Mrs. Maudsley measured Isabelle against the picture in her mind. How many shades separate white from pale yellow? Where exactly is the borderline between slight and slim? How might a blow to the head affect a person’s memory? She wavered, then, seeing the emerald eyes and finding an exact match in her memory, decided.
‘Yes. That black beast that gnaws at my bones whenever he gets a chance. He loiters in corners and behind doors most of the time, because he’s afraid of these.“ She indicated the white pills on the table beside her. ”But they don’t last forever. It’s nearly twelve and they are wearing off. He is sniffing at my neck. By half past he will be digging his teeth and claws in. Until one, when I can take another tablet and he will have to return to his corner. We are always clockwatching, he and I. He pounces five minutes earlier every day. But I cannot take my tablets five minutes earlier. That stays the same.“
He had problems. Plenty of them—holes in the roof, cracked windowpanes, pigeons moldering away in the attic rooms—but he ignored them. Or perhaps was so far removed from the world that he just didn’t notice them. When the water penetration got too bad he just closed up a room and started using another one. The house was big enough, after all. One wonders whether in his slow-moving mind he realized that other people actively maintained their homes. But then, dilapidation was his natural environment. He felt at home in it.
‘May I have a word with you, sir?“ he asked, turning to Charlie. Charlie looked blankly at him, but the doctor took him by the elbow— ”The library, perhaps?“—and led him firmly out of the room.
Slowly I returned to my chair.
‘Yes. This is the person.“
For a moment the assembled group looked at the broken violin abandoned on the floor, and considered the lump that was forming on Mrs. Maudsley’s temple, but before anyone had time to respond to the theory, Isabelle appeared in the doorway. Slim and willowy, she was wearing a pale lemon dress; her haphazard topknot was unkempt and her eyes, though beautiful, were wild.
Reluctantly honest, the Missus murmured, “Yes,” and the doctor pressed his lips into a worried line.
‘No, it was just for a moment.“
‘The pills are here, look. And the glass of water. If I wanted to, I could put an end to it myself. Whenever I chose. So do not feel sorry for me. I have chosen this way because I have things to do.“
‘So. Let’s get on and do them, shall we? Where were we?“
I closed my book, slid my pencil into the spiral and stood up.
Baffled, she nodded her head, and the doctor’s wife rose to leave.
‘I thoughtyou said something about a wolf,“ I began.
At two o’clock three men came to the house, and they led Isabelle out to a brougham in the drive. She submitted herself to them like a lamb, settled obediently in the seat, never even looked out as the horses trotted slowly down the drive, toward the lodge gates.
And I left her alone with her wolf.
I had been engrossed in the story, and so it took me a moment to re-focus my eye from the prone figure of the doctor’s wife in the story to the storyteller herself. When I did I was dismayed. Miss Winter’s normal pallor had given way to an ugly yellow-gray tint, and her frame, always rigid it must be said, seemed at present to be girding itself against some invisible assault. There was a trembling around her mouth, and I guessed that she was on the point of losing the struggle to hold her lips in a firm line and that a repressed grimace was close to winning the day.
The twins, unconcerned, were drawing circles with their toes in the gravel of the drive.
Charlie stood on the steps watching the brougham as it grew smaller and smaller. He had the air of a child whose favorite toy is being taken away, and who cannot believe—not quite, not yet—that it is really happening.
She looked at me, very matter-of-fact, then relented.
‘Does she do this herself?“
From the hall the Missus and John-the-dig watched him anxiously, waiting for the realization to dawn.
‘My wolf,“ I thought I heard her say, but the effort to speak was enough to send her lips into a quiver. She closed her eyes, seemed to struggle to measure her breathing. Just as I was on the point of running to find Judith, Miss Winter regained control. The rise and fall of her chest slowed, the tremors in her face ceased, and though she was still pale as death, she opened her eyes and looked at me.
Tears glittered in Mrs. Maudsley’s brown eyes, but she was adamant. “Yes, a woman, slightly built, there on the chaise lounge. She heard the piano and rose up and—”
With her arms sprawled any old how, and her neat white handkerchief still tucked inside her watch strap, she looked as though there wasn’t a drop of life left in her. Little puffs of dust that had come up from the carpet when she landed fell gently back down.
‘I’ll be away for three days,“ I reminded her. ”I’ll be back on Thursday.“
There was no sign of a figure in white.
‘Well then, you see? It cannot be,“ the Missus interrupted her, and though her voice was sympathetic it was also firm. ”There is no woman in white. You must have seen a ghost.“
‘Miss Winter,“ I exclaimed helplessly, ”whatever is it?“
‘Nonsense,“ said the Missus, at once reassuring and dismissive. ”There is no woman in white in the house.“
‘Did you see her for long?“ Dr. Maudsley asked.
‘I’ll make the arrangements with the asylum,“ he told the Missus. ”Leave the transport to me. Will two o’clock be all right?“
As I transcribed from memory, Miss Winter’s voice seemed to fill my room with the same degree of reality with which it had filled the library. She had a way of speaking that engraved itself on my memory and was as reliable as a phonograph recording. But at this point, where she said, “There was no sign of a figure in white,” she had paused, and so now Ipaused, pencil hovering above the page, as I considered what had happened next.
‘The doctor’s wife. In the music room. With the violin.“
‘Of course. Once a week, or once every ten days, he adjusts the dose. Only never quite enough. He does not want to be the one to kill me, you see. And so when it comes, it must be the wolf that finishes me off.“
And then for the first time, John-the-dig’s voice was heard. “They do say that the house is haunted.”
‘Better…“ she said weakly.
I nodded. “All right.”
Still, a doctor’s wife apparently dead in the music room was a problem he couldn’t ignore. If it had been one of us… But an outsider. That was another matter. Something had to be done, although he had no notion of what that something might be, and he stared, stricken, at the doctor’s wife as she put her hand to her throbbing head and moaned. He might be stupid, but he knew what this meant. Calamity was coming.
In the drawing room the Missus and the doctor’s wife waited and pretended not to pay any attention to the sounds that came from the library. There was the hum not of voices but of a single voice, calm and measured. When it stopped, we heard “No” and again “No!” in Charlie’s raised voice, and then again the low tones of the doctor. They were gone for some time, and we heard Charlie’s protestations over and over before the door opened and the doctor came out, looking serious and shaken. Behind him, there was a great howl of despair and impotence, but the doctor only winced and pulled the door closed behind him.
‘But surely the doctor—“
That was that? The words were a curiously understated endnote to the disappearance of Miss Winter’s mother. It was clear that Miss Winter didn’t think much of Isabelle’s abilities as a parent; indeed the word mother seemed absent from her lexicon. Perhaps it was understandable; from what I could see, Isabelle was the least maternal of women. But who was I to judge other people’s relations with their mothers?
From that moment, forgetting his wife, it was Isabelle the doctor attended to. He looked at her closely, kindly, with worry in the back of his eyes while he asked her question after question. When she refused to answer he was unrattled, but when she was bothered to reply—by turns arch, impatient, nonsensical—he listened carefully, nodding as he made notes in his doctor’s pad. Taking her wrist to measure her pulse, he noted with alarm the cuts and scars that marked the inside of her forearm.
There she lay for a good half hour, until the Missus, back from the farm where she had been to collect eggs, happened to glance in at the door and see a dark shape where she hadn’t seen a dark shape before.
‘Could this be the person you saw?“ the doctor asked his wife.
She had not the time to appreciate that the white-robed figure was brandishing a violin, and that the violin was descending very quickly and with great force toward her own head. Before she could take in any of this, the violin made contact with her skull, blackness overwhelmed her and she fell, unconscious, to the floor.
The car reached the lodge gates and disappeared through them. Charlie continued to stare at the open gates for three, four, five seconds.
And we continued our work.
The girls looked up from their toe circles for a moment, then returned impassively to them. John-the-dig tightened his lips and turned away, heading back to the garden and work. There was nothing for him to do here. The Missus went to Charlie, placed a consoling hand on his shoulder and attempted to persuade him into the house, but he was deaf to her words and only snuffled and squeaked like a thwarted schoolboy.
I rose from my chair in alarm but had no idea what I ought to do.
The Missus sent John-the-dig for the doctor and in due course the doctor arrived. And it seemed for a while that premonitions of disaster were ill-founded, for it was found that the doctor’s wife was not badly hurt at all, barely even concussed. She refused a tot of brandy, accepted tea and after a short while was as right as rain. “It was a woman,” she said. “A woman in white.”
Charlie wasn’t used to dealing with problems.
And that was that.
Then his mouth opened. A wide circle, twitching and trembling, that revealed his quivering tongue, the fleshy redness of his throat, strings of spittle across a dark cavity. Mesmerized we watched, waiting for the awful noise to emerge from the gaping, juddering mouth, but the sound was not ready to come. For long seconds it built up, accumulating inside him until his whole body seemed full of pent-up sound. At long last he fell to his knees on the steps and the cry emerged from him. It was not the elephantine bellow we were expecting, but a damp, nasal snort.
The Missus and John-the-dig avoided exchanging a glance.
