The Painted Bridge A Novel

EIGHT





Anna breathed in the fog, felt it on her cheeks, her lips, her tongue. It was white and tasteless, different from London fog. It was different from sea fog too—thick and unmoving. Abse had agreed to her request for a walk in the grounds. She could go where she liked, he said, with a poor sort of laugh. Within reason. Lovely would follow behind.

She walked along the gravel path at the back of the house, felt her way past the brickwork of a walled garden and arrived in front of a cottage, a curl of blue smoke from its crooked chimney pot merging with the white blanket that pressed down on the roof. A bird was calling somewhere nearby, making a high, harsh shriek that hurt her ears. She stopped to look at the cottage, leaning on its fence of wooden palings, peering toward the latticed windows for signs of normal life being lived by someone.

“Hello?” she said, experimentally, keeping down her voice so Lovely shouldn’t hear.

At the side of the cottage, something red appeared to turn in her direction.

“Who’s that?” came a high, clear voice. Anna made her way up the path and saw the girl. She was younger than she’d realized, pale and graceful inside her cloak, her eyes large and serious under a high forehead. She was standing in front of an enclosure, a book balanced on a fence post beside her. On the other side of the woven fence was a large, grubby bird with a crest of small quills like pins on top of its head and a long ragged tail stretched out behind. The mud in its run was marked with angular footprints and scattered with bits of what appeared to be dumpling.

“Even he hates suet,” said the girl. “Peacocks usually eat anything.”

“Is that what it is? A peacock?”

“A silver peacock. That’s what my father calls it but it’s not really silver. More of a dirty white, don’t you think? Poor creature. I don’t know why he has to be penned in like this. It’s so unfair.”

The girl held her hand over the fence, dropped another lump; the bird shifted backward on scaly feet.

“My father’s afraid he’ll be eaten.”

Anna cast a glance over her shoulder and Lovely clapped her hands, the sound muffled.

“Come along, miss. Best get going,” she called.

The girl picked up her book.

“We can walk together.” She took Anna’s arm and they passed back down the path and set off across the grass that led to the field. Anna had a sense of unreality that she should be next to the girl, feeling the light grip of her fingers.

“I’ve seen you from my window. What’s your name?”

“Catherine Abse. I’m not allowed to talk to lunatics but you look alright.”

“I’m Anna. Mrs. Anna Palmer. I’m not a lunatic. You must be Mr. Abse’s daughter?”

“Yes. I suppose I must be.” Catherine let go of Anna’s arm and peered at her out of the vapor, her white face coming nearer. “How old are you? Let me guess. Twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-four, if you must know. How old are you?”

“Nearly sixteen. At what age should a girl marry, do you think?”

“I’ve never thought it mattered much. Why? Do you intend to marry?”

Catherine let out a noisy breath.

“One day I might. Not many men would want to marry a girl from a loony house.”

They continued toward the lake under looming trees, their top branches amputated by the fog. The grass was thick and soft along the edges of the mud path, wet with dew. The hem of Anna’s dress began to slap at her ankles, dampen her stockings. She’d wanted to use the walk to find out if the high wall went all the way around the grounds of Lake House, whether the bridge and the gates were the only ways out, but the visibility was too poor.

“Do you love birds? Is that why you come out to feed them? I’ve seen the ducks all coming to meet you.”

“Not really,” Catherine said. “I can’t eat the food we have at home so I give it to the ducks. Most things stick in my throat. I can feel them choking me, even after chewing fifty times.”

“Really? I would have thought that was impossible.”

“Mother says it’s impossible too. How many times do you chew things, Mrs. Palmer?”

Anna laughed. “I’m afraid I’ve never counted.”

They went through the gate and on in the direction of the lake. Catherine began talking about an Indian man she’d read about in the Illustrated News, who fell in love with an elephant. She could understand it because she had fallen in love with Italy—“The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy”—even though she’d never been there. But she supposed falling in love with a country wasn’t the same as falling in love with an elephant. Or a man. She stopped, turned her head toward Anna.

“Is it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have the time to think about that kind of thing.”

“What do you think about, Mrs. Palmer?”

Anna glanced around. She couldn’t see Lovely or hear her but it didn’t mean she was not near. The fog clothed everything.

“Since I was brought here, I have found it difficult to think of anything, Miss Abse, except how to get away.”

“Call me Catherine. Please.”

* * *

The edge of the lake presented itself suddenly, its surface still and black, dotted with white feathers, the clean, muddy tang of it penetrating through the fog. Anna stepped down a shallow bank and pulled off her glove; the water was soft and cold, lapped around her fingers, magnified them. The white bridge gleamed through the vapor from farther down the lake, the far side of it vanished in the mist. She gestured toward it and made her voice casual.

“What a pretty bridge. Where does it lead?”

“Nowhere.”

Catherine tossed something out of her umbrella. It splashed into the water and two dim shapes nosed their way to the surface. Anna heard Lovely’s voice calling from a distance. She had a sense that she had been given another chance, in place of the one Higgins denied her.

“Catherine!” She put her hand on the girl’s arm and met her eyes. “I know we’ve only just met but I need to ask for your assistance. Would you help me escape?”

“Why should I? Oh—I suppose you miss your husband too, too desperately, Mrs. Palmer.”

“Not really, I …” Anna lapsed into silence, looking at Catherine’s eager expression, the sympathy on her face. “Yes, I do. Miss him. Of course, I do—most terribly.”

“But how could I help you?”

“You might speak with your father. Persuade him that I am perfectly well. Do you have any influence with him?”

“No,” Catherine said, abruptly. “He never listens to me.”

Anna cast around in her mind.

“Could I pass as one of your friends, next time you go somewhere? Slip out of the gates with you? Or hide in a corner of the carriage?”

“I don’t go out. Except to church, sometimes. And we don’t keep a carriage anymore.”

“I’ll think of another way, then. But you don’t refuse?”

Catherine leaned on a silver birch, resting the back of her head against the peeling trunk, picking at the side of one of her nails. Her skin was as pale as the bark, her hair lank where it emerged from her bonnet. She looked like a woman, where a moment before she had appeared a child.

“It would be an adventure,” she said. “I long for adventure. A quiet life isn’t life at all, don’t you think? Who was it that had you locked up? Was it a jealous sister? His mother?”

Lovely’s outline approached, slow and steady, growing more definite with every step. Anna and Catherine stopped speaking as she appeared in front of them, rubbing her bare hands together, her shawl pulled up over her head.

“There you are.” She looked from face to face. “Thought I’d lost the pair of you.”

They began to move back through the trees toward the field. Catherine told Anna how her brother was teaching boys from the slums of the Rookeries, instructing them in reading and arithmetic, how she planned once she reached twenty-one to change her name to Aurora, like her heroine, Aurora Leigh, and go to live in Italy. She intended to travel about freely by train, might even dress as a boy to achieve it, although the truth was that despite everything, she’d never wanted to be a boy. She sighed and turned her serious eyes to Anna again.

“Do you believe that life for a woman begins when she marries?”

“For some, perhaps. I don’t know much about marriage.”

Catherine giggled as she tightened her bonnet strings. Her hands were small as a child’s, the fingers tapered, the nails flecked with white.

“But you are married. You must know about it.”

“I haven’t been married long. And my husband—well, he’s not the easiest man to know.”

He was impossible to know, Anna thought to herself. More remote and silent with every month that had passed. Catherine clapped her hands.

“Is he mysterious like Mr. Rochester? Older than you and broody? Passionate?”

“I wouldn’t call him passionate, exactly.”

“Why did you marry him then?”

A pair of swans flew low over their heads, their outstretched wings beating hard on the air, necks craned toward the water. They heard the splash of their long, skidding landing on the lake’s surface. Both Anna and Catherine turned to see it but could not.

“There are many reasons to marry, Catherine, apart from passion.”

“I know that. I’m not a child.”

They made their way up through the field in silence, keeping to the sheep path. Anna felt an unexpected impatience to get back inside. Catherine was a sweet and likable girl but she couldn’t help her. It was foolish to imagine she might be able to do anything, and Anna ought to be at her post in the window seat in the dayroom—able to see Louisa or Vincent the very moment they arrived to collect her.

On the higher ground, the mist had thinned; Lake House had come back into view. It looked perfectly flat up on its ridge, like a piece of scenery that she could reach out and topple with a shove of her hand. Lovely had gone on ahead and was opening the side door, wiping her clogs on the boot scraper. Next to Anna, Catherine’s cloak rustled against her skirts. Her boots squeaked on the wet grass.

“What did you say was the matter with you, Mrs. Palmer?”

“Nothing. My husband got it into his head that I needed a rest. And your father”—she kept her tone light—“so far hasn’t seen fit to let me go.”

“There must be something wrong,” Catherine objected. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”

Anna paused. She didn’t intend to embark on the story of recent events with Catherine Abse but she wanted to give her an answer.

“Catherine, I am called to help the drowned.” She was about to tell her about the boy but Catherine interrupted.

“You really are a lunatic. No one can help the drowned.”

She stalked ahead through the open door and into the house, the flash of red vanishing into the dim interior.

* * *

Back in the dayroom, on the window seat, Anna wrapped her arms around her knees, closed her eyes and made herself think about her marriage. Vincent was almost twenty years older than she, and since being in Lake House she’d wondered if that was the difficulty, if it was impossible to bridge the years between them. But it wasn’t only that.

She met Vincent in London, at a Missions to Seamen Society meeting organized by Louisa’s sister-in-law. The sister-in-law was a bossy little woman, Louisa said, unmarried and much concerned with good works. It threw Louisa into a panic when she asked for her help because Lou wasn’t by instinct a do-gooder. She spent her spare time at the house of her spirit medium, to the scorn of her sister-in-law.

Louisa wrote begging Anna to get her out of a tight spot, to come up to London for a week and prove that the Newloves were decent people with charitable urges. Anna, who was the last of the sisters and stranded at home with their widowed mother in Dover, jumped at the chance. She disliked London but she needed a change of scene and she welcomed the opportunity to try to help mariners and their families. Even before their father lost his life at sea, she’d had a particular feeling for sailors, for their courage in entrusting themselves to the uncertain oceans.

The day arrived. In a meeting room off Piccadilly, Anna spoke easily—about the need for help for sailors of all nations, not just spiritual aid but practical assistance. She didn’t talk long but she described cases she knew from Dover, even including their own in a disguised form. Storms and hurricanes were no respecter of persons, could swallow the captain as readily as a cabin boy. Some sailors came ashore maimed in body or mind or both, unable to work. Some never came home at all. And the heartbreak and hardship that were the legacy to women of men’s deaths at sea never eased.

Afterward, a tall man dressed in a black coat almost to his ankles approached her. He had a cup of tea on a saucer in one hand and a curious old-fashioned hat adorned with cords in the other. He handed her the tea, professed himself in full agreement with her sentiments and introduced himself as Reverend Vincent Palmer. He was austere-looking, serious, talking about his parish, his vocation. Anna was thirsty, her throat parched and the tea was nectar. Vincent Palmer fetched her another cup, talked on.

Elated from her speech, her head spinning from the novelty of it, she felt that this man recognized her. He saw past her dress and boots that seemed unremarkable in Dover but that in London looked downright shabby. Past her direct way of speaking, that Louisa insisted was unfashionable. And he shared her concern for seamen.

Her feeling was confirmed by what followed. Reverend Palmer called at her sister’s house the following day, to pay his kind regards, showed an interest in their background. Louisa tittered, after he departed.

“Careful, Anna,” she’d said. “He’ll have you up the aisle before you know it. He’s measuring you up for a wife.”

“What if he is?” Anna had said, coldly. Louisa’s beauty had always made it easy for her to scorn suitors, men in general.

Vincent Palmer called again the next day, with a gift of a small hymnbook bound in calfskin, and on the morning she was due to travel back to Dover, he came to the railway station. Anna was alone on the platform; Louisa hadn’t wanted to get smuts on the children’s outfits and had said good-bye outside the station. Anna looked up from her suitcase and saw a tall man in a tall hat, raising his arm to her in a proprietorial wave, striding down the platform. From afar, Vincent Palmer looked distinguished. Energetic. She felt a visceral response to his maleness. He drew nearer, accidentally knocking a small child out of his way, his eyes fixed on her.

“Miss Newlove,” he said. “I’ve come straight from a meeting with the Canon. I am so glad … I mean, I hope I am not too late. I have come to inquire whether you wish to become”—he paused, removed the hat from his head—“Mrs. Vincent Palmer.”

Anna could smell the frankincense lingering in his clothes, feel the tension in him as all around them the impatient engines roared and sighed. He was obscured for a long moment by a billowing blast of steam, then appeared again, his face eager. Waiting.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will.”

The whistle blew and she had no choice but to board the train. Vincent passed up her bag behind her, slammed the door, waved through the sooty glass. She found her seat and as the train drew away watched him hurry in the other direction along the platform.

Anna sat without stirring all the way to Dover. Everything around her, the crowded carriage, the families with their boxes and rugs and walking sticks, was the same but she had changed utterly. A man who had reached middle age without finding a woman suitable to be his wife had chosen her, without hesitation. And he wanted to marry as soon as possible.

Anna had never been much interested in marriage. She’d seen too much of her mother’s suffering, left alone for months at a time with five children and never quite enough money, then widowed in the middle years. Anyway, isolated as their family had become, Anna had never met anyone she wished to marry. She’d acted out of character in accepting, she told herself sternly. But the alarm she felt was matched by an unexpected elation. A man wanted desperately to marry her. She would escape from the house on the cliff, from her mother’s bitter, circling ruminations.

Anna saw Vincent only twice in the months before the ceremony. He came to Dover to meet her mother; Anna went to London once and spent three days with Louisa. Meanwhile, he remained in London in his new parish. He wrote a few times, notes, more than letters, and said he was busy preparing things for their life together. The idea that there was a life waiting for her made her dizzy. She tried not to think about living in the East End. Shoreditch could not be very far from the river, she told herself. And judging by his interest in the Seamen’s Mission, Vincent might even be as glad as she would to move to a seaside parish when the opportunity arose.

When Anna arrived at the Vicarage in May, after the wedding, she couldn’t see any evidence of preparations. The house was tucked in between the churchyard of All Hallows and a busy road. Spring appeared to have passed by the little house, which was unadorned by blossom or even ivy. It had a worn, white gravestone set over the front of a ground-floor window, bearing the names of a series of girl children who’d died of diphtheria, one after another, quickly followed by their mother. From the way the stone was set, she had the impression they might be interred within the walls of the house but Vincent had said not to be fanciful and of course they were not. She took a deep breath, stepped over the threshold straight into a parlor, and looked around for something she could not identify exactly except by the fact that it was missing.

* * *

The truth was that she hadn’t felt ready for marriage when it came to it. She met Vincent in October. The following January, Anna’s mother, Amelia Newlove, had fallen ill. She lay in her bedroom in the flint house, the curtains drawn night and day, complaining that she could hear the sea through her earplugs. Even when the wind outside dropped and the sea grew limpid, she heard waves dashing on the old chest of drawers, the carved headboard, felt them lapping at her ankles if she lowered them to the floor. She clung to Anna, begging her not to let her go, not to let her drown too; her nails left small, curved wounds on Anna’s wrists.

By March, Amelia said she’d had enough. She cursed every new morning, refused to open her eyes to it. Begged the sea to take her, raged at it for leaving her in the dry place, marooned, cut off from the tides. In the middle of one such lament, she stopped. “No matter,” she said. “What a beautiful day.” And she was gone. Anna emerged from the sickroom disoriented. Death had become a constant companion, a trickster hiding behind the curtains with the toes of his shoes in full view.

Vincent favored proceeding as planned with the wedding, soon after the funeral. Not as an occasion for jollity, he said, but as a holy sacrament. The Bishop was anxious that he regularize his domestic situation. Louisa, grieving, begged her to postpone. Anna could come and live with her, she insisted. She needed help with the children. Anna, who had been wavering, saw clearly the choices that lay ahead of her and decided to proceed with the ceremony. She told Louisa she could not help her with the children. And asked Vincent for two months in which to ready herself.

By then, she thought of the marriage as necessary. Like the boys who jumped from the clifftop at high tide on summer days to get money from trippers, she was jumping into life. She had to. She had no inheritance, no skill in nursing or governessing. Her father, Amos Newlove, had quarreled with his family when he went to sea; her mother’s line was far-flung—the only things Anna had inherited from her were pride and a resistance to being beholden. She would marry Vincent, and even if she did not yet love him she could be a good wife to him. Love would come to her in her life. She felt certain of it.

* * *

The bell for luncheon ended Anna’s reverie. She unwrapped her arms from her knees and stood up, stretching her arms over her head, pushing back her escaping hair. Following the others into the dining room, she looked without enthusiasm at a tureen of stew, a crowd of drowning dumplings. She knew what she must do next.

That night, once Lovely was prone under her blanket, Anna got out of bed and drew up the chair to the washstand. She would be defying Vincent’s wishes but she had to write the letter. She couldn’t think of any other course of action. She dipped the pen in the last drops of ink and inscribed on an envelope the name and address that were imprinted in her memory: Miss Maud Sulten, 59 Sebastopol Street, London SW.

She put the envelope aside to dry and in a careful hand, making sure to avoid blots and smudges, began the letter.



Dear Miss Sulten,

You do not know me. You may not even know my name. But I am writing to plead for your help….



She continued to the end in small, deliberate characters intended to ensure that not one word could be misread.