The Painted Bridge

by Wendy Wallace

  Anna tried to sit up but her own arms refused to help her. She raised her head and saw a flash of a silver wig, heard men’s voices. The sound of the waves died away. She must tell the men something, she knew, if she could only remember what it was. Trying to right herself, get her bearings, she collapsed again. Her head was heavy, her eyelids weighted with shells.

  Someone was touching her. She opened her eyes and saw Lovely’s face.

  “Let me sleep.” The words dissolved in her mouth, ran down her chin. Lovely pulled her into a sitting position and propped her against the wall. Lovely slapped her face, then loosened the band around her mouth. The corners of her mouth were stinging. Lovely untied the bonds at her back and her arms returned to life.

  “Swaller it, miss.”

  Anna could smell something familiar and bitter. Lovely pressed the rim of a china cup against her lips and tipped liquid into her mouth. It was cold on her tongue. Coffee. She opened her eyes again and looked around. She was in a narrow room, one she’d never seen before. Curious that such a large house should contain so many small rooms. Like the chambers of the nautilus. The floor under her feet and the wall behind her back were soft, as if she was in a dream still. She had been dreaming about something. Something that left her heavy, waterlogged with some imagined or remembered grief.

  Lovely shook her again and pinched her cheeks.

  “You’re going to speak to them.”

  “Speak to whom?”

  She sounded drunk. She laughed. Lovely slapped her again, harder.

  “It ain’t a joke, miss. Get up.”

  Lovely pulled Anna to her feet, held her up with one strong arm and walked her, half stumbling, back along the treatment corridor, through the dayroom and down the stairs.

  * * *

  From outside the office door, Anna could hear Querios Abse and other, unfamiliar voices. Lovely lifted her apron, wiped Anna’s chin with it.

  “Now, miss. This is it. Here’s yer chance.”

  Lovely opened the door, pushed Anna through it in front of her and closed it behind the two of them. The study expanded in front of Anna; the floor rocked and tilted under her feet. She reached for something to steady herself and found nothing.

  The room looked as if it had been ransacked. Scores of ledgers had been taken down from the shelves, set out across every available surface, some laid open, some stacked in piles. Abse was there, standing behind his desk, in the company of three other men.

  One, leaning back in his chair with his long legs stretched out in front of him, wore a silver wig. He had curved brows that precisely mirrored the curve of his eyelids, steady, doubtful eyes and a spotless white stock tied at his neck. A younger man, bursting his buttons, stared at her with his mouth hanging open. A third sat with his fingers linked under his chin.

  The youngest man broke the stillness; he got out of his chair and carried it forward to where she stood.

  “Do sit down,” he said. “You appear a little unsteady. On your feet, I mean.”

  “Thank you.”

  She took hold of the back of the chair.

  “You’re wandering, Mrs. Palmer. You know you shouldn’t be down here.” Abse’s voice was jovial, tense. “Lovely, take her back upstairs.”

  Anna glanced at the window and saw a flurry of snowflakes outside, colorless against the thick sky.

  “I want to speak to the magistrates, Mr. Abse.”

  Her heart had slowed now that she was here in front of them. She could feel it beating strongly in her chest. Abse approached the man in the silver wig, who sat leafing through a ledger.

  “I apologize, Sir John, for the interruption.” He thumped down another armful of files. “Patients’ particulars. Daily observations. It’s all here. The weather seems to be worsening but I hope you may at least cast an eye over the paperwork without jeopardizing your dinner date.” He raised his head. “Off you go, Mrs. Palmer. You’re disturbing the gentlemen.”

  “I have a right to speak with them.”

  “I say, Sir John,” said the young one. “Oughtn’t one to hear …?”

  The snow was falling in earnest, thickening, the flakes huge and clumsy in their descent. The door opened behind Anna. She heard Makepeace enter and clear her throat in a parody of indignation. Anna tightened her grip on the chair. The man in the silver wig, Sir John, sat up straighter, adjusted his stock. He was so engrossed in the file, so intent on his reading matter, he had not noticed that she was there. Abse called across the room.

  “Remove her, Mrs. Makepeace.”

  Sir John crossed one long leg over the other as he turned another page.

  “Do sit down, Mrs. Palmer,” he said. “Take your time. When you are ready to speak, I am ready to listen.”

  * * *

  “My name is Anna Palmer.”

  “A little louder, if you can,” Sir John said.

  “They say the best place to start is at the beginning, Sir John. My problems began before I arrived at Lake House, when I married a dishonest man.” As she heard the words, she felt a lightening of her whole self. It was true. She had barely known it herself until she said it aloud. She had married a dishonest man. She breathed and resumed. “I married a dishonest man. Mr. Abse had no hand in that. But when that man brought me here, on false charges of hysteria, Mr. Abse was only too happy to oblige and serve as a jailer.

  “I was brought here without my consent or knowledge and kept here against my will. Mr. Abse claimed it was a place where a woman might find solace. I did need solace, Sir John. I needed it more than I understood at the time. But there has been no solace here. And if I was not ill when I arrived, I was likely to have become so afterward.”

  She swallowed. The young man leapt forward again and handed her a glass of water. She smiled at him.

  “Thank you.”

  “Go on,” said Sir John.

  “When I tried to protest against my detention, they called me hysterical. I had either to go along with my imprisonment and surrender my life, or to speak against it and be told I was a lunatic. I have been made sick with powders. Frozen half to death in a cold shower. Tortured in a whirling chair. My hair, which had never been cut, has been taken from me.

  “The person given the title of matron offers petty cruelties in place of the kindnesses that might make life tolerable. She turns to a treatment of her own. Mr. Abse knows what happens.”

  Abse banged his fist on the desk. “She’s a maniac, unsuitable for Lake House. I requested her removal some time ago. Husband doesn’t want to know.”

  “Be quiet, Abse,” said Sir John.

  “Some of us here are not ill at all. And those who are don’t get any better. Miss Talitha Batt, whom I was proud to call my friend, met her death in this shabby prison. Mrs. Lizzie Button is a mother, parted from children whom no one could love as well as she does. Mrs. Valentine, whom you saw upstairs, deserves better than this at the end of her long life.

  “All I want is to be allowed to leave. I have nothing that can be taken from me, apart from life itself. I have lost my reputation. My health. I have come close to losing my mind. As close as I will ever come.”

  She turned her gaze to Abse.

  “For that, I am grateful to you. You have shown me that except by the will of God, I will not be destroyed. Not by powders or potions, not by spinning chairs or cold showers or locked doors or petty cruelties. Not by razor blades or confinement or blows. Not by boredom or hopelessness. Nothing short of murder can kill me.”

  She stopped. She had finished.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Palmer,” Sir John said.

  He rose to open the door for her; his eyes met hers and he nodded his head up and down, slowly, for a long time.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Anna walked alone back up the stairs, through the empty dayroom, the dining room. Beyond the dining room, by the stairs to the patients’ rooms, she paused. She heard no footsteps. No sounds of crying or laughter. No rain falling indoors. Only a deep, muffled silence.
She walked down the corridor, past the linen room and tried the door to the clothes store. It was unlocked. Pushing her way in, she rummaged in the pile of garments until she caught a glimpse of sea green. She pulled out her own dress and held it up, creased but intact. Hugging it against her, she slipped up the stairs.

  Her door was open and the fire in the room lit. The air held a faint, aromatic smell and dried lavender flowers were scattered over the hearth. She gathered up a few and crushed them, bringing her fingers to her nose, breathing in the pungent scent. Through the window, snow was thickening the branches of the trees, piling on top of the railing to the field and the backs of the huddled sheep. “A dishonest man,” she said aloud. “A trickster.”

  She undid the skirt and bodice, then stepped out of Makepeace’s black dress, kicked it away from her into a corner and put on her own. The familiar, worn velvet grew quickly warm against her skin. Filling the mug, she took a long drink of water then sat down in front of the washstand. She pulled the towel away from the mirror and looked at herself. Her hair was soft and spiky like the fur of a cat. Smoothing it down on her head with one palm, she examined her face. The bruises had faded and the scabs were gone from her forehead. She rested her fingertips in the round pale scars they had left behind, felt the bone strong and hard under the warmth of her skin.

  It occurred to her that she wished that Lucas St. Clair had been among the people in the room. She wanted him to know what had happened to her, that she was of sound mind and hadn’t been broken. Anna still had the feeling that she knew him, more deeply than through the exchanges that had passed between them. That in other circumstances they could have been not Dr. St. Clair and Mrs. Palmer but man and woman, with nothing and everything between them.

  He’d been nervous when he made the close-up picture of her. She wanted to see what he saw, pushing the camera so near she could smell the chemicals from inside the wooden box, had almost believed that the lens would make contact with her skin. Pulling the St. Christopher out from under her bodice as she had for the portraits, she let it hang over the neck of her dress, round and solid as a moon.

  Anna leaned in to the glass. Her breath softened the reflection, misted the mirror as if she looked at an old photograph of herself, from another time. Her eyebrows were dark, her eyes clear and direct. Something had changed in them since she arrived. Something had been settled, some question answered, and it showed. Her mouth was soft. She didn’t look either like a lunatic or exactly as she had when she came to Lake House. She looked like her own older sister. Not Louisa or any of the others. Her own, wiser self.

  Her eyes traveled to the silver circle that gleamed under her chin. It was luminous, the figure standing out in relief. She lifted it closer to the glass and stared at the old man walking out of the waves, bowed under the weight of the child on his shoulder. She’d worn it since the day her mother died and she had never properly seen it. It was growing, filling her field of vision, obliterating the room, the green thistles on the walls, the lingering smell of lavender. Anna felt weary. So weary she could not remain where she was. She crossed the floor and lay down on the bed.

  * * *

  She was in Dover. In the flint house. It was bitterly cold, the milk frozen in the jug on the breakfast table. She tested it with a spoon; the crystals were sharp and thick on her tongue, the liquid underneath watery. Their mother was in bed with a migraine and a hot brick wrapped in flannel. Amelia Newlove shouted down the stairs that the children should go out, get some fresh air. Give her some peace and quiet.

  Anna thought about peace and quiet, struggling with her blue coat. About what it meant. The buttons were too big for the buttonholes and her fingers stiff. The back door was open: Louisa had gone on without her. She got one button done up and ran through the glasshouse, sniffing the dry, fragrant smell. Through the garden, holding her hands tight over her ears to keep the cold from getting inside her head. There was no wind and the air was frozen like the milk. It felt solid with cold.

  She came fast down the path, slipping and sliding, the chalk layered with ice, the bushes tearing at the skin of her hands. Reached the bottom, her head rushing with the downward plunge, feeling dizzy. Inspecting the beads of blood that stood up on her palm, she put her hand to her mouth and tasted her own blood, then felt with her teeth for the tip of the thorn and pulled it out. All the time, Anna was aware of a silence. A silence that should not have been. When at last she looked up, she cried out.

  The sea was solid in front of her. It was pale and stilled, shut under a lid of ice with its top turned white. It was angry underneath. Raging at the imposed stillness. She knew that. Anna was frightened. She called for Louisa and heard nothing back but her own voice dying on the air. She walked toward the sea, tested the uncertain edge through the toe of her boot, keeping just a small part of it in her sight. She dared not look to the horizon, wished she had stayed in the flint house and never seen it. It was an evil omen, like in the Bible—a sea of glass. And before the Throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal.

  She hadn’t been thinking about him. She never did. He was just there. Always there. Trailing them, crying if they left him behind. Falling asleep on the sand, in a corner of the garden, anywhere. She wasn’t thinking about him.

  And then she saw him. Standing on top of the chalk stack, the low one, closest to the cliff at the edge of the bay. He was there, with his spinning top in his hand. He threw the top out over the ice as if he tossed a ball. It sailed a short distance through the air, then fell and bounced and skidded on the surface. He watched it fall, observed its sliding path. Then he jumped, his face creased with smiling. He flew through the air, landed, paused for a moment as he imagined he would, as if he arrived on solid ground. He stumbled, slid half from view, slowly. Anna saw his face change, the expression turning from joy into puzzlement. He slid farther and disappeared. His hair was there for one last arrested moment, bright against the colorless matter of the sea ice. Then gone.

  Anna ran along the hard strip of exposed sand, scrambled and crawled along the rocks to where he had been, farther out around the edge of the bay. The ice wasn’t solid there. It was in jagged pieces with cracks between them. She climbed down onto the largest of them, under the rock, pushed her hands down though the crack, felt the bite of the water closing on her hands. Felt their emptiness as they sought and did not find. She was shouting at the top of her voice. No sound came. After a while, the cold drove the breath from her chest; she couldn’t shout, couldn’t breathe, could only whisper. She stayed there, plunging her arms down into the water, dragging her hands through it, her fingers spread. There was nothing. Her hands were empty. Only her eyes still held him. She turned back, crawled on her hands and knees, along the beach, up the path, through the garden.

  She was in bed; the roses turned gray. Her hands were raw and grazed. She couldn’t feel anything. She should have been watching. It was her fault. Every night in her dreams the sea entered the house, it filled the rooms, to the ceiling. She lived underwater, hearing nothing from the land but fragments, exploding.

  In the days that followed, as the ice melted, she waited at the top of the cliff, lying on her stomach, hanging over the edge and watching. Looking for something, she didn’t know what, searching with her eyes, willing something to appear from the opaque waves, to emerge, float up, become whole again.

  One morning, the old man was down on the shore, bent over and digging for worms, in his wading boots that came up to the tops of his legs, his stooped shoulders in his usual navy jersey, his long, white hair blowing out in the wind. He pushed his toe into the sand, explored with it. He kneeled down as if he was praying and stayed there as the tide turned and began to run in around him. After a long time he rose, with something in his hands.

  He laid the bundle, it could have been cloth, an old coat lost in the sea, waterlogged, heavy and limp at the same time, or a dead bird, a bird that fell from the sky, he laid it over his shoulder and he walked out of the sea, past t
he path that adults never took and up through the cut passageway.

  By the time he reached the top, Anna was waiting for him at the gate, hiding. She followed him into the house; he kicked open the front door, walked straight in, water leaking from his boots with every step. There was something on his shoulder. An arm, hanging down against his back. The top of a head. Curled hair the color of sand.

  The old man reached the kitchen, took off his cap and dropped it on the table. He leaned forward and as he did so the bundle on his shoulder contorted, the head rose. Antony lifted his head and looked at her, his blind eyes open, his face blue, the features thickened.

  After that, there were only noises. The ship’s bell, ringing and ringing. Louisa, crying. The sound of hammering, of nails being driven into wood, slow and somber. Adult voices. Her mother’s screams, that drowned out the sea. Antony was gone. His bowl and spoon were gone, his smocks and shoes. His singing in the morning. His name was gone. They were not allowed to speak it. Erased from the air, from their mouths. From everywhere.

  * * *

  Anna lay on the narrow bed for a long time, listening to the thickening silence. As the light disappeared, she stood up and went to the window, resting her elbows on the sill. On the other side of the glass, huge broken flakes still drifted downward, obscuring the boundary between the lake and the shore, blanketing the shallow mound under the sycamores. In the whiteness, the bridge had disappeared. Nothing moved but the snow.

  THIRTY-SIX

  At the Pall Mall Club, Lucas St. Clair stood at a podium in front of the members of the Alienists’ Association. More had turned up than had been expected. The organizers had brought in extra chairs and still a line of men were standing at the back leaning on the wall. Lucas rested his hands on either side of the lecture stand and breathed in the clubroom smell of leather and beeswax, a smoldering ash log.

  “Good evening, gentlemen. Some time ago, a distinguished doctor proposed that the new art and science of photography had application in the diagnosis of madness. I became interested in this idea. We all agree that we stand in grave need of tools to improve our capacity to diagnose mental distress.