The doctor dreaded seeing Victoria’s cot, empty now for seventeen days. He paused on the landing to prepare himself and to catch his breath after running up the three flights of stairs. He considered himself fit for a man of sixty, but the stairs were steeper than he remembered and he should have had the sense to take them at a slower pace.
After the darkness of the stairwell, the bright light in the room blinded him when he entered. He reached sideways automatically and it was the cot that steadied him until his eyes adjusted to the glare. He kept his head facing to the front while he regained his vision, but then found his eyes drawn to the contents of the cot: a rumpled red blanket, and a white linen sheet that was smooth at the outer edges and wrinkled towards the centre.
From the opposite side of the vast room the young child in the bed stared at him.
“I was told to leave it exactly as it was. Not to touch a thing, I was told,” said the nanny, standing beside the child’s bed.
“You did well, Nurse Dixon.” Dr Finn smiled in the direction of the young woman he’d always thought of as “nervy” even though she stood straight and still with her hands clasped in front of her; a picture of calm. Maybe it was the hurried way she spoke or the constant blinking that hinted at an uneasiness beneath the surface.
He wondered if it was the police or the mother who had given the order to leave the cot exactly as it was. Whoever it was had neglected to ensure young Charlotte was moved to another room where she wouldn’t have to look, on a daily basis, at the emptiness behind the bars of the cot.
The girl in the bed kept her dull eyes on the doctor and didn’t smile or speak as he crossed the room. He hoped that the concern he felt on seeing her looking so ill didn’t show on his face.
“Well, how is my favourite girl?” he asked her, before shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with the nanny, who immediately reverted to standing straight with her eyes cast down and her hands clasped in front of her. “Now let me have a look at you, Miss Charlotte, and we’ll see what the problem is.” He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Tell your old friend what the trouble is.”
“She isn’t talking, Doctor,” said the nanny. “Not one word since the baby disappeared. And not eating neither. I keep saying if you don’t eat you’ll lose your strength. I keep telling her that.” Her eyes closed as if for emphasis.
“Thank you, Nurse,” he said. “How long has she been in bed?”
“Four days, but she were poorly before that. Ever since . . . well, you know. Gets out to use the commode then crawls right back in again. Won’t let me help her neither.”
He checked Charlotte’s pulse, temperature, throat, eyes, heartbeat and abdomen, all the while calling her his pet and his brave girl. “Now your lungs,” he said as he helped her into a sitting position, noting how much weight she had lost since he last saw her.
“Take a deep breath and hold it, there’s a good girl.” He lifted her nightdress and saw the large fading bruises in a line across her back.
“Oh dear, that looks nasty. I thought that you’d given up falling off horses.”
The nanny’s head bobbed down. “It weren’t the horses – it were horseplay on the bed, more like. Gets overexcited and don’t know when to stop.”
“Will you ever forget your broken arm last year when you couldn’t ride for ten weeks? Now that wasn’t much fun, was it?”
Charlotte looked at the doctor, then the nanny, and then finally, as she slid back onto the pillows, the ceiling.
The doctor noticed that the nanny cast her eyes down when he spoke to her, but watched him when she thought he wasn’t looking. With his peripheral vision, the doctor noted the bobbing head and the blinking eyes.
“Will I ask Manus to find you a quieter pony?” asked the doctor and was pleased to see Charlotte smile as she shook her head. “I saw him on the way up riding your Mandrake. What a big horse for a little girl of eight. He’d frighten the life out of me.” The smile grew wider. “Manus told me months ago you’re well able to handle Mandrake. He says you’ve got a special talent and you’re nothing short of a champion. Actually, if I told you all the good things he said about you, you’d get a big swelled head.”
Charlotte continued to look pleased but, as the doctor began to pack his black bag, a look of disquiet replaced the smile on her face.
“And what’s this I’m told? That you’re not eating? Would I be right in saying that?” The doctor noticed out of the corner of his eye the nanny lifting her head. Charlotte glanced at her before looking back at the doctor and nodding.
“We’ll have to do something about that or Cook won’t be too happy, will she? And what about sleeping? Are you getting plenty of sleep?”
Charlotte shook her head.
“She’s awake half of the night and when she is asleep she’s tossing and turning around and opening her mouth all weird like,” said the nanny.
“We can’t have that,” said the doctor. “Exhausting for both of you. Is it nightmares you’re having, Miss Charlotte? Is that the trouble?”
Nod.
The doctor sat for a long period before asking softly, “Are you dreaming about little Victoria?”
He noticed her lip trembling as she nodded.
“I think we’re all having bad dreams about her,” he said, taking her hand. “It’s only natural. It’s hard to think of anything else. Of course your dreams are disturbed. How could they not be?” His other hand patted her arm. “Who knows, she might still be found. We can only hope and pray.” He turned to Nurse Dixon. “It’s important that Charlotte isn’t left alone at night even for a minute.”
“There’s no need to tell me that, Doctor.”
“Of course, Nurse. I wasn’t suggesting you needed telling, I was thinking of your isolation up here – no one even in earshot. So high up and so far away from the rest of the house. Perhaps you should ask another member of the staff to stay.”
“I wouldn’t trust no one else, especially not now. I can manage, Doctor.”
“I’m sure you can, but I’d hate to see you wearing yourself out with all that broken sleep and no time off. It must be lonely for you at all events. And you must be missing Teresa Kelly.” He looked over his half-glasses. “Have you heard from her yet?”
“No, she’s only been gone three weeks. She won’t have arrived yet.”
“Well, I hope when she gets there she’ll do well in her new life. She’s a great girl and deserves to.”
The doctor stood and crossed the room to look out one of the windows which was fitted with iron bars high enough to prevent a child falling out accidentally. “Spectacular view,” he said, admiring the green fields disappearing into the oak and beech forest in the distance. “Pity to see you missing this sunshine, ladies. God knows we get little enough of it.” He turned. “We’ll have to see how soon we can get you out of this bed, Charlotte, and then back into the fresh air with the both of you. I’ll have a chat with Miss East and we’ll see what we can do.” He smiled down at Charlotte. “It’s a pity that I can’t take you home with me. Mrs Finn would love a dotey little girl like you to fuss over. But we couldn’t take you away from Nurse Dixon, could we?” He looked up at the nanny. “You’d be lost without her, wouldn’t you, Nurse?”
Charlotte grabbed his hand before he heard a reply and he saw she was weeping and mouthing, but there was no sound.
“What is it, my dear?” he said as he sat down again. He tried to lip-read but she ceased her efforts before he had time to make out a single word.
“Can you write it down?” asked the doctor, taking his pen and a notebook out of his pocket.
“She can’t write,” said the nanny. “She’s had no governess yet.”
“Try to slow down, pet,” he said, “and I’ll see if I can understand.”
Charlotte looked over his shoulder at the nanny, then shook her head, sighed, closed her eyes and lay still.
The doctor stayed and talked of Manus, Mandrake, Lady Blackshaw in London visiting Lord Waldron and surely planning to bring her back a wonderful gift, the cook’s sponge cakes, his new grandchild, until he thought he was annoying rather than comforting her and that it might be time to leave.
“Now try not to fret,” he said. “I’ll report to Miss East on the way out and I’ll be back to see you first thing tomorrow. You are not to upset yourself. We’ll have you back on your feet in no time.” He bent over her. “You do trust your old doctor friend, don’t you?”
Charlotte kept her eyes closed and turned her face to the wall. Her expression was so desolate the doctor wished he could say the one thing that would bring life back into her face – that Victoria had been found safe and well and would soon be reunited with her family – but he couldn’t say it, and wondered if it would ever be said.
“You and your father saved my life all those years ago, Dr John. Now I’m asking you to help me save Charlotte’s.”
If Dr Finn didn’t hold her in the high regard that he did, and if he hadn’t been so disturbed by what he’d just seen in the nursery, he would have had to accuse Miss East of being overly dramatic.
“What’s going on, Lily?” he asked simply, handing over his hat, coat and Gladstone bag and accepting a measure of whiskey before sitting in the chair to the left of the turf fire. “You tell me. That little girl up there looks as if she’s dying of a broken heart.”
“It might be a broken heart and it might be something else, something to do with Nurse Dixon.”
We are all put on this earth to do one great thing, Miss East’s mother used often say, and Miss East, believing it, felt the enormity of her responsibility as she prepared to do the ‘one great thing’ that would justify her existence.
Dr Finn’s grim expression continued to darken as Miss East argued for the dismissal of Nurse Dixon and the handing over of Charlotte’s care to herself.
It wasn’t what she and the servants had seen and heard, though they had seen and heard troubling things, but Charlotte’s demeanour that had convinced her that Nurse Dixon wasn’t a fit person to be in charge of children.
“I’m sure you can see in your professional capacity that she’s no more a nurse than the cat. She gave herself that title, you know.”
“That I couldn’t comment on,” said the doctor. “I’ve never seen her do anything except stand still with her hands clasped in front of her. I think I make her nervous as she keeps blinking all the time.”
“She has a lot to be nervous about,” Miss East continued, and then proceeded to tell him everything she’d seen, and everything she suspected.
Dr Finn already knew of Miss East’s antipathy to Nurse Dixon, but not the strength and depth of it.
“She has Lady Blackshaw completely hoodwinked, which wouldn’t be difficult seeing Her Ladyship takes no interest in the child, but she doesn’t fool me.”
Charlotte always looked dispirited and morose in the company of Nurse Dixon, signs of a child in despair. Miss East recognised the signs because she had once been like that, and all Nurse Dixon’s smiles, concern and ministration while in public, especially for the benefit of Manus and Lady Blackshaw, not only didn’t fool her, but filled her with even more misgiving.
Miss East needed the doctor’s co-operation, not only for his physical presence to intimidate the tall, strong, young Dixon, but also for his gravitas and reputation, to give authority to what she was about to do.
Dr Finn felt sorry for Nurse Dixon who at her age should be out dancing and courting rather than leading a dreary, isolated life, and he didn’t like to interfere in the workings of the estate, but when Miss East said, “We can’t chance a second tragedy on our hands, especially while the mistress is away,” he felt the truth of it and agreed to support her.