The Painted Bridge (34 page)

“Alright, miss?”

“When I get out of here, Lovely, will you come with me?”

“To the Vicarage?”

“No. I’m never going back there.”

“Where, then?”

“I don’t know, yet. I’ll know soon.” She would know soon, Anna felt sure. Things were changing in her as surely as they were changing in the winter garden. “Will you, Lovely?”

“I might do. You’ve got visitors inside, miss. Gentlemen.”

*   *   *

Lovely helped her out of her cloak and up the stairs, then showed her into the dining room.

The table looked naked without the oilcloth and two men were sitting at it with their backs to the sideboard. Both got to their feet as she closed the door behind her and reached out their hands to shake hers.

“Mrs. Palmer?” said the older one.

“Yes. I’m Anna Palmer.”

“Dr. Frank Fairclough. This is my colleague Dr. Brewer. Mrs. Palmer, please accept our apologies. Your sister asked us some time ago to call on you but we understand from Mr. Abse that you have not been well enough to see visitors.”

Dr. Fairclough was ruddy-cheeked, one eye drooping below the
other. He had a rumpled, human look about him, as if he had known trouble himself and might be able to sympathize with other people’s. His good eye regarded her with intensity as Anna pulled out a chair and sat down opposite the two men. Dr. Brewer, young enough to be Dr. Fairclough’s son, looked at Anna with undisguised pity.

She addressed herself to the older man, propping her elbows on the scarred mahogany and clasping her fingers together.

“Is that what Mr. Abse told you? At any rate, I am quite well now.”

“Do you feel strong enough to answer questions?” said Dr. Brewer, his voice gentle. “Mrs. Heron hoped that we could ascertain your state of mind. She has asked us to help you.”

“We are indeed here to help you, Mrs. Palmer,” said Dr. Fairclough. “At the same time, you will appreciate that we are doctors. That if we find you to be unwell, we will be under a professional duty to report that fact.”

Anna looked at the black-and-white photographs on the wall next to the fireplace. Her eye came to rest on the portrait of Violet Valentine, her bird cupped in her hands. These men could help her, of that she felt sure. Could help any one of them. She pictured Talitha Batt as she had been at the sideboard, on the very first morning after Anna had arrived. Heard again the pain in Lizzie’s voice not half an hour earlier, when she spoke of her children.

“There is something you can do to help me.”

“If we can, we will,” said the younger one.

“There is nothing wrong with my mind.” She looked across the table at them, steadily, meeting Dr. Fairclough’s good eye. “Nothing at all. But there is someone else in this place who urgently requires your aid. Will you interview her as well as me?”

Dr. Fairclough laughed.

“Mrs. Palmer, we are not here to consult with every inmate. Only to assess your own state of mind.”

“The fees cover only one consultation,” Dr. Brewer said. “And this is the third time we have made the journey. Does the lady have means?”

“No, I don’t believe she does.”

Anna made a decision. She rose, clenched her nails into the palms of her hands, and before she could change her mind walked toward the
door of the dayroom. She put her head around the door. Makepeace wasn’t there nor Mr. Abse. She went to Lizzie, took her hand and led her into the room.

“They’re doctors, Lizzie. Proper doctors. They can pronounce you well.” Anna turned to the men. “Her need is more urgent than mine. Please tell my sister that I shall free myself in my own way. She needn’t worry.”

Closing the dining room door behind her, she went to the window seat of the dayroom. She sat down and stared at the pictures on the wall opposite, at LM in her convalescence, feeling as bleak as at any time since she had first arrived.

Lucas St. Clair had brought the plate back to Popham Street in one piece. He’d fixed it that same night and applied a coat of varnish in the calm and order of his own darkroom, inhaling the scent of lavender oil and sandarac as the flame of the spirit lamp flickered over her mouth, her eyes. It was important not to let the glass get too hot when drying the varnish. It could crack or the edges could burn your fingers, impelling you to drop it. He did not want to drop her. He had the sense that the plate, in some primitive way that contradicted the scientific nature of the medium, that the plate
was
her.

Sitting on the stool, holding it carefully by the edges, he marveled at the way her face filled the large sheet of glass. Wondered if it had been proper to approach as close as he had. He felt as if through the medium of the camera he had touched Mrs. Palmer, held her face in his hands.

When the weekend arrived, he made a dozen sheets of albumen paper, coating them with egg white and salt that had been strained and strained again then left for a week to cure. Stickles made egg nog from the yolks, had the hiccups all Sunday. The papers dried smooth and glossy. Lucas brushed on the silvers, freshly mixed, one midweek night after work. He saw the pearly patina in the amber light of the dark chamber, sniffed its blank promise, and marked the backs in pencil with a cross. Having flattened each piece in the press, he stored the sheets in a light tight box interleaved with blotting paper.

And then he had hesitated. Opportunities came and went; fine days passed unexploited. The picture mattered too much to him, he dimly
perceived. When he had made the print, he would have to look at it and analyze it, not as a photograph but as a means of diagnosis. And that was the difficulty. Everything about the way Mrs. Palmer looked on the plate suggested mania. But in his heart, he did not believe she was suffering from mania.

The talk to the Alienists’ Association was only weeks away. Mrs. Palmer awaited his findings. He could not delay any longer. On a sun-warmed Saturday morning a full fortnight after his visit to Lake House, he pulled on a pair of cotton gloves and brought down the printing frame. The box of sensitized paper. The plate itself. In the yard at the back of the house, he secured the plate on top of the paper in the frame and offered the whole contraption up to the light, balanced on an old trestle left by a previous tenant. The sun fell on his own face as he waited in the shelter of the south-facing wall. He closed his eyes and offered his winter-white flesh to its rays. It was March; the days were getting longer. A leggy shrub blossomed on the far wall; a crop of gold flowers, sodden by the previous night’s rain, lay on the stones underneath.

He watched through the glass as the paper began to respond to the light, darkening under the clear parts of the plate. He felt the habitual anxiety about making a successful print; the trick was to leave it long enough for the blacks to become richly black but not so long that the whites became fogged. After half an hour, he pulled out the paper and slid it into a tray of hyposulfate to halt its development. With a pair of tongs, he began to agitate the paper, rocking the edge of the dish, sending liquid in waves over Mrs. Palmer’s face. The photograph looked almost larger than life, as clear as a pre-Raphaelite painting by one of the disciples of realism. Her eyes stared at him from underwater, then they darkened and were lost. Overexposed. He went back upstairs to wash his hands then came down and tried again.

The second print was still too dark and the following attempt too light—revealing just a pair of eyes on the paper and the medallion at her neck. The St. Christopher medallion, the old man bent over a staff, a child on his shoulders. Lucas stopped, arrested by the odd nature of the image. He would keep it. The accidental could be interesting. His next attempt was scuppered by a blemish in the weave of the paper. He
carried on. The problems that arose in printing were ones that could be solved—technical issues that demanded nothing more from him than steady effort and patience. The larger challenge, proving the truth of the theory, lay ahead.

He plunged the fourth print into the fix and rocked the dish, willing the image to respond to the cyanide, to cease responding to light, to remain as it was. It did. He carried it upstairs and set it to wash. Mrs. Palmer floated under the surface, bobbing up with the flow of the water, rising as if for air. Her irises were a rich brown black, the whites of her eyes clean and bright, the lashes separate and stark as pen lines. The grain of her skin was a fine, silvery sand. Her parted lips, their outline slightly darker, looked as if they might speak. The light on her face was stronger from one side, illuminating the curve of her cheek, the highlights on it, and casting the other into a graded shadow.

The bruises and scabs defaced her. Abse had said they were self-inflicted but seeing them on the print, looking at them under the magnifying glass, Lucas doubted it. The scabs were blister marks, clumsily inflicted and kept open too long. Higgins was a disgrace to the profession. The old charlatan ought to have retired years ago. The bruises ranged in a row on her cheeks looked like fingerprints from a hand a great deal larger than her own.

The fumes in the darkroom were making him nauseous. He pegged the print on the line strung across the bench, made his way downstairs and threw himself in the wing chair. He lit a match with wrinkled, waterlogged fingertips and held the flame to the tobacco in the bowl of the pipe as Stickles entered the room.

“Didn’t you hear me knock, sir?”

“Hello, Stickles. Didn’t hear a thing.”

She handed him a plateful of anchovy toast. He took a bite and grimaced as he felt the sticky paste on the roof of his mouth.

Lucas tapped ash out on the side of the plate and got up to pour himself a whisky, appreciating its clean, deep sting on his tongue and in his throat. He’d made the image he dreamed of making. Now, all he had to do was interpret it by comparing the signs on Mrs. Palmer’s face with those in the textbooks. He fetched his dog-eared copy of Morison from the shelf and sat with it on his knees. He expected to open
The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases,
study the illustrations within its pages and compare them to the face of Mrs. Palmer, looking for the signs of mania, the peculiar expression of the countenance and the eyes that the physician described. But he found that he could not.

*   *   *

Anna stood at the sideboard, rubbing the back of a spoon with a rag loaded with a paste of salt, vinegar and flour. She’d taken on some of the small jobs that Talitha used to do—cleaning silver, stacking plates, sweeping the hearth. She found relief in it, the same relief that she now understood Miss Batt must have obtained. It enabled her for minutes at a time to forget where she was.

She heard the dining room door open and looked up to see Catherine’s mother, Mrs. Abse, coming from the dayroom. She looked as if she limped but watching her Anna realized that she did not. It was more that her entire locomotion seemed impeded and difficult. She reached Anna, her face creased in a frown, and stood next to her. Mrs. Abse looked down at the cleaned spoons lying in a nest and picked up one.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Palmer,” she said. “I hoped to find you alone.”

She put down the spoon and looked at Anna.

“It’s my daughter, Catherine. Would you talk to her? Try to bring her to her senses? I am so terribly worried about her.”

Anna licked her dry lips. She’d been afraid that Mrs. Abse bore some sinister message from Querios Abse. Anna’s fear of the chair was ever present, even though the treatments had ceased as suddenly as they began.

“Catherine?” she said. “I’d like nothing more than to see her. What ails her, Mrs. Abse?”

“I wish I knew. Would you mind coming now? I see you are occupied but it’s just that my husband is …”

A harsh noise sawed into the air from the other end of the room as Makepeace cleared her throat.

“Do you think that’s advisable?”

They both turned to face Makepeace as she crossed the floor, from the other door.

Emmeline Abse’s voice was suddenly surprisingly commanding.

“If I didn’t think it advisable, Fanny, I wouldn’t be suggesting it. Please attend to your duties. If you can.” She looked back at Anna, her tone softened, almost pleading. “If you wouldn’t mind coming with me, Mrs. Palmer?”

*   *   *

The Abse parlor was shabbier than Anna might have imagined. The piano lid was open to reveal yellowed ivories, thinned at their tips. A cracked glass case held a half-melted posy of wax flowers, and the mantles of the lamps were obscured by soot. Catherine lay back on a chaise longue. She wore a wintry green dress that hung off her thin frame and had a large shawl pinned around her shoulders despite the warmth of the room. Beside her on a low table was a plate of black grapes. Anna tightened the cotton scarf over her head as she walked toward her.

“Hello, Catherine.”

Catherine clapped her hands, half rose from where she lay, and sank down again.

“Where have you been, Mrs. Palmer? And what on earth has happened to your hair?”

She looked too fragile to hug; Anna bent and brushed her cheek with her lips, took her cold hands in hers. Catherine’s pearl ring was slipping off her finger and her nails were tinged with blue.