The Painted Bridge (26 page)

*   *   *

Lucas stood and ran the tap at the sink, rinsing his arms up to the elbows. The talk to the Alienists’ Association was a month away, he must begin on a rough draft of the presentation. But tonight, he would put St. Mark’s out of his mind and prepare for his next visit to Lake House. He had been thinking about the girl from Regent Street, how she was in the picture and not in the picture. Shown and not shown. It was the complaint Mrs. Palmer had made—that she didn’t recognize herself. He had pointed the camera at her competently enough but what did that mean, if she did not find herself in the image?

He picked the first image he’d made of her out of the wooden plate holder, intending to score his nail through it in a cross, peel up the collodion in four neat triangles. Holding the sheet of glass in both hands, looking at Mrs. Palmer’s black face, her long, white hair falling over her shoulders down to her narrow waist, he experienced a curious sensation that he held a person between his fingertips. That it was important not to injure her. A longing came over him to see Mrs. Palmer again.

Lucas settled the plate back in the rack and set about mixing a solution of fresh collodion. Measuring out ammonium iodide, he mixed it with distilled water and watched it clump and cake in the bottom of the beaker. He liked the delicate tones of a solution higher in bromides. He added half the quantity of cadmium bromide, stirred it in with a glass rod, and held the container over a spirit lamp, keeping back from the rising fumes. Opening the collodion bottle, he trickled in the salts through a funnel. The mixture fizzed and subsided, turned cloudy inside the brown glass. He agitated the bottle and set it back on the shelf.

He had decided to alter his approach—to experiment with larger images, from close up. It would enable him to see patients more clearly and read more accurately what was exhibited on their faces. It might, he hoped, answer the question of how a person could be captured by a camera at the same time as they escaped it.

Lucas returned to his stool and drained his whisky. He sat nursing the empty glass until the church clock beyond his window chimed one. Timekeeping was the only use he had for the church; he did not resent its insistent message of the passing of the hours. He rose and left the room to prepare for bed. He would go to Lake House in the morning and request to photograph Mrs. Palmer again. He could see in every detail the picture he would make of her.

*   *   *

It took time to rope the carrying cases onto the seat of the cab, the stoppered bottles chinking against one another inside. The driver tried to insist that he strap the plate box on the luggage rack and looked disapproving when Lucas informed him that the box was of the greatest importance, that he would rather if necessary get rained on himself. The man thought he was a drunk, it occurred to him, as they lurched past the Angel and began the long ascent of the Hollow Way. He thought he carried his gin supply with him. He laughed and rested his head back on the worn leather. It was the first opportunity he’d had since Christmas to return to Lake House and he was impatient to arrive.

*   *   *

The maid’s face fell as she pulled open the great front door. She looked past him as if she expected someone else then met his eyes with an agitated expression.

“It’s not my place to ask I know, but is there any news, sir?”

“Nothing in particular. I’ve come for Mr. Abse.”

Lucas smiled at her, passed through the dim hallway into the study to wait for Abse. He walked up and down the room, underneath the ledgers and leather-bound books on the shelves, threading a path between the curios that Abse seemed to be collecting, almost falling over a bowlegged ladder. A woman was wailing somewhere in the house.

When the door at the far end of the room opened it wasn’t Abse but Makepeace who appeared. She had an air of triumph about her as she sailed toward him with one hand clutched over a ring of keys hanging from the device she always wore at her waist. It was a chatelaine. His grandmother used to have one and he’d always found it ominous. He disliked things being locked.

“Morning, Makepeace. Tell Mr. Abse I am here, would you?”

“Mr. Abse is engaged with a family matter, Dr. St. Clair.”

He felt cheered by the prospect of avoiding an encounter with Abse. The fellow used up daylight with his ponderous conversation.

“No need to trouble him, in that case. I shall set up in the Fernery. I intend to photograph Mrs. Palmer first.”

“You’re too late.”

He looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

“It is certainly not too late, Makepeace.”

She smirked. “I think you will find that it is, sir. Mrs. Palmer has absconded.”

Lucas felt as if he had walked into a lamppost.

“She can’t have.”

“I’d say the same myself but she has. She’s gone, no one knows where, and she’s taken the daughter of the house with her.”

If she wasn’t there, he couldn’t photograph her. He could not absorb
it. He had thought so much about the picture he was about to make, had imagined it in such detail, that in his mind it already existed.

“She was here last time I came.”

Makepeace laughed and the buttons on her bodice rolled from side to side.

“See for yourself. I was on my way up to the guests’ rooms. We’re all at sixes and sevens. They haven’t even had their breakfast yet.”

He followed her up the elegant stairs from the ground floor, running his hand along the smooth, curved banister. Through the deserted dayroom and on across the dining room, where he consulted with patients over their photographs.

They continued—up a narrow staircase of thin and splintered treads along a low-ceilinged corridor of numbered doors, each with an observation slot at eye level. His head just cleared the bowing ceiling and the air was foul; used chamber pots stood outside some doors, discarded trays of food by others. Lucas felt a creeping sense of shame at the conditions, at the compromises involved in using a private house as an asylum. He’d never been to the patients’ sleeping quarters before. It occurred to him that he really knew very little about Lake House.

Makepeace stopped at door number 9.

“See for yourself,” she said, unlocking it and swinging it open. The door banged against the wall. She let the key fall back among its companions and jerked her head toward the interior. “Good riddance, if you ask me. But it is awful that Catherine’s missing. Poor Mrs. Abse is beside herself.”

Lucas took in a cold grate. A dormer window catching a reflected gleam of the morning’s light and a pair of worn slippers placed neatly by the bed. Just looking into the room made him feel constricted. It was a case history, he told himself. Nothing more. He could have no personal interest in her. Mrs. Palmer was not only a patient but a married woman. He would use the time to make another image of Mrs. Button or Miss Batt. The disappointment wasn’t lessened. He was flummoxed by his sense of loss. Spotting the photograph he’d made of her, on the mantelpiece, he ducked inside the room, picked it up, and took it to the window.

The black fronds of the fern she held were turning rusty brown. He
hadn’t washed the print for long enough. A fingerprint had bloomed in one corner. His own thumb made an illiterate signature on his work. The image intended to arrest time had changed even since he had presented it to her.

The picture looked different, in other ways. Her eyes, the direct appeal they made, announced her desperation to be free, he could see now. Her face was alive with unexpressed emotions that he hadn’t been able to interpret but looked like a plea for help. He stopped, arrested by a thought that hadn’t occurred to him before but suddenly seemed obvious. Perhaps it was not only the photograph that might alter. The viewer could change too.

As he went to replace the photograph on the mantelpiece, a scream came from outside the door followed by a heavy thump, a rattling of metal as if someone had hurled a handful of coins at the floor. He put back the photograph, took a last glance around the room, and stepped out into the corridor.

Makepeace lay in a heap by the door to the next room, keys scattered all around her on the boards. Her skirts had risen to show men’s socks emerging from the tops of her Adelaide boots and a pair of thick white calves. She was moaning and his first thought was that her heart had failed. He kneeled beside her and felt for the pulse in her wrist. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

“Not me, you fool,” she said, her voice choked and harsh. “It’s Talitha. Help her, Doctor. Help her.”

He got to his feet with a sense of dread and put his eye to the observation slot.

Miniature smocks and pantaloons hung in neat lines on a clotheshorse by the side of the fire. Anna breathed in the pleasant, soapy smell of drying cotton and blinked at the light, strong against the nursery curtains. The sheet was fine and soft against her skin, the cotton pressed smooth. She reached for a flask of water on the bedside table and poured herself a glass. Catherine was still asleep, lying on her stomach in the other bed. The children and their nursemaid had gone.

She remembered the dream she’d had, drifting in and out of sleep as the nursery fire subsided. Lucas St. Clair had been making a picture of her. It was a wedding photograph; Anna had her hair piled high on her head, threaded with country flowers. As well as being the photographer, Lucas St. Clair was the bridegroom. He stood beside her, his own dark hair loose on his shoulders. The two of them were naked as Adam and Eve, without even the fig leaves, but in the dream she’d felt no shame—only a deep, insistent pleasure. She felt a stirring of it again.

The dream was so real, seemed more real than the morning she woke to. She wondered at the pictures her own mind could throw up as she got out of bed and walked in bare feet along a carpeted passageway to the bathroom. She filled the basin and washed herself all over with scented soap from a patterned dish. Letting the water run away through a brass grille at the bottom of the basin, she refilled it and splashed her face again and again with warm water. Then cleaned her teeth with clove-scented powder, combed her hair, and rubbed some of Louisa’s cold cream onto her face. Reluctantly, she put on the dress Louisa had left out for her.

When she’d finished, she sat on the edge of the bath with the door still locked and put her head in her hands. She was ready, but she didn’t know for what. She was not married to Lucas St. Clair—the thought prompted a sad, sweet pang—she was married to Vincent Palmer. Morning had come and she still lacked a clear idea of what she should do; what she
could
do. She might beg Louisa to conceal her here while she searched for some employment and a place to stay. Some women did live alone in rented rooms. But she would not be able to hide indefinitely from Vincent. They would still be married. She could confront him with the injustice of her incarceration, perhaps with her brother-in-law at her side to make sure she wasn’t carted back to Lake House. She might even voice her suspicions that he had a mistress, if she dared. But then the best that could happen would be that she found herself back at the Vicarage.

Blundell called out a good-bye to Louisa, somewhere down below in the house. He sounded impatient. Anna didn’t hear her sister’s reply. She wondered what it was like to be Louisa. She didn’t know, even wearing her clothes, using her toothbrush, her hairbrush, what Louisa’s life was. What she felt when she opened her eyes, what she dreamed about. She never had done. Anna opened her sister’s scent bottle, dabbed the glass rod on her wrists, and went down the stairs.

The dining room was empty. She took a poached egg from a covered dish and slid it onto a plate decorated with painted insects. They were the plates that they’d had in the flint house, brought from Germany by their father. Even when the days came when they were living on rice pudding and sago, Amelia Newlove refused to let her sell them.

Anna breathed in the smell of carnations on her wrist. It was the scent that their mother used to wear on what she called
occasions
—a powdery, musky smell. It reminded her of something that eluded her. Something that mattered. She had a sense that if she knew what it was, she would know what to do. She looked down at the bone handle of the knife resting on her palm and felt the familiar sensation of emptiness in her hands.

“You look miles away.” Louisa was in the doorway.

“Good morning, Lou.”

Louisa poured herself a cup of tea and pulled her chair close.

“Good morning, Anna. I only wish you were here in happier circumstances. Have you thought what you’re going to do?”

“Not yet. Did you talk to Blundell?”

“Yes.” Louisa averted her eyes. “You have to go to Vincent, Anna, and apologize. Plead with him to take you back. There’s nothing else for it.”

“I can’t go back there.”

“To bedlam?”

“To the Vicarage.”

She hadn’t told Louisa that she’d seen Vincent at the fair. Louisa wouldn’t believe it. Anna could hardly believe it herself.

“You can’t stay here,” Louisa said, bluntly. “Blundell won’t allow it.”