Lost Among the Living

by Simone St. James

  I heard the chair rock. “I brought her home. She wouldn’t speak for weeks. When she did speak again, she was worse than ever. She spoke about a dog named Princer. She said he’d come through the doorway to protect her.”

  I turned back around. “Come from where?”

  Dottie shook her head, and then she sighed. “From her dreams.”

  I stared at her, silent.

  “They all came from her dreams,” Dottie continued. “The faces, the figures. The dog. She believed they were the spirits of the dead. But Princer was different. He was—a demon of some kind. He did not come to kill her, but to keep her safe.” Dottie raised a hand and pinched the bridge of her nose briefly, the only indication she gave of her deep distress. “My own daughter talked of these things. My own daughter. What was I to say?” She dropped the hand and continued. “Things were better for a time, after she began to imagine the dog. Frances still saw things, but she felt that Princer made them go away. It was a sort of self-suggestion, I think, but at least she was less tormented. I hired tutors, and she’d take walks in the woods, sketching and exploring. And then one day I was in the library when I thought I heard a sound on the back terrace. I walked to the morning room and looked out the doors. And then I heard screaming.”

  I stood, transfixed, thinking of the view I’d just seen from the gable, the sheer drop to the cobblestones. I saw her, I wanted to tell Dottie. I saw your daughter the day we came here, sitting in the parlor. She never left. She’s here. I almost spoke the words aloud, but they would not be a comfort.

  “I knew what it was,” Dottie said. “In that moment, I knew. But I couldn’t make myself believe it. Not when things were going well. Not my Frances.” She took a breath, raised her chin, and looked at me. “But it was. It was Alex who stopped me at the front door and told me she was dead.”

  For a numb moment, the words did not sink in. Then I thought perhaps I’d misheard, the blood pounding in my ears confusing my perception. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You didn’t know he was here, did you?” Dottie asked. I must have looked bewildered, because she nodded. “I gathered as much. He was here on leave, paying us a visit, the day Frances died.”

  “No,” I said. “Alex had leave in April 1917, and he spent all of it with me.” It was during that leave that he had received the camera. “He didn’t have another until 1918, which was the last one before he disappeared.”

  Dottie nodded again, as if she had expected my answer. “Frances died in August 1917,” she said. “And Alex was here. On leave.”

  “I—” My hands had gone cold. I stared at her in shock, the same kind of surprise I would have felt if she had risen from her chair and slapped me. “Alex—Alex came home on leave without telling me? Without seeing me?”

  “Yes. He even spent quite some time walking the grounds with Frances the day before she died.” Dottie looked at me for a moment. The pain had left her expression, which was now unreadable. She pressed the arms of the rocking chair and stood, the chair moving emptily behind her. When she stepped toward me, the dim lamplight played over her features, putting the sockets of her eyes and the hollows of her cheekbones in shadow. “You met a man, and you married him,” she said to me. “I’ve known you for some time now, and I’ve come to understand that you loved him. But what did you know about him?”

  I tried to think of how it had been with Alex, how it was when we were together. It was so long ago now. “He told me everything,” I said.

  “He told you nothing.” She stepped forward again, and this time the lamplight showed her features to me. Her eyes were fixed on my face, blazing with some emotion I could not name. “Do you understand? He was my nephew, my dead sister’s child. I took him in, raised him for nearly four years. Then he went off to live with Germans. Germans! And he looked me in the eye and told me, ‘Aunt Dottie, I want to go.’”

  “They were his relatives,” I stammered. “There wasn’t a war then.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dottie snapped back. “I didn’t hear he’d come home to England until he’d been at Oxford for six weeks. When he was finished, he said he was off to travel the Continent, but I never got a letter or a postcard. Where did he go?”

  I stood transfixed, her questions cutting me like needles.

  “He married you,” Dottie continued, “a woman we’d never seen. He didn’t invite us to the wedding. Yet for all that time, I still saw him as my nephew. My family. He was always Alex. And then the war came, and suddenly he came to visit me on leave. He told me he was visiting you next, that he was going to London before going back to the Front. And at the same time, he never told you anything.”

  My stomach turned. I would have done anything—literally anything—to see Alex for a second leave in 1917, and he knew it. I’d been home, worried that every day would bring me the telegram telling me he was dead, and he’d come to England without telling me. If I had discovered he had another woman, I could not have felt more empty, more betrayed.

  “It makes no sense,” I said. “He could have visited me. Why did he lie about it to both of us? Why?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Dottie countered. “I have wondered that myself. Perhaps it was the war that did it—I wouldn’t know. But the moment he told me Frances was dead, when I looked into his face, I realized he wasn’t the boy I’d known. He was a man, and a stranger to me.”

  “He wasn’t a stranger to me,” I replied. “He wasn’t.”

  “Then ask yourself why he was here that day while you were at home worrying about him,” Dottie said. “That’s what I would do.”

  Then she was gone, though I did not see her leave, did not hear the door click shut. I stood in the dim lamplight, my mind spinning and my stomach sick, as the clock ticked quietly on the wall.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  On our drive from London, Dottie had told me she expected me to serve tea among my other duties. As art buyers began to arrive at Wych Elm House, I put this task into practice.

  It wasn’t difficult, as Dottie had noted. A potential buyer would arrive for a meeting; a maid would bring in a tray within five minutes, containing a tea service and several dainties; the maid would depart, and I would take over. I would pour the tea and serve it, my job only to be helpful, decorative, and silent. I felt much like I had in Casparov’s office, like a brass paperweight with the added bonus of arms. I wore the new frocks Dottie had had me order, and I kept my hair pinned up as neatly as I could. Dottie even loaned me a string of pearls, expensive but understated, to add to the effect. I was the same girl from Casparov’s office, but older, wiser, and more elegant.

  There were a few advantages. It was easy, for one. And unlike Casparov, Dottie held all of her meetings in front of me, letting me hear every word of conversation while I sat there as if I didn’t exist. In this way I learned how she did things, and I also learned how she was going about finding a wife for Martin.

  “That last fellow seemed very interested in the Turner,” I ventured to comment one day after a buyer had left.

  “He talked too much about painters,” Dottie scoffed. “As if I wish to talk about painters. However, his daughter is pretty, and I hear he’s going to settle a good amount on her. If he writes asking for another meeting, say yes.”

  She did not, in fact, want to talk about painters. Despite months of acquiring it, art for art’s sake was not Dottie’s goal. Art was simply a means to an end—or, in this case, a means to two ends: to make money and to find a suitable daughter-in-law, now that I was out of the equation.

  We did not talk about our conversation in Frances’s bedroom. Nor did we discuss her original plans to wed me to her son. Martin told me she’d taken the news of my muddied legal status remarkably well. “I told her to find me somebody else,” he reported to me. “Anybody else, really. Though I hope she finds me someone pretty, at least.”

  “I don’t lik
e the sound of it,” I told him for the dozenth time. “You should pick your own wife.”

  “I think of my life in terms of weeks, not years,” Martin replied. “I can’t imagine I’ll be with a wife for any length of time, so I can’t say it rightly matters.”

  We debated this at length, over lunches and walks and the occasional evening drink in the drawing room. He had an easygoing nature—too easygoing, I thought. But he wasn’t just being agreeable when he acquiesced to Dottie’s plans to marry him off. I sensed true apathy beneath it all, a blankness that was dark and a little frightening. He had grown strong enough to come down from his bedroom again, but his health was dangerously fragile, and he didn’t often have the energy to be social. When he did, despite our debates I found myself enjoying his company.

  But I often found myself alone in my off hours. I experimented with Alex’s camera, wandering about at dusk and—less frequently, for the mornings were increasingly cold—early dawn. The pictures I’d taken of the tableau Frances had left me in my bedroom had not turned out—Mr. Crablow, who developed them for me, showed me that the prints were simply black squares. “Are you quite certain you opened the lens, my dear?” he asked me. I was, but he only shook his head indulgently and encouraged me to try again. So I did.

  I had begun using the camera with a specific reason in mind, but to my surprise I discovered I enjoyed using it. When I took photographs, alone in the slowly failing light, huddled inside a sweater and a coat, my feet damp and cold, my pretty dress and borrowed pearls left behind in my room, everything fell away. I did not think about Dottie’s family or my own uncertain future. I did not think about the fact that I could not spend the rest of my life as Dottie’s handmaiden. I did not think about Frances’s mysterious death and who may have pushed her from the roof. And I did not think the thoughts that threatened to consume my mind: that Alex had lied to me. That Alex had come to England without telling me. That he had been seen speaking at length with Frances the day before she died. You met a man, and you married him. But what did you know about him? He was a man, a stranger to me.

  In the first days after my conversation with Dottie, the thought was like a fist in my gut. I had spent three years with the Alex I had in my mind, the husband I carried in my memories, so certain that the picture I had was accurate. Dottie’s words changed all of that. I wavered between shaky denial and cold fear, brought on by my memory of Alex’s face, his handsome features and extraordinary blue eyes those of a stranger.

  After several days, I could touch the thought of Dottie’s conversation tentatively, like a bruise, run my tongue over the thought like a healing tooth. And then I began to grow angry.

  “Mrs. Manders.” This was one of Dottie’s art clients, sitting on the sofa in the parlor, watching me pour tea. I was so lost in my thoughts, so unused to being acknowledged during these meetings, that for a moment I forgot my own name.

  “Yes, sir,” I managed.

  “You are married to Mrs. Forsyth’s nephew, I believe?”

  I paused, the teapot poised just at the end of a pour, and glanced at Dottie. I had not been given instructions should a client ask me questions. Dottie was frowning but silent.

  I turned back to the man. He was sixtyish, distinguished, with upright posture and thick, silver hair. A prominent, well-shaped nose, high in the bridge, made him look especially aristocratic. I searched my memory for his name.

  “I was married to him, sir.” I choked the words out—had he known I was thinking about Alex? “He died in the war.”

  “A great shame,” the man said. His gaze traveled down my arm to my hands, where they held the teacup and pot, and I wondered if he was looking at my wedding ring, the narrow band of gold Alex had given me one golden day in Crete. “An officer, I presume?”

  I gritted my teeth. What did Alex’s status matter now that he was dead? “Yes, sir. An officer in the RAF. His plane went down in 1918.”

  “Indeed.” He took his teacup from my hand and sat back on the sofa, regarding me. My spinning brain did its job and supplied his name: Mabry. Colonel Mabry, though he did not wear a uniform. “I knew a great many RAF men. They were brave lads.”

  I set the teapot down, trying not to bang it. “Yes, sir.”

  “Colonel,” Dottie broke in, gesturing impatiently at me for her own teacup, “perhaps you’d like to come to the gallery and see some of the works you’ve expressed an interest in.”

  Colonel Mabry turned to look at her, and for a second I thought I saw faint surprise in his eyes, as if he’d forgotten she was there. “That does sound enjoyable,” he agreed, “but there is lots of time.”

  Dottie raised her thin eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I am staying in the area,” Mabry said. “I have put up in the small hotel in the village. I’m mixing business with pleasure on this particular trip. I spent some time working in the neighboring government installation some years ago, and I am here again at their request, assisting them with a small matter.”

  “I see,” Dottie said. “How fortunate.”

  “The Ministry of Fisheries?” I asked. “That is a strange assignment for an army colonel.”

  The air in the room grew as brittle and cold as the ice over a puddle. I did not look at Dottie, but I felt the blast of her disapproval, and I dropped my gaze to the lap of my skirt as I lowered myself to the sofa.

  “It was a personal matter,” the colonel said. His voice was low and cautious, but not angry. “Not official business, I’m afraid. It was some years before the war.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I apologize.”

  “It’s quite all right. I am flattered you take a personal interest in me, Mrs. Manders.”

  I looked up at him. He was not flirting with me; his expression gave nothing away. I had an inkling that I was dealing with a man whose words carried a great deal of obscure meaning. “Colonel,” I said, ignoring the poisonous look that was no doubt being sent my way from Dottie’s direction, “you say you knew many RAF men.”

  “I did,” Colonel Mabry agreed. “I spent most of the war in France and Belgium.”

  “Did you know my husband?” I asked, keeping my voice calm. “When you served? Alex Manders?”

  Mabry regarded me calmly, but a quick spark of interest crossed his gaze, a light that I could not quite read. “It is possible, Mrs. Manders, that I came across him at some time or another. I will give it some thought. My aging brain does not recall names as quickly as it used to.”

  Of course. I had hoped for honesty, but he was humoring me, as would be expected when an army colonel spoke to a civilian woman. The realization did nothing to bank my anger.

  “I would appreciate it if you could recall any memories of him.” I tried to sound sweet, though I was not certain I succeeded. “I cherish any memories of him I can find, as you can imagine.”

  “As any good lady would,” he agreed. “Where are your people from, Mrs. Manders?”

  “London,” I replied, lying blithely, as if I had people. “Though my mother now lives in Hertford. She is retired.”

  “Well earned and well deserved, I’m sure,” Mabry said, and suddenly I knew that he knew I was lying. A liar knows a liar, my mother had always said. My mad mother, who had retired to an asylum in Hertford, where she dug her nails into her own neck. “I am certain you do both her and your husband credit. The brave widows of the war are a part of what makes England a great nation.”

  “Oh, but I am not necessarily a widow.” I was not sure what had come over me, but the words would not stop. “You must not count me in that number. My husband disappeared when his plane went down, you see, and his body was never found.”

  “Manders,” Dottie interjected, her voice choked, “Colonel Mabry is not interested in your anecdotes.”

  “It’s quite all right, Mrs. Forsyth,” the colonel said. “Mrs. Manders, though I do not recal
l your husband, you can rest assured that he provided an invaluable service to England. Perhaps more so than you, a lady, can ever quite know. It is his sacrifice that matters. That much I am confident of, sight unseen.” He picked up his teacup and turned to Dottie. “Mrs. Forsyth, please continue.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “He was lying,” I said to Martin.

  We were sitting on the back terrace as night fell. I was perched on the tiled marble slabs of the steps, my coat around my shoulders, my arms hugging my knees. I still had my hair tied back neatly, and I still wore the new, modest heels Dottie had had me buy. I watched darkness creep over the trees, savoring the slap of fresh air that likely reddened my nose.

  “That’s a tall accusation, Cousin Jo,” Martin replied. He sat next to me, a scarf wound around his neck. I hadn’t seen him all day, and the pained lines of his face told me why. Still, he seemed to enjoy our moment of peaceful privacy as the dinner preparations went on in the house behind us.

  “He knew who Alex was,” I insisted. “I’d bet all of my money on it. He fed me a dose of claptrap about brave widows, but it was all a lie. I think he just wanted to watch me swallow it.”

  “Jolly good,” Martin said, watching me with some wariness. “You’re a little frightening right now, I don’t mind saying. However, if you start shouting at one of Mother’s cronies, it’ll be the most entertainment I’ve seen in a year.”

  “He lied to me,” I said. “Alex, I mean. He lied to me about his leave. I’ve spent three years not asking questions because I was terrified of the answers—it was too hard. But now I think I want to know. I’d like to know what Colonel Mabry could tell me, if only I could convince him to help me.”

  Martin sighed and gazed off into the trees. “I know what you mean. I tried to find answers myself, you know—to his disappearance. While I was over there. I don’t suppose I’ve told you that.”