Ada grasped his hands across the table, nearly knocking the claret onto his journal. How shaky she felt. How hot.
“Oh Hugh, I’m so happy! After everything we saw today—well, I know how distressing it was to find your family home in such a state . . . but with this chapel you can honor your family’s memory. Their losses.”
At her words, Hugh drew back, the shadows from the candlelight distorting his face ever so briefly. The room turned grey. She felt moisture dot her brow.
“Is it warm in here?”
“My love, what’s happening to you?” he cried, his eyes wide.
“I-I don’t know.”
As if from a distance, she heard Hugh’s chair fall as he sprang toward her. Hugh pulled her against him just as her chest began to catch again. Her stomach too. “Doctor!” Hugh shouted in French. “My wife needs a doctor! Get one!” Her lungs heaved as she began to shake. I’m dying, she thought. It’s not how I expected it would be. She’d imagined she’d see her parents awaiting her, Wilhelm too. Some kindness to soothe her away from life. She saw nothing but Hugh’s panicked face above hers.
A flare of pain. The room turned a blinding yellow.
Yellow brilliant as sun.
His heart grew loud against her ears, drowning everything else out in the restaurant. “Ada,” she thought she heard. “Never leave me.”
A viscous fluid filled her mouth. Her throat. The tang of iron.
Red as dark as blood.
She tried to speak but couldn’t. She clutched her hands over her chest. Her throat. Her mouth. A splatter of red splayed from between her fingers. Onto Hugh’s favorite blue shirt.
Blue brighter than twilight.
* * *
Ada knew it was serious, for the doctor would only speak to Hugh, and Hugh’s eyes were swollen, and he wouldn’t touch her when she offered her hand. He sat on the edge of their bed in their rooms in the Marais for some time before he spoke. He wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“I was wrong to wed you,” he said. “Wrong to take you from your home. Wrong to let you love me.”
Ada began to weep. She recalled how Hugh had scolded her in Sèvres while they’d climbed to his family home. Like he was someone else. Not the man she’d married.
“But I am your wife!” she cried. “Do you no longer love me?”
Hugh wouldn’t answer.
* * *
Isabelle’s voice broke. Robert set down the journal.
“I’m sure this is difficult to speak of,” he said.
Isabelle shook her head, her eyes suspiciously red. “We must continue, Mr. Highstead. After all, I’m nearly to the end.” She glanced anew at the door. “I’ll be quick as I can.”
“Very well, Miss Lowell.”
Robert wrote the remainder of her story without halting. Later he couldn’t recall how Isabelle’s words had found their way from her mouth onto the page. But there they were in his neat handwriting for anyone to read.
The Raven and the Rose
Excerpted from The Raven and the Rose by Hugh de Bonne, published 1835 by Chapman & Hall, London.
As I dream, my Past arises to judge
Amid this Limbo abiding on this sweet Earth—
For I was One who once wandered thus
O’er Wood and Moor laid low by Birth
Made too bitter from Darkness and Lust,
My sole low Companions then.
And then—
I awake—I remember—I see—
My locus amoenus lying beside me
Again crowned by Roses
And tamed by Ravens.
*
I.
The Fourth Day’s Story, Continued
When does an ally turn into an enemy? That was the question Ada asked herself, Mr. Highstead, the day after their return from Hugh’s family home in Sèvres.
At first, all seemed to be well: once the doctor left, Hugh took Ada’s hands and said, “Forgive me for speaking as I did. I was terrified—you were going to die, and blamed myself for forcing you to exert yourself. I couldn’t abide without you!” But from the look in his eye, she suspected there was something he was hiding. Something she feared to learn. For some reason, she recalled Missus Dido’s gossip about the courtesan who’d drowned herself. Though Hugh had confessed to Ada of his past before their marriage, he’d offered no explanation for the suicide beyond a remorse-filled shrug.
Still, they pretended all was well, especially as November gave way to December, with all the festivities that corner of the year entailed. As sick as Ada had been, within four weeks she was nearly as she was before her collapse, though she still found spots of blood in unexpected places: on the edge of a lace collar, or inside the palms of her gloves. Once Ada was able to sit again, she’d watch children squeal as they pelted each other with snow in their corner of the Marais, taking solace in shop windows decorated with bright bows and candles, all evoking our Savior’s birth. While she did her best to engage in the season, she found herself unable to banish her foreboding.
Yet there were consolations to be found.
Watkinson, to Ada’s astonishment, sent by special parcel an array of jewelry that had belonged to her mother, Adelaide: emeralds, rubies, even a necklace of diamonds. He wrote, “Now that you are of age, they should be yours.” Ada gave Hugh a walking stick carved of mulberry. “Magicians make wands of mulberry,” she explained. Hugh delighted Ada with a spinet piano and a private dinner catered by her favorite restaurant. The dinner took place in a candlelit room inside a palace near the Louvre, where waiters left them in solitude once the food was served. As Ada lay in Hugh’s arms while he hand-fed her prunes stuffed with fois gras and spoonfuls of oeufs à la neige, she remembered how wonderful it had been to love him before that day in Sèvres. She drank so much champagne that she recalled nothing more save that she’d dreamt of her parents for the first time ever. In her dream, Lucian and Adelaide were in the rose garden at Weald House. Her father was trying to say something Ada couldn’t understand.
Christmas led into the New Year, and Hugh insisted Ada take voice lessons “to strengthen your lungs.” He was busy too: his second book, Cantos for Grown Children, had been published several months earlier, which brought enough acclaim that he was emboldened to begin a new poem cycle now that his bird poems were finished. “This one will be even more ambitious, my love,” he told her. “I’m thinking of using our story for inspiration.” He also received a letter from a famed poet who shall remain nameless. He invited Hugh and Ada to visit him in the north of England.
“When?” Ada asked, excited; by then her foreboding over that day in Sèvres had become a scar that only aches in poor weather.
“This spring, once it’s warm.” Hugh looked up from his desk, where he’d been writing. “He writes we’d be very welcome.”
Ada felt the entire world open beneath her feet. Had she ever lived in a manor house on the moors inhabited by ghosts? “What else did he say?”
“Read the letter for yourself. I’ve never received such praise! My head is spinning. Over there, in my bedside table.”
Ada opened the drawer. She found two letters. The first was as Hugh described: an effusive letter of praise for his poems. The second was from a doctor specializing in lung conditions.
Monsieur de Bonne, the letter began. I have read your letter detailing your wife’s condition with great interest but acute despair . . .
The doctor’s words seeped into her like she’d been bit by a snake. The venom rushed through her veins, her muscles. Her heart. Her lungs. Suddenly Ada sensed the presence of those ghosts from Weald House. Her mother’s calm hand on her shoulder. Her father’s scarred hands amid the roses.
She was distracted from ghosts by the murmur of words. Hugh. He was sounding out the resonances of a poem.
“I awake—I remember—I see—
My locus amoenus lying beside me
Again crowned by Roses
And tamed by Ravens.”
She s
at up against the pillows, struggling for air.
Hugh turned from his desk. “How wan you look! Are you well?”
She held up the letter. He burst into sobs.
Once he’d contained himself, Hugh confessed the truth: the night of her collapse upon their return from Sèvres, Hugh had been informed by the attending doctor she would die if they remained together. “Your wife’s consumption has advanced enough to require rest in a sunny climate,” he’d said. “I recommend a sanitarium in Fiesole, outside of Florence. To hope for recovery is too much, but you may yet save her life if you cease your unfortunate connection.” The doctor also included a list of rules drawn from the most modern medical studies. “If you wish for your wife’s survival, I pray you mind them.”
The first rule was that Ada must sleep on her back at a nearly upright incline, to avoid taxing her lungs. This would allow her blood to better irrigate from her heart. The second rule was that Ada was not to go outside unless accompanied by a nurse or a physician. The third rule was effective for the rare occasions Ada ventured out. She was to wear a heavy veil over her bonnet to avoid spreading her illness. When it came to meals, a fourth rule posited food must be served at room temperature. Like Goldilocks and the bears, her meals must not be too hot nor too cold, but just right. No matter that what Ada considered “just right” wasn’t yet another blancmange, the eggy mixture pearled with sweat after sitting out for hours, or flavorless boiled meats. Raw fruit and vegetables were also forbidden, since they could sicken her system into collapse. Finally, emotional excesses and upsets were to be avoided as assiduously as uncooked fruits. “Marital relations and childbirth would be the undoing of her,” Hugh had been warned.
Disbelieving this advice, he’d sought other opinions. Hence, the secret letter Ada found.
“I am a terrible, selfish man—a man who you loves you too much,” Hugh confessed, his tears hot on her hands. “I deceived you, for I couldn’t bear to leave you. Therefore you must leave me, Ada.”
“Leave?” she said. “Never!”
“And yet . . .” Hugh’s words trailed off.
“Yet what, darling?”
“I can’t bear to say it, Ada. I won’t say it.”
“Why not?”
“I’m superstitious.”
“Then you must say it.”
Hugh looked up at last. “If you were to die, I wouldn’t want to live.”
His voice was nearly too soft to comprehend. Regardless, Ada pulled away as though a cold hand had been set on her shoulder.
That night as Ada was drifting off in bed, the memory of Lucian on the moors returned. Instead of his scarred hands among the Weald House roses, she imagined him decomposing beneath a cluster of crows after Adelaide’s death. Then she knew: better she live apart from Hugh than he suffer her father’s fate.
“I’m leaving,” she whispered against his sleep-warmed neck. “I must.”
To fund her unexpected journey to Italy, Ada sold some of her mother’s jewels, sewing the remainder into the hem of her cape. They weighed down her steps as she traveled, but she did not truly leave Hugh behind. Four months after she’d arrived in Fiesole, Ada came across a book he’d authored displayed in the sanitarium’s common room. Before she could stop herself, she’d opened it and read:
I awake—I remember—I see—
My locus amoenus lying beside me . . .
Her fingers curled around the book’s leather binding, just as they’d once curled about Hugh’s hand. Her tears stained the pages.
The sanitarium was a peaceful place with a view of the hills of Tuscany. By the time the first lilacs began to bloom, Ada was deemed improved enough that she was moved from the main building into a cottage flanked by poplars and pines. Improbably, it contained a parlor piano. The air agreed with her lungs. She began to take constitutionals in the sanitarium gardens. She’d saved her life—or so she thought.
One day while sitting in the garden with her nurse, Ada found an egg that must have fallen from its nest. The egg was still warm, the sepia-mottled shell miraculously uncracked. She set the egg inside a small box padded with a pair of velvet gloves Hugh had given her. A week later, a bone-white beak poked through the egg, revealing a tiny grotesque creature tufted with down.
Ada recognized the chick at first sight for what it was: a raven. Like her sparrow of long ago, she taught the raven to play with string and straw. She hand-fed it bread crumbs and seed. By late summer, the raven had transformed into a magnificent predator with grand plumage—far too wild to live inside. Though she knew she’d miss its company, Ada took it out into the garden to free it.
“Goodbye!” she said. “Godspeed!”
The raven returned the next morning, tapping on the window nearest her bed with its beak. Its talons were bloodied.
Ada didn’t take this as a sign. Not yet.
* * *
Ada was alone playing the piano the day the knock arrived. It was just after dawn on a sultry August morning, the sort of day when it seems impossible to believe winter will ever return. Her nurse had left with breakfast, and Ada had been practicing the adagio from Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata.
Just as she’d arrived at the mournful final chord, the knock had sounded. She opened the door.
A tall man stood on her threshold, silhouetted by brilliant sun. Though he was several feet away, she made out a familiar scent. He smelled like roses and fir trees. Like Weald House, where her parents had met their ends.
It can’t be, she thought. She folded her arms over her bosom; she was still barefoot in her nightdress.
The man stepped toward her, emerging from the light. Hugh—but how different he was from when she’d last seen him! He looked wearier than when they’d parted six months earlier in Paris. New wrinkles crested his forehead. The hair at his temples had gone bone white.
He held a brass cage bearing a pair of white doves.
“I brought you a gift,” he said.
He set the cage at her bare feet. The raven swooped down from its perch to land beside the cage, managing to unhitch the door. The doves hopped out and fluttered to the table, where a loaf of bread had been left out to grow stale. They pecked delicately at it.
“You came,” Ada said, unable to turn from her husband’s gaze. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I tried to stay away. I couldn’t.”
“I’ll be the ruin of you,” Ada said, tears leaking from her eyes.
Hugh kissed the moisture from her cheeks. “We’ll ruin each other then.”
And then he whispered for some time into her ear—words that shall never be revealed by any living being. Once he’d finished, he offered her his hands.
Ada hesitated only a moment before she took them.
Just as she had that night at Herne Bay when he came to her room, she rubbed her thumb along the heart of his palm.
Three times. Once for each forbidden word.
Hugh collapsed sobbing to the floor before her feet, pressing his lips against her hands, the tip of his tongue tasting the salty skin between her fingers. A strange peace fell on Ada, a relief even. It was the sort of relief you’d feel upon coming to the end of a long journey when you’re tired and hungry and lonely. Even if she wasn’t where she’d expected, at last she’d arrived.
Somehow she fell onto the floor into his arms and was kissing him, and his mouth was on hers, and then they were on her bed with the linens twisting about their limbs, her nightdress raised above her thighs.
As they lay together, the doves swooped above their bodies, their feathers rising like souls returning to heaven.
II.
Alas, Ada’s joy would soon be replaced by sorrow, Mr. Highstead.
Immediately after their reunion, Ada left the sanitarium against her doctor’s advisement. Hugh insisted they find a similar environment for her health. Remembering Ada’s beloved book of fairy tales, he suggested the Black Forest, where they could live alone amid nature. Hugh found a cottage deep in the wo
ods, where the trees grew so thick that little sun fell. Rose brambles trailed along the window ledges, and sparrows nested in the eaves. The cottage reminded Ada of Weald House, though it was much smaller. It had belonged to a sheep herder who’d recently expired from old age. His widow could no longer bear to live there, but neither could she bear to sell the place. The house was covered in cobwebs and inhabited by feral cats. They mewed as they rubbed against Ada’s ankles, desperate for milk and attention.
“The cats are included with the cottage. They’re good mousers, though your doves may not like them,” the widow said, shoving a tabby and her kittens off the kitchen table. “I must warn this is not a good place to be in winter. You could freeze to death if the snow gets too deep. Better to stay in the village. No one will find you here.”
“But that’s what we want,” Hugh said. “To never be found.”
Once the landlady left, they fell into each other arms and onto the bed.
“This shall be our locus amoenus,” Hugh said.
“Forever,” Ada responded.
Ada and Hugh. Hugh and Ada. Surely things would return as they were. They didn’t. Just as the oak trees finished turning color, Ada began to sicken in a manner different than any she’d ever experienced.
At first the illness was such that she discounted it. “I’ll be better soon,” she told Hugh, ignoring the piano he’d had delivered to their cottage. This illness was different than last time, when she’d collapsed in the restaurant. She spent her days lying in bed too dizzy to stand. Food rarely passed her lips. She refused doctors. And then the vomiting began. Sometimes she spent all day curled over a bowl, unable to move lest her stomach clench anew. If that wasn’t awful enough, the vomiting spurred fits of coughing, leaving Ada depleted of air as well as nourishment.
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