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The terrible news about Mrs. Tilney was not something Henry could recover from in haste. It was a very great shock. His mother, whose decline and death he had witnessed as a young man, ten years ago – or thought he had - how was it possible that she could have survived? He had seen her lying waxen and still, with his own eyes, as had Frederick. Eleanor had been from home, at school, and only arrived to see the already closed coffin.
Now Eleanor came as swiftly as the fastest horses could bring her and her husband, not four and twenty hours since the most shocking of all discoveries. Henry had been badly shaken by having to identify the body and confirm that it was, indeed, Mrs. Tilney, but the arrival of his sister did something toward a beginning of restoring his composure. Considerate of what he knew would be her feelings, he collected himself enough to receive Eleanor with a warm reassuring embrace and lead her to a seat in the garden, where he regarded her with anxious compassion. Charles and Catherine watched the brother and sister with concern of their own.
Eleanor was the first to find her voice. “Was it really – our mother?” she asked. “How could this possibly be? Surely it is a mistake?”
“We still don’t altogether know what happened,” he told her. “But the lady is indeed our dear mother. Dr. Lyford, and Mr. Carter, and I, all concur that she did not die in what we thought was her last illness.”
“But you saw her then, Henry?” asked Eleanor, bewildered. “And Frederick saw her. You both told me that she was gone.”
“She was still and white when I saw her,” said Henry with difficulty, “and I did not question what my father told me. I was only permitted to glimpse her from the doorway, for a brief moment; and I was very greatly affected. I remember I could hardly bear to look.”
“And I too believed what I was told,” reflected Eleanor. “But the doctors – they surely certified her death?”
“I had not come into attendance upon the family yet, you remember,” said Dr. Lyford, “but I never heard of any thing strange or out of the way about it. There was no talk.”
“It was my predecessor who certified the death,” added Mr. Carter. “It might be a matter of inquiry to unearth Mrs. Tilney’s tomb, and see who – or what – or if any thing is buried there.”
“However it was managed, and why, it is a fact that this woman did survive, and was kept walled up in a secret compartment in the catacombs, for an entire decade,” concluded the doctor.
“My mother! Oh, and all the time we thought her gone, I might have had the indescribable happiness of seeing her,” said Eleanor, in tears.
Henry turned away and could not look at his sister.
“And I,” murmured Catherine, “might have known her.”
“Mr. Carter,” said Eleanor presently, “tell me, if you can, what were her quarters like? Do you believe she suffered very much in them?”
“You can see the room,” said the doctor, but Eleanor only shuddered. “No, no.”
“It is a pleasant enough chamber, with a water-closet, lamps, and books. She might have been comfortable in body, though I have no doubt that if she had been sane during those years, she must have missed her children grievously, and perhaps tried to escape.”
“But why was she kept in captivity? And why? Did my father do it?” asked Eleanor, bewildered.
“He must have done it,” Henry concluded reluctantly, turning around to face her. “Who else? She had unquestionably been very ill; perhaps he thought it was the action of the curse. Perhaps that was why he kept her confined, in order to keep her safe. No one will ever know, now.”
“But that is madness indeed,” exclaimed Catherine. “What could he hope to gain by such behavior, keeping her a prisoner?”
“There is reason to believe that he did think her a madwoman,” the doctor replied, trying to speak carefully. “Her health must have been very frail, after such an illness, with her weakness the result of all she endured from him over so many years. By all accounts it was a most severe bilious fever, which must have left her weak, and in pain. We found medicines there, that made it appear that she was given sedatives which would have kept her quiet, and also prevented her from trying to escape. They are medicines such as are given to the mad.”
“How horrible,” murmured Catherine, while Eleanor was crying openly, and her husband trying to comfort her.
“Catherine, how extraordinary that you always suspected something like this, and that you should have been proved right,” Henry could not help saying.
“I only read about such things in novels,” she answered, bewildered, “and was goose enough to think they might occur in real life.”
“On the contrary,” Henry replied, “it now appears that your suppositions showed a mind of some considerable genius.”
“No,” protested Catherine, “Now I see that it was not that I really believed my readings, but that I suspected General Tilney’s nature. You were used to it, but he was a sort of person who was quite new to me.”
“I can easily believe that,” said Charles, looking at his wife with pity. “When I think of what Eleanor’s life was with him...”
Eleanor wiped her tears. “Don’t think of it, Charles,” she urged, “it is over, and let us only think how happy we are together now.”
“It took little imagination to realize that perhaps General Tilney had been cruel - had not been kind to your poor mother.”
“Yes. You were judging his character rather than his actions. And now his actions have proved him to be uncannily like what you thought him. In looking back – to think that a man of his intellect and achievements could have fallen under the rhodomontade of a John Thorpe, and cast you out of his house as a result – why, Catherine, he might almost have been suffering from derangement himself.”
“Softening of the brain, perhaps,” contributed the doctor.
“And you and I, Henry, never thought of such a thing.”
“No, Eleanor. We were too close, and had been bullied every day for years; we were his victims almost as much as our mother. I blame myself for not protecting you better, however. You were too often left to his tender mercies. I always hated to leave you alone with him.”
“Do not quarrel for the honors of a share of the guilt,” Dr. Lyford advised. “It is often so when a person begins to show signs of derangement, and General Tilney had been of very difficult character for as long as you knew him. You did not make him the way he was, and must not take blame.”
“And we must remember,” Catherine mentioned, “he kept your mother living. He did not murder her; nor was she starved, was she? How did she eat, how was food and water provided?”
“I think we can answer that,” said Claiborne. “The gardener’s men were dismissed by Frederick, but one Tom White, a laborer, still lives in a cottage on the estate with his old grandmother. He is waiting to tell his story. Let us bring him in now, shall we.”
White, a short but sinewy young man, had little education, and almost all he knew had to do with what his task had been, the digging of vegetables, and he was frightened at being summoned to speak to the gentlefolk. Henry gently questioned him, however, and drew out his recollections that the head gardener, Wantage, often was called in to private closetings with General Tilney, and given special instructions.
“He was to grow certain food,” White told them, “nothing fancy, a few swedes and potatoes and corn and such like, kept apart special.”
“But where did he grow them?”
“Why, in the General’s pine-apple glasshouse.”
“And no one saw them there, or asked about them?”
“Law, no. It was as much as your place was worth, to set foot in that there glass house. Only Wantage did that. None of us was allowed.”
“And you think he grew food for her there?” Henry asked incredulously.
“It seems likely to have been so,” concluded Dr. Lyford. “I deduce that Wantage must have been charged to supply Mrs. Tilney with her meals. He could deliver them to her chamber from the garden door, quite easily.”
“And his cottage was right hard by,” pointed out White.
“He could cook there?”
“Certain sure.”
“Wantage the gardener – I remember him,” said Catherine in some surprise. “I always liked him, and used to stop and talk to him about his plants. He would cut posies for me.”
“Yes, so he did,” said Eleanor. “He once asked me about the visiting young lady, and if Mr. Henry was not very taken with her. Catherine, do you know – I wonder if it was he who left that note on your door?”
Catherine’s eyes dilated. “Why, it might have been! He must have meant it as a warning!”
“To keep you from marrying into the family, and suffering a fate like that of my poor mother, as he may have feared,” Eleanor concluded.
“Wantage’s duties must have become increasingly painful for him to carry out, as her strength declined,” the doctor considered. “And General Tilney died too suddenly, it is evident, to pass on to any body the secret of his wife’s survival, and her need for care.”
Claiborne agreed. “And don’t you recall, after the General’s death, almost Frederick’s first act as master of Northanger was to immediately sack the gardener? I asked him why he wanted this done, and he said he considered his father’s gardening his most expensive and excessive hobby horse. He would spend no more on it, and the head gardener was the first to go, to be followed by his minions, as Frederick put it.”
“Yes, Frederick did always did detest that greenhouse,” said Henry, “but I never realized to what extent. It seemed to represent every thing he hated about his father.”
“He never knew that his action in turning away Wantage, was his own poor mother’s death sentence,” said the coroner.
“Good God,” Henry exclaimed. “I cannot think of it. But what became of Wantage?”
“He suffered a paralytic stroke within days of the General’s death, and was taken to his daughter’s house, in Gloucester,” said the doctor. “When I saw him, he was laid up, unable to speak, but he may have improved, and retain understanding enough to confirm or deny this whole story.”
“It will be looked into,” said the coroner, “and Mrs. Tilney’s tomb opened.”
“It is incredible,” said Henry, “I can hardly take this all in. To think we might have seen, might have helped our mother, Eleanor.”
“It is too terrible to contemplate,” she whispered, and swayed, as if she might faint.
She was soon revived, with wine and water, and taken up to bed by her husband and Catherine.
“I don’t know how Eleanor will ever recover from this,” Henry said, “she loved her mother so very dearly, and was so desolate after she was gone.”
“It falls hard upon you too, my boy,” the doctor said gravely.
“It is, but I have my Catherine, and our baby, and our happy life at Woodston. I never can forget my mother’s tragedy, but remember her gentle soul, and know how happy she would have been if she could have seen our happiness. To think she could have! She was still alive, all that time. Oh, how I wish we could have spoken.”
“Though she is dead, she speaketh,” the doctor intoned soberly. “Mr. Tilney, I did not want to show you this whilst your sister was present, for fear she might be overset. But I will show you now, and you can decide for yourself when to tell her about this finding. This – document was in your poor mother’s chamber, and in her hand.”
He drew from his pocket a small scrolled parchment, scratched on in faint ink.
“That is my mother’s writing,” breathed Henry.
“Would you read it aloud, Mrs. Tilney?” asked the doctor.
Catherine took the parchment with some reluctance, remembering the others she had read in the General’s room.
“Yes, go ahead, Catherine,” Henry encouraged her.
“My dearest children,”
Catherine read.
“How it breaks my heart to see you at Northanger, and I not able to approach you, or speak to you. Yet I have seen you, time and again. You do not know how often I have glimpsed you, followed you, peered in at you, in my sadness and my love. Frederick, you have grown to be a fine man; I hope your character is as stalwart as your figure, and that you will prove to be a benevolent Master of Northanger Abbey, and an honour to your country. Henry, my sweet son, I have been made so happy to know that you have become a man of God, and I rejoice in your wedding to your Catherine, which your father has told me of. I wish you both joy for ever, and I know you will treasure for my sake the little piece of tapestry I worked for your bride.”
Catherine looked up. “She did – the Grey Lady left me a piece of stitchery with a kind message embroidered into it. I have kept it, and we will treasure it always. Now let me go on.”
“And Eleanor, my darling girl – you are all I ever hoped you would become, and it is the greatest heartbreak of all that I could not complete my mission of being a mother to you, and guide you to womanhood.
When, someday, you read this, you will know that your father has kept me shut up in these dismal quarters for at least a decade; he thinks me mad, and so I suppose I am in some ways; but he is the one who is not only mad but cruel. When I fell ill he conceived that the curse of Northanger had fallen upon me, and he sequestered me away in his mad solicitude, to keep me safe. He would sit with me now and then, not deigning to speak often, and I was hard put to it to conceal that the sight of him was so much worse than entire solitude would have been. My only other visitor was the gardener, dear old Wantage, who looked after my needs, and to whom I have much reason to be grateful.
I dared never try to speak to you, or break the secret of my confinement, for your father threatened to murder you all, and certainly myself, if I dared; and as I have grown weaker and frailer over these years, I accepted my lot, as the punishment of God for marrying such a man; and I would do nothing to endanger you. It was enough to know, from my brief glimpses of your faces, that you were well, and you were happy.
Wantage has told me of your father’s death, and I hope to be soon released from here, and know the great joy of being reunited with you; but I have a foreboding, for he has not been here in some days, and I grow faint from lack of nourishment. I confess that I fear Frederick may have interfered in some way, but I will wait a little longer; in any case I am all but certain that my own death is nearly upon me.
All that remains, my dearest children, is for me to tell you how much I love you, and always have, and always will. God’s blessing upon you, and your children, forever more.
Your loving mother.
E. Tilney”
There was a silence, which Charles interrupted by coming down stairs to report that Eleanor was quiet, and would soon be asleep. “I think she will be better in the morning,” he said to the anxious Henry. “She is such a sensible woman, you know, and will endeavor to think of other things; and I hope that all will soon be as if this never was.”
“I don’t know if that is possible quite yet,” Henry told him. “We have more to tell you, Charles, and you must help us to judge how much should be made known to my sister. A letter has been found from my mother, to her children.”
“No! Can it be?”
“Read it yourself.” And Henry proferred the parchment.
After reading the sad missive, Charles looked up. “Knowing Eleanor’s tenderness, I have great fears,” he said, “but her love of her mother was so deep, and her heart so badly broken by her loss, that I could not in all conscience keep this message from her. You do not recommend such a thing?”
“I do not at all know,” said Henry. “I have hardly taken it in myself. My mother! Speaking to us, after so long. And now her voice is silenced. It breaks one’s heart, for her, even more than for us.”
“It does, Henry,” Catherine said softly, “but I am sure that, however painful, Eleanor ought to know of her mother’s last loving message to her. She will cherish it for ever.”
“Yes, I will tell her of it, gently,” Charles decided. “And then, afterwards, I will endeavor to help Eleanor, as Catherine will help you, Henry.”
“You will be her best consolation,” said Henry gratefully, “as Catherine is mine.”
“And once the message has been digested, I think, I believe, that Eleanor will not want to remain in this place for long, but to go home to Eastham House, and to our happy life there.”
“I am sure you are right,” said Henry ruefully. “I can hardly bear the thought of Northanger Abbey myself.”