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The winds of autumn rustled the leaves of England, as Edward walked through the grounds of his estate. Their bronze beauty graced the trees and, for a moment, he was swept once again to France. It had been much like this when he had left the trenches to return with bread, such an ordinary necessity on a commonplace day. How quickly it all had changed so shortly after, when the bullets had rained down in the tempest that waylaid him on his journey. Or perhaps, he thought, with a touch of philosophic musing, it had really set him forth upon the sea of discovery he found himself sailing on now. Had a year really passed since that deafening blast?
Limited as his hearing still was at times, there was an abundance that he did hear. The sound of the rains on the window panes still sent his body quivering in remembrance of the soaked trenches and brought to mind the smell of the mold, forcing it into his nostrils and he sent it away with the expulsion of his cough. So too could he hear the tears of Agnes, hidden away, disguised among the dark solitude of night as his own tormented cries had been so many times in the months he'd spent in her home. John's disappearance only became worse and more unbearable in the daily reminders of her home. Edward's house, despite its drafty corridors and mysterious framed inhabitant, had offered the serenity his wearied soul sought so fervently. Agnes's home had stolen all solace from her, chaining her to the tormented pain of memory. In every chair, John's smiling face had sat. In every room, his melodious whistle scattered the stillness. Her heart broke at the thought of those lips never parting again. She could not bear the possibility of him not returning.
“Edward, I can't handle it. He is everywhere I turn, now more so than ever before. I find myself remembering the smallest gesture, a faint snippet of conversation, some tiny mannerism or expression. Rather than comfort, they torment me. What an awful sister I have become!” she had said to him, broken in those first days after the telegram's arrival.
He had wanted to say that he understood. James and the faces of so many others, which he had regrettably paid less attention to at the time, haunted his own mind as well. But, Edward could admit no such thing. Instead, he had said to her,
“Agnes, come and stay with me. I offered before and you were unready. Come now.”
He held out his hand to her with all the kindness in his heart. He knew the kindness could only thrive because of her own compassion she had not merely shown him, but heaped upon him, this past year. She looked at him with a look he had felt within himself so many times before. Agnes's grief had hardened her in determination. Realizing it was futile to pretend she could withstand the circumstances alone, she gave in to Edward's suggestion and stopped trying to protect everyone alone.
There was also the sound of the names of Ypres and Passchendaele, which crossed the lips of hundreds, which months before had spoken of Verdun and the Somme. New weapons, new troops, even new countries with the arrival of the USA this past summer found themselves in new places to fight, but the war was the same, unrelenting and unyielding.
The painted lady, rather out of character, had yielded little to Edward either as of late. With the great cacophony of sound enveloping him, she had been unnaturally quiet. It was almost as though she were a person, contemplative on the matters as the rest of them were and so reserving her speech. Such a thought was lunacy though, because any right-minded person knew that she had no knowledge of what was occurring in the war. For that matter, she had no knowledge at all. No, it must be something else. Perhaps, Edward was simply not allowing her enough time to speak. Their conversations were reduced to the status of a clandestine affair of stolen moments with Agnes present. He had been certain that was the case anyway, until Agnes had returned to the rooms of the school and the words of the other woman in his life still had remained absent.
Well, absent was a bit of an overstatement, but the woman who had before seemed unable to do anything other than lob a barrage of questions at him, was now refrained in her words. The bold and brazen woman of accusation had become the shy temptress of contemplation. Maybe her coy nature was a personality trait he had bestowed upon her himself since she no longer adorned the spot above his mantel, prominent and center-stage, but now was tucked into the wardrobe safely stowed away from Agnes's eyes.
He told himself that concealing the painting was an act of benevolence. Were he to expose Agnes to so severe an examination of herself, what resolve she had mercifully managed to maintain may very well crumble. It was a compassionate solution to prevent Agnes from seeing the painted lady. Logical as his rationale was, Edward knew full well that it was not the complete truth. No, to be honest, Edward knew that it was not even what constituted half of his reason. It was rather, only a pleasant and convenient side effect. The impetus behind his stealthy stowaway was not even entirely to prevent Agnes from thinking he was crazy, as he had imagined the reason to be at the beginning. Edward realized now that he desired to keep the painting hidden, because she was his. The statement seemed rather ill-fitting to his reality, as he walked through the wide open grounds of his house now. He was not a pauper clinging desperately to his only possession. Despite the war, Edward was a gentleman of means and had managed to acquire a house full of costly possessions. Edward stopped in his tracks, his head suddenly reeling in confusion. What was he doing? How could he have proven that he was more than just a man of wealth, dressed in John's clothes, insisted upon enlisting and being a soldier, no better off than any other soldier who had been a farmer or a blacksmith or a factory worker rather than the son of a factory owner and land holder, to return unchanged?
It was far from true. The air whistled harshly against his left ear, stinging it with a pulsing burn of cold. He was changed. His hearing would probably never fully be restored and his memories hounded him wherever he turned. Somehow though, the arduous task of remaking himself had not happened. Edward sat down hard, allowing the dirt to push against his trousers and leave its muddy handprint on him. Is that what he had set about to do? Had he become so disillusioned with wealth in the face of suffering that he had subconsciously decided to abandon it? Is that why he had decided not to return home to California? If it were true, then he had failed. Almost immediately upon returning to England, he had immersed himself in the hunt for the owner of the largest house in town and then proceeded to buy it! He had devoted himself to the mystery of a painting, when surely Agnes could have needed him more. Had he seemed ungracious to her? He'd torn from her home, as one caught on the tail of the wind, on so many occasions to sneak away and spend time with another woman. Worse, she did not even need him and was pigment rather than flesh and blood.
There was, of course, another woman who was in desperate need of help. As Edward's eyes surveyed his now harvested fields— perhaps there was some good in wealth after all— he became lost in a vision of Clara in the gardens of Rosebrim Manor. So little of her case made sense. How could she have done it? Her disposition was nothing of a murderer— but, then neither was his and surely bullets he had fired must have ripped into the bodies of men he'd shot at across the trenches. His stomach lurched forward, as nausea swept across him in its body-gripping intensity. How many had he killed, anyway? The nausea sent chills of discomfort with sickening speed throughout his body.
But, with Clara it had been different. She had known these people. They were not the nameless strangers blindly fired at across the fences of wire and from the turrets of the towers of sandbags. As poorly as he could comprehend her ability to commit such an act, he had even more difficulty in fathoming how she was physically able to complete the task. She was not an especially tall woman, though she was an inch or two taller than Agnes. She had easily hoisted the laundry basket in the afternoon sun but within the mental hospital, at closer range, her muscles had seemed normal in size. He had heard that suffocation was involved but if one of the three had succumbed to so tragic an end then, surely, the other two would have noticed and prevented falling victim to the same crime. Wouldn't they have? Well, wouldn't they have? The words echoed in his mind, sounding much like the stream of commentary hurled at him by the painted lady on her more gregarious days. His thoughts spun, dizzying his senses and heightening his nausea.
Acid crept from the base of his throat and he spat it out against the deep brown of the soil. He pushed himself up with his hands and continued in his walk. The trees had already begun to shed their summer coats. Their stark bareness, disrobed of the luscious greens of spring and summer and then the crackling fiery colors of autumn, had always before appeared lonely to him, stripped, and exposed. Now, for the first time, he began to envy their lithe nature that would be forthcoming in the subsequent months. They would be unencumbered, their load would be removed and they would be truly free.
A haziness arose from the shifting light, flitting between cloud and sun, as a witness to the alteration of the seasons. The traces of light filtered lazily through the leaves above, sending a mosaic onto the ground at his feet and speckling his memory. The light lulled him into a fogginess. It was far more pleasant than, but not so different from, that haze that had rolled over those vast expanses of open spaces in France. Tiredness seemed to come upon him instantaneously, leaping upon him as though he were its prey. The predatory confusion of torn affliction and deepening mystery pressed upon him in the form of an unnaturally heavy burden.
“Edward,” James called to him from beneath the shadow of the tree he approached.
“Edward, don't forget to wear your mask.”