Lost Among the Living(30)

In the hall behind us, a door slammed.

I was still at the foot of the stairs, Martin several steps up. I felt a chill—as if a hand had touched me—and I took a step back, my feet quiet on the carpet, and looked down the hall. There was no one in sight. A servant is about, I told myself, changing linens or cleaning . . .

“Martin, did you hear that?” I asked softly.

There was no sound from him. I stood frozen. The air grew thick, hard to breathe.

“Hello?” I called.

Near the end of the hall, my bedroom door swung open in a silent motion. I did not hear the click of the latch. The door hung open like a gaping mouth, dark and somehow obscene, for a long moment before another door in the corridor swung open in exactly the same manner. And another, on the other side of the hall.

A bead of cold sweat ran down between my shoulder blades. I opened my mouth, wanting to call for Martin—for anyone—but I could not make a sound. I forced my feet backward and nearly stumbled onto the staircase, turning and looking up.

Martin had sunk down onto a step, his body sagging. His hands gripped his knees and his head hung down, as if its weight were too much to carry. He was breathing heavily. With the lowered angle of his head, I could not see his face.

I climbed the steps and approached him. “Martin?” I whispered.

He raised his face to me. It was ghastly in the dim light of the stairwell, his eyes sunken, his cheekbones stark. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and his temples. His jaw sagged.

“I’m afraid I cannot show you any more of the house,” he said to me in a voice that was nothing but a low rasp. “I don’t feel quite capable.” Behind me, I heard soft footsteps, and one of the doors in the hallway snicked closed.

Martin blinked. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I reached out and grasped his arm. It was thin as a matchstick inside his sleeve. “Martin,” I said.

But he was already gone, his eyes rolling back in his head, his body falling gracefully on the jagged steps.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN



Wych Elm House fell silent after Martin’s collapse. Dottie called it an attack of nerves, as if her son were merely anxious instead of wasting away to nothing, incapable of taking a walk around the house and back. Doctors came and went for a few days, and then Dottie declared that what Martin needed was rest and absolute quiet. Her rule was law, so everyone, servants and family alike, took to tiptoeing silently around the house, speaking only in whispers and low tones.

Robert quickly finagled a steady stream of invitations that took him out of the house in his motorcar, as he had no patience for Dottie’s rules. That left Dottie and me alone. I ran her errands, wrote out her correspondence, and made her telephone calls—she had a distaste for the instrument and had me use it in her stead. After a small meal at my desk or a tray in my room, I would continue work in the afternoons until she dismissed me.

There was plenty to do. We sent out a volume of correspondence that rivaled Casparov’s, handling the business of the house, inviting potential buyers to view and purchase her art, and receiving replies. Dottie also took delivery of the art itself, dealing with deliverymen and the display of the works in the upstairs gallery, as well as overseeing the servants and the daily people she used to supplement them, including a woman to help with laundry twice per week and a single hapless gardener she hired to tackle the overgrown grounds.

Despite the nunnery-like rigidity of our routine, Dottie was tense and irritable, impossible to please. As she had throughout our trip home from the Continent, she nitpicked me endlessly, from my messy curls to the dull shine on my new shoes. She acquired a typewriter for me to use for her letters, then stood by like a harpy as I used it, searching for errors and complaining about the noise it made. She had spent much time at Martin’s bedside, and the sour disposition that resulted made me wonder if he’d told her about my marriage situation. Perhaps she was hoping I would quit. Or perhaps she was simply miserable, and it had nothing to do with me at all.

I was miserable myself. I was suffering from incurable insomnia, my nights plagued with sleeplessness and my few bouts of slumber weighted with dreams that were complicated and vivid, filled with images like I’d seen on that first night, real and somehow horrible. I sometimes woke weeping, or laughing, or trying not to scream. Twice I woke to find my hair and nightgown soaked with chill water and a sickly sweet smell in my nose as I clutched my sheets in panic. I would spend the rest of the night awake, until it was finally time to rise and dress and sit at my typewriter, gritty-eyed and dull. I found no more leaves in my room. If I had deluded myself into seeing them the first time, I had done it convincingly.

I barely recognized myself. I had never been like this, prone to hallucinations and dreams, even in the awful days after Alex died. My mind kept circling back to the footsteps I’d heard and the doors I’d watched swinging open—including the door of my own bedroom—as I’d stood transfixed in the hallway. No one had witnessed that but me, not even poor Martin. Either I was going mad or something uncanny was happening.

Frances.

In the haze of my exhaustion, her face was clear in my mind. I could see her that day in the small parlor. I could see her gray dress and the string of pearls around her neck, the clasp where it sat at the back of her collar. I could tell myself that I doubted her identity, that I was not sure, but pure exhaustion lowers your ability to lie to yourself, and I knew deep down that I’d seen Dottie’s lost daughter. I felt at times as if I could turn a corner or look in a mirror and I’d see her again, glimpse her image in the shadows of the huge, silent house. I thought I heard her footsteps in the corridor, ahead of me or behind me, or saw her hand on the curtain at the window from the corner of my eye. The things she saw coming through that imaginary door were dead, David Wilde had told me. She lived at home in privacy, plagued by her waking dreams.