Lost Among the Living

by Simone St. James

  I had not brought the tripod with me. I carried only the camera as I traveled the path, my boots sliding in the mud. Thick, cold water trickled down my mackintosh, the droplets catching the light. I could feel my own damp breath on the edge of the scarf that touched my lips. I headed for the lookout where I’d read Mother’s letter the last time, settling into a strange state of meditation as I walked, watching and listening. On some level I was afraid, but on another I was excited, alive with almost painful anticipation.

  At the lookout, the fog blurred the edges of the view. The sea was a deep, hollow roar, its churning faintly visible through a layer of mist; the Ministry of Fisheries was a ghostly outline of walls and right angles. I stood for a moment, drinking the salty air, feeling the wind brush my damp cheeks, and then I fumbled with the camera.

  I sank to one knee on the rocky ground and placed the camera on my other knee to steady it. I took off the cap, advanced the film, and bent to the eyepiece, framing the misty ocean in my view. I snapped a photograph, then moved back to get a wider shot, knelt again, and took another.

  “Where are you?” I shouted into the wind.

  I changed my angle as the wind rose in the trees behind me. The dawn light was just perfect, making the edges of everything soft, the mist diffusing the rising sun. A single boat on the ocean drifted into my line of vision, and I bent to the eyepiece again, watching the dark speck move on the lonely expanse of ocean, placing my finger over the button.

  Something moved on the path behind me.

  I straightened, the hair on the back of my neck prickling. “Frances?” I called.

  There was no answer. Slowly, my clenched muscles protesting, I twisted my body and looked back over my shoulder at the path into the woods.

  There was nothing there.

  As I gripped the camera and stood, pain stung my knee where it had been pressed into the hard ground. I turned and faced the path, my back to the water now. Still there was no sound, no movement, but I sensed her watching me. I took a few cautious steps, my breath held in my chest, my boots quiet against the damp ground.

  She was not on the path. I had nearly reached the first bend when it occurred to me to raise the camera to my eye and look through it.

  I held the camera unsteadily to my face and squinted through the eyepiece. I saw the path, the woods around it, the tatters of mist. Nothing else appeared. Slowly, I pivoted on my heel, my damp, icy hands gripping the leather of the camera, my arms shaking as I held it in place at my eye. My breath was loud in my ears as I swiveled carefully, my lens taking in the pattern of tree trunks, turning back to look at the clearing and the water. The wind kicked up, and I heard the rustle of dead leaves.

  She was there. Standing where I had just been, her skin the color of parchment, her eyes watching me from their dark recesses, staring, the hem of her dress unnaturally still in the rising wind.

  I made a strangled sound in my throat and jerked my face back from the camera, my slick hands nearly letting go. I blinked and stared at the space I’d just seen through the lens, my vision clearing. There was nothing there.

  “Frances?” I whispered.

  Before I could lower my eye to the camera again, the leaves in the clearing kicked up in the wind, swirling. I stood hypnotized as dead leaves funneled up from the ground and down from the branches overhead, moving like motes of light. It was beautiful and terrible, unnatural. The icy wind howled.

  High over the trees, shrill and imperious, came a long, unearthly whistle.

  I turned on the path and ran.

  I pounded over the muddy path, my clumsy boots slipping. I still carried the camera, held close to my chest in both hands. My fingers struggled to keep their grip and my breath came in gasps as the camera banged clumsily against my body.

  The whistle sounded again—it split my brain, like a long-ago train whistle had on the worst day of my life—and a bolt of panic shot down my spine. She is calling him, I thought. I changed direction and left the path, scrambling down an incline tangled with brush, no longer aware of my direction or which way led back to Wych Elm House. I hit the bottom of the incline, the thorns of something in the underbrush tearing my stockings above the top of my boot, and kept running.

  Far behind me in the woods, the birds went silent, as if they sensed something coming.

  I staggered down another incline and found myself on a dirt path, wide and flat, bordered by thick brush. I could see no distance either up or down it—the fog was too heavy. In the spin of my panic I realized this was the same path I had stood on the morning I had met Robert. I was at the other end of it, far on the opposite side of the woods that spanned the Forsyths’ property.

  I jogged along its easy length for a moment, feeling the jagged pinch inside my rubber boots and a trickle of blood warm on my calf. Cold rain had begun, dripping in the trees and spattering my mackintosh. My breath was sawing in my lungs, and cold sweat slicked down my back beneath my layers, but I did not stop. If I could take the road far enough to get back toward the house, to familiar ground—

  Something moved in the trees far behind me. Without thinking, I ducked off the road, struggling through sticky underbrush again. My hands slipped on the camera, but I did not let it go. I slid down an incline into a valley of dead leaves, then scrambled up the other side.

  From the road came a heavy scrabbling sound of claws in the dirt. There was a rushing overhead—the birds, this time, still silent, flying upward en masse. The entire woods denuded of birds in a single, soundless exodus. Over the roar of my own pounding heart in my ears, I heard something breathe—the harsh rasp of panting, deep and throaty.

  My foot in its clumsy boot slipped, and I fell, bumping and careening into a low, wet ditch, the mackintosh acting like a slick toboggan. I came to rest on my back in a puddle of cold water, staring up into the rainy trees.

  There was no time to escape, not now. I froze by instinct, going still, my breath stopping, like a mouse or a shrew when it feels an owl fly overhead. My legs clenched; my mind went white. All thought stopped, all motion, as I lay and waited.

  The smell came first. An overpowering rotten stench, damp and greasy. The bushes shifted and tore as something large came through them, up the rise, the heavy grind of paws gaining purchase in the loamy earth. There was a gasp and a growl, and the thing hit the top of the rise and launched itself over me.

  I could not scream. A whistle of air squeezed through the back of my throat, its sound lost.

  I could not see all of the creature in the fog. I glimpsed long, sprawled legs, muscled almost like a human’s, and vicious paws like hands. A chest thick as a barrel, covered in a ruff of long, filthy fur. And a long body, leaping over me in my icy ditch in a single, soundless move, the belly passing within arm’s reach of my face. Its head was lost in the white mist, though a vicious, drawled growl came from its unseen throat and trailed after it in the air.

  I pressed myself into the puddle of water and watched in terrorized silence as Princer’s stomach, matted and foul with a coppery stench like blood, passed before my eyes. Of their own accord, my hands gripped the camera pressed to my chest, and my finger clicked the shutter.

  Then he landed on the ridge of land at the other side of the ditch, I glimpsed a heavy curl of tail, and he was gone.

  I lay shivering as my hands went numb on the camera and the water in the ditch soaked my hair. The fog swirled past my unseeing eyes. It was a long time before I realized that the birds were singing again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “My goodness, Mrs. Manders—what happened?” Mrs. Perry dropped her chopping knife on the counter and came toward me as I stood in the kitchen doorway.

  “I’m all right,” I told her. I had pulled off Frances’s rubber boots, caked with mud, and left them on the floor of the vestibule alongside the filthy black mackintosh. “I just need a towel, if you please, so I don’t trac
k water all through your tidy kitchen.”

  She picked a towel from a cupboard and snapped it open. “I didn’t even know you were out of the house. Did you have an accident?”

  “Yes.” I rubbed the towel over my soaked feet in their torn stockings and avoided the curious gaze of the maid staring over the cook’s shoulder. “I was taking pictures in the woods, and I’m afraid I fell. I’m a mess, but I’m not hurt.”

  Mrs. Bennett came into the kitchen, spotted me, and joined Mrs. Perry as I explained. “You’ll catch a fever,” she proclaimed, her hands on her hips. “You need tea and a hot bath.”

  After walking home, soaked, through the foggy forest, I would have married Jack the Ripper for access to either. “Yes, thank you. I’ll just go up the back stairs and—”

  “Tildy, go with her,” Mrs. Bennett barked at the maid.

  “No, please.” I straightened, the dripping towel in one hand, and pushed my hair back from my face with the other. I gave both of them a beseeching look. “I’d rather Mrs. Forsyth not know. She didn’t know I was out at all, and with the engagement party today . . . It was just an accident. More embarrassing than anything, really.”

  Mrs. Bennett and Mrs. Perry exchanged understanding looks. “Take the servants’ stairs, then,” Mrs. Perry agreed. “I’ll put the coat and boots away. Tildy will bring up tea in a few minutes.”

  But as I picked up my camera and crossed the kitchen to the servants’ stairs, Cora Staffron walked in. “Do I smell tea biscuits?” She looked at me, and her eyes widened at my disastrous appearance. “Oh. Mrs. Manders.”

  I sighed. “It was an accident,” I said.

  She bit her lip. She was wearing a thick, quilted dressing gown decorated top to bottom with twines of flowers that strongly resembled wallpaper. Her blond bob was carelessly combed, her neck protruding gawky and thin from her collar. I realized that she was just as embarrassed as I was.

  Mrs. Bennett came to our rescue, since we were both frozen in humiliation. “The tea biscuits will be ready any minute, Miss Staffron,” she said. “I’ll have some sent up to you, along with tea for Mrs. Manders. Will that be acceptable?”

  Cora snapped out of her freeze, probably at the mention of biscuits, and gave Mrs. Bennett one of her smiles. “You bet!” she said, and turned to me. “Let’s go, Mrs. Manders.”

  She was surprisingly sisterly when we got upstairs, drawing me a bath and fetching extra towels from the linen closet. Our corridor was temporarily deserted, and no one saw me hobble to the bathroom, damp and muddy, wrapped in a bathrobe. When I had lowered myself into the water, blessing Wych Elm House’s modern, immaculate plumbing, I realized Cora was still in the hallway, on the other side of the closed door.

  “I hope your camera can be repaired,” she said. “It looked rather wet.”

  “Wet?” It had been out in the rain with me, but I had thought it came through all right.

  “Sure it is!” Cora replied. “There’s water coming out of it and everything! It looks a mess to me, and I think your photographs will be ruined. It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

  There had not been water running out of it when I carried it. The word came to me unbidden: Frances. There would be no photograph of her dog, not if she could help it. The pictures of the ocean would be ruined as well. I pressed my hands to my eyes and tried to calm down.

  “Mama wants a Christmas wedding.” Cora chattered nervously through the door. “But that’s barely six weeks away. What do you think, Mrs. Manders?”

  I dropped my hands and doused my muddy hair in the water. Keep it together, Jo. “I hear Christmas weddings are nice,” I replied in a shaky voice.

  “Was your own wedding very large?”

  The words were automatic. “We married by ourselves in Crete.”

  “An elopement!” I heard her clap her hands. “That’s so scandalous, like something a movie actress would do.” There was a thumping, shifting sound, and I realized she had sat down on the floor of the corridor, her back against the door. I wondered how nervous she must be, or how badly she wanted to avoid starting her day, to sit on the floor in her dressing gown and talk to me. “Mama says my dress should be satin, but I look so terrible in satin! It never sits right on me. I wonder if Mama will let me wear rouge.”

  I looked down at my hands, which were still shaking. Her prattle was actually soothing me, bringing me back from the nightmare I had just experienced and was only beginning to understand. “Will your other relatives be here tonight?” I asked.

  “I don’t have many,” Cora replied. “I’m an only child. I wish I had cousins my own age, but I don’t, just an older cousin who’s a doctor on Harley Street. He said he’d come.”

  “That’s very nice,” I said, using the sponge on my face and neck.

  “He is nice,” Cora said. “Mama asked him if the madness in Martin’s sister could run in the family, but he said he didn’t think it could.”

  I sank down in the water, soaping my hair and rinsing it again. Oh, Frances, Frances. What do you want? But already I knew. Even through the fog of my terror, I knew. She wanted me to see. That’s why Princer didn’t harm me. She wanted me to see. “Cora,” I said, “don’t listen to any rumors about Frances. And Martin is not mad.”

  “Oh, I know!” she said with an awkward laugh. “He’s a gentleman, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.” I closed my eyes, trying not to see Princer’s hideous stomach leaping over me. I prayed she wasn’t going to ask for a lesson about wedding nights. “He is.”

  “He’s kind to me, and he makes me laugh. Everything is going to go swimmingly, I just know it! I just wish he could eat something and rest more. It makes him moody—have you noticed that? He’s a little frightening sometimes. Last night I found him in his room, burning his sister’s letters in the fire.”

  I was wringing out my hair, but I stopped. “What do you mean, burning his sister’s letters?”

  “From the war,” Cora said. “All the letters she wrote him at the Front. I don’t know what they said, because he wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Why did he burn them?”

  “I don’t know.” The brassy confidence had left her voice, and for the first time since I’d met her, she sounded unsure. “He never talks about the war, at least not to me. He won’t talk about his health, either, and he won’t let the doctors answer my questions. He just goes quiet and tells me everything will be fine.”

  I stood from the bath and pulled a towel around myself. Damn you, Martin. Just tell her about the morphine. “Men don’t talk about the war,” I said.

  “I just want to help,” she said. “We’re going to be married by Christmas. Mrs. Manders, you’ve been married before. How do you get your husband to tell you everything?”

  “You don’t,” I said, and I reached into the tub and pulled the plug, watching the water spiral down the drain.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Dottie had chosen the upstairs gallery for the engagement party. Tables had been lined along one side of the room, laid with delicacies and flutes of champagne. A string quartet played in a corner, and a raised dais had been set up at the head of the room for announcements. The floral arrangements arrived by luncheon, profusions of gardenias and roses and chrysanthemums, lilies in tall sprays. Workmen had lined the walls with small portable electric lamps that would give off elegant light when the room was dark.

  I entered after the first guests had arrived. There were some two dozen people drinking and circulating beneath the canvases we had collected so assiduously on the Continent—Dottie’s art and business acquaintances, local gentry who were likely Robert’s cronies, the Staffrons, and the members of the Staffrons’ circles who had made the journey from London. Every bedroom in Wych Elm House was occupied tonight, as well as several rooms in the area’s surrounding inns.

  I spotted Cora and Martin near the center of the room, nodding a
nd greeting guests as they approached. Martin wore immaculate black tie and tails, his hair slicked back and gleaming in the soft light. His eyes were bright and his smile was genuine. I breathed a sigh of relief that tonight seemed to be a good one.

  Cora was in a dress of striking blue shot with white, puffed at the sleeves and beaded on the bodice. It was almost absurd—she looked a little like Anne Boleyn crossed with a respectable modern matron—yet somehow Cora looked born to it, her hair swept up and her tilted eyes aglow with demure pleasure. She turned to me with her familiar wide smile.

  “Cousin Jo!” Martin said as I approached. “You look a vision.”

  “What an elegant dress!” Cora cried.

  I smiled at them. My dress had arrived from London the day before; the dressmaker in Anningley had ordered it special for me. It was a simple sleeveless sheath that fell in a straight line from my shoulders to my hips, then down to a jaunty hemline at the knee. It was of deep, rich jewel blue, and peacock feathers adorned the skirt, their soft fronds waving as I moved. The final adornment was a single flower of pink satin sewn to the left hip. A maid had helped me pin my hair up with just a few curls loose over my temples, and I wore black high-heeled shoes. Since I did not own any expensive jewelry, I wore only my wedding ring.

  “Thank you,” I said to Cora. “Dottie is going to think it fast, but it’s a party, is it not?”

  “Mother thinks that anything other than a mannish suit is fast,” Martin commented. “She’s hardly the first word in fashion. Do get some champagne, Cousin Jo, since I believe you’re the one who had it ordered especially.”

  I was. Ordering champagne had been one of my duties. I was just sipping my first glass—the stuff was divine—when a man approached my shoulder. “Mrs. Manders.”

  I turned in surprise. “Colonel Mabry.”

  He gave me a quick, formal bow, elegant in his dark suit. “Mrs. Forsyth was kind enough to invite me, though I’ve shamefully put off deciding on one of her artworks.” His gaze moved up the walls, taking in the various canvases. “I believe I’ll have to make a decision soon.”