But when I looked at the gowns again, it was only the cuffs that were touching, as if they were doing no more than holding hands, just as she had said.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I would call that holding hands, but if there are other things you would like, Nell, let’s see…’ She reached over to my gown again and took up the sleeve, folding it upwards so that the cuff rested firmly on the little yellow irises – the chest of her gown. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘that is how Vesta Tilley would want it.’ She looked at me squarely. ‘Isn’t it, Nell?’
I felt my face burn and found that I could not look at her.
‘Oh, come on, Nell,’ she said. ‘I am only joking with you.’
‘It is not a joke,’ I said quietly. ‘I have to go.’ I took a step towards the door but she grabbed my hand quickly.
‘Will you brush my hair?’ she said. ‘Like you did last time.’
‘I am not your maid!’ But the words were only in my head and I followed her silently back to the dressing table, the sting of tears in my eyes.
She sat down on the little stool and I stood behind her, taking up the silver brush, my cheeks still warm. I started to draw the brush through her long strands of hair. She winced a little as the silver hit the boning of her corset and I remembered the marks I had seen under her shoulder blades. This time was not like the last, for now her shoulders were completely covered by the childish blue dress and the jut of her collarbone and paleness of her skin were no more than a memory.
I looked into the mirror and saw that our reflections could not have been more different. The bonnet hugged my head like a white eggshell and my nose and chin seemed large with no tresses or fringe to soften them, and there was nothing to hide the scar on my cheek. Iris’s small nose and her deep, bright eyes made my own features look dull and clumsy in comparison. She was as delicate as any of the portraits of her mother, and I understood why Sam would want her over me.
My thoughts turned to that day at the stables of Waldley Court – of what I had seen and what I had not – and suddenly I thought I could see the outline of Iris’s face caught in the little window and the curve of her thighs as she drew up her petticoat, Sam’s fingers stroking the collarbone I had admired, then moving down to the jut of her breasts. But these were scenes that existed only in my imagination and I wondered why such thoughts had come into my head.
‘What is wrong with you?’ she cried, spinning round quickly, her hand clasping the back of her head and her face furious. ‘Why did you do that?’
I looked down to see the little silver brush in my hand, long tendrils of golden hair falling from the bristles. ‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered, but then I realised that I should not be, for I was the one who had been betrayed. ‘What will you do with your hair on May Day?’ I said trying to steady my voice. ‘My mother told me that we should talk about your hair, for she wants to make you a willow crown.’
She sighed and turned back to the mirror grumpily. ‘I expect it will just be loose,’ she said. ‘That is the way May Queens tend to have it.’
‘I am sure that my mother will have me wearing the bonnet again,’ I said.
‘You can still have some flowers on it though,’ she said more softly.
‘And you will have irises,’ I said managing to steady my voice at last, ‘but only the blue garden ones will be in season, and you will carry a bouquet, just like your mother does in that photograph.’ I pointed to the silver frame on the dressing table.
‘I suppose so,’ she said glumly.
‘I thought your father would want that kind of thing,’ I said. ‘After all, it is a photograph from when your mother was May Queen. It is so romantic. It has always reminded me of a print that I saw in a book when I was in school. It was a woman in white with flowing hair and flowers everywhere – the Lady of Shalott.’
‘You are right – it is supposed to look like the Lady of Shalott,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want to—’
‘But it is surely how a May Queen should look,’ I insisted.
‘My mother is not the May Queen in that photograph,’ she said shortly. ‘She is dead.’
‘Dead!’ I echoed. ‘But…’
I looked at the photograph again and I saw how the hair I had thought caught in a breeze was in fact fanned out over a pillow, a soft crease of fabric behind the woman’s neck. The eyes that I had thought gazing down at the posy, were actually closed, the lids above the fan of her eyelashes smooth and slack. What I had thought a pure complexion was no more than skin that was lifeless and drained of blood, and instead of irises in the posy I saw scented lilies to mask the smell of death.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I knew that people used to take these kinds of photographs of relatives after they had passed. I…’ I could not explain that this photograph was quite unlike the others of this type that I had seen. The corpses in such photographs were usually held rigid against the backs of chairs or propped up by relatives, their heads lulling and arms limp, and I always thought they looked creepy as if they had dropped dead unexpectedly in the middle of receiving visitors or a family party. Yet the photograph on Iris’s dressing table seemed to show nothing of death. ‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated.
But she turned to me, her face full of rage. ‘If you had listened in school and not got yourself expelled then you might have learnt that the Lady of Shalott is dead in those pictures,’ she yelled. ‘Just like how my mother is dead in that one!’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, my face burning, and then I felt the warm trickle of a tear on my cheek. ‘Shit!’ I muttered. ‘Oh, no, I did not mean to use that word. I meant to say…’
She stared at me for a few seconds, her face so pale that I saw the throb of the little blue vein on her temple, but then she let out a kind of breathless laugh, and I laughed with her as she passed me her handkerchief. Then she stood up from the stool and flung herself against me, wrapping her arms around me, and I heard the clatter of the silver hairbrush as it fell from my hand.
‘Oh, Nell,’ she said, but she did not have to say any more because only then did we realise why we had really been brought together. It was not what we had in our lives that united us, it was what we did not.
23
I was being watched; we all were.
With barely a week to go before May Day, Francis Elliot-Palmer had begun his observations. I would see his dark figure in the undergrowth behind the big black box, its glassy eye peering out from the dapple of leaves, or his black coat hunched behind a wall or tree, the limbs of the tripod mingling with his body as if they had become one. He did not hide, but I thought that he did not want to be seen, as if the people he observed were no more than animals – like the foxes he had recorded hunting in broad daylight or the horses that had been loosed on the common. He wanted to record real life. He wanted the truth.
Francis saw my mother’s bleeding fingers as she sat on the bench under the oak tree and twisted willow rods into the shape of the May crown. He saw the soot and bent nails scraped from the cobbles of the blacksmith’s yard and the freshly painted banners propped up against the wall to dry. He saw the tangled ribbons of the maypole and the muddied tracks circling its base. He saw the blue irises shrivel in the frost and the silhouettes of the dog-foxes who braved the daylight.