by Ellen Datlow
They were borne out. Lady Donner renewed her friendship with Mrs. Breen. They were seen making the rounds at the Royal Academy’s Exhibition together, pausing before each painting to adjudge its merits. Neither of them had any aptitude for the visual arts, or indeed any interest in them, but being seen at the Exhibition was important. Lady Donner attended to assert her supremacy over the London scene, Mrs. Breen to bask in Lady Donner’s reflected glow. After that, the first dinner invitations came in earnest. Mr. Breen once again took up at his club; Mrs. Breen resumed her luncheons, her charity bazaars, her afternoon calls and musical soireés. Both of them looked forward to the great events of the summer—the Derby and the Ascot in June, the Regatta in July.
But, foremost, they anticipated the high holiday and official commencement of the London Season: First Day and its attendant Feast, which fell every year on the last Saturday in May. Mr. Breen hoped to dine with one of the First Families; Mrs. Breen expected to.
She was disappointed.
When the messenger from Lady Donner arrived, she presumed that she would open the velvety envelope to discover her invitation to the First Feast. Instead it was an invitation to the Second Day dinner. Another woman might have felt gratified at this evidence of Lady Donner’s continued esteem. Mrs. Breen, on the other hand, felt that she had been cut by her closest friend, and in an excess of passion dashed off an indignant reply tendering her regret that Mr. and Mrs. Breen would be unable to attend due to a prior obligation. Then she paced the room in turmoil while she awaited her husband’s return from the club.
Mrs. Breen did not know what she had anticipated from him, but she had not expected him to be furious. His face grew pale. He stalked the room like a caged tiger. “Have you any idea what you have done?”
“I have declined an invitation, nothing more.”
“An invitation? You have declined infinitely more than that, I am afraid. You have declined everything we most value—place and person, the divine order of the ranks and their degrees.” He stopped at the sideboard for a whisky and drank it back in a long swallow. “To be asked to partake of ensouled flesh, my dear, even on Second Day—there is no honor greater for people of our station.”
“Our station? Lady Donner and I are friends, Walter.”
“You may be friends. But you are not equals, and you would do well to remember that.” He poured another drink. “Or would have done, I should say. It is too late now.”
“Too late?”
“Lady Donner does not bear insult lightly.”
“But she has insulted me.”
“Has she, then? I daresay she will not see it that way.” Mr. Breen put his glass upon the sideboard. He walked across the room and gently took her shoulders. “You must write to her, Alice,” he said. “It is too late to hope that we might attend the dinner. But perhaps she will forgive you. You must beg her to do so.”
“I cannot,” Mrs. Breen said, with the defiance of one too proud to acknowledge an indefensible error.
“You must. As your husband, I require it of you.”
“Yet I will not.”
And then, though she had never had anything from him but a kind of distracted paternal kindness, Mr. Breen raised his hand. For a moment, she thought he was going to strike her. He turned away instead.
“Goddamn you,” he said, and she recoiled from the sting of the curse, humiliated.
“You shall have no heir of me,” she said, imperious and cold.
“I have had none yet,” he said. His heels rang like gunshots as he crossed the drawing room and let himself out.
Alone, Mrs. Breen fought back tears.
What had she done? she wondered. What damage had she wrought?
She would find out soon enough.
It had become her custom to visit Mrs. Eddy in her Grosvenor Square home on Mondays. But the following afternoon when Mrs. Breen sent up her card, her footman returned to inform her as she leaned out her carriage window “that the lady was not at home.” Vexed, she was withdrawing into her carriage when another equipage rattled to the curb in front of her own. A footman leaped down with a card for Mrs. Eddy. Mrs. Breen did not need to see his livery. She recognized the carriage, had indeed ridden in it herself. She watched as the servant conducted his transaction with the butler. When he returned to hand down his mistress—Mrs. Eddy was apparently at home for some people—Mrs. Breen pushed open her door.
“Madam—” her own footman said at this unprecedented behavior.
“Let me out!”
The footman reached up to assist her. Mrs. Breen ignored him.
“Lady Donner,” she cried as she stumbled to the pavement. “Lady Donner, please wait.”
Lady Donner turned to look at her.
“It is so delightful to see you,” Mrs. Breen effused. “I—”
She broke off. Lady Donner’s face was impassive. It might have been carved of marble. “Do I know you?” she said.
“But—” Mrs. Breen started. Again she broke off. But what? What could she say?
Lady Donner held her gaze for a moment longer. Then, with the ponderous dignity of an iceberg, she disappeared into the house. The door snicked closed behind her with the finality of a coffin slamming shut.
“Madam, let me assist you into your carriage,” the footman said at her elbow. There was kindness in his voice. Somehow that was the most mortifying thing of all, that she should be pitied by such a creature.
“I shall walk for a while,” she said.
“Madam, please—”
“I said I shall walk.”
She put her back to him and strode down the sidewalk as fast as her skirts would permit. Her face stung with shame, more even than it had burned with the humiliation of her husband’s curse. She felt the injustice of her place in the world as she had never felt it before—felt how small she was, how little she mattered in the eyes of such people, that they should toy with her as she might have toyed with one of Sophie’s dolls, and disposed of it when it ceased to amuse her.
The blind, heat-struck roar of the city soon enveloped her. The throng pressed close, a phantasmagoria of subhuman faces, cruel and strange, distorted as the faces in dreams, their pores overlarge, their yellow flesh stippled with perspiration. Buildings leaned over her at impossible angles. The air was dense with the creak of passing omnibuses and the cries of cabbies and costermongers and, most of all, the whinny and stench of horses, and the heaping piles of excrement they left steaming in the street.
She thought she might faint.
Her carriage pulled up to the curb beside her. Her footman dropped to the pavement before it stopped moving.
“Madam, please. You must get into the carriage,” he said, and when he flung open the carriage door, she allowed him to hand her up into the crepuscular interior. Before he’d even closed the latch the carriage was moving, shouldering its way back into the London traffic. She closed her eyes and let the rocking vehicle lull her into a torpor.
She would not later remember anything of the journey or her arrival at home. When she awoke in her own bed some hours afterward, she wondered if the entire episode had not been a terrible dream. And then she saw her maid, Lily, sitting by the bed, and she saw the frightened expression on the girl’s face, and she knew that it had actually happened.
“We have sent for the physician, madam,” Lily said.
“I do not need a physician,” she said. “I am beyond a physician’s help.”
“Please, madam, you must not—”
“Where is my husband?”
“I will fetch him.”
Lily went to the door and spoke briefly to someone on the other side. A moment later, Mr. Breen entered the room. His face was pale, his manner formal.
“How are you, dearest?” he asked.
“I have ruined us,” she said.
She did not see how they could go on.
Yet go on they did.
Word was quietly circulated that Mrs. Breen had fallen ill and thus a t
hin veil of propriety was drawn across her discourtesy and its consequence. But no one called to wish her a quick recovery. Even Mrs. Breen’s former friends—those pale, drab moths fluttering helplessly around the bright beacon of Society—did not come. Having abandoned them in the moment of her elevation, Mrs. Breen found herself abandoned in turn.
Her illness necessitated the Breens’ withdrawal to the country well before the Season ended. There, Mr. Breen remained cold and distant. Once, he had warmed to her small enthusiasms, chuckling indulgently when the dressmaker left and she spilled out her purchases for his inspection. Now, while he continued to spoil her in every visible way, he did so from a cool remove. She no longer displayed her fripperies for his approval. He no longer asked to see them.
Nor did he any longer make his twice-weekly visit to her chamber. Mrs. Breen had aforetime performed her conjugal obligations dutifully, with a kind of remote efficiency that precluded real enthusiasm. She had married without a full understanding of her responsibilities in this regard, and, once enlightened, viewed those offices with the same mild aversion she felt for all the basic functions of her body. Such were the consequences of the first sin in Eden, these unpleasant portents of mortality, with their mephitic smells and unseemly postures. Yet absent her husband’s hymeneal attentions, she found herself growing increasingly restive. Her dream of the ladder recurred with increasing frequency.
The summer had given way to fall when Sophie became, by chance and by betrayal, Mrs. Breen’s primary solace.
If Mr. Breen took no interest in his daughter, his wife’s sentiments were more capricious. Though she usually left Sophie in the capable hands of the governess, she was occasionally moved to an excess of affection, coddling the child and showering her with kisses. It was such a whim that sent her climbing the back stairs to the third-floor playroom late one afternoon. She found Sophie and Miss Pool at the dollhouse. Mrs. Breen would have joined them had a book upon the table not distracted her.
On any other day she might have passed it by unexamined. But she had recently found refuge in her subscription to Mudie’s, reading volume by volume the novels delivered to her by post—Oliphant and Ainsworth, Foster, Collins. And so curiosity more than anything else impelled her to pick the book up. When she did, a folded tract—closely printed on grainy, yellow pulp—slipped from between the pages.
“Wait—” Miss Pool said, rising to her feet—but it was too late. Mrs. Breen had already knelt to retrieve the pamphlet. She unfolded it as she stood. A Great Horror Reviled, read the title, printed in Gothic Blackletter across the top. The illustration below showed an elaborate table setting. Where the plate should have been there lay a baby, split stem to sternum by a deep incision, the flesh pinned back to reveal a tangle of viscera. Mrs. Breen didn’t have to read any more to know what the tract was about, but she couldn’t help scanning the first page anyway, taking in the gruesome illustrations and the phrases set apart in bold type. Too long have the First Families battened upon the flesh of the poor! one read, and another, Blood must flow in the gutters that it may no longer flow in the kitchens of men !—which reminded Mrs. Breen of the boy who had hurled the stone through their carriage window. The Anthropophagic Crisis, Mrs. Graves had called it. Strife in the House of Commons, carnage in the streets.
Miss Pool waited by the dollhouse, Sophie at her side.
“Please, madam,” Miss Pool said. “It is not what you think.”
“Is it not? Whatever could it be, then?”
“I—I found it in the hands of the coachman this morning and confiscated it. I had intended to bring it to your attention.”
Mrs. Breen thought of the coachman testing the weight of her husband’s walking stick, the brigand’s blood black in the jaundiced fog.
“What errand led you to the stables?”
“Sophie and I had gone to look at the horses.”
“Is this true, Sophie?” Mrs. Breen asked.
Sophie was still for a moment. Then she burst into tears.
“Sophie, did you go to the stables this morning? You must be honest.”
“No, Mama,” Sophie said through sobs.
“I thought not.” Mrs. Breen folded the tract. “You dissemble with facility, Miss Pool. Please pack your possessions. You will be leaving us at first light.”
“But where will I go?” the governess asked. And when Mrs. Breen did not respond: “Madam, please—”
“You may appeal to Mr. Breen, if you wish. I daresay it will do you no good.”
Nor did it. Dawn was still gray in the east when Mrs. Breen came out of the house to find a footman loading the governess’s trunk into the carriage. Finished, he opened the door to hand her in. She paused with one foot on the step and turned back to look at Mrs. Breen. The previous night she had wept. Now she was defiant. “Your time is passing, Mrs. Breen,” she said, “you and all your kind. History will sweep you all away.”
Mrs. Breen made no reply. She only stood there and watched as the footman closed the door at the governess’s back. The coachman snapped his whip and the carriage began to move. But long after it had disappeared into the morning fog, the woman’s words lingered. Mrs. Breen was not blind to their irony.
Lady Donner had renounced her.
She had no kind—no rank and no degree, nor any place to call her own.
A housemaid was pressed into temporary service as governess, but the young woman was hardly suited to provide for Sophie’s education. “What shall we do?” Mr. Breen inquired.
“Until we acquire a proper replacement,” Mrs. Breen said, “I shall take the child in hand myself.”
It was October by then. If Mrs. Breen had anticipated the previous Season, she dreaded the one to come. Last winter, the days had crept by. This winter, they hurtled past, and as the next Season drew inexorably closer, she found herself increasingly apprehensive. Mr. Breen had not spoken of the summer. Would they return to London? And if so, what then?
Mrs. Breen tried (largely without success) not to ruminate over these questions. She focused on her daughter instead. She had vowed to educate the child, but aside from a few lessons in etiquette and an abortive attempt at French, her endeavor was intermittent and half-hearted—letters one day, ciphering the next. She had no aptitude for teaching. What she did have, she discovered, was a gift for play. When a rocking horse appeared on Christmas morning, Mrs. Breen was inspired to make a truth of Ada Pool’s lie and escort Sophie to the stables herself. They fed carrots to Spitzer, Mr. Breen’s much-prized white gelding, and Sophie shrieked with laughter at the touch of his thick, bristling lips.
“What shall we name your rocking horse?” Mrs. Breen asked as they walked back to the house, and the little girl said, “Spitzer,” as Mrs. Breen had known she would. In the weeks that followed, they fed Spitzer imaginary carrots every morning, and took their invisible tea from Sophie’s tiny porcelain tea set every afternoon. Between times there were dolls and a jack-in-the-box and clever little clockwork automata that one could set into motion with delicate wooden levers and miniature silver keys. They played jacks and draughts and one late February day spilled out across a playroom table a jigsaw puzzle of bewildering complexity.
“Mama, why did Miss Pool leave me?” Sophie asked as they separated out the edge pieces.
“She had to go away.”
“But where?”
“Home, I suppose,” Mrs. Breen said. Pursing her lips, she tested two pieces for a fit. She did not wish to speak of Miss Pool. “I thought she lived with us.”
“Just for a while, dear.”
“Will she ever come to visit us, Mama?”
“I should think not.”
“Why not?”
“She was very bad, Sophie.”
“But what did she do?”
Mrs. Breen hesitated, uncertain how to explain it to the child. Finally, she said, “There are people of great importance in the world, Sophie, and there are people of no importance at all. Your governess confused the two.”
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Sophie pondered this in silence. “Which kind of people are we?” she said at last.
Mrs. Breen did not answer. She thought of Abel Munby and she thought of Lady Donner. Most of all she thought of that endless ladder with its greased rungs and rails and high above a radiant circle from which dim voices fell.
“Mama?” Sophie said.
And just then—just in time—a pair of interlocking pieces came to hand. “Look,” Mrs. Breen said brightly, “a match.”
Sophie, thus diverted, giggled in delight. “You’re funny, Mama,” she said.
“Am I, then?” Mrs. Breen said, and she kissed her daughter on the forehead and the matter of Ada Pool was forgotten.
Another week slipped by. They worked at the puzzle in quiet moments, and gradually an image began to take shape: a field of larkspur beneath an azure sky. Mrs. Breen thought it lovely, and at night, alone with her thoughts, she tried to project herself into the scene. Yet she slept restlessly. She dreamed of the boy the coachman had killed in the street. In the dream, he clung to her skirts as she ascended that endless ladder, thirteen stone of dead weight dragging her down into the darkness below. When she looked over her shoulder at him, he had her grandfather’s face. At last, in an excess of fatigue, she ventured one evening with her husband to broach the subject that had lain unspoken between them for so many months. “Let us stay in the country for the summer,” she entreated Mr. Breen. “The heat is so oppressive in town.”
“Would you have us stay here for the rest of our lives?” he asked. And when she did not reply: “We will return to London. We may yet be redeemed.”
Mrs. Breen did not see how they could be.
Nonetheless, preparations for the move soon commenced in earnest. The servants bustled around packing boxes. The house was in constant disarray. And the impossible puzzle proved possible after all. The night before they were to commence the journey, they finished it at last. Mrs. Breen contrived to let Sophie fit the final piece, a single splash of sapphire, blue as any ribbon, or an eye.