The English Wife Read online

  Did they keep parish records in India? They must, Janie supposed. One presumed that Colonel Lacey had had his infant daughter baptized. But India was such a long way off.

  It was, she thought, really very clever of Giles Lacey to have created a story that could be neither proved nor disproved.

  Odd. She hadn’t thought him clever. He’d seemed a poor actor, uncomfortable in his own lines, blustering and awkward when charm had failed. Cunning, then. One didn’t need to be clever to be cunning. One didn’t need to be able to work knots with words like Mr. Burke to achieve a successful deception.

  “Will there be anything else, Miss Van Duyvil?”

  For a large woman, Mrs. Gerritt was surprisingly light-footed. “No, thank you, Mrs. Gerritt.” The full oddity of the housekeeper waiting at table struck her. The sense of emptiness in the house might be more fact than metaphor. “Where is the rest of the staff?”

  “Let go,” said Mrs. Gerritt. She had, Janie vaguely recalled, been a maid in her grandmother’s household when Janie was a child; her husband a tenant farmer’s son. They were as Van Duyvil as the Van Duyvils and stood on no ceremony.

  Janie frowned up at her. “By whom?”

  “Mrs. Van Duyvil.” The of course was implied. “She didn’t see the point of keeping a full staff for an empty house.”

  But it wasn’t empty. The children were still here. And it was, Janie presumed, not her mother but Sebastian who was now the master of this great pile and all it contained. She hadn’t thought of that before. The reading of the will, like everything else, had been delayed while the coroner deliberated.

  It was, she thought wryly, very much like her mother to have assumed the authority, without waiting for the imprimatur of law. And why not? It seemed unlikely anyone else would be appointed guardian. They had been an unlucky family, the Van Duyvils. Where there ought to have been a gaggle of them, in her generation there was only her and Bay.

  And Anne. But Anne wasn’t a Van Duyvil. She was the daughter of Janie’s mother’s sister, a pale wisp of a woman who had married a war profiteer, a man whose immense energy had flared briefly and then been extinguished in scandal and ruin.

  Which left only the two children upstairs in the nursery.

  “Mrs. Gerritt?”

  Mrs. Gerritt turned, waiting impassively. Her dress was of a dark, heavy fabric, plainly cut, enlivened only by the ring of keys at her waist.

  “Has a man inquired here after the children? An Englishman?” Feeling foolish, Janie stumbled on, trying to come up with a story that wouldn’t sound like madness. “We had a call in town from a cousin of Mrs. Van Duyvil and, well, he seemed to think that the children belonged with their family in England.”

  Lies, rank lies, but what else was she to say?

  “That’s why I came, really,” said Janie, settling for a version of the truth, “to make sure Mr. Lacey didn’t try to remove the children.”

  Was it her imagination, or was there a scuffling and scuttling in the walls? She couldn’t imagine Mrs. Gerritt would stand for mice. Even understaffed, the house was painfully clean. Or that might just be its newness.

  “No one has been here,” said Mrs. Gerritt, making it sound like an unalterable law of nature. “If there is nothing else?”

  So much for a comfortable coze with the housekeeper. When Sherlock Holmes went to call, Janie thought with some asperity, retainers fell over themselves to provide useful bits of information. Mrs. Gerritt just wanted her gone so she could get on with her dusting.

  Or perhaps Mrs. Gerritt had a secret passion for French novels and only wanted to get back to her office so she could revel in forbidden love.

  One could hope.

  That scrabbling sound again. Moving very slowly, Janie pushed her chair back from the table, pretending to carry her plate to the sideboard. The breakfast room was decorated in a style Janie could only think of as ye olde monk’s parlor. The ceiling was coffered and painted with Tudor roses, thistles, and various other horticultural embellishments. The mullioned window that took up one wall was inset with numerous small panels of stained glass. The other three walls were all heavily paneled in dark wood, hung at intervals with tapestries that stretched from ceiling to floor.

  Was it her imagination, or was the tapestry on the far wall moving?

  Moving quickly now, Janie poked her head behind the tapestry. Not solid wall, but a narrow passageway and a small figure pressing itself into a depression in the wall.

  “Sebastian?”

  Nothing. Not even dust motes. The secret passage was too new—or Mrs. Gerritt too efficient—to harbor the sort of dust and cobwebs it seemed to demand. Janie wondered that her brother hadn’t ordered cobwebs crocheted from string and hung for effect. No cobwebs, but was that the tip of a boot she saw?

  “Sebastian? I know you’re there. I can see your boots.”

  A wisp of white. Not a boy’s smock, but the ruffle of a pinafore. “It’s Viola.”

  “Hello, Viola.” Janie didn’t want to let the tapestry fall behind her, which left her stuck where she was, at the end of the corridor. “I would have come to see you last night, but I was told you were already in bed.”

  A small figure emerged from around the corner. Her hair was the same tow color that Janie remembered from her own childhood, but the rest of her was pure Annabelle, from the three-cornered face to her dark eyes, too large in her child’s face. She held a doll clutched in her arms, the silk hair snarled around a painted china face.

  “My mother and father have gone.” There was a challenge in the child’s voice. “That’s what Nurse says.”

  Janie stood, holding the tapestry. “Yes, I’m afraid so. I’m very sorry.” It sounded so hopelessly inadequate. “Won’t you come out and join me? There’s toast.”

  “I’ve already had toast.” Viola slipped under her arm, small and fierce in her pinafore and buttoned boots. She turned to face Janie, saying accusingly, “They won’t let me go home.”

  “But … you are home. Aren’t you?” Janie felt as though she’d fallen through the rabbit hole. She didn’t know the first thing about speaking with children. She hadn’t spoken to children since she’d been a child, and rarely even then.

  “This isn’t my home.” Viola’s shoulders hunched, her face twisting as she tried to maintain her expression of scorn. “I want to go home. I want my real home.”

  “Oh, Viola.” Janie dropped down on her knees, her black worsted skirt pooling around her. If she was confused and miserable, how must Viola feel? Her parents had doted on her, spent far more time with her than parents were wont to do. Janie remembered the bleak days after her father’s death, when she would creep into the deserted library to sit in his chair, pretend his presence beside her. “Would you like to come back to town with me?”

  “I don’t want to go to town, I want to go home.” Viola scowled at her, infuriated by the idiocy of adults. “Nurse and Mrs. Gerritt say we can’t go there. The house is closed.”

  Her words had the conscious echo of Mrs. Gerritt. It was clearly a direct quote.

  “What house?”

  “My house.” Viola crushed the doll’s face under her arm in a punishing embrace. “The white house.”

  “The … oh.” Understanding dawned. “You mean the old house?”

  “My house,” Viola corrected her. And then, sensing, perhaps, that here was an adult that might be used, she took Janie by the hand and tugged her towards the window. “You can see the roof just there.”

  It was a pleasant prospect, or would be in spring, when the trees were in flower and the walks lined with creeping herbs. The breakfast room looked out over Annabelle’s knot garden, the herbs she had tended with her own hands, less formal than the terraces that led down to the river, with a view to a high hedge with a gate set in it. In summer, when the trees were in leaf, that was all one would see. But now Janie could see straight through the bare branches, to the outline of a peaked roof, set with humble dormer windows.

>   “There,” said Viola, pointing emphatically.

  What a fool she was. Of course the new house felt empty. It was Bay’s love offering, built from the ground up as an exact—or near exact—replica of Annabelle’s home in Lincolnshire. The original plan, Janie recalled, had been to enlarge the old house, but a conversation with Ruth Mills’s architect, at Staatsburg, had convinced Bay of the folly of that idea. So they’d left the old house, left it and lived in it while the new house rose stone by stone.

  Janie glanced down at her niece, feeling a surge of pity. How much worse to lose one’s parents and one’s home, living in hollow splendor when remembered comfort was only yards away, just beyond the hedge. “Why won’t they let you go back?”

  Viola shrugged. “We don’t live there anymore.”

  That, too, sounded like a direct quote.

  “Well, I don’t see why not,” said Janie. “Do you have a coat?”

  She didn’t know whether to feel pleased or guilty when Viola’s haunted eyes lit with delight.

  TEN

  Cold Spring, 1899

  January

  Slipping through the gate in the hedge felt like stepping back in time.

  Viola skipped ahead of Janie, down the path, her red muffler lending color to her pale cheeks, her breath frosting in the air as she made determinedly for the white house that sat well back from the river, on the site Janie’s ancestors had chosen long, long ago, still homesick for their native Holland.

  There were no gargoyles here, no mullioned windows or stone facing, just a white frame house, with a large central block and low wings protruding from either side. The original farmhouse had been burned down during the Revolutionary War, by either the rampaging British or familial carelessness, depending on which story one preferred to believe, but Janie’s ancestors had thriftily reused the old foundations in building the new. The green-painted shutters had been closed over the windows, giving the house the look of a comfortable matron who had nodded off over her knitting.

  A flight of three stone steps led up to the front door, framed in a narrow arch, with a simple pediment above. Viola was already at the top, fizzing with impatience. Janie followed more slowly. In her imagination, she could smell apple fritters frying, spitting and hissing on the open range in the old kitchen. This had been her grandmother’s house when she was a child. Her mother and her grandmother had had little use for one another, but she and Bay had been sent for long weeks in the summer to stay with her grandmother, in the nursery up beneath the roof, where the sloping ceilings and dormer windows had made a cozy haven.

  Janie could still remember the smell of those country mornings, the chill tang of the air, the chirpings of the birds in the trees, the bluebirds, robins, and sparrows as foreign and exotic to her city-bred ears as a flock of parrots.

  “I used to visit here when I was your age,” she said, but Viola was deeply uninterested.

  “We’re here, we’re here, we’re here,” she said, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Can we go in? Please, Aunt Janie?”

  It was only when she reached for the knob that it occurred to Janie that the house, disused, might be locked. But it wasn’t. The knob turned easily, and Janie felt her breath release. It would have been miserable to disappoint Viola, and she hadn’t looked forward to the prospect of demanding the key from Mrs. Gerritt.

  The house had seemed large when she was little, a sprawling place built for a large family, but in contrast to the baronial splendor of Illyria, the square hall felt low-ceilinged and quaint. Through the doors to right and left, Janie could see shadowed rooms, chandeliers wrapped in sacking, Holland covers over the furniture. The fireplaces were cold and dark, the grates scrubbed clean.

  “It does seem small after the new house, doesn’t it?”

  A flounce of petticoat and a flash of dark eyes. Viola was already halfway up the stairs, moving with the determination of the very young. “My mother liked the old house better. She didn’t want to leave, either.”

  “Didn’t she?” Janie followed her niece up the narrow stair with its solid oak banister. Viola must have misunderstood. Or reinvented her mother’s words for her own purpose. “It’s very beautiful. The new house, I mean.”

  Viola paused on the landing, drawing herself up imperiously. “Nurse says it’s haunted and she wouldn’t stay there for a night if it weren’t for the poor wee mites.”

  Janie bit back a laugh. She could just see Nurse, in her white cap, with her hint of an accent she tried to hide. “You’re a very good mimic.”

  Viola looked at her blankly. “What’s a mimic?”

  “It’s a—” How many words did one know simply because one knew them? “Like an actor. Someone who can pretend to be someone else.”

  Viola had already lost interest. She tugged on Janie’s hand. “Come to my room.”

  She didn’t take Janie up to the third floor, where the old nursery had been, but to the second, down two steps to one of the wings that overlooked the river. This had been an adult bedroom, Janie vaguely remembered, dark and formal, papered in green stripes with heavy drapes at the windows and a large bed hung with embroidered curtains. Now it was an open space, scattered with toys. Janie recognized some from her own youth: a battered wooden duck on a string, the yellow paint chipped and scraped; toy soldiers in various states of decrepitude; lopsided tops and leather balls missing their stuffing.

  Viola pounced on the duck with cries of joy. She tugged on the string, sending the duck’s wheels clattering across the floorboards. “Polly! There’s Polly!”

  “Polly the duck?” Janie turned slowly around the room, old jarring with new. “In my day, she was Mrs. Mallard.”

  Viola cast her a narrowed-eyed look. “It’s not Mrs. Mallard; it’s Polly.”

  “Polly,” said Janie and received a nod of acknowledgment.

  Someone had papered the walls of the room. In a stylized forest, blackbirds flew out of a pie, a king lolled under a tree, and the knave of hearts stole some tarts. The old blue-and-white tiles around the fireplace had been replaced with ones that matched the wallpaper: Cinderella kneeling while the birds picked the lentils from the hearth; Rapunzel letting down her hair; Jack shimmying up the beanstalk, where a giant harp awaited him. Janie thought she recognized Annabelle’s touch.

  The rest of the house, the little she had seen of it, seemed unchanged, with the sturdy furniture her grandmother had favored. But here, someone—Annabelle—had created an enchanted bower.

  There were doors off to the sides. A quick look revealed a night nursery with two narrow beds, forlorn without their bedding. On the walls, the cow appeared to be vaguely surprised to be jumping over the moon. Through another door was the nurse’s room, the brass bedstead still made up with blanket and pillow, but clumsily, as though they had been used and quickly drawn into place again.

  Thump, thump, thump. Polly the duck rumbled over the lintel. Abandoning the duck on the threshold, Viola clambered up on the quilted bedspread and buried her face in the pillow.

  And that, thought Janie, accounted for the rumpled blanket. A moment of doubt caught her. But hadn’t Viola said she hadn’t been allowed to go back?

  Perhaps she meant it in the larger sense, that she hadn’t been allowed to go back to live there. She seemed, if current events were any indication, to have free run of the house; small children burrowed like mice through narrow places, making their way where adults feared to tread.

  Janie sank down on the mattress next to Viola. “Viola, won’t Nurse be missing you?”

  Viola scrunched her head deeper into the pillow. “She’s with Bast.” Lifting her head, she added, in her strangely adult way, “He had a bad night.”

  “Nightmares?” said Janie. She didn’t wonder at it.

  Viola shook her head. “Bast gets coughs in the winter. He has a Weak Constitution and needs Constant Care. He has to have mustard plasters.”

  “I’ve had a mustard plaster. I didn’t much like it.” Janie thought she
was beginning to understand. Mrs. Gerritt was busy with the house, and Nurse was preoccupied with Bast, who had a weak constitution. Which left Viola to her own devices. Tentatively, she rested a hand on her niece’s back. “And what of your constitution?”

  “I’m shamefully hardy.” Viola’s voice was muffled by the pillow.

  “I shouldn’t call it shameful. Consider it a blessing, rather.” Before she was told not to be too strong or too fast; before she was laced into dresses that stole her breath and hobbled her legs. “It’s Bast you should feel sorry for, cooped up in the house while you get to run and play.”

  “It’s too cold to play outside, that’s what Nurse says.” Viola still had her head buried in the pillow and gave every appearance of planning to remain prone indefinitely.

  “She’s not wrong.” It was cold in the old house, too. Janie could see her breath in the air. There was a fireplace on one wall, a strange luxury for a nurse’s room, and a scuttle full of coal still by the side.

  And ashes in the hearth.

  Janie slid off the bed, kneeling on the hearthrug. Fragments of paper were scattered among the ashes. Janie thought of the scrupulously clean grates downstairs. This was a small room, all the way off to the side of the house, easily forgotten. It might merely have been overlooked in the cleaning.

  But there was the rumpled bed. And the paper in the grate.

  A piece of paper had drifted under the bed, unscathed. No, not paper. A picture. On her hands and knees, Janie fished it out from beneath the iron bedstead and found herself looking at Annabelle. But this wasn’t the Annabelle she remembered. Not Annabelle with her close-lipped smile and watchful eyes. This was a different Annabelle, with a bow in her hand and a quiver of arrows at her waist, laughing at someone just out of the frame of the picture.