I finished the rest of Dottie’s errands in numb silence. I visited the dressmaker’s and came away with two ready-made frocks in packages under my arm, as well as an order for two more to come in a week’s time. I had barely looked at them, letting the dressmaker select what was best. I also bought new stockings, one pair of new shoes, and a new hat. I had paid for all of it on Dottie’s credit; likely I’d have to work for her for years before we were even again.
Next to the dressmaker’s was a photographer’s studio. It was closed—the sign said the proprietor was in only on Mondays and Thursdays—but I paused and looked at the photographs in the window. One showed Anningley’s own High Street, on a misty early morning, looking toward the gentle rise of a hill, which was crowned with a pretty church of old stone, its spire coming out of the mist above the roofs of the village houses. I thought of that same church, rising out of the same mist, two hundred or even three hundred years ago, patiently waiting for Sunday attendance by villagers now long dead, weathering storms long forgotten, just as it would do when I was dead and so was everyone around me. And I thought for the first time in months of Alex’s camera in its case in my bedroom at Wych Elm House.
I turned and looked down High Street at the spire from the photograph. A church meant a graveyard. She is buried in the churchyard, if you want to see her.
Still, I dawdled on my way to Frances’s grave. I stopped at the pharmacist’s and the lending library, David Wilde’s words turning over in my head. Finally I had no more errands, no more excuses, and I opened the churchyard gate with my gloved hands, listening to it creak in the peaceful stillness of the sunny afternoon.
The church was a snug building of buttery stone. I saw no sign of a vicar or a groundskeeper, though the grounds were immaculate; there were only the starlings crying at one another in the trees over the hill.
From the very first, I knew which monument I was meant to see.
It was a long block of shiny marble, raised and gleaming, overshadowing all of the graves around it—humble stones from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, planted by the good people of Anningley. Frances Forsyth’s grave was slick and shiny, almost obscene. As I approached I could see the lettering—FRANCES FORSYTH, B. 1902–D. 1917—and an angel etched, weeping, into the marble above it. Beneath the dates was a single sentiment: ANGEL ON EARTH.
I stared at the grave. It made my throat thick, made my heart beat slowly and sickly in my chest. This was Dottie’s work, there was no doubt of it—Robert had had nothing to do with this monstrosity. She must have faced some objection to having Frances buried in the churchyard at all, as a suicide and a suspected murderer. She had not only prevailed, but she had raised her daughter’s monument above the rest. It was a mother’s act of love, of defiant and loyal belief.
But as David Wilde had intimated, I knew something of what it was like, caring for the mad. I knew how it drained you, how it ate at you, how your love for the mad person both fed you and consumed you. How you felt it was all your fault, or all theirs. I knew of the unspoken moments as you worried in the dark—as your own life sat frozen and forgotten—when you hated the mad person with all your heart, when the black part of you wished they would simply go away, that they would simply die. And I knew of the hideous wash of relief that overcame you when the burden of caring for that person was finally lifted.
Frances Forsyth’s monument was an act of love. But I could see what it also was—an act of guilt, the kind that bows a person and alters them forever. This was what Dottie lived with, what no one could understand. No one but me, who had lived with Mother.
The last place she ever wanted to go was through that terrible door, to be with the things on the other side. Some mad people wished for death, but others clung to life, even when that life was filled with pain. Yet Frances had, finally, decided to go through that door she so dreaded. Or had she? Was it possible her mother had helped her? That the final result was this monument to Dottie’s own guilt?
I turned away and walked back to the motorcar in silence.
When I arrived in the front hall at Wych Elm House, all was quiet. I removed my hat and stood for a moment. I heard the ticking of the grandfather clock in the next room. I smelled furniture polish and dust. I looked at the sunlight coming interrupted through the glass door from the sitting room, sliced by the lines of a tree branch. At the quiet corridor, its floor gleaming.