The Crimson Bed (45 page)

    Ellie felt the tears rise to her eyes again. 'It was, darling, it was.'

    'Mr Winstone
was
special,' said Mary. Her own eyes filled with tears in sympathy. 'I always liked him so much. He was fun with us children and spoke to us as if we were grown up and interesting. He made us laugh and drew little pictures of Charlie and me. I shall always keep them.'

    Later, they all sat in the parlour while the landlady brought them tea and cakes. The funeral had been a quiet affair.

    Mary was now a very tall and elegant lady of twenty-six, her hair dark auburn and eyes hazel-green like her mother's. She had married John Matheson about five years ago. John was a friend of her father's, a highly respected and wealthy art dealer in his own right. They had set up house in Belgravia and kept a beautiful country home in Gloucestershire, which always reminded Ellie of Oreton Hall. When she was there, Ellie always kept to the house and gardens and refused to walk in the woods or near the river. To do so was to invite the ghosts of Alfie and Dillie to come to her, ghosts never far away from her dreams and always quivering on the edge of her consciousness.

    It was being aware of her own ghosts that helped Ellie to understand Henry when he assured her that he felt Tippy's ghostly presence. She knew too that he had sometimes attended séances and that he had sworn to see Tippy's ghost by his bed at night while he lay sleepless in the dark. Then he would rise and pace about the house or go for long walks in the night by the river.

    Tippy had been no saint but death casts a cloak over memory and in Henry's eyes she was now sanctified just like Beatrice Portinari was to Dante and Lizzie Siddal to Gabriel Rossetti. Tippy was now the Blessed Damozel leaning from Heaven and calling to her lover to join her. She would always be his spirit-bride. His last painting of her had incorporated all the love he had felt and the intuition they had both had over her imminent death in childbirth. It was almost as if he drank himself to death on purpose.

    'Death, Ellie, is but a state,' he told her some days before he died. 'I want to leave this business they call Life and find her and be united with her. I want that, Ellie! You were so right. It's Hell down here alone.'

    Now he lay in peace at last, rested far away from them all in the quiet little graveyard at Southend-on-Sea, near the sound of the crashing waves and the wailing wind. Far from all the fears, hates, loves, longings and sorrows of his short and brilliant life.

When Mary married, Ellie had said, 'You will want to have the bed now, Mary.'

    Mary had known all her life that the old four-poster bed was meant to come to her, it was almost a family joke. She had never really given it a good deal of thought but when her mother said these words, Mary's heart sank.

    'I don't want to turn you out of your own bed, Ma,' she said.

    'I said that to my own mother,' chuckled Ellie. 'We'll just have to get another bed, that's all.'

    Mary sighed. The fact was she really hated the bed. It was dark, old-fashioned and gloomy. She had always felt just a little bit afraid of it as a child and afraid of her mother in it. Her mother always seemed another person, sitting up in that bed with the glass of chocolate on a tray on her lap and a strange smile on her face.

    'Maybe Charles would like it?' she said hopefully. 'He's getting married soon.'

    Ellie looked at her daughter and sensing her reluctance, seemed hurt.

    'But Mary, you know it passes down in the female line,' she said.

    'Yes, yes, I do know,' said Mary hastily, 'but truly, there isn't room for it in our house.'

    'Nonsense, there's plenty of room in these huge old houses. It will fit in beautifully and lend grandeur to the bedroom. It is so very old, Mary, such an antique, so venerable.'

    
But I hate it,
thought Mary and felt a little crushed by the weight of her mother's eagerness and of the whole of this female ancestry that seemed to have been absorbed into the carving, the hangings, the very presence of that huge dark bed as if it was a living being. It almost made her shudder.

    'Let me ask John, Ma – he may not want it, you know.'

    'I'm sure he will,' said Ellie stubbornly. 'He loves antiques, he told me so.'

    'Leave the girl be,' said Fred who had been listening to this conversation from behind his morning paper. 'If she doesn't want the bed, then you can't force it on her, Ellie.'

    Mary threw a glance of gratitude in her father's direction and he nodded at her with an understanding smile. He had never liked the bed either.

    'Your mother has always been obsessed with that wretched bed,' he said, 'and her Templeton ancestry.'

    Ellie was hurt and baffled. How could Mary not want the wonderful four-poster bed, the one carved for her ancestral grandmother's wedding? How could she even consider the idea of it passing to strangers? She had promised Maria that strangers would never sleep on that bed.

    'I want something lighter and more modern, Ma, darling,' said Mary as if reading her thoughts. 'Don't be upset about it. It's only a bed.'

    'It's more than a bed,' said Ellie, 'it's more than a bed, Mary. But you don't understand. You modern young girls, you just don't understand. Promise me that when I die... and I suppose I shall die in that bed as my mother did, promise you will never sell it to strangers.'

    'I promise, Ma,' said Mary, 'I promise.'

Epilogue

October 1913

Mary and her brother Charles stood in the garden of their parent's home in Chelsea.

    'Ma lived to be a good old age,' said Charles reflectively. 'She outlived Dad by ten years but she was determined to stay on here and run the place till the end. Such an amazing lady, bless her! And painting her splendid pictures even at the age of eighty. The attic is absolutely full of them.'

    'She w
as
amazing, I shall miss her so much,' said Mary. 'I think she had a wonderful, peaceful life on the whole.'

    'Well, I don't know that she did. That business with Lord Dillinger must have been very nasty and unsettling.'

    'Mum said it brought her and Dad closer together. Do you know, I still remember that day so clearly; it's imprinted on my memory. I remember sitting upstairs in the old schoolroom on a stool while Mulhall read us a story...
Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight
it was... then the pistol went off. I thought someone was shooting rabbits or something, but Mulhall was all of a flutter and seemed so scared that it made me scared as well. Do you remember it, Charlie?'

    'I do. I thought it was really exciting when the policemen came making such a fuss. Then Dad suddenly arrived. I never really understood why Dillinger killed himself but Mum said it was because he was very ill anyway and didn't want to live to be an invalid and in pain.'

    'Grandma Beatrice once told me that Dillinger was Mum's lover. I was so shocked that I went straight to Mum and asked her if it was true.'

    'What on earth did she say?'

    'She was furious and said it just wasn't true. She said Grannie Bea had always hated her and was a nasty old gossip who had nearly ruined their lives with her talk. Grannie
was
a peculiar old thing, really rambling at the end, wasn't she? Fancy making up stories like that about Mum!'

    'All the same, Lord P. left us a fair bit of money,' said Charles thoughtfully, 'why would he do that?'

    'Well, Mum
was
his goddaughter and he liked her a great deal, even old Aunt Charlotte says so.'

    'Fair enough, I suppose that must be the answer. Can you remember him?'

    'A little. He was a rather frightening man, I thought. I was afraid of him as a kid; he was always so cross and stern. But I felt he was kind – and sad somehow – underneath it all.'

    'I was scared of him too! But I wonder if it
was
true? ' pursued Charles. 'True that he was Ma's lover, I mean.? Suppose we turned out to be his children?'

    Mary shrugged. 'With you looking the image of Dad? Well, we shall never know the truth of it. It's gone with them all to their graves. And frankly, Charlie, I don't much care.'

    'Nor I... as you say, better to forget such family myths.'

    'Will you set fire to it or shall I?'

    'You should.' said Charlie decisively. 'It's the f
emale
bed, isn't it? You have to be the one to destroy it once and for all.'

    'I feel bad about it, but I did promise it would never go to strangers.'

    'It's a bit like a Viking pyre isn't it, burning the person's beloved goods so they can use them in the other world.'

    'I suppose so. I feel more as if I was about to burn a martyr at the stake.'

    Mary took a box of matches and struck the flame. On top of a pile of kindling wood in the centre of the garden were the hacked and sawn up pieces of the old Templeton bed. She lit the wood beneath it which, dry and rotten, burst into an immediate blaze. In no time at all it began to roar and leap upwards with huge red and gold flames. Dark smoke began to pour into the blue sky above and to Mary's fanciful ear the old bed shrieked with anguish as its hidden, clutching ghosts were forced to depart upwards and into the ether.

    'Seems a pity in a way, it was a marvellous old bed,' said Charlie as he watched it disintegrate into the flames. 'I agree. It is a bit like burning a martyr at the stake, a horrible feeling. Almost as if that bed had been alive.'

    'I feel I've committed a murder,' admitted Mary. 'But, you know, Charlie, I also feel cleansed and lightened. I can't explain it. I couldn't have lived with that bed in my house.'

    Charlie's daughter Isabel came out of the house with her two children running out after her, shouting with excitement.

    'You should have waited for Guy Fawkes Night, Grandad,' said the little girl, laughing and dancing around the flames. 'We could have had potatoes and chestnuts and lots of fireworks!'

    'We could have made a Guy to put on top,' said the little boy. 'He'd have burnt up
so
fast. Isn't it a splendid fire!'

    Charlie laughed.

    'We couldn't wait till Bonfire Night, Timothy,' he said, ruffling the little lad's fair hair, 'we have to clear Grannie's house out, you know. Other people are coming to live here.'

    Mary smiled but said nothing. The charred pieces of the bed fell now into the hot, molten mass below it and she felt a momentary pang of regret at its demise. She stood there for a long time and watched as the fire soared upwards, roaring, crackling, wrathful, leaping in a whirlwind of tempestuous flames.

    In the morning, the little girl, Lucy, poking curiously amongst the remains of the fire, found a piece almost untouched. She picked it up, blew away the ash and looked at it with delight. The figure of a gallant lover was still discernible, smiling and bowing even though his ladylove was now no more than a heap of charred wood.

THE END

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Sick Rose
from William Blake's
Songs of Experience
:
Blake's

Songs of Innocence and Experience
by Joseph H. Wicksteed,

M.A published by J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1928

The Lady of Shallott
by Alfred Lord Tennyson: T
he Works of

Alfred Tennyson Poet Laureate
. Published by Kegan Paul Trench

and Co., 1883

Isabella and the Pot of Basil by
John Keats: K
eats Collected

Works
,1884

Charge of the Light Brigade
by Alfred Lord Tennyson:
The

Collected Poems of Tennyson
publ. Wordsworth Editions Ltd.,

1994 edn.

Death in Love: Jenny: The Sea Limits -
from T
he Poems of Dante

Gabriel Rossetti
published by Ellis, London, 1907

The Blessed Damsel
: this version of the famous poem was written

when Gabriel Rossetti was about 18-19 years old and he later

wrote to say that it had not been altered greatly since then. This

version would be the one that Henry Winstone would have heard

Gabriel recite in 1853. It was later altered to T
he Blessed

Damozel
. Apparently the poem was inspired by the character of

Lenore in Edgar Allen Poe's T
he Raven.
I am indebted for this

information to Jan Marsh from her book
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Painter and Poet
p 23 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson London, 1999)

Turn away thy false dark eyes
by Elizabeth Siddal quoted from Jan

Marsh's
Dante Gabriel Rossetti Painter and Poet
p.190

Sudden Light
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti from
A Victorian

Anthology 1837-1895
edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman.

Cambridge Riverside Press 1895

In an Artist's studio
by Christina Rossetti from
The Poetical Works of

Christina Georgina Rossetti. With Memoir and Notes &c
, Ed.

William Michael Rossetti (London; New York: Macmillan ,

1904

Many thanks to Paul Newman, Jane Conway Gordon, and Patricia

O'Connor (president of the Pre-Raphaelite Society) for reading my

first drafts and their invaluable advice. Thanks also to my dear

friends M Jean Pike and Mary Cade for reading and enjoying and