Murray took her aside. ‘I will send medicine.’
‘It is only heat and exertion,’ said Letty, searching his face with rather stern eyes, ‘is it not?’
‘Agitation also.’ He spoke haltingly, as if divested for the moment of medical authority. ‘Is Mrs Bulwer still in the house?’
‘No. Why is Fwances worse now than at first?’
‘She still had her mission. Her mission accomplished, she could give way to shock. It is the way with most of us.’
‘Shock at Wobert’s accident?’
‘Why, ma’am, at what else? Shall I send for Mrs Bulwer to return?’
Although Frances’s face was still averted, Letty saw that her mouth now hung slightly open. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’
‘But with two sickbeds—’
‘Wobert is only next door. And Madge Noakes is with him.’
‘She can not provide the kind of nursing either he or Miss O’Beirne needs. It will all fall to you. Send for Mrs Harbin. Miss O’Beirne is fond of Mrs Harbin.’
‘I shall if needs be. But pway, leave me now to manage alone.’
‘At least let Cowper see her.’
‘James, are you distwessed for her?’
‘Not distressed, no. But it would be as well.’
‘Then Henwy may come. And in the meantime, Madge Noakes will help me clean her.’
But when Murray left, Letty did not ring the bell. She did not wish any of the servants to see her sister in this state, and nor was she willing to enlist Amelia, or even Louisa. Frances’s open eyes were as passive as her open mouth, betraying no pain, no passion, no feeling of any kind. Letty no longer suspected her of acting, and had all but discounted her suspicions of James Murray. She now feared that Frances had been struck mad. And if it got about that she was subject to fits of madness, it would certainly undermine her chances of marriage to a nephew of the Annings.
She brought a basin of water and a cloth to the bedside. Frances was quiet and tractable. She turned her head when Letty told her to, and allowed herself to be made clean. Letty kept up a quiet, calm flow of talk—‘And now we must do this. And now let us do that.’—as if talking to a child. Frances rolled over and let the soiled counterpane be pulled from beneath her, but when Letty said, ‘And now you must lie still, while I go and fetch fwesh bed clothes,’ she raised herself on an elbow and grasped her sister’s hand. Letty’s ministrations had had an effect; intelligence was breaking into her eyes. She said, ‘It was the letter.’
‘What letter?’
‘Well, you see, it must have happened while I was writing to Edmund.’
‘Beginning a new letter to him alweady!’ exclaimed Letty with approval.
‘Yes. Over there. At my desk. And I came and lay here on the bed. Not for long, but very likely for longer than I thought. I don’t remember.’
‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter.’
‘But it does. That’s when it must have been done.’
‘My love, no one blames you.’
‘And I thought I was so vigilant.’
Letty was so relieved that she laughed aloud. Frances was not mad after all. She was suffering from heat, exertion, and pangs of conscience made worse than usual by her earnest nature. Laughing, Letty bent forward to embrace her and to assure her again that Robert’s injury was in no way her fault, but at the moment of embrace she was deterred by her sister’s scowling brows and resisting shoulders. She straightened herself and spoke with persuasion. ‘But my love, who could blame you? Wobert is always hurting himself.’
‘Robert!’
The anger and contempt with which Frances spoke her son’s name was so unexpected, so unprecedented, that Letty was stunned by it, and went on as if it had not happened.
‘And if you must blame yourself, my dear, make amends by getting well quickly. Wobert loves you and will need you.’
But Frances, as she let herself drop back on the bed, loudly laughed.
‘Robert needs nobody.’
‘Fwances!’
Frances raised her voice. ‘Robert needs nobody. For him, we run from all quarters.’
‘Mama!’
The cry was lusty, and came from the nursery next door. Frances laughed again, but Letty, as if in perfect proof of her sister’s assertion, had already reached the door. But on her way out she hesitated, and turned, and flung out a pleading hand.
‘Sister, lie still. Sleep. I will soon be back. James is sending medicine for you.’
Robert had been asleep for an hour. He said he wanted to go to the Jericho, and Letty sent Madge Noakes to fetch him a bottle from the scullery. He was still sweating. Letty washed his face and dried his damp hair with a towel. A good pink colour rose to his cheeks and he cried out cheerfully that he was starving. Letty sat by his bed, and Elizabeth Robertson, smiling and munching and trundling, brought calvesfoot jelly and milk. He said he didn’t want that; he wanted a piece of roasted cheese. Lucy ran in, and would have jumped on to her brother’s bed had Letty not made a barrier with one arm. Lucy began to cry. She was hungry, she said, and wanted a piece of roasted cheese. Henry Cowper arrived, smelling of mint and rum, and sanctioned a piece of roasted cheese for them both. When he removed the bandage from Robert’s leg, and the wound was disclosed, Lucy began to weep fiercely. Robert told her curtly to be quiet, and she ran from the room, followed by Elizabeth. It was growing dark. Henry asked for candles, and when Madge Noakes had brought them, and he was examining the wound by their light, the commandant came in.
He put one hand briefly on his son’s head. ‘Well, my boy.’ And to Henry he said, ‘What is your opinion, Cowper?’
‘Murray has done well.’
‘Mr Cowper, Mr Murray gave me brandy.’
‘Did he indeed. Well, tonight you may have port wine.’
‘Papa, I am to have port wine.’
‘Yes, my son.’
‘Where is my Aunt Fanny, mama?’
‘In bed, my love.’
‘Is it late?’
‘Not vewy. She is indisposed.’
‘Oh.’ The boy’s gaze became remote, as if he were trying to remember something. Henry was swabbing his wound with cold water. Robert watched him for ten seconds or so, then raised his head.
‘Papa, what happened to Martin?’
‘He was punished, Robert.’
‘The water, ma’am,’ said Henry Cowper, for Letty had suddenly put the dish on the floor, out of his reach. ‘Water, if you please,’ he said sharply.
The commandant picked up the dish from the floor and put it into his wife’s hands. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘Mrs Bulwer will be happy to help you, and Mrs Harbin too. I have their assurances on it.’
She did not look at him. ‘I need no one.’
‘You are tired.’
‘For the moment I pwefer to manage.’
But the water in the dish was slopping at the sides. ‘I will hold the dish,’ said Madge Noakes, ‘if the candle will do on the table.’
‘Nobody need hold it,’ said Henry. ‘I have finished with it.’
Letty set the dish on the floor. ‘Henwy, did James give you the medicine for Miss O’Beirne?’
‘In my bag.’ Henry began to put a fresh bandage on Robert’s leg. ‘In the small blue bottle.’
Letty, in a hurry, rose and shook out her skirts. ‘I will take it to her at once. Pway attend her when you have finished here.’
*
The wind blowing down the kitchen chimney had enveloped Annie in smoke as she stood lunging with a poker as if trying to stab the fire to death. Letty found a tray. She set it with a glass, a spoon, the medicine, and a lighted candle, and set out for Frances’s room. As she passed the nursery she saw her husband and Henry Cowper, standing one at each side of R
obert’s bed, while Robert, his eyes passing from one to the other, drank port wine.
Expecting to find the disorder she had left, Letty was surprised to find both Frances and the room clean and neat. The soiled linen had been removed and the bed freshly made and covered with a fresh linen counterpane. The ewer stood in its basin on the wash-stand, and clean folded towels hung on both rails; and although the smell of vomit was still present, the window had been thrown open and a warm breeze was flushing the room.
Letty had spent only about twenty minutes with Robert in the nursery. She knew that Madge and Elizabeth had been busy for all that time, and Annie, very audibly, had been in the kitchen. So Frances must herself have carried off the dirty linen and gone to the cupboard for fresh, must have emptied and washed the basin and filled the ewer with water drawn from the casks, must have made the bed, washed herself, brushed and tied back her hair, and dressed in clean clothes. But the energy needed to do all this had failed her, Letty guessed, when the light faded. She now sat on the bed steps, her feet drawn up on the bottom rung, an elbow on a knee, and one hand supporting her chin. In the other she loosely held one of her wide blue sashes. It was as if she had been struck into impassivity at the moment of picking it up.
She was very quiet; she gave Letty a smile but did not move. Letty came forward with her tray.
‘Henwy bwought you this medicine. He will attend you in a few minutes. All seems well with Wobert.’
Frances smiled again. ‘I am glad. I did not mean to laugh at him.’
‘I know. Will you take the medicine?’
‘It was not at him I was laughing.’
‘Will you take the medicine now?’
‘Of course.’
Letty carried the tray to Frances’s open desk and set it down. Here she found a small exception to the order of the room: two sheets of paper had been torn together from a letter book, and then torn four times across. Letty read phrases.
‘. . . live in peace and fidelity . . .’
‘. . . abate my former immoderate . . .’
‘. . . hope your dear aunt and uncle may find me . . .’
On one of the pieces of paper lay a scrap of red pulp, about the size of a grain of corn. The paper beneath it was stained a weak pink. The stem of the lily still stood in the vase, but supported an empty calyx.
Frances took the medicine at a draft, not seeming to notice its bitterness. She handed the glass back to Letty, spread her sash across both her knees, and looked at it as if considering its weave and colour. Letty, holding the glass, looked down at her sister’s glossy brown hair, which was drawn back tight and tied at the nape of her neck with an old narrow brown ribbon. ‘When you went to fetch James,’ asked Letty, ‘where did you find him?’
Frances did not look up. ‘At the hospital.’
‘In the office?’
Frances shook her head. Letty, feeling her altitude a disadvantage, dropped to one knee. Frances was smoothing the sash upon her lap. Letty put a hand on one of hers.
‘I think you saw Martin.’
‘Yes, I did.’ Frances’s voice was uninflected. She took the glass out of Letty’s hand, drained it of the remaining drop or two, and handed it back. ‘Yes, I did see him,’ she said.
‘He had been punished?’
‘Yes, punished.’ She spoke in the same uninflected voice. ‘Yes, he had been flogged.’
‘But,’ said Letty, ‘you knew.’
‘Yes.’
‘Knew it likely today. And have always known that—that thing—happened. We spoke of it the day after you came.’
‘Yes.’
‘It has never been kept secwet.’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t take your meaning.’ Letty was disturbed as well as puzzled by this inconsequent affirmative. Frances made no reply. Her head was bowed over the sash lying across her knees. The breeze stirring one of its loose ends also stirred her hair and the muslin flounces of her skirt. Letty lowered herself into a sitting position on the floor. She was still holding the empty glass. ‘I don’t take your meaning,’ she said again. She wished she could drop the subject, and persisted against her own exhaustion and hovering dread. ‘You say first it is known, was known, and yet you say now it has been kept secwet.’
‘We knew it in words, yet kept it secret. The words we used in speaking of it were the words that kept it secret. And then we kept it secret in the way we behaved, in our manners and our dress and our pastimes. I don’t exactly see what else we could have done. It is very hard to live in their proximity. And in saying this I don’t speak of him. He does not keep it secret.’
Letty, comprehending at once that ‘he’ was her husband, could not help sounding a note of eager commendation.
‘Well, there you are! He never has.’
‘Oh, but it doesn’t excuse him.’ Frances raised her head and looked straight into Letty’s eyes. ‘In secrecy,’ she said, ‘in avoidance, at least there is shame.’
The need to escape Frances’s eyes made Letty struggle to her feet with uncharacteristic clumsiness. ‘I am sure I don’t understand you,’ she murmured, looking distractedly about for somewhere to set down the glass. ‘I am sure your bluestocking talk is too much for my poor bwain.’
‘You know it is not.’
When they heard a knock at the door, Frances took no notice, but Letty, eager for the ease of a third presence, first hurried to open it, then hesitated for fear it should be her husband. But as she hesitated, the door opened a few inches, and she heard Henry Cowper’s voice.
‘May I come in?’
‘Come in, Henwy. Do come in.’
She saw that he looked wearier than usual, though his manner was much the same as always—off-hand, affable, his bow slightly sarcastic—until he turned to Frances. Frances had not moved except to coil inwards, it seemed to Letty, so that she sat more crouched, or hunched, on the small set of steps. Only her gaze moved outward, flaring into Henry’s face with the same galvanic intimacy she had shown to James Murray.
Henry, like Murray, returned it in kind, but unlike Murray, who had appeared unable to disengage his eyes, he returned it for only a moment. The moment was long enough for Letty to understand that what her sister shared with these two men was nothing so innocent as sexual passion. Theirs was a complicity of incurable knowledge. She found it no less shocking for having defined it. It was a relief to see Henry master it. He mastered it by laughing, by advancing on Frances and saying in a sing-song voice, ‘Come now, Miss O’Beirne, what is all this? What is all this fuss and bother?’
Though partly recovered from a difficult day, Henry was still feeling rather tired and testy. He had drunk too much at the Eagle Farm and had been too much bored by Scottowe Parker’s complaints. Parker was lonely; he felt ousted. Murray, he said, was so much occupied on his visits that he had no time for conversation, and when Parker was able to go in to the settlement, which, heaven knew, was seldom enough, everybody was so busy that they had no time for him. His isolation and danger were not appreciated. He was forced to carry a big stick for self-protection. He showed Henry the stick, and although he confessed that he had not yet beaten anyone off with it, he said the time would come. Perhaps, he added with gloomy sagacity, it would come for them all.
On his way home Henry had gone to sleep and fallen off Murray’s horse. The horse had walked away and he had had to go after it. But as soon as he drew near it trotted away. It played games with him, teasing him, letting him almost catch it and then moving out of reach and trotting around in circles. He cursed it. ‘You horse! Fiend from Tartarus! Mistake of Poseidon!’ The appellations were ridiculous for such a nag. He began to laugh, but was still angry. Here he was, Henry Cowper, who had once thought to become the richest surgeon-merchant in Batavia, who had meant to loll in a palace—a pavilion, Nobby Clark said it would
be—and be waited upon by twenty frisky but docile young wives, yes, here was that same Henry Cowper, dodging around a clayey little clearing, among stunted twisted bushes of an unknown genus, sweating, sick in his stomach and rotten in his mouth, playing games with a skittish old nag. In repudiation of the image, he had dashed at the horse and vaulted on to his back, taking both the horse and himself by surprise.
For a moment he was Buck Cowper again. It was the most adroit and energetic movement he had made for years. But what was that violent rasp across his chest? What was that gong in his temples? And that airy expansion of his cranium? ‘But I am only thirty,’ argued Henry with indignation. The horse, the fiend from Tartarus, the mistake of Poseidon, was moving meekly on. But Henry’s bridle hand shook, and in the other (set stylishly on a thigh) a nerve came alive and passed up his arm and made his elbow jerk. ‘One more caper like that,’ said Henry in amazement to himself, ‘and I’m a done dog.’ Yet he hoped he exaggerated.
Immediately on his arrival at the settlement he had been met by Murray with the story of Robert’s injury, and of how Frances O’Beirne had burst in upon him when he was about to treat Martin’s back. The latter event had filled Henry with fury. He had been drinking a pannikin of water and had almost dashed it in Murray’s face. ‘God’s teeth! Why didn’t you stop her?’
‘But she burst—’
‘Oh, burst, burst, burst. Well, damnation to you, what am I to do?’
‘See her. She is in a curious state.’
‘So am I. I am in no state to encounter a radical virgin.’
‘Could it have driven her out of her wits?’
‘It has evidently driven you out of yours. And in revenge you are trying to drive me out of mine.’
But in fact Henry was already feeling better. He gave several of his roaring groans, attracting the attention of the orderlies and the giggles of the cleaning gang. He drank a small glass of rum, washed his face and hands, and went to the commandant’s house. Here he was further restored by their need of him, and the need on his own part for professional concentration. He reminded himself that in thirty minutes he would be back in his quarters. He foresaw his hand grasping the neck of the bottle. He would sleep tonight, and live another day. But when Letty put the basin of water on the floor, he spoke sharply. ‘The water, if you please.’
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