After Alice Fell: A Novel

by Kim Taylor Blakemore

  Ada makes a small noise and pinches another serving of millet for the birds. “Poor Alice.”

  “Ada teaches one class at Mrs. Brown’s, on the Romans.” Mr. Hargreaves raises a finger. “On Lucretius this week. Is that not right?”

  “Theodosius.” She stands of a sudden, and sets the cup and saucer to the piano top with a clink. “Theodosius. It’s much too early in the term for Lucretius. The girls would rather contemplate the blue sky and the state of their hair ribbons.”

  Mr. Hargreaves leans back, resting the cup on his chest. “Not everyone is as serious a scholar as you, my dear. Of the girls, that is. Or even the boys.”

  I look toward the back of the cottage, to the high-walled garden beyond the dining room, and imagine past it to the playing greens of the school. The missing of all this sits like lead. Benjamin at his desk, Alice in the garden. A simple pattern to the days. It is a lie, and I know it. Benjamin at his desk with the door shut. Alice in her turret, the door locked from the inside. Sometimes the three of us passing in the hall and sometimes else a dinner with guests and Alice flitting to each with a drawing of a posy as a gift. Sometimes that. And others marked with all our silences.

  “Are you staying for supper?” Ada asks.

  “Of course she is. Of course. It’s much too horrible out there.” He slaps his knees and leans back. “We’ve left the blue robins.” He points to the ceiling. “All those little blue robins Alice painted on the ceiling of her room.”

  I shake my head. “Why would you keep them?”

  “They’re pretty.” He half rises. “Would you like to see?”

  “I’ll take her.” Ada flicks bits of seed shell to the cage and makes a kissing noise at the birds. Then she takes up my tea by the saucer and sets it to the side table. She tilts her head and waits for me to stand. “You know the way.”

  Alice’s old room with its six walls and windows, a turret built by the occupants two generations before, is musty, empty of furnishings save a sleigh bed and a mattress used now for storage. Old boxes and trunks are stacked atop, a glass lamp without a shade. The blue robins on the ceiling to keep watch over it all. I can’t look too closely at them; there’s something off about each: a missing beak, a dragging wing, a black eye painted on the blue breast. The wing feathers are blurred, as if she’d caught each of them midflight, capturing the flutter and flap and their valiant attempt to escape.

  She was better here. Carried herself, most of the time, as any young woman would. Rising with the first light, dressing in simple calicos or wools, her thumb stuck in whatever book she was reading. A romance. A treatise on the heavens. A train schedule. Sitting at the morning table with Benjamin and me, the sun through the window burnishing the copper in her hair.

  Each morning, she ate two poached eggs. One then the other, then cut her toast in diagonal fourths and ate those without butter, from left to right before washing it down with milk. The napkin lifted from her lap, pressed to her lips. Folded once and again as she turned to the window glass and watched the light on the garden hedge.

  And I thought—because I always did, over and over—Alice is well. Alice is beautiful, composed like a Danish oil painting, a still life. Well and whole.

  But I was burnt by that beauty. It shattered like porcelain, the cracks discolored and fragile where I’d worked so hard to glue it tight.

  Ada moves to a window seat, shifting aside a leather hatbox so she can sit. “This is an odd room.” She gestures to the walls. “Nothing to anchor anything on.”

  “Alice liked it.” I move to a window across and slip back a lace curtain. The wrought-iron table still sits in the corner of the garden, two chairs tucked in and a third pulled to the far side with a watering can on its seat. The irises have buckled the brick, but the zinnias are bright and full. The garden wall the extent of our world. Benjamin forbade us from stepping past the gate. “It is too much a risk,” he said. It was, he meant, too much a shame.

  “I’m so tired of wearing black.”

  Ada picks lint from her skirt, keeps her gaze on her hands. “I am a member of the Ladies Aid Society. We visit the women at the asylum. Every third Thursday.”

  I turn to her. “So you know.”

  “Your sister was well cared for, I think. Content. She liked to tat; the lace she made was marvelous. I never mentioned to the others. That I knew her.” She pulls in a breath, gives a half smile. “I hope it will console.”

  “They say she jumped off the roof.”

  “Oh.” She searches the room, struggling for words.

  “It’s not true. I’ve made a formal complaint.”

  “Cathy must be beside herself.”

  “Cathy?”

  “She visited. Quite often. To read to Alice.” Ada touches her chin and frowns. “I’ll need to write her.”

  “I’ll deliver it,” I say. “No need for the post.”

  Downstairs again, Ada signs her name to a black-framed condolence card. Thomas takes the pen, bends to the paper, and adds a postscript.

  The birds, both fat, peck at their feathers. The smaller one has plucked the feathers from around its neck, leaving the skin bare and wrinkled. I toss in seed, but they stare at me and continue their preening.

  “Did you know Beatrice Beecham?”

  “Who?”

  “She died just before Alice.”

  “We only visit once a month. Perhaps—”

  “Never mind.” I take the card and slip it to my bag. “I will be sure to deliver it.”

  “Are you sure you won’t stay the night?” Thomas asks. “The weather is still on the move.”

  “No, thank you, that’s kind. I can make the last coach out.” I glance at the grandfather clock near the stairs. Too late to look again for Lionel. My purse is on the table in the front hall. On the floor sits the carpetbag Ada has folded my widow’s weeds to.

  “Still slightly damp,” she says.

  “I appreciate—When was the last time Cathy visited my sister?”

  Ada blinks. Her gaze slips to Thomas, who is smiling, all big teeth and vanity. “I don’t remember. Last month, I think.”

  “July?”

  “I think.” She presses her palms together, fingers pointed to the floor. “Or perhaps the month before.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The coach is overfull. My legs are pinched between a knobby knee and a wood crate marked Wilkins. The tobacco smoke is thick enough that the open windows do no good to shift it from the tight space, so it curls itself around our necks and shoulders. The woman next to me—a tiny thing with braided rounds of white hair looking close to toppling from her head—wrinkles her nose and then sneezes.

  Outside, the road glimmers with pools of leftover rain. The moonlight spatters its reflection in through the wet leaves of the trees. The air is gummy, and the mix of it with the smoke makes my stomach shudder.

  I tighten my grip on my reticule. A corner of Alice’s book pokes the soft of my inner arm.

  I want to go home.

  “Where is home?” I whisper.

  The coach hits a rut. “Wouldn’t find a road like this in Concord, no, you wouldn’t,” says the woman next to me.

  The other voices ripple, and discussion begins on the various grades and soils of New Hampshire roadways. They don’t stop yapping as we make Turee. The stable boy pulls the step and doesn’t help with the carpetbag. It’s passed hand over hand in the cabin and dropped to the dirt.

  I hop to the ground. My legs and back still feel the sway of the ride; I press my hands to the small of my back to stretch and gain land legs.

  The carpetbag is swiped from in front of me. “Come on.”

  “Lionel.”

  He tramps to the road, not slowing his long strides. His beaver hat catches the lamplight on the mill pond bridge. It bobs in time with his steps.

  I shrug my purse across a shoulder and jog to catch up. “They’ve lied, Lionel.”

  “No.” The muscles in his jaw tense.


  I grab at his linen coat, bunching the fabric and twisting it to get him to slow. To stop and listen.

  “I said no.” He yanks his elbow up to free it from me, then shakes out his arm.

  I run sidewise, move in front of him, and push my hand to his chest. “Where were you today?”

  His green eyes flick to me, then up again to the road. He twists his torso to elude me.

  “Where were you?”

  His boot hits a puddle, splashing mud along the hem of his trousers. “God damn it.”

  “I needed you, I needed to see you. Where were you?”

  He stops. Grips his fingers to my arm and pulls me so I’m on the tips of my toes. His teeth are bared, lips taut, the whole of his face quivering. Then he shakes his head and keeps walking. His fingers dig as he half pulls me down the street.

  “Let go of me. People will look.” But there weren’t people, only the fields and the white-headed sheep.

  He leans forward, doubling his pace. His Adam’s apple slides up and down, stretching the skin of his throat.

  “They killed Alice.” My arm’s going numb under his grip. “Did you hear me?”

  His step stutters. He drops his hand from my arm, wiping it on the side of his thigh, and makes a noise in his throat.

  There’s a flash of movement from the turn to the house: Toby careens around the hedge and rushes toward us. “Auntie.”

  I push his hands away when he tries to grab on to me. “Leave us, Toby.”

  “Not now.” Lionel takes a breath and leans down. “Go get a treat from Saoirse.”

  “Do what your father says.”

  The boy flinches, as if I’ve cuffed his ear. When I reach in apology, he smacks at the top of my hands.

  “Toby. Enough.” Lionel drops the carpetbag and lifts him under the arms. His legs dangle, socks slipped to his ankles. He squirms and kicks, red cheeked and thin mouthed.

  “Do something with him.” I brush past them and make my way to the front door.

  “Where are you going?” He sets Toby down and follows me. His shoulder bumps into mine as he elbows past me in the hall, blocking my way. “You lied to Cathy. You said you were going to see a friend.”

  “Move.”

  “I told you not to—”

  “I want you to see something.” I shove him away, scramble around the chairs in his office, then grapple in my bag for Alice’s book. “This is where we sent her, Lionel. We sent her to her death. You and me.” I circle the desk, pushing bills and diagrams to the side, then set her notebook on the leather. “Someone was watching her. And Kitty said someone was on the roof. Alice turned around and—”

  “You need to settle down.”

  “I won’t.”

  There’s a quick movement; Toby slinks around the doorframe and plasters himself to the wall. Lionel sees him. He takes a step back, palm out, as if he’s keeping his son from me. “You’re scaring the boy.”

  Cathy is now in the room. “I can hear you all the way in the sewing room.”

  “It’s not just negligence, Lionel. She knew about another woman who . . . She sent a complaint to the constable. So at least give me the courtesy of looking at this.”

  He lifts his hands and looks over my head at Cathy. “Do you have any idea what she’s talking about?”

  “You need to stop, Marion,” Cathy says. “You’re sounding like her.”

  “They’re lying.” I pound my fist to my thigh. “Listen to me.”

  “Get Toby out of here,” Lionel says.

  Cathy takes the boy by the hand and leads him back to the hall. Bends to whisper something in his ear. Pats his head. Then she closes the door and leans against it. “Marion.”

  “She knew she was going to die.”

  She presses her lips together, bites the inside of the lower one. “Where would you get an idea like that?”

  “I met with Kitty Swain.” I turn to Lionel. “But I think your wife told you that; she read my letter—you read my letter—which is why you met me so rudely at the coach.”

  Lionel’s gaze flicks to Cathy, then he startles when I thump my fist to the book. “Here. Read it.”

  He pinches a corner and opens it. Not to the first page, but to the page with the cat. His cheeks pale. He turns another page. Back to the first.

  “She knew she was going to die.” I stab my finger to the page. “Look.” Then I twist the book around, flip back to the picture of the box with the lock on at the temple. “Look. The bruises she had were directly from this device. I’m sure of it. This—it is murder. Maybe she saw something. I’m certain she did. Beatrice Beech—”

  “And maybe she killed the poor cat and cut it up just to draw pictures of all its parts.” Lionel turns the book to Cathy.

  “I don’t want to see it,” she says. “She wrote things like that all the time. What in here is different from anything else she’s written?”

  “Kitty said her door was opened. She was pushed off that roof. And she was locked in a box before that. Those bruises I saw, they’re directly from that, I’m sure of it. She’s afraid of the dark, Cathy, you know that. You don’t leave someone in a box who’s afraid of the dark.”

  Lionel snaps the book shut. “You need to leave things alone.”

  “Something was going on, Lionel. She writes it in here. She sent a complaint.”

  “Delivered by Kitty,” Cathy says. “Or so she states. What a marvelous imagination for a dull girl.”

  Lionel laughs. Puts his finger on the journal and slides it back to me without another look. Then he takes a ring of keys from his trouser pocket and unlocks a cabinet behind him. He grabs a handful of papers, all folded in thirds. Official blue paper with numbers inked along a top edge. He pulls out another handful to drop on top of the first.

  “Why don’t you look at this. Before you believe her.” He clears his throat and unfurls the nearest, shaking it and holding it out. His eyebrow lifts.

  “A party of seven Confederate rebels stole three bushels of corn from the feed barrel in the barn. Proof: Milk taken from milk cow. Proof: udders. Proof: Cobs on property.”

  He folds it and sets it to the side.

  “Runyons of Turee, Post Road, continue to enter my room and wake me hourly. Proof: Always leave a crow’s feather on the pillow. Three included.

  “Or, how’s this: Lionel Snow (brother) has poisoned the wood warblers. Proof included: 1 bottle of lye, 1 bottle of whiskey, millet stirred with above. No bird song.”

  My stomach drops. “How many?”

  “Twenty-seven. You’re not innocent, either. She submitted a complaint that you smothered our dear mother with a hand pillow. Embroidered with spring peas.”

  “Why do you have the complaints?”

  “Constable Grent was kind enough to return them to me so I didn’t go bankrupt paying fees for delusions. Thus precluding the need for a ridiculous investigation.”

  “She never did that when she lived with Benjamin and me. I don’t . . .”

  “Maybe Benjamin intercepted them all.”

  “He’d have told me.”

  “Would he? Or would you have taken them—believing them true, even if it was about you murdering your own mother? Would you have walked that down to the station and filed it yourself?”

  “Of course I wouldn’t.” My skin prickles with sweat. I swipe the back of my hand to my forehead, hold back the clatter of memories. “Those are fantasies.”

  “So is this book,” he says. “I’d like to have a talk with the woman who gave you this and filled your head with some inflated conspiracy.”

  “I believe her.”

  Cathy twists to face me. Her lips are drawn taut. “Your obsession is ruining this family.”

  “She wouldn’t be dead if she’d stayed here. She didn’t deserve—”

  “Enough.” Lionel’s face is purple with rage. “Stop defending her.”

  I fist my hand, then stretch it out. “She couldn’t get out of that room without someone opening th
e door. Someone obviously did. She knew it was going to happen. She knew it.” I point to the notebook. “It’s all there. It’s . . . someone had to have pushed her. She wouldn’t have . . . She’s telling the truth. I’m sure of it.”

  Cathy twists the book toward her, lifts the cover, then lets it drop closed.

  “What if I’m right?”

  She gives a nod, then moves next to Lionel. She stacks the papers, runs her palm down a side to straighten the pile, then sets the papers on top of the notebook. “So, someone at the hospital took it into their head to let a patient run free. Sorry. Pushed a patient from a roof. To what purpose? I mean, really?” She lifts her palms. “To what purpose?”

  “I believe Kitty. I believe her.” I look toward my brother. “I would have taken care of her.”

  “How?” Cathy asks. “You have nothing now, Marion. She’d be right back here and it would all be as much chaos as it was before. She killed herself.” She lifts a shoulder and drops it. “It should have been expected. She tried once before.”

  “When?”

  She crosses her arms and bites at her lip. “She was in the greenhouse. When it burnt. Barricaded herself in with the pots and stuck something in the lock. Poured oil from the lamp all along the floor. If Elias hadn’t come from the barn . . . I don’t want to think what would have happened.”

  The cabinet drawer scrapes as Lionel opens it. “Give me the book,” he says. But it’s in his reach, so he grabs it up and drops it to the papers.

  “Please listen.”

  Lionel locks the cabinet. “No more, Marion. Take one moment to see your sister as she really was.”

  I push aside the chintz curtains in Toby’s room, tug the roller blinds until they lift and open with a snap, then pull up each window. The stump of the old tree looks like a wound in the yard. It’s split in places, dark fissures where the tar has been painted to stop more growth. The roots that once fanned across the ground have been lopped. Still the dahlias rise, inky purple and ruby, the flowers the size of dinner plates.

  “What would you like me to read?” I ask, then step around the toy train track and move to the side window.