Page 52 of The English Wife

“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.

Janie sank back onto her knees, seeing the picture at once in both sepia and in glowing color. She had been there, too, hovering under the awning, doing her best not to be noticed. That had been at the Casino, that summer at Newport, that horrible, painful summer. Janie was meant to play in the archery tournament, but she had never been very good at it. She had ceded her place gratefully to Annabelle, who had won handily, receiving her trophy from a tight-lipped Carrie Rheinlander, the previous year’s champion.

“That’s my mama.” It was Viola, hanging over the edge of the bed.

“Yes.” Janie felt like she should say something more, so she added, “She won a trophy for archery.”

She had forgotten that about Annabelle. She had forgotten about that first summer. Or maybe it was merely because she couldn’t think of that summer without the pinch of remembered pain, the strain of having to smile and pretend not to mind while Anne paraded past with Teddy on her arm and a large sapphire ring on her finger. It wasn’t that she had wanted Teddy. She hadn’t. But there was no one who would have believed that if she had told them so. Except, perhaps, Annabelle.

Janie hadn’t minded Annabelle; she had been grateful to Annabelle, grateful to her for seizing attention, for giving people something else to gossip about. And it had seemed like Annabelle was everywhere that summer: splashing in the water at Bailey’s Beach, playing lawn tennis at the Casino, promenading on the Cliff Walk. She’d put them all to shame riding sidesaddle and danced her slippers to tatters. Her Paris dresses, breathtakingly à la mode, had inspired more than one woman to run to her dressmaker with orders for urgent modifications. But it wasn’t the clothes one remembered, not really. It was Annabelle, and the sense of vitality about her. Her vitality and the magic that seemed to surround her and Bay; the way they would look at one another, as though they were exchanging jokes no one else could hear.

Janie had been grateful for the advent of Annabelle, but she had found it very hard to be near them.

For the first time, she was struck with the oddity of it, the gulf between the Annabelle who had taken Newport by storm and the Annabelle who had lived with Bay at Illyria. Something had happened, something to change her. Annabelle’s humor had become more mocking, her vitality turned into something hard. And there had been the sense of a secret about her, something hidden.

An affair with Mr. Pruyn? Or the knowledge that Mr. Giles Lacey was just behind her, a threat to her and her children?