‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He likes things like that.’ I saw that she was wearing the navy blue dress with the white trim again and I realised now that it was the same dress that her mother had worn in the photograph that sat on the desk in the study, the one in which she posed with a bucket and spade. It was a childish dress that fell well above her ankles, and would not have looked out of place with a bonnet. I realised then why Sir Howard had never found my bonnet strange in the way that everyone else did.
I looked out of the long window and down on to the little lawn where my mother and Sir Howard had set deck chairs out on the grass by the sunken fence and were shielding a page of a book from the glare of the sun.
‘The weather is nice,’ I said. ‘Will you not be riding over to Waldley Court today?’
But she did not pick up on the real meaning of my question, nor the hint that I knew of her affair. ‘I can’t ride today,’ she said. ‘My father will not allow it anymore.’
‘Why is that?’ I asked. ‘Are you still ill?’ But she did not look ill; as I studied her reflection, I saw that her cheeks were now quite rosy.
‘It comes and goes,’ she said, but only that. She stared into the mirror, our eyes meeting in the glass, and I looked away quickly. ‘In fact, I am starting to feel a little queasy again,’ she said. ‘You do not seem quite yourself either, Nell. Maybe it is best that we are alone up here so that we don’t infect others with our ills. Won’t you tell me what is wrong because your voice is strained and you will not look at me?’
A shrill laugh drifted on the breeze and I glanced out of the open window to see my mother’s hand reaching out from under a parasol and patting Sir Howard’s sleeve.
‘I’m fine,’ I said but there was a catch in my voice that showed I was not. I cleared my throat. ‘I think I am just under the weather with a cold that is going around,’ I said with some effort. ‘Would you like me to get you something if you think you might become unwell again? You will have some liver salts around somewhere – my mother got them from the chemist for you.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I have not had any of those. I did not know we had any. Maybe my father forgot about them.’
‘I gave them to Dora,’ I said. ‘Maybe she put them in the bathroom cabinet.’
I left her without further word and headed for the bathroom, locking the door behind me and breathing heavily. I found the liver salts in the medicine cabinet but the tin was already empty.
There was a brown paper bag alongside the tin, like the one my mother had given me from the chemist, but when I looked inside there were no liver salts, just a little glass bottle of pills. They were small, white and round and I remembered the ones that her father had urged her to take – the ones she said made her feel worse. I picked up the bottle and looked at the label. There was a name – Doctor Young’s Purification Pills – but nothing to indicate what the bottle actually contained, just a few more words printed in a small banner: ‘Cures female irregularities and obstructions’.
I thought of girls who were small and delicate, like Iris, and of the swooning women in the novels that I read. I was not sure what an obstruction was but I fancied it meant something like a clot or swelling that would block blood flow or breath. Suddenly I wondered if Iris’s illness might be serious.
I returned to the bedroom empty-handed. ‘It seems you have run out of liver salts after all for I couldn’t find any,’ I said. ‘There were just some pills, white ones.’
She groaned. ‘No. My father has me taking those – they don’t seem to work.’
‘Then why does he insist you take them?’ I asked.
She hesitated, a strange expression on her face. ‘I think he is desperate to cure me, so he thinks anything is worth trying. I suppose that he fears me dying,’ she said. ‘The way my mother did.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
Then she laughed. ‘He is just fussing, but still he fears it. I see him wringing his hands and watching over me all the time.’
‘But just because your mother died, it doesn’t mean that the same will happen to you,’ I said. ‘Does it?’
‘No, I suppose not,’ she said quietly. Then her mood seemed to brighten. ‘We should cheer ourselves up. Dora has left our gowns on the bed; we should go and see them.’
‘Our gowns?’ I repeated.
‘I mean our nightgowns,’ she said. ‘Your mother brought them both over last week.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.
But she had already stood up and was walking over to the bed, so I followed.
The long white nightgown that my mother had been embroidering lay flat on the counterpane, the full sleeves crossed over the chest like a corpse in a romantic painting. Next to it was my own nightgown, plainer, yellowed and made only of linen compared to the fine cotton of Iris’s gown, but lain out in a similar way. Next to each nightgown was a frilled petticoat – Iris’s embroidered with yellow flowers to match her nightgown, while mine was faded and plain. The fabric of the nightgowns had been ironed flat, with neat creases at the seams and I fancied that they looked like dead bodies that had been interred together – the May Queen and her attendant lying side by side.
‘No!’ I said. ‘I don’t want this.’
‘But your mother said that you would—’
‘She did not ask me because she knew I would say “no”!’
‘Please, Nell,’ she said. ‘You must. We thought that it would cheer you up. Anyway, you must do it for me because the other attendants are Emma Flanagan and Rosalie Harris – they are both just twelve years old, and Rosalie still has gappy teeth! I will look foolish among them – my father thinks I am still a child. If I can show people that I have an attendant who is my age, a friend, then I might just bear it.’
‘No,’ I said again. ‘I…’
But she reached across the bed and took a sleeve of her nightgown in each hand, uncrossing them and placing them at the sides of the garment. The she leant over further and did the same to my nightgown.
‘There,’ she said. ‘That looks better, we look happier now and not so much like corpses.’
‘I still don’t—’
‘Then how about this?’ She looked at me and smiled then took the sleeve of her dress and pulled it across the counterpane towards mine so that the fine lace of her cuff lay on top of my rough linen gown.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘Put it back!’
‘What’s wrong?’ She laughed.
‘You know what I mean!’ I cried. ‘The hand of your gown is touching my…’ but I did not know what to say next as I could not speak words that I did not know. I remembered how we had ridden together and she had put her hands on my waist and hips, and suddenly the memory warmed my blood again.
‘Take it off,’ I said firmly.
‘They are only holding hands!’ she protested.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You have put them that way to make it look as if your hand is reaching to my…’ But again, the words did not come. ‘You did that on purpose. You…’