“The family curse, Miss Ferrars: I suffer from bouts of acute melancholia. I could not complete my medical studies, and so Dr. Straker took me on as his assistant. Here, at least, my illness is of some use; our patients find me easy to talk to. I sometimes feel, Miss Ferrars, that I am a lay brother in a strange sort of latter-day order: we no longer believe in God, but hope nevertheless for miracles—though Dr. Straker would not agree.”
“But surely, would you not be better living—” anywhere but here, I almost said “in the world?”
“It is natural to think so, Miss Ferrars, but my duty lies here. Dr. Straker has come to depend upon me, and besides—”
He blushed, averting his gaze; I wondered what he had been about to say.
“And you, Miss Ferrars?” he said after a pause. “Would you tell me something of yourself? You grew up on the Isle of Wight, I understand.”
Hesitantly at first, I began to speak of the scenes I had recalled that morning, though not of my fascination with Rosina and the mirror. He listened attentively, smiling at my portrait of Aunt Vida. It struck me as I talked that, despite the loss of my mother, my childhood had been far happier than his.
“Was your mother always an invalid?” he asked. “From childhood, I mean?”
The question stirred a troubling memory. I had never thought of her as an invalid; as a child, I had accepted her being delicate, and needing to rest a great deal, as simply part of the order of things. And when I was told, in the first extremity of grief, that her heart had been diseased, I assumed it had always been thus. It was only years after Mama’s death that it occurred to me to put exactly this question to my aunt.
We were standing, that afternoon, on the path by St Catherine’s Lighthouse, gazing out across the sea. Neither of us had spoken for some time. It was a clear, windless day, early in the spring, and I was wondering whether a faint skein of cloud along the horizon was actually the coast of France, when my aunt said, more to herself than to me, “Emily always liked this spot.”
Aunt Vida, when preoccupied, would speak of “Emily” rather than “your mother”; she always talked more freely when we were out of doors. Though we were only about a mile and a half from the cottage, the path was rough, and very steep in places, and I could not imagine Mama negotiating it.
“Was she stronger—her heart, I mean—when she was a girl?” I asked.
My aunt nodded, still in her reverie. “Could walk all day then. No sign of anything wrong.”
“So when did she . . . ?”
“At Nettleford, after—” Her expression changed abruptly, as if a blind had fallen across her features.
“After what, Aunt?”
“Don’t know. Woolgathering. No good asking me. Never saw the place.”
My aunt had scarcely known my father. She had moved to the Isle of Wight when my mother was quite small, and though Mama had spent a good deal of her time there, my father had never visited the cottage. Aunt Vida had met him on a few occasions in London, but she in turn had never been to Nettleford.
“Why did you never visit her at Nettleford?” She had always evaded the question, but now that I was as tall as my aunt, I felt entitled to an answer.
“Told you before. Godfrey was too ill; didn’t want to be a nuisance. Before that, he was too busy. Asked them here several times, but he could never get away. Always worried about his patients. Would have lived longer if he’d chosen another profession, your mother said.”
“Was he—were he and Mama happy together?”
“Of course they were, child. Why do you ask?”
I did not know what had prompted me to ask. I had been possessed, of late, by a strange restlessness, as if I were yearning for a place I had never seen but would recognise at once if only I could find it. I was in my sixteenth year, and on the verge of womanhood, for which my aunt, in her gruff, taciturn way, was doing her best to prepare me. Earlier on our walk, we had seen a cow giving birth to a calf, and not long after we had passed a field in which a bull-calf was attempting to mount a heifer—a common-enough sight, with so much farmland around us. I had once asked Mama about it, and she had told me that they were playing at leapfrog. I soon learnt to avert my eyes unless I was quite alone, but by the time I was thirteen, I had deduced what I supposed to be the essential facts of procreation.
That day, however, as I was studiously ignoring the bull-calf, my aunt had abruptly said, “Mating. Same with humans. ’Spect you’ve guessed. Never cared for the idea myself.”
I could not imagine anyone caring for the idea, but as I stood beside her, with the white bulk of the lighthouse towering above us, the groaning of the cow in its birth throes came back to me, and with it a dreadful suspicion that I knew why my mother had died so young.
“That was why Mama always changed the subject,” I said, my previous question forgotten, “and why you will not speak of it—of Nettleford. It was giving birth to me that strained her heart.”
My aunt turned on me, her face white with shock and fury. I recoiled, thinking she meant to strike me, until I saw that she was furious not with me, but with herself. She seized my shoulders and fixed me with blazing eyes.
“Never think that, never! Not a jottle of truth in it—none at all. Always remember—only remember—she loved you best. You were her joy, her happiness: hold to that, and ask no more!”
She drew me close and held me in a rare and crushing embrace while I wept.
The memory faded at the sound of Frederic Mordaunt’s voice.
“I do beg your pardon, Miss Ferrars; I did not mean to distress you.”
“It is not that,” I said. “I grieved dreadfully for my mother, but—” I did not know what else to say. He rose and added more coals to the fire. We had long since finished our luncheon, but he seemed in no hurry to leave.
“Were you ever sent to school?” he asked, settling himself again. “After you lost your mother, I mean.”
“No; my aunt used to say that if you could read and do sums, you could give yourself an education.”
“And did you—do you have friends there still, at Niton?”
“I fear not. Most of our neighbours were retired army men; the families all knew one another, and we didn’t fit in. We used to converse with the men, if we met them out walking, but we were too unfashionable, and too eccentric—my aunt, I mean—for the women. The farming people would remember me.”
“Was it a lonely life?”
“I suppose it was, though I did not feel it at the time; my life in London has been far more solitary. And you, Mr. Mordaunt? You must have been very much alone here.”
“I was, yes. I had a series of governesses, because none of them would stay very long; they didn’t like living in a madhouse. Like you, I found solace in walking, once I was old enough to be let out on my own. I used to roam all over the moor; there are some wonderfully wild places, and huge clusters of standing stones, left by the Druids. The wind has a strange, thrumming note when it blows amongst them; you always feel that something uncanny is about to happen. I used to stand by Dozmary Pool—where Sir Bedivere is supposed to have thrown Excalibur—and hope that the Lady of the Lake would show herself.
“And of course the house—the original part, where I grew up—was built nearly eight hundred years ago. Nobody lives there anymore. I would find it oppressive, even now; to a small boy it was profoundly so.”
I shuddered, imagining lunatics shrieking and clashing their chains in the night.
“Oh, it was not the patients,” he said, seeming to read my thought. “They were never kept in the old house. The voluntary patients have always lived in the middle wing, where we are now—it was added early in the seventeenth century—and those confined under a certificate are all in the new building, farthest away from the original house. No, it was—well, I suffered very badly from night terrors, and the housekeeper we had then—Mrs. Blazeby, her name was—used to play upon my fears, telling me bloodcurdling stories of ghosts until I did not know whether I was more afraid of falling asleep or staying awake. A house as old as that is never entirely still, even in the dead of night, with a myriad of tiny creatures gnawing away at the fabric, not to mention—”