Afterimage Read online

  Helen Humphreys

  Afterimage

  A Novel

  Dedication

  for Mary Louise

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Guinevere

  Ophelia

  Sappho

  Grace, Humility, Faith

  Member of the Expedition

  Madonna (mortal)

  Madonna (divine)

  Cosmographia universalis

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  International Acclaim for Afterimage

  Author’s Note

  P.S. Ideas, interviews, & features

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Guinevere

  Annie Phelan hurries along the lane to the Dashell house. The coach from Tunbridge Wells let her off on the main road and she is to walk the last half mile by herself.

  It is June. The narrow lane announces its summer inhabitants with Annie’s every step. A magpie! A bee! The dry clicks of insects busy in the hedgerow. It is so different from London. There, the clatter of people and carriages was constant, though sometimes, at night, when Annie was walking home from reading classes she would hear the soft, tumbly voice of a nightingale calling in the Square. In London, the horizon was stacked with buildings, and the air was rheumy with coal smoke. Here, the sky is huge and blue, uncluttered.

  All the long journey down from London Annie has imagined this walk, has imagined that the lane to the house will be rutted and dusty, that the house will suddenly appear as she rounds a bend, that it will be magnificent and stately. Perhaps a little decrepit. Like Thornfield Hall, she had thought in the coach. She has recently finished Jane Eyre, again, and this is how she has imagined a country estate.

  And just as she had imagined, the Dashell house becomes visible as Annie rounds a bend in the rutted, dusty lane. She stops walking. There it is, looking much more decrepit than magnificent. Huge and sprawling, but definitely neglected. The bushes out front are straggly and tall, block out some of the downstairs windows with their green, swaying bulk. The stone on the upper storey is crumbly with age. A sign on the gatepost says Middle Road Farm. The last two words are obscured by brambles.

  Annie stands there, in the lane, looking at the distant house, feeling apprehensive, wishing really that she could just keep walking down this lane, that the house would just keep appearing around every bend. She needs more time than this to arrive here fully. The moment she enters that house, sees the rooms, meets Mrs. Dashell, all her imaginings of this will stop and what is real will fill that space completely. In a few steps, in a few brief moments, this world will be exchanged for that one.

  Cook has a crown of flowers in her hair. Eldon sees it when she leans over to serve him the vegetables.

  The slick surface of the table looks watery in the weak window light, slopes away from him to Isabelle, at the other end, reading her book.

  “Who are you this time?” he says to Cook.

  She reddens. “Abundance, sir.”

  “Abundance?”

  Isabelle looks up from her book. “After the bountiful harvest,” she says helpfully.

  Eldon bends his head over his plate of underdone turkey, which has been hacked from the bone in rough, stringy wedges. There’s the whicker of the clock being wound in the hall. A bract of vines at the window. The cut heads of roses float in a crystal bowl, one turning slowly in the whispery light, bumping against the others, turning like a compass disc towards the thought of North.

  *

  Annie Phelan waits in the drawing room. In her hands she holds the newspaper with the advertisement in it, and the return letter from Isabelle, because she might need these to prove she should be here. In the Dashell house the red velvet curtains are drawn back and tied, fall in heavy, pleated braids to the floor on either side of the window. There are oil paintings on the walls, all portraits except for one over by the piano—cows in a field, hills in the background. The sun behind the hills has swept the grasses gold. On a side table by the door is a porcelain figurine of a naked man. Annie smoothes the front of her good lilac cotton morning dress, plucks at the stray threads of her plaid shawl. Her one shawl. In summers she cuts it through to a single layer. In autumn she sews it back together again.

  The door to the drawing room crashes open and Isabelle swoops into the room, the flounces of her long dress brushing the porcelain figurine off the side table and onto the rug. She doesn’t bother to pick it up.

  Annie Phelan bows her head.

  “Oh, don’t do that,” says Isabelle irritably. “Sit down. You’ve come a long way. No need to stand.”

  “I’m fine, ma’am.” Annie is used to the measured, careful movements of her former mistress. Mrs. Gilbey would never knock anything off a table. Annie eyes the naked figurine on the floor. It is lying face down on the rug. Should she go over and pick it up? The curve of its back looks like a small, white wing.

  “Suit yourself.” Isabelle strides across the room to the window, strides back again. Her dress makes a breeze. Her tall body carving cleanly through the still air. Her quick movements unnerve Annie. She has not expected Mrs. Dashell to be as young as this—middle-thirties—and so full of energy. Her dark hair is pulled back, secured untidily in a knot with what look to Annie like hat-pins. It is as though Mrs. Dashell has done her own hair, and done it by grasping it with one hand and stabbing it into submission with the other. “You’ve come from London?” Isabelle asks, as she strides back towards the window. “Remind me.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Portman Square. I worked for a Mrs. Gilbey there.”

  “And why did you leave her employ?”

  “She died.”

  Isabelle stops pacing, stands in front of Annie, and, for the first time, really looks at her. She sees a dark-haired, scared-looking girl of perhaps twenty, in a worn-out grey dress. Her skin still milky with youth. “I’m sorry,” she says. She feels exhausted by having to conduct this interview, each useless question she utters wrests precious strength from her body. “It’s just that I don’t like my day’s work to be interrupted.”

  “But”—Annie waves her evidence of newspaper and letter—“you wanted me to come today. Now. After the noon meal.”

  “Did I?” Isabelle glances out the window, where her real life is waiting for her return. “How can I be expected to remember what I wanted.” She turns back to Annie. “What’s your name?”

  Annie has two names. In Mrs. Gilbey’s house she was called Mary, because Mrs. Gilbey always called her maid Mary, no matter what her given name had been. Those were the rules of Mrs. Gilbey’s household. Maids were called Mary. Cooks were called Jane. Annie almost forgot her other name, living with Mrs. Gilbey. Now she is trying it on again, something that used to fit but now feels strange to her.

  “Annie,” she says.

  “Annie what?”

  “Annie Phelan.”

  “Irish?”

  Annie hesitates. In the newspaper she holds in her hand are hundreds of advertisements for servants of all types. Some of the notices ask for “No crinolines,” because the popular dress style takes up too much space in a room and interferes with a maid’s ability to light a fire and sweep out a hearth. Many of the ads specify “No Irish.”

  “Yes and no,” she says finally.

  “And what does that mean?” Isabelle feels impatience rising in her again. She doesn’t sound Irish at all. In fact, she speaks surprisingly well for a servant.

  This is not like Jane Eyre, Annie thinks. When Jane first arrived at Thornfield Hall she was welcomed by Mrs. Fairfax in a very generous and hospitable way. Mrs. Fairfax wasn’t impatient and snappy. Mrs. Fairfax sat knitting by the fire, a cat curled co
ntentedly at her feet. Jane was treated like a visitor. Jane was offered a sandwich.

  “What?” says Isabelle again, waving her hand. Annie is shocked to see that her fingers are all stained a hideous black.

  Annie closes her eyes for an instant and tries to pretend that the sharp features of Mrs. Dashell are really the soft, kind features of Mrs. Fairfax. “Born Irish. Raised English,” she says slowly. “My family died in the hunger. My parents. My brothers. I was given to the Cullens, who were making the passage over here. They took me because I was small enough to carry, but couldn’t keep me because they had children of their own. So they left me in a workhouse and Mrs. Gilbey took me from there when I was nine years old.” Annie takes a deep breath. It is the most she has said in days.

  Isabelle watches Annie Phelan recount her brief life. There is something in her face that opens when she tells her story,this story that Isabelle has heard so many times before, different versions from different Irish famine victims, but the same story. But what is different this time is the face of Annie Phelan as she tells her tale, how the expression shows the emotion so completely. Sadness, fear, shyness—it is all right there, all that feeling at once—and this is something Isabelle has perhaps never seen before. Or only once before, long ago, in another world entirely.

  “My parents raised money to help the Irish Relief,” Isabelle says. “You have nothing to fear from me there.” She walks back over to the window. The noon light is high and harsh. Objects outside the room seem transparent. The tin pail on the flagstone path. The apple tree. “The position is housemaid,” says Isabelle. “I can pay you twenty-five pounds per annum, paid quarterly. It is what I pay the other servants. We have a cook, a laundry-maid, and a gardener. You may have an afternoon off every week and a Sunday off every month. You must make your own dresses or have them made, but we will pay for the material.” She pauses. The light is flattening the apple tree, she thinks. Stepping on it. “Can you read and write? I already have a cook who can’t, and the new laundry-maid seems stupid as a brick. Am I to be completely surrounded by imbeciles?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Annie says to Isabelle’s back. “No, ma’am. Yes I can read and write.” She almost mentions Jane Eyre, but stops herself. Perhaps Mrs. Dashell, like Mrs. Gilbey, doesn’t approve of novels.

  “Oh,” says Isabelle. “I really can’t do this any more. Come here.” She beckons Annie over to the window. “Look,” she says, tapping the glass. “There’s Wilks, the gardener.”

  Annie sees a leg poking out from behind a potting shed.

  “He doesn’t do a stick of work,” says Isabelle. “He’s a terrible gardener. Cuts the heads off all the flowers. Hides all day down by the cabbages. Nothing but trouble.” She sighs, a long drawn-out fluttering sigh. “I hired him because he has a gorgeous back. All sinew, and broad as this county.” She looks hard at Annie Phelan, the grey of her eyes, the slighdy down-turned mouth. If I hired you because you are beautiful, she thinks, would I be sorry?

  Annie climbs the narrow stairs to her room at the top of the house. She has never slept up high before. At Mrs. Gilbey’s she slept in a narrow room off the kitchen, on a cot. The room was once a broom closet. In the early days, when there was a Jane, Annie would be up and in her morning dress by six a.m. to clean and blacken the kitchen range and grates. Later, when Mrs. Gilbey could no longer afford to keep both a Jane and a Mary, Annie would be up even earlier as she now had to take on all of Cook’s responsibilities, in addition to her own.

  Annie is to share an attic bedroom with Tess, the new laundry-maid, who started work with the Dashells the week before Annie. The room is large, has two dormer windows. Annie puts her carpetbag down on the bed by the right hand window. The bedroom is at the back of the house, and when Annie looks out the window she can see down into the garden, all the way to the orchard behind the old stone wall. She sees Isabelle hurrying along the path, her arms full of black cloth. She disappears into a glass henhouse near the garden wall and then Annie can see the cloudy shape of her moving about inside. From above, through the glass, Isabelle looks like the dark shift of flame in a hearth.

  Annie unpacks her belongings, hangs her other morning dress and her maid’s black afternoon dress in the vast wardrobe, stuffs her underthings into an empty drawer. She picks up her Bible and goes down to the kitchen. Cook is making bread, her hands and forearms are coated with flour.

  “You sort yourself out all right?” asks Cook.

  “Yes, missus.” Annie stands against the larder. The Bible is a box of words she holds against her chest.

  Almighty Everlasting Grace

  Cook looks up again in a few minutes, surprised. “What are you doing still here?”

  “I’ve come for the afternoon prayers.”

  “Prayers,” Cook snorts. “That’s a rich one. Prayers, indeed.”

  “Did I miss them?” Annie is confused. “Were they earlier?”

  Cook rests on her knuckles, leans over the table towards Annie. “There are no prayers here,” she says. “It is not allowed. The Dashells are not believers in such foolishness. That’s what they call it, ‘foolishness.’ No going to church. No God. Now, out with you. The Lady wants you to take the afternoon to get acquainted with the house. You’ll have no cleaning duties today.” Cook pounds a fist into the slab of dough on the table. “And mind,” she says. “You are not to go into Mr. Dashell’s library and disturb his work. And neither are you to go near the glasshouse in the garden.”

  Annie climbs slowly back up the staircase to her room. She sits on her bed holding on to the Bible, the hard brick of it solid in her hands. At Mrs. Gilbey’s, God was everywhere. There were morning, afternoon, and evening prayers. On Sundays there was church and three evenings a week Annie would copy out Bible verses from memory to practise her handwriting and Mrs. Gilbey would correct her spelling and grammar. It was God who taught Annie to read in the first place. The reverend of the nearby church gave reading and writing lessons to maids, and Mrs. Gilbey had sent Annie there when she was a young girl. There was safety in those words she grew up reading. They could be depended on.

  God was the sky. With no words to keep the world together, the sun would burn through, brighten everything to black. The lace of apple trees. The flicker of Isabelle moving inside the glasshouse.

  “What are you doing?”

  Annie looks up to see a plump, red-faced girl in the doorway. The girl walks over and stands right in front of Annie, glares down at her. There is sweat on her forehead and upper lip. Her hands, on her hips, are bright red. “That’s my bed,” she says. “That one you’re sitting on.”

  Annie gets up quickly. “I didn’t know,” she says.

  “Well, you should have known.” The girl doesn’t move, remains solidly in front of Annie.

  “Tess?” Annie feels that it is a bit hopeless now to ingratiate herself with her new roommate, but she has to try. “I’m the new housemaid, Annie Phelan. I am pleased to be meeting you.”

  Tess doesn’t alter her stance or expression. “My bed,” she says.

  Annie retreats to the other bed and carefully puts her Bible under the pillow. “There,” she says, because Tess is still watching her suspiciously. “This is my bed. This one. Over here.”

  The Dashell house is full of rooms attached, each to each, through other rooms, as though the builder needed new space immediately and desperately, had no time for such niceties as hallways. The farther away from the main part of the house, the plainer the rooms become, some are even steps down from the level of the preceding rooms. Annie realizes that some of them were perhaps once even outbuildings.

  Annie wanders through the strange, unfolding rooms, each one like a pause in a long, rambling story, a place to draw breath before continuing on. The dark furniture, the lavish velvet drapes, the paintings and rugs all seem vaguely sinful compared to Portman Square.

  At the very back of the house, in one of the farthest rooms, Annie finds a collection of baby equipment—carriages, c
radles, a trunk full of clothes, a rocking horse. She puts her hand on one of the carriage hoods. The carriage sways in great, squeaky wheezes. When she takes her hand away her flesh is coated with dust. No one has spoken to her of children. She has seen no evidence of them in the house. Why is there this room full of dusty prams and moth-eaten receiving blankets? It feels to Annie as though she has been the only living thing in this room for years and years. She pokes at a doll lying tangled with other dolls in a box on top of a steamer trunk. The doll’s eyes snap open and Annie jumps. The eyes flick closed again.

  Annie is unlikely ever to have children of her own. She is unlikely, if she remains in service, even to marry. Sometimes it is possible for a maid to take a male servant in the same household as a husband. Annie thinks of Wilks, of the leg poking out from behind the potting shed. She shakes the leg of the doll again and the eyes fall open and stare at her, unblinking, blue as a morning sky.

  The rest of the house is not as sinister. Rooms for dining. Rooms for receiving visitors. To the right of the sitting room where Annie first met Mrs. Dashell is a long hallway, a wing that, like everything else, seems to have been built on as a kind of rash afterthought. Annie wanders down the hallway, hands out to touch the cool walls on either side of her. At the end of the passage a door is ajar. Annie pushes it slowly open, enough to peer inside. Books are layered from floor to ceiling. The density of them like strata in a glacial bluff. Annie has never seen so many books in one place. The small library in the reverend’s house in Portman Square was no match for this one. Near the end of her time in London, Annie was afraid that she’d have to start again in the reverend’s library, start back at the beginning, at the first book she’d borrowed from him.

  There is no one in this forbidden library and Annie pushes the door completely open and enters. A huge oak table piled up with sheets of paper dominates the centre of the room. There’s a desk near one set of bookshelves, and a free-standing globe, almost as tall as Annie, beside the desk. But it is the books Annie is interested in. She stands in front of the shelves, greedily reading the titles of these volumes she has mostly never seen, or heard of before. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The Last Days of Pompeii.