‘What is wrong with you?’ she cried, spinning round quickly, her hand clasping the back of her head and her face furious. ‘Why did you do that?’
I looked down to see the little silver brush in my hand, long tendrils of golden hair falling from the bristles. ‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered, but then I realised that I should not be, for I was the one who had been betrayed. ‘What will you do with your hair on May Day?’ I said trying to steady my voice. ‘My mother told me that we should talk about your hair, for she wants to make you a willow crown.’
She sighed and turned back to the mirror grumpily. ‘I expect it will just be loose,’ she said. ‘That is the way May Queens tend to have it.’
‘I am sure that my mother will have me wearing the bonnet again,’ I said.
‘You can still have some flowers on it though,’ she said more softly.
‘And you will have irises,’ I said managing to steady my voice at last, ‘but only the blue garden ones will be in season, and you will carry a bouquet, just like your mother does in that photograph.’ I pointed to the silver frame on the dressing table.
‘I suppose so,’ she said glumly.
‘I thought your father would want that kind of thing,’ I said. ‘After all, it is a photograph from when your mother was May Queen. It is so romantic. It has always reminded me of a print that I saw in a book when I was in school. It was a woman in white with flowing hair and flowers everywhere – the Lady of Shalott.’
‘You are right – it is supposed to look like the Lady of Shalott,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want to—’
‘But it is surely how a May Queen should look,’ I insisted.
‘My mother is not the May Queen in that photograph,’ she said shortly. ‘She is dead.’
‘Dead!’ I echoed. ‘But…’
I looked at the photograph again and I saw how the hair I had thought caught in a breeze was in fact fanned out over a pillow, a soft crease of fabric behind the woman’s neck. The eyes that I had thought gazing down at the posy, were actually closed, the lids above the fan of her eyelashes smooth and slack. What I had thought a pure complexion was no more than skin that was lifeless and drained of blood, and instead of irises in the posy I saw scented lilies to mask the smell of death.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I knew that people used to take these kinds of photographs of relatives after they had passed. I…’ I could not explain that this photograph was quite unlike the others of this type that I had seen. The corpses in such photographs were usually held rigid against the backs of chairs or propped up by relatives, their heads lulling and arms limp, and I always thought they looked creepy as if they had dropped dead unexpectedly in the middle of receiving visitors or a family party. Yet the photograph on Iris’s dressing table seemed to show nothing of death. ‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated.
But she turned to me, her face full of rage. ‘If you had listened in school and not got yourself expelled then you might have learnt that the Lady of Shalott is dead in those pictures,’ she yelled. ‘Just like how my mother is dead in that one!’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, my face burning, and then I felt the warm trickle of a tear on my cheek. ‘Shit!’ I muttered. ‘Oh, no, I did not mean to use that word. I meant to say…’
She stared at me for a few seconds, her face so pale that I saw the throb of the little blue vein on her temple, but then she let out a kind of breathless laugh, and I laughed with her as she passed me her handkerchief. Then she stood up from the stool and flung herself against me, wrapping her arms around me, and I heard the clatter of the silver hairbrush as it fell from my hand.
‘Oh, Nell,’ she said, but she did not have to say any more because only then did we realise why we had really been brought together. It was not what we had in our lives that united us, it was what we did not.
23
I was being watched; we all were.
With barely a week to go before May Day, Francis Elliot-Palmer had begun his observations. I would see his dark figure in the undergrowth behind the big black box, its glassy eye peering out from the dapple of leaves, or his black coat hunched behind a wall or tree, the limbs of the tripod mingling with his body as if they had become one. He did not hide, but I thought that he did not want to be seen, as if the people he observed were no more than animals – like the foxes he had recorded hunting in broad daylight or the horses that had been loosed on the common. He wanted to record real life. He wanted the truth.
Francis saw my mother’s bleeding fingers as she sat on the bench under the oak tree and twisted willow rods into the shape of the May crown. He saw the soot and bent nails scraped from the cobbles of the blacksmith’s yard and the freshly painted banners propped up against the wall to dry. He saw the tangled ribbons of the maypole and the muddied tracks circling its base. He saw the blue irises shrivel in the frost and the silhouettes of the dog-foxes who braved the daylight.
I wondered what he really saw through his shiny coppery lens, or even through those pale eyes that always lingered just a moment too long. I wondered if he saw the truth, or just a dull flicker of light.
It was a time when my life seemed no more than one of his grainy recordings, yet there was one embrace, one memory, that lived in bright colour. I thought of that moment often – the tears on my cheek, the clatter of the silver hairbrush as it fell from my hand, and the warmth of her body against mine.
But the moment had not lasted and I had not even had the chance to return the embrace before Iris had run off at her father’s call and I had been left alone, looking at the nightgowns on the bed and straightening their arms to be sure that they were not touching.
It was a hug and no more than that, but something about it had felt wrong. I worried that Francis had been standing outside the window with his cine camera, and that the machine could somehow see us through curtains and walls and had captured my racing heart. I worried that he would see the truth – that the pain I had felt over the last month had been for Iris and not Sam – but I did not know that there was a bigger secret that was not mine, and I was to hear it later that week from the lips of another.
* * *
I did not see the woman until she stepped out of the shadows by the village hall and stopped me in my tracks. I had been to the high street, to the little bookstand at Partridge’s, a novel wrapped in striped paper tucked in my basket and I had hoped to go home and lose myself in a world that was not my own. I had thought to cross the road when I heard the echo of Mrs Elliot-Palmer’s voice from inside the hall and saw the flicker of the projector through the gaps in the curtains, but just as I was about to step off the kerb there was a shift in the shadows and the woman stepped in front of me.
She was a woman who I had seen before around the village. Although she must have been twice my age, she was no taller than me and wore a long, dark cape that made her look quite stocky. Her hair was pulled back from her rounded forehead and pinned behind the angular cap of a nurse. She hesitated when she saw me, holding her glowing cigarette in mid-air.
I nodded briefly and lowered my head, but she recognised me. ‘Nell! Nell Ryland!’ I stopped dead in fear that the whole hall would hear her through the walls.
‘Hello,’ I said, trying but failing to sound cheery.
‘Sadie,’ she said. ‘My name is Sadie. We have never met but I recognise you as the late Father Ryland’s daughter.’
‘Hello,’ I said again but she did not seem to notice my awkwardness.
She tossed her head back in the direction of the hall. ‘Did you hear her in there?’
‘I’m afraid I missed it,’ I said quietly.
‘It’s not really what I signed up for anymore,’ she said, as if she had to explain why she had been caught outside smoking. She sat down on the bench under the window, leaving enough space for me, as if it was a signal for the start of a conversation.
I sat down reluctantly.
‘I joined up because I’ve seen too much suffering among women,’ she beg
an. ‘Laws that control their bodies, wages that impoverish them, restrictions on what they can do and what they own.’ She took a long drag on the cigarette and I felt that she wanted to make her opinions known to someone – anyone who would not counter her.
I feared I was that person, but I nodded and sat quietly.
‘I’ve seen sores on the mouth of a mother who turned to gin because her husband had taken her children from her,’ she said. ‘I’ve bandaged the hands of a laundress who had to work day and night to feed hungry mouths. I’ve seen women committed to asylums by their husbands when they become inconvenient. I’ve stemmed the bleeding of women who had cut their own bodies to rid themselves of a child. I’ve dressed the sores of syphilis passed on by an unfaithful husband, and stitched the slashed wrists of a woman whose husband forced himself on her night after night.’
I felt that I should say something but I could not, for what she said shocked me and there was nothing I could possibly add. I could hear Mrs Elliot-Palmer’s voice through the window again and the words that I had heard before – representation, freedom, action – words that now seemed as fantastical as those of any preacher. I thought of the leaflet that my mother had torn up, of the words that she said were high-minded, and of the angel – no more than a mythical being – when the words this woman spoke were so real.
‘But it is not these women that she cares about,’ she continued. ‘She does not even care about ladies who work, like you and me. She cares more about her own vanity than the problems women face – that, and the destruction of her enemy.’
‘I’m not sure what you—’
But she gripped my arm firmly. ‘I know that the Elliot-Palmers have tried to use you to influence the Caldwells,’ she said, ‘and I am sorry about it. You are practically a servant at Haughten Hall and Mrs Elliot-Palmer should not expect you to risk your position and your wages. She means to set a young lady against an arrogant man who is already set in his ways.’
‘If you mean that they asked me to talk to Iris,’ I said, ‘I could not do it anyway. I tried but I soon realised that Iris has no influence over her father.’
‘Well, Mrs Elliot-Palmer talks of asking you again,’ she said. ‘She does not give up easily.’
‘I can’t!’ I cried. ‘You must tell her that I can’t.’
She shook her head slowly as if her words would do no good.
‘Iris is ill,’ I said, ‘and it would not be right to push her.’
‘Alright,’ she said, ‘I will tell Mrs Elliot-Palmer that, and if what you say is true, I wish Iris a swift recovery as there are some bad things going round at the moment, tuberculosis and pneumonia and the like.’
I nodded and at last she fell silent, but there was something about what she had said that caused me to worry.
‘I don’t know if it is serious,’ I said, ‘but there are things…’
There must have been something that she heard in my voice because she took the cigarette from her lips and turned to me.
‘You wear the uniform of a nurse,’ I said, ‘and you have spoken of tuberculosis and of women you have tended…’
‘You are right,’ she said, when I could not finish the thought. ‘I am a nurse. I am based at the cottage hospital, but I have also seen the pitiful state of the patients in the London infirmaries, and tended soldiers returning from the Boer War.’
‘Iris’s father fears that she might die,’ I said. ‘At least, that is what she told me. She said it in a way that made it sound as if he was fussing over nothing, but I can’t help but think—’
‘I cannot say what is wrong with her,’ Sadie said quickly. ‘I am not a doctor and I cannot help her unless she comes to me. I cannot really talk about—’
‘But she is pale sometimes,’ I cut in. ‘She is often queasy, and her father says he fears her dying the way her mother did.’
‘The way her mother did?’ she repeated. I noticed that her eyes had widened a little, but she said nothing more and just stared at the glowing tip of her cigarette.
‘She says the illness comes and goes,’ I added, ‘but it seems to have lasted for weeks now. Do you think it serious?’ When she did not answer, I felt a pit start to hollow in my stomach.
‘Please,’ I persisted. ‘I found pills in the medicine cabinet at Haughten Hall – pills that say they are to cure female irregularities and obstructions. If there is some growth in Iris’s system – her blood or her breath – that would surely be serious!’
Her lips pursed round the end of the cigarette, her brow furrowed a little, but she would not look at me, then after a while she said: ‘Has she been taking the pills?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘but her father wants her to, he wants her to be well enough to be the May Queen.’
‘The May Queen,’ she repeated. ‘That involves a procession. How far would she be walking?’
‘It starts at the blacksmith’s yard,’ I said, ‘and then once around the village green and to the crossroads up by Missensham Grange, and then back to the green.’
‘That is over a mile,’ she said. ‘These aristocrats do not have the constitution of the farm girls. Whether the pills have worked by then or not, Iris would be weakened, and it would be too far for her.’
‘I can’t stop it,’ I said. ‘It is her father who wants her to be May Queen, just as her mother was.’
‘Well, you should keep an eye on her,’ she said.
I nodded.
‘And make sure that she does not have to carry that willow arch too far.’
‘I don’t think that will be just her,’ I said. ‘She will have attendants, and it would only be for a little way.’
She wrinkled her lips in disapproval. ‘Well, just tell her not to walk too far if she can help it, or raise her arms above her head.’
They were words that I had heard before on the lips of Dora, the Caldwells’ housekeeper. I remembered her as she stood in the thicket of wych elms and talked of what the doctor had advised for her condition – orders to not walk too far or raise her hands above her head while she was with child.
‘No!’ I cried. ‘I have heard that advice given before. You cannot think that Iris is…’ I still did not believe it.
‘I didn’t mean to say that,’ said Sadie quickly.
But it was too late. I thought of Iris and the way she had embraced me barely a week ago. Despite that, she still had not felt that she could confide in me. ‘She can’t be,’ I said, ‘because she is planning to go to finishing school in Switzerland. She barely leaves the house, and she is not—’
‘—married?’ said Sadie.
We fell silent. Music drifted out from the hall, the stutter of trumpets from the gramophone and then the sound of the women singing along but I could not recognise the words or the tune.
‘You do know, don’t you?’ said Sadie after a while.
‘Of course,’ I said but my voice was faint and would have convinced nobody.
‘Just as I would have expected from a vicar’s daughter!’ she cried. ‘Oh, the church is so irresponsible…’ As she continued to rant about what girls are taught in school – the lack of anatomical textbooks, and the prudishness of society – I realised that the anger in her voice was not directed at me.
She had called me a vicar’s daughter, just as Iris once had when she had dared me to climb on to the back of her skittish horse. I was used to people mocking me in such a way, or assuming that I was a do-gooder, but there had been something else about growing up in the parsonage that meant people thought I should always be ignorant of the relationships between men and women, because to tell me of such things would destroy some sort of sanctity and open me up to evil.
Iris did not need to be married to be in the family way, of course she didn’t, but it was an idea that I could not get past, for Iris was a girl, like me, who liked horses, storybooks and embroidered nightgowns. When I had sat in the stable yard and listened to Sam’s voice and her laugh coming from the tack room, I had thought them
overcome by the passionate embraces that I read about in novels. But it had been more than that, and as I thought of the rhythmic thud of the mattress against the wall – the movement that had quivered a spider’s web and trembled the water in a bucket – I realised that I had seen enough of the world to understand, but only just. What I had witnessed that day was nothing like the soft love of a romantic novel but something raw and animal.
‘What are the pills for?’ I asked.
She stopped talking at last and looked up, her face grim, and this time I knew the answer.
‘Will they work?’ I persisted.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know which maker they are from but some will cause damage, whereas others are nothing more than aloe and soap. In most cases, they will do nothing but it depends how many she takes.’
‘The bottle was full,’ I said.
‘Maybe it is none of our business. We should not talk of this.’
‘You think that I am stupid, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Because I couldn’t work it out, because I could barely understand how something like this might happen? You and the Elliot-Palmers call me a lady, but you are the only ones who call me that!’
‘It is best that you stay a child for as long as you can,’ she said, ‘because womanhood comes too quickly for some. Under all those nursery clothes that her father makes her wear, Iris Caldwell has the body of a woman, but not the brains – she may know little more than you about what she has been doing.’
‘What can I do?’ I said. ‘Is there any way I can help her?’
‘You can tell her this, but tell only Iris and no one else.’ She paused, a little crease on her brow as if she was searching for the right words. ‘There are always two nurses at the cottage hospital, so one should always be on hand to help her sort it out.’
‘What?’ I murmured but she said nothing, and suddenly I realised why my mother avoided the cottage hospital and would cross the street when she saw the nurses. I also understood a little of why she had received women into the parsonage sitting room when I was a child – the women who would sew a quilt that showed the life of Eve. I thought I knew at last what they were repenting for and why their eyes were swollen.
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