Lost Among the Living(39)

I exhaled a shocked breath. What that must have done to Frances—already isolated, terrified, and alone. How it must have broken her.

I heard the chair rock. “I brought her home. She wouldn’t speak for weeks. When she did speak again, she was worse than ever. She spoke about a dog named Princer. She said he’d come through the doorway to protect her.”

I turned back around. “Come from where?”

Dottie shook her head, and then she sighed. “From her dreams.”

I stared at her, silent.

“They all came from her dreams,” Dottie continued. “The faces, the figures. The dog. She believed they were the spirits of the dead. But Princer was different. He was—a demon of some kind. He did not come to kill her, but to keep her safe.” Dottie raised a hand and pinched the bridge of her nose briefly, the only indication she gave of her deep distress. “My own daughter talked of these things. My own daughter. What was I to say?” She dropped the hand and continued. “Things were better for a time, after she began to imagine the dog. Frances still saw things, but she felt that Princer made them go away. It was a sort of self-suggestion, I think, but at least she was less tormented. I hired tutors, and she’d take walks in the woods, sketching and exploring. And then one day I was in the library when I thought I heard a sound on the back terrace. I walked to the morning room and looked out the doors. And then I heard screaming.”

I stood, transfixed, thinking of the view I’d just seen from the gable, the sheer drop to the cobblestones. I saw her, I wanted to tell Dottie. I saw your daughter the day we came here, sitting in the parlor. She never left. She’s here. I almost spoke the words aloud, but they would not be a comfort.

“I knew what it was,” Dottie said. “In that moment, I knew. But I couldn’t make myself believe it. Not when things were going well. Not my Frances.” She took a breath, raised her chin, and looked at me. “But it was. It was Alex who stopped me at the front door and told me she was dead.”

For a numb moment, the words did not sink in. Then I thought perhaps I’d misheard, the blood pounding in my ears confusing my perception. “I beg your pardon?”

“You didn’t know he was here, did you?” Dottie asked. I must have looked bewildered, because she nodded. “I gathered as much. He was here on leave, paying us a visit, the day Frances died.”

“No,” I said. “Alex had leave in April 1917, and he spent all of it with me.” It was during that leave that he had received the camera. “He didn’t have another until 1918, which was the last one before he disappeared.”

Dottie nodded again, as if she had expected my answer. “Frances died in August 1917,” she said. “And Alex was here. On leave.”

“I—” My hands had gone cold. I stared at her in shock, the same kind of surprise I would have felt if she had risen from her chair and slapped me. “Alex—Alex came home on leave without telling me? Without seeing me?”

“Yes. He even spent quite some time walking the grounds with Frances the day before she died.” Dottie looked at me for a moment. The pain had left her expression, which was now unreadable. She pressed the arms of the rocking chair and stood, the chair moving emptily behind her. When she stepped toward me, the dim lamplight played over her features, putting the sockets of her eyes and the hollows of her cheekbones in shadow. “You met a man, and you married him,” she said to me. “I’ve known you for some time now, and I’ve come to understand that you loved him. But what did you know about him?”

I tried to think of how it had been with Alex, how it was when we were together. It was so long ago now. “He told me everything,” I said.

“He told you nothing.” She stepped forward again, and this time the lamplight showed her features to me. Her eyes were fixed on my face, blazing with some emotion I could not name. “Do you understand? He was my nephew, my dead sister’s child. I took him in, raised him for nearly four years. Then he went off to live with Germans. Germans! And he looked me in the eye and told me, ‘Aunt Dottie, I want to go.’”

“They were his relatives,” I stammered. “There wasn’t a war then.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dottie snapped back. “I didn’t hear he’d come home to England until he’d been at Oxford for six weeks. When he was finished, he said he was off to travel the Continent, but I never got a letter or a postcard. Where did he go?”

I stood transfixed, her questions cutting me like needles.

“He married you,” Dottie continued, “a woman we’d never seen. He didn’t invite us to the wedding. Yet for all that time, I still saw him as my nephew. My family. He was always Alex. And then the war came, and suddenly he came to visit me on leave. He told me he was visiting you next, that he was going to London before going back to the Front. And at the same time, he never told you anything.”

My stomach turned. I would have done anything—literally anything—to see Alex for a second leave in 1917, and he knew it. I’d been home, worried that every day would bring me the telegram telling me he was dead, and he’d come to England without telling me. If I had discovered he had another woman, I could not have felt more empty, more betrayed.

“It makes no sense,” I said. “He could have visited me. Why did he lie about it to both of us? Why?”