, and I am at their centre, cornered like a beast about to be drowned.

  Do they knock? Sometimes they do. They knock and run, tittering or crying, and whispers like feathers come floating through the door, Alice, oh, Alice, are you there, Alice? Am I here? I am not sure. I think I am. Somebody is.

  *