The Painted Bridge (17 page)

Anna had agreed to Makepeace’s demand that she find something to occupy her hands. A handkerchief-size square of cambric lay on her lap alongside a limp cotton bag of silks. Makepeace had instructed her to embroider a letter
V
on the squeaking, starched piece of fabric. Anna had made the first tentative stitches but the line refused to take shape. She dragged the needle off its thread and began to unpick a line of puckered chain stitch.

“Miss Batt?”

“I am listening, Mrs. Palmer.”

“Will you call me Anna?”

“I would rather not.”

“Why?”

“Habit. My family always took comfort in formality. It does not preclude close acquaintance.”

“It’s just that I don’t feel like a Mrs. Palmer. I never have.”

She was sitting between Talitha Batt and the fire, driven off the window seat by the draft. It was over a fortnight since the cold shower and six days since Lucas St. Clair took her picture. She barely knew how, but she’d somehow begun talking often and easily to Batt. What she’d told Dr. St. Clair, that she hadn’t laughed since she got here, was no longer true.

Miss Batt was thirty-six years old. She had been in Lake House three years and eleven months. The only thing Anna hadn’t discovered was why. She hadn’t liked to ask and Miss Batt had not volunteered the information—or asked Anna what had brought her here.

“May I ask you a personal question?” Anna said.

Batt pursed her mulberry lips. “If you must.”

Anna hesitated and substituted another inquiry. “Do you see madness in my face?”

She turned to Batt as if braced for a photograph, eyes wide and unblinking. Miss Batt looked back at her with cool gray eyes and smiled.

“We can all look at times as if we’re losing our wits,” she said. “It helps not to be idle, although I have observed that you have no aptitude for handwork. Do you enjoy sketching?”

Anna shook her head.

“What do you like to do?”

“Almost anything apart from sketching and sewing, Miss Batt. I’m not much of a pianist either. What I really love is dancing.”

“Not much of that goes on here, unfortunately.”

Batt selected a golden silk from the tangle of colors and drew out a length of it. A long-trumpeted orange lily was taking shape beneath her fingers in a succession of neat, slanting stitches.

Anna looked up at the ceiling and examined the deep, molded frieze that ran around its edge. The plasterwork was discolored, blackened with smoke and chipped, with some of its cherubs missing toes or noses. She brought her eyes back down into the room. She had to know.

“If you don’t mind my inquiring, Miss Batt, what is the nature of your affliction?”

Batt was tying the end of the silk in a double knot, using the tip of her needle to tighten one on top of the other. She pulled the thread taut with both hands.

“That is a question one does not ask in Lake House, Mrs. Palmer.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that I can’t see anything the matter with you.” Anna looked at Miss Batt’s white, powdered face and the exaggerated, drawn-in features. “Not really.”

“I suppose I should be glad of that.”

Batt’s voice was vexed. Anna rethreaded her own needle and began again on the cambric, in a different corner. She felt reproached. She ought to have stuck to her original impulse and not said anything. She
jabbed the point through the resistant weave and gasped as it pierced her thumb. The blood when it came was profuse, disproportionate to the wound. Anna sucked it, tasting it on the tip of her tongue, and looked up to find Batt watching her again.

“I committed a mortal sin, Mrs. Palmer. My family convinced themselves that I must be ill. They didn’t believe that in my right mind I could do what I did.”

“I see.”

Had Batt killed? Was she a murderess? A flurry of sleet splattered against the window like a handful of thrown gravel and Anna’s skin crawled under her clothes. She couldn’t suppress the shudder that ran through her. Miss Batt laughed.

“I fell in love.”

“That’s hardly a crime.” Anna could hear the relief in her own voice. “Wasn’t it possible to marry?”

“No.”

“But why? If you loved each other so? Couldn’t your family have accepted your choice?”

“No. And nor could his. You see, Mrs. Palmer, my lover was not a Christian. There was no possibility on either side of our marrying. I lived with him for a year without the shelter of the law or the consent of a single human being other than myself. We lived in mutual happiness until the day my family came and took me away from him, using the methods they thought necessary.”

Batt’s hand was shaking. Anna felt herself turning scarlet and for a minute neither spoke.

“I’m so sorry if I intruded, Miss Batt. I haven’t … I didn’t … the truth is that I haven’t known love. Only marriage.”

“You’re not alone in that, Mrs. Palmer. My observation is that few women experience both.”

“Do you regret it? Living with him?”

Batt studied the world that had come into bloom under her fingers. The pattern of vivid, exuberant flowers and diaphanous insects in jewel-like colors—gold and fuchsia and sapphire and purple and behind it all a bright, cooling green the color of fresh limes.

“For that one year, I was alive, Mrs. Palmer. I was alive in my heart
and soul, in my body, too, as I never had been before and never expect to be again. I cannot regret it.”

*   *   *

Anna smoothed the material on her own knees and stared at its virginal blankness. Miss Batt had loved. She had known passion and given herself to it, regardless of the price she would pay. Anna knew as little about love as she’d known before she was married.

She and Vincent hadn’t touched before the wedding. There had been the opportunity; Vincent had stayed at the flint house overnight when he came to meet her mother, had slept in Lavinia’s old room. Anna had always been curious about the sexual act. They didn’t know men, in their house, but there were sometimes sailors who wandered along the bay, stopped to smoke and watch as they played on the shore. One had taken out his penis, long and blue-looking in his hand. Anna had been grinding chalk to make milk, rubbing together two smooth-edged stones, sitting on the ground with her pail between her knees. She looked up and saw the member bob upward clumsily as if it floated in the air.

She overturned the milk on the pebbles, watched for an instant as it spilled and dissipated, then she scrambled back up the path, the path that adults never took. Next day, she came back with Lou. Her pail was still there, lying on its side. Nothing had changed.

She had waited for Vincent’s advance, expecting him to attempt to step over the bounds of propriety, as Louisa said all men did. She would have let him. She was impatient to explore the mystery. And she needed a way to know this man, who in conversation revealed little of himself, preferring to quote from the Bible rather than from his own mind and heart. Anna waited for him, listening to the creaks and sighs of the timbers, the night barking of the dogs beyond her window. He didn’t come.

It was because he was a clergyman, she told herself in the morning. A good man, better than other men. She sat opposite him at the old drop-leaf table in the dining room of the flint house and watched him chew his way through a pile of toast. It was burned, had arrived at the table scraped and the air smelled of carbon. Anna thanked God, while he said the longest grace she’d ever heard, that he was unaware of her impure thoughts.

It would be different once they were married. The physical act would make them intimate, Louisa said, with a little smile. But it had not. The first night, in the Vicarage, Vincent undressed as if he was alone, taking time to hang his trousers on a wooden hanger, lining up the hems, putting in his shoe trees while she lay in the bed watching him.

He got between the sheets and turned to her purposefully as if she was a job that needed doing. Pulled up her nightdress, explored between her legs with one impatient hand and pushed himself into her without a word, his face over her shoulder, while she bit on a hank of her hair with the effort of not crying out. He had finished with a prolonged, internal groan and rolled off her.

Anna lay in the dark, waiting for him to say something. She felt proud. It had been achieved, after all. The great mystery had been accomplished and she had been present. For some reason, she felt like laughing. But he hadn’t said anything at all.

Over the weeks that followed, she wondered whether she might have understood it all better with a man closer to her own age. She found Vincent physically—well, not quite repulsive, but somehow she didn’t much like the smell of him. The feel of his skin, always slightly chilly, almost damp, against hers. The whiff of frankincense that reminded her of church.

She didn’t love Vincent, she understood, sitting on the wobbly bentwood chair in the dayroom watching Miss Batt’s flying, fluent needle. She didn’t want him. She never had.

*   *   *

Anna felt someone watching and looked up to see Makepeace surveying her and Batt from the other end of the room. Makepeace’s face was set and her arms hung rigidly by her sides. The woman didn’t like the developing friendship between Anna and Miss Batt. Preferred to claim Talitha Batt as her own friend, when she could. And Miss Batt obliged, had a kind word for everybody.

Anna shivered, rubbed her own arms and breathed in the smell of fish rising from the kitchen. She was feeling more than usually restless. They couldn’t walk in the grounds, because of the rain, and the air in the room was close. She lowered her voice.

“Did you ever consider escape from here, Miss Batt?”

Batt gave a laugh that was over as soon as it began.

“Of course. I thought of nothing else for a long time.”

“What happened? Did you ever try?”

“There is no escape. Not in the way you’re thinking. Not through scaling walls and so on.”

Her voice was subdued; Anna had to strain to hear her over the squawking of Violet’s bird and the maid banging around the skirting boards with a dustpan.

“What other way is there?”

Batt didn’t answer.

“I believe this place is enough to drive one mad,” Anna said, leaning toward the fire, lifting her skirts to warm her ankles. “Sometimes, I think it would be better not to live at all than to live where there is no life. Death must surely be better than this hell.”

Batt looked her fiercely in the eye. “Our life on this earth is given to us by a greater power, Mrs. Palmer. Ending it is not to be contemplated. Not ever.”

“You are right. Until we can get out we must find a way to escape inside Lake House. Within ourselves.”

Anna dropped the handkerchief on the floor and stood up. She kicked the slippers off her feet and conjured in her head the opening notes of a polka, a rough country polka played on fiddles as the Gypsy players did at the Christmas fairs in Dover. She bowed to an imaginary partner and began, slowly at first, skipping forward and retreating again, turning in circles, raising her hand for twirling. The music in her head picked up speed and so did she, moving along the length of the frayed rugs, spinning in circles as she engraved a larger pattern over the whole room, her stockinged feet moving fast, her skirts swinging out around her. The music filled her head—the lilting, turning rhythm of the polka that promised life’s continuance through good times and bad, that expressed its endless, unstoppable movement.

She danced until she could stay upright no more and came back to the chair, laughing, collapsed down onto it with her chest heaving and her limbs loose, eyes shining. Miss Batt and Violet Valentine clapped
their hands; Miss Todd and Miss Little stared at her. Makepeace turned on her heel and left the room, banging the door behind her.

Anna picked up her workbag. She wouldn’t surrender. She and her sisters had been brought up to be as bold and strong as boys. Taught by their father when his ship was in to swear and spit and whistle. To endure. Survive anything that came. She licked the end of her thread, inserted the fine tail into the eye of the needle and dragged the length of silk through the cloth. She would get outside the walls of Lake House. Free herself. If her own sister wouldn’t help her, Dr. St. Clair would. She was sure of it.

Lucas St. Clair stood by the mantelpiece in the dining room, looking at the photographs on the wall. He had on the same worn coat as on the first time she’d seen him and carried a portfolio under his arm. Anna sensed life in the air that surrounded him, felt it hanging on him like a strong, enticing scent. He looked as out of place in the utilitarian room as a banquet would have looked on the old oilcloth.

“Hello, Doctor.”

He turned and smiled at her.

“Hello.”

He put down the portfolio and they both looked at it. Anna felt dizzy, to think that the means of escape might be right there in front of her, lying flat and contained as a rail ticket, tied up by the buff-colored tapes. She held on to the back of a chair.

“How are you, Mrs. Palmer?”

“I’m perfectly well, Doctor. Except for being here, of course. How are you?”

“Me? Oh, I’m all right, thank you. Overworked and underpaid.”