House of Shadows

by Pamela Hartshorne

  But when I finish reading the story, Angie is all smiles. She claps her hands together. ‘Wasn’t that a lovely story Mummy read to you?’ she says to Felix, who shoots me a glance of complicity. He is not going to tell her I’m not his mummy. He’s going to stick to our agreement. We know the truth, even if nobody else does.

  I smile encouragingly at him, and he jumps up to find another book. ‘One more!’

  ‘I think that’s enough,’ Angie says. ‘Mummy can’t sit like that any longer.’

  It’s true. My leg is agonizing, and when Angie helps me up from the floor, only Felix’s blue-eyed stare stops me from cursing at the pain. But it has been worth it. I still don’t remember Felix, but I have made a connection with him, and it is strong enough to drown out the voice in my head which clamours: No, not this one! This is not your child! I don’t try to kiss him goodbye, but I rest my hand briefly on the top of his head, feeling my palm twitch as if it remembers the springy softness of his hair.

  ‘Maybe we could read another story tomorrow?’ I suggest, but Felix is playing with his train and doesn’t look up.

  ‘’Kay,’ is all he says.

  I leave Felix with Angie and begin the long trek back to my room. I turn the memory of Michael around and around, examining it from every angle. He is a vital piece of the puzzle that I am trying to put together. Now I have remembered my husband, and a little about my parents. Soon, surely, I will remember Felix too, and what I was doing just before I fell. I am recovering myself piece by piece, like a heavily pixelated picture that is slowly coming into focus. I am beginning to feel real after all, my existence more than just a smudgy reflection of Isabel’s.

  If our past didn’t exist, we would need to invent it. Oliver Raine told me that. Holding onto the banister, I make my way carefully down the stairs from the nursery, trying to ignore the white glare of pain in my leg. What if Oliver is right, and those vivid memories of Isabel’s life are simply some kind of transference? Perhaps now that I have remembered Michael, my subconscious will have no need to invent Edmund. Perhaps now I can recall something of my own childhood, I won’t need to remember Isabel’s. And now I have made a step to rebuilding a relationship with Felix, there will be no point in remembering a time when I bore another child.

  No! No! The words flutter faintly at the back of my mind in frustration. No, you know that’s wrong! Felix isn’t the son you’re looking for. You know that he isn’t. You need to find your son.

  The Hall opens to the public at eleven, so breakfast is eaten in the dining room before the notices are set out and the guides arrive, before the thickly twisted red ropes block off access to the Vavasours’ private quarters. I can’t help thinking it would be easier to have breakfast in the kitchen, to jam a piece of toast in the mouth while peering in the fridge for something to put in a sandwich, but that’s not the way the Vavasours do things.

  The dining room is certainly impressive, in a lugubrious kind of way. Vast and darkly panelled, it has a square bay window looking out over the knot garden. I can see neat box hedges and narrow gravel pathways, and I have a sudden, sharp sense of walking along them, talking earnestly to someone, but when I strain to see whose face it is, I get only the familiar blankness.

  Ornate silverware sits on massive, carved sideboards, and the walls are hung with paintings in heavy gilt frames. Landscapes in murky greens and browns, and a number of portraits of nineteenth-century Vavasours with those disconcertingly realistic eyes that seem to follow you around the room. I sit facing the windows – because of course we all have a set place – and I was glad not to have to look at them at first, but now I almost think I’d prefer to look at the paintings instead. Then at least I wouldn’t have the prickle between my shoulder blades, or the eerie conviction that at any moment one of them will reach out and clap a cold hand on my arm.

  At a guess, the polished table could seat twenty. It sits squarely on an Eastern rug and high-backed chairs are ranged on either side. Three spectacularly ugly silver candelabra dominate the table. At breakfast a concession is made to informality, and we cluster at one end of the table, Jasper at its head. Margaret sits on his right, with George next to her and then Philippa. I’m on Jasper’s left, next to Fiona and Joanna. This puts me directly opposite Margaret, and I have to eat with her contemptuous stare scraping over me.

  When I suggest it might be easier to have breakfast in the kitchen, Margaret tuts extravagantly. ‘Here she goes again, trying to change everything.’

  I wonder what I tried to change before. ‘I’m merely suggesting—’

  ‘People like the fact that they’re looking round a family home rather than a museum,’ Fiona breaks in smoothly. ‘The fact that we use almost all of the rooms here is part of what makes Askerby unique.’

  ‘Felix is part of the family, and he doesn’t eat in here,’ I point out.

  ‘You obviously don’t remember what a messy eater Felix is,’ Jasper says, a little tactlessly, I can’t help thinking.

  ‘No, I don’t remember,’ I say with a cool look.

  ‘Felix is happy eating with Angie near the kitchen,’ Fiona says firmly. ‘With the best will in the world, he’s only a little boy and this is an extremely valuable carpet.’ She nods at the floor. ‘Visitors don’t want to see rubber mats or wipe-clean surfaces. They want to know that this has always been the dining room, and that the family still eat here as they have always done.’

  If the visitors want a real sense of the Vavasours, they should visit the kitchen and see how they shut their children away, I reflect. I’m not paying attention, and I speak without thinking. ‘It wasn’t the dining room when it was first built,’ I say, and they all pause in the middle of buttering their toast or stirring their coffee.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Margaret puts her cup sharply back in its saucer. ‘Of course this was the dining room.’

  But Edmund and I never ate in here. This was Edmund’s closet, where he met his steward and his man of business, where he would talk politics with his neighbours and write letters and dispense justice. We kept to the old ways and ate in the great hall still, although after Judith arrived, we did use the parlour more, it is true.

  I open my mouth to explain this, and only just manage to shut it in time. I can imagine how Margaret would react to that.

  With an effort, I push the memories away. Haven’t I decided that I don’t need them now that I have remembered Michael? I must be more careful. I want to be normal, and sane, and not afraid that my in-laws will accuse me of being ‘doolally’ again. I can’t gaily inform them of how I used to eat in the great hall with my husband and our servants and guests all together.

  I meet Margaret’s hard stare, and return it with a long, cool one of my own.

  ‘I must have read it somewhere,’ I say.

  ‘Pity you can’t remember something useful, instead of inaccurate rubbish.’

  ‘Quite,’ I say calmly as I pick up my knife and spread marmalade on my toast. I haven’t told them I’ve remembered Michael. I don’t feel like sharing him, not yet. I want to remember him as the man who loved me, not as the putative Lord Vavasour who didn’t have the sense to find himself a suitable wife.

  Margaret glares at me and there’s another of those uncomfortable silences in which this family seems to specialize. I marvel again that Angie can find their life so alluring. Doesn’t she feel the tension in the air? Can’t she see how the Vavasours hold themselves apart from each other? It is as if the Hall has cast a spell on her, or perhaps it is her longing that blinds her, the yearning for George and a family and the security of knowing she never needs to leave home.

  But who am I to judge? I cut my slice of toast in half, thinking about what it must have been like for Angie growing up in the lonely lodge with only her grandparents for company. No wonder she looked at the children living at the Hall and thought their life charmed.

  The silence stretches and thins. I pick up my toast, but am afraid everyone will be a
ble to hear me chewing, and I’m grateful when Jasper clears his throat and falls back on that old standby, the weather.

  ‘Not a very nice day,’ he says.

  We glance with varying degrees of interest at the windows, where a steady, sullen rain is falling. So much for June. The dining room gets little enough sunlight as it is, and it is so dark outside that the lights are on.

  ‘Try telling the dogs that,’ says Fiona, gamely following Jasper’s attempt at a diversion. ‘They don’t care about the weather. I hope you’re not planning to go outside today, Kate,’ she says, turning to me. ‘You’re looking very tired. I don’t think you should overdo it.’

  Without warning, another memory slides into place, and I pause with my toast still halfway to my mouth.

  It’s just a fragment. I don’t remember what happened before or after, but it is very clear: Edmund, Judith and I were in the parlour. It was cold and wet, and Judith had ordered a servant to light the fire. Edmund was reading in the turned chair, his long legs stretched out to the hearth where his favourite hound lay sleeping, its flanks twitching as it dreamt. Judith didn’t like the dog and had drawn her stool away from it. She was mending a smock, her stitches small and neat.

  I couldn’t settle. I was making an endless perambulation of the room, riding its boundaries as it were. I adjusted cushions, straightened the carpets on the chests, moved the flowers that drooped in the gloom, all the while sending yearning glances at the window, where the wind was hurling rain at the glass and making the panes rattle.

  I didn’t realize I was sighing until Edmund looked up from his book. ‘It will not stop raining because you huff at it, Isabel,’ he said with a sigh of his own. ‘Why can you not sit quietly like Judith and occupy yourself some other way?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, you should take care,’ Judith said. ‘You must not overtire yourself. You do not want to risk the babe.’

  ‘How can I tire myself when I cannot go outside?’ I snapped. ‘I will not get tired walking around the parlour!’

  ‘You might not, but you are tiring us,’ said Edmund, exasperated. ‘How do you expect Judith to concentrate on her stitching? I must have read the same page a dozen times now while you fret and fidget.’

  ‘Very well, I will go and fidget elsewhere!’ I flounced out of the parlour, banging the door behind me with a clatter of the latch. It was childish of me, but I felt childish. I wanted to get out. I could not bear to be cooped up all day.

  More, I did not like the fact that Edmund and Judith were becoming allies. I wanted them to be friends, of course. I wanted Edmund to love Judith as I did, and I wanted Judith to see what a good husband Edmund was to me, but I did not want them to exchange looks and click their tongues against their teeth at me.

  I stalked down the long gallery, my pantoufles slapping on the Turkey carpet, and swung round at the end, my skirts swishing furiously, to march back. I was on my third circuit when Edmund appeared. He didn’t say anything at first, but paced by my side. Even though he seemed to be walking slowly, he had no trouble keeping up with me. After a while his quiet presence soothed me and I let out a long sigh.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, tucking my hand into the crook of his elbow. He patted it with a smile.

  ‘You don’t like being penned in, I understand. Sometimes I think you are like a half-wild creature, Isabel, yearning for the woods and the moors. But, dearest, you must take care of yourself. Judith worries that you will become overwrought. She is afraid—’ He broke off as if he feared he had said too much.

  I stopped, dragging at his arm so that he had to stop too. ‘What?’ I demanded. ‘What is Judith afraid of?’

  ‘That you may resemble your mother more than you think.’ Edmund spoke like a man picking his way through a thorn hedge. ‘It is only because she cares for you,’ he added quickly as my face darkened. ‘She just wants you to be well.’

  ‘I am well!’ I cried, wrenching my hand from his arm in frustration and raising my fists to my temples as if I would beat myself. ‘I am with child, not sick!’

  ‘Of course,’ he said soothingly, so soothingly that I nearly hauled out and beat him with my fists instead. ‘But I am glad that Judith will be with you while I am in York. She will not let you do anything foolish.’

  At the breakfast table, I lay down my toast with an unsteady hand. I remember it all so clearly. And now I remember what happened next too, how once Edmund had retired to his closet I clattered back into the parlour. Judith was still sewing and for a moment I wanted to wrench the smock from her hand and fling it to the floor, to make her look at me and see me. I am not a child! I wanted to shout at her, even as I realized how childish I would seem if I did.

  ‘What did you tell Edmund about my mother?’ I demanded instead as she raised her brows in mild reproof at my noisy entrance.

  ‘Why, only what your aunt told me.’

  ‘What? What did she say?’

  Judith’s needle darted in and out of the fabric. ‘Your mother was . . . excitable,’ she said after a moment, having taken the time to find the right word. ‘Her passions ran strong, your aunt said, just as yours do. When she discovered that she was with child again, she grew fearful and fretful and she would not be confined. Do you not remember?’

  ‘I was but a child myself,’ I said. I hugged my arms together and moved over to the fire for warmth. I did not like thinking about my mother. I remembered her only after my brother was born dead and she was strapped to the bed, her eyes bulging and rolling like a terrified horse, the whites glistening with fear in the stifling darkness.

  Judith knew all this. She knew everything about me. She did not need me to tell her how I feared the madness that had consumed my mother, how I feared that I would share her fate, bound and screaming in the dark.

  I had not told Edmund this, but he knew how I craved openness and light. One bright day he had taken me right up to the roof of the west tower. The light made me screw up my eyes, and the wind snatched at my hair. ‘Turn,’ he said, and I turned in a complete circle, slowly.

  Far below, the estate stretched out in every direction. Behind were the moors, shifting endlessly in the light, rolling out to the horizon. Ahead, the village was no more than a scatter of humped roofs overseen by the church. There were woods and coppices, strip fields, the river. The track winding away to the bridge. I could see sheep dotting the moorland, cattle huddled together, chewing aimlessly. A small girl drove a gaggle of geese down a path to the pond.

  ‘Everything you see is yours, Isabel,’ Edmund had said, his hands warm on my shoulders. ‘You are free here. You can ride as far as you will. You need never feel trapped at Askerby.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Standing in the dark parlour, I remembered how my heart had swelled, how the light had poured into and around me. It was dazzling. I could feel it seeping into my skin, smoothing out my restless, prickly edges until I could breathe deep and serene. Edmund did not think I was mad. How fortunate I was to have a husband who understood me.

  But he hadn’t known about my mother. I had seen no need to tell him.

  Now Judith had told him, would he start to watch me? Would he whisper to Judith not to agitate me? I remembered how she had hissed in a breath when I told her about the tower, how you could put your hands on the stones and lean out and see for miles and miles and feel everything bothersome lift and blow away in the clean air. When I looked at her in surprise, she had said she would be frightened; had I not been afeared of falling?

  ‘Not I,’ I’d said. ‘When I’m up there, I feel almost as if I could fly.’

  ‘Do not say such things.’ Judith had shushed me, looking over her shoulder in case a servant might sprout from the skirting boards, perhaps. ‘It makes you sound . . . fey.’

  Mad. That was what she wanted to say. But I was not mad. I was just restless. Was that so hard to understand?

  Judith laid her sewing aside and got to her feet. ‘Isabel, there is no need to worry,’ she said as she took b
oth my hands. ‘If only you will let us take good care of you.’

  ‘I am not worried!’ Pettishly, I pulled my hands away. ‘I do not need to be cared for! I am not a child. I am not sick. I have told Edmund there is no call for him to worry, and do you not worry either, Judith.’

  ‘We cannot help but worry about those we care for,’ she chided me gently.

  Did that mean I didn’t care sufficiently for Edmund? I was not a worrier. I took life as it came, but now I fretted that I should be more concerned to show my love. Should I worry about Edmund at court? I could worry about vagabonds knocking him off his horse, about sly courtiers or the pox, but in the end, what good would it do? That way really did lie madness, I remember thinking.

  ‘I wish you had not told Edmund about my mother, that is all,’ I said after a minute, muffled. ‘Now he will always be thinking I am about to run mad.’

  ‘Isabel, Edmund is your husband. You should not hope to have secrets from him.’

  ‘It is not a secret. It was just . . . something that happened. My mother was not always mad. It was only after her babe died and they would not let her out of that room.’

  It was true. I did remember my mother then. Not as she was that last terrible time, but I had a flash of memory: my mother’s laughter, her hand taking mine, running with me through the long, sweet grass.

  Judith looked grave. ‘Your aunt said that she was never steady. Her emotions ran up and down like fingers on a lute. Losing the babe merely pushed her over the edge into madness.’

  I put my hands over my belly where my own child lay, all at once protective. ‘Losing a babe would drive anyone to madness, I think.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Judith. ‘I fear you may be right.’

  She smiled suddenly. ‘But you are not going to lose your babe and you will not be mad,’ she said. ‘I will not let that happen. Come, stop sulking, Isabel. What will cheer you on this dull afternoon? Shall we make some merry music?’