by Clare Beams
“Only that you can’t know how terrible it is,” Livia said.
In the next room Abigail told them, with hmms breaking the joints of her speech, that she felt so afraid every time she couldn’t say what she wanted to. “Like I’m drowning and yelling and I can’t make anybody hear.”
Rebecca had a rash too now on her wrists—different from Meg’s, a stamping of individual, slightly puffy welts. The teachers gathered close to peer, but none of them was sure whether to touch.
“Excuse me for a moment,” Caroline said, and went to her room. Her hand sung out its tingling. She could not, could not, bear the ancient fear that feeling carried with it.
She tried asking herself her father’s question: What could she tell about what was happening to her?
Well, now she could tell for certain that it all came from that one finger. From tip to root and from there across her left palm, spreading.
Caroline simply wouldn’t allow the spread, then. She’d keep what was hers. She had not asked for this late visit, if that was what this was, would do all she could to thwart it. She plucked a hair from her scalp and felt the small nip of its give—she would certainly have felt it, she thought, had the birds plucked that whole clump of hair from her—and wound it, tight, tight, around and around her fifth finger’s base. The thin dark ring dimpled her skin. Her finger, above, began already to flush. She imagined the tingling caught there, behind the tourniquet.
Day gloves, before she rejoined the others. When her father glanced at her hands as they prepared to enter Tabitha and Julia’s room, she said she had a slight chill.
“I can’t stand the touch of shoes,” Julia said, “and my mother always told me I must never walk barefoot. What am I supposed to do?” She wiped her nose with her hand, which surely her mother would never have countenanced either.
“You can walk, though,” said Tabitha.
Caroline’s finger pounded beneath the glove while she took notes. To begin with, the throbbing was worst right at the line of the hair, but soon it took up the whole finger. Harder and harder, so that it became difficult for her to believe her finger didn’t actually contain her heart.
Her right hand slid smooth and merciless across the page, completing its work.
“It’s not a competition, girls,” said Samuel. “We know you are all suffering. What would help us most is to understand what it feels like, precisely what it feels like, and in particular what your inner reactions were at the moment you first realized you were becoming ill.” That moment, it seemed, would solve everything, in his mind. That threshold each of them had passed: this moment well, the next moment sick. Caroline could forgive him—she had imagined it that way too—but she was beginning to think sickness might work differently, less like crossing a border than like entering, slowly, a fog that didn’t announce itself in any clear leading edge.
Her hand seemed now to be following the waves of pounding forward—though she looked down and could see that it was still, falsely collected beneath that glove.
“I got up from my chair just as usual,” Tabitha told him. “I hadn’t any idea anything was wrong until I tried walking.”
“I did feel a bit strange,” said Julia.
Forward and forward crept Caroline’s still hand. The space it moved through, feeling its way, was of a different kind from the space around the rest of her.
And without her volition, she felt her hand make its way up to her mother’s hand. Slide inside her mother’s hand, like sliding into another glove.
What would their hands do now?
“Strange in what sense?” David asked Julia.
Caroline was fighting the urge to tear the glove off right where she sat and pull at the hair until it gave. She couldn’t, couldn’t, because that would let the numbness out. She must remember she was keeping it there, in that finger.
Julia’s forehead wrinkled. “I don’t know, quite. A little off, and then my feet felt warm. When I looked at them I saw the rash.”
Her mother’s hand—Caroline’s inside it—reached for something.
For Samuel? Miles? For the crown of Caroline’s own small head? For roses or paper or a bedpost or a ribbon, a spring-green ribbon to tie in her daughter’s hair?
Caroline could hear the throbbing of her finger. Hear, feel, see, smell it.
“I’m sorry, one moment,” she said, and rose, and went into the hallway, and tore off the glove to reveal her finger, which screamed its red. She broke the hair.
Oh, the relief of its release. Not numb now; probably it had never been numb.
She turned at the sound of the door opening. David came toward her. “Caroline, are you all right? You seemed—”
Caroline clasped her hands behind her back. “I’m fine. I’m just anxious, I think. Did anyone else notice?”
“No. I said I was stepping out, but they were too preoccupied even to hear.” He laughed. “We’re all anxious.”
“You noticed I’d gone, though.”
“I did,” he said, more softly.
She sighed. “What are we going to do?”
“I’m not sure we can say yet. None of the girls has told us much that’s very revealing—I don’t have a clearer sense yet of how to move forward.”
She wondered if he knew this wasn’t what she’d really meant.
“Your father may be noticing more, though. Having ideas.”
“He usually does,” she said. And then, “David, might I show you something?”
The nest was where she’d left it, though it had slumped a little into the ground and frozen there. It stuck for a moment, when she pulled, before giving. Caroline moved the rock from beside it and found that the cloth remained, but not the hair—blown away, probably, too light to be pinned firmly and left too long. She would have liked to show that tangle to David, to see if he also recognized it. And she felt uneasy about its absence. Just one hair had been enough to change her hand; who knew what effect a whole tangle might have, on what things.
She held the nest out to David, tipped so he could see inside as she had. “When I saw it first there was a trilling heart in it. A full nest this time. I don’t know that anyone’s seen their nests before. I don’t think they stayed long enough to build them when they came last time.”
“Fascinating.” He didn’t take it from her but instead began to explore it with his fingers while she held it, shifting twigs, testing its firmness. The small motions of this investigation pressed into her palms. “An unusual kind of nest.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I’ve never seen one constructed in quite this way. It’s not at all uniform in shape.”
“Why would they be doing this now?” she said.
“Maybe they were here earlier, in the spring, and we just didn’t see them.”
“Maybe,” Caroline said. “Look at the cloth. I pulled that from the weave of it.”
“Such scavengers.”
That he could say this so lightly surprised her. “Don’t you find it unsettling?”
“Well, I don’t know. Magpies do the same, don’t they?”
The sound of a carriage coming up the drive made them turn. The front door opened, and Samuel flew out. “It’ll be the telegram!” he shouted. “From Hawkins!”
So it was.
Curious. There tomorrow. Keep them quiet. Save dinner.
12.
CORRESPONDENCE
She seemed suddenly transformed into the most desperate of wild wounded prey.
—MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 301)
Dear Miss Sterne,
I ought to have replied before now to thank you for your letter, which was very helpful and which must have cost some courage to send. I can sympathize with the difficulties of diverting from official position in this sort of matter. I kept your letter
in strictest confidence, and if I might, I would ask now the same of you. As I am sure you will understand, this is a matter of some delicacy.
The patterns from Miss Bell’s past that your letter laid out have in fact continued here and actually seem to have intensified, perhaps under the personal pressures of being at our school, which of course played a role in her father’s life. Whatever the cause, she is finding her way into unsettling new territory—and evidently leading some of our other students with her. I apologize for the imprecision of my account but am not certain it would be right to disclose more until more is known, and until we have had a chance to take certain steps we have planned.
At this point I did wish, however, to consult you, as Miss Bell’s previous educator and as the possessor of a longer history with her. When she limited her consumption of food as you described, did you find that any particular actions, on your part or on the part of Miss Bell’s other teachers, helped to move you all onto safer ground? Was there any special tone or emphasis that seemed effective in reaching the students under her sway? Or perhaps in reaching Miss Bell herself, and helping her to understand the prudence of altering her path? Your letter did seem to convey that the episode passed of its own accord, but I wonder if, in retrospect, you can think of any words or actions that seemed to assist its passing.
I care deeply for Miss Bell and for her welfare, as I do for the welfare of all our students. Any insight you can give that might help us to nurture her more wisely would be most welcome.
Sincerely,
Caroline Hood
Since childhood, writing had calmed Caroline, the effect perhaps of all her Samuel-led journaling. Here this still is, this still works. She wrote the letter before sleep—they’d retired early—and was comforted by her reasonable, concerned but distant self on the page, a self like Caroline but lacquered smooth. She liked the idea of sending this Caroline Hood to meet plump and pleasant Miss Sterne. With the opening of the envelope, Miss Sterne would feel, across the miles, the touch of this Caroline’s sleek hand, a hand that did not tingle, and had not been punished for its tingling, and certainly had not slid inside the hand of any dead mother. The letter helped Caroline to find all that impossible too. She slept heavily after writing it.
In the morning, she folded and sealed the letter. She would do without breakfast until she walked it into town to post.
Who better at foiling a plan than Sophia? She called to Caroline from inside the kitchen as Caroline passed the doorway. “Where are you off to? Have you eaten?”
“I have a letter to send,” Caroline said, hovering.
Sophia raised her eyebrows. “An urgent letter.”
“Oh no, not really.”
To prove this lack of urgency, Caroline came in and took a piece of cornbread from the sideboard. She sat down across from Sophia to eat it. Chew, chew, swallow. Smile. “You’re up early,” she said.
“I couldn’t seem to sleep,” Sophia said. Yet her face, in the weak winter light, was marked the way a child’s would be after sleeping, with furrows where the folds of the pillowcase had pressed themselves into her moist skin.
“Is something troubling you?” Caroline said without thinking.
Then she heard herself and laughed. Sophia laughed with her. The moment was companionable until they caught it being that way.
“Everything feels backward,” Sophia said. “All of this. It doesn’t feel quite real somehow, does it?”
“It’s happening no matter how we feel about it.”
Sophia looked at her. “Isn’t that a useful sentiment.” She rubbed her arms as if chilled. “We need more places to go. If we could see more people, everything might be more ordinary.”
“Ordinary was never really what my father wanted.” When Caroline dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, her fingertips crackled. “Anyway, we have more people now than I ever did before.”
“At home I’d wake up, and I’d help my mother awhile, and then I might go down the road and call on my friend or my cousin, and then David would call…”
“Here we’ve always filled the time up with books.”
“How did you bear it?” Sophia grimaced to make a joke of the question, but Caroline knew she was really asking.
“It was never lonely, exactly,” Caroline said. “There was a certain way of seeing that the words could give me. A certain taste and sound and color of them. Not usually a whole book, but a phrase, a line. It’s hard to explain how much I loved it.”
“Your father’s words, you mean?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes others. Like the ‘vegetable gold’ of Eden in Paradise Lost. Or the green of that vine that enthralled Lucia in the Herrick poem. Does that make any sense? I suppose not.” She was surprised at herself, saying all this to Sophia, who watched with her lips pursed. “And I had other things that made me happy. I’ve roamed where I wanted. I was always very free.”
“Where?”
“Oh, the stream, the woods, you know. This place feels to me like a kind of person. A third, to complete us.”
“But there were others too, like this doctor who’s coming. They all lived here once.”
“He did, they did. A long time ago.”
Sophia peered at her. “You don’t like him, do you?”
Caroline would have to remember to be more careful with her face. “Whether I like him doesn’t matter.”
Sophia gave her head a frustrated little shake. “You’re very good at not answering the question.”
“I just feel an answer should matter before I give it.”
“That’s what your father taught you?”
Caroline considered. “I taught myself, I think.”
They ate for another moment. Sophia spoke of the cold, and Caroline said it wasn’t so unusual for this time of year. Winter. Sophia stood then, saying that she had things to attend to upstairs (David, perhaps), and Caroline at last left the house.
The surface of the road was frozen into fantastical shapes where it had been churned up before going solid. Caroline shattered thin skins of ice with her boots as she walked, making a slight fragile music in the quiet. She slid her gloves along the rich stock of the envelope. Her father believed in good paper.
She hadn’t been to Ashwell for weeks. When she reached it, all was shuttered and silent. The pavement felt uncomfortable somehow beneath the soles of her boots, as if she and the town did not join properly where they met, a stiffness at their hinge. She had the feeling she wouldn’t see another person at all before arriving at the post office and then it too would be shuttered, and nowhere in this whole town would there be anyone accessible to her.
But the post office was lit. Its door did open when she pushed, and there was Mr. Perkins, as ever, behind the counter, where he probably slept—a plucked-looking man with almost lashless round eyes and a bald head. After the cold the post office had the feel of a hibernation space, warm with the smell of cooking chicken. His dinner, probably.
“Miss Hood!” he said. “Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
“We haven’t been seeing you.”
“Oh, we’ve been busy.”
“How are things going out at the school?”
What if she told him? What would he do?
“Well, thank you,” she said.
He rapped the counter purposefully, and she smiled—she thought she was smiling; she hoped she still knew what her face did—and fumbled for coins in her purse. The letter left her hands to begin its journey. Miss Sterne wouldn’t know she was waiting for it, sewing beside her sitting-room fire, thinking which stitches to cover next lesson with the young ladies whose stitches had been entrusted to her. Warm and well cosseted in flesh and fabric.
Caroline was aware suddenly that she was also warm—too warm. Her sweat prickled. It coated.
The sensa
tion was like the laying on of a new, oily skin, much too small. Intensely, she wanted it off.
She dropped coins into Mr. Perkins’s palm and pushed toward the door, out onto the street, into the very center of the pavement of the still town, trying to escape the certainty filling her. This was her mother’s skin, here now on her skin. Over her skin, closing over her. Coming at last, late but certainly coming now. That skin craved things it had not gotten, and it carried the electricity of its wanting in itself, and now that electricity was passing into Caroline.
She unbuttoned her coat to let the cold air down her clothes. She raked her hair off her neck. A shimmer was stealing over her surroundings—she could see it out of the corners of her eyes, but it disappeared when she turned to look. The heat, it was from the heat. Why was she wearing a coat? If she took it off she would feel right again.
Her mother’s skin, heavy and decorous but sparking all down her arms and legs. It wanted her to move it, as it had not been moved the first time. It had grown impatient with only twitching in place in the rooms where Samuel had placed it.
The shimmer bore down on her now, descending over her head and shoulders like a slick, hot prickling veil, clinging to her mouth and nostrils, stopping her breath, driving her to her knees.
* * *
*
“Miss Hood?”
Jeffers loomed. He took up her whole field of vision. From this close his mustache was like a double tail, so substantial it seemed impossible there wasn’t some anchoring structure inside, small bone after small bone tapering to those points. Caroline sat up and the street leaned away from her, but she leaned with it, righting herself. Her right arm was wet all down the side from the slush on the ground.
Why was Jeffers here? She hadn’t been at the furniture store. Had he been here in the street before she fell? Jeffers didn’t seem to know whether he should touch her. His palm neared her shoulder. The ends of his mustache trembled and she expected them to sweep like the tail of a cat.
