The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  Caroline thought she saw. “And, of course, you trust him not to say anything.”

  Tightly, her father said, “I won’t pretend that isn’t a consideration, though of course not the primary one. He will have information for us, and we ourselves will read too. We’ll read, and look for answers, and we’ll find them, and when we do we’ll use them to the best of our abilities.”

  He was still hoping they could be saviors, just as they’d imagined from the start.

  “Then this scheme has nothing to do with what it would look like to the world at large if Miles Pearson’s daughter were to collapse in her parents’ coach on the way home, just like a character in his book?” Caroline asked.

  “Caroline, I think I needn’t remind you that you are the one who decided she should come here, dearest,” her father said. “Perhaps you might allow me to decide when she should leave.”

  That knocked her silent.

  * * *

  *

  Eliza had her next fit that afternoon, in her bedroom. She had come down for dinner, eaten a little, then gone up to rest. Felicity screamed, and everyone came running, but by the time they reached her Eliza was already finding her feet.

  “It’s all right, I’m all right.” She patted her hair and her sleeves, gray-faced.

  “Miss Bell,” Caroline said. “Really, I don’t understand—why would you want to stay here? Surely you can see that you need to be at home, under a physician’s care.”

  “I don’t,” Eliza said desperately. “I need to be here. I need this place, what’s here for me in this place. Please, there’s nothing at home for me.”

  Felicity stroked her arm.

  “And anyway, leaving would harm me. You all saw that.”

  Samuel cleared his throat. “Well, Dr. Burgess did say that this might happen,” he informed all of them. “He said there can be several attacks in close succession at first. I’ll send word to him. See what he advises.”

  Caroline followed him out into the hall. She waited till they were out of earshot of the rest. “Papa—”

  “I’m going to write to Hawkins right now too, so we might begin to get a clearer picture of what next steps to take.” Was he avoiding her eyes, or only not looking at her? He walked down the stairs.

  Caroline went to her room to dry her sweating face. Then she went to look for David. She found him in the study, hunched miserably over a medical book.

  “You heard?” she said.

  “Sophia told me. I was in the barn, checking the ceiling patch. I’d wanted to think about an easier problem, I suppose. Sophia said Eliza was recovering for now, so I came in here, to try to pin it down,” he told her. “Anemia, maybe, paired with the sort of suggestibility we were discussing. You see?” He swiveled the book toward Caroline, stabbing at the margin with his finger. “That would explain the paleness and lethargy.”

  “Anemia doesn’t cause red markings on the skin, does it? Twitching, jerking?”

  He squinted at the page. “No, those I’m thinking must arise from whatever’s amiss in her thinking. Or perhaps even unrelated, coincidental secondary problems.”

  “What was it someone said about the role of coincidence in explanation?”

  “I’m sure something damning.” David rubbed his face. Caroline wanted to lay soft fingers over his eyelids to make darkness.

  “Where’s your wife?” she said.

  “She said she wanted a walk. I think this is frightening her.”

  So Sophia was walking now too.

  “And you?” he said softly. “Caroline, this must be horrible. The parallels must seem…”

  He took her hand. The skin of his palm was warm, rough, much as she’d always imagined it. The air went soft around her. She tightened her grip.

  He squeezed back but then pulled away. He turned a page of the book.

  To let him hear how unaffected her voice was, Caroline asked, “What will Hawkins say, I wonder?”

  “He’ll have some insight. This kind of thing can’t be entirely unprecedented.” He looked at her. “I know it seems like a risk to you, keeping her.”

  “Not a risk. A mistake.”

  “But your father’s right about what they’ll do to her if we send her away. And us? We’d have to close. This, all of this, all of us, we’d be ruined.”

  They would. The school would close, the girls would go home, and who would ever give them any others? David and Sophia would go home too.

  “Your father, Caroline,” David said softly.

  Yes, none would be ruined more than Samuel. He’d had two chances now. There would be no third. After all the beautiful words, all the beautiful ideas, he would die a failure, and no one would look at anything he’d done or written, forever after, without seeing how he’d failed. The result would be a new smallness and poverty, and a new depth of aloneness in her own life, with so many years of it left, still, to get through. She took a breath, then said, “I know. But I think we must, must now take the actions that are best, without considering the effects on ourselves.”

  “I’m not thinking only of us, though. Think what they’ll say.”

  It didn’t take her long to understand. He watched her face as she saw his meaning. Trilling Heart’s closing would be used to prove a point: that all of them here had been wrong about girls. They thought they could pack them full. Thoreson would have his pen out as soon as he heard the news. Perhaps now we can see that what individual students require, regardless of sex, is practical preparation for their likely social positions and tasks. As for the rest? Needless weight. Even the headmistresses of some of the traditional long-standing girls’ schools might feel moved to write. The inherent differences in robustness between male and female, and the differences in the proper roles of each, must, it is clear, be taken into account. Then those women would resume teaching their posture classes, embroidery, elocution, reassured in the rightness of their elegant miniature worlds—after all, look what happened when those worlds got larger. Thoreson would resume producing well-behaved, adequate citizens who understood how to establish orderly homes.

  Caroline wanted more than that for their girls, for every one of them.

  David was watching her. “We can resolve this,” he said.

  As a boy he had lifted her father’s book out of the dust of the road. She could see now his expression in that moment, when he’d decided that the force that had thrown it to him would also throw him whatever else was necessary for the rest of his life, and the look of that young, sure face enraged her.

  They had trapped her in their plans, these men.

  “I admire your faith,” she told him. “You and your wife have that in common.”

  He flinched. “Was that necessary?”

  “It felt necessary.”

  David bent low over the book again. “If that’s all, I’d like to get back to this.”

  * * *

  *

  Caroline sat down at her desk that evening to write the letter to the Bells herself. She would write it and walk into Ashwell in the morning to post it.

  Her lamp cast a glow over only the paper and her arms; the rest of the room, even her own lap, was in darkness. There was enough moon to see the branches of the tree just outside the window. At this time of the year they always looked to her like crabbed, crippled hands.

  She wrote Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bell very slowly, in her largest and most confident script. If she shaped the letters well enough, her pen might carry right into the next, and she might manage to write the words that would stir the Bells to come and fetch Eliza so they could bring her home and properly address the problem of her. Only she wished she’d never met Eliza’s parents. It wasn’t helpful to her now, picturing the woman who would open this letter and take it to her sofa to read. No, to glance at. With those darty, distracted eyes, Mrs. Bell might not get to the en
d, no matter what Caroline wrote; Caroline doubted she’d ever read anything whole. (Where had Miles Pearson found her? Why had he married her? Maybe he’d only wanted someone who would never make it far enough into The Darkening Glass to worry about Louisa and Miles’s feelings where she was concerned.) Or Mr. Bell might be the one to open the letter, decide not to wade into this mess, for fear of griming his nice clean trouser cuffs, and put it by, somewhere, for his wife to read—somewhere she would never find it. Go on thinking about safes or steel.

  Or Caroline might be wrong. They might read, and get to the end, and call the papers—no matter how calmly Caroline phrased it all—before they even arranged to bring Eliza home. “He has disturbed her,” Mrs. Bell might say, and her eyes, whatever else could be said of them, would be appropriately teary. “Samuel Hood has undone our daughter.” Mr. Bell standing beside her, giving the accusations ballast. People would believe them. The ending, for all of them, would be the one David had made Caroline envision.

  Caroline shook her right hand: just a few quick shakes. She thought, but was not sure, that it had tingled, and now she could tell herself that was because of the shaking. Then she did the same with her left.

  She wished she could write to Miles Pearson himself. I don’t understand your daughter. If we have undone her, she seemed very ready to be undone. Whatever drives her, it is too large for us; it frightens us here. It’s changing us. This must be your fault. Please come collect her.

  And if she were writing impossible letters, she could write one to her mother too. Dear Anna. Dear Louisa. Dear Anna. Dear Louisa.

  Tell me who you were.

  The tree branches scrabbled at the sky outside her window—she felt she should actually have been able to hear the scratching.

  She made herself practice living through the ending. The Moores would leave if Trilling Heart closed. David would go with Sophia, forever and ever, amen. Caroline and Samuel would resume reading their books in front of the fire in the evenings together—fewer books, older favorites, as they would need to spend less, as there would be less new income from Samuel’s reprinted essays, growing daily dustier and more forgotten. Most days neither Hood would mention the Moores or Trilling Heart at all. Listen to this, Caroline, Samuel would say, and give his dry chuckle, and read her a line he’d read her three times before, pinching and pinching at his earlobe the way he always had. The skin of Caroline’s face every day a little heavier. And elsewhere, all these girls would be preparing for their own domestic firesides, where they would mend clothes and prepare dinner invitations, and no one would ever know how Livia acted Shakespeare, how Abigail’s mathematical reasoning had improved, how much they all could do.

  Caroline put her pen away.

  * * *

  *

  She stayed in her bedroom during supper. Later, she went down to the kitchen to make tea. Sophia was standing at the corner window, looking out, eating a piece of bread with jam.

  Caroline put the kettle on. She hoped Sophia would leave the room when she finished the bread.

  “I do love sweet things,” Sophia said. “I can stand most anything if I have a sweet taste in my mouth. It’s a little treat you can always give yourself.” Another slight, frivolous insulation, like the pink silk inside her dress.

  Sophia hadn’t made that jam—Caroline had, last summer, before anyone had said a word to her about a school. On one of the hottest days of the year, because the strawberries were starting to turn and couldn’t be wasted, she’d filled this kitchen with sugary steam, boiling them to pulp. Her clothes had smelled of it for days. Her hands had looked bloodstained. All, it turned out, so David’s wife could have something sweet in her mouth.

  Sophia dusted crumbs from her fingers onto the floor. She took up her jam knife again. “I think I’ll bring Miss Bell a piece.”

  “Is that wise?”

  Sophia spread the jam, then looked up at Caroline. “We don’t any of us know what’s wise regarding her, do we? It must be strange for all of you, not knowing.” She carried the plate from the room.

  Going to the cupboard to take out her favorite cup and saucer, Caroline felt her fingers tingling again. The last three on her right hand. A buzzing feeling, as if insects with vibrating wings had hatched in the pads. She paused mid-reach and shook her hand in the air, but the buzzing’s pitch raised.

  It seemed important suddenly to leave the house, so Caroline went outside and sat down on the bench on the back porch. The air was bitingly cold. She laid her buzzing hand in her lap.

  The house was too full, that was all. Too much sharing of its air. She wondered if her mother had felt the same about the Birch Hill men and their wives.

  Best not to wonder if this was how her mother had felt, though; if, just a little later than expected, she was finally going to feel all of it for herself.

  A red flapping, and a trilling heart landed on the lawn, twenty feet or so from where Caroline sat. It stalked, pecked, stalked, pecked, each motion so predatory. How the thin membrane of its throat rippled and pulsed—thin enough, it looked, to give under a fingernail. The bird rustled its wings and bobbed its head and fixed Caroline with its sightless-looking eye. Novels and novels could be written about this thing’s beauty, crowds could will themselves into raptures, and Caroline would never see it. She watched it step across the grass and swore she could feel its talons on the skin of her stomach.

  She leapt up from the bench. She ran onto the lawn, waving her arms. “Get!” she yelled.

  The bird squawked and rose briefly into the air, landed again, and watched her to see what she might do next.

  “Get!” Caroline swept her arms up and down, as if she were trying to signal to someone in the distance.

  The bird squawked again and flew off, still calling. In response, perhaps, another emerged to join it—flew from where she hadn’t seen it, from the branches of the big tree at the edge of the lawn.

  Flew from within something that sat amongst those branches, a lump shape nestled in that tree.

  Caroline advanced. The nest wasn’t high, perhaps four feet above her head, spread between and below two branches the way the meat of a hand fills the space between finger bones. She’d climbed this tree many times as a child; her feet knew the toeholds. A step up, another, and she could reach and see. A small hunched cave of a nest, the hole still, nothing inside moving. She rebalanced with her elbows against the trunk, put her hands on either side of it, like gripping a face, and tugged. Nothing happened. She tugged harder, and it gave.

  She cradled it, climbing down, though really she didn’t want to touch it, wanted it far from her own body. She could smell it, the same fetidly rich smell from the ceiling collapse—a smell of secret folds full of old food and old birth.

  On the ground again, she held the nest upside down, cupping its strange, irregular rounded top, to examine it. The outside was shaggy, its lines bulging as if something inside had pushed at randomly chosen places. In its side, near the base, that small dark entrance. She made herself pull the hole open wider with her fingers to let light inside. The inner weave was tighter than the outer, and denser, a thick knotted curving wall of twigs coated in the grimy residue of feedings and hatchings. Some hay too, and a tangle of rough horsehair. A patch of cloth, brown, with a pattern faded past deciphering. She reached within and pulled the cloth from under, over, in between the twigs, rolled her fingers across it, and was filled with the memory of a dress she’d had at eight or so—wearing it to play, ripping open seedpods while she ran and scattering them behind her, pretending she was a queen sowing a magical forest. Her hem could have caught and left this scrap. It should have rotted by now, but maybe it had lodged somewhere that had provided shelter.

  Any of the girls she showed it to would have a memory of the cloth as hers, Caroline understood.

  Farther along the curve, closer to the nest’s ceiling, was another
tangle of hair, finer than the horsehair. She tugged it loose. A small tangled clump, like something from a locket. The color was a deep dark brown. She knew the grain. Her scalp prickled, right at the back, where she wouldn’t have been able to see if something had plucked it from her head.

  She’d have felt it, though. Many people have dark brown hair.

  Caroline would bring David to see the nest, so she could see what he thought, so he could say something rational to lessen her fear. She set it down on its side at the base of the tree trunk, on the far side, where no one went, and laid the cloth and the hair down next to it, weighted with a small stone so they wouldn’t blow away.

  But coming through the front door, she heard David and Sophia in the sitting room. David said something. Sophia laughed. David laughed too, the sound of a man enjoying what the universe has tossed his way. She did not want to bring the two of them together to see what she’d found. She didn’t think she had it in her to stand and talk to Sophia just now, to hear calmly whatever Sophia would have to say about the nest.

  If her fingertips prickled as she went up the stairs, well, she’d been rubbing them against that cloth, and fingertips on cloth always prickled.

  * * *

  *

  While the teachers read about ailments, and thought, and waited for Hawkins’s reply and whatever absolutions and repairs it might contain, they also went on teaching. And so Romeo and Juliet continued to progress toward its usual end. The lovers’ only night together, the plan set in motion, each chance at happiness once again missed, just as nearly—that tyrannical lack of surprise. David’s lessons had moved into chemical compounds, properties of acids and bases.

  Eliza raised her hand in class, not infrequently.

  On Thursday, Tabitha went upstairs to fetch her shawl before the afternoon lesson and shrieked. Some of the girls were already in the barn—and David and Sophia—but Caroline and Samuel and the girls present ran toward the sound. Instead of Eliza inside writhing, they found Tabitha hovering at the door of the room, flapping her hands, and a trilling heart inside erratically circling the ceiling.