I should never have come to this house, my mother used to say, and it was always this house, not this country, even though she complained enough about how the weather compared to her childhood home—the endless days of drudging gray, the bare trees in winter, the frozen drizzle, the narrow hours of weak winter light. She used to describe the grand estate where she grew up to me as I sat and watched her do her toilette—the afternoon thundery showers, the heat of the jungle that made your limbs so hot they pulsed, her favorite swimming pond, and the raucous birds that swooped down from the hills and swept past her veranda. The green, she used to say, with a voice full of longing, they call this a green land but they lied to me; it’s a poor cousin to it, dry and pale, with every leaf so small and mean. Your father promised to build me an orangery, she would say gloomily, and fill it with my plants, but he lied too, for there is no orangery, there is only these gray stone walls, these endless rooms and all the things hidden away in them. And then her voice might trail off and she might turn to look at me as if she did not know who I was.
I’ve had enough of this house, she would say in various tones—bitterly, fearfully, angry, despairingly, and sometimes she would shout the words so loudly you could hear them the floor below or above, and then she would throw something—a china figurine, a book, a side table—which the servants would have to tidy up and, if possible, mend.
Why did you bring me here? I heard her sob to my father once, as I lingered outside their bedroom, frightened after seeing a shadow in the hall outside my own bedroom and thinking it someone lurking, but equally too frightened of my mother’s distress to knock on their door.
It was Martha, a maid who had worked at the house since before I was born, who had found me that day, and taken me by the hand down to the kitchen for hot milk and then set me to work helping her to fill the vases crowding the cramped flower room, showing me how to remove the leaves that would sit under the waterline. Martha had long been my favorite servant because she was plump and motherly in a way that my mother wasn’t, with no invisible trip wires where something you did might unwittingly set her off, but also because she was the only person who could manage my mother and deal with her fits of madness.
“It’s like you cast a spell on her,” I told Martha once, I who had been raised by a woman who spoke often of spells and charms and curses.
“It’s not a spell,” Martha had replied with a laugh. “My father trained horses and I learned how to soothe skittish animals from him. More likely it’s that something about me—my voice or my face—reminds her of someone from her past, like a childhood nurse.”
Martha was wise, no-nonsense, and she always had an answer for me when I was frightened about something, a rationalization.
That scraping noise you hear is ivy scratching the windows in the breeze, she would say when I cried and told her my fears. The scrabbling sound is mice in the wall, hurrying home to their family. When I became scared of the large beast from my nightmares—with four legs or six, with a great furred side and teeth sharp enough to slice through my fingers—she would say, Your father’s hounds will hunt down anything larger than a rat that dares enter the house. Ghosts do not exist, she would say when I told her my fear of the woman in white, the dead are slumbering peacefully in heaven, and it is only the wind or a shadow or a servant ducking out of sight into the back stairs.
Yet she could not be with me all the time, for comforting me was not her job, and she could only spare an hour here or there. I tried to cling to what she said, to the way the house did not seem to affect her as it did everyone else, but the nights were dark and long, and my imagination was boundless.
A few years ago, Martha had grown too old to walk easily up and down the stairs, to do the fiddly polishing and cleaning that was the work of many of the maids, so she became Lockwood’s laundress, and I used to like spending time with her in that boiling cauldron of a room, my hair curling tight to my head, my face flushing damp, as she listened to me speak of my wishes and dreams and I listened to her speak of what her nieces and nephews were doing, how her father’s old stables fared.
When a maid would bring me my laundered clothes, I would know that Martha had worked them with her tough hands, had tended to them as she’d once tended to me, and folded them carefully, slipping in a linen bag stuffed with dried lavender now and then. She might not have believed in charms, but I did, and she was mine.
But now she was gone. Not because she wished to leave, but because my father had wished it so.
“She upset you,” he said when I argued against it, “and made your nightmares worse; this is your home and I won’t have someone living here who upsets you, my dove. Servants come and go but I only have one child.”
“But it wasn’t her fault,” I said.
“I’ve made my decision,” he said firmly, laying a hand on my shoulder. “And besides, she’s getting old, losing her wits. People like that, liars, can be dangerous.”
Martha was the furthest thing from dangerous, or a liar, and all this mess was because of one particular afternoon two months after my mother’s death, when she had been found wandering the house feverish and out of sorts.
She’s only caught a chill, I had said to one of the newer servants who gawped to see Martha scrambling along the corridor of the second floor, searching in the servants’ rooms, and then hurrying down to the floor below to search those rooms too, eyes wild and manner frantic.
“You need to rest,” I told Martha, as the servant ran to get the housekeeper.
But Martha tugged her arm from my grip and continued her search, grasping onto each doorframe in turn and pulling herself inside as if she were on a boat and had lost her footing, whipping her head from side to side.
“What are you looking for?” I asked, trying to soothe her as she had once soothed my mother.
“The blue room,” she replied. “Where has she put it?”
“The blue room,” I repeated, feeling my stomach hollow and a rush of blood to my head. “Do you mean the morning room?” I said. “That has duck-blue walls. Or the room where the tweeny sleeps?”
“No, the blue room,” she had said crossly, dashing into the next bedroom, shaking her head, cursing words under her breath that I had never before heard her say.
“What’s in the blue room?” I asked, thinking of my nightmares, of the walls with their pattern of blue swirls, of an eye staring at me from the fireplace as I tried to find my way out . . .
“Her daughter.”
My knees buckled as I followed her into one of the unused rooms that had been shrouded in dust sheets. “Whose daughter?”
“Heloise; her little daughter.” Even as she spoke, her hands scrabbled at the wall.
Me, she meant, I was the daughter, and Heloise my mother. “You have a fever, Martha, you need rest,” I said.
She scoffed and then, as if she had only just realized that I was standing there, she turned around, her mouth white. “Where have you put it?” she asked me.
“I don’t know what you mean. Please, Martha.”
She had dug her fingers into my arm so tightly it hurt. “Heloise,” she said, and I knew then that she thought I was my mother, the both of us dark, our faces so alike. “Where is the blue room, where is it?”
“I don’t know. I’m not her. Please, Martha,” I begged.
“Lucy?” she asked then, finally.
“Yes, you’re ill, Martha, you need to rest.”
“You need to help her, you need to help Heloise, she’s in danger—” she said, and then she groaned, clutching her hot head, the frenzy leaching from her.
I dragged over a chair for her to sit in and she drooped forward.
“Why is she in danger?” I asked quickly, as I heard other footsteps run down the hall toward us, but she didn’t reply.
The housekeeper arrived at the door, bringing with her two maids, and Jenkins as well, as if the old laundress was a wild animal that needed rounding up.
Martha was duly led back to bed on the top floor, where the doctor gave her something to sleep off her fever. She was lucid the next day and remembered nothing of her frantic search, nor her words of warning, the ones I excused as confusion—perhaps willfully, not wanting a reminder of my mother’s fears, of her infamous woman in white—and which had in any case come too late.
My father said that Martha disturbed me, and it is true that I had some of my worst nightmares for a week after her episode—but they could be triggered by anything; they were always in the crucible of my mind, ready to boil, and was it not only a few months since my mother had died, was that not the reason why my cries woke the house?
And even if it were not the reason, it was wrong of my father to make Martha leave after just one afternoon of madness, when my mother and I had been mad in our own ways for many more afternoons than that.
I thought of her that evening, as I picked up the gowns Hetty and I had left in a pile on my floor—my mother’s dresses that were now mine. I thought of how careful Martha was when she cleaned them, each sequin and ruffle and silver thread immaculate.
I thought of how she had kept back the darkness for precious hours, of how she had protected me.
I thought of her looking at me as if I was someone else, her face creased in anguish, clutching my arms and crying, Where have you put her, Heloise, where is your daughter? and I saw that blue pattern swimming again before my eyes, felt the prickle of unease scramble up my spine.