I bow my head. It takes might not to dispute my employer. I want to shake him and remind him what wonderful children he has and how his children are a gift, a gift not everybody has the fortune to experience, and if he only spent a little more time with them, loving them, cuddling them, they wouldn’t be frightened of him.
‘I could help them to understand,’ I venture. ‘If you think it would benefit.’
‘All the children need benefit from is your tutelage.’
I nod. ‘Of course.’
‘And they would also benefit from having a governess who is committed to their care and not concerned with her own affairs.’
‘I beg your pardon, Captain?’
‘I think you heard.’
I’m stunned. ‘Sir, to doubt my commitment to your children is—’
‘I understand you met with Henry Marsh last night.’
Unable to deny it, I lift my chin. There is no need to ask how he knows: I can imagine it already, my naivety in thinking I could go unnoticed through the back pass when all along the captain was watching me, trailing me, why does he observe me so?
‘You admit it,’ he says.
‘I do. The children were in bed. My evening was my own.’
‘I had specifically requested that you avoid Henry Marsh.’
‘I’m sorry. I hadn’t realised it was an instruction.’ Although I must have, because why else would I have engaged in secrecy? I acknowledge the thrill it gave me to disobey the captain and to conceal my disobedience from him. I acknowledge that throughout my evening with the doctor, I had the captain in my mind, not the doctor at all but the captain, picturing him in his study, smoking, writing, his dark silhouette brooding against the candlelight. I enjoyed the fact that Henry was his physician and that I was coming between them; I enjoyed the clandestine quiver of my defiance and the promise, however faint, of my punishment. I realise that I wanted the captain to find out. I needed him to. I am becoming as addicted to him as I have only been addicted to one other before in my life. I never thought I would feel this way again, as if love might save me. It frightens me how quickly I am falling.
‘I’m not in the habit of being misread, Miss Miller.’
‘I quite understand.’
‘I don’t think you do. The children showed me the drawing they did of you in the glade, dressed as a bride. They brought it to my desk and I must say I was quite alarmed. I would appreciate it if you would refrain from imposing your fantasies on their impressionable minds, especially on Constance, for whom, as a girl, such ideas hold special allure. Whatever your reasons, it isn’t correct conduct for a governess.’
I laugh. ‘But that was the twins’ suggestion, Captain, I hardly think—’
‘No, it doesn’t appear that you do.’
I remember the twins’ sweet enthusiasm and the innocence of their task. They would have been excited to show the captain, and likely received a rebuke for their effort. But another, more appealing, thought surfaces. That the children wished their father to see me as I might one day appear to him, as his beloved and betrothed. That an unconscious desire propelled them to draw me like that in the first place, a desire to have me as their mother, and as his wife, and for Winterbourne to belong to us all…
‘Hopefully you will think on this,’ the captain says, interrupting my contemplation. ‘Aside from the impropriety of your outing when you are employed at Winterbourne under my authority, you must take my advice when it comes to Henry Marsh. He is a fine doctor – but the man is not to be trusted.’
I frown. It is hard to think of a more trustworthy man than the doctor.
‘Captain, you need not concern yourself—’
‘Oh, but I must,’ he says, and for an instant the burns on his face tighten. ‘I have known the doctor for many years. He was my wife’s physician as well as mine. I am better informed to pass judgement on his character than you are.’
‘Then why are you trusting him with your injuries?’ It is a brave challenge, the first time his wounds have been recognised, but he meets it unswervingly.
‘It is not his capability as a medic that I doubt,’ he says. ‘It is his dishonesty.’
‘Excuse me?’
But the captain has said too much. He leans more heavily on his cane. ‘I am merely confirming my point to you, Miss Miller. My reasons for warning you away from Henry Marsh are not simply in Winterbourne’s interests, although I do feel that your direction should be solely placed here – they are to ensure your own safety and well-being.’ He speaks this last part with an endearing self-consciousness that is at odds with his command. ‘In any case,’ he finishes, as if done with the matter, ‘do as you wish. You are aware of my preference. Think of it what you will.’
The captain turns and makes his way back to the house, his collar turned up against the cold. A chill wind blows in from the sea, flipping his coat like the dark wings of a bird. Behind me, Storm retreats into her stable and I wonder if I am standing now where Laura once stood, watching her husband, knowing he is hers, and marvelling that Winterbourne and all it contains is mine, all mine, all mine.
*
The rest of the day passes without a glimpse of Captain de Grey. I confess I am looking for him, hoping to see him, for his company both terrifies and excites me. With Henry Marsh I am Alice Miller, ordinary, unexceptional, familiar; with the captain I am somebody else. I don’t know whom. I don’t know if I trust her.
I have always craved to be that other woman. How could I not? Ever since school, since the crime I committed when I was seventeen years old, I have yearned to step into new shoes. I detest what I did. I wake at night sweating and sick with it. What frightens me almost as much as being discovered is the cold hard stone that became of my heart; that I was able to walk from the scene, calmly and coolly, and return to my dormitory, brush my teeth and comb my hair and wait patiently for lights-out, wishing Matron a polite goodnight, all the while knowing what I had left and what would be revealed in the morning. What sort of a person can do that? Me. I could. I did. And I got away with it, too. Who would have suspected meek, mild Alice Miller, who wouldn’t say boo to a goose? Nobody saw me there. It was a tragic accident, that was what they said, poor girl, such a shame, such a loss, so young and full of promise. Assemblies in memoriam, a collection for her parents, a project room named in her honour… I nodded along, pretending to wipe my eyes.
Now the nightmares come and come, louder and brighter each time.
At Winterbourne, with the captain, I could put my crime behind me. I could start again. I could stop longing for a life that didn’t work out and begin an untainted one. Jonathan de Grey is a new species, one I have never encountered before. I yearn to strike him and to be struck by him; I yearn to be kissed by him until my lips bleed.
Later that night, when I am alone, I try to talk myself out of my preoccupation. Jonathan sees nothing in me; I am his children’s instructor. He is still in love with his wife. As if to torment myself with this, I lift the silver clock from where I set it on the table when I first arrived, thinking it might be fixed. L. Until the end of time…
The engraving stares back at me, devastatingly real and heartfelt. The hands read twenty-five minutes to three. In this stilled hour, Laura herself has been stilled. The captain’s love for her has been stilled. Their marriage has been preserved in a moment, perfect and eternal, untouchable to mortals like me.
‘The captain stopped it when she died,’ Mrs Yarrow explained to me, when I enquired about it. I didn’t need to ask the significance of the hour – it was the same hour that Constance had been sleepwalking outside my room, and the same hour on which, I’d noticed, the other clocks in the house had been stopped, the ormolu in the captain’s study, the carriage clocks in the dining room, the grandfather in the hall.
‘Time ground to a halt for the poor man after she went,’ said Mrs Yarrow. ‘I thought it would pass, that we could start the blessed things up again, but when I went to wind the carriage, all h
ell broke loose. I vowed I’d never go near them again.’
I touch Laura’s clock now. The cook told me that the children had insisted it be put in my room before I’d even arrived, a pretty token for their new governess, and now I find myself consumed by its power, taunted by it, tempted by it. How can I compete? Laura, with her lashings of hair and glimmering eyes; Laura, the mother of his children; Laura, with the romance of death… I cannot. And yet I am unable to deny my jealousy.
I wish her husband to be mine. I wish her children to be mine, and her home to be mine, and her horse to be mine; every part of her life I wish to swap for my own. I wish to wear her clothes and be draped in her jewels; I wish to dance on a moonlit night with a wild-haired captain; I wish to know his secrets as she must have, to kiss him tenderly and make love with him fiercely; I wish to be his confidante, his friend, his mistress. But Laura is a woman against whom I stand no chance. She towers over me, mighty, powerful, a goddess, and I am nobody. I am not she.
My desire for the captain exhausts me. I admit it. It will not be denied.
I undress slowly; the curtains are open so that the black shiver of the sea can be glimpsed in the burgeoning dark. I want the captain to be watching.
I want him to see me, like this. For him.
I glance down at my nakedness and the pattern of red marks that run up my arm. The spots have spread since I arrived, some of them mellowed to bruises and some of them fresh, recently made. I touch the skin to see if they hurt, but they don’t. I must be sensitive to something in this house, some fabric or else a contagion in the air. And yet I don’t mind them. With each day that passes, with each day my passion thrives, so my blood appears to rise to my skin in coin-sized petals, no bigger than a thumbprint, attesting my devotion. I wish him to kiss them away, to kiss me all over.
Finally I draw the drapes closed, the material soft against my body.
Did my predecessor stand where I am? Did she long for him as I do?
I slip into my nightdress and crawl between the sheets, where I lie awake for some time, gazing into the dark and struggling to capture the details of his face.
Chapter 21
The week passes in a state of high tension. Winterbourne feels like a storm about to break, the air charged with unknowable forces. I see the captain only once, standing alone on the Landogger Bluff, during my afternoon walk with the children.
‘Isn’t that Father?’ Constance asks me. ‘What is he doing?’ I wish I knew. But the more intense and isolated Captain de Grey becomes, the more he enthralls me.
‘Come along,’ I say hurriedly, ‘your father will be in presently.’
It is an effort to hide my craving from the children, and from Mrs Yarrow. Each time the captain arises in conversation I must turn away, for surely my racing heart will give me away. They seem not to notice, for which I am grateful.
On Wednesday, after breakfast, we have a fright. The last I saw of the children was my dismissal of them and instruction to go and dress; but thirty minutes later I am still waiting in the classroom. I go to Mrs Yarrow. ‘Have you seen them?’ I ask.
‘No, miss. I thought they were with you.’
Together, we ascend to the twins’ bedroom and their beds are neatly made; the clothes I laid out for them last night are not in evidence.
‘Well, at least the mites are dressed,’ says Mrs Yarrow, in that mistrustful tone I have become used to, seeming to suggest that the children are engaged in some unsavoury activity, with us as the butts of their joke. I do not address her disloyalty for now is not the time. Instead I say, ‘Perhaps they’re with Tom.’
We find Tom outside, up a ladder, clearing the rain gutter of leaves. He climbs down when he sees us, but confesses he’s had no sight of them either.
‘Oh, Lordy!’ Mrs Yarrow wrings her hands.
‘Keep your head, Mrs Yarrow,’ I say, ‘there will be a perfectly reasonable explanation.’ I am just praying that explanation arrives before Captain de Grey does, for I feel his eyes on me again, watching me all the time, everywhere, always.
‘They wouldn’t ’a’ gone downstairs, would they?’ says Tom.
‘Downstairs?’
He nods. ‘To the cellar.’
‘Why on earth would they do that?’
‘The girl was talking about a mirror,’ Tom says. ‘She wanted to show you, miss.’ He pauses, averts his gaze, and his next words are an effort. ‘It were a mirror of Madam’s,’ he manages. ‘All her things were moved down there after she left.’
‘It’s true,’ says Mrs Yarrow. ‘The captain wanted them out of sight, all of Madam’s possessions. We don’t use those rooms any more, in any case.’
The three of us hurry inside and head for the bowels of the house. I haven’t ventured this way since Tipper led Henry and me on a mission, the first time the doctor visited, and it smells as dank and disused as it did then. Down the servants’ corridor and getting closer to that weird room with the diminutive entrance, we hear the tinkle of children’s laughter. ‘There they are!’ I cry. ‘I hear them!’
I am surprised to find the strange, small door open, and it strikes me as odd that the children should be giggling if what Tom said was true and they are sitting surrounded by their dead mother’s belongings. Was that what Tipper was barking at, just a trove of old effects? Why was he so afraid? I long to creep inside and touch the fabrics this woman wore, to glimpse the life she led, but then the laughter stops and the children appear at the hatch. The light is so faded that it is hard to make out their shapes, but I would know my children anywhere.
‘Help us,’ urges Edmund, ‘Tom!’
Now I see why. They are attempting to carry a considerable weight and as its outline appears through the alcove I see it is the mirror. Laura de Grey’s mirror.
I rush to help and between us we wrench the glass through. Mrs Yarrow falls back, disapproving, and I ought to share her disapproval but cannot, for the intrigue is too great for me to contest. Tom stands the mirror and for a moment we all gaze at it, as if a new person has joined us. It is oval in shape, the glass plain enough but the frame is beguiling. It is twisted and black like a froth of serpents, or the head of Medusa, and one has the sensation of reaching to touch it and one of its tentacles coming alive in one’s hands. It reminds me of the mural in my room – that writhing greenery – where I cannot trace a stem of it without becoming lost.
My vision of Laura at her dressing table was wrong. She was not sitting but standing. The beauty of her head alone was not enough.
Constance snivels. She was not laughing in there, but crying!
I kneel to her. ‘What is it, darling?’
‘This was my mummy’s,’ she says.
‘I know it was. But you hoped to find it? Tom said you did.’
Constance nods. ‘Edmund promised he’d help me. I wanted to see it again. May we bring it upstairs, Alice, please? I don’t like it being down here. It isn’t happy down here.’ I look up at the others, at Mrs Yarrow and Tom, and they are doubtful.
‘The captain won’t like it,’ says Tom.
I stand, smoothing my skirt. The captain’s rage flies towards me on wings made of gold. ‘I am sure he’ll understand once I explain it to him.’
*
The private reprimand I am hoping for doesn’t arrive; instead, we are all of us present when the captain sees the excavated mirror, and all of us are subject to his anger.
Anger, though, is not nearly the right word. Instead the captain receives our find as if absorbing a blow to the stomach: quiet, controlled and steady.
‘Constance wishes to keep it here, in the hall,’ I say.‘Could we?’
The captain eyes each of us in turn. I can hear Mrs Yarrow’s protests without her needing to speak: ‘It weren’t me, Captain, I didn’t want anything to do with it, it’s a horrible thing anyway; forgive me, Captain, it were the children’s doing, the children and her!’ He watches the mirror carefully, as if it is an old adversary.
‘Is
that right, Constance?’
The children no longer hold my hands; they have stepped away from me. Edmund’s glance flits over me: a shiver of conspiracy passes through the hallway then disappears. ‘Mummy used to brush her hair in it,’ says Constance faintly.
The captain’s shoulders drop, surrendering to a great exhale.
‘Very well,’ he says, ‘you may keep it above stairs. But not here.’ He doesn’t have to say: Not here where I can see it. Not here where I must be reminded of her.
‘In Alice’s room,’ says Constance, as if this has been the plan all along.
Startled, I turn to her.
‘Alice will take the mirror,’ she goes on, and there is that quiver of collusion again; I cannot put my finger on it. ‘Then we can see it any time we like. Alice will look perfect in it. Don’t you think, Father? It’s a waste for it to be hidden away.’
‘Come now, children,’ I object, ‘I wouldn’t assume—’
‘If she wishes it,’ says the captain, meeting my eye with his cold blue glare.
I cannot speak. The mirror observes me. The children are pleased.
Tom lifts the glass with some effort. Leaving behind our companions, we take it to my room. ‘Is here all right?’ he asks, settling it by the window.
‘That’s fine. Thank you, Tom.’
Before he leaves, he asks, ‘You’re sure about this, miss?’
‘It is the children’s wish,’ I answer; ‘I am happy to entertain it.’
‘Mrs de Grey used to love that mirror.’ He hesitates. ‘She’d be in front of it every day – obsessed, she was – brushing her hair or admiring the new clothes the captain bought for her. But she hated it by the end. She weren’t at all keen on it by then. Said it gave her a fright.’
‘Well, I’m not about to let a rusted antique do such a thing to me.’
‘Of course not, miss.’
I am relieved when he goes and I am alone, looking at myself in the glass and liking how it makes a grander person of me. I find myself smiling, despite the strain of the morning, and a warm beam of sunshine pools on the floor around my ankles.
The Woman in the Mirror: Page 16