The Lost History of Dreams

by Kris Waldherr

  “And now you have me gossiping,” she said once she’d let the dog out. She handed Robert a paring knife. “Perhaps you need to be less idle, Mr. Robert.”

  “My apologies. I should have offered.”

  Ada’s dead. Buried in the glass chapel, he told himself as he peeled potatoes for dinner. It was hard to imagine the Isabelle Lowell he knew malnourished with lice and sores. As for Mrs. Chilvers’s account of Hugh and the key, surely the fact that Hugh expected Isabelle to arrive at Weald House weighed in her favor.

  “Is Miss Lowell about?” he asked Mrs. Chilvers once he’d finished the vegetables. He’d use Missus Dido’s warning about Tamsin Douglas as an excuse to see her.

  “Is that wise?” She shook her head. “How strange you are today, Mr. Robert.”

  However, he did see Isabelle later that afternoon, though the encounter was unplanned. When Robert left the kitchen to wend his way back to the stable house, he heard a rustling from the kitchen garden. He peered over the wall.

  Isabelle stood by the beehive. Unsurprisingly, she was dressed in black. The remainder of her attire wasn’t anything he’d ever expect. Her arms were covered by long white gloves, and her head hidden beneath a wide straw hat covered by a white veil thick enough to obscure her features.

  A soft murmur rose from beneath the veil as she dragged briars from a pile toward the beehive.

  “I’m sorry,” she said gently. “I know you’re angry, but this is to help you. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  For a moment, he wondered if she was speaking to herself. And then he understood: she was talking to the bees just as Grace had that morning.

  Robert watched in silence, fearful of upsetting her or the bees, as she methodically wove briars around the base of the hive, pausing only to survey her work or to speak to them. The thorny barrier must be to dissuade anyone from disturbing the bees. “It’s for your own good,” he heard her say. “You need peace.”

  He finally tore himself away, yearning for peace himself. But it was not to be: in the stable house, Robert found a thick green book on the table where he’d taken his meals. A letter was set on top of it.

  Gratitude does not come easily to me, Isabelle had written:

  Regardless I would be remiss not to thank you for your protection this morning at the church. After much reflection I understand I have been unkind—you suffer as I do. I hope this book offers you consolation, and invite you to take your meals henceforth in the kitchen.

  The book was a pricey 1841 edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The leather binding seemed to welcome his touch, for it felt warm and pliant when he opened it to the title page. Hugh de Bonne’s signature slashed across the top margin. He’d written beneath in sepia-colored ink: Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved?

  Robert stared at Hugh’s inscription for some moments, feeling as though his cousin had reached a hand across the veil of time. But then Robert’s elation transformed into an odd disappointment. It took him a moment to recognize why: the signature he’d yearned to see was Ada’s, not Hugh’s.

  II.

  Isabelle did not speak of their encounter on the moors, nor of the book and her letter when they met the following evening in the library. But Robert did—he’d spent the day thinking of little else. Despite the comfort of taking his meals in the kitchen and the diversion of Hugh’s Ovid, he found himself checking the clock as the day dragged toward seven, scarcely paying mind to Sida’s return. “How distracted you are, my sweet,” she’d said before she’d taken off in her usual way.

  “I apologize for startling you on the moors yesterday,” he said to Isabelle after offering an awkward thanks for the Ovid. “When I saw you, I remembered I’d found your handkerchief in the church. But then I understood my intrusion.”

  His tone was careful, as though to avoid upsetting a bird in a tree. Isabelle’s hair was again unbound about her shoulders, as though she’d been too weary to dress it. She appeared a different figure than the white-veiled woman he’d witnessed weaving briars around the beehive, or the vision on the moor. He glanced at the oil painting of Ada across the library, at her eyes cast in shadows, her long dark hair. The tenderness he’d felt upon first encountering the portrait now seemed layered with all he’d learned from Isabelle’s story: Ada’s gentleness and artistry. Her vulnerability. For a moment, he imagined the painted figure bearing light hair instead of dark. Grey eyes, like Isabelle’s.

  Ada is dead. You only wish her to be alive.

  Isabelle accepted the handkerchief without examining it. Her breathing sounded heavier than usual.

  “I’d thought you’d returned after the service, Mr. Highstead. I didn’t recognize your carriage.”

  “I had tea with someone in the village,” he said carefully. “Someone you might know from your past.”

  “It seems my past is the same as my future. Here, at Weald House,” she said, staring down at the fire while it crackled in the grate. A corner of her mouth lifted. “When I first saw you on the moors, I considered if you were on your way to climb Ada’s Folly again.”

  He swept his hand toward his ankle. “I am quite tamed, Miss Lowell. We have our agreement. I keep my word.”

  “And I mine,” she countered, her old sharpness returning.

  “Understood.” A deep breath. “I have something I must speak about. This will be unexpected, but there’s something I must warn of. It regards Missus Dido and Ada’s Folly—”

  The speech he’d carefully planned was cut short by a breeze picking up, rustling ashes from the grate. A smattering of dust flew into Isabelle’s face. “Oh!” she cried, as she dissolved into a fit of coughing. “Oh, my eyes!”

  “You should take better care of yourself,” Robert said once she’d calmed. He found himself staring at her hair, her face, her hands. She looked as she ever did, with her tight angular form adorned in grey half-mourning, her preternaturally white hair, her large pale eyes with their dark lashes, her long musician’s fingers. Yet everything was different.

  She shook her head, moisture streaming down her cheeks. “Why should I take care of myself? No one but pilgrims come here. No one truly knows me now that Ada’s gone—not Owen for all his loyalties, not Mrs. Chilvers for all her age, nor Grace for all her cleverness. Ada was beautiful. Ada was loved. What did that get her?” She rubbed her fists against her face, her eyes watering still. “A glass chapel in the woods.”

  “It must be difficult to view so much of the world as your enemy.”

  “I don’t see the world as my enemy, Mr. Highstead. Only the pilgrims and . . .”

  You. She was going to say this—Robert had no doubt.

  “I know you consider me an interloper,” he said, his tone rising. “Someone who’s arrived to bring discord into your life after you’ve lost so much. I do understand—you and I, we’re more alike than not. I’ve also lost those I love. Not just my wife, but my mother when I was a boy, my father as a young man. It’s for these reasons I became a daguerreotypist.”

  “Which is why you’re here.” She looked up at last, her eyes swollen from ash. “Our conversations always return to those daguerreotypes of Ada’s Folly, don’t they? You must be very desperate to regain your brother’s favor.”

  Before he could stop himself, he snapped, “You think that’s why I’m here? Because of an inheritance? It’s my wife I’m doing this for. No one else. I know what it’s like to mourn a spouse and yearn to be reunited with her. If I can grant this to Hugh . . .”

  Isabelle’s face crumbled briefly. “Oh,” she said.

  Robert could hear the wind outside rustling against the trees. The crackle of fire in the grate.

  Isabelle said, “You must have loved Cressida very much.”

  “More than you can imagine.”

  “What was she like?”

  Robert knew he shouldn’t answer, but he couldn’t resist. In a way, it was li
ke making Sida live again.

  “She—my wife, Cressida—was an artist. She was wise. She helped me see beauty. She made me care about the world. To take part in it, instead of writing of it for a book.” His voice thickened. “She was the kindest person I’ve ever known.”

  Before he could think twice, he’d taken out the eye miniature from his pocket. As Isabelle examined it, her brow rose. Like Ada, he suspected she was thinking. But that wasn’t what she said.

  “Such a dark iris. Like that of a Persian.”

  Robert nodded reluctantly, though he didn’t sense judgment in her observation. “Her father was a lascar, her mother English. Cressida was orphaned as a child. Sent to live with her mother’s brother who considered her little better than a servant . . .”

  Robert’s words drifted into silence as yearning overtook him. That August day he’d come upon her by the river surrounded by cattails and dragonflies. She’d offered an apple. “Pomona,” he’d murmured. The apple was crisp and cool. “Eve,” she’d answered, taking a bite in turn, defiant despite the bruise on her jaw where her uncle had slapped her. Their lips had met and they’d sunk into the cattails, where no one could spy their entwined limbs. Afterward, she’d said, “I must go. Yet I can’t leave you, my sweet.” He’d answered, “Nor I you . . .”

  Isabelle’s voice interrupted his memory.

  “Mr. Highstead? Are you well?”

  Robert drew a deep breath before returning the eye miniature to his pocket. “I’ve said too much. My apologies.”

  What had possessed him to reveal the miniature? It only reminded him how he’d ignored Sida that afternoon. Worst of all, he’d grown no closer to uncovering Isabelle’s identity. Nor had he warned of the threat to her inheritance.

  Isabelle burst out, “I don’t mean to be unkind, Mr. Highstead. Had circumstances been different, we might have even been friends—God knows I could use one. It’s just . . .”

  She dipped her face toward her clasped hands on her lap.

  “Ada. Hugh. The pilgrims.” Robert trained his gaze on his journal. “I understand.” Yet he found he understood nothing at all.

  A long moment of silence passed, broken only by Virgil nudging the door open. Once the dog settled at Isabelle’s feet, she pointed at Robert’s journal. “I must continue Ada’s story.”

  III.

  The Third Night’s Story

  You asked me of Missus Dido and Ada’s Folly, Mr. Highstead. Despite Missus Dido’s jealousy, you might think the visit to Canterbury Cathedral was when the seeds for the glass chapel were planted. You’d be right, but like seeds sown in frozen soil, they took time to flower. However, if I am to be completely honest in my recounting of Ada’s story, I must admit this mattered not. You see, there were other forces affecting my aunt.

  Ada was not the same after that trip to Canterbury, when Hugh had her eye painted. If she’d thought she’d loved him before, she now knew without a shadow of doubt that she loved him more than she’d believed anyone could love. Yet this knowledge was an icy splash of water. It wasn’t because of Hugh—Ada remained as drawn to him as the day they’d met over her poor dead sparrow. Nor was it because of the portrait of her eye—if anything, she’d taken the portrait as a sign he loved her too. It was because of her parents, Lucian and Adelaide. All those stories she’d been told of her parents and their eternal devotion returned to her. They rearranged themselves into a new narrative: love had led to their deaths as surely as consumption would one day lead to hers. Protectiveness rose in her. If Hugh cared for her, she’d destroy him in time. Ada had never felt so haunted.

  If this wasn’t enough of a detriment, Missus Dido had uncovered Hugh’s history beyond what he’d confided to Ada: the married women he’d seduced, the courtesan who’d drowned herself after finding herself with child, the duel he’d fought in London over a flimsy insult, which had left him with his limp and scar. The scandals. The waste.

  “You believe Mr. de Bonne is courting me for my inheritance,” Ada said.

  Missus Dido clucked her tongue. “I didn’t say that exactly.”

  Regardless, Missus Dido’s spiteful words hit their mark. Ada refused to leave her room. Ignored the piano. Refused to come down for meals. Her love for Hugh would become another loss among many.

  Sensing her avoidance, Hugh sent Ada the miniature of her eye later that week; he’d mounted the watercolor inside a small brass frame. He wrote: I have been forward in my attentions. I wish to make amends, but fear I am too late. Regardless, I will remain in Herne Bay hoping for some sign of your favor. He finally sent the afore-promised dove to join the first one, but he was right: it was too late. Ada set the doves in their golden cage outside on her balcony. Still, his letters continued to arrive, some light of tone, others concerned. I must have wearied you with my talk of queens and kings, he wrote in one. In others he included poems that spoke of birds and air from a new book he’d written:

  Alone, I turn to find her thus:

  Her dark hair asunder with nested

  Sparrow. Her shoulders artless

  Yet garbed with Dove and Ibis.

  Ada did not respond. Missus Dido tutted at the arrival of every letter, but insisted Ada read his poems aloud.

  Hugh soon replaced his letters with packages. These offerings contained books to tempt Ada’s interest, though he had no idea of her interests beyond music and birds. Some were of the classical world to match the Ovid Wilhelm had taught her. Others were of scientific knowledge, such as Audubon and John Walker. None were novels. This pleased Ada, for she was hungry for truth, not illusions—she’d lived with those long enough. He even created a scavenger hunt, where one book led to another, and finally to a letter tucked inside a teapot. Though Ada showed no one what he’d written, her cheeks had stained scarlet.

  Encouraged by her spare note of acknowledgment, Hugh sent her geological specimens he’d uncovered during his travels. They were dark and darted with strange shapes. Fossils, Hugh called them; Ada recalled finding similar while on the moors with Wilhelm when she was five. She discovered herself staring at the fossils at odd times: when Missus Dido plaited her hair, or when she should have been asleep. The shapes and colors of these fossils suggested life in reverse; one had to imagine the form that had been trapped in them so long ago, then calcified into loss as they rotted away. The fossils contained a primordial power. She sensed that if one were to look away from them, they’d morph on their own into a fungus that would overtake the room, banishing the pink cabbage rose wallpaper into memory.

  Missus Dido offered to speak to Hugh. “I see him every night in the restaurant downstairs,” she explained more eagerly than Ada cared. “I can tell him to let you be.”

  “It’s not necessary. I’d like to leave tomorrow,” she informed Missus Dido. “Time to go home.”

  * * *

  That last night in Herne Bay, Ada breathed regularly to calm herself; her last physician suggested this as an alternative to laudanum or morphia when her nerves became overtaxed. In and out, she thought, her diseased lungs straining. Even after removing her stays and donning her nightdress, she still felt distressed. (Perhaps a better word was disoriented; Ada found this easier than overtaxed or delicate. How weary she was of being an invalid!) She forced the window open, welcoming the chill air. In the distance, she heard the lobby clock chime eleven; surely everyone was now asleep. Even Hugh.

  It doesn’t matter, she told herself. I mustn’t love him.

  Then: Did Hugh know she was leaving?

  The memory of Hugh in the cathedral returned. His eager voice as he recited his poem. His face beneath the stained glass. His delight in the eye miniature.

  What does it matter? she thought. Nothing matters.

  Ada blew out all the candles save the two framing her mirror. She unpinned her hair, which was as fine as it was dark. Just like her mother’s. Her eyes looked especially large and bright, though she hadn’t taken any belladonna. Were they like her father’s? She untangled her hair,
first with her fingers, then moving to the brush. It was a difficult business without Missus Dido’s help; she’d sent her guardian away after finding her inexplicably weeping over Hugh’s poems.

  She blew out another candle, leaving only one. Darkness would help to forget.

  Perhaps it was the lack of light, but Ada’s hearing sharpened. She heard each stroke of the brush as it caught against each snarl, the rush of the ocean through the window as it beat against the pier. Neptune’s Arm, they’d called the pier. A lovely name for something so unlovely. During the day the pier was brash and loud, lined with paddle steamers and people, as hard of aspect as water was soft. Now that it was night, all was silent on the pier but birds. Gulls, cormorants, even crows. She closed her eyes to take them in, imagining their wings caught by air, the rush of wind sweeping toward France. Across the sea. Away.

  Her reverie was interrupted by footsteps outside her door. A soft knock.

  “I’m sleeping,” she said.

  “You don’t sound asleep,” a calm male voice replied from outside the door. Hugh’s voice.

  Ada opened her eyes to stare at herself in the mirror. She was flushed beneath golden light. Her lips parted in a manner she’d never noticed before. Her eyes widened as if she was anticipating something. But what? If I love him, we must never be, she reminded herself.

  “Come in.” The command in her voice surprised her.

  She heard the door open. She heard Hugh take a step toward her.

  “Why are you here, Mr. de Bonne?” Her voice was bitter in its imperiousness.

  “Because you’ve been sad.”

  Hugh stated the sentence like the irrefutable fact it was. Just as Madame Clarice had when she’d described that Beethoven sonata.

  Ada didn’t bother with a denial. She thought of her piano, how each note marked the passage of time in a way that turned it endurable, how the sound rose from inside it to rise into air. Her fingers clenched, yearning for the keyboard. As if this could distract her from his presence.