The shrieking does not stop as I hurry to the second floor and the suite Luther and Jessamine share. Mrs Charlton is there just before me, in a dark pink dressing gown, a white sleep cap askew on her hair. I’m fearful of what we might find – what might Luther be doing that caused his wife to make such a noise, for her fear to overcome her natural desire to pretend everything is well enough?
We thrust open the door and barge in.
In the middle of the room, in the sitting area, is a white-nightgowned Jessamine Morwood, dark hair loose, giving a series of high-pitched howls, flailing like a mad thing. She’s hitting at the air in front of her and her own face and chest. Turning in a circle like a top, the motion moves her around and around, miraculously avoiding furniture. There is no sign of her husband.
Mrs Charlton goes to her charge, tries to calm her, but Jessamine slaps at the older woman now. I grab at her arms, hold them to her sides. She keeps pressing out screeches, however, and I exchange a look with Mrs Charlton. She slips a hand over Jessamine’s mouth, and begins to make shushing noises, soft and low.
‘Hush, my dove. We are here and you are not alone. Quiet, my girl,’ she croons.
‘Mrs Morwood,’ I say. Jessamine’s eyes above Mrs Charlton’s hand are terrified, darting from me to her old nanny and around us. ‘Mrs Morwood. What happened?’
Tiny peeps come from behind the housekeeper’s fingers. I can see the flesh of Jessamine’s face is being pressed white. I gently pull Mrs Charlton’s hand away; Jessamine’s panicked breath becomes a series of sobs.
‘Jessamine, what happened? Was it… Mr Morwood?’ Her eyes go wide, the fear seems to increase, so I put a finger over my own lips.
‘She… she walked through the wall.’ Ragged, her voice, and harsh.
‘Who?’ I ask and Mrs Charlton echoes me.
‘A woman. Red h-h-h-h-hair.’
My heart stutters. I touch the mourning ring.
‘Who was she?’
‘Red hair. Red hair.’
Given the racket, I’m astonished there’s still no sign of Luther. Nor Burdon, nor Luned. But I notice three heads are peeking around the doorframe, eyes enormous, faces pale and fearful. Jessamine’s shaking like a leaf in a storm and looks set to begin her shrieks anew. I change my grip, catch her fingers gently in mine.
‘Jessamine. You’re frightening the children,’ I say and her gaze follows the direction of my nod. She sees her babies and slumps; we have to hold her up. I jerk my chin at Albertine. ‘Back to your rooms. I’ll be there shortly.’ I don’t check to see if she obeys. ‘Let us get you lying down. I think you’ll feel better.’
Between us Mrs Charlton and I help Jessamine beneath the covers of the black oak bed with its red velvet canopy; the other side is untouched, the linens still intact. The housekeeper has the look of a mother in despair.
‘A damp cloth, Mrs Charlton?’ I say, and she bustles through a narrow door leading into the bathroom. I sit on the edge of the mattress and take Jessamine’s hand; her wrist, I notice, is bruised. The other matches it – dark contusions, going yellow with age, precursors to the new. ‘What woke you, Mrs Morwood?’
She turns her head on the pillow, her eyes like pits, her lips bloodless. ‘I… don’t know. I thought I heard… someone crying… the children… but there was that woman. I got up. She was moving around the room, touching things, then she looked at me – and she was so angry. She flew at me…’
Her eyes fill with tears. I look more closely at her throat: there are old bruises there too, usually covered by the high necks of her dresses. Luther.
‘Did you know her? Did you know her face?’
‘I’ve never seen her before. I don’t know what she wants.’
I could tell her it was a dream, that she imagined it. I could do that but perhaps it would make her worse, to be disbelieved. ‘Jessamine, I don’t believe she’s here for you. Old houses sometimes… throw up things such as this. But you mustn’t speak about her again. It wouldn’t do for anyone to think you were… unwell.’
Her eyes go wide. She takes my meaning. Mrs Charlton returns, a cool damp cloth in one hand. I let her replace me. Jessamine might ignore me, might repeat what I said, then I would deny it; it would make things worse for her. Perhaps she senses that.
‘I will make a tisane to help her sleep. Will Mr Morwood—’
‘He won’t be back tonight,’ Mrs Charlton says with certainty. I doubt she’ll leave the girl’s side this night, even if Luther tried to physically remove her. I close the door softly, find my hands are cold and shaking. But there’s no time to indulge myself, the children will be waiting.
They are in the girls’ room huddled on one of the beds like terrified chicks. When you realise a parent cannot look after themselves… well, it’s a terrible moment. I fix a smile, sit beside them. They lean into the circle of my arms, and I hold them for a while.
‘Your mother had a terrible nightmare, but she’ll be fine now. What a shock to wake up to!’ Their faces clear; if I’m not worried, then it must be alright. ‘Come along, back to bed.’
I tuck the girls in first, then escort Connell to his chamber. ‘Will Mother be well?’ he asks in a trembling voice. I hold his hand, find it colder than mine, and rub the fingers, breathe warm air onto the icy skin until he laughs that it tickles.
‘Yes, Connell, your mother will be well.’ I say it though I cannot know if I lie or not. ‘I will do my best to help her any way I can. Now, sleep.’
When I finally return from the kitchen, a cup of sleeping draught in hand, I notice something shining at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to the attic rooms where the servants sleep. On closer examination I realise it’s the heavy-chained chatelaine Mrs Charlton usually wears at her waist. Perhaps she grabbed it in her confusion or out of habit when the ruckus began. I pick it up. Not so many keys, so one must be used for all the internal doors. I slip it into my pocket.
Back in the room, Jessamine takes the cup from me and drinks like an obedient child. ‘You’ll stay with her tonight, Mrs Charlton?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then I will see you in the morning.’ As I close the door the housekeeper begins to sing, one of those songs I half-remember from childhood. It takes me back to a tiny house in Whitebarrow, to my own mother’s voice sweet and low, one of those times there was no need of a protector and it was just us. I shake myself, feel the past cascade from my shoulders.
I quickly check on Leonora. She’s breathing deeply, sleeping under the influence of the possets I’ve been giving her for some relief from the pain of the eye treatment. She’d not have heard Jessamine’s ruckus at all.
Then I’m out in the dim corridor, gazing to the far end, where the locked room lies. I touch the chatelaine in my pocket. This might be my only chance. I tiptoe along, try all the keys until there is just the last one left; it slides into the lock almost unwillingly. It doesn’t turn at first, but then finally grinds over grit and gilings. But click it does at last, and I push the door open.
The air is cold, cold, colder. Colder than it should be.
I breathe dust and cough. All is dark but for the moonlight coming in the tall windows; there are no curtains and the bed is free of hangings and coverlets as if everything was stripped away after she was gone in an attempt to wipe her out. Everything except the painting hidden in Leonora’s dressing room, taken from the wall in the days after her child was sent away. There is a chair, though, beneath the window, the only other piece of furniture, and a slim spectral figure perches upon it. The moonbeams pass through her, yet I can make out the crimson of her hair, the strange blue fire of her eyes, the pale spill of her skin. The dress isn’t the green one of the portrait, but the plain grey rough wool shift she died and was buried in because we couldn’t afford anything else.
I approach but not too close. I sit on the edge of the four-poster bed. Particles rise around me.
I stare at her and she acts as if I’m not there; perhaps she doesn’t recognise me. It’s five minutes or more before I find my voice, and I know that the moment I speak things must change. I will have no choice but to do what I’d hoped not to.
Ghosts can be left behind, but they can find you too. I had hoped I’d travelled far enough. Hoped she might never follow me, though I had made promises to her. I thought she might forget, but in life she was never one to let go of anything so why would she change in death?
At last, I say, ‘Hello, Mother.’
* * *
My earliest memories are of my mother’s hair, so bright it seemed stardust had been sprinkled through it. Some days I forget the shape of her face, the slant of her eyes, the tilt of her nose and the set of her lips but I can always recall the fall of her copper-crimson locks as she leant over me in my crib when I was a baby. No one else I ever saw had quite that hue; she would let me brush it when she was in a good mood and I was old enough to hold the implement. It picked her out in a crowd, made people stare at her, and for the longest time I was proud of that: that everyone looked at my beautiful mother.
I didn’t understand, then, not entirely, their gazes. I saw the envy and awe, certainly, but didn’t comprehend the rest, the darker shades of what was in their expressions. Not until later when I grew older and began to listen, really listen to what people said as we passed. Only when I understood what she was and did to keep us – how others regarded her – did I become less proud.
She was well known in Whitebarrow was Heloise, by men and their wives − sought by the former and loathed by the latter, although it must be admitted that some of those women might have had very mixed feelings about her. Some approached Heloise too, and were rebuffed unkindly, which was unwise; if only she’d been gentler towards them perhaps her later life would have been different. But I suspect her past had been so fraught with gazes and touches she did not invite that she had no grace left for what she did not feel and therefore did not understand. When her looks began to fade and her hold on those husbands who were not her own loosened, when the madness tightened its grip on her, in those days she might have done better had she been kinder to those wistful wives.
Yet in those early days in Whitebarrow when her beauty brought us prosperity, when I was dressed like a little princess and taught to behave as one, when she was wanted and envied by all, in that cold golden time my mother mostly loved me.
Now, here in the place she’d fled, in the place I promised to return her to, I tell her all I’ve done since I left the university town. I don’t mention that I ran away, or that I hoped she’d not follow or ever find me even if she did – it makes little sense, I know, for I fled to her childhood home, but hope is not a rational thing. It was always a vain wish when I carry the item which is intrinsically hers − but even if I did not, how could I escape when I am so intrinsically hers too? My blood and bone, the very fabric of me came from her. How could I hope to dig those bits of she who birthed me out of my skin?
I tell her all these things knowing she cannot reply; the illness that ate away at her in great ragged bites took her tongue a year before it rotted everything else. She made her wishes known, then, when she still had the wherewithal to write, by use of a small chalkboard. When she did not, it was with furious blinks and grunts and groans that still make me shudder when I hear them in my dreams. In her last days, if she even knew what she wanted all she had was rage to offer.
But I tell her that all I promised, all I learned at such great cost to myself and others, can be done and will be done, but it will take a little time yet. That she needs to be patient a while more.
Long after I’ve finished speaking she turns towards me at last. Surely she recognises me though I look different. Surely she knows her own kin no matter their skin. I stare into her eyes and see that the agonies of her last days have not deserted her. Staring into her pain, I wonder how I could have ever run from my promises to her. And I wonder, not for the first time, if all that’s gone before hasn’t made me a little mad, that I should ever have thought those promises reasonable. And so the thing I thought perhaps I had escaped, the vows I thought I might avoid, must now be honoured, all because of this spectral thing sitting voiceless by the window.
‘Stay in this room, Mother, I beg of you. Leave the inhabitants of this house alone; you’ll have your due soon enough. Do not wander lest you make my task more difficult. Lest it take longer. Remain here. I will come again.’
When I leave, I lock the door as if that will stop her. Back in my room, I press the key into the small wax tablet I carry for just such purposes; I must return the chatelaine to Mrs Charlton in the morning, but I need to be able to come and go as I please. I must find a means of making a duplicate.
At last, I lie on my bed; I don’t bathe or remove my dress. I’m too exhausted for these rituals tonight, even though I know they are such small things and would make me feel better. I don’t want to feel better. I don’t deserve to do so. Every time I close my eyes all I see is the burning blue of my mother’s eyes, and the guilt threatens to overwhelm me.
* * *
I sleep only a little before dawn begins to splash itself across the sky. In the end I give up, make myself a tonic, and dress warmly. I’m still hooking the satchel over my shoulder by the time I step outside. My breath mists the air as I walk briskly across the fields, then into the woods.
I took careful note when Eli brought us back this way.
The sounds are strangely clear in the freshness of the morning, yet also strangely dulled by the trees and bushes. I see no small animals but I hear them; and nothing like Eli Bligh’s creeping in the undergrowth, so there’s that.
When I reach the quarry, there’s still a thick fog on the water, and it hasn’t quite dispersed by the time I walk around the rim of the crater to find the path down. The gradient is comfortable and generally the track is free of scree that would cause a fall. Still, I’m careful. If I trip and fall, who’s to find me? No one knows where I’ve gone or even that I’ve left the house. Just another girl to disappear from Morwood.
When I set foot on the ground, it’s fairly firm but damp and the fog seems to have lightened. I go to the edge of the water and, taking a jar from my bag, kneel. Then I plunge my hand into the water – it’s breathtakingly cold – and dig around. A handful of white goop comes up and I examine it minutely. Kaolinite clay. I suspected as much from the colour of the liquid that first day Eli led us here. I’ve a use or two for it, and it never hurts to have such a substance on hand. I fill the jar to the brim, screw the lid on tight.
I rise, looking up at the walls of the dig, admire the neat cutouts where stone’s been taken to build things. Then I realise I’d best hurry to get back in time to clean up, and present myself at breakfast. But when I turn around, the fog has thickened again.
I take a few steps forward in the direction I came from. A few steps, just a few steps, then look behind – and the pool is gone, the wall of cut stone similarly disappeared. The fog begins to move around me, swirling slowly then with increasing speed until it’s like the hard flurries of a snowstorm and I can barely keep my eyes open to see.
Something tugs at the back of my coat, like a child seeking attention, and I swing about to face – nothing. The tugging again, behind me once more, this time at my skirt. Again and again and I swing about like a fool until I’m dizzy. Then a sort of tunnel forms in the whiteness, head-height only, and then there’s a face looming at the end of it, not enough detail for me to think I know who it is, but it dives.
Dives towards me at speed and I collapse to my knees, a cry on my lips that I hate letting out. My mother would be ashamed of me. As I’m on my hands and knees, forcing back tears – why am I so rattled? Why? – I notice something in the damp earth: my footprints from when I went to the water’s edge. Whispering Thank you to I don’t know who, I crawl back along the trail I unwittingly left myself. I keep crawling until I’m halfway up the switchback path, well above the fog – yet when I turn and look back where I’ve been there’s no sign of the whiteness. All is clear: the water, the wall; I can even make out the spot where I dug up the clay, the pool murkier, the shallows disturbed.
My breath catches in my throat and my feet make a decision for me: I run.