After Alice Fell(43)

They have painted the walls. No longer the light peach that held in the sun—for didn’t the cottage want always for light? Now it is an aggressive puce. The settee itself is much the same tone, the curtains and their tassels a sickly mint, and all of it seems to pall. It is 3:00 p.m. The wall clock clangs the time. “You have put your mark on the cottage,” I say.

“Do you like it?” Ada’s gaze is that of a teacher; she won’t give up the attention until I’ve answered the question and she is content with the response.

The calico dress she has lent me is too tight at the neck, pinches my armpits. The cotton petticoat is too short in length. But they are dry, and it’s the first time in so long I’ve worn anything with color. It’s almost too much, this weave of bright-orange flowers and green threads. “I like it very much.”

The answer suits. Her lips play at the corners, and she relaxes in the seat. “We thought, why not?” She gives a shrug. “Why not?”

“It’s inexplicable,” Mr. Hargreaves says.

“What is?” I ask.

“You. Of all the people I thought I would never see—though I do think of you and Benjamin often—it would be you. On the street.” He crosses his feet at the ankles. Shakes his head, then wipes the corner of his lip with his knuckle. “All so terribly grim, though. Poor Alice.”

Ada makes a small noise and pinches another serving of millet for the birds. “Poor Alice.”

“Ada teaches one class at Mrs. Brown’s, on the Romans.” Mr. Hargreaves raises a finger. “On Lucretius this week. Is that not right?”

“Theodosius.” She stands of a sudden, and sets the cup and saucer to the piano top with a clink. “Theodosius. It’s much too early in the term for Lucretius. The girls would rather contemplate the blue sky and the state of their hair ribbons.”

Mr. Hargreaves leans back, resting the cup on his chest. “Not everyone is as serious a scholar as you, my dear. Of the girls, that is. Or even the boys.”

I look toward the back of the cottage, to the high-walled garden beyond the dining room, and imagine past it to the playing greens of the school. The missing of all this sits like lead. Benjamin at his desk, Alice in the garden. A simple pattern to the days. It is a lie, and I know it. Benjamin at his desk with the door shut. Alice in her turret, the door locked from the inside. Sometimes the three of us passing in the hall and sometimes else a dinner with guests and Alice flitting to each with a drawing of a posy as a gift. Sometimes that. And others marked with all our silences.

“Are you staying for supper?” Ada asks.

“Of course she is. Of course. It’s much too horrible out there.” He slaps his knees and leans back. “We’ve left the blue robins.” He points to the ceiling. “All those little blue robins Alice painted on the ceiling of her room.”

I shake my head. “Why would you keep them?”

“They’re pretty.” He half rises. “Would you like to see?”

“I’ll take her.” Ada flicks bits of seed shell to the cage and makes a kissing noise at the birds. Then she takes up my tea by the saucer and sets it to the side table. She tilts her head and waits for me to stand. “You know the way.”

Alice’s old room with its six walls and windows, a turret built by the occupants two generations before, is musty, empty of furnishings save a sleigh bed and a mattress used now for storage. Old boxes and trunks are stacked atop, a glass lamp without a shade. The blue robins on the ceiling to keep watch over it all. I can’t look too closely at them; there’s something off about each: a missing beak, a dragging wing, a black eye painted on the blue breast. The wing feathers are blurred, as if she’d caught each of them midflight, capturing the flutter and flap and their valiant attempt to escape.

She was better here. Carried herself, most of the time, as any young woman would. Rising with the first light, dressing in simple calicos or wools, her thumb stuck in whatever book she was reading. A romance. A treatise on the heavens. A train schedule. Sitting at the morning table with Benjamin and me, the sun through the window burnishing the copper in her hair.

Each morning, she ate two poached eggs. One then the other, then cut her toast in diagonal fourths and ate those without butter, from left to right before washing it down with milk. The napkin lifted from her lap, pressed to her lips. Folded once and again as she turned to the window glass and watched the light on the garden hedge.

And I thought—because I always did, over and over—Alice is well. Alice is beautiful, composed like a Danish oil painting, a still life. Well and whole.

But I was burnt by that beauty. It shattered like porcelain, the cracks discolored and fragile where I’d worked so hard to glue it tight.

Ada moves to a window seat, shifting aside a leather hatbox so she can sit. “This is an odd room.” She gestures to the walls. “Nothing to anchor anything on.”

“Alice liked it.” I move to a window across and slip back a lace curtain. The wrought-iron table still sits in the corner of the garden, two chairs tucked in and a third pulled to the far side with a watering can on its seat. The irises have buckled the brick, but the zinnias are bright and full. The garden wall the extent of our world. Benjamin forbade us from stepping past the gate. “It is too much a risk,” he said. It was, he meant, too much a shame.