by Rosie Thomas
The rooks clamoured as daylight died.
‘I have no message,’ Nancy insisted. ‘I thought you said you knew no barriers here. What could I offer, if all is clear already?’
He stooped to rest his hand on her shoulder.
‘Not one word?’
The couple edged closer still.
Beyond them, where the field ended and the trees began, she saw the little figure.
It was Feather’s ability to draw the apparition from her subconscious, as he had always done.
As it had been hers to hear Helena’s confession and know of her brother’s abuse.
Lenny stood less than a yard away now. Twilight and the fire’s glow hollowed his face. His wife crept with him, her hands outstretched to clutch at Nancy’s clothing.
‘Where is she?’ she whispered.
Nancy gazed towards the soaking girl, and her mother and father craned in the same direction. From their stricken faces it was plain they could see nothing.
‘He promised us,’ Lenny murmured.
‘Give her to me. Give her to me,’ the wife begged.
She was crazed with hardship and Feather’s fantasies, and so was her husband in his ratcatcher’s coat with the catapult dangling from a pocket. Their need was menacing.
These people were all deranged. She must get away from their camp or she would lose her own grip on reason.
‘I can’t give her to you. She is not mine to command.’
Somehow she broke free of Feather and lurched to her feet.
Lenny and Peg blocked the way, with the lumpen others ranged behind them. It was a hundred yards to the gate and beyond that the path was in darkness, bordering a steep drop to the river bank. The smell of weed and water flowed over her. The little figure stood motionless, almost melting into the murk gathered under the trees.
Nancy pointed her finger.
‘She is his.’
In this isolated place Feather manipulated them all. Her head spun with the Uncanny, and a sickening new conviction. Feather still yearned to pay her back for rejecting him in favour of the Palmyra. He had brought her here with the intention of doing her harm.
Her mind reeled. The layers of subterfuge, the seances and the spirit voices, the tricks and confidences they had both employed obscured everything. Even gravity itself deserted her. She swayed as the ground tilted under her feet.
Peg snatched at her arm.
‘Let my girl go.’
Lenny hissed, ‘We’ve watched you, we have. With Mr Feather, since he came to tell us who you are, we’ve known you held our Emmy.’
Poor creatures, under his spell. Her skin crawled.
‘I haven’t held her. He did.’
She took a step, and another, trying to push past them and at the same time willing herself not to break into a run. Her heart was thudding. The accomplices converged, closing off her escape.
The soaking girl was drifting towards them. The sockets of her eyes were black.
The mother and father sensed she was close at hand at last. The mother moaned and opened her arms, staring around in hope and horror.
The apparition was holding up something Nancy had never seen her with before. It was the posy basket, her proud possession aboard the Queen Mab, from which Devil had produced the cricket ball. The child smiled at her through a hank of dripping hair and then she said, ‘I am going now.’
Nancy had never heard her speak. It was a child’s high innocent voice.
She tried to smile back at her.
‘Yes, it’s time to go.’
She felt rather than heard Lenny’s wild bellow. He was as desperate as the butcher at her first public seance.
‘No, darling. Let me see you. Emmy, stay here with me.’
Peg screeched in agony.
‘Go to sleep, my baby. Rest now.’
The soaking girl seemed to hesitate between the two of them. Then she placed a finger to her lips. In a sudden rush of flying hair and scattered droplets she swept straight at Nancy. Nancy made to sidestep and there came a confused movement, too fast for her eye to catch, as Lenny fitted a stone into the leather sling.
There was a whistle in the air before the darkness exploded.
Nancy’s hands flew up to cover her face, too late. Her legs gave way and she pitched to the ground.
Pain was a reality. Pain was the only reality, pain and more pain.
She was being carried in a blanket slung between two poles. Rolled up like a corpse. Jolting and swaying, bloodshot branches overhead against a netted crimson sky. The swinging beams of torches, and urgent voices calling.
A bed, more voices. One of them belonged to Frances Templeton. A hand was placed on her forehead but she could see nothing. She was blinded and in agony.
Darkness deeper, and a kind of sleep.
When she woke up it was to the impression of a clean white place, although she could see nothing. She twisted in panic and cool fingers found her wrist.
‘Are you awake, dear?’
The other hand was free and when she raised it to ex-plore the source of her pain her fingers encountered layers of bandages.
‘Can you hear me, Nancy?’
She had been in the grip of horrible dreams and the visions receded slowly. Her mouth was parched.
‘Where?’ she mumbled.
‘You are in hospital. Quite safe. Here’s the doctor now.’
Someone was beside her head and she flinched. There was the creak of a starched shirt.
‘I am Dr Pennington. You have an eye injury, but please don’t worry. You are not blind.’
Nancy lay in the hospital. The heavy bandages covering her face were removed and with her right eye she could just pick out the blurry outlines of the window and the bed curtains. A huge pad of dressings still covered the left. Cornelius and Devil sat beside her. Devil leaned forward into her narrow field of vision.
‘That bastard Feather. I’ll kill him, with these.’ He waved his bare hands.
‘No, Pa. That won’t help anyone.’
Feather and his followers had struck their camp and vanished. A vagrant had knocked at the kitchen door at Whistlehalt and told Guillaume that the lady was hurt, and then he had run away. So they had found Nancy, lying amongst the half-dismantled tents.
Mrs Templeton came to see her, and in her presence even the senior nurses shrank against the walls. Devil went quiet.
‘You will get the best treatment here, Nancy. Dr Pen-nington is the top man in the field. Everything that can be done will be, I assure you.’
She understood that it was Mrs Templeton who had chosen and arranged for her care.
‘The police are searching for Mr Feather and his companions. I am so sorry this dreadful affair happened on our land. I shouldn’t have agreed to let them stay.’
At last, after what seemed a long time but was really only two days, Gil came. He had identified a time when she had no other visitors. She tried to smile but it turned into a wince of pain.
‘Hello. What about the mill strike?’ she whispered.
He stroked her cheek with his finger. ‘Nancy, the strike doesn’t signify. What happened? Jinny told me what she could but it wasn’t much. I need to know what I can do.’
She understood his need to do something. He was a powerful man, used to giving orders and having them carried out.
She described the incident but it was as if she was telling someone else’s story. It had been an accident. There was a dismal gathering of itinerant cranks, a poacher with a catapult who had taken exception to a supposed intruder. It had been a careless warning that had misfired. No mention of the soaking girl, or of Lenny and Peg. No Queen Mab, not a breath of the Uncanny. That would have been to unravel too much and they didn’t do that any longer. What had once united them now drove a wedge between them.
‘My darling girl. My poor Nancy.’
She didn’t want to be his poor girl. That was not her role.
Her sight in the undamaged eye was acco
mmodating, but when she was tired a faint rainbow haloed everything she looked at. Gil was outlined now, as if he were a rather well-dressed saviour in a religious picture. She smiled in spite of herself, and winced again.
It was enough that he was here. She didn’t want him to do anything more than sit beside her. She held on to his hand, drawing strength from its warmth.
Gil had brought her a basket of hothouse roses. They were perfectly shaped blooms but after he had gone, when she asked the youngest nurse to hold them closer, she found they had no scent.
‘They are still gorgeous,’ the little nurse breathed.
When Freddie came later he brought a bunch of bluebells from the Whistlehalt woods. They were so fresh and delicate with their sapphire bells curling to pale azure at the margins. Made breathless by the discovery that she could still see colours she traced one sappy stem with her fingertip.
A telegram came from Jake in California and there were dozens of other messages and cards and letters with good wishes. Nancy lay against her pillows, listening and watching as the sight in her right eye came back. The nurses’ shoes squeaked on polished linoleum and their starched headdresses lifted like flags of an unexpected truce. Squares of weak sunlight illuminated cream-painted walls, flowers opened and faded in their vases, chips in the enamel of water jugs and dressings cases revealed themselves in the shape of continents or crouching beasts. She drank the soup that was fed to her, sipped cocoa, pulled the crisp sheets against her chin and slept, woke again and found herself at peace.
She gave herself up to the daily routine of being cared for, and to the long nights that were disturbed only by the muttering and cries of the other women. Even the pain in her head was a finite thing, capable of management. The nurses began to praise her for being a model patient; she joked about their boyfriends or tiny rebellious infringements of uniform rules.
It was peculiar to discover serenity in such circumstances, but she did find it.
One day, Dr Pennington explained that the sharp stone had been fired with such force that it had shattered her left eyeball. He had done his best but it had been impossible to save the sight in that eye and he had taken the decision to remove it.
‘I see,’ she murmured automatically as she took in this information, and then laughed aloud. ‘I do see, don’t I? Even if it’s only with the other eye.’
The doctors and nurses were surprised by her equanimity. She supposed that being partially blinded would have its impact on her before too long, but while she lay there in the ward she was preoccupied with a different realisation.
In this place she would have expected the reek of antiseptic, floor polish, sickness, boiled greens and a dozen other odours to flood through her. They would herald the warning flow of spit into her mouth, the rising gorge, and the shimmer of the Uncanny. But there was nothing. The hospital was functional, a place of repair, perfectly predictable.
She corrected herself: there were a few scents, she hadn’t lost her sense of smell, but they were no more than wafts and they disappeared altogether as she grew accustomed to them.
Yet another day came when the last layer of padding was briefly lifted and she was allowed to study her face in a hand mirror. She took in the purple-and-yellow bruising and the weeping, scabbed lids welded over the crumpled and empty socket. It was ugly and sad, but it wasn’t fearful.
She handed back the glass.
‘I’ll be needing a black eyepatch,’ she said. ‘Like a pirate’s.’
After two weeks Dr Pennington told her that she had done so well she could be discharged, provided she came back every other day to have the socket cleaned and the dressings changed. Whistlehalt was much closer than Waterloo Street, so Freddie insisted on taking her back there.
Her nurses and the other patients crowded in on the last morning to say goodbye. Nancy had never realised that it was so easy to be ordinary.
Freddie and Guillaume and Mrs G had made up her Whistlehalt bedroom for her.
‘Jake told me to buy you a present from him, something decadent and gorgeous. I chose this because I’d really rather like it for myself.’
Freddie draped a cream cashmere robe with satin revers against his lean body and spread the skirts. ‘Mmm?’
‘It is utterly gorgeous. If it’s really mine, hand over, please.’
The robe had probably cost more than she had spent on clothes for herself in her whole life, in total. She would have liked to have her mother’s old red robe. Perhaps Sylvia would send it.
Whistlehalt ran with its accustomed casual opulence and she spent her days lazing and watching the unfurling of leaves on the branches outside her window. It was still remarkably easy to be ordinary, and to be looked after by her friends.
She spoke to Gil on the telephone, sometimes twice a day. He had been dealing with the difficulties in Manchester and these were now resolved.
‘I’ll come to Whistlehalt tomorrow,’ he promised.
Before he arrived Guillaume advised her, ‘Do your hair. Put on something pretty.’
Cornelius and Jinny had brought her a small suitcase, packed by Jinny. Nancy dressed and stared at her reflection, having hardly used a mirror since the bandages had come off in the hospital. Uncertainly she rearranged her appearance and even tried out some make-up. Lipstick and one painted eye looked so wrong that she scrubbed it all off again. She heard a car turn in at the gates and watched the Bentley roll into view. Gil was wearing a soft hat with the brim turned down and he didn’t look up to her window. She walked down the stairs to meet him at the front door.
When he visited her in the hospital she had been dazed by painkillers and intent on her own recovery, but now she saw him clearly without any surrounding halo of light. Her first thought was that he was as familiar to her as her skin. The second, hard behind it, was that in their long intimacy and then the drama of her eye injury she had stopped noticing his gloss. Celia and he had worn it the first time she met them in her Palmyra dressing room, and now she noticed all over again how wealth burnished him. Every stitch and seam of his clothing was the best, his skin and his nails were polished, each movement he made expressed confidence.
She thought with slight bewilderment, But we don’t match. Not in one single respect.
In the drawing room he took her by the elbow and led her to the French windows to study her face in the daylight. She had deliberately left off the dressings. She flinched only a little as he examined the ruined eye socket. Nancy had never been over-concerned about her appearance except when it exposed her status, and she held her chin high now.
‘Does it hurt very much?’
‘Not any more.’
They sat down in front of the fire. They knew Whistlehalt well enough but it was hard not to feel a touch of discomfort in surroundings that were not their own, where the theatrical decor featured oversized vases and Freddie’s favoured drapes, as well as the new life-size portrait of Jake costumed as Hamlet. Nancy caught herself thinking that there was more fun and warmth under this roof than in all the grand rooms at Bruton Street.
‘There must be something I can do,’ Gil repeated.
She studied his face. She loved every piece of him. She didn’t want anything done, only to be.
‘Well, you could kiss me,’ she smiled.
He leaned forward very slowly and pressed his lips to her forehead.
‘When will you come home?’
Home being Bloomsbury, of course. She longed to be there, opening the windows to let in fresh air and arranging flowers in the vases.
‘Oh, quite soon. In a week, perhaps. It’s been lovely here with Freddie and the others but I want to set my life going again.’
She wasn’t sure how that would be, sensing what she now did about the Uncanny, but she didn’t mention that.
‘That’s good to hear,’ he murmured.
Freddie looked in, wearing a loose silk shirt with his bare feet in Moroccan slippers. The two men shook hands and Gil thanked him warmly for taking
care of Nancy.
‘We adore her,’ Freddie said, fitting a cigarette into its holder.
They began a conversation about a Cubist exhibition. Trailing in a robe, an actor called Frank brought in the tray. The last to appear was Guillaume.
He stopped as soon as he saw Gil’s face, and there was a tiny break in the chatter. Gil accepted a cup and a plate from Frank before the talk resumed.
‘Divine cake,’ Freddie murmured. ‘Feathery as angels’ wings.’
After the boys had wandered away Freddie said that he must go and change.
‘Do come any time to call on our darling girl,’ he told Gil.
Nancy sat in her corner of one of the big sofas, still laughing at the nonsense the boys had talked.
‘They’re good fun, aren’t they? Have you met Guillaume before?’
‘No,’ Gil said.
It was time for him to leave. He was dining in Kensington, he told her.
‘How is Celia?’
He took her hand and turned it over in his, examining her fingers. Nancy sat more upright, wondering what was to come.
‘Celia has taken a bad turn. I didn’t tell you earlier, when you were in the hospital. Perhaps I shouldn’t mention it even now.’
Her breath stilled.
‘Yes, you should. What sort of a bad turn?’
‘At the moment she is in a secure hospital. Her mother and the doctors are afraid she may do serious harm to herself, and I agree there’s a risk of that.’
‘Oh, Gil. Poor Celia.’
He was pale, frowning down at their linked hands.
‘I have been thinking about a divorce.’
She stared, with wild hope leaping inside her. The first thought was, At last. Gil and she had both done wrong to Celia, but for the nine years they had been in love he had given every consideration to a neurasthenic girl-woman. If poor Celia was losing her reason altogether, that was not Gil’s doing – nor was it hers.
A clamour started up inside her although she tried to silence it.
Divorce her. Marry me. I’ll love you and care for you. You deserve to be happy. We deserve it.