The Painted Bridge

by Wendy Wallace

  Anna walked fast and kept her eyes fixed on a spot a few yards ahead of her as she’d learned to do when she first came to London; you couldn’t look at every person you passed or greet strangers, as you did around Dover. You had to see without seeing, otherwise you would drown in people.

  Her pleasure at being on the streets, back in life, was spoiled by a constant terror—of hearing someone shout her name, feeling a hand on her shoulder. She tried to shake off the sense that anyone and everyone might apprehend her, drag the pair of them back to Lake House.

  A little farther on, in a high street, Anna hurried Catherine by a man passed out drunk by the side of the road with his trousers open, pulled her past a woman clouting her child and a pickpocket stalking an old lady, walking close at her elbow. They carried on, over a canal with a boat gliding along it, past Moroni’s ice warehouse—so wide it occupied three plots—past dank passageways and public houses squeezed between foundries and workshops, toward the new railway station.

  “What should we say, if anyone asks?” Catherine said.

  “Nothing. Just keep quiet and stay close to me.”

  “Shall I be your sister too?”

  “If you like.”

  Catherine looked pleased.

  “I always wanted a sister. You’re so fortunate.”

  “You think so?”

  “You’ve got four of them. And you’re not imprisoned in your father’s house.”

  “I don’t have a father, Catherine. Or a house.”

  Catherine clapped her hands.

  “You’re like Aurora Leigh, Mrs. Palmer. She was an orphan too, ‘in this unroofed and unfurnished world.’”

  They turned into a wide thoroughfare of solid houses, their brass door plates and whitened steps gleaming. A constable walked along the other side of the street and Catherine waved at him. Anna grabbed her wrist and pulled down her arm.

  “What did you do that for?” she whispered urgently. “Keep your eyes down and carry on walking.”

  It was too late. He’d crossed the road and was standing in front of them—so close that Anna could see the dried blood from a razor cut on his chin and the shine on the neck of his serge tunic.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Catherine said, smiling up at him. “My sister and I are lost. We are trying to reach Robin Street.”

  “Wren Street,” Anna said.

  The policeman set about explaining the way he would take himself. He took a long time over it, drew a map with his pencil and tore it carefully from his notebook. Anna pretended to study the map, her heart beating so hard she felt the policeman must be able to hear it. She forced herself to turn and face him, smile her thanks. He winked at her, touched his helmet and stood aside to let them pass, looking after them for longer than seemed necessary.

  She waited until they got around the corner then whirled toward Catherine, trembling with rage and fright, her hands on her hips.

  “He might have arrested us. Taken me back! How dare you put us at risk?”

  She could have slapped the girl. Catherine looked startled.

  “Don’t treat me like a child, Mrs. Palmer. If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have been able to get away at all.”

  The little map bore no relation to the city they encountered. Roads led them in circles and each one looked the same as the last. Without the advantage of elevation, they couldn’t see St. Paul’s. Despite Catherine’s pleas, Anna refused to ask further directions. She’d been to Wren Street many times and she had a sense of where it was, if not an exact one. Their steps slowed as they wandered past taverns and coffeehouses, putting off hawkers of buttons and beads, sidestepping beggars and drunks. Anna gave a penny to a woman sitting on the stone steps of a church with a baby at her breast, another one to a blind singer standing under a tree. She let Catherine put a threepenny bit in the hand of an old man in the tattered remnants of a naval uniform.

  “God bless,” he said, looking at them with rheumy eyes, raising his hand in a salute.

  * * *

  By the time they reached Wren Street, it was mid-afternoon. The sun had disappeared behind dense gray clouds and the temperature was dropping. The cold bit at their flesh; fragile sheets of ice were re-forming across the smashed puddles. Catherine was shivering so much she couldn’t speak. They limped past a pair of housemaids huddled up to their suitors on the corner with their hands under the boys’ coats. The street was narrower than Anna remembered. The houses stood nose-to-nose, the fanlights over the doors small and neat. Gas lamps illuminated cosy-looking drawing rooms where the curtains had not yet been drawn for evening, rooms that looked to Anna as if they sheltered harmonious, happy lives of a kind she had never really known.

  “Come on, Catherine. Nearly there. I hope my sister is at home.”

  She reached number 6 and climbed down the area steps, clinging to the handrail, ignoring Catherine’s protest that they were creeping in like Gypsies and ought to announce their arrival at the front door. Anna pushed her way through an unlocked door into the kitchen and breathed in its steamy fog.

  “Clear off,” said a woman standing at the range, replacing the lid on a pot. “I’m not buying. What have you got anyway?”

  “Is Mrs. Heron in?”

  The cook looked her up and down.

  “Who wants her? The cat’s mother?”

  “Her sister. Tell her that her sister wants her.”

  They waited while she delivered the message then heard a shout and a pair of feet running down a wooden staircase. Louisa took one look at Anna and collapsed in the doorway, her crinoline tipped up like a shuttlecock.

  * * *

  On her knees in her bedroom, Emmeline made a vow. If God returned Catherine to her, she would believe in Him properly, as she had always known she should. She would fast every Friday, attend church twice on Sundays and embroider ecclesiastical vestments. Make a pilgrimage up a stony hillside on her knees, like the Catholics in Ireland. Become a missionary in Africa. She closed her eyes. “Dear God, if you have to take a life, please let it be mine. Take me, I beg you. Leave my little girl safe.”

  The commotion outside the door increased. Querios was shouting orders at Fludd. Martha Lovely’s voice rose in protest, somewhere farther away. Fanny Makepeace’s iron tread in the corridor made the boards shake. The house was in uproar. The sanctuary of her bedroom, the fringed mantel cover, the dusted rosewood expanse of the dressing table, the twin miniatures on the wall of her mother and father, was always under siege. Now it was breached entirely. There was nowhere she could get away from what had happened. She could go to Timbuktu and not escape it.

  Emmeline buried her face in the baby dress, felt the soft linen against her skin, the raised pleats of smocking across the bodice, and inhaled the faint scent of cedarwood. It was her own fault. If she’d agreed to the outing, Catherine would still be here. Or they might be at the fair together, watching the dancing bear, the jugglers. She’d never enjoyed fairs herself and hadn’t understood how much it meant to her daughter. Such a small thing to have granted, it seemed now. Emmeline made a solemn promise to whatever great power saw fit to witness it that if she was spared, she would grant Catherine anything. Always.

  One of the patients, the Reverend’s wife, had disappeared at the same time. Lovely had lost sight of the patient, she said, after slipping on the ice. Poor woman had searched everywhere before she returned distraught to report Mrs. Palmer missing. Catherine was out in the grounds at about the same time and there was no trace of either of them. The gatekeeper swore on his own daughter’s life that the gate hadn’t opened all morning, that he never took his eyes off it and that no one had passed on the road. No woman could climb the walls of Lake House. They looked low enough from the road but there was a ditch running round them on the inside that made them eight feet tall. The pair of them had vanished into thin air.

  Querios was convinced that they were still somewhere in the house or the grounds. He’d had Fludd and the groundsman checking the bushes and gl
asshouses, the shrubbery. Indoors, the maids were searching the attic, the cellars. There were cupboard doors banging, the drag of bed legs on bare boards, drawers that hadn’t opened in years squeaking in protest as they were hauled out on their runners and shoved back in again. No cries of delight, of discovery.

  Emmeline knew Catherine wasn’t hiding in a broom cupboard. She hadn’t told Querios about Catherine’s request to go to the fair. It wouldn’t help anyway. Catherine hadn’t said which fairground or even why she wanted to go. Emmeline hadn’t thought to ask. Catherine wasn’t a lover of spectacles. Tricks. She would have thought she’d hate to see monkeys smoking pipes, horses forced to rear up and walk on two legs.

  She closed her eyes and asked God to forgive her wandering thoughts, to hear her prayers. She would accept anything in her life except that harm should come to her daughter. God had to agree that it was wrong for Catherine to suffer before she was an adult woman. Still a child, really. And it was so cold. Such a bitter, bitter day. The light already beginning to dim. She pressed the smock against her eyes, trying to ward off visions of Catherine lying in a ditch with her ankle broken or being kidnapped by the lion tamers at a traveling fair.

  Sometimes she still missed her own mother. At this moment, she felt her absence as keenly as if she was a child lost in a strange place. And she was forty-two. Catherine wasn’t yet sixteen. She was out in the world alone, unchaperoned except perhaps by a lunatic. Her father never noticed anything, had willfully refused to see what was happening with her. Emmeline threw the baby dress over her head and began to cry into the red satin bed cover.

  The door opened. She heard Querios enter, felt him standing next to her, looking down at her.

  “Emmeline, really. This is no time to indulge in the vapors.” She remained on her knees, her arms spread across the soft warmth of the bed, her face buried in it. It seemed impossible that she would ever move again.

  “I’ve got up a search party in the grounds. Benedict’s gone to ask around in the village.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “If all you can do is be hysterical, you’d better stay here.”

  “I’m not hysterical, Querios.”

  His voice softened.

  “Don’t worry, Em. She’s probably set her heart on a bonnet or something.”

  “She’s run away to London, Q. To a fair.”

  He tutted.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. What would a girl like Catherine be doing at a fair?” He shut the door sharply behind him.

  “There are no girls like Catherine,” Emmeline said to the empty air. “There is only Catherine.” She started to howl.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Louisa was propped on a heap of cushions at the end of a couch, holding a burnt rag to her nose. She was the beauty of the family with black hair that fell in good-tempered curls and creamy skin that she’d been at pains to protect from the sun. Her eyes were round and brown and her lashes curled upward, giving her an innocent look that verged on startled, as if everything caught her slightly by surprise.

  “Catherine,” Anna said. “Meet my sister, Mrs. Heron.”

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Heron.”

  “This is Catherine,” Anna said. “A friend of mine.”

  Louisa looked at Catherine without curiosity, nodded a greeting.

  “I thought you were dead, Anastasia.” With her small hands, the fingers sparkling with opals and marquises, the nails buffed to a shine, she folded the burnt rag into a flat, neat square. She leaned forward to where Anna sat at the other end of the couch and looked at her intently. “I’ve been through such torment, you can’t imagine. I waited for you all that afternoon. I couldn’t understand why you didn’t come, thought you must be ill. Next day, I went to the Vicarage.”

  “You saw Vincent? What did he say?”

  “He told me that you’d gone to stay with friends of his. That you needed rest. Peace and quiet. He was busy with a sermon so we didn’t talk for long. The next time I went, no one answered the door.” Louisa’s eyes flickered toward her belly. “I thought perhaps … well, you can imagine what I thought. You’re not, are you, darling?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “Lou, I …”

  There was a tap at the door and the King Charles spaniel on the hearth squeaked in its sleep. A domed mirror over the fireplace reflected the parlor walls curved into a globe, a contained world like a stage set or a painting. A girl opened the door, admitting a waft of boiling fowl, and laid a baby between them on the couch. It was wrapped in a shawl with only its face showing. Louisa dabbed her eyes on the rag and looked at the infant.

  “How could you?” she said to Anna. “Just disappear like that.”

  “I wrote to you so many times. I expected you every day. When you didn’t come, I thought Vincent must have persuaded you … I was afraid he might have convinced you that there was something wrong with me.”

  “Vincent could never convince me of anything,” Louisa said. “I begged you not … Well, it’s too late now.” She picked up the baby and adjusted the swaddling, pulling the shawl more tightly around its chest. The baby opened its eyes and began a protesting whimper. Its skin was irritated, flaky pink patches standing out on the cheeks, and a soft silken fringe of red hair escaped from the edge of a tight white cap. Louisa jiggled it impatiently.

  “Shhhhh, Harriet,” she said. “Meet your auntie Anna.”

  “Oh, it’s a girl. Congratulations, Lou,” Anna said. “You must be so happy.”

  “Yes.”

  Anna had the faint sense of oppression that she always felt with her sister, as if in her company she became a dilute version of herself. She’d rehearsed the escape again and again mentally but she hadn’t thought much about what would come afterward. She’d trusted that things would take care of themselves if she could only get outside the walls of Lake House and reach her sister. Now she was here, she felt shabby and clumsy. Out of place.

  Anna pulled her sleeves down over her wrists, trying to conceal their frayed edges, and clasped her hands together in case Louisa should notice that she wore no ring. Her boots had left clods of mud on the carpet. Anna felt mired in what had happened, as if she hadn’t left it behind at all. She didn’t know how to begin to explain it to her sister, how to ask for the assistance she needed.

  She smiled at her. “Louisa, I …”

  Louisa reached forward and plucked a twig from Anna’s hair. Her nose twitched and a look of distaste flickered over her face. The folds of her shot silk dress shimmered from orange to gold and back again with every movement she made.

  “If you have a bath, you’ll look alright. I’ll lend you something to wear. I was washing gloves when I heard your voice. It gave me such a turn. Did Vincent bring you here straight from his friends’ house? You look so bedraggled. I thought at first”—Louisa put her hand in front of her mouth and laughed a light, incredulous laugh—“I thought you might have run away from something. You looked as if you’d been tramping across the countryside like a pair of navvies.”

  Catherine was sitting on a footstool fondling the dog’s ears. She jumped to her feet, overturning the stool.

  “That’s exactly what we did do, Mrs. Heron. It was so romantic. We had to hide from everyone, even the milkmaids, until we got to London. Then we disappeared among the crowds. It’s the best way to disappear, you know—in full view of everyone. I’ve read about it.”

  Louisa had stopped laughing.

  “Anna, what is she talking about?”

  Anna got up and went to the fire, leaned on the mantelpiece next to a photograph of a small, fair child, in a frame decorated with seashells. She looked into the steady, lively flames, the swept hearth contained behind a polished brass fender.

  Louisa had always been unreliable. Reluctant to take responsibility. It was always Anna who’d insisted they walk all the way along to the lighthouse. Anna who’d had such a yearning for whelks that they had to stay out on the rocks past the time when they should
have scrambled back to the beach. There was something else, tugging at the edge of memory. She couldn’t remember what. Only that it was important.

  She cleared her throat and turned to face her sister.

  “I need your help. Vincent doesn’t know I’m here, Louisa.”

  She related in brief the events since November, leaving out the vision of the boy. She wouldn’t bring that up now. Louisa had always been frightened of what Anna saw.

  “It’s a madhouse. Can you believe that Vincent took me to a madhouse? The only person from outside I’ve seen since I got there is a photographer. His name—”

  “It’s not a madhouse,” Catherine interrupted. “It’s a country retreat. It promotes peace of mind.”

  Louisa rolled her eyes in Catherine’s direction and lowered her voice.

  “I suppose she’s one of the inmates?”

  “This is Catherine Abse. The daughter of the proprietor.”

  Louisa’s eyes widened. “And you’ve run away with her? You want me to hide the two of you? Really, Anna … People see everything in this street.” The sound of hooves colliding to a halt on the cobbles echoed up into the room and Louisa pressed the rag under her nose. “See who it is, Anna. I think I might faint again.”

  Anna went to the window. Her stomach churning with fear, expecting to hear the crash of the knocker on the front door at any second, she pulled aside a lace curtain patterned with bouquets of flowers and grapes. A cab had pulled up at the house opposite. A woman climbed out with a hatbox slung by its cord over her arm. A maid stood at the open door in readiness; the light from the sconces in the hallway spilled out into the dusk and made a halo through which the woman passed. The door closed, the carriage pulled away.

  “It’s nothing, Louisa,” Anna said, sitting down, feeling weak.

  “My nerves, Anna,” Louisa said. “Please think of my nerves.”

  Louisa’s priority was a quiet life, without interruptions from the past. Louisa had left Dover and their family behind when she married Blundell Heron, whom she’d met when he was on a holiday down there. She’d shed her past like a snake’s skin—changed her way of speaking, her way of dressing. She announced after the wedding that she didn’t want to come back to the harbortown except in her coffin and then changed her mind and said not even then—she’d be buried in London, thank you very much, with all the other people who’d come to make a decent future for themselves.