by Sarah Bryant
“Eleanor?”
I gripped his hand, forcing my mind to encompass the whole of what I was thinking.
“The day Dorian first came here,” I said, “he gave Tasha roses. When did you put them by her bed?”
“I didn’t,” Alexander said softly, his eyes still resting on my face but seeing something else entirely. “Mary brought them to her when she first became ill.”
“And suddenly she was more ill,” I continued, as understanding began to creep across his face. “My grandmother was ill, too, for years, with a disease that no one could diagnose. That last night with Tasha, when you were asleep, I threw the roses away. The next morning she was better.”
Alexander was shaking his head. “Why would Dorian wish to harm Tasha?”
“I believe the roses were meant for me. But perhaps, when he saw her, he saw a different kind of opportunity.”
Alexander sighed deeply. “All right. But I still don’t see what this could have to do with your grandmother.”
I shook my head, then regretted it as yellow spangles flurried in front of my eyes and the shapes of the room swam. I cursed all of them for reducing me to this state.
“If only I could think. . . .”
“No, Eleanor; that is exactly what you must not do. You must allow yourself to recover.”
“I won’t recover,” I said flatly. “Not as long as it’s useful to him to keep me this way.”
“Remember that this particular misfortune is my fault.” He was silent for a moment, his jaw working. Then he said, “Give this first dose of medicine time to wear off, then perhaps Mary will see sense. In the meantime, I will think of something.”
Before I could answer, there was a businesslike rapping on the door, and Mary entered, followed by a tall man with thinning grey hair and a long, drooping moustache.
“Eleanor, this is the doctor to see you. Alexander, if you wouldn’t mind . . .”
“Yes, of course—” he began, but I didn’t like the look of this doctor.
“Alexander can stay,” I said.
Mary frowned, but it was the doctor who said, “I understand your concern, but I prefer to speak to Miss Rose first without distractions. I will be happy to meet with Mr.—”
“Trevozhov,” Alexander said.
“—afterward, if he so wishes.”
I began to protest again, but Alexander silenced me with a look in Mary’s direction. I didn’t like it, but I knew he was right; better to submit to her doctor’s examination if I wanted to convince her that she was mistaken.
Alexander stood up to go, but I stopped him. I took Eve’s journal from the top of the pile on my bedside table and held it out to him.
“You asked for this a long time ago,” I said. “It’s what led me to the murals. Maybe you’ll see something else in it.”
Alexander pocketed the book, then bent down to kiss me good-bye. “Don’t worry, my love,” he said softly, “I won’t go far.”
I thought that his assurance would give me the willpower to face Mary and the doctor with poise, but even this was about to shatter.
“Eleanor,” Mary said, “this is Dr. Dunham. I called him in specially, as he treated your grandmother.”
I blinked at her in disbelief, as a chill spread across me. The doctor smiled, but the smile seemed pasted on and his grey eyes remained aloof. I looked at Mary in appeal, but she was already backing away.
“I’ll come back up with your lunch when the doctor’s finished,” she said, forcing another smile into the clenched muscles of her face.
When she had gone, the doctor’s smile faded, leaving the rest of his face as calculating as his eyes. He proceeded to examine me physically from head to toe, then he asked me a series of questions that I imagined were designed to probe my mental state. At the end of the examination, he stepped out into the hallway and began consulting in low tones with Mary. He hadn’t shut the door entirely, and thanks to the uneven floors of the old house it inched open as they talked, allowing me to hear a portion of their conversation.
“. . . state brought on by the changed climate, isolation, and lack of healthy occupation.”
“Then you don’t think it has anything to do with . . . the grandmother?” Mary asked tentatively.
There was a long pause before the doctor answered. “I looked over my old records, and it appears that Mrs. Fairfax’s delusions manifested in a similar way to Miss Rose’s—namely, through her dreams. Such delusions are often symptomatic of mental illness; but they are not necessarily diagnostic. We must remember that Mrs. Fairfax was ill for many years before the dementia manifested itself, and Miss Rose has only recently fallen ill. The patient knows her grandmother’s history, and this in itself could be producing anxiety-based delusions, particularly when combined with the unusual factors of her environment.
“I will conduct more tests if she isn’t better within a few days. For now, try to distract her from her obsession with the past. I am going to leave you with a small supply of sedative tablets, to be administered at the onset of a hysterical episode such as you witnessed last night. I must make it clear that these should not be used until her current sedation has worn off. You must be careful not to exceed the recommended dosage, either; she was given far too much medication last night.”
“Yes, I’m afraid that was my fault. I didn’t know that she’d already had some.”
“Of course, it’s understandable in the circumstances. Nonetheless, I need to be certain that you can take responsibility for all of this; otherwise, I’ll send a nurse.”
“No, I’ll take care of it.”
“Good. Now, several last things. She must be watched carefully at all times. Do not under any circumstances allow her to go off on her own, even if she seems perfectly recovered. It’s typical of a manic or hysterical state—”
Before I could hear the end of the sentence, one or the other of them realized that the door was ajar and shut it again, then moved farther off down the hallway, so that their voices were lost. The heavy sickness was too much to combat any longer. I drifted back into a half sleep, while a tiny, still-clear part of my mind chimed its warning.
SEVEN
THE rest of that day was a hell of dazed consciousness. Fractured images from the last few days mingled with scraps of dreams, so that even my conscious moments were dislocated, and I couldn’t separate my memories of dream and reality. In the convolutions of my mind I searched by a river for something lost and unnamed; a moment later I stood in the midst of a fire, looking up at a hard, dark sky. I sewed a quilt from squares of snow, stitching them together with gold thread and icicle needles, and laid it over Alexander’s prostrate form. I stood by a piano encased in a cube of glass and cried as I battered at its smooth, intractable sides, knowing that I would never penetrate them. At one point I was certain that I saw a dark-haired woman standing by the window with her back to me; when I looked again, it was only Mary, her worried eyes fixed on my face. I could hear Tasha playing outside, singing songs to herself, or perhaps to an obliging adult, in Russian. More than once I thought that I felt my hand in someone else’s, and I did not know whether to be comforted or frightened.
Toward evening the effects of the drug finally began to abate. When I could stand without the dizzy spangles cluttering my vision, I walked to the French door and out onto the gallery. It looked down onto a sheltered corner of lawn at the left side of the house, bordered by live oaks. Wildflowers and long grass swayed in the evening breeze. The tops of the trees glowed dusty gold in the last light of the setting sun. For a moment I felt at peace; I could almost believe that the last few days had been nothing more than a fever dream. Then Mary opened the bedroom door, a bowl of soup in her hands and that drawn, restive look on her face, and all of it was real again.
“Eleanor,” she said, the relief evident in her voice. “I thought you’d never wake up.”
I managed a wan smile. “I was beginning to think so, too.”
“Oh, Eleanor,” s
he said, and I was surprised by the tears that filled her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know that you’d already had so much medicine, or I never would have—”
“I know.”
For a moment, I saw the old Mary. She opened her mouth, as if there was something else that she wanted to say; then she seemed to recall herself, and her sympathy retreated behind its new casing of fear. She set the soup bowl on my bedside table.
“I brought this,” she said. “You haven’t eaten in over a day. You must be hungry.”
The thought of food made my stomach churn, but I knew that the most important thing now was to convince her that I was recovered. “Yes, thank you.” Drawing a breath, I said, “I’m still quite tired,” hoping that she would take this as a polite request to be alone.
Instead she answered, “I’ll just sit with you while you eat, then I’ll leave you to rest.”
I forced another smile and allowed myself to be led back to bed. I choked down the soup, spoonful by spoonful, while Mary made small talk about the servants, the gardens, the weather. The care she took not to mention Dorian or the party, our calamitous meeting by the painting the night before, or the doctor’s visit that morning weighed on me until it was almost more than I could bear. Then, just as I was reaching the end of my endurance, she said something that grabbed my attention again. She tossed it into the conversation almost perfunctorily, but I knew that she was watching carefully for my reaction:
“Oh, and we uncovered the rest of those paintings this afternoon.”
I made myself take another spoonful of soup before I replied, “Did you?” wondering who constituted the “we.”
“Perhaps if you’re feeling more rested later, you’d like to come see them?”
I let the spoon settle back into the bowl and looked at her. There was nothing in her face to tell me what had prompted the suggestion.
“All right,” I answered, then added after another moment’s thought, “Why don’t we look at them now?”
Still watching me with neutral eyes, she said, “If you feel up to it.”
I climbed carefully out of bed, and donned my red silk wrapper. My heart was beating fast when we rounded the bottom of the staircase and started down the corridor. I was acutely aware of the sound of my own breathing, of every step I took. Mary went ahead of me to turn on the floodlight that somebody had brought in, so the murals were brightly lit when I turned to face them.
There were four in all, just as Eve’s journal had suggested. They filled the spaces inside square borders of plaster molding, which stretched almost from floor to ceiling, so the figures in the paintings were life-size. Louis had adopted the design of illuminated manuscript pages, bordering each painting with stylized vines and gilded scrollwork that reminded me of the books in the library in the house on the hill.
The first painting depicted morning in a garden with a flowering apple tree, ringed by water. One of the twins knelt in front of the tree, in what looked very like the wedding gown from the attic. Her lap was full of pale-pink roses. She smiled out of the picture with radiant happiness. It was the first time I made the correlation among the dream garden, the real one with its burnt stump, and the Fontaine family’s crest.
The same tree stood at the centre of the second painting, covered with golden apples and bright noontime light. One twin stood beneath the tree in a rose-colored dress, her hair full of petals. Her eyes were cast down, her face partly averted from the man who leaned from the branches of the tree, extending an apple to her with one long-fingered hand. Despite his expression of supercilious cunning, he bore more than a passing resemblance to Alexander.
The third painting was set in the same garden, but now the woman’s gown was blue, the tree’s leaves yellow. She sat beneath the tree, long branch-shadows crossing her like bars. She looked down with a beatific half-smile at the baby sleeping in her arms; a baby who already had a wealth of golden curls. I wrapped my arms around myself and moved on to the last image.
The sky was dark and full of stars, the tree’s branches bare. The moon above was a waning crescent, reflected in the ring of water. Something about the reflection looked wrong. I stepped closer to get a better look; what I saw sent my heart racing. The white crescent was not the moon at all, but a woman’s face turned in profile with a swath of dark hair curving across it. Her eyes were closed. A line from a play I had read at school came back to me then: Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.
I was unaware of having spoken the words aloud until Mary said tentatively, “Eleanor?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. This picture reminded me of something I read once.” I turned back to it, and found the signature in the bottom right corner: L. Ducoeur, 1902-4.
“Has Alexander seen them?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. There was an equivocation in her tone that I didn’t like.
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know, he didn’t say much—he only asked to borrow the car to go to the village. He left in a hurry. It was a bit odd.”
The expectant look was still on her face, but I had no idea what she wanted to hear, and no desire to feed her fears about my state of mind by saying the wrong thing. I suppose she saw my hesitation, and perhaps guessed its source, because she hastened to say, “I hope I haven’t done anything to upset you, Eleanor.”
“What upset me yesterday has nothing to do with you.”
“But Dorian, and the party—”
“I should have told you how I felt about him before it came to all of this.”
Relief flooded across her face, but like a river around rocks, it only made the doubts Dr. Dunham had fed her that morning more obvious. She must be watched carefully at all times . . . even if she seems perfectly recovered. I wondered whether Dorian had bought the doctor, or if it had all been a convenient coincidence.
“I don’t suppose you found out why they were papered over?”
Mary shook her head. “Although now that you mention it, Dorian did say something . . .”
“Well?”
“He said you might have thought better of tearing that wallpaper down, because it was a limited edition William Morris. He said he’s only seen it once before, in London.”
I was trying to remember when William Morris had begun designing wallpaper, when Mary voiced the question that must have been troubling her since the previous night. “Eleanor . . . how did you know they were here?”
“Intuition,” I answered after a moment’s consideration. “Besides, valuable or not, that wallpaper has never seemed to belong.” Then I said, “I know how I must have seemed last night, Mary. But you can imagine what a shock it was, finding these here.”
She answered without a hint of the retraction I had hoped for. “Of course; particularly when you weren’t well.”
I waited, but she said nothing else. Her unwillingness to see what was so clearly in front of her was hard to take, but I knew that I must take it, or dig my own grave deeper. So, pleading tiredness again, I escaped to my room.
In actuality, the drug’s dissipation had left me feeling a peculiar, lucid emptiness, as though the hazy confusion it had caused on entering my body reversed itself on leaving it. I was restless, but I didn’t want Mary to hear me pacing. Instead, I picked up the second of my mother’s journals and began leafing through it, hoping to find some reference to the murals I had missed in my prior examinations.
What I found reduced the fragile stability I had rebuilt over the last few hours to rubble. The photograph slipped from the book like an ugly secret from a thoughtless tongue. It had the poor, grainy quality of the pictures Eve had taken of Eden, but this one had been taken in Boston. Snow covered the ground, the trees, the ice on the pond in the Public Garden. The two central figures sat on one of the benches, clearly oblivious to the cold. They looked at each other as only young lovers can look: the girl’s face, one of the twins’, bright and expectant beneath her fur-lined hood, Alexander’s half-averted, as i
f he was shy of the camera.
With shaking fingers, I turned the picture over. On the back, in Eve’s sloppy, scrawling hand, was an inscription: Elizabeth Fairfax and Alexander Rose, January 1898.
Alexander Rose: the father who had abandoned my mother with a child, whose name I’d never known. I looked at the photograph once more before my shaking hand closed around it. I could not comfort myself with even a glimmer of doubt that the boy in the photograph bore a mere likeness to my lover; I knew the smile and penetrating eyes better than my own.
Overcome with a wave of nausea, I ran to the gallery. Once there, though, the catharsis of sickness eluded me. I stared into the darkness, my mind as full of the obvious, preposterous truth as my blocked throat was of bile. I began to sob uncontrollably, and pitched gracelessly to the floor. I kept trying to tell myself that I must somehow be mistaken, that somewhere, somehow there must be a reasonable explanation for what I saw in that picture. But Dorian’s final warning kept playing in my mind, dragging with it the monstrous image of my mother smiling at the man who by all logic must be my father.
I was crying too violently to hear Mary calling. By the time her hands came down on my shoulders, she was shaking almost as badly as I was. I heard her speaking to me, demanding that I calm down and tell her what was wrong, her voice a perplexity of solicitude and panic. I can only imagine what I must have looked like: a fury wailing gibberish into the night.
I pity her now. A part of me can even understand what she did later, in light of what I must have seemed to be then. But at that moment I was too wounded even to be able to feel sorry for myself, let alone appease Mary with the rational, if preposterous, explanation for my outburst which might have saved us all so much grief.
After a time she went away, and I began to calm down; at any rate, I seemed to have exhausted my tears. Still, I didn’t move from my place by the gallery railing, nor relinquish the hem of my wrapper, which I had pressed against my eyes as a kind of security blanket against the truth I could not face. After some minutes I heard Mary’s footsteps climbing the stairs again with the inevitable others. At the thought of seeing Alexander hysteria consumed me again, so that by the time he and Mary entered the room I must have appeared to be in much the same state she had left me in earlier.