Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle

by Helen Humphreys

  “Thirty-six, thirty-seven.” She counts out loud and her voice fills the small brick chamber, seals her safely inside this pocket of darkness.

  Cook stands in the roses outside Mr. Dashell’s library, banging on the window with her fist. “Fire,” she yells. And then, “Sir.” The thorns are scratching at her legs. She turned her ankle rushing down the path and long needles of pain shoot up it as she stands in the flower bed.

  Eldon, sitting at his desk, hears the shouts from far away, as though they’re underwater. He looks up and sees a face at his library window, and then a fist raised and hammering on the leaded glass. It’s Cook. Behind her, smoke trails in wisps above the hedge. His first thought is that the garden is on fire. He doesn’t realize that the smoke has blown over from the main house until he has unlatched the window and sees where it is coming from.

  “Quick,” says Cook, not knowing how much longer she’ll be able to remain on her painful ankle. “The house is on fire. Come out the window. Sir,” she says, as an afterthought.

  Eldon unlatches his window and swings his leg over the sill. He sees the smoke behind Cook gathering like a storm cloud. “Is everyone out?” he asks.

  “Everyone’s out, sir.” Cook puts her hand out for him to grasp as he guides himself over the sill and out of the library, but at that moment Tess rushes round the side of the house.

  “She’s gone in,” she says to Cook. “She says there’s a boy in there.”

  “The bell-ringer’s son,” says Cook. “I thought they were all down the garden.”

  “Who’s gone in?” says Eldon. He is perched on the window sill, one leg out against the wall of the house, one leg still anchored on the floor of the library.

  “Annie, sir. Annie’s gone back in,” says Tess.

  It is the easiest thing Eldon has ever done. He doesn’t even think about it, just leans his weight back into the room and his leg clears the sill. He lets go of Cook’s hand, and as he moves from the window, listening to their cries of protest, it’s as if they’re at sea, the great smoky spray behind their wrecked ship. It is their drowning cries he hears, as he sails safely past them.

  *

  Annie comes through the kitchen door. She wets a cloth in the pail of water by the sink and clamps it over her face. The kitchen is clear but there’s a lot of smoke in the main hall, billowing out from the drawing room where the fire must have started. Annie sprints up the staircase, as fast as her heavy cloak will allow.

  Gus is standing in the upstairs hall, pressed against a wall. He is not crying or screaming, doesn’t say anything to Annie when she rushes out of the smoke towards him. There are flames trickling down the feathers on his wings. She removes the cloth from her mouth. They stare at each other for the briefest of moments. It is now that Annie feels afraid. When she ran into the house and up the stairs she was so intent on finding the boy that she wasn’t aware of anything else. Now, when she sees how frightened Gus is, she thinks he must be recognizing the same fear in her eyes. He must know how afraid she is, and in that moment, with the smoke blurring around them, Gus reminds Annie of herself as a child in Mrs. Gilbey’s home. How small and scared she must have been.

  “Put your arms out,” she says to Gus. He stretches his burning wings so that they stay clear of her clothes and she runs with him like this, down the hallway to Isabelle’s bedroom. The bedroom is at the end of the house. The fire seems to be mainly in the central portion of the building, seems to have burnt through the drawing-room ceiling into part of the upstairs hall. It is not fanning out. They will be safer in Isabelle’s bedroom.

  There is smoke in the room, but the window is open. Annie sets Gus down by the door, closes it, then goes over to the bed and hauls the mattress off it. She struggles the mattress through the window and it somersaults to the earth below.

  The wings on Gus’s arms are burning. It is too late to try and fumble them off him. It will take too long to undo the leather straps. Annie grabs the boy under the arms again, rushes him over to the window, and then leans with him in her arms over the sill.

  “I’ve got you,” she says.

  And then she lets him go.

  The shape he makes as he’s falling, his fiery wings spread and holding the air, is almost the shape of a country. All jagged on the edges, carved out by the punishing sea.

  Annie leans out over the sill and watches the boy fall to safety. Michael, she thinks. Connor. He is her brother and she has saved him and now he can live, again. She has dropped him from the heavens and he flies down to his mortal life.

  Angel of Mercy. I have set you down upon the earth.

  Annie feels something around her ankles. It’s like a tickle, like a feather that has worked loose from the wings and is brushing up against her legs. She looks down. Her cloak is on fire.

  Eldon moves through the corridor outside his library towards the main part of the house. He is moving into the smoke and halfway down the hall his eyes are stinging too much and he can no longer see. He puts his arms out, feeling along the walls to find out where he is. He has never realized how thoroughly he knows this house, how every nick in the wallpaper, every texture of picture frame is a landmark detailing his position. His hands, he thinks, his hands have always made journeys. They have been to many wondrous places. They have traced the skin of Isabelle and felt along the walls of this darkened hallway. They have held the head of a flower filled with rain. If he had been a surveyor, walking through the wilderness, surely he would have been no different. He would have felt distance out,tree by tree, measuring the landscape by feel. Just as now his hands slide over walls, marry the shape of doorframe and lintel.

  I am here.

  The main staircase is burning. The banister a shivering ladder of flame. Eldon has pulled himself up the few stairs that are still safe. He is coughing now and having trouble breathing. There’s a pain in his head. He sits down on the bottom stair. Perhaps the back staircase is still functional. He should go into the kitchen and check it. He could get out through the kitchen door if need be. Phelan is probably long gone by now. But he doesn’t move. He has used all his strength to get here and now he’s coughing too much to go any farther. But it is all right, he thinks, sitting on the stair. He has done his best. He has gone back for a member of the expedition. He has been his bravest self.

  It has been a long journey. He is finally home.

  And as Eldon sits there, for the few moments that he sits there, he feels the air cool around him, until his skin tingles with it. His breath is smoke, rising out of his body. Ash wafts down from the floor above, floats down the emptiness where the staircase used to be, as fine and particulate as snow falling to earth. He is snow, falling to earth.

  When Isabelle finally opens the door of the coal cellar and climbs up the few stairs into the garden, it is as if she is climbing up into one of her own photographs. Everything is blurry, out of focus, soft and grey as the inside of a cloud. She walks through the smoke in the slow way one moves inside a dream, noticing things as though she’s drugged or underwater. Smoke, she thinks. It is smoke after all.

  When she gets round the side of the coal cellar and can see the burning house, she thinks, Who lived there? as though the fiery ruin is something she has stumbled across, accidentally, on a walk in the woods.

  There are men with buckets, and Cook and Tess sitting on the ground by the rose bushes.

  The kitchen is still intact. So is the wing with the library. Everything else is a smouldering wall of stone. Isabelle walks closer to the guttering main part of the house. She hears her formal name, distant, as if she is being called back from across a great stretch of water. This is where the stairs were, she thinks. This is where I lived.

  She looks down. Her feet are hot from walking on the jumble of stones. There, by the toe of her left boot, is something familiar. She bends down and picks up the glass plate. It is smoky and the glass is warm like skin. When she holds it up to the light she can still make out the image. The head turned toward
s the camera. The beautiful, ordinary face of Annie Phelan, as Grace, looking out at her.

  “Look!” cries a man’s voice behind Isabelle. She turns to the voice. It’s one of the men with the water buckets. He’s pointing to the upstairs of the house. Isabelle looks up. She sees a slow blur riding down the smoke from an upstairs window. An angel. A child. It’s the winged boy, floating down a ladder of air, drifting calmly down to earth.

  Cosmographia universalis

  Eldon is laid out in the library. It is one of the few parts of the house that has remained undamaged and it is the most dignified place to put him until the doctor can get there. He has been heaved up onto the big library table, right on top of a stack of his maps.

  Isabelle stands in front of her husband. Most of his clothes have burnt off his body. He still wears the upper portion of his trousers, and one shoe. His hair and beard are gone. Mercifully, one of the men has shut his blackened eyes. The stench of his scorched flesh is so strong that Isabelle will wake for months afterward with the acrid smell of his burnt body occupying her like a ghost.

  His skin is black and blistered. Most of his fingernails are missing. “From crawling,” one of the men said. “We found him on his hands and knees. He must have been crawling to the kitchen to try and get out that way.”

  Cook has blamed herself. “I had him by the hand,” she said. “I should have been quicker in getting him out that window.”

  Isabelle can’t bring herself to touch her husband, to lay a hand on his flesh, black and bubbled like tar. She wants instead to remember the smooth slide of it from before. A long time before. Intact. Beautiful.

  It must have hurt so much. She hopes he wasn’t too afraid. She hopes he wasn’t calling for her. If she’d known what was happening she would have gone in after him. But even as she thinks this she knows that this is not the truth.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  They had moved away from each other slowly, almost imperceptibly, like the drift of the continents that he’d told her about once, each year a microscopic shift in attitude and distance. They had married for what they had pretended was love. They had lived in this house. They had buried three infants together, each one marked with a small white stone with a carving of an angel’s wing on it. The unnamed graves said simply, Infant Son and Infant Daughter of Isabelle and Eldon Dashell. On Rose’s small stone it said, Our Baby Called Too Soon to Heaven.

  He was a shore her body had once sought. He was a place she had been that still glows dimly in the memory of her flesh. Now that he has died he has taken their whole shared past with him and she is left, here, in the ruin of their lives, to go on into a new world, without him. What is she to do with her understanding of him? She knows his history, the names of all his family, every piece of his clothing. All the details of Eldon that, when he lived, were just part of their life together. And what about her? Will anyone ever know Isabelle again, as long and as well as Eldon did? He has remembered her, so she doesn’t have to. Wasn’t this love? Not the bright flare of Isabelle’s past, but the subtle, constant present of life with Eldon. The accumulation of small moments, wasn’t that at least equivalent to an instant of profligate desire?

  The truth is that Eldon’s death means also that Isabelle will never be as she was, will not exist as strongly as before. She pushes her forehead against the hard edge of the library table. The truth is that Eldon has gone, and he has taken her with him.

  Isabelle closes her eyes.

  “Dear God,” says the doctor, when he sees the condition of Eldon’s body. He approaches it slowly, keeps raising his hand above it, but never setting it down on the burnt flesh.

  Isabelle stands by her husband’s desk and watches the village doctor, whom she and Eldon have known all their married life, the man who delivered her three dead children, struggle with accepting what has happened.

  Isabelle sits down at the desk. “He was dead when they had controlled the fire enough to go inside. He was found like this. There is nothing you could have done for him, Russell.”

  The doctor bows his head over Eldon, says nothing.

  Isabelle turns away and, in doing so, sees a letter on her husband’s desk. She picks it up and slips it into the pocket of her dress.

  When they carry Eldon from the library to the doctor’s carriage, Isabelle stands by the table, watching as he is moved from the room. The smell of him is still in the air, the scorch of hair and flesh. When she looks down, after she has heard the clatter of the carriage wheels over the stones on the driveway, she sees the map he was lying on has become a blotter for the ink of his dissolving body. His flesh has divided counties and formed tiny islands in the sea. The seepage from his body has permanently altered the maps beneath him. New lines have been created. New bays and, further inland from the coast of Ireland, a darker shading to the landscape. On the map under that one, an early survey of the Great Lakes in the Dominion of Canada, Eldon’s body has oozed plasma into the basin of Lake Superior, completely changing the course of the northern shore. And on the map under that, the Arctic Circle spreads out to join hands with Greenland. Like strata in a bluff, Isabelle peels the maps one from the other to see how they have changed, how they have revealed themselves. He has been granted his wish. Eldon Dashell has been on a journey. He has made his map of the world.

  In the days after the fire they live in the parts of the house that have survived the flames. The several rooms in Eldon’s wing have been turned into a bedroom for Isabelle, a bedroom for Annie and Tess. Eldon’s library, aside from storing some of the wreckage from the fire, has been left as it was. The kitchen is functional, although now that there is no longer a main section to the house, it is only accessible from the garden. To get a cup of tea or to make supper, Isabelle has to walk around to the kitchen, which has become its own building now, and enter through the kitchen door. The part of the wing that used to be attached to the main house, and was just a jagged hole, has been partially bricked up to provide shelter from the elements, to make the wing a self-contained building. A heavy blanket serves as a door.

  Isabelle can’t decide what to do about the house. At first she wanted to leave it immediately, but there were too many things to think through, to consider, and so she just stayed, because really that seemed the easiest course of action. And now, there is something comforting about being there. The house is as Isabelle feels. Parts of it are safe, parts of it are utterly ruined. She is constantly reminded, by everything around her, of what has been lost to her. And what has been saved.

  Wilks has been let go. Cook has gone to her sister’s in Chert-sey to recuperate and rest. She says she wants to come back into the household, but Isabelle thinks this is only because she still feels guilty about Eldon. Isabelle is not sure she wants Cook back, and hopes that, in the end, Cook decides to move on. At the moment it feels as if the fewer people she is responsible for, the better.

  Annie Phelan has burns on her hands from when her cloak was on fire and she turned back from the window after dropping Gus to safety, turned back and tore the burning cloth from her body. She is still bruised and sore from her own flight down, but otherwise, miraculously, unscathed. Gus, aside from some minor burns on his arms, is also fine.

  Because Annie can’t do much with her hands at the moment, and because Tess’s baby is due soon, it is Isabelle who has to take care of their everyday survival. She is not used to this kind of work, this kind of responsibility. A week of cooking has put her into extremely bad humour.

  “This has to stop,” she says, slamming down two plates of fish pie in front of Tess and Annie. “I can’t be expected to continue in this way.”

  Annie gingerly combs her fork through the mound of potatoes, looking for fish bones. Isabelle hasn’t proved to be the most careful of cooks. Yesterday there were small stones in with the vegetables.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” says Tess. This is her response to Isabelle’s frustration at her new household role, and it only seems to infuriate Isabelle
further.

  “You will just have to leave,” says Isabelle. “I can’t be expected to keep you on. Not with the baby coming this month. You’ll be of no use whatsoever.”

  There is silence. Annie can hear the wind fumbling the kitchen door. She watches the breath catch in Tess’s throat, the way her hands flutter down to her sides and are still. She thinks of the Vicar of Wakefield, of how he would embrace this new misfortune, would be optimistic and generous in this moment. “You can’t do that,” she says to Isabelle. “You’re in charge now. You have to look after us. All of us.”

  Isabelle is standing very still. “And why,” she says, “do I have to do anything you say?” Her voice snaps shut on each word.

  Tess is breathing hard with nerves. She keeps her head down, won’t look up at Isabelle.

  What would happen to Tess if she was forced to leave Middle Road Farm? Would the baby end up in an orphanage? Then a workhouse? Would the baby end up like Annie?

  Annie stands up to face Isabelle. She hadn’t realized it before but they are close to the same height. She wants to say, You have to think of someone other than yourself for once, but instead she says, “I thought you cared for me.” The line, meant to be another line, meant to sound casual, comes out all shaky, the words rattling hollow in the stillness of the room.

  Isabelle looks about to say something, but says nothing, and Annie turns from her, walks out of the kitchen.

  Eldon’s library smells of the fire. Annie stands by his desk and the charred rasp of the air in her lungs brings back the moment in Isabelle’s bedroom when she leaped out the window. The stench of her own clothes burning on her body. The rush of air pushing at her like a soft choir of hands as she fell to earth.

  What Annie wants from this room is right where she remembered it being. She tucks it inside her cloak and hurries from the house.

  The winter is nearly over. Already, as Annie walks across the garden, there are snowdrops starting to inch up through the grass, the sudden sight of them so unexpected, like words you didn’t mean to say that blossomed on your tongue and surprised you with their truth.