The Lost History of Dreams

by Kris Waldherr

  He rose from the bed. Nothing was as he believed. Ada was dead. Mathilde was born alive. Isabelle had been there with Ada and Hugh during their marriage; she’d misled Robert probably because she felt complicit in some way for Ada’s death. Worst of all, he’d believed her. His skills as a historian had been outfoxed by her ability to spin a tale—he hadn’t learned anything since his Oxford days. Yet what upset him most was how she’d held him hostage with her story, ensuring he wouldn’t be able to reunite Hugh with Ada in the chapel. Isabelle was evil, a demon, a Circe. A fury. And now the darkness Robert had sensed within himself, which had arisen when he’d encountered Isabelle that first night at Weald House, rose anew, vile and foul and impossible to ignore. She’d tainted him. How could he have ever thought he loved her?

  He grabbed the letters. Clutching them against his chest, Robert staggered out of the hotel room where his wife had lost her life. He tore down the stairs, stumbling as he swerved around the hotel lobby to avoid its inhabitants sitting laughing and drinking their elevenses tea. Everyone seemed foul and depraved, every single one of them: the debutante tittering with laughter as she flirted with a man old enough to be her father, the carmine-lipped dowager preening over her fan, the bald waiter sneering with sycophantic derision. Yet Robert understood it was only envy he felt, for they all possessed futures while all he had were regrets. He envisioned what they saw as he ran: a tall bearded man, his blood drained from his face, his hands clutching a handful of papers like he’d been poisoned. Here is the poor man unfortunate enough to have his wife die on their wedding night. What a fool! Not that anyone would say this, mind—it would require too much honesty. If there was one thing he’d learned over the past weeks, it was that the truth was only a fabric to be sewn into a garment to suit the wearer’s fancy.

  Robert didn’t stop running even when he’d smashed against the doorman. “Rather early to be drinking, sir,” the doorman smirked. Robert resisted the urge to punch him. Instead, he stumbled as his weak ankle gave way, granting the appearance of truth to the doorman’s assumption.

  Outside the Union Hotel, Robert’s feet beat against the pavement as though he was chased. He ran down Cockspur Street toward Trafalgar Square. The cold air felt a slap. His chest heaved. His ankle stung. He wouldn’t slow down.

  Once he arrived at Trafalgar Square, he shoved aside the line of people waiting at the cab stand. He thrust money into the driver’s hands.

  “Euston Station as fast as you can.”

  There was only one place Robert could go. He had to get there immediately or he’d turn mad—if he wasn’t mad already.

  * * *

  When the coach from Shrewsbury left Robert at the same crossroad where he’d first arrived less than two weeks earlier, it was well into the small hours of the morning.

  Not even a slit of a moon lit the fields, for the sky was pissing with rain. Would spring ever arrive here? Even then Robert knew this was a strange question to ponder when your heart had been ripped from your chest, but there it was. Until he confronted Isabelle he’d be trapped in eternal winter, his mind tripping over Ada and Hugh’s story of love and loss.

  Despite the long journey and lack of sleep, Robert’s fury gave him an energy he’d never felt. He lurched down the long road toward Weald House in the horizontal downpour. The water soaked his boots. Plastered his hair against his face. The only thing he cared to keep dry was Hugh’s letters, which he’d set beneath his waistcoat. The words they contained were ones he’d use to free himself from Isabelle forever.

  Sooner than he’d thought possible, Robert arrived at the iron gate. He yanked the handle, ignoring the slurry of ashes along the surface. The gate wouldn’t budge. He climbed over its six-foot height, not caring when his ankle twinged.

  Once he landed on the ground, he didn’t go around to the kitchen door. Instead, he went to the front door, the one nearest the stairs to the library, where Isabelle slept most nights. He pounded on the door until his fists felt bruised.

  No response. Not even the dog. He took to shouting. “Let me in!”

  Several moments later, he was greeted by Isabelle Lowell in her wrapper, holding a solitary candle. No dog. No servants. Her hair was unbound, just as he’d seen it that day on the moors.

  Not Ada.

  She blinked several times as she took him in, her body blocking the door. Any illness she’d suffered from appeared gone; she’d probably feigned it like she had her collapse. A smile of welcome teased her lips, a softening. The smile faded as quickly as it had arrived, leaving her as wary as ever. And then he remembered: not only was he still wearing Hugh’s mustard-colored overcoat, his beard had thickened in the four days he’d been away, making him appear more akin to his cousin than ever.

  “Mr. Highstead. You’re soaked with rain.”

  “This isn’t the time to discuss the weather, Miss Lowell. I’ve come all the way from London.”

  “For me?” Her eyes widened. “Couldn’t this wait until morning?”

  “Let me in.”

  “Why should I?” Again Isabelle blinked, still blocking the door, her white hair loose around her shoulders, long and pale and lush. Like Ada. Not Ada. How coy she sounded! As though she thought he’d rushed all the way to Shropshire on a train and coach to press his suit like a callow Lothario.

  “Open the fucking door already. Now.”

  Whether it was Robert’s tone or his profanity, at last Isabelle acquiesced.

  “You’re dripping on the floor, Mr. Highstead,” she said coolly. “If you’re going to burst in here in the middle of the night, at least take off your coat. I’ve no one to clean up, for Mrs. Chilvers has gone to Shrewsbury to find someone to rebuild the stables and Grace and Owen ran off together to God knows where, probably to avoid accusations of arson. I can’t even find the dog, who no doubt left with them—so much for loyalty of canines! But somehow I suspect you know all this already.”

  Why was she talking about servants and dogs at a time like this?

  “You’re not Ada de Bonne. You misled me. Who the hell are you?”

  She looked at him askance. “You know who I am.”

  Robert grabbed her arm. “There’s only one way to settle this. I want you to open Ada’s Folly.”

  She gave a little laugh as she pulled away. “You still want to daguerreotype it?”

  “No. I want you to open it because there’s something in there for you. I don’t know what it is or what it signifies, but that’s why Hugh insisted I daguerreotype you inside it—because he wanted to make certain you’d find it. You suspect this too. That’s why you refused to let me inside the chapel, why you’ve been so confusing with your damn story, and why you wanted me to believe you were Ada de Bonne. I don’t claim to understand your motivation, but there it is.”

  Her face blanched beneath the candlelight. “That’s enough. One more word and I’ll scream until your ears burst.”

  “You won’t scream because I know the truth.”

  “How do you know I’m not Ada?”

  “Because after I returned to bury Hugh, do you know what I found?”

  Now Isabelle looked truly fearful. “No.”

  Robert pulled out Hugh’s letters from inside his waistcoat and threw them at her face. The papers scattered to the wet floor, visible evidence of her lost history.

  “Within those documents,” he continued, “I found a letter from Hugh to my father describing Ada’s death.”

  She flinched, but to her credit, she didn’t turn away.

  “Is that all? If so, I’m going to bed. You can see yourself out.”

  “No, that’s not all. We’re going to open the chapel to find out what Hugh left you. Together. Now.”

  “I don’t have the key. Grace stole it.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  She set the candle between them. “I lost it.”

  He sidestepped the candle. When she turned to flee, he grabbed a handful of her loose hair. “It’s not like you to be
so sloppy to lose something so precious.”

  “Let me go! You’re hurting me!”

  To Robert’s horror, all the compassion he’d prided himself on while he’d daguerreotyped the dead was gone. He couldn’t feel any empathy for her suffering, for her loss. But he couldn’t turn back. Instead, Isabelle seemed to encompass everyone who’d thwarted him before and since Sida’s death. “Get the key, Isabelle Lowell or whatever the hell your name is. You’re naught but a liar—”

  “That’s not true!”

  “It is! You even lied to me about Mathilde. She survived Ada’s death.”

  Her voice grew small. “You know Mathilde is alive?”

  Robert nodded.

  “Was there anything in those letters stating her fate?”

  “Only that she was born healthy.”

  “Oh.”

  For whatever reason, all defiance fled Isabelle; her shoulders slumped, her hands fell. She drew the key from beneath her wrapper, where it still hung about her neck on a black ribbon.

  She handed the key to Robert as docile as a child. She lit a lantern, pulled on boots and then a cloak over her wrapper. The letters remained on the wet floor; he supposed they no longer mattered.

  They walked to the chapel together in a silence broken only by the calls of crows and owls. The doves nesting must have been deeply asleep, for they didn’t stir. By now the night was softening into the dense cobalt that precedes dawn, and the rain had become a fine mist. Isabelle didn’t pull up the hood of her cloak, as if she could no longer be bothered to shield herself from the elements.

  Once they arrived at the door of the chapel, she turned away, biting her lip. Her shoulders shuddered. Robert actually felt pity for her. She became the woman he’d thought he loved: the sparrow-clad vision he’d encountered on the moors during that moment of grace, the heartbroken mourner he’d nearly kissed in the library, the wife who’d lost her husband and child in a story he had yet to learn the end of. Not the cruel Scheherazade who’d tormented him with her tales and half-truths while his cousin lay unshriven before being consumed by flames.

  And then Robert experienced something that surprised him more than his compassion: Isabelle’s cold hand slipping into his.

  “Open the door already,” she said.

  II.

  When Robert was to think back upon the moment when he’d unlocked Ada’s Folly for the first time since Hugh de Bonne built it nearly a dozen years earlier, he’d decide it felt anticlimactic, as many significant acts are. Just as when he’d married Sida after years of yearning, or when his first book had been published. After so much anticipation, the event couldn’t possibly approach what he’d expected. However, in the case of Ada’s Folly, it was what happened afterward that shocked most.

  Isabelle lifted the lantern high with her free hand, the rain sizzling against its hot brass top. She turned her face from the desiccated roses nailed to the door. Robert couldn’t help but glance at her. Her face seemed a mask he couldn’t decipher. Again, he pitied her. He knew opening the glass chapel would cause her distress. He knew his words had upset her. Who was he to be so cruel? He considered turning back—his stomach tightened, his step slowed. He couldn’t. In that moment, his need to learn what was in that chapel felt as tangible as the need for water and food.

  The key slid into the lock like a knife through butter.

  Robert pushed the door open. A rush of air hit his face. It bore the faint scent of pine. It set the lantern to flickering.

  The chapel was colder than he’d have imagined, stilled and fetid from years of being locked. He took the lantern from Isabelle, his eyes straining to make out the contents of the chapel. His toes snagged against what felt to be moss or grass, and possibly stones; tree roots must have forced their way through the floor. The hour was still too early to see any of the stained glass. He made out only one certain thing: the chapel was empty save for a long alabaster marble bench inscribed with Ada’s name. On it was an unsealed piece of paper folded into a square addressed to Isabelle. The ink was brown as a sparrow’s wing.

  He handed the letter to Isabelle. “Read it.”

  “I can’t.” She released his hand.

  “Isabelle—”

  She clamped her palm over his mouth. Before Robert could turn away, she ran her thumb across his scar. His lips. Just as Ada had done to Hugh that night in Herne Bay before they’d kissed for the first time.

  “Ada,” she said. “I’m Ada. Isn’t that what you want?”

  Robert pulled away, the letter forgotten. She couldn’t be Ada—this was only a gambit to distract from Hugh’s last letter. Yet he couldn’t turn away. He cupped Isabelle’s chin in his palms, tilting her face toward his. Stared into her eyes. A vein pulsed in the hollow of her throat.

  But then he remembered who he was, and what he’d come to do.

  “You’re not Ada. Read the damn letter already—”

  It was too late: Isabelle, or Ada, or whoever the hell she wanted him to believe, had covered his mouth with hers. Before he could push her away, she’d coiled her arms about his neck, drawing him against her.

  Too stunned to turn away, his mind silenced.

  To his surprise, he liked her kiss. Her kiss was different from Sida’s—even in their most ardent moments, there was a delicacy about his wife that kept Robert from fully losing himself to protect her. Isabelle’s lips were warm, demanding, yet softer than he’d ever expect, given the sharp words he’d heard spilling from them since he’d known her. And in that moment Robert learned something he never dared admit: that the separation between hate and love was hair-thin, and could flip like an hourglass, leaving nothing the same as it had been.

  Robert’s hands unclenched. The letter fluttered to the ground.

  Shaking as though with fever, he drew her into his arms, pressing his lips against her wet hair, her neck, her cheeks, before returning to her mouth, which awaited his with a sigh. Her lips opened beneath his, her tongue meeting his without shame. There was an inevitability about their kiss. From their first meeting in the library, to all those nights where they’d tussled with stories and sentences, this is where their interactions had led them.

  By then she’d blown out the lantern and pulled Hugh’s sodden overcoat off his shoulders, setting the dry side up along the chapel floor. Before Robert could turn away, she’d pulled him down beside her onto it. “I love you,” he thought he heard her whisper. “Only you.” She draped her cloak over them to protect them from the cold. For whatever reason, this signified to his mind there was no turning back from what was about to happen. He, Robert Highstead, a historian unable to write a word after his wife’s death; a son who’d rejected his family’s income upon his wife’s death; a husband whose wife had visited him as a ghost was going to commit sexual congress with a woman pretending to be someone who was, in all likelihood, dead. A woman who wasn’t a ghost—a woman he suspected might even be a virgin.

  Virgin or not, her lips felt like sun-warmed velvet, as though she was welcoming him home after a long journey. Somehow he’d opened her wrapper, freed her breasts from beneath her chemise. In the darkness, he brushed his fingers along her bared flesh; her skin was prickled with gooseflesh, the soft hairs standing upright. She drew his hand between her thighs, to the soft fur lining her cleft. Unlike Sida in that desperate ghostly encounter he’d dreamt of, she was solid, flesh, warm. She was also moist about her sex, wetter than he could have imagined. She desired him. This tipped Robert from the abstraction of desire into deep panic. She was real.

  She whispered against his neck, “You know what to do.”

  “I can’t.” Ada? Isabelle? He stared at her, lying beneath him in the darkness.

  Who was she?

  “You can,” she said. She pulled his shirt off, ripping his buttons, and bit his shoulder so hard he wondered if she’d drawn blood. For whatever reason, the pain shook him awake. He pulled her against him. In the dimness, her form seemed a shadow, a silhouette flickering with
darkness beneath him. In that moment, she seemed to blur from Ada into Isabelle and then back again.

  “You’re not Ada,” he said. “Who are you?”

  She kissed him again, this time her tongue pressing into the deepest recesses of his mouth. Then it no longer mattered. Whoever she was, he wanted her. Only her.

  She tasted sharp, like apples. Her hair was caressing against his cheek, fragrant with pine and flowers. Her fingers unbuttoned his trousers. She parted her thighs for him, pressing against him, her eyes shut tightly, her eyelids puckered. He was more aroused than he could remember. Robert pushed into her before he could change his mind. In all those nights while she’d told him stories of Ada de Bonne and her marriage and their loss, he’d never expected this to happen.

  He couldn’t stop himself. “I love you. I do.”

  “I . . . I love you too.”

  She turned her face from his kiss, tears spilling down her cheeks.

  “Should I stop?” The question seemed ridiculous even as it left his mouth.

  “No . . .” She reached up to cradle his head against her breasts. How warm they were! How soft! “I love you,” she said again, this time forceful.

  Making love with her was like swimming through a river laden with undercurrents. Her chemise kept tangling about his legs, the layers of lace and linen pulling him closer toward her. His overcoat and her cloak twisted about their bodies, wrapping them together as one. Yet this was a strange affirmation. Even had he wanted to, he couldn’t have unwound his body from hers. They were entangled in a cocoon, a cave of warmth and fabric and flesh. It protected them from the cold floor prickling their bared limbs, the threat of their pasts pursuing them.

  To avoid crushing her, Robert pulled her body against him, all that fabric still wrapped about them. He shifted his weight to turn onto his side. As they rolled, Hugh’s final letter crinkled beneath their bodies, and she gave a little gasp that seemed to emerge from the back of her throat. He heard his breath but couldn’t believe it was his, for it seemed so far away. But then her warmth surrounded him, so encompassing that he had the sense he was falling. She shuddered against him, biting his shoulder again to muffle her cry. And then he could hold back no more.