by C F Dunn
“Lizzie…” I said, looking over to where I could just make out Ollie nosing her, making his bridle jangle. She struggled and screamed – a sound that seared my eardrums. “She’s in dreadful pain. I couldn’t help her.”
“I saw,” he said, his face grim. “I want to get Ellie sorted out and you home safe, and then I’ll look after Lizzie.” It was the way he said it, reminding me of the moments before I left Matthew and the river to look after Guy. He took a step towards me, blocking the writhing horse from view. “It’s the kindest way, my love. I can’t let her suffer any longer. Sometimes we have to do things that go against everything we believe. Sometimes we have to make that choice.”
CHAPTER
5
Of Dragons and Giants
“It’s only for a few days.” Matthew lifted Lizzie’s now redundant saddle onto the wooden saddle rack. “Ellie specifically asked to see Maggie and it makes sense for her to stay here in her old room. She’ll spend most of the time at the Stables, so I doubt you’ll see her but, if you do, remember that this is your home and she has to abide by your rules.” He used his thumbnail to scrape ingrained mud and blueberry scrub from the fine stitching. His hand rested on the glossy leather. “Anyway, she’ll probably be too preoccupied with Ellie to give you any grief,” he added without conviction. It wasn’t just Maggie’s imminent arrival bothering him; something else had kept him subdued since finding us on the mountain among the broken boulders.
“There wasn’t anything you could do for Lizzie, Matthew; she was in too much pain. Ollie’s going to miss her, though. We’re all going to miss her.” He didn’t answer. I put my hand on his shoulder and tried to see into his face. “Does it remind you of losing Arion at Ancaster Heath?” At the mention of his horse’s name, he closed his eyes, the muscles of his back tightening under my palm.
“It was the screaming – I couldn’t stand the screaming. I’d forgotten what it was like, how I’d felt when Arion was shot from under me. I just wanted it to stop. I didn’t think it would affect me after all this time. Ridiculous, isn’t it? You’d have thought I would have become inured to such things by now. Obviously, I haven’t.”
“It’s what makes us human. Lose our ability to empathize and we risk becoming so much less. I think we die a little when we forget to feel.”
“I had to suspend that part of me in battle or I couldn’t have faced it.”
I recalled the moments before Matthew stopped me from killing Guy with his sword, anger expanding inside me until it cornered compassion. “Yes, I understand that now. I don’t think I’ll ever view war in the same way again. Talking of which,” I gave a brief shrug, “I’ll do my best to be patient if I see Maggie.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. We could do without Maggie’s vinegar at the moment.”
I managed a civil greeting when Maggie arrived, but avoided her thereafter.
Instead of turning right at the top of the stairs to go to our bedroom, I turned left and found myself outside her door. I had never seen inside the room she kept for her infrequent visits and the shut door felt like a bit of a snub. I sucked my cheeks. Perhaps the room needed airing. Or dusting. This was my house, after all, and I had the right – the responsibility – to know every corner of it. I took hold of the round brass handle and twisted. It was locked. From the direction of the kitchen I heard a door bang and then voices, and I scooted along the landing and into my bedroom before Maggie began climbing the stairs.
“I wondered where you’d got to,” Matthew said when he came to find me some time later. “Are you feeling nauseous again?”
I waved vaguely at the laptop on my knees. “I thought I’d get some work done, but I was distracted by the view and then must have dropped off. This chair’s very comfortable.” From the bedroom window, full autumn colours lay in pools of copses or ran in ribbons along the river edge. Closer still, the orchard rusted.
His lips curled into a smile. “And there was I thinking you might be hiding from Maggie.”
I pulled an innocent face. “No, no, of course not.”
“I’ve some work I want to finish at the med lab this afternoon and I thought you might like some lunch before I go. Maggie’s gone to see Ellie, by the way,” he said, smiling sideways at me. “She’s likely to be there all afternoon.”
“In that case,” I rose, stretching carefully, “I do feel a bit peckish.”
Lunch helped settle the nagging nausea. I padded back upstairs to fetch my laptop and the little Italian treatise Matthew had transcribed for me last year when I was recovering from flu. Heading towards the stairs, something caught my eye: a shadow down the edge of Maggie’s bedroom door where there hadn’t been one before. The door was slightly ajar. I reached out to close it, but instead knocked. No answer. I checked over the banister, listened for any sounds and, curiosity singing, pushed the door open far enough for me to slip inside.
I’m not sure what I expected to find, but given Maggie’s regimented attitude to her work and her immaculate grooming to the point of obsession, it wasn’t this. A single bed lay pushed against the far wall as if irrelevant, and in the centre of the room, piled high with folders and skinned in dust, a table and chair. Document boxes stacked to one side looked abandoned as if a job once started had been left unfinished. Spanning the mantle shelf were framed photos of her family, and above them – on the wall over the fireplace – were scattered a dozen or so pictures of… cats. Curiosity overcame guilt. Tiptoeing, I examined the photographs, a secret history, a snapshot of Maggie’s world. Among the portraits of Ellen I would have expected to see were those of her father in his youth, of Dan and his family, several of Ellie and two of Maggie as a tot and another, older girl – Little Ellen? She looked about eight years old, vibrant and alive. Maggie trotted along beside her, holding a child’s bucket and spade and laughing. It must have been about two years before the crash that took Little Ellen’s life and shattered the family, rendering Maggie an emotional orphan. Their mother, Monica, present only as an aside – stirrup trousers moulding to long legs, carmine-lipped, silk headscarf over curls, dark glasses mirroring the sky – she looked away from the camera at something distant and unseen. Apart from Dan and his children, there were no other recent photographs, and Maggie’s life appeared to have stopped nearly fifty years ago, terminated along with her sister. Next to the picture of a smiling Ellen with the two young girls was a single votive candle in a clear glass holder in the shape of a cat, and a box of matches. It made me uneasy, intruding like this on an unspent grief.
As I made to leave, my eye fell on the manila folders on the table: hospital records – dozens of them. What were they doing here? Didn’t data protection apply? Anyone might walk in and see them. I lifted the corner of a folder: medications, psychological assessment, somebody’s history. History. That was it. Giving in to curiosity and putting my laptop and book down beside me, I sifted through the documents on the table, then bent and removed the lid of a box and frowned at the chaos. Folders had been dumped in no particular order, corners scuffed, pages unfiled. I couldn’t help it. I checked a loose page, found its folder and popped it inside. Then another. Halfway through the first box, I stopped short. Staahl. Kort. It took a moment to register and another to quell the urge to throw up at the sight of his name. Breathing carefully, I removed the thick file, and sat cross-legged on the floor. I had that feeling, like standing on the clifftop, knowing it’s dangerous, yet compelled to lean forwards and peer over the edge. I counted to three and opened the folder and was immediately confronted by Staahl’s grey gaze. I gagged, controlled myself, and turned the page. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but to see my name in the profile notes felt like an act of aggression, making me complicit in this man’s insanity. I baulked, disassociated myself from the text, and read on.
Over the course of several months, Maggie had peeled Staahl’s psyche like an onion, removing layers of madness until she found the core of the man. He’d been born in the west of Ho
lland near Leiden, just over a decade after the end of the Second World War, the fourth and last child of a former professor at the university. Staahl had been the youngest by eight years, but other than the age of his parents at his birth – his mother had been nearing forty – nothing of remark stood out about his childhood other than a bout of truancy in his early teens.
“Tell me about running away,” Maggie had asked. “Did you think about how your parents would miss you? Worry about where you were?”
“Why would they do that?” Staahl had responded, according to the annotated transcripts.
“What about friends?”
“Other children bored me. I preferred my own company.”
“Would you describe yourself as a lonely child?”
He had thought about this for some time before answering. “I wouldn’t say so. My oldest brother found a young rabbit. It had been caught by a cat and he gave it to me.”
“Did you have a good relationship with your brothers?”
He had seemed surprised by her question. “My brothers?” He shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Are you in contact with them now?”
His lip had curled. “Ernst and Johann send me Christmas cards. Peta died of tuberculosis some time ago.”
“And do you miss him?”
“Should I?”
Bit by bit she picked away until she revealed the foundations of his childhood. When Leiden University was shut by the Germans in the winter of 1940 after the rectorial address protesting the exclusion of Jewish professors and the ensuing student protest, his father had found work with the German regime, identifying Jewish families and arranging for their arrest and deportation.
“And how do you feel about your father’s involvement with the round-up of Jews?” Maggie asked him.
“It was the best position he could get at the time and it was better than starving. My oldest brother was about two then, with another on the way. They were always hungry, they said. There were Jews everywhere; they had to be controlled.”
Maggie had recorded his lack of expression, of remorse. “Tell me about your mother.”
“So that you can tell me she is the source of my problems?”
“Is she? What happened to her?”
He hadn’t answered, but instead went on to explain that she had been a linguist and taught English and translated documents, but that she had stopped when she married.
“Did she resent giving up her career?”
Apparently he had shrugged. “She used to read Beowulf to me as a child,” he sidestepped. “She liked to read stories of dragons and giants, of maidens in distress.” I could imagine him lavishing stress on the final syllable. Maggie had underlined the word and then circled it twice.
“When did your father first start hurting her?”
Staahl didn’t seem surprised she knew, or perhaps he assumed it was normal in most families; whatever the case, she had asterisked his reply.
“I used to go to sleep listening to her crying and I knew I wasn’t alone. That’s very comforting when you’re young, Dr Lynes, to know your parents are nearby. Were your parents there for you when you were growing up?”
Maggie ignored his attempt to draw her in, and instead asked, “Did she stay to protect you, or because she was too frightened to leave?”
“Neither. She stayed because she wanted to. She was always so grateful to him; she loved him. Were you loved as a child, Dr Lynes?”
“What happened to your mother, Kort?”
I imagined Staahl’s blank eyes focused on Maggie’s face as she recorded his responses in tiny script, and he described his mother withdrawing from the world bit by bit until she had slipped into the river one night and disappeared altogether. “She always liked the Koornbrug bridge; she said the water was like music.” He had laughed. “Did you know the canals are full of rats, Dr Lynes? During bad winters they would come into the streets foraging for food. I would go with my father to kill rats. We would kill dozens. Dozens. They had to be controlled.” Like Jews. He made no differentiation. Wind whistled in the chimney making my skin crawl. How could he have managed to go masked for so long without detection?
I read Maggie’s next question. “How did you feel when your mother killed herself?”
“It was a nuisance at first, but then we had a woman cook and clean and another who took in the laundry. The cook made a better filsoof than my mother. Do you know what that is, doctor? Philosopher’s stew – made of whatever was left over. I liked her stews.”
I skipped pages detailing a series of failed relationships and his more recent past, until I came to a page that stopped me cold.
“Why did your father not return to Leiden University after the war?”
“They wouldn’t take him back because of his war record, the hypocrites.”
“Why do you call them hypocrites?”
“Because they wanted to do what he did but were too afraid. It takes guts to follow your instincts. People conform out of fear. They fear judgment.”
“Judgment? Whose judgment?”
A slim smile. “God’s. People’s. Their own.”
“Does God judge you?”
“What is God but the manifestation of people’s guilt? They assuage their desire to hurt others all in God’s name, but it is in the nature of Man to inflict and receive suffering because only then are they truly free.”
“Free of what?”
I imagined the flash of temper. “Haven’t you been listening? Guilt. Haven’t you understood? Guilt shackles us to the earth. Don’t you feel the weight of it, doctor? Wouldn’t you want to be free of it if you could?”
“And the people on whom you inflict pain…”
“Inflict pain? I didn’t say I inflict pain. I share pain. I grant the beauty of suffering.”
“As you did to Emma D’Eresby?”
At this point Maggie recorded he closed his eyes and exhaled slowly through his teeth ending with, “Mmm, Emma… She understands the darkness. She wants to be free – you can see it – so much uncertainty, so much guilt.”
“So, you were helping her when you shared the pain?”
“Helping her?” He blinked. “Yes, of course; she wanted me to help her. Only I understand what she needs to be free.”
Maggie had resumed the interviews in December around the time Matthew must have received my note telling him I knew who he was, and just before he went to England to find me. I detected a change in her questions, and they became pointed and, I would have said, leading.
“Tell me about your relationship with Dr D’Eresby.”
He did – at length. In infinitesimal detail he told her about the times we met, what I’d said, how I’d looked, how I had responded – his perverted understanding so warped that I didn’t recognize myself in the woman he described as being infatuated with him. At last he came to the night of the All Saints’ dinner, describing the lilac note he thought I had left for him, the steps he took to ensure we could be alone, the preparations he made to act out the fantasy he believed I shared, and Matthew’s untimely intervention that prevented him from setting me free.
Unable to read on, I closed the folder with shaking hands and waited until the wave of sickness passed and my heart beat normally again. On the cover was a scrawled comment: Patient 105. Preston Falls. ME. I replaced the folder where I had found it. As I straightened, I nudged a slim folder with my elbow and it slid to the floor, spilling papers. I bent over to pick it up and put it back on the table face-up: E. D’Eresby. My name shouted from the cover. I always suspected she had compiled a mental dossier on me, but I hadn’t expected it to exist in reality. A ribbon of anger coiled from me. I scanned the pages in mounting fury, thumped the folder back on the table, snatched up my laptop, and stomped out of the room uttering oaths under my breath.
* * *
“Why didn’t you take it?” Matthew asked when later that evening I told him what I had found, still fuming and not in the least bi
t repentant now about snooping in Maggie’s room. “She shouldn’t have done that. It’s unethical and disloyal.”
“Not in her eyes. She was protecting you and the family from a gold-digging harlot. Oh, and a deviant one at that. Did you know that she believed every word Staahl ever said about me?”
From the expression on his face, he did. “She might have mentioned it.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me if she left that door unlocked on purpose.” Which didn’t exactly excuse my intrusion on her privacy. I hunched my shoulders. “Well, I’m not going to let it lie.”
I didn’t need to. The following morning as I finished breakfast, the kitchen door swung open.
“I think this belongs to you,” Maggie said without preamble or pretence at niceties, and she deposited the little Italian treatise on the table by my hand. I sucked my teeth, equally annoyed she had managed to intercept my own planned ambush and at leaving such incriminating evidence in her room. This could go one of two ways.
Opening the book, I turned to the title page. “Good morning, Maggie. Thank you. I wondered where I had left it. How was Ellie yesterday?”
“As if you care what happens to her – to any of us. You were in my room…”
“Yes, I was – evidently. You really shouldn’t keep patients’ files unsecured; anybody might walk in and find them.” I rose and took my plate to the sink. “By the way, I’d appreciate it if you would give me the file you compiled on me. Your notes are incautious – anyone reading them would be surprised to read that I ‘relentlessly pursue the undead’, which is a horrid way to describe Matthew’s current state, if I might say so, and your assertions that I enjoyed being mutilated by Staahl are patently untrue. I don’t want your incoherent suspicions falling into the wrong hands and damaging the family. I’ll burn the file. Do you want me to come upstairs with you now while you fetch it, or would you rather give it to Matthew when he gets home?” I met her eyes without flinching.