by Rumer Haven
“Charlotte?” I called weakly when I had found my strength abandon me by the fourth step. I awaited response and, receiving none, had returned to my chamber and paced before treading down the hallway to access the servants’ stairwell to the rear. Nimbly, I lowered myself down step by step, a direction which I found easier, yet I did not want to descend too far and thus obligate myself to climb back by the same distance.
I was just level with the first window I reached when I paused to call my friend’s name once more. Right then, through this side window that had been raised ajar for proper ventilation, I heard a muffled cry. Moving to it, I looked out and up to where the cry seemed to lift upon the air, only for my gaze to fall on the shapely form of Charlotte. My dear girl was in Victor’s bedroom above, weeping at the window.
I busied my mind with what circumstances might have brought her to this state, and at that location, which fueled my ascent up the stairwell to find her where she stood. The door had been closed but not locked, and I, as Lady of the House, opened it without requesting permission.
Admittedly in trepidation that I might not find her alone, it was with a heavy sigh that I saw she was. I strode to her at once, whereupon she sank her pink, shining face into her hands and shook with greater sobs. I held her and caressed her hair, bidding her to quiet as though she were one of the darling lost daughters that would never know my arms.
“Why, Charlotte! Whatever are you doing in here, dear? What could be the matter?”
It took some time, but eventually, I drew from her what I sought.
“My darling Hazel,” she pled, “please mention nothing to Master.”
“Why should I? Why should he matter?”
“It is only that he reprimanded me this morning, as you slept.”
“But why?”
“He faulted me for a task in which he found me lax. However…”
“Yes?”
“Well, I believe it is fair to say Master does not approve of my attentions to you, nor yours to myself.”
I raised my brow and laughed. “Ah! Is that all? Well, my dear, we need not allow him to be a bother. I shall not be having any of that, when you have done so much to aid me, to nurse me, to—”
“I believe he finds my work to exceed my station, to transcend my duties without necessity.”
“Well, never you mind him,” I said and assured her Victor was best left to his own delusions; he was no threat to either of us. This seemed to offer her some solace, and her tears ceased to flow.
My fatigue persisted in the coming summer months, the rising temperatures only wearying me further. Some of our servants had begun to slack in their responsibilities and became very rude in their tones indeed, and I, in my fragile state and increasingly unstable temperament, acquiesced without argument when Victor demanded that a couple of them be dismissed on suspicion of theft besides.
This placed more burden on Charlotte, unfortunately, who became more of a maid-of-all-work in assuming their foregone responsibilities. Victor began directing orders himself, his interactions with her accumulating in number and length.
Charlotte’s moods darkened, as did mine in her wake, and in our limited contact we found ourselves irritable—those times when we should have been joyful in each other’s company and savoring the respite from daily drudgery. I suspect she blamed me for her demotion, and, though guilty of allowing it to happen, I still could not help but resent her for showing me less attention and showing Victor more.
I found myself taking longer to rise out of bed—unattended as I was—and lacking motivation to do anything more than sit and cry in the servant stairwell, waiting, should Charlotte cross my path or appear again in Victor’s bedroom window.
I found myself intolerant of closed doors and the secrecy that could lie therein, and if ever I saw them so, I opened them at once.
I found myself alone again, losing purpose and questioning whether or not to lose my life as well. It was as though by their neglect, they had signed my death sentence, and, looking to the scar of bloodletting at my wrist, I contemplated how I might be my own executioner.
He had warmed toward her; that much was evident. Once, upon entering the parlor, I observed him touching her chin as he made a light joke of an error distressing her—a joke! When before he had chastised for these frequent, clumsy mistakes… His warm frivolity made her laugh, I recall, though her sound lacked the richness that would normally lift and cradle me. Instead, her pitch was artificially high, and it echoed emptily.
I should have taken some degree of comfort in this observation, but I was cross at her energy, at her healthy pink complexion, and without thought I mechanically mimicked her silly laugh out loud before retiring upstairs, my back turning on their surprised faces. I sought the confinement of Victor’s dressing room, slamming the door to wall me inside a close privacy until I could no longer bear the sight and scent of him all around me.
When Charlotte came to me that night, I chastised her for tasks she had neglected and heaped instructions upon her to coldly assert my position.
“Yes, Hazel.”
“Perhaps you ought to practice addressing me as Madam once more, in the event anyone does come calling.”
“Yes, Madam.”
I conducted myself thus for a little more than a fortnight when a weeping Charlotte fell at my feet one July afternoon.
“Madam, I… Oh, Hazel! What has happened to us?”
The most frigid of hearts could not have held their stinging frost at this. My own thawed at once and dripped through my eyes.
“No,” she said, “do not distress yourself so. The fault is mine. You are so pale, I refuse to drain your health further.”
I might have said the same of her; her pallor was not as rosy, and her eyes appeared ringed with fatigue. So when she suggested I emerge from my living tomb, as my home now felt to me, and take a turn about the garden for fresh air, I hesitated to disagree for the good it might bring her as well.
“It has been weeks, Madam. Your circulation would benefit from the exercise, and you will have me on which to lean if it proves difficult.”
I nodded dumbly at first, then eventually managed to say, “Hazel. Please.” Then, “Yes, a walk. But not here.”
Oh! How my ailing heart leapt on walking arm and arm with my Charlotte! We strolled through Brompton Cemetery in this way, rather than on the open street—not in shame of our fondness for one another, but in protection of it.
My lungs filled, and I thrilled in the feel of once again engaging my muscles. And yet, a tickling at the back of my neck reminded me of our visibility, and my exhilaration was checked by an increasing suspicion that someone was watching the two of us, perhaps waiting for indiscretion to feed his or her gossip at teatime.
“Let us walk this way,” I said as I diverted my friend onto a smaller path that led into more shade and fewer visitors, a path with which I was all too familiar. I casually looked about—scanning for leering eyes, in actuality—and my arm, interlocked with Charlotte’s, grew rigid.
“My dear, it is so nice to be held close to you,” she said as she laid her opposite hand onto my forearm and emitted a sigh as she squeezed it. She seemed to lean on me as much as I on her. “I have watched you, you know. As you have slept these past weeks. I have crept into your chamber as you slumbered so soundly and just stood beside you, daring not touch, but permitting myself to look over you, as I always had done. The moment you stir, however, I have hastily fled, fearing discovery.”
As she said it, dreams resurfaced to me, sensations I had had whilst sleeping that someone had, indeed, been near. I had only comforted myself at those times that it was my guardian angel when most desperately needed.
Charlotte proceeded to speak as she clung to me, and her pace slackened.
“At those moments when I looked upon your face, so much more at peace in sleep than I have seen of you awake, I…I would look to the lamps and ponder turning them up…but low, just low, enough that no flames
would bring light but enough that their vapors would bring us both sleep, and, through that, eternal, perfect peace. Oh, how I longed to crawl in beside you such that we might sleep forever in that way.” She then smiled her satisfaction at all she viewed around her. “Darling Hazel, I feel this will always be our place.”
I exhaled, cupped my hand over hers, and eventually slowed her steps further.
As we stood at the foot of my infants’ shared grave—indeed, where Victor and myself will lie one day—my spine shivered and sensed an unseen presence once more. Charlotte’s sympathetic hands caressed my arm as I avoided looking in any other direction but the burial plot. If someone was, in fact, spying on me, they felt so very near, and I wondered if I might not even feel the pursuer’s breath upon my neck…
Perhaps it was only my guardian angel again, keeping ever-close watch if I was not to be left to my own devices. Nevertheless, preferring distraction, I bent down to pluck a flower I had planted at my unborn children’s resting place and recited my Wordsworth:
thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave…
As I concluded the stanza and twiddled the little flower in my fingers, Charlotte pulled me closer, asking if I would prefer to return home, where she would make me some tea or draw a bath if I wished to soak after the day’s exertions.
I replied that I wanted to paint her.
Once home and in my bedroom, we both took liberty to forego our restrictive outer layers and corsets for lightweight muslin that allowed us to breathe. I felt buoyant, and Charlotte’s ease inspired my brush. She sat so still for me—as she always had before—and adjusted herself readily to the positions I asked of her.
As the sun sank lower in the sky, so did the shadows creep across her face, altering her appearance from what I had hoped to capture. Yet she sat there, still, looking to me so sweetly; I stood holding my brush aloft, frozen as a statue, returning that gaze.
With a rustle of muslin, I stepped around the easel to approach Charlotte and run my finger down her ivory neck. I traced it back to her cheek; then, with a finger at her jaw and my thumb on her chin, I angled her face such that it would capture more of the light.
“You have the face of an angel,” I said.
Charlotte uttered nothing but held me in her eyes.
Relations between us were good again from that day on. Euphoric, I might even say. My health was returning to me, and I was able to take to our stairs with more ease. Charlotte and I maintained the façade of mistress and servant whilst occupying other floors, but how my head would become dizzy and my heart flutter on ascending that penultimate flight to my bedroom, where I always knew I would find her waiting for me, no matter what work was neglected.
It was Victor’s countenance that had become more forlorn as late. A transparent man, he could never conceal his smoldering eyes when looking from me to Charlotte and her to me. Not very long, then, after we had commenced our sittings for what I entitled, Phantom of Delight—after Wordsworth’s poem and for which I dressed her in the most liquid, translucent silks—it should not have surprised me as much as it did to climb those stairs one afternoon and find Victor there waiting for me instead.
It did not take long for him to undress me after running his hand down my back in his signature seduction, the way he would settle his hot palm at the base of my spine and make my nether region yearn to yawn open. And so I allowed him to take me in body that day although I gave heart and soul to someone else.
She had heard everything from the landing.
I would later learn from the cook that a bout of sickness had delayed Charlotte’s completion of duties downstairs, which now reconciles with my memory of her ill color and slouching stature as she stood there, just one flight below us. I will not forget how she turned her face to the wall as Victor stroked her cheek with a finger on his way down to depart for business matters up north at the canal. I stood there in the doorway in my robe, useless to do anything but back into the dressing room as she started up the stairs towards me.
“What have you done?” she moaned. “Why have you done this?”
“I…” I struggled to find my tongue. “He was here, and he…he is my husband.”
“But is it not me that you want? Is not this, what we have, what you wanted?”
“I don’t know what I want,” I replied, “nor indeed ever did.” He is my husband, reason bade me to say again, but instead I moved to close the door against sound, only for her to draw it back open.
“You did know, once,” she hissed. “When it was convenient for you, when you had everything to gain and I nothing to lose. Well, I have lost something, haven’t I? I lost it to you, and now am I to lose you as well?”
“Contain your volume.”
“Contain myself, indeed! I am not the one with so much to conceal!”
“Please.” I seized the air for breath, cocking my head to glance anxiously beyond the doorway for what ears might intrude. “I lack the fortitude to address this now.” Firming a fist beneath my bosom, I implored in a whisper, “You must know.”
“Must I?” Her spiraling waves liberated themselves from the knot I had clumsily plaited for her earlier; twitching as she spoke, they accentuated the mad glare of her red-veined eyes.
“I should hope, yes, that you do.”
I saw her eyes follow my hand as it dropped to just below my naval. “I should think not,” she spat before throwing the door closed as she removed herself from the dressing room.
In hindsight, covering my womb with my hand during this exchange had not been deliberate; in view of my history of swift conception, it had been an automatic gesture as I realized a feasible consequence of Victor’s and my actions. That would have been enough to awaken my companion’s envy, and yet was not her own sudden illness and swelling as much cause for mine?
Without any regard for how grievously the previous occasion of its kind had upset me, Mama called for another séance. Same medium, same drawing room, but differing participants. Victor did not attend. Nor did Charlotte. As it was, I had seen very little of either of them.
As her friend was also otherwise engaged, “Ah! Well, five is number enough,” Mama said and assumed her seat.
This time round, I brought pen and paper with which to ponder the subject of a new painting. Mama frowned upon the unneeded clutter at the table, particularly the ink that could spoil the cloth, yet acquiesced when I asserted the activity would bring me peace and only be inspired by the proceedings rather than a distraction from them. A falsehood for certain, but it satisfied her.
Lights dimmed, the medium led us in song to a discordant melody. As we chanted our last refrain and he continued to preside, I absently began to sketch on my sheet; the first contours of my pen automatically followed the line of Charlotte’s jaw from memory. I dipped my pen again to scribble that out and recommence on a different portion of the page.
Ignoring the summonings of the medium, I allowed my eyes to drift instead to my reflection, visible on a black slice of window still exposed. Occupied as such by my own visage, I sought to draw it.
My features were altered in the low light, the glass appearing like the dark waters of a still pond; I sought out its depths. Lightly, I brushed my pen tip to the paper, outlining my forehead and temples and rounding out the cheeks as I would have them look, rather than sunken and angular as they actually were.
Without separating my line of sight from my own eyes’ reflection, I allowed my left hand to move mechanically. I remained transfixed, no longer aware of anything around me, just that within me. I was an old woman, I was a child, a man, a blade of grass. In the quiet recesses of my mind, I began to feel infinite, that I transcended this time that
caged me in a mortal coil, and I murmured what I later saw my hand had already written—a prayer from my childhood:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
“Yes, take it. Do more with it than I have, I beg of you…”
“Hazel, dear!”
“Stay with us, darling. And you, do something!”
A cough. “Er, Margaret, ah, is that you, you naughty girl? You leave her in peace at once!”
“Hazel, Hazel! Open your eyes.”
I felt the pen pulled from my grip and a hand at my shoulder, shaking it gently. A red glare signaled me to open my eyes to a brighter room and my brother at my side. His wife was already holding my right hand and patting it, whilst Mama fanned herself and asked for her salts. The medium dabbed his gleaming forehead with a handkerchief and took a swift sip from a small flask he had withdrawn from his inner coat pocket.
Remembering not only where but when I was, I heaved a deep breath through my nose and cleared my tightened esophagus.
“I—” I choked out. “I am all right.”
Massaging my throat, I then nearly strangled myself on looking down at my drawing. Behind the words of my prayer peered a woman’s face, but it was not Charlotte’s, and it certainly was not my own. It was not, in fact, anyone’s whom I have ever had the recollection of seeing. Most prominent were the eyes; though sketched in black ink, somehow I knew their color.
“Is that Margaret?” the medium asked of me.
“Pardon?”
“Is that a rendering of her? Did you see her, or might she have drawn a self-portrait using your hand as her instrument?”
“You silly man,” my brother said. He had barely exhibited patience at the previous séance, unwilling as he is to bother with much outside his own household affairs, and with the supernatural at that. “Can you not provide explanation for such a thing? Must you again distress my sister with these theatrics?”