Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (7 page)

Tess is a sound sleeper, doesn’t wake when Annie rises and leaves the room. The stairs creak as Annie walks slowly down to the front hall, her candle flickering in the draughty night air of the house.

Eldon’s library is as she remembered from that first day. Annie shuts the door carefully once she is safely inside. The candlelight stutters along the shelves.
Cartography. Geology.
Annie slides Richard Hakluyt’s
Voyages, Trafiques, and Discoveries of the New World
from its seat on the shelf, tucks it against her chest, and goes back upstairs to her bedroom.

Sitting up in bed, reading about perilous ocean voyages, Annie is able to stop imagining her family on that road in Ireland. The words of the book cover her as comfortably as a blanket on a cold night. She can wrap herself in the warmth of them. She can rest here. The noise of the shovels and axes is replaced with the sweet drop of words falling from her mind into the empty chamber of her heart.

At breakfast the next morning, when Tess and Annie are hurrying through their cups of tea at the table, Cook suddenly bursts through the kitchen door with a kettle of water in either hand. “Would this do?” she says.

Tess looks up, looks down again. “Why is that interesting?” she says.

“It’s my work.”

“One chore, out of all the work you do. Is that how you want to be? Forever?” Tess looks over at Annie. “Am I right?” she says.

Annie has no idea what is happening, why Cook has turned into a water-bearing statue on the kitchen stoop, why Tess’s opinion is required on this. Mad, she thinks. They’re all mad here. Every last one of them.

“Annie!”

Annie looks back, stops hurrying along the path to the glasshouse, and waits for Tess to catch her up.

“Where are you going?” Tess is puffing, bends forward to catch her breath. Her face, when she looks up, is red from being in the laundry all morning and from sprinting up the path after Annie.

“Mrs. Dashell wants me to model for her again today.”

“You haven’t stripped the beds.” Tess stands up straight.

“I know.”

“I’m supposed to wash those sheets today. Now.”

“I’ll do it when I get back.” Annie glances down the path to the glasshouse. She doesn’t want to keep Isabelle waiting. “Just leave them.”

“I can’t do that.” Tess works to a strict schedule. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are for washing and rinsing. Thursdays and Fridays are for mangling, starching, and ironing. She washes linen on Mondays, muslin, coloured cottons, and woollens on Tuesdays, bed sheets and kitchen cloths on Wednesdays. Today is Wednesday. If something isn’t washed on the correct day, it changes the entire week’s schedule and throws the household management into confusion. “I’ll have to do it myself, then,” she says, waiting for Annie to change her mind. Annie says nothing. “Well, then,” says Tess. “I’ll do it myself, but I’m none too happy about it.” She turns and stomps back down the path towards the house. Annie watches her go, feeling regretful. Tess has enough work of her own to do without taking on extra. They have been getting along so well together, too. Annie enjoys the companionship at night in their attic room, how they talk to each other when the lamps are blown out, lying in their beds, calling softly across the dark. Stories of Mrs. Gilbey’s meanness, of Tess’s family struggles in the north of England.

Annie resumes her journey to the glasshouse. She needs to speak to the Lady about how she is to do her duties and do this modelling, too. Annie has only been here a few weeks. She cannot let Tess do work for her again. It is not fair.

But when Annie gets to the glasshouse, there is no talking to Isabelle about her maid-work. Isabelle is fussing around, all quick and cranky.

“What took you so long?” she says, when Annie hurries into the studio. “I sent for you ages ago. We’re losing the good light. Here.” She shoves a wooden box into Annie’s arms. “Carry this. And follow me.” She has folded up the legs of the box camera, clasps the length of it to her bosom, and pushes through the door of the glasshouse, out into the afternoon sun.

Annie struggles to catch up as Isabelle strides through the orchard. “Where are we going?”

“To drown you,” says Isabelle. She doesn’t sound as though she’s joking and Annie has to tell herself that it can’t really be the truth. Maids are useful. They aren’t just casually disposed of by murder. Still, she has never found out what had happened to the last housemaid, the one whose place she has taken.

They walk through the orchard, across a field, and down a wooded slope. There, at the bottom of the slope, flows a small brook, pale with sunlight.

“All right,” says Isabelle. “This will do.” She lays her camera gently on the bank. “This is a good spot to drown you.” She takes the box from Annie, smiles when she sees the look on her face. “Ha! You’re frightened. You think I’m serious.”

“No, ma’am.” Annie can feel herself blush.

“You’re lying,” says Isabelle.

Annie is lying. She feels a fool. “Well,” she says defensively, “I thought that you wouldn’t. But I felt that you might.”

Isabelle laughs. “Good girl,” she says. “Now go and sit on those rocks over there and look distraught.”

Annie obediently squats on a narrow shelf of stone by the water’s edge. She squints up at the sun, watches Isabelle arrange the camera on the bank.

“Field darkroom today,” says Isabelle, attaching a black cloth hood to the back of the camera. “Doesn’t always work, but never mind.” She fusses around in the wooden box, laying things out beside it. She hums, seems to have forgotten about telling Annie to sit on the rocks.

“Ma’am,” says Annie, after a while. “Is this right?”

Isabelle looks over. “No,” she says cheerfully. “All wrong. Just a moment and I’ll be right there.” She pushes at her camera to make sure that the legs have embedded properly into the ground of the bank and that it’s stable. “Good,” she says, and stepping carefully over the paraphernalia she has laid out on the bank, makes her way to Annie. “Loosen your collar.” Annie tentatively undoes a few buttons at her neck and Isabelle impatiently reaches down and undoes a few more. She pulls one side of Annie’s dress away from her neck. “I need this line,” she says, and touches Annie’s collarbone.

Even though Mrs. Dashell’s touch is brazen and careless, Annie shivers at it. She has not been touched by anyone in so long that she is startled by the feeling of Isabelle’s fingers trolling her collarbone. Isabelle doesn’t notice Annie’s reaction. “Those rocks are a catastrophe,” she says. “You must be lower down than that.” She scans the bank and, finding nothing to her liking, bends down and scrabbles through the dirt herself, rearranging the stones until they suit her.

Annie takes her seat on the new rocks. She is closer to the water now, can almost feel the jump and tumble of it beside her as it shoulders through the narrow streambed, rolling from hollows, dodging rocks.

“Your hair,” says Isabelle, and Annie reaches up and takes out the pins that hold it up in its neat bun. She shakes it briskly, like a dog that has just stepped out of the water. She remembers, from last time, how the Lady prefers her hair to be loose and unruly. She shakes her head again, and Isabelle absent-mindedly reaches down and touches it with her fingers. “Good,” she says.

“Who am I?” asks Annie.

Isabelle crouches down beside her. “Ophelia,” she says. “Do you know the story?”

Annie shakes her head.

Isabelle’s voice is soft. “You are Ophelia,” she says. “You’re in love with Hamlet, but he doesn’t love you back. Your father and brother have advised you poorly on this matter. Hamlet is preoccupied with his own demons. He doesn’t even notice you, certainly doesn’t guess that you love him.”

Annie can feel the warmth of the summer sun on her bare throat. The whispery voice of Isabelle beside her sounds like the wind in the tops of the trees outside of her window last night. She puts a hand out and lets the cold water of the stream spool through her open fingers. She can guess the rest of the story. “I drown myself,” she says.

“Yes. You drown yourself.”

“Am I always to be full of sorrow, ma’am?” Annie thinks back to Guinevere, to how it felt lying on the stone floor, clutching Arthur’s ankle. After that photograph, she had been shaky most of the day, as though she’d suffered a bad fright.

Isabelle looks carefully at Annie. She is clever, this housemaid, certainly more observant than any of the others. “I know,” Isabelle says. “I know what you mean. They are tragedies, but they are also the stories we have, the ones available to us. And I like to work with the stories that people know.” She says this, and at the same time as she says it, she stops believing that it is true, that it has to be true. “Just because these women are tragic,” says Isabelle, “doesn’t mean that they aren’t strong.”

“But how strong am I if I drown myself?” asks Annie. “If I drown myself at the first hint of trouble?”

“It’s more than a hint of trouble,” says Isabelle. “It’s loving someone and having them completely ignore your love.” But Isabelle feels less convinced. She thinks of the stories she is drawn to, the heroines she has portrayed in her photographs—Guinevere, Beatrice. Is she attracted to these stories partially because she has seen them depicted so many times by male artists, by people like Robert Hill? Maybe, as a woman, she should resist these stories, not embrace them?

“Ophelia,” says Annie.

“Ophelia,” says Isabelle, standing up. She no longer wants Ophelia to drown. She wants her to not care a whit about Hamlet, not bother about his love. Why does she need to drown herself anyway? Why can’t she just love someone more appropriate?

The sun has made runnels of light on the water, coming down from the green boughs above. There is a patch of light at Annie’s throat, like a word lying on her skin. The delicate line of collarbone looks as frail and solid as a bird’s wing.

“What do you want me to do?” asks Annie.

“Ophelia,” says Isabelle again. “Maybe you’re not going to drown yourself.”

“But what about the spurned love?”

“Well, maybe this time you’re just going to think about drowning yourself over Hamlet. Consider it.” Isabelle moves back to her camera, back to get perspective on Annie and the stream. “Besides, this stream isn’t really deep enough to drown in. You would have to make a tremendous effort to die here. I think we’ll just offer it up as a possibility.” Isabelle plucks a wild orchid from the stream bank, tucks it into the turned-down collar of Annie’s dress. The flower droops towards Annie’s throat. Something young and natural, considering defeat. “Put your hand in the water again.”

Annie trails her hand in the stream, playing scales of watery notes with her fingers. She is glad that Isabelle has decided to let Ophelia live. Ophelia wouldn’t want to drown herself on such a fine sunny day, Annie is sure of that. No matter how much she loved Hamlet. And really, wouldn’t Ophelia have thoughts and feelings that had nothing to do with Hamlet at all? Annie tilts her head up to Isabelle. I am alive, she says to herself. She can feel the pulse of the water playing against her hand. I am alive, and I am everything.

“Perfect,” says Isabelle, from behind the camera. “Don’t move.”

*

Eldon cannot stop thinking about Annie Phelan and the story she told him that afternoon when they walked out together. Her story seems more clear to him every day that passes. He remembers the angle of the sun on the fields, the sounds in the hedgerows. How when she started talking, telling him about her brothers and parents, the outside world thinned to nothing and all he could hear was her voice, all he could see was the road she described her parents working on. A famine road. Eldon has heard various stories of the Irish plight during the famine. The famine seems recent because there are still so many Irish people living in England. A lot of them brought the hunger sickness with them. Eldon has memories of walking with his father in London twenty years ago and seeing entire families huddled against brick walls, too sick to stand or talk, their hands out for money, their eyes dark and blank. He remembers seeing an Irish woman walking the streets with a basket. She was a “pure-finder,” collecting up dog excrement to sell to the tanyards. Poor wretch, said his father. That must be the only work she is able to get.

And now, this summer, Eldon is reminded of the famine again because of the cattle plague that has descended on England. A mysterious swift-moving disease, the “rinderpest” has devastated the dairy herds. On almost every farm now there are massive graves dug for the carcasses. In Ireland, twenty years ago, Eldon knows there were similar mass graves for the victims of the famine. Often, at the side of these vast pits would be a coffin with a sliding bottom so that a body could be dropped into the pit by drawing out the bottom. The coffin could then be used again. The famine. The blight.
Blight
was such an inappropriate word for what had happened. Blight—a brief stumble into light. The right word would be heavy, drawn to earth, leeching down into darkness.

Eldon has thought about the famine a great deal. The injustice of it. The way it is still being blamed on the Irish themselves. He has thought about it, but he has never imagined it so vividly as he did when Annie told him about the famine road. All of his life he has believed in connecting things, in filling in the spaces on the map. A connecting line is a bridge that makes two worlds accessible, whether it is just the joining of two villages or the joining of two huge continents with a transatlantic telegraph cable. It is a way over, a way through, a way for people to believe in something beyond the limits of their known world.

Now Annie Phelan has drawn a line in his mind, each end of it falling away into nothingness. Her parents, the Phelans, used the last of their strength to build a road that would never carry the weight of horse and cart, never carry a man into town for supplies, a family to market. A hundred years from now that road will be invisible, will perhaps be a line in a forest where the vegetation does not grow as high as elsewhere. And to work on a road like that, surely it would make you die faster? The road would end where you ended and the road ending meant that you would die. The whole enterprise was a gesture of hopelessness.