The Soprano

by England, Sarah

  He was wrapping ribbons of reed around her ribs, tying them into bows and she was laughing, river water in their hair, droplets trickling from eyelashes…Now this was heaven, this was joy, ecstasy…

  Suddenly, like a rip-cord the ribbons were yanked so forcefully she was propelled out of the dream and straight back into the cold bedroom, sitting up lunging desperately for breath. Every inhalation was a knife to the chest, her frail ribs almost cracking with the strain.

  “Mum?” A voice resounded through her head. “I’m trying to get Dr Fergusson out to you urgently. Can you hear me? We need to–” Interrupted, the voice paused and a wracking cough broke out. “It could be pneumonia.”

  She tried to work out who was speaking. And who is it who has pneumonia? Aaron’s mother had it. Clara had it…

  “Clara?”

  “Mum, it’s me – Rosa. You’re a bit confused. I can’t get hold of the doctor because of the weather.” A hand spanned across her back, and something was held to her lips. “Try to drink some of this.”

  Scorching brandy burned her throat and she spluttered, flopping back in the crook of Rosa’s arm, a bundle of rags.

  “I’ve put a hot water bottle in, can you feel it on your feet?”

  Ellen nodded.

  “Good. Marion’s still really poorly. She’s in bed with a nasty cold, probably flu. We spent the night on the moors after we got lost in the blizzard, do you remember me telling you? Anyway, we’ve all of us been asleep all day and now it’s evening. Mum, can you hear me? Do you know where you are?”

  Ellen nodded, slumping back onto the pillows.

  “We found you outside on the lane. You must have fallen but you’re back in your own bed now and I’m looking after you. You’ll be okay, Mum, but you’ve a bad chest and probably need some penicillin.”

  Ellen winced at a sudden stab of pain in her hip, a fuzzy recollection of slamming sideways onto the ground. “Lost?”

  “Yes, in the forest. It was the strangest thing but we couldn’t find the path – couldn’t see a thing. To cut a long story short we ended up on the moors again and sheltered in Green Mans Cave until daylight. At least by then we could see the way home. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now – we got back safe and sound….freezing and exhausted but…”

  Ellen tried to move her head but couldn’t.

  “Mum, are you in pain? Is it your hip?”

  She nodded, the slight movement causing a swell of dizzy heat to rise in her throat from the liquor.

  “We’ve got plenty more aspirin if you need it, and I’ve put a dressing on your leg so that’s what you’ll feel pressing on there. Can you manage some soup, do you think? I’m going to make some for me and Snow.”

  Ellen frowned, her last vision of Lana at once stark in her mind.

  “Mum? Could you manage soup if I brought you some?”

  She shook her head.

  “A dry biscuit, then? And a glass of milk with some aspirin?”

  Her head lolled to one side, eyelids dropping.

  “Alright. Look, I’ll go and make something for me and Snow, then I’ll pop back and see if you’d like a cup of tea. You need more rest. It’s going to take some getting over that’s for sure. Are you warm enough?”

  “Mmm…” Ellen tried to push away the blankets as nauseating heat spread rapidly into her neck and face.

  “No, keep the blankets on. It’s freezing in here. The generator’s not working again and all the lines are down. We’ve no electric and the pilot light went out on the range. Stay in bed and keep warm. I’ll be back in a while.”

  The bedroom door clicked shut and Rosa’s footsteps tap-tap-tapped down the corridor. After she’d gone, Ellen inwardly recited her daughters’ names over and over - Marion, Rosa and Vivien, Marion, Rosa and Vivien - holding onto reality for as long as possible until all the years she had blocked out for so long began to crowd angrily forwards once more, baying to be heard.

  Fuchsia spots blazed on the crests of her cheekbones, a slick of sweat on her skin. The hot water bottle in the bed was scorching her legs and she kicked at it; mumbling, clutching at the air as if falling backwards from a great height.

  It was the strangest thing....but we couldn’t find the path…couldn’t see a thing…

  “No, no, no….please, don’t take me there again… Don’t let me see…”

  ***

  She is eight months pregnant with Vivien when she wakes on top of the sheets in a sheen of sweat. Already the heat is up and it will rise and rise until there is no air even in the shade. By three o’clock, that most intense point of the afternoon when the ticking grasshoppers and droning bees finally still - time seems suspended and even the hardiest of souls will sag with fatigue. If only the sky would crack and break – spark a dousing, bouncing downpour; but this July is topping all records and no end is forecast.

  After splashing her face with cold water, Ellen walks straight out of the back door in her voluminous white nightdress and heads to the coolness of the forest, relishing the dewy grass beneath her bare feet. Without even the wisp of a breeze, the water in the lake behind her is at such a low level the bell tower spikes out in the middle. People had taken to bathing in it, including herself, but now it lies glistening and untouched, fright tales of coming face to face with the long-drowned dead having circulated rapidly, along with accounts of being pulled underwater by cadaverous hands. Thus she heads for the dappled coolness of the woods.

  Beneath the sylvan shade, baked earth crumbles between her toes, a blackbird sings a sparkling fountain of song from the sunlit canopy, and a mellifluous stream trickles from deep within the moss and trees. Deeper and deeper into the woods she wanders, sleepily and dreamily, drowsy in the hazy dawn of what will be a blistering day.

  Soon she will turn back.

  Although he left at dawn and will have been at the mills for many hours already, Aaron frequently rides home to check on her; keeping a close eye now that her time is nearly due. She must not worry him by not being there. She smiles, picturing his concerned, steady grey eyes searching hers for any sign of worry or pain. His are the arms that cannot but enfold her, the hands that constantly reach for hers, the lips compulsively searching her own; the kind of love so intense, so all-encompassing it has knocked them both blind. They crave each other’s company, words, looks, caresses… dazzled at what they have found, disbelieving and a little bit afraid. After all, what was given could just as abruptly be snatched away…and with it the essence of life itself.

  It catches her totally unaware, time dissolving so suddenly it’s as if a switch is flicked. Without her noticing any transition it is now absolutely dark – as dark as night, in fact - and deathly quiet. There is not the faintest of sounds – not from the stream, the blackbird’s aubade or the foraging of any small creature. And the air is as damp and chilly as November – smoky and swirling with mist. Instinctively she looks up to find the canopy no longer green but as black as a starless night. Bewildered she assumes she must have fallen and hit her head; that she has been unconscious and he will be out looking for her. Or did she sleep too long? And yet she is still standing. What madness is this?

  At once the ground begins to roll beneath her in a turbulent sea and from somewhere nearby a baby is crying; whimpering at first but quickly escalating into open-throated screaming for attention. She holds out her hands in front of her, feeling her way in the dark towards the howling child, but the ground is as insubstantial as a flying carpet and she stumbles. It seems the nearer she gets to the child the further away it moves. Where is it? The trees are now spinning around her in a bonfire of screeches and wailing.

  Still the baby cries and in desperation she calls out, “Where are you? Where are you?”

  “Mum, it’s okay.”

  And then they are everywhere: babies – only not babies at all, but dolls - staring unseeingly from pinned eyes and cracked china faces; melted wax effigies with grotesquely distorted features; blood-soaked bandages unfurling from popp
ets, nails hammered through foreheads, limbs dangling from trees…Not dozens of them either, but hundreds.

  Reeling, her heel catches on the corner of something and her spine slams down hard onto stone. The wind is knocked from her lungs and a sickly wave threatens to engulf her senses; but from far, far away her name is still being called. She opens her mouth to respond but no sound comes and no words will form.

  There is only the nightmare in front of her. A nightmare from which she cannot wake. A male doll, definitely and obviously male with its phallus fashioned into a mangled, gargoyle caricature of a man, swings by its broken neck from the bough of a weeping willow. Squinting at the hideous effigy that is stuck with pins through every part of its waxen body, the neck snapped at right angles, she slaps a hand to her mouth. But it doesn’t stop the screaming. Nothing stops the screaming.

  “Mum? Mother, wake up. Are you alright? It’s Rosa.”

  Eventually Ellen quietens and her breathing steadies, wheezy and tight, but slipping once more into the oblivion of dreamless sleep.

  ***

  Chapter Twenty

  Ellen – continued…

  That same morning, Aaron was thrown from his horse and died instantly from a broken neck. On hearing the news, even though on some level she knew what was coming, Ellen doubled over in agony, her waters broke and Vivien was born some five weeks prematurely.

  She never ventured into the woods again, not once, preferring to lie stonily on the marital bed staring into a void of despair. Unable to move, even to turn her head when the new baby was shown to her, she had to be fed, bathed and tended to by a nurse. But the years had passed; and in a state of dissociation she eventually began to drift around the house again, gradually mastering the marionette motions of her role as a mother. Six months later the nanny Clara Danby had hired for her moved on, and one by one the girls started school.

  With Ludsmoor Primary School directly on the other side of Grytton Forest, however, naturally enough the girls wandered into the woods. She hadn’t realised. Had never thought. And one day while deadheading roses in the back garden she looked up and saw the two oldest burst from out of the darkness in a tumble of apple cheeks and curls, duffle coats and satchels. A vague fear clutched at her but she couldn’t quite say why that was.

  She should tell them to take the lane to school, but why? Bouncily happy, they were running across the lawn to tell her everything they’d learned that day.

  “I don’t want you taking short cuts through the woods.”

  Their joy visibly drained away. “Why?”

  “Just don’t go in, that’s all.”

  “But why–?”

  “There are bad things in there—”

  Well, what bad things, they wanted to know.

  “Evil things.”

  “Like what?”

  Ellen frowned so hard her forehead ached with the wrenching worry of how to explain it. What could she say about a terror hidden in a vault so far down the corridors of her mind, so heavily bolted and chained, that its very existence could never be acknowledged, much less discussed? And so she’d had no option but to frighten them with fairy tale readings of child-eating witches and hungry wolves. Rosa, dear sensible Rosa, had heeded the warning, sticking to schoolwork, attending Chapel and helping to look after Vivien. Marion, though… Well, she just had to go looking, didn’t she?

  Ellen drifted in and out of dreams. Occasionally, she called out and a woman’s face hovered over hers, feathery hands smoothing away tendrils damp with sweat. “She’s getting worse.”

  Another one further away, coughing – a sore, nasal voice. “Could you get to Dr Fergusson on foot, do you think? Do you feel well enough?”

  She tried not to groan. Dr Fergusson… Don’t they know yet?

  “We could ask Vic and Nell, I suppose?”

  Was that Rosa? Was that Rosa asking about Agnes’ boy? She tried to shake her head.

  “No!” said the other voice in between sniffs and coughs. “No, we absolutely cannot.”

  “I don’t see why—”

  “Just no. Not ever. Rosa. We have to fetch Dr Fergusson.”

  So Marion knew… Marion knew…

  “…and still snowing…”

  She faded in and out of consciousness. Snowing? Was it? Good God, how long had she been lying here? What year was it now?

  And the girls…they’d still gone into the woods even though she had strictly forbidden it, hadn’t they?

  The slap had stung her palm and Marion, still in her school pinafore, was falling sideways onto a kitchen chair… her cheek smarting scarlet in the shape of a handprint.

  No, they had not found anything in the woods… just trees and a stream… a beautiful place where sunshine danced off the spray and the rocks were shiny, and there was a magic pool with stepping stones. They’d played there all day… Marion was clutching her face, tears swilling into her eyes.

  “Until it got dark? Did it not occur to you how much I’d worry? You know I told you not to go in there, yet you even took Vivien with you too. And I expressly told you not to linger after dusk. How dare you disobey me, Marion! How dare you!”

  Marion hung her head. All three girls stared at the floor, their happy day snuffed out.

  “Tell me one thing – just one thing. Did you find an odd place – anything unusual? A place that scared you? Is there anything you want to tell me about?”

  All three shook their heads most vehemently. ‘No, no, they really hadn’t.’ Their eyes shone with honesty. ‘Nothing. It was just a place to play.’

  At first it came as a relief her children hadn’t found anything untoward; but on further introspection this only served to deepen her own confusion. Maybe then, she had imagined it all….and in the white, static space between sleeping and waking, where dreams merged with reality, maybe… maybe… that was where her mind had made it all up? Perhaps to make sense of what happened to Aaron? Some said it was the trauma of a birth brought on too soon by shock. Others said she had clearly suffered a head injury. So had she slipped on the rocks that day and fallen? Perhaps she was mentally ill and just as Dr Fergusson diagnosed, suffering from ‘nerves’? After all, there was nothing in the forest except trees and a stream, rocks, grass, and a picnic spread of bluebells in May – the ones the girls had picked bundles of for the kitchen windowsill. Just as they said: an enchantingly beautiful forest in which to play.

  She spent a lot of time gazing out of the window after the confrontation with her daughters; the slap forever imprinted in the echo of the house. And in the midst of her pain and bewilderment she had called Clara Danby once again, for help. Fearing Ellen might tip once more into depression, Clara suggested the girls could be schooled privately in town now they were a little older. The Danbys had paid for a cleaner too. After which the years merged into cotton-wool corridors with Ellen drifting through arranging flowers for Chapel and gazing out of windows at the woods. There was not a room where she didn’t gravitate to the view and stay there, motionless and transfixed. Was there anything to fear in there or had she had a vision, like the ones she used to have as a child? In other words had everything, in fact, happened inside her own head?

  It was just a feeling, albeit a strong one however, that she had not been mistaken at all. Piece by piece and often when least expected, fragments of memory floated to the surface to catch her off guard. Did this or did that, tie in? What was it she was missing?

  On the day of Aaron’s funeral, her mother, Annie, and sister, Agnes, had sat at the back of the little chapel as if magnetically challenged to have crossed the threshold, both dressed in the same long, black outfits they had worn to her wedding. With faces veiled, they inclined their heads as she walked in; each with the tiniest pin-prick smile, the slightest upturn of sour lips. And only because she knew them both so well had she noticed.

  She had chosen his favourite hymn, ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Has Ended.’ Beams of light streamed through the stained glass window he had personally c
hosen, radiating through the dust mites of gloom. How her heart had swelled, her stomach hollowing, as the pain wrenched through her in convulsions of a grief she could not contain.

  The Danbys kept their poise but a small hand had slipped into hers and she held onto it. Marion – a toddler who miraculously seemed to understand – had looked up and squeezed her hand without question and without words. Looking back, she realised the child had seen her through that dreadful day, the last day she was seen in public for nearly a decade.

  The coffin had been taken out through the porch into a summer’s day bursting with life and song; and she had to let the congregation file out ahead in order to regain composure. Although she’d hung back for only a few minutes, by the time she emerged both her mother and sister had vanished. She glanced around several times, before having little choice but to be helped into old man Whistler’s black carriage. The glossy, plumed manes of the horses bounced in the sunshine as the procession clattered smartly down the track to Ludsmoor Church, but it was not until they rounded the corner and levelled with the lychgate that she saw Annie and Agnes again. Her gaze settled on two dark silhouettes by the grave prepared for Aaron’s coffin. So they couldn’t wait, she thought, to see her husband lowered into the dirt.

  By then Agnes was pregnant with Victor. She’d married a miner, a strikingly handsome man of considerable brawn. Sam Holland had thick, black hair he combed back with brill cream, and dazzling emerald eyes. No one could quite understand what he had seen in Agnes – a sallow, mean-tempered stick of a girl with a long aquiline nose that gave her the same hawkish appearance as her mother. And unlike Annie she possessed no hidden skills such as tarot reading for lovelorn girls. No, Agnes was a woman who slinked in the shadows, watching, lurking, and oozing malice. It was said that in the classroom many a child had been fixed with one of her murderous stares and subsequently been signed off ill for weeks on end. Some had even contracted a disease or taken a chain of misfortunes home to their families.