My bedroom at Wych Elm House was on the second floor, overlooking the front of the house. I could see the circular drive leading off into the trees, and the overgrown front lawn. It did not escape me that my window was almost beneath the upper gable and that my view was of where Frances Forsyth’s body would have landed the day she jumped.
Queer cousin Fran. She has died, poor thing.
That simple sentence of Alex’s, one that hid so much. Perhaps he had hoped to shield me from disturbing family news; perhaps he hadn’t wanted to put the distressing facts in a letter from the Front that would be read by censors, strangers. Perhaps he’d been ashamed of Frances’s madness, the strain of insanity in his family, and he’d hidden it from me.
But Alex had known about Mother. He had met her. He knew about the madness in my family. And he’d come home on leave in early 1918, after Frances had died. Why hadn’t he told me of it then?
They kept her locked up, out of sight.
I sat in my bedroom’s window seat and pulled up my legs, hugging my knees, gazing out at the tangled landscape, a book unopened in my hand, as darkness fell and the house settled into silence. I could not complain about my room, which was nicer than any flat I had lived in—the furnishings were polished and expensive, including the high bed heaped with thick linens and the imposing walnut wardrobe that reached nearly to the ceiling. I almost did not want to touch the gleaming wainscoting or the expensive carpet, so perfect were they. My own modest trunk, lodged against the door of the wardrobe, looked shabby in comparison.
Alex and I had been as intimate, I’d thought, as two people could be. We’d married quickly—I supposed marrying a man two weeks after you’d met him even qualified as hasty—but we’d spent endless hours talking deep into the night, telling each other about our lives. He had been orphaned as a child. He had German relatives on his father’s side—foreign blood was part of what made his father so unsuitable, according to his mother’s family—and had spent some years with them. He had gone to Eton, then Oxford. He’d told me of his relatives in Sussex, but the family rift meant they were not close.
His was a slightly unusual life, due to his being orphaned, but it was not an overly strange one. A man from a good family, educated, brilliant, handsome, tall, and athletic—granted every privilege, on his way to becoming something breathtaking and splendid until the war had taken him. As it had taken so many others.
A mist had settled, sliding among the trees. I watched it dully, following its dirty gray smear as it moved across the darkness. I scraped a cold knuckle across the glass.
I could not countenance what I had seen today. That girl in the small parlor, the set of her thin shoulders, the way she had turned and looked at me. I wondered with a chill if somewhere in this house there was a photograph of Frances Forsyth. Whether that same face would look out at me if I found it.
No. That is Mother. That is not me. That was never me.
I had been the sane one, the one who saw that the rent was paid, the one who had gotten a job and married a good man. Mother was the one who saw things, not me.
A man was torn to pieces. They kept her locked up, out of sight.
The mist had stopped moving, I realized. It hovered in the woods, blurred among the trunks of the trees, still and cold. It almost seemed to be watching me. I stared out the window and watched back.
When I had packed up Alex’s things, getting ready to leave for the Continent with Dottie, I had gone through his personal papers. I had found the usual dry things—bank records, school records, our marriage certificate, all the milestones of his life. But I had not found one memento. No letters, photographs, or journals. No postcards or souvenirs from vacations, no notebooks or letters from schoolmates. Not one.
The man I had married was gone.
I slid into the overweening bed late, and I slept badly. I dreamed of something falling past my window, the ruffle of a skirt and a sleeve, the fabric flashing as I startled awake. And somewhere in the dim place between waking and sleeping, I thought I heard soft footsteps in the corridor, tapping past my door.
? ? ?
I reported to Dottie at eight o’clock the next morning, as instructed. She was in the morning room, located at the back of the house, a warm room with glass French doors that opened out to the back terrace. The windows let in swaths of sunlight, bright and slightly chill. The sideboard was set with a variety of breakfast foods, steaming in large dishes and smelling thickly of sausage. Dottie sat alone at the table, straight as a needle, surrounded by an expensive tea set. Robert was nowhere to be seen.