by Rosie Thomas
When she’d looked up again the woman had gone. Elizabeth reached the spot where she had been standing and searched between the trees, even calling out Are you there? but there was only the sound of her own voice, the sea-birds and the waves. Her feet and legs were soaking and the cold had made her shiver.
‘That was her. That was the woman I saw,’ May cried. Then she stopped short and chewed at the corner of her mouth as she took a reckoning. ‘But I don’t believe it. It was fifty years ago?’
Elizabeth understood that to May it was an aeon of time. She nodded her head.
May sneered bravely, ‘So you’re saying this woman is, like, a ghost, right? Like The X-Files or something?’ Only she couldn’t disguise the flash of fear in her eyes.
‘The Passamaquoddy Indians believed that the island was haunted, or possessed. It was one of their sacred places. Then, in the nineteenth century the whalemen had a small settlement on the seaward side, just a few rough huts for shelter and a tavern. The only building here on the bluff in those days was yours. The Captain’s House.’
‘Yeah?’ May shrugged. But she knew she was caught. She didn’t want to be, she wished she could unlearn what she had already seen and discovered. But Doone and the white-faced woman were much too close to her now; she didn’t know who would step which way, whether they would slip into her ordinary world or whether she would mistakenly break through a membrane and become part of theirs. The boundaries of normality were dissolving, fearfully, as if they were no more solid than a morning’s fog. She wished with all her heart for them to be in place again.
Elizabeth Newton was waiting. Her chair was placed with its back to the light, so May couldn’t see her face properly. She was afraid of Elizabeth, too, and of the other spectres of old age and resignation. She wanted to jump out of her tapestry armchair with its feet like claws and run out of the house, but she didn’t move.
Instead, she sat still, listening to the clock ticking. ‘What did you do after you saw the woman?’
‘I asked my mother first of all. She was a very rational person, May. She believed in everyone and everything having their proper places in the world. If anyone had lived on the island after the whalers were gone she would have known about it. And she didn’t know, therefore no such person existed.’
‘And so you went to your grandmother, right? What was her name?’
‘Elizabeth Page Freshett. I was named for her.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Come into the dining-room with me. I’ll show you her picture.’
Reluctantly, May followed the old woman into the next room. The dining-room was a gloomy place with high-backed chairs ranged down a long table in expectation of guests who would never arrive.
‘I think I told you that her husband was Senator Freshett, my paternal grandfather. That’s his portrait above the sideboard.’
He was a frowning man with side-whiskers and a high collar. May glanced at him and looked away. There was a photograph of Elizabeth’s son done up in academic dress on the sideboard. May reflected on how pleased with himself he seemed and the thought cheered her a little. Elizabeth held out another picture in an oval gilt frame.
The grandmother had a mass of dark hair arranged to crown her head with a miniature turret, a patient expression and a high-necked lace-throated white blouse. May nodded as politely as she could and handed her back.
‘My grandfather bought this parcel of land when they were first married in the 1880s. He wanted her to have a summer cottage. She had a tendency to weakness in the chest and the sea air was believed to be good for her.’
May could imagine the dark-haired woman sitting propped up on some Victorian sofa, mournfully coughing. Boredom and impatience with Elizabeth’s ancestors snagged with her deeper-seated anxiety. She found it difficult to breathe, and her skin crawled and itched so that she clawed at one forearm with blunt nails. Suddenly she thought of Lucas, flip-haired and sun-tanned, and how dismissive he would be of all this musty stuff. And of her childish fears and superstitions. She knew that she was childish, and May so much wanted to be adult, and with him and part of him, that she had to stop herself from groaning in despair.
Elizabeth was telling her about her grandparents building their cottage, and how old Mr Swayne had bought alongside and built the extravagant place with all its gables and gingerbread woodwork, and the widow’s walk at the crown. ‘Long before Marian Beam’s day,’ she said.
May asked, ‘When did Mr Fennymore build his house?’
Elizabeth’s hand touched her throat. ‘Oh, he put it up, let’s see, it wasn’t until just after the war. He went into the building business. His family were fishing people, always had been, but Aaron was different.’
Once she thought of it, May was surprised it hadn’t occurred to her before. ‘It was him, wasn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘It was Mr Fennymore. The boy you fell in love with. And he was only a fisherman and your mother and father wouldn’t let you marry him because your grandfather was a senator? So you went off to Europe and married Mr Newton, and the Fennymores married each other and he built his own house up here. Just kind of to show you that he could? Is that what he did?’
Elizabeth’s mouth went white and she put her grandmother’s picture back on the sideboard next to Spencer’s.
‘Sorry. It’s none of my business,’ May offered. She was trying not to remember what the old woman had told her at the Flying Fish, about sneaking off to the Captain’s House and lying in the goose feathers having sex. With old Mr Fennymore. The thought of it disgusted her. It seemed that sex was all around her, oozing and creeping, contaminating what was supposed to be clean. Leonie Beam making eyes at her father. Ivy and Lucas in their hollow on the island. And another image: a shadowy room, lit by a single shaded lamp. Two people on a sofa, naked legs wound together, and a noise, the same sound, two voices. May squeezed her eyes shut, then forced them open again.
‘Yes, it was,’ Elizabeth said abruptly. ‘It was long ago. It doesn’t matter any more.’
Her voice and the sight of her face helped May to overcome her distaste. She took her arm and steered her to one of the straight-backed chairs. ‘Can I get you something? Some, um, water or anything?’
‘No, thank you. I’m quite all right. No one knows any of this, May. Do you understand?’
I don’t want to know it either, May thought. Why is it me, why should I have to? ‘Did Doone?’
Elizabeth looked startled. ‘No. Of course not.’
That was something. It wasn’t Doone who had fed the knowledge into her mind. She sat down at the table opposite Elizabeth, as if they were about to eat dinner together. ‘I’ve forgotten it already,’ May said. Alison had told her once that it was the right thing to say if you knew something that somebody would rather you didn’t know.
‘Thank you. You are a very nice and thoughtful young woman, May.’
‘I wish that was true.’
Elizabeth only smiled. ‘Do you want me to tell you about the Captain?’
‘Um. Well, all right. Yeah, go on then.’
‘The Captain was a whaleman. He was from Maine, not very far from here, and he went down to New Bedford to sign on a ship in the fleet there. He was brave and lucky, and in time he came to command his own ship. His wife, who was then his widow and an old woman, told my grandmother all this when she first came to live on the bluff.’
Seven
‘You remember, May, I told you the Captain’s was the first house here on the bluff. Then my grandfather bought a parcel of land next to it and built a summer cottage for his wife, and old Mr Swayne built what’s now the Beams’ place.’
It was a relief for Elizabeth to talk about land and history rather than to recall the other details of those long-ago summers. The girl had startled her by making such a shrewd guess, that was all, and it was unlucky that her own reaction to it had been so unguarded.
Her guess could be forgotten again, May had said so, yet Eli
zabeth had the sense that the ground was shivering beneath them both, that some seismic disturbance would expose what had been buried and believed to be obliterated. It was May’s vulnerable age and the blindness of pain written in her face, and the crows’ wings of secrets that even Elizabeth couldn’t guess at that had set the tremors off. She was afraid that they wouldn’t subside into stillness again. Carefully, deliberately therefore, she concentrated for this moment on what it was safe to remember.
Elizabeth could hear her grandmother’s soft voice as clearly as if she were in the room instead of May. The old lady had loved to talk about the early days of her marriage, of the novelty of leaving Boston behind and travelling east to the coast to play at house in the cottage above the seashore. The blue-and-gold tea service had belonged to those times, and most of the heavy furniture that still filled the rooms, and the beginnings of the flower garden surrounding the house.
Even late in life the Senator’s wife had been a dreamy, otherworldly creature, made almost ethereal by long years of invalidism and cosseting by her husband and servants. She had told the story relayed to her by the Captain’s widow in languorous detail and the very words she used had stayed in Elizabeth’s mind. They murmured and whispered around the image of the island woman. White, scraped face. The poor, sad creature. Eyes set deep in the staring bone. A tragedy, and quite a mystery.
Long ago when she was a young wife and mother, the Captain’s wife had been sitting beside the window of the solid house her husband had built for her. It was within sight and sound of the sea that had made his fortune, but at the same time it turned its shoulder a little aside as if to emphasise that its hold on him had slackened now. It was a stormy evening, the last of the light just fading. The waves boiled and coalesced, and burst themselves on the shingle with furious energy. The young wife was musing on the desolation of the world beyond the windows and on the comfort within, where the stove glowed and her husband was whistling softly as he bent to some task. Their new baby lay asleep on her lap. She dropped her eyes from the window to look at the rosy little features. Then she looked up again.
She saw a face staring in at her, so close that the features seemed almost flattened against the glass. The hollow eyes were wide and staring, and the mouth stretched open in a silent howl. The wet hair, a woman’s long hair, stuck to the apparition’s forehead and cheeks like coiled black snakes.
The Captain’s wife screamed and swept the baby close to her heart. Her husband came running and looked where she pointed, but the face had already vanished. He ran out into the storm, leaving the door banging in the wind, but although he searched until the rain had soaked him to the skin there was no one to be found. He came back into the lamplight and tried to reassure his wife, telling her that what she had seen was only a trick of the light or a spectre conjured out of her own imagination. At last he was able to persuade her to follow him up the stairs to the safety of their bed and to lay the baby in her crib at the foot of it.
The storm wore itself out by the next morning. A day of stillness passed, then another and the Captain’s wife began to believe that the face framed by the snakes of hair had after all been imaginary, just as her husband insisted.
On the third day, a fisherman was passing close by the seaward side of the island. He noticed an unusual concentration of seabirds lifting and circling around a point on the hillside above the shore, and growing more curious as he watched them he turned his boat and took it in to land. He made fast and climbed the slope to where the whalers’ old stone tavern and refuge looked out to sea. In those days the cabin was already deserted and falling into disrepair because the few ships that still passed now made for Pittsharbor itself. The fisherman glanced in under the stone lintel, then walked out again into the sunlight. A cloud of birds rose with noisy cries from the trees behind the cabin and wheeled into the sky above his head. The man climbed slowly to see what it was that had drawn them in such numbers.
A woman’s body hung from a branch of one of the trees. It slowly revolved on its rope, as if the buffeting of the wings and beaks had set it turning on itself.
When the poor body was cut down and the pockets searched for clues to the woman’s identity, a piece of folded paper was found with the Captain’s name scribbled on it. The words written beneath his name read, I could not find it within myself to take the life of an infant’s father. I take my own life in its place and I bequeath you the legacy of remembering what you have done. Sarah.
Sarah was not a local woman and the enquiries that were made never revealed where she had come from nor why she had chosen to make such a sad end of herself. The Captain himself always steadfastly denied prior knowledge of her, or any of the details relating to her life and death. He had been, he said, to many strange places in his time and had seen many peculiar things that did not lend themselves to ordinary explanation. He was content to let mysteries lie. To his wife he insisted, ‘She was some poor, deranged woman in the grip of a sad fixation which cannot now be explained. A decent burial is the best farewell we can give the poor soul.’
Sarah was buried on the island. Her lonely grave was within sight and sound of the sea and some of the fishermen’s wives, who guessed at a history they would never know for sure, made it their duty to tend it. They planted herbs, which flourished in the broken ground, and at the beginning there were often fresh-cut flowers placed in a glass jar at the grave’s head. But there was no name or stone to mark the place, and over the years the mullein and catnip ran wild around it and the low grassy hump sank back into the hillside once again. The suicide’s grave was slowly forgotten, except when the Captain’s old widow recalled the history of it for her new neighbour.
Elizabeth Page Freshett had listened to the widow’s story with a shiver that made her want to forget what she had heard. She was waiting for the birth of her first child, and the image of a face staring in from the darkness at a mother and baby in the lamplight cruelly embedded itself in her imagination. There were often times after her son was born when she looked at the blank window glass as darkness fell and hurried to draw the curtains across it. But she never saw anything except a reflection of herself and the comfortable room behind her.
Her granddaughter was a different woman. The young Elizabeth was neither dreamy nor delicate and she was not especially susceptible to fears or morbid imaginings. But then she had fallen in love, and after the first delight the helplessness of her state seemed to peel her flesh raw and to leave her at the mercy of fierce influences that were not explicable by the steady rules that had governed her all her life.
And in this naked, elated and despairing condition she had seen the woman on the island.
She described her features and appearance to her grandmother, and the old woman lay back on her sofa and pleated her cashmere shawl between her ringed fingers. ‘There were stories, some of the fishermen’s wives used to whisper about a haunting. They always said in my young days that she only showed herself to other women. To young women in trouble, as a warning and a reminder.’ The diamonds flashed as the fingers suddenly stopped their fidgeting with the soft shawl. ‘Elizabeth, are you in trouble?’
‘No. Of course not.’ She knew that much, at least. Aaron wouldn’t let that happen to her. Elizabeth kept her face and her voice as bright as she could, not knowing that all she achieved was a pain-filled parody of happiness which the old woman chose to ignore. ‘I’m going to Europe, aren’t I? I’m going to see all the sights and have experiences I will remember for the rest of my life.’
‘Yes, my dear, you are and you will,’ the Senator’s widow had said.
*
Aaron and Elizabeth lay in their nest in the deserted Captain’s House. In the house next door Elizabeth’s steamer trunks were packed and her ticket for the Carpathia lay waiting for her. It was the last hour they would be able to steal together.
Elizabeth’s head rested on her lover’s chest. She could hear the steady pounding of his heart and when she moved her fingers sh
e traced the outline of his mouth and the curve of his nose, knowing his features by touch as intimately as she knew her own. She was watching the window above their heads and the infinite gradations of pollen-yellow light that filtered through the salty glass.
‘I knew there was a suicide’s grave,’ Aaron said.
His voice resonated within the arch of his rib-cage and Elizabeth moved her head a fraction, to press her ear closer to the sound. It was like hearing two voices, the inner and the outer. ‘I saw her, standing there in the trees. I know it was Sarah and that she was watching me.’
Aaron would not deny what she had said. He lay in silence, sceptical and separate from her, listening to the contradiction of their joined breathing.
Elizabeth suddenly felt the tears running from the corners of her eyes.
‘I’ll come back,’ she whispered. ‘In a year I’ll come back to you.’
‘Is that it?’ May demanded. She was rubbing the mosquito bites on her bare ankles where the raw patches wept like tiny red eyes. The room, the house and Elizabeth’s murmuring voice made her shudder with claustrophobia. Why had the passage in the book about the grave seemed to jump out at her, when there was just such a real grave, if it wasn’t that Doone had read it before her? Angrily she pushed the thought out of her mind. She could stay real, if she concentrated hard enough. ‘You’re saying, like, this is a woman’s ghost, which only appears to women and I’m in some kind of trouble so she’s warning me just the same as she warned you when you were young?’ She shook her head, not waiting for Elizabeth’s answer, and gave a dismissive bark of laughter. The echo of it seemed to hang in the room.
