The Painted Bridge A Novel

FOURTEEN





Catherine had arranged the slices of peach around the edge of her plate and was eating them in order. She picked one up with her fingers, slid its glistening tip into her mouth.

“I could live on peaches,” she said, swallowing, selecting another piece.

“No one can live on peaches, Catty.”

“Fruit bats can. Please don’t call me that, Mother.”

Querios looked up from his Stilton.

“Surely it isn’t necessary to have them every night of the week?”

“We don’t, Father. We haven’t had them since Sunday.”

“Catherine enjoys them. Use a spoon, darling, please.”

“Why? What difference does it make?”

“It is not a question of enjoyment, Em. It is a question of household economy. Balancing the budget.”

Querios smiled at her, a benign, affectionate smile, and Emmeline wished he was sitting nearer. She wanted to pinch him or kick his shin under the table. Didn’t he understand that if Catherine craved peaches, she should have them? Even if they had to be brought fresh on the back of a donkey from wherever it was they grew. Spain. Arabia. China. It wouldn’t matter.

Hannah Smith was taking her time brushing the crumbs from around Benedict’s place, leaning over his shoulder.

“From the right, Hannah. And not so close.”

Catherine wiped a dribble of juice from her chin with the back of her hand and Emmeline picked her own napkin off her lap, offered it to her. Catherine didn’t take it. Her elbow appeared to be glued to the table. It was unnatural, the way it didn’t move.

“Can you think of a fruit that you like better than peaches, Mother?”

“I like strawberries. With cream and sugar.”

“Strawberries are boring. Everything English is.”

Catherine inserted another slice of peach between her lips. She’d had beautiful lips from the day she was born. Pink and shapely, a rosebud mouth, like a girl from an advertisement. She’d loved playing at being a woman, trailing around in Emmeline’s shoes with the heels clopping on the floorboards, draping strings of beads around her neck or cooling herself with an ostrich-feather fan. As soon as she became old enough to start the rehearsals for womanhood in earnest, she’d stopped. It was as if she lost all interest in female life. One might almost think she’d begun to despise it.

“Some of them have never even seen a p-p-piece of f-f-fruit.” Benedict’s head was bent over a heap of peach slices, a thick wedge of Stilton. At least he had a healthy appetite. Hannah finally left the room, filling the doorway with her back view as she did so. Emmeline could swear she had on a crinoline. She would have to speak to her.

“I had to explain to them the d-d-difference between an orange and a l-l—”

“Lemon,” Querios said. “I suppose you want me to supply your urchins with tropical fruits as well.”

“What a good idea,” Catherine said.

Catherine had dressed, at least, was wearing the primrose-yellow lawn. Emmeline had chosen the simple gown for the rounded neckline that flattered girls of her age, made a subtle allusion to the bust without vulgar display, the wide sleeves that accentuated dainty hands. But what bosom Catherine had developed seemed to be disappearing. She’d trailed one sleeve in the soup and had the other wrapped tightly around her wrist.

“Fox has been sniffing around again,” Querios said. “The question is whether the peacock will survive long enough for the magistrates to see it.”

“He doesn’t like to be penned in,” Catherine said. “I feel sorry for him.”

“The bird told you so itself, I suppose,” said Querios. “Did it?”

“Do you think any living creature can thrive in captivity, Father?”

“Catherine!”

Emmeline gave her a look. Querios couldn’t get over the fact that the magistrates had described the airing grounds as “gloom-filled” the last time they came. The chief magistrate had added a note suggesting they offer patients rides out, in a carriage. She’d laughed when Querios showed her the report. They didn’t even keep a carriage for themselves anymore. Only the pony and trap for going to the village or the station.

Emmeline resented the patients. Even if you didn’t see them, you always knew they were there. They were like ghosts—more present for being invisible. Sometimes, in bed at night, she heard them wailing or singing. It was one of the reasons she’d insisted that the boys be sent away to school. In her heart, she cherished a wish that the inspectors would close down Lake House. They could sell it, move somewhere else, and live like normal people.

Two years before, a patient had jumped out of a window. She took it into her head that her husband waited for her down on the lawn with a lit candle in his hand, and threw herself right through the glass from one of the bedrooms on the second floor. She and Querios had been preparing to retire for the night when they heard a noise like a sack of turnips falling from a cart. Emmeline had grabbed the first thing that came to hand, which happened to be her opera cloak, and had run down the stairs behind Querios, out into the moonlit garden.

The woman was already dead. She was naked. One breast pointed upward and her head rested on the gravel at an impossible angle. Her feet were bare and dirty. Emmeline threw her cloak over the body while Querios fetched Fludd. Ever since, she couldn’t walk past the oak without seeing a pair of startled eyes looking up at the moon. It had been full, of course, they were always worse then.

Catherine was often out and about in the grounds and she must see things, hear things. It probably accounted for some of her notions. Emmeline could have sworn she saw Catherine push her chop into the sleeve of her dress a moment before Hannah cleared away the main course. The chop was there one minute and next time she looked, Catherine’s plate was empty. Not even a bone. She could be mistaken. Her eyes weren’t what they had been. She made a mental note to tell Cook to order more tinned peaches. It was astonishing, the things they put in cans. Oysters. Peas. The idea of preservation in a dark safety soothed her.

“I shall retire early,” she announced. “Good night, Ben, sleep well. Good night, Catty, darling.”

* * *

The moon was unnaturally small and a cold blue-white. It looked like a harvest moon in reverse. Emmeline tiptoed around the side of the house across the gravel and along the edge of the grass. She’d made herself stay awake, propped up on the bolster making lists of matters to which she must attend. She was wearing her opera cloak over her nightgown and had pulled a pair of shoes onto her bare feet. An owl swooped somewhere out of sight, its call written across the night, and she shivered. The garden in the darkness was a different place—wild territory in which she was a trespasser.

Catherine’s window was lit, the curtains parted and the frame lifted a few inches at the bottom. She crept toward it, barely breathing, trying not to dislodge any stones. Under the window, Emmeline turned so that her shadow fell behind her, bent down and began to pat the ground. The stones were sharp and damp against the tips of her fingers. Nothing. She got onto all fours, padding the ground under her knees as best she could with the folds of the cloak, and spread her arms in a wider circle—out toward the path, patting, checking the earth around the roots of the magnolia, feeling between the stones.

Still nothing. She was about to give up and go inside when her fingers encountered something large and greasy, both soft and hard. It was the chop bone, still heavy with meat. Picking it up with her thumb and forefinger, she dropped it in her pocket. Emmeline felt on in the darkness, blind and determined as a mole, and her fingers pressed into something spongy and congealed. She shuddered with disgust and felt a little of her own dinner rise sourly in her throat. Dead man’s eyeballs. Her brothers used to force her to play that game, blindfolding her and pushing her hands into aspic or creamed potato. She had forgotten that sensation for thirty years.

She picked up the chilly lump, added it to the pocket, grasped a branch of the magnolia and heaved herself back onto her feet, shaking out her cloak. There was no cloud in the night sky and the stars were profuse, scattered diamonds. Emmeline tipped back her head, searching for the elusive, flashing triangle. She treasured the Seven Sisters. Her father had shown them to her when she was small and ever since she’d thought of them as his gift to her. It was one way of looking at things. The entire estate had gone to her younger brothers, but she had inherited the galaxy.

Back in her bedroom, she washed her hands, rubbing and rinsing them for some time. Afterward she sat at her dressing table, smoothing cold cream upward over her cheeks. It soothed her to sit at the dressing table, readying herself alternately for the day and for the night, knowing that one would follow the other. There were some certainties in life. Her fingers smelled of lavender and underneath was the faint, unmistakable sweetness of pork.

The soft shuffle of Querios’s slippered feet on the carpet made itself heard and Emmeline put down the pot with a brittle tap on the rosewood. She felt the need to alert him to her presence; she couldn’t rely on him to notice her. It hadn’t always been like that.

“Q. It isn’t often I ask something of you.” She glimpsed his creased face in the mirror, saw it stiffen.

“I’ve got accounts outstanding, Em. Peaches are an extravagance.”

She turned on the stool and caught hold of his hand.

“I’m not talking about groceries. Catherine ignores my advice. Contradicts everything I say to her. I’m worried about her. I want you to talk to her.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Catherine. Young women always want their own way.”

“I am not talking about what she reads or what she wears. Even the friends she associates with, although lately she’s become so solitary. I’m talking about …” Emmeline stopped. She had not spoken of her fears to anyone. She’d kept quiet, on a superstition that if she voiced what she saw it would confirm it. “I’m talking about her figure.”

Querios sat down on the edge of the bed in his nightshirt. The springs lurched and resettled themselves in twanging complaint.

“What about it?”

She held up the pocket. It was stained around the bottom and bulged in unreadable shapes.

“I found this under her window. It’s a chop. A pork chop and a slice of suet pudding. It’s her dinner, Querios.”

“Really, Emmy, this is something for the maids. I have told you time and time again that I have larger concerns.”

He banged his ear down to the pillow and pulled up the red satin eiderdown around his head.

Emmeline put down the bag on the hearth tiles and sat looking at nothing in particular. She suspected that Catherine’s monthlies had ceased. When she asked her, Hannah Smith had confirmed that nothing of that nature had come to the laundry for some time. In fact, she could remember the last time, Smith had murmured, as if she spoke to herself. Then she said, well, it didn’t matter how she recalled it, but it was a few months ago. Something snagged Emmeline’s attention as she remembered Hannah saying that. She pictured Hannah’s eyes. Her averted face as she served Querios his kippers and her fingers swollen around the curtain ring she’d taken to wearing on the left hand.

“Oh, dear God.”

Hannah Smith was expecting. Why was it that one only ever understood things backward? Querios stirred and subsided in the bed as Emmeline’s mind roamed over the possibilities. She supposed it must be the groundsman. Her heart sank at the thought of the squalid cottage with its earthen floors. Or it could be Jethro Fludd, the only male attendant. Fludd had something in his eyes. Something … well, animal was the word that came to mind. She remembered the sun-browned man who came to sharpen the knives every year. Oh, please, Hannah, not him. In that shelter on the heath where they all camped. When was it that the knives had been sharp?

By one in the morning, Emmeline’s only comfort was the memory of the Pleiades. She lay on her back, absorbing the silence all around her and picturing the far, flashing stars.