Lost Among the Living(10)

“What tales?” I asked.

Again the two women exchanged a look, but this time their professionalism overruled the need for gossip. “As I said,” Mrs. Bennett repeated, “silly tales for children.”

“Please,” I said, suddenly ravenous to know. “Mrs. Forsyth never speaks of her death, and my husband wouldn’t tell me.”

It was Mrs. Perry who finally answered me. “The girl was mad,” she said, her voice tight with disapproval. “They kept her locked up, out of sight, until one day she escaped her room. Jumped from the roof, she did, from the gable right up at the top of the house. She wasn’t but fifteen.”

For a long moment, I could not speak. The room receded. I remembered getting out of the motorcar, looking up at the high gable. Walking across the cobblestoned path beneath it. Dottie, I thought, no wonder you were unhappy to come home.

Mrs. Perry broke in again, her voice grim. “A man died in the woods that same day,” she said. “Some said the girl must have done it, though he was ripped to pieces, so I don’t see how she could have done such a thing, mad or not. As I say, I don’t take to gossip. They shut up the house after it happened, and all of them left. But now they’re back, and we’re to expect the son, who’s been in a hospital. I hope he isn’t going to be any trouble.”

“If it’s shell shock, he might be quiet as a lamb,” Mrs. Bennett supplied. “I had one of those two employers ago. Barely said a word, the poor boy.”

I pushed my chair back and stood. “I should go,” I said. “Mrs. Forsyth will be looking for me.”

“Tell her the rooms are prepared, just as she requested,” Mrs. Bennett said to my retreating back.

I turned back and looked at her. “How many?” I asked, thinking of the girl I’d seen in the parlor, forcing the question from my throat. “How many bedrooms are prepared?”

Mrs. Bennett frowned, as if I were slow in the head. “Why, four, of course,” she said. “For yourself, Mr. Martin, and Mr. and Mrs. Forsyth.” Her lips pursed briefly. “They sleep separate.”

I had nothing to say to that. I turned in silence and left the room.





CHAPTER FIVE



My bedroom at Wych Elm House was on the second floor, overlooking the front of the house. I could see the circular drive leading off into the trees, and the overgrown front lawn. It did not escape me that my window was almost beneath the upper gable and that my view was of where Frances Forsyth’s body would have landed the day she jumped.

Queer cousin Fran. She has died, poor thing.

That simple sentence of Alex’s, one that hid so much. Perhaps he had hoped to shield me from disturbing family news; perhaps he hadn’t wanted to put the distressing facts in a letter from the Front that would be read by censors, strangers. Perhaps he’d been ashamed of Frances’s madness, the strain of insanity in his family, and he’d hidden it from me.

But Alex had known about Mother. He had met her. He knew about the madness in my family. And he’d come home on leave in early 1918, after Frances had died. Why hadn’t he told me of it then?

They kept her locked up, out of sight.

I sat in my bedroom’s window seat and pulled up my legs, hugging my knees, gazing out at the tangled landscape, a book unopened in my hand, as darkness fell and the house settled into silence. I could not complain about my room, which was nicer than any flat I had lived in—the furnishings were polished and expensive, including the high bed heaped with thick linens and the imposing walnut wardrobe that reached nearly to the ceiling. I almost did not want to touch the gleaming wainscoting or the expensive carpet, so perfect were they. My own modest trunk, lodged against the door of the wardrobe, looked shabby in comparison.

Alex and I had been as intimate, I’d thought, as two people could be. We’d married quickly—I supposed marrying a man two weeks after you’d met him even qualified as hasty—but we’d spent endless hours talking deep into the night, telling each other about our lives. He had been orphaned as a child. He had German relatives on his father’s side—foreign blood was part of what made his father so unsuitable, according to his mother’s family—and had spent some years with them. He had gone to Eton, then Oxford. He’d told me of his relatives in Sussex, but the family rift meant they were not close.

His was a slightly unusual life, due to his being orphaned, but it was not an overly strange one. A man from a good family, educated, brilliant, handsome, tall, and athletic—granted every privilege, on his way to becoming something breathtaking and splendid until the war had taken him. As it had taken so many others.

A mist had settled, sliding among the trees. I watched it dully, following its dirty gray smear as it moved across the darkness. I scraped a cold knuckle across the glass.

I could not countenance what I had seen today. That girl in the small parlor, the set of her thin shoulders, the way she had turned and looked at me. I wondered with a chill if somewhere in this house there was a photograph of Frances Forsyth. Whether that same face would look out at me if I found it.

No. That is Mother. That is not me. That was never me.

I had been the sane one, the one who saw that the rent was paid, the one who had gotten a job and married a good man. Mother was the one who saw things, not me.

A man was torn to pieces. They kept her locked up, out of sight.