The Sister

by Lynne Alexander

‘‘Shall I close the curtains, Miss?’’

  ‘‘Yes,’’ I said, then changed my mind. ‘‘No, Wardy, leave them: the sun will shift soon enough.’’

  ‘‘You can be sure of it, Miss,’’ she said, handing me the day’s newspaper along with a swinge at the town’s radical mayor. I took aim with the newspaper accusing her of despising him precisely for being one of her own kind; while at the same time choosing to enthuse over a stodgy foxhunting squire – ignorant, idle and selfish – like a cringing dog ready to lick the hand that beats it.

  ‘‘It fairly makes me vomit! Wardy,‘‘ I concluded, ‘‘you are a shame and a disgrace to your class.’’

  ‘‘And you … ,’’ she begins threateningly.

  ‘‘Yes?’’ I smile sweetly: ‘‘Go on.’’

  ‘‘Nothing,’’ mutters the little coward, fleeing. A minute later she returns with the post as if none of the above has taken place: ‘‘Who’s the popular one today? There’s a letter from your brother William … and another from a, let’s see, Miss Jewett.’’

  ‘‘Wardy, I can read the return inscriptions for myself.’’

  ‘‘I was only trying to be helpful, Miss, so you know what to expect.’’

  I glared at her, ‘‘I guess I prefer to be surprised.’’

  The letter from William was all about my furniture and effects. Enclosed was a note from Alice with news of the children, particularly little Margaret Mary; with a ‘PS’ thanking me for the knitted ‘object’.

  But it was the letter from Miss Jewett that arrested my attention:

  ‘My dear Katharine and Alice,

  You may be surprised to hear from me after all this time,

  but I have been thinking of you together in the closest way,

  and how you think together and know each other’s thoughts

  as only those friends can who are very near and dear.’

  She went on to speak of her own companion Annie Fields and their life together, ending with:

  ‘I wish your ‘reach’ together is as firm and easy as ours …’.

  Together and together and together. What a lot of ‘togethers’! thought I, rather flippantly; yet there was a kind of comfort in it. I grabbed up a piece of writing paper. ‘My dear Sarah,’ I began. After thanking her warmly for her wish for our continued happiness together, I added, ‘It gives us great pleasure to hear of the life you and Annie have created together. It is an accomplishment after all – your ‘original’ lives together – firm and easy – outside the usual bounds. Really, I think we are all to be congratulated …’. Katharine and I, I was pleased to add, were managing with our permanency, at least from time to time. I ended on a shamelessly self-congratulatory note saying with luck we would carry on and nothing I felt sure would threaten our ‘reach’ together until our bones fell asunder. Then for some unaccountable reason I added: unless some magic transformation takes place in my state. Then, astonishingly, it did. I met Bowles the Mesmerist.

  Forty-three

  We’d just passed the Pump Rooms when he came haring round the collonade as if on the run from an angry mob. Katharine held fast to my chair. ‘‘Thoughtless oaf!’’ she shouted after him but he’d already disappeared into the shrubbery. She checked my right shoulder for damage. I shook her off, saying it was nothing but she assured me, oh yes, ‘an outrage’ had most definitely occurred. That raised the question of how to respond. Should I be offended at an impropriety, insist on an ‘insult’ so that Katharine must then do something about it? But what? Having located the fellow – assuming she could find him again – would she be obliged to square up to him? See here, my good man, my friend does not take kindly to being knocked about …? But had I been ‘knocked about’? I felt for my arm; did it harbor a grievance, or something quite other? The sense of smash faded and in its place came – unthinkable – that of having been touched by a man. (But had I?) For a man’s touch, with the exception of my brothers and a series of doctors, was a rare and therefore unsettling experience.

  Next day – it was Wardy’s turn to take me out – there he was again: small and spare as a water biscuit, with the exception of a pair of shockingly red lips. Stripped of moustache and side-whiskers, and dressed accordingly, I saw that he would have made a pleasingly pert female. ‘Beauty is enchanting, Alice, but apt to be weak,’ sounded Henry’s warning voice in my head. But before Wardy could move me officiously on, the man had extended an ungloved hand: ‘‘Arthur Bowles, at your service.’’ I refused it, of course. Some cock-and-bull story followed about having been in a tearing hurry, not that that could excuse such oafishness etcetc, to which I heartily agreed.

  ‘‘Please allow me to apologize. If you will forgive my presumption,’’ he went on presumptuously, ‘‘you look like a lady in need of some radical treatment.’’

  The word ‘radical’ caught my attention; yet I was wary. ‘‘Is it your usual custom, Sir,’’ I charged, ‘‘to accost women in public?’’

  Fixing me with a squinty look not unlike my brother William’s, he half-shut his eyes and began intoning as if reading from a script tucked beneath the lids:

  ‘‘You are in pain much of the time … pain, how it inhabits … inhibits you, forcing you attend to it, its seemingly random pattern … how in its grip you become less and less your known self … an animal … a wolf, I sense, yes, howling and keening and …

  It went on

  ‘‘I see you shut in a dark room invaded by [he searched for an image] pachyderms of pain … a desperate frustration to communicate what it must be like, to be taken seriously … for them to know …’’ His eyes shot open as he added:

  ‘‘… the never-endingness of it.’’

  I was affected in spite of myself. How could he know of such things? His powers suddenly seemed formidable, even fearsome. I was tempted to tell him everything, beg his help, throw myself in his way. It was only Wardy touching my shoulder, saying, ‘‘Miss, are you allright?’’ that returned me to my senses.

  ‘‘All that may be,’’ I managed to inform him in a more-or-less rational voice, ‘‘but anyone seeing me as I am could guess as much.’’

  He shrugged, gazing past me towards York Bridge and the River. ‘‘In that case’’ – a small, stiff bow – ‘‘I will not detain you further.’’

  ‘‘No wait,’’ I reached out, ‘‘how do you propose to put an end to my condition as you describe it?’’

  But he was gone.

  Later I suffered a migraine which lasted three days and left me with a lingering fatigue.

  ‘‘Perhaps,’’ Wardy asked, ‘‘you should consult the gentleman we met at the Baths the other day, Miss?’’

  ‘‘I’m not sure ‘gentleman’ is a word I would apply to him.’’

  ‘‘Why, Miss, they say he has healing powers.’’

  ‘‘You mean like our former landlady’s tripe and potato soup?’’

  ‘‘Mock me as you will, Miss, it’s for your own good.’’

  ‘‘And who are ‘they’ that have recommended him in your vast range of experience?’’

  She trotted out the names of some doughty invalids: Duchess This and Lady That.

  ‘‘And what of Lord So&So?’’

  ‘‘Oh, well, they say the mesmerism does not work so well with the menfolk.’’

  ‘‘Oh dear,’’ I drawled out my sarcasm, ‘‘I can’t image why.’’

  ‘‘Perhaps it has something to do with their pipe smoking,’’ said the clueless thing.

  ‘‘Wardy.’’

  ‘‘Yes, Miss?’’

  I could barely control my irritation. ‘‘If you used what you please to call your brain – you do have quite a good one – and if you spent less time talking to other intellectually starved servants you would guess as well as I why Bowles’ fakery might not work with men.’’

  She stopped bustling about and threw her arms in the air. ‘‘And who do you expect me to talk to, the Leamington swells and toffs?’’

  I had no answ
er for that. Later, she proposed a visit to the Baths, adding: ‘‘if you are well enough.’’ That would take my mind off Bowles.

  ‘‘My mind is not on Bowles,’’ I protested.

  *

  An assistant led us through the ‘Hammam’ or Turkish Bath, an octagonal area lit by a starburst dome and decorated with blue, red and black tiled panels. ‘‘This is where you will finish up,’’ she said darkly. Beside four giant palms lay four women sprawled on slatted wooden recliners in various states of languid relaxation, or exhaustion. The echo of whispered voices.

  We were directed to one of the side treatment rooms. Wardy helped me down the four steps and through a doorway into a saline bathroom where we were met by another white-coated assistant. ‘‘Welcome to the ‘tepidarium’.’’ I was assigned a cubicle and helped to undress, then laid on a slab where I was ‘roughed up’, the latest treatment apparently for rheumatism and fibrositis. At the end of the pummeling I was given an aeration bath.

  After that came the ‘Vichy Douche’: warm water sprayed at ferociously high pressure to stimulate the skin and to my surprise, rather exciting. But then came ‘The Needle Shower’ enclosing me in its six brass arms like some malevolent Hindu god shooting me from his finger-ends with dart-like jets of hot and cold water. If I had not had the ‘arms’ to hold onto I would most certainly have collapsed. But the assistants were merciless and Wardy too respectful to stop them.

  The torture proceeded. Since I could no longer stand on my own, the assistant placed me in a special contraption for paralytic patients. I was then wheeled down a ramp and dumped into a ‘Zotofoam’ bath where the temperature was slowly raised until I felt I’d been captured by a tribe of cannibals and would soon be boiled and eaten alive. ‘‘It is to cure obesity, it will help burn away fat,’’ explained the assistant. ‘‘But I am not obese,’’ I protested, ‘‘far from it.’’ She pretended not to hear.

  After that came the Bertholet Steam Cabinet, followed by the Hot Wax Bath in which my arms and legs were covered in layers of wax then wrapped in greaseproof paper and towels. I waved my arms like a giant tortoise in its last throes. ‘‘What purpose …?’’ I managed to gasp. ‘‘Pain relief,’’ shouted the assistant.

  Then there was the Electrical Treatment Room, where a lamp-like structure was turned on to ‘stimulate’ my paralyzed muscles, also my skin and blood. By this time I was the color of half-cooked pork. ‘‘I believe I am frying,’’ I told Wardy, holding fast to the electrical bar. The smell and crackle of burning flesh.

  After that I was slapped down onto a shallow stone trough as if I were a trout, and there massaged and sprayed with another high pressure hose. Then I was lifted off and placed on a stool inside a bubbling whirling ‘Vortex’. Finally I was given cervical traction in which I was attached to a sort of chair-lift, my arms raised over my head and secured to a winding mechanism; as the chain wound I felt my bones come apart, cracking like nuts.

  Eventually Wardy took receipt of my flaccid body, placing me back in the invalid’s chair and wheeling me out the way we’d come. Oh, but it was not over yet. I was shown into the ‘Frigidarium’ where I was forced to spend at least ten minutes cooling down before being led into the ‘Hammam’ where, as promised, I was made to join the other women in various states of recovery, though I was too exhausted to speak or take in any of the gossip. Eventually, I was well enough to be dressed and led home.

  The results were disastrous. The pain in my back was so bad I could not sit up. I had swollen neck glands and could not turn my head. I barely slept. Every time I was on the verge of falling asleep there would be another contraction of some nerve or other which was like being strangled, drowned and punched in the solar plexus simultaneously. The headaches were so severe I begged Wardy to be a dear and cut off my head. She declined, suggesting saucily: ‘‘Shall I bring Bowles to see you then?’’

  Forty-four

  ‘‘Follow me,’’ Wardy commanded him, only he slipped past her like the fox in Red Riding Hood, arriving first in the parlour. Catching him up she delivered a swift kick to his ankle sending his hat tipping into his hand. She hung it up along with his coat, throwing me one of her dark looks.

  ‘‘Naturally my nurse will stay,’’ I informed him, ‘‘and my companion, Miss Loring – ‘‘if you don’t mind.’’

  Katharine, playing her part, rose majestically from her corner.

  Bowles suddenly pulled back as if he had misperceived something in his calculations. ‘‘Oh,’’ he countered, his eyes travelling from me to her and back to me again: ‘‘But I do.’’

  ‘‘Do …?’’

  ‘‘Mind. There is no need for two chaperones – or even one.’’

  ‘‘In that case,’’ I said, ‘‘we shall have to cancel the ‘event’.’’

  ‘‘It is a question of trust,’’ he insisted.

  ‘‘For me, Mr Bowles, it is a matter of propriety.’’ I was as determined as he was, and he saw this.

  ‘‘Well,’’ he conceded, ‘‘I will allow it this once – but only one, if you please.’’

  So it was agreed: Wardy would sit quietly in the corner and not interrupt under any circumstances. Katharine, who had work to do in any case, would leave us.

  Bowles remained standing. He put me in mind of the little dancing master in Bleak House, albeit less humble than that literary personage. Indeed, once he rolled up his sleeves, which he’d taken the liberty of doing, I saw that his arms were roped with vein and muscle as if he’d been climbing up houses or cliffs, hanging there like one of Sara Darwin’s pater’s apes. And it was with those very arms that he now began arranging the ‘set-up’ for our encounter, placing a dining chair and Henry’s nursing chair so that they were facing one another a pace or so apart.

  ‘‘You will sit here.’’ He stood gripping the back of the nursing chair, voice softly commanding. Take your wretched hands off that chair at once! I wanted to shout, but somehow did not. The chair – my only valuable piece of furniture – had cabriole legs and a high hoop-shaped mahogany frame, and had recently been covered in wine-dark velvet. Naturally low-slung, it suited small women such as myself and Constance Woolson, though not Katharine.

  Since my ordeal at the Spa I had been bleeding heavily – ‘flooding’ Wardy called it, as if I were a river that had burst its banks. I’d also been having nightmares in which I haemorraged unstoppably: blood filling the the house, the street – until the River Leam ran red with it. Flooding indeed, I thought. My stomach was so swollen and hard I feared it would burst open with the pressure; yet I almost wished for it, for the relief. As for the pain, it went crawling about my body like some demonic infant with fanged canines and stilleto-sharp nails.

  I managed to swing my legs off the sofa where I’d been comfortably stretched and hauled myself up. I assumed Bowles would help me but he did not, nor would he allow Wardy to do so. No, he preferred to watch me stagger across the room where I eventually contrived to fling myself into the nursing chair. Perhaps that is his secret, I thought: the deliberate arousal of resentment which feeds the muscles with a perverse kind of energy. Well, then, at least if I start ‘flooding’, it will soak into the clot-colored velvet, and not stain too disastrously.

  ‘‘It is rather hard,’’ I complained.

  ‘‘All to the good,’’ he replied, ‘‘it will keep you awake.’’

  ‘‘But surely,’’ I argued, ‘‘a somnolent state is required for your … procedure?’’

  Twitch went a string of muscle at his temple. ‘‘If you will take your seat, Alice, you will find out.’’

  Alice? He dares to address me as Alice? Yes, he does. And I allow it.

  Eventually we were settled: I in the nursing chair, he, straight-backed, facing me.

  ‘‘Before we begin,’’ I requested – reasonably, I thought: ‘‘may I know something of your procedure?’’

  ‘‘And why would that be necessary?’’ he inquired.

  ‘‘Because …’’ – I ha
rdly knew how to put it – ‘‘it would help to place you … as a mesmerist, a medical clairvoyant, a neuro-hypnotist, a …?’’

  ‘‘And how would it help, Alice?’’

  Sweat was pooling under my arms, blood bubbling out of me. It was hardly a question, barely polite, baldly accusatory. I wanted to cry out at its unfairness: It would help to know because knowing is what I’m good at … all I’m good at … a useless body but a mind – at least that – that still burns on. More rationally, I at last managed:

  ‘‘Surely it is only natural that I should know something of what may be expected of me?’’

  He spread his legs then pulled them together again like a bird withdrawing from an insect’s attack.

  ‘‘Well,’’ he drawled: ‘‘I prefer not to define myself one way or t’other as I find such definitions limiting. However, I have been known, for your information, to use magnetic passes when necessary, though I am more likely in your case to use hypnotic suggestion. But my advice to you now’’ – he leaned forward to cup my chin as if it were a rare flower – ‘‘is to put yourself into my hands.’’

  I felt a tingling in my jaw as after eating a sour cherry that soon spread to other parts of my body. How easy it would be, I thought – now that I’d given him my chin – to allow my head and body to follow; indeed, for a moment I did let go, breathing in his nearness. (Good heavens, was he wearing scent?) But then I was frightened, shocked at myself, at the ease with which I was ready to surrender, causing my teeth to rattle in my head. After all, what did I know about him beyond Wardy’s gossipy recommendation?

  A spasm of pain. And still he held on, as if to receive the trembling into his own body, so that I nearly wept to have it shared. I am no longer alone, I thought, at which the spasm died down.

  ‘‘Do you want to be well, Alice?’’ he asked, releasing me.

  ‘‘Yes.’’ It emerged, to my shame, as a sob.

  ‘‘What has conventional medicine done for you, except to pump you full of drugs?’’