The Painted Bridge A Novel

FIVE





“Doctor’s attending today, miss,” Lovely said, escorting Anna back to the bedroom after breakfast. “Mrs. Makepeace says you’re to wait here. I’ll be up for yer soon as he’s ready.”

“Thank you, Lovely. I’m hoping he’ll help me.”

Lovely sniffed and wiped her nose on her cuff.

“Daresay you are,” she said, pulling the bedroom door closed behind her and locking it.

Anna felt too impatient to sit down. She had been in Lake House for one week and felt she could not tolerate another day. Another hour. She pulled one of the rough brown blankets off the bed, wrapped it around herself and went to the window, leaning her elbows on the sill, feeling the cold air streaming in around the edges of the frame.

The view was the only comfort the room offered. In front of her was a spacious downward sweep of grass with an ancient oak that stood to the right of her window. The tree’s shedding leaves created the impression of a rich, golden shadow in a circle underneath it. Beyond the lawn, marked off by iron rails, was a sheep field and at its boundary a row of breeze-tossed willows leaned out over the fringes of a body of water. It could have been a river but from its stillness she took it to be a lake, a cool reflective eye staring up at the sky, filled with it. On the other side of the lake were woods and open land and on the far horizon, beyond everything, the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, small and softly round, as if fashioned from cloud.

Anna’s eye was drawn again to the bridge beyond a thicket of trees farther along the shore of the lake. It was a white bridge, stretching from one side of the lake to the other, delicate and ethereal, its three shallow arches a row of half-moons that seemed to float on the surface of the water. The bridge was the most beautiful she’d ever seen, like something from a painting or an illustration for a fairy tale.

As she stared out, a girl in a red cloak appeared from the direction of the house. She wove a path across the grass, her head bowed, moving in an erratic line. She was about to collide with the railings when she stopped and raised her head. As she turned toward the gate, Anna saw the reason for her strange progress. The girl was reading a book.

She passed into the field and continued her meandering way to the edge of the water. A line of ducks swam to meet her and she began to throw scraps to them, swinging her arm again and again. She reopened the book and walked back toward the house, still reading, oblivious to the sheep that followed her through the open gate.

On impulse, Anna tapped on the glass and lifted her hand in a wave. The girl stopped and looked up, pressing the open pages against her chest. Anna saw a still, pointed face, thin fair hair. Suddenly, as if she heard someone call her, the girl thrust the book under her cloak and darted out of sight.

* * *

A minute later, Lovely arrived and led Anna down the stairs to Abse’s study.

Anna paused in the doorway, casting her eyes over the cliffs of books, the fox in its glass cabinet. It seemed wrong to her that she should be entering the room from inside Lake House, from the patients’ quarters, instead of from the outside like the accidental visitor she felt herself to be. A man sat writing behind Abse’s desk.

“Best o’ luck,” Lovely muttered from behind her. “I’ll be back to collect yer in ten minutes.” Lovely departed, closing the door behind her.

Anna reminded herself that this was her chance to get out. She might even be free today if the physician gave her a fair hearing. Digging her nails into the palms of her hands, she readied herself to tell the whole story, calmly, from the beginning.

“Good morning, Doctor.”

He raised his head, looked her up and down as she walked toward him.

“Come in, come in. I won’t bite.”

“You are Dr. Higgins?”

“Indeed I am. Sit yourself down.”

He rose and took hold of her hand, two fingers pressed to her wrist while looking at his watch. She smiled at him.

“I am not ill, you know. I need to explain to you what has happened.”

“Open your mouth.”

“Doctor, I’m perfectly well. If I could just recount to you …”

He bent his face close to hers and opened his own mouth to reveal a white-coated tongue. She averted her eyes as he flattened her tongue with a spoon, peered into her throat. He was old, fifty or more, to judge by the slump of his shoulders, the corrugated skin of his forehead, but he had the hair of a boy, glinting chestnut, smooth and shining on his head.

“Throat looks normal.”

“My throat isn’t important,” she said when he removed the spoon. “But I must talk to you.”

“Now, Mrs.—Mrs.?”

“Palmer.”

“I believe the doctor is generally considered the one who knows what’s important. Eh? Do you know what year it is?”

The wind was gusting outside; she could see what might have been leaves or birds whirling through the sky on the other side of the glass. The globe stood on the floor by the window, tilting on its stand, swaths of pink glowing in the gloom.

“It is 1859, sir. The first of December. But Mrs. Makepeace said I would only have a few minutes with you and I want—”

He interrupted with more questions. Anna supplied the name of the monarch and the Prime Minister, told him how many fingers she had. How many toes.

“There was distress, on admission, according to the notes,” he said.

“Distress?”

“You were out of control. Hysterical. Have you any recollection of it?”

“It wasn’t hysteria, Doctor. I was alarmed to be locked in a room by two strangers. Frightened. I was angry too. Wouldn’t you be?”

“It is you that is under discussion. Not I.”

He put a trumpet against her chest, leaned his ear against the end of it. His head was so close she could feel its warmth under her chin, see the hairs growing out of his ears, the line of grime on the inside of his collar.

“Rapid heart rate,” he said, straightening up. “Not unexpected.”

She took a deep breath.

“Dr. Higgins, I am here only because my husband didn’t understand why I acted as I did.”

He resumed his seat, scanned a piece of paper in front of him.

“Says here he’s a man of the cloth. A vicar must know something of human nature even if he knows more of God. Eh?”

He looked at her, pleased. She felt a sense of disbelief that the interview should be going so awry. She must make him hear her.

“Listen! There were hundreds drowned that night, all around the coast. I still believe it was right for me to try to help.”

He shook his head, held up a finger to his lips.

“A young woman has no reason to think about death. A young woman should contemplate life. Increased life in the case of a married woman like yourself.”

His gaze shifted to her breasts.

“When did you last have your monthly bleeding? Do you recall?”

It had added to her difficulties on the journey back to London. She’d felt the usual relief, despite the jolting pains in her belly, echoing the jolting of the carriage, mile after mile. She somehow couldn’t imagine having Vincent’s child. The eyes looking up at her from the crib, hard and opaque as black marbles. Vincent never mentioned children, which she found odd. Anna shook her head. She didn’t want to talk to this man about it.

“I see. Suppressed catamenia. Uterine disturbance.”

“I am well, Doctor. In all respects.”

“On the contrary. You are suffering from hysteria. Most of your sex do, at some time in their lives.”

He crushed a blue pill on a scrap of paper with the back of a spoon, mixed it in a tumbler of water. The solution flew round and round, grains descending to the bottom in a slow fall.

“Oh no, Doctor. I don’t want any medicine,” she said, her hand rising to her mouth. “I never …”

“Emetics are helpful in cooling the blood, restoring the proper balance.”

He had stood up, was pressing the tumbler to her lips, holding back her head with the other hand as he tipped the contents of the glass into her mouth. “Count yourself lucky,” he said, addressing the ceiling, ignoring her choking. “Abse believes in restraint from within. There are no shackles here, no bridles. The tea isn’t laced with antimony and you won’t find yourself in the strait waistcoat, unless strictly necessary.”

She spat out what she could, then swallowed and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. The liquid was bitter on her tongue, undissolved fragments catching in her throat. Higgins sat down again, picked up his pencil and focused on the sheet of foolscap in front of him.

Anna thought of their doctor at Dover, his kindly prescriptions of syrups and tonics. Morphine, in extremis. Words, sometimes. She pictured his quiet nodding, as his patients told him what ailed them. She had never known a doctor could be a brute. She felt as if the world had spun upside-down, as if she had failed to understand something important.

Curbing the urge to reach across the desk and grab his lapels, demand to know how this man dared call himself a physician and disgrace an honorable profession. She took a deep breath. Swallowed again.

“You haven’t given me a chance to explain.”

The pencil scratched its way across the rough weave of the paper; Higgins’s stomach rumbled.

“I’ve heard all I need. Good day, Mrs. Farmer.”

“I told you, my name is Anna Pa—”

Lovely was back. She pulled Anna from the room, hurrying her up the stairs to the bedroom. When they got there, she said she’d be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail and left again, banging the door shut, running down the corridor in her heavy clogs.

The fire was out and the room felt dead too, the air still and cold and stale. Anna sat down on the bed and looked at her feet in the pair of shapeless slippers they’d supplied in place of her boots. She felt sick with disappointment.

The feeling grew stronger. She got up and clutched at the washstand, leaned against the wall then stumbled to the bed to lie down. Waves of nausea rose from her stomach up through her chest, her head. She jumped up from the bed as Lovely rushed in and set down a tin bowl. A stream of liquid spurted out through Anna’s mouth, spattered across the bottom of the bowl. The sickness ceased and returned immediately, more strongly. Lovely stood beside her, holding her hair out of the way, wiping her mouth, as Anna vomited again and again.

“How does anyone get out of this place?” Anna said, between heaves of her stomach. Lovely held a cup of water to her lips.

“They get out sooner or later, miss, most of ’em. It depends mainly on what happens outside. Who wants them out. Who wants them in.”

Anna continued retching, violently, though nothing came. Black spots danced in front of her eyes; her stomach muscles ached.

“Damn you, Higgins,” she said, leaning on the bed frame, gripping it with both hands. “And damn you, Querios Abse. Damn you to hell.”

Lovely put the bowl outside the door, came back and squeezed out a flannel with water from the ewer, smoothed it over her lips, her ears, her neck. Anna didn’t resist, as Lovely helped her into a nightdress.

“It’ll pass, miss. Lie down a minute.”

* * *

It was dusk when Anna woke. The light glowed violet through the flimsy curtains; outside, sheep were complaining in long plaintive cries. Someone had laid the fire and the bedroom door had been left ajar, kept open by a wedge of wood. She could get off the bed and walk through it. She pictured herself doing that, gripped the mattress and tried to sit up. At the sound of footsteps in the passageway, she fell back on the pillow and closed her eyes.

Lovely returned and busied about the room. She struck a lucifer and the air grew sharp with the smell of sulfur. Anna heard her blowing into the sticks, then the sound of liquid splashing into a cup. The rattle of a teaspoon, followed by the double tap of it. Her mother, Amelia Newlove, used to make the same sound. Stir, stir, stir. Tap, tap. Her own little tune.

“You feeling any better, miss?” Lovely laid a hand on her shoulder. Her touch was gentle, despite her brawn. “I brought sweet tea and Cook’s spared a dash of brandy. Sit up and take it while it’s hot.”

Tears sprang from Anna’s eyes and rolled toward her ears. She couldn’t accept pity from Lovely or from anyone else. The only strength she still had was to rely on herself and keep everyone here at a distance. Rolling over toward the wall, she stared at the reflection of the fire, the flames in the glass licking at the fisher girl’s back.

“I don’t want tea. Just leave me alone, will you.”

“As yer like.”

Lovely dragged the mattress out from under the bed and threw herself down on it. Anna lay still, waiting to hear the Lord’s Prayer in the fervent whisper that made her feel as if she’d never properly heard the words before. Nothing. Only, after a while, a creaking and rustling of the straw. An Amen.

When she judged Lovely was asleep, Anna sat up. The door was locked again. Lovely had left the tea on the chair, drawn up by the bed. Anna reached for the cup and took a sip. The tea was lukewarm but the brandy felt fiery in her throat, heated her from inside. She drained it and eased herself back down under the blankets, hugging them around her ears, her feet tucked up under the rough nightdress.

She thought back over recent events, trying to see them clearly. The mission to the coast had not been what she had imagined. It was the first time since her marriage that she’d traveled alone, and when she set out on the Tuesday after the great storm she’d felt sure of herself, had a sense of invulnerability that was new to her. The feeling ebbed away as the train tore past cottages with their roofs blown off, trees lying on their sides, their roots in the air, festooned with mud.

Taking coaches from Birmingham, she traveled north and west toward the Welsh coast, through mountain passes where the road was scattered with fallen boulders. Three times, all the passengers had to disembark, the women huddled in the wind by the side of the track while the men lent a hand shifting rocks. The world seemed to have been torn up, thrown around like a plaything by the storm.

By the time the coach reached the harbortown it was dark. The exhausted horses had ceased to respond to the driver’s whip. They trundled at walking pace past windows lit with rushlights, past leaning hovels with people clustered round their open doors, dogs barking and snapping at the wheels of the coach. Peering out from her seat by the window, Anna felt afraid. She gripped the handles of the carpet bag for reassurance. It was heavy, stuffed with her new clothes and Vincent’s old ones. Hidden right in the middle was his second-best watch, the silver one.

She’d rummaged in the drawers in the wardrobe before she left, pulling out shirts with signs of wear on the necks, socks in need of darning. The drawers were labeled but the contents did not match the labels. There had been socks in the Shirts drawer, shirts in the one for Cravats. They had nothing for children in the Vicarage. She had run down to the kitchen before she left, requested a pound of currants, some loaf sugar. It was all she could think of.

“Could you hurry, please? It’s urgent. Actually, it’s a matter of life or death.”

Cook had looked at her oddly but for once she hadn’t cared. The image of the boy brought from the water was so clear in Anna’s mind that it seemed to outshine ordinary life. Vincent was conducting a funeral and although she hadn’t intended to conceal the trip from him, she found she wanted to get away before he returned. She scratched a hasty note and left it for him in the study, propped against his dictionary. Slipping out through the side door, which led directly to the street, she climbed aboard an omnibus in the direction of the railway station.

* * *

By the time she got off the coach in the main square of the Welsh town, Anna was hungry, her hands freezing. She couldn’t put down the bag; the filth was inches deep under her feet, clinging to her boots. She felt relieved when she found a room in an inn. It bore no trace of the sea view it was named for and a salty dampness pervaded the air, the walls, the bedding—but it was a place to lay her head and make a plan.

The first morning, she woke early. It was a fine day, clear and still with not a breath of wind. She hid her bag under the bed and paid a boy a farthing to guide her to the bay where the ship had gone down, picking her way behind him through alleys where pigs ran free and the stench from the flooded ditches made her retch. There were chimney pots lying smashed in the cottage gardens, walls and fences blown down so what had been private, a broken-doored privy, a three-legged chair balanced under a kitchen window, was exposed for all to see.

The Katerina lay a little distance away from the land, half submerged, sinking as the waves broke over her then rising up between the swells, water pouring out of her portholes like tea from a pot. Anna hesitated, standing at the water’s edge. The sea under the morning sun did not appear a killer. It advanced playfully, surge by small surge, retreated again. She knew what she must do. She took a deep breath and waded into the shallows, first gasping then crying out loud from the cold, sifting branches of podded seaweed and splintered lengths of driftwood through her hands, plunging her arms in deeper. She knew even as her empty hands trawled through the water, her fingers in violent pain from the cold, that she would find nothing. The sea had swallowed hundreds of adult men, without trace. And the newspaper report had said that the boy had been rescued alive. Yet she’d been compelled to search for him in the water. She couldn’t quite understand it.

A crowd of children had gathered to watch from the rocks and were throwing pebbles in the water around her. The ship’s cat bobbed on the tide—inflated, water-slicked. If she ever had to drown, please God let it not be by a black beach, she prayed, as she walked out, her skirts heavy, and her heart, asking herself what she’d imagined she might find.

The children followed Anna back to the Sea View Inn, jeering, pulling at her soaked clothes. Back in the privacy of her room, she sent down for hot water for a bath. The water was plentiful when it came and smelled of wood smoke; it left a residue of grit in the bottom of the tub like pepper in a soup bowl. She left her sodden skirts drying by the window, put on her other dress and made her way down the creaking, wooden stairs to a snug off the saloon bar and ordered a chicken sandwich, warming herself by the fire, trying to think what she should do next.

Anna felt a growing awareness of the oddness of her situation. An awareness brought about not just by the stiff politeness of the landlord, the guarded looks of the other residents at the inn, but by the utter novelty of the experience. She had never traveled such a great distance alone before or stayed in a hotel on her own. Yet this was the response she was impelled to make to the storm, to the wrecked ships and lives it had left in its wake.

In the afternoon, she set off around the cottages with the bag, intending to give away the things she’d brought and make inquiries about the boy at the same time. Some of the survivors turned down what she offered, refusing the sober shirts and jackets as not what they would wear even if they were about to be buried six feet under. One pointed out the worn knees on the trousers. Another grabbed her from his sickbed, took her by surprise. There were better things than socks to offer a man back from the dead, he said when she escaped to the other side of the room, the skin around her mouth rising in a rash of protest, her breast throbbing.

No one knew anything of a small boy, brought from the water still breathing.