The Painted Bridge A Novel

THIRTY-ONE





Lucas St. Clair had brought the plate back to Popham Street in one piece. He’d fixed it that same night and applied a coat of varnish in the calm and order of his own darkroom, inhaling the scent of lavender oil and sandarac as the flame of the spirit lamp flickered over her mouth, her eyes. It was important not to let the glass get too hot when drying the varnish. It could crack or the edges could burn your fingers, impelling you to drop it. He did not want to drop her. He had the sense that the plate, in some primitive way that contradicted the scientific nature of the medium, that the plate was her.

Sitting on the stool, holding it carefully by the edges, he marveled at the way her face filled the large sheet of glass. Wondered if it had been proper to approach as close as he had. He felt as if through the medium of the camera he had touched Mrs. Palmer, held her face in his hands.

When the weekend arrived, he made a dozen sheets of albumen paper, coating them with egg white and salt that had been strained and strained again then left for a week to cure. Stickles made egg nog from the yolks, had the hiccups all Sunday. The papers dried smooth and glossy. Lucas brushed on the silvers, freshly mixed, one midweek night after work. He saw the pearly patina in the amber light of the dark chamber, sniffed its blank promise, and marked the backs in pencil with a cross. Having flattened each piece in the press, he stored the sheets in a light tight box interleaved with blotting paper.

And then he had hesitated. Opportunities came and went; fine days passed unexploited. The picture mattered too much to him, he dimly perceived. When he had made the print, he would have to look at it and analyze it, not as a photograph but as a means of diagnosis. And that was the difficulty. Everything about the way Mrs. Palmer looked on the plate suggested mania. But in his heart, he did not believe she was suffering from mania.

The talk to the Alienists’ Association was only weeks away. Mrs. Palmer awaited his findings. He could not delay any longer. On a sun-warmed Saturday morning a full fortnight after his visit to Lake House, he pulled on a pair of cotton gloves and brought down the printing frame. The box of sensitized paper. The plate itself. In the yard at the back of the house, he secured the plate on top of the paper in the frame and offered the whole contraption up to the light, balanced on an old trestle left by a previous tenant. The sun fell on his own face as he waited in the shelter of the south-facing wall. He closed his eyes and offered his winter-white flesh to its rays. It was March; the days were getting longer. A leggy shrub blossomed on the far wall; a crop of gold flowers, sodden by the previous night’s rain, lay on the stones underneath.

He watched through the glass as the paper began to respond to the light, darkening under the clear parts of the plate. He felt the habitual anxiety about making a successful print; the trick was to leave it long enough for the blacks to become richly black but not so long that the whites became fogged. After half an hour, he pulled out the paper and slid it into a tray of hyposulfate to halt its development. With a pair of tongs, he began to agitate the paper, rocking the edge of the dish, sending liquid in waves over Mrs. Palmer’s face. The photograph looked almost larger than life, as clear as a pre-Raphaelite painting by one of the disciples of realism. Her eyes stared at him from underwater, then they darkened and were lost. Overexposed. He went back upstairs to wash his hands then came down and tried again.

The second print was still too dark and the following attempt too light—revealing just a pair of eyes on the paper and the medallion at her neck. The St. Christopher medallion, the old man bent over a staff, a child on his shoulders. Lucas stopped, arrested by the odd nature of the image. He would keep it. The accidental could be interesting. His next attempt was scuppered by a blemish in the weave of the paper. He carried on. The problems that arose in printing were ones that could be solved—technical issues that demanded nothing more from him than steady effort and patience. The larger challenge, proving the truth of the theory, lay ahead.

He plunged the fourth print into the fix and rocked the dish, willing the image to respond to the cyanide, to cease responding to light, to remain as it was. It did. He carried it upstairs and set it to wash. Mrs. Palmer floated under the surface, bobbing up with the flow of the water, rising as if for air. Her irises were a rich brown black, the whites of her eyes clean and bright, the lashes separate and stark as pen lines. The grain of her skin was a fine, silvery sand. Her parted lips, their outline slightly darker, looked as if they might speak. The light on her face was stronger from one side, illuminating the curve of her cheek, the highlights on it, and casting the other into a graded shadow.

The bruises and scabs defaced her. Abse had said they were self-inflicted but seeing them on the print, looking at them under the magnifying glass, Lucas doubted it. The scabs were blister marks, clumsily inflicted and kept open too long. Higgins was a disgrace to the profession. The old charlatan ought to have retired years ago. The bruises ranged in a row on her cheeks looked like fingerprints from a hand a great deal larger than her own.

The fumes in the darkroom were making him nauseous. He pegged the print on the line strung across the bench, made his way downstairs and threw himself in the wing chair. He lit a match with wrinkled, waterlogged fingertips and held the flame to the tobacco in the bowl of the pipe as Stickles entered the room.

“Didn’t you hear me knock, sir?”

“Hello, Stickles. Didn’t hear a thing.”

She handed him a plateful of anchovy toast. He took a bite and grimaced as he felt the sticky paste on the roof of his mouth.

Lucas tapped ash out on the side of the plate and got up to pour himself a whisky, appreciating its clean, deep sting on his tongue and in his throat. He’d made the image he dreamed of making. Now, all he had to do was interpret it by comparing the signs on Mrs. Palmer’s face with those in the textbooks. He fetched his dog-eared copy of Morison from the shelf and sat with it on his knees. He expected to open The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases, study the illustrations within its pages and compare them to the face of Mrs. Palmer, looking for the signs of mania, the peculiar expression of the countenance and the eyes that the physician described. But he found that he could not.

* * *

Anna stood at the sideboard, rubbing the back of a spoon with a rag loaded with a paste of salt, vinegar and flour. She’d taken on some of the small jobs that Talitha used to do—cleaning silver, stacking plates, sweeping the hearth. She found relief in it, the same relief that she now understood Miss Batt must have obtained. It enabled her for minutes at a time to forget where she was.

She heard the dining room door open and looked up to see Catherine’s mother, Mrs. Abse, coming from the dayroom. She looked as if she limped but watching her Anna realized that she did not. It was more that her entire locomotion seemed impeded and difficult. She reached Anna, her face creased in a frown, and stood next to her. Mrs. Abse looked down at the cleaned spoons lying in a nest and picked up one.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Palmer,” she said. “I hoped to find you alone.”

She put down the spoon and looked at Anna.

“It’s my daughter, Catherine. Would you talk to her? Try to bring her to her senses? I am so terribly worried about her.”

Anna licked her dry lips. She’d been afraid that Mrs. Abse bore some sinister message from Querios Abse. Anna’s fear of the chair was ever present, even though the treatments had ceased as suddenly as they began.

“Catherine?” she said. “I’d like nothing more than to see her. What ails her, Mrs. Abse?”

“I wish I knew. Would you mind coming now? I see you are occupied but it’s just that my husband is …”

A harsh noise sawed into the air from the other end of the room as Makepeace cleared her throat.

“Do you think that’s advisable?”

They both turned to face Makepeace as she crossed the floor, from the other door.

Emmeline Abse’s voice was suddenly surprisingly commanding.

“If I didn’t think it advisable, Fanny, I wouldn’t be suggesting it. Please attend to your duties. If you can.” She looked back at Anna, her tone softened, almost pleading. “If you wouldn’t mind coming with me, Mrs. Palmer?”

* * *

The Abse parlor was shabbier than Anna might have imagined. The piano lid was open to reveal yellowed ivories, thinned at their tips. A cracked glass case held a half-melted posy of wax flowers, and the mantles of the lamps were obscured by soot. Catherine lay back on a chaise longue. She wore a wintry green dress that hung off her thin frame and had a large shawl pinned around her shoulders despite the warmth of the room. Beside her on a low table was a plate of black grapes. Anna tightened the cotton scarf over her head as she walked toward her.

“Hello, Catherine.”

Catherine clapped her hands, half rose from where she lay, and sank down again.

“Where have you been, Mrs. Palmer? And what on earth has happened to your hair?”

She looked too fragile to hug; Anna bent and brushed her cheek with her lips, took her cold hands in hers. Catherine’s pearl ring was slipping off her finger and her nails were tinged with blue.

“I wanted to come and see you before but I wasn’t permitted.”

Mrs. Abse retreated toward the door.

“I’ll leave you girls to talk.”

Catherine and Anna looked at each other, Catherine’s eyes glistening with unshed tears.

“What has my father done to you, Mrs. Palmer?”

“I’m alright, Catherine. The treatments are over now, you needn’t worry about me. But what’s happened to you? Have you been ill?”

Catherine averted her eyes. Her ears poked through her hair; her white skin was dry.

“Nothing’s happened to me. I’m conquering my appetites, Mrs. Palmer.”

She held out the plate of grapes. “Have some. I had to promise to finish these.”

Anna took one and felt its cool, moist plumpness between her fingers.

“You look ill.”

“I am so tired of being talked to about myself. Where’s your hair? You were so pretty before.”

Anna put her hands to her head again and felt the bristles through the cotton scarf.

“My hair will grow back. It’s already starting to.”

She ate the grape and handed a stem of them to Catherine. Catherine picked one off, began to peel it in irregular strips, licking her fingers as she went.

“Have you finished ‘Aurora Leigh’?” Anna said. “Would you like me to read aloud to you?”

“Not really. I don’t want to finish it.” Catherine put the peeled grape down on the plate and they sat in silence. Catherine’s face was wistful, lit on one side by the light from the parlor windows. Anna felt a twinge of guilt. She hadn’t thought much about Catherine since they returned and the girl was so altered it was as if months, not weeks, had passed.

“Catherine, please. Tell me what’s the matter.”

“You might as well go now if you only want to bully me.”

“I don’t. I want to help you if I possibly can. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Catherine giggled and for a moment she looked girlish, like herself again.

“We were sisters for three days. I wish it had been longer. You’re the only sister I ever had.”

Anna lifted her hand and kissed it. Catherine sighed.

“Talk to me, Mrs. Palmer. I have never known the truth about another human being.”

“I haven’t either.”

“You must have done. Having all those sisters. A husband.”

“No. I don’t think I ever have. I never really had a husband. And my sisters were much older than me. I’ve always felt alone, especially when I was a child.”

“You could take up reading. The people in books never desert you.”

“Catherine?”

“Yes?”

“Was it the Fasting Girl? What happened, when you saw her? Did she speak to you?”

Catherine nodded, twisting her ring, pushing the pearl to the back of her finger and around to the front again. “There was a man there most of the time but I was alone with her for a minute at the end. She spoke to me then.”

“What did she say?”

Catherine stared down at her hands, her face a deepening pink.

“She asked if I had any food. She said she was starving. I went out and bought a baked potato for her. When I came back, the man wouldn’t let me in. I tried to get past him, I told him she only wanted to warm her hands on it, but he chased me away. He threatened to call the police.”

“The poor woman. She looked half dead, in that picture we saw.”

“She is dead. I read about her in my father’s newspaper. She died on the boat on the way back to America.”

A clock somewhere out of sight chimed gently as Catherine sat back in the chair and looked at Anna defiantly. Anna felt a surge of frustration with her and checked it. She made her voice neutral.

“Why are you trying to be like her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fasting isn’t living, Catherine. It’s more like dying. What happened to all the adventures you planned?”

* * *

Emmeline, passing the time in the sewing room while Mrs. Palmer was with Catherine, couldn’t settle. She went to the window, sat down, rose again. She couldn’t take up her mending or close her eyes for a doze. A door banged farther down the passage and she jumped up and put her head round the door to make sure Querios hadn’t returned early. The corridor was empty—she saw only Hannah’s skirts sailing around the landing and down the stairs.

She returned to the sewing room window. She half expected the gray sky outside to come collapsing down on all their heads. The old oak tree, the line of waving willows by the lake, seemed unaware of her transgression, unaware that on this ordinary day the world had turned upside-down. She reached into her sewing bag and took a drop of laudanum, squeezing the pipette over her open mouth. Querios would not be back until suppertime. There was nothing to fear.

Catty had left her book balanced on top of the chest. Emmeline picked it up and felt the weight of the thick pages in her hands, the soft binding. The pages were falling away from the spine. It was Catherine’s favorite, “Aurora Leigh.”

She opened it at random and began to read.



For he, a boy still, had been told the tale

Of how a fairy bride from Italy

With smells of oleanders in her hair

Was coming through the vines to touch his hand.



She put down the book. Ben was right. Catherine needed to travel. She would take her, herself. They would go to Italy. The thought made Emmeline feel tall and straight. Just to think it changed something inside as if already she had traveled to a strange land and become a more intrepid version of herself.

They would go on a tour. If she had to defy Querios’s wishes, so be it. She was past the age where it befitted a woman to obey her husband’s every wish. She had that advantage at least.