The Wintering House · novella
4The Family Piece
By the end of November I had a liturgy, and I loved it, and I will set it down here plainly so that nobody may say afterwards that I was tricked.
At seven I rose in the dark and broke the skin of ice on my own ewer, because my room had no fire and never would. At half past I went along the gallery to the warm room and knelt at the hearth and fed the fire, a little coal at a time, on the grey heart of it, and blew, and waited, and had it red before the house was up. I changed the water in the mistress’s glass, which was never drunk. I set the fresh ewer and carried away the stale. I drew the curtain to the second fold and not beyond. I dusted about the walnut table and did not move it, and did not close the book, and after the first week I stopped looking at the brown shape on the eleventh sermon, the way you stop looking at a scar on your own hand. I said good morning to the bed. At eight I went down and ate a hot breakfast with the family, at a table laid for four, and was asked how she had passed the night, and answered — quietly, sir; she had a quiet night — and Mr Ravenscar would put down his cup and look at me with his tired grateful eyes and say that I was very good.
I was very good. That was the wage. I have been paid in money by nine households and I was paid at Wintering House in being told, at eight o’clock every morning of my life, that I was very good, and I would not have exchanged it for a hundred pounds a year.
Charlotte took to coming to the warm room while I worked, to sit in the chair by the fire — not her chair; that one was drawn up at its exact angle and nobody sat in it, ever — and to talk. She talked about the house as it had been. She talked about the winter of the great snow, and the summer the beck dried, and how her mother had once walked the whole ridge to Fellgate in a green dress and come back with her hem four inches in mud and laughing. She always spoke of her mother in the past, and always to the bed in the present, and moved between the two the way you move between rooms, without noticing the door.
And I noticed the door, every time, and I stepped through it after her, every time, and if you want to know how a woman of sense is ruined, it is not in a moment. It is in about forty mornings.
In the first week of December, Charlotte brought me a shawl.
She came into the warm room with it over her arm and shook it out, a great soft weight of grey wool with a fine dark border, worth more than every stitch I owned put together, and she put it round my shoulders herself and stood back with her head on one side.
“There,” she said, and her eyes filled. “Oh, Aldous should see. You’re not to catch cold in that gallery, you’ll be no use to us dead.”
“Miss Ravenscar — Charlotte — I can’t.”
“You can. It’s nobody’s.” She said it lightly, and she meant it kindly, and it was the plainest thing that had yet been said to me in that house. “It’s been in the press this age. She’d want it used. She hated a thing put away.”
She’d want it used. I stood in the warm room with a dead woman’s shawl about my shoulders, and above my head, one floor up, the woman it belonged to was to come down and take her place at the foot of the table just as soon as she was strong enough, and I said, “Thank you. I shall take great care of it,” and I meant that too, and I wore it every day after, and I have it still.
The cold clear part of me put up its head that morning and said, very reasonably: if she is coming down, why are they giving away her clothes?
And I folded it away. I have folded that part of myself away so many times in my life that the crease has gone permanent, and I could do it, by then, without breaking step; and what frightens me now — what frightens me still, at this distance, in a warm ordinary room with an ordinary fire — is not that I did it, but how little it cost me. A guilty woman argues. I did not argue. I simply preferred the shawl.
I did not sleep, the night of the eleventh, and towards two I took my candle down the gallery.
I have said the gallery was cold. It was more than cold; it was the spine of the house and it was dead all along, hearth after black hearth, and the wind came off the moor and got in under the sashes and walked in it. I went along in my nightgown with the shawl over it, telling myself I was going to look at the fire and knowing, in the honest cellar of me where I never went, that I was going to look at the picture.
The family piece hangs at the turn of the stair, above the second landing, and it is a great dark canvas of the kind that was painted everywhere fifty years ago, brown and varnished and glossy as treacle, and in an ordinary house you would walk under it your whole life and never see it. I had walked under it forty times.
I held the candle up.
They were all there. Old Mr Ravenscar, seated, dead these thirty years, with a hand on a book. Aldous at his shoulder, a boy of eighteen with the same grave courtesy already fitted to him like a coat. Charlotte on a stool at the front with her hair down her back, twelve years old and bright as a struck match. And in the centre of it, in a chair, a woman in a black gown with her hands folded in her lap: a big-boned handsome woman, high-coloured, with a wide, humorous, obstinate mouth, looking out of the brown varnish straight into my candle as though she had just that moment stopped speaking.
I had never seen her face before. There is no likeness of her anywhere else in that house — not a miniature, not a silhouette, not a sketch in a drawer. In the warm room where she lived there was nothing on the walls at all, and I had never once thought that strange until I stood in the gallery at two in the morning and understood that I had been keeping a room for a month for a woman I could not have picked out of a crowd.
And then, because the candle was low and I moved it, I saw the other thing.
Behind her chair, at the left, half in the brown dark, a woman was standing.
She was nobody. She was plainly dressed, plainly done, a grey woman of forty with her hands folded at her waist in the exact attitude of a companion being presented — and she was painted in a different hand. Once you see it you cannot unsee it: the paint sits differently, lies on the varnish rather than under it, and the drawing of her is stiffer and thinner and more modern than the drawing of the family, and the shadow she stands in is not the shadow the rest of the picture makes. She had been put in afterwards. Years afterwards.
I moved the candle again.
There was another beside her. Younger, in a blue dress, painted in yet another hand and with more skill, half a step behind the first, her hands folded at her waist.
And beyond her, at the very edge of the canvas where the frame begins, a third: a narrow, dark-haired woman, the paint on her still fresher than all the rest, so fresh that in the candlelight it had a different sheen, and she stood a little apart with her hands folded at her waist and looked out at me with a face that I did not think, then, was frightened, and that I know now, and shall always know, was.
And beside the third woman, between her shoulder and the frame, there was a space.
It was not brown varnish. It was not the dark of the picture. It was a patch of canvas that somebody had sized and grounded and left pale — smoothed, prepared, ready, the exact width of a woman standing — and it had been waiting there long enough to gather a fine grey bloom of dust along the bottom edge, and I stood in front of it in my nightgown with a dead woman’s shawl round my shoulders and my candle shaking and I did not need one word of explanation from anybody.
“You’ll want to come away from there, miss,” said Mrs Hale, behind me, in the dark.
I did not jump. I want that recorded too. I had got so far, in six weeks, that I did not even jump.
“Who are they?” I said.
She came up and stood beside me and looked where I was looking, holding her own candle low, and she was in her nightgown as well, and I understood that she had heard me go along and had got up and come after me, and had been doing that, probably, since the night I came.
“That’s Miss Pargeter,” she said, of the grey one. “That’s Miss Vane.” The blue dress. She was quiet a moment. “That’s Miss Loder.”
The fresh paint. The narrow dark woman with the folded hands.
“And where are they now, Mrs Hale?”
“They went,” said Mrs Hale.
“Went where?”
And she turned and looked at me, with her kind hands and her cold face and the candle under it, and she said, “I’ve told you all the true things I mean to tell you, miss, and I’ll tell you one more, and then you’ll not ask me again, because I’m an old woman and I want to die in a warm house.” She lifted her candle to the pale prepared patch of canvas. “It don’t get bigger,” she said. “It’s always been one.”
Then she went away down the gallery, and I stood there until my candle guttered.
At breakfast Mr Ravenscar was in high spirits, which in him meant that he spoke twice unprompted.
“Sowerby comes up from Lanthwaite in the spring,” he said. “He did the Fellgate people. Charlotte has been at me about it since Michaelmas.”
“I have been at you,” Charlotte agreed happily, “because it is wanted, and because the picture on the stair is a hundred years old and we are none of us in it as we are,” and she put her hand flat on the cloth beside my plate, not touching me, and looked at her brother, and then at me, and her bright brittle face was doing something I had not seen it do before, which was pleading.
“We should like you to sit, Miss Thorne,” said Mr Ravenscar. And then, with great care, as a man lays down something he has carried a long way: “We should like you in the picture, Agnes.”
The fire cracked. The fourth place lay laid and served at the foot of the table with its little spoonful of meat going cold on the cold plate. Upstairs, one floor up, the fire I had fed at half past seven was burning steadily in the only warm room in the house, for a woman whose face I had seen for the first time six hours ago in a picture where three other women stood behind her chair with their hands folded at their waists, in a space that does not get bigger, because it has always been one.
I knew. Let there be no mistake in this account, ever: at eight o’clock in the morning on the twelfth of December, sitting between them in the warm parlour with the good coffee in front of me, I knew.
“I should like that very much, sir,” I said. “It would be an honour.”
And Charlotte cried out and clapped her hands, and Aldous Ravenscar closed his eyes for a moment like a man setting down a great weight, and said, “Thank you,” in a voice that was not quite steady; and I went up afterwards to the warm room and fed the fire and said good morning to the bed, and then I went along to my own cold room and shut the door and sat down on the edge of the bed in my dead woman’s shawl.
And I cried. I want you to understand what I cried for. Not with fear.
I had been asked into the picture.