Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 17

  The guests have been ushered into the drawing room for a glass of claret before dinner is served. When Annie walks into the room, a dozen people look up. She hears someone say, “That’s her. That’s the maid.” The talk stops. People lean forward, staring at Annie over their glasses of wine. She backs herself into a corner by the piano.

  “Miss?” Tess is in front of her with a tray of drinks. Annie takes one and Tess does a curtsy.

  “Don’t,” says Annie.

  Tess gives her a half smirk, half smile as she moves away.

  Annie drinks her wine too fast and then doesn’t know what to do with the empty glass. Around her the buzz of voices lifts and falls. Every time she looks up, someone else is staring straight at her, unabashedly, as though she herself was a photograph, a portrait and not a living person at all.

  “We have been offered a proposal of marriage,” whispers Isabelle. She is suddenly beside Annie, leans into her.

  “We have?” says Annie, so grateful Isabelle has finally rescued her that she almost doesn’t pay attention to what she is saying.

  “Shhh,” whispers Isabelle, her voice close to Annie’s ear. “He’s over there. See. Between Letitia Hill and that man with the gold watch-chain.”

  Annie sees an elderly man with curly white hair and an unusually large head. He has his hands on his knees and is staring intently at Annie and Isabelle.

  “He’s staring at me,” Annie says. “And he must be ninety years old.”

  “Well, he probably can’t even see you then.”

  “Are you serious?” says Annie. Surely Isabelle wouldn’t marry her off to that old man? He looks as if he can barely stand. “Did he actually propose?”

  “What would you like to say in response?”

  “No,” says Annie, a bit too loudly. A woman to the left of her turns her head at the sound of Annie’s vehement refusal.

  “Shhh,” whispers Isabelle again. Her breath is warm on Annie’s cheek. “Of course it’s no. I’ll go and tell him. He’s Archibald Stanford. One of the Stanfords. He collects portraits. He says he saw your image in the photograph of Humility and he fell in love with you, right then.” Isabelle looks across at Archibald Stanford, who is winking at Annie Phelan from the other side of the room. “It will give me great pleasure to kindly, but firmly, decline his generous offer of marriage. He has never thought me worth collecting before.”

  “Don’t leave me,” says Annie, in a panic. “Don’t go. They’re all staring at me.”

  Isabelle puts her arm around Annie’s shoulders. “Well, then,” she says. “Don’t take your eyes from me.”

  Annie watches Isabelle cross the room to Mr. Stanford. She walks slowly, has such poise doing something as simple as moving across a room. That is part of being a Lady, thinks Annie. The luxury of moving slowly. A Lady is not meant to have any worries, none that require her to hurry. It doesn’t matter if the beds need changing or Cook wants help. A Lady always leaves these small concerns to others. That’s what servants are for, the small concerns.

  Isabelle is talking to Archibald Stanford. Annie watches the graceful nod of Isabelle’s head. She sees Mr. Stanford slap the arm of his chair, as if he’s killing an insect. Then Isabelle lifts her head and stares straight at Annie. Don’t take your eyes from me. She’s making sure, thinks Annie, that this is what I’m doing, that I’m watching her.

  At dinner Annie finds herself seated between Robert Hill and a Mr. Drake. This is even worse than drinks in the drawing room. Now she is trapped, wedged in on either side, facing a confusing puzzle of cutlery.

  There are eight courses to dinner and Annie feels full right at the beginning, after the clear soup. She pokes at the main dish of roast pork, occasionally pops a boiled carrot into her mouth to keep up the pretence of eating.

  Cook serves the dinner. She is wearing a maid’s uniform for this duty, something Annie has never seen before. Tess is too pregnant to help serve. Annie can imagine Isabelle thinking that the puffy, stumbling pregnant figure of Tess would put everyone off their food.

  When Cook leans in to ladle Annie the turnips, she accidentally knocks Annie’s plate and sends a small rivulet of gravy down Annie’s borrowed dress. “Sorry Miss,” she says, her voice hard and flat. When Annie looks into her eyes she sees that Cook is closed to her. It is as if they’ve never known each other. It is as if Cook hates her now.

  “The Irish,” says a voice beside her. “It’s all the fault of the Irish.”

  Annie looks over at Robert Hill. What is he talking about? Luckily Eldon asks the question she is thinking.

  “What is the fault of the Irish?”

  “Everything,” says Robert Hill. “The great mass of them coming here and taking the jobs of Englishmen, relying on our benevolence. Even the cattle plague.”

  “What about the cattle plague?” says Eldon, his voice low and quiet.

  “I think the cows caught that plague from the Irish.”

  “The Irish died of starvation.”

  “How do we know that?” Robert Hill leans forward over his dinner plate. “Perhaps their sickness wasn’t caused by hunger, but was an epidemic. We were told it was hunger so we wouldn’t worry. And now the cows have caught it.”

  “What nonsense,” says Eldon. He looks at Annie and she stares back at him.

  “And who’s to say,” says Robert, getting carried away with his enthusiasm for his theory of the rinderpest, “that as many Irish died as we were told. Perhaps hardly any died. Perhaps none at all.”

  “My family died,” says Annie. She hadn’t meant to speak at all during this dinner, had meant to sit and be the living photograph Isabelle wanted her to be. But Isabelle, despite all her earlier promises never to leave Annie’s side during the evening, seems to have abandoned her completely during dinner. Robert Hill’s remark is the last thing she can bear. “My family died building a road for your government,” she says. “A road that went nowhere. A useless scheme for which they weren’t even paid.”

  The dinner guests are suddenly silent. Annie can hear the loud sounds of her own breathing, reeling in, reeling out. “Excuse me,” she says, and rising from her chair with some dignity, rushes from the dining room with none.

  She runs through the drawing room and out the doors to the garden. The cold air is balm to her nerves as she hurries round the side of the house. Laughter rises, like the scent of flowers, from the sunken windows of the dining room. How could she have agreed to attend the dinner? How could she have let herself be put on display like that? Did Isabelle really have the right to expect such things from her?

  “Phelan.” It is Eldon, rushing after her. “Phelan.” He is slightly out of breath when he catches her up.

  “Sir,” says Annie, “you didn’t have to leave the party on my account.”

  “I know,” he says.

  They’re standing by the lit window of the dining room. Outside their breath is cloudy in the cold night air. Inside, the charlotte russe is being served. Isabelle waves her arms, conducting the tempo of her dinner party.

  “Sometimes I think I married Isabelle because I wanted to be her.” Eldon watches the ease with which his wife draws all the attention to herself, sews up the space around her, the absence of himself and Annie. “Do you want that? To be like her?”

  Does she? Annie watches Isabelle through the window. She thinks of the glasshouse, how sometimes all she wants is for Isabelle to be looking at her in the way she does when she has all the hope in the world that whatever photograph she’s taking of Annie at the moment will be the answer that she wants. Don’t take your eyes from me. “That’s not it,” she says.

  They stand at the window, watching the dinner party go on without them. Eldon is glad to be away from the dinner. It is not that he doesn’t feel proud of Isabelle for her unexpected success. But her success makes him think about his own failures. In the drawing room, before dinner, when he’d been standing with Isabelle and Mr. Drake had come over and exclaimed about the photographs,
he’d felt glad for his wife, glad to see how pleased the praise made her. But when Mr. Drake had offered to exhibit all of Isabelle’s new work, without even seeing it beforehand, Eldon had felt the sharp teeth of envy at his throat. She was being rewarded for doing what she wanted to do. He was being stopped from doing what he had waited his whole life to do. There was no escaping the dismal comparison. And he has wanted so litde in his life. He has wanted to travel and then to be able to record where he has been. To go away. To come back. He has wanted to turn his face to the stars. To draw the line of his breath across a blank piece of paper. I was here.

  “You should go back in,” he says. “Phelan, they’ll miss you.” He puts a hand on Annie’s shoulder, squeezes it gently. “Isabelle will mind that you’re gone,” he says, and starts off down the path, away from the house, leaving Annie standing by the window.

  *

  The dinner party that Isabelle has meticulously planned and anticipated is not going very well at all. First Annie Phelan has bolted from the room, and now Robert Hill is holding forth on the limits of the photographic arts. Why has everything gone so horribly wrong? Isabelle looks around the table at her guests. Perhaps the sad truth is that she is only accepted within this society because she is the daughter of a Lord. They don’t care a whit about her identity as an artist. They are moved only by the status of the peerage. Why did she imagine that they would care about her gold medal from Dublin? And is that why Robert Hill went on about Ireland and drove Annie Phelan from the room? Because Isabelle’s award was from Dublin?

  “I fear that photography will be the death of painting,” Robert Hill is saying, loudly, to the dinner guests. “An art that depends so largely on technical skill and craft, on God-given talent, will be subsumed by a machine that practically anyone can operate with a litde instruction. We are entering a new and dangerous age when being an artist will not mean what it does now, when an image is quick and temporary, casual even, not something to be invested with meaning, to be laboured over and appreciated partly as a result of that labour. What will art mean,” he says, dramatically waving his cheese knife in the air, “when it is the property of anyone? When it is even the property of those so obviously beneath us? Of course, my dear Isabelle, you cannot help this. You aren’t responsible for what is to come.”

  Isabelle raises an eyebrow. “Am I not?” she says. What a pompous idiot he is. Afraid, she thinks. He is so afraid that she is at the beginning of what he is at the end of, that her success will ultimately mean his failure. “Am I not the future, Robert?” she says. “Isn’t that what you were saying?”

  Letitia Hill clasps a napkin to her mouth. She is either coughing or laughing.

  Robert hesitates for only a moment. He raises his glass of wine to the assembled guests, nods deferentially to Isabelle. “To the future, then,” he says, and drinks.

  As Annie slips back around the side of the house, back through the drawing-room doors, ready to go upstairs and hide in her room to avoid rejoining the dinner party, she hears voices. Crying. Wilks is trying to walk out into the hallway, but Tess has both her hands around his arm, holding on. Neither of them has seen Annie. She stops just inside the garden doors. Beyond Tess and Wilks are the closed doors of the dining room, the sounds of the dinner guests. The loud booming voice of Robert Hill.

  “Get off me,” hisses Wilks, shaking his arm, trying to dislodge Tess. “Get away from me, you fat cow.”

  “But you love me. I love you.” Tess’s second declaration comes out softer, like a whisper.

  “Won’t change anything. It’s not my child. I don’t have duties to you. If you hadn’t gone slutting after your last master, you wouldn’t be with child at all.”

  “He forced me,” says Tess, her voice a real whisper now. “You know that. I told you that.”

  “Could have been lies. It all could be lies. Everything you say. In any case, I want nought to do with you now.” Wilks uses his hands to firmly pry Tess’s fingers from his sleeve. He turns to walk out of the room.

  “I thought you cared for me?” says Tess. “Don’t leave me,” she cries, and throws herself onto the ground, grabs onto Wilks’s leg to stop him from walking out of the room.

  Annie has recognized the scene, the pose, this vocabulary for love and loss. Guinevere. It frightens her. It is powerful, what happens in the glasshouse. Isabelle is powerful, perhaps more powerful than Annie had thought.

  Wilks has surged free of Tess’s desperate grasp, and is out into the hall, is gone. Annie crouches down beside Tess, tries to haul her up, but Tess collapses into Annie’s arms instead, cries onto her shoulder.

  The baby is not Wilks’s after all. The real father is the master of the last house Tess worked in. Probably this is what made her leave that employ. Annie suddenly feels sorry for the baby, sorry for Tess. Annie rocks Tess slowly. “Hush,” she says. “Hush, now. Don’t cry. I’m here.”

  Eldon sits at his desk. When he was a boy, confined mostly to bed, coughing into a handkerchief and having to drink great steaming mixtures of foul-tasting liquids, he’d dreamed of travel. It was foolishness, he thinks now, nothing but romantic nonsense. He has read the field journal of a surveyor in the Canadian wilderness. He knows that the reality of that man’s life was nothing even close to the heroicism Eldon had imagined for him. Canadian survey parties were given rations unsuitable to the harshness of the northern bush where they worked. Flour would become saturated with water from an overturned canoe. Butter would go rancid in the heat. Half the time the survey party was starving. The other half they were so badly besieged by mosquitoes and blackflies that it was, as the surveyor had recorded, an agony of which leads men to madness. No matter how they smeared tar and paint on their bodies or swathed their heads in cloth, the insects crawled into their noses and ears, swarmed about their heads. It was impossible to breathe without swallowing them and the faces of the men would have been constantly swollen beyond recognition.

  If Eldon had been there, he would have wanted to get out. Never being able to see more than a few feet in front of him for the tangle of branches and swamp alders. Laying the heavy survey chain down across the forest floor, one sixty-six foot length at a time. The thick, thick heat of the summer pressing at him like so many hands. The flies. The rations spoiled and the men in the survey party restless with hardship. He would want to get away from that. The long climb alone with his clothes humid and filthy on his body, loose rocks of the screes skittering out from under his feet like nervous laughter. And perhaps there was one moment, near the top of the cliff, one moment before he fell from the sky. When he could see. For miles.

  Eldon gets up and goes over to his map table, flips through the stack of maps until he finds the one he wants. It’s the last map that this surveyor made. He finally was able to leave the closeness of the northern bush and was given the task of mapping the Great Lakes. The relief he felt at this change is evident everywhere on this map. Eldon lays a finger down and runs it slowly over the faint lines of ink. The compass rose is a spiky chrysanthemum. There are coastlines scalloped like holly leaves, islands as chiselled arrowheads. Lakes are river-tentacled, covered in grey spots and floating unattached to land, like large, bulbous soft-bag jellyfish. The scale is draped with a garland of flowers and vines. Lake Huron is called the Grand Lake of the Sweet Sea. This map makes Eldon’s breath burn in his throat. The cartographer loved this map, not as a record or a guide or a deed of ownership, but as a landscape itself. To shift the pen so carefully around the indentations of a bay. To draw the mountain ranges as thick lengths of rope. To have no explanations. To list latitudes observed as though they were migrating ducks, something seen overhead and fleeting, on wing. To say on the edge of the map, From this place to the fiery nation is forty-three days’ Journey. This map-maker felt the geography as a runner feels speed, a solid, tangible thing, bridged by the mind and crossed by the body.

  When the map-maker made this map he had no idea that it might be used, years later, as a guide to
the area’s minerals, so they might be exploited for profit.

  Terra cognito. The known world. Eldon stares down at his hand on the sheet of paper in front of him. It is a dangerous thing, making a map. If there is a pure curiosity, an authentic urge for discovery and knowledge, why is it that every map seems a precursor to some form of exploitation? Settlement or battle. When the cartographer stands on a high place and draws lines radiating out like spokes, like the rays of the sun, how can he doubt that where he is, is not the centre of the world?

  I am here.

  This is mine.

  And whether the idea of a New World is land, or love, the map is often the first step towards colonization. The voyage motivated by the desire for discovery. The map the proof of the voyage. Settlement or batde, the proof of the map.

  Eldon sits at the pivot point of an imaginary compass and wonders how straight it is in human beings, this line between discovery and conquest. How direct. The bearings of the compass. The compass of the heart.

  *

  Annie is hiding in her reading room, crouched down on the floor between the carriages, head resting on her knees, crying. She is still wearing Isabelle’s dress, couldn’t bear to face Isabelle to return it, as she is certain Isabelle will be angry that she bolted from the dinner party and never returned.

  It is late at night. All the dinner guests have gone. Tess is sleeping fitfully in their attic bedroom. The house creaks with night sounds, but is quiet of human noises.

  Annie doesn’t know what to do about Isabelle. She can’t hide here forever, will have to, at some point, go up to Isabelle’s room and present herself in order to return the dress. She’ll have to accept whatever blame or punishment Isabelle has decided to give to her. But it seems so unfair. Annie hugs her knees. If her family had lived, if she’d never had to leave Ireland, would she have ended up as a maid? It is as though another life has grown quietly beside her all the while she has been living this life, another life that might have been hers. In that life she might have been working on a farm, or even as a schoolteacher. She would have been Catholic, would have had a different God, or the same God approached from a different direction, up a different set of steps.