Crimson Peak: The Official Movie Novelization (15 page)

Maybe my mother tapped inside her coffin
.
Perhaps the mirrors in this house were not hung with black crepe when the dead expired
.

The thoughts came unbidden, and they threw her. They were evidence of a fevered imagination. Perspiration beaded on her forehead and upper lip.

Lucille was still waiting for an answer.

“I’m still exhausted.” Which made little sense, really. Someone who was exhausted would fall asleep easily, would they not? She determined to change the subject. “That piece of music. What is it?”

“An old lullaby,” Edith replied. “I used to sing it to Thomas when we were little.”

A much more welcome topic of discussion.

“I can imagine the two of you in here as children. You playing, Thomas coming up with his inventions.”

Lucille’s eyelids became hooded as she raised her chin. Her expression grew faraway. “We were not allowed in here as children. We were confined to the nursery. In the attic.” She spent a moment in that other place, seeing things that Edith could not, and Edith had the sense that Lucille was holding tightly to precious memories that she did not wish to share. Edith had imagined that the two of them would giggle together over stories of Thomas as a young mischievous boy, forging bonds of family and history. But so far, Lucille had maintained firm possession of all her reminiscences as tightly as the household keys, and Edith felt rather locked out.

Lucille went on. “Mother had this piano brought from Leipzig. She played it sometimes. We’d hear her through the floor.” She swallowed down another emotion. “That was how we knew she was back in the country.”

That seemed so sad. Wouldn’t a mother rush to their children, throw open her arms, and gather them in? Perhaps playing was her special way of announcing her return, like a secret code between the three of them. Her own mother’s playing had been a sort of code:
Do not fear. I am near.

Edith had compassion for Lucille then. Of course she would be possessive of Thomas. They had only had each other to turn to. It must be difficult for Lucille to stand aside. Edith was expecting too much too soon.

Lucille motioned toward a large painting of an unsmiling, elderly woman with leathery skin stretched over a narrow, skull-like face. She had the coldest eyes Edith had ever seen, and her mouth was set in an angry, stern line. Lucille seemed to falter as the two gazed at it, and then she collected herself.

“Mother,” she said.

Edith was shocked. The woman seemed more like a grandmother or a maiden aunt. Thomas had told her that their mother had passed when he was but twelve, nearly the same age she had been when her own mother had died. And her mother had been young and beautiful.

Until the black cholera. I know what she looked like now. I saw her.

And I saw something last night, as well.

There. She had said it. Admitted it. A pall fell over her.

“She looks…” Edith ventured, and had no idea how to courteously proceed.

“Horrible?” Lucille asked bitterly. “Yes. It’s an excellent likeness.”

Edith approached the painting and read a small brass label set into the frame: L
ADY
B
EATRICE
S
HARPE
. Then she noticed the huge garnet ring on the ring finger of the withered left hand. It was the engagement ring Thomas had given her. It was on her hand now. She glanced down at it. Yes. The identical ring. It unsettled her.

“Thomas wanted us to take it down. But I didn’t want to,” Lucille said. “I like to think she can see us from up there. I don’t want her to miss anything we do.”

Was that a smirk? Lucille smiled at the painting as if she and that evil-looking woman were sharing a private joke.

“This is, I think, my favorite room in the house,” Edith said, both to change the subject and because it happened to be true.

“Mine, too.” Lucille smiled briefly, but it was a warmer smile than she had favored her mother’s portrait with. “I read every book I could find. Specifically entomology.”

“Insects,” Edith filled in.

“Insects, yes. Jean-Henri Fabre. There’s nothing random about insects. And I admire that. They do what needs to be done to assure their survival. Even their beauty and grace are only means to ensure their species—”

“Are these all your books?” Edith asked quickly.
Anything to stop her talking about how moths eat butterflies
, she thought.

“Mother selected most of these. Had them brought from afar. She was not very mobile, you see. So the world needed to come to her.”

Thomas hadn’t mentioned anything like that, but then, he had been quite circumspect when discussing their parents. She had assumed at the time that he didn’t wish to bring up an indelicate subject so soon after her father’s death. The English were far more indirect than Americans. One had to listen for subtleties. Edith didn’t mind. She could listen to Thomas talk all day. Perhaps she could find a more discreet way to bring up her experiences in the house. If she could get him to talk about the house’s legends and ghost stories, perhaps, or its past. Who had died here, and how… and why.

As she considered that, she skimmed a few of the titles of the dozens if not hundreds of books, recalling how she had done the same thing in Alan’s ophthalmology practice. It had crossed her mind a number of times to write her old friend, but it didn’t seem proper. She was certain now that he had entertained hopes, and as such, he was—had been—her husband’s rival for her affections. It would not do to correspond with such a person, no matter what place he had held in her earlier life. It would be disloyal.

And yet, she wished that etiquette decreed otherwise…

“
Oratory of a Pilgrim
,” she read off the spine of one of the volumes.

Lucille almost grinned. “Sounds quite virtuous, doesn’t it?” She paused as if for dramatic effect. “Have you heard of a fore-edge illustration?”

Edith shook her head, and Lucille took the book. “They are images hidden in the book’s fore-edge, carefully dissimulated as a pattern until you bend the pages so…”

She bent the side of the book so that it curved, revealing a colorful painting of a Japanese couple in flagrante delicto—performing sexual acts upon each other. Edith was nonplussed.

“Oh, my. Are all the books…?” The books that Thomas’s
mother
had ordered?

“Surely that can’t shock you now?” Lucille said. “Now that Thomas and you…”

Edith shook her head. She was actually beginning to feel close to Lucille. It was good to have another woman to talk to.

“No, no. He was so respectful of my mourning. We even traveled in separate cabins.”

Lucille seemed to brighten at that. Or perhaps she was amused.

“How considerate,” she drawled. “Well, my darling. In time, everything will be right.”

Those were comforting words if they were true.

They will be my lullaby
, Edith thought, and smiled at Lucille. But the other woman had returned to her playing, and so did not see the smile. Edith glanced back up at the portrait of Lady Beatrice Sharpe, and was very grateful that so dour-looking a woman had not survived to become her mother-in-law, no matter how uncharitable that was.

L
UCILLE CONTINUED HER
playing, and Edith went back to the bedroom, to discover that Thomas had dressed and gone out. She put on one of her favorite gowns, a dark green velvet with pumpkin appliques, and put up her hair. It was inconvenient, to say the least, to do without a lady’s maid. She thought of home. Annie already had a new position; all the Cushing servants did. Her family’s residence would soon be sold, and everything in it.

I wish that I had saved my picture books
, she thought. Perhaps she could write Mr. Ferguson in time to stop their sale.

Edith settled in front of her typewriter to work on her novel, but the day passed drearily without Thomas and she found herself easily distracted.

As the day wore into dusk, Edith gazed through the window and saw her husband with Finlay and a couple of men from the village at the base of his harvester. She knew what she was looking at. She had grown up around similar apparatus. There were actually several machines on the grounds, quite enormous, the derrick-like poppet head towering over all of them. She made out the drill and the harvester, the several conveyer belts, one placed beside an oven intended to bake the clay into brilliant bricks such as the one Thomas had shown off in her father’s meeting room. The lumpy, industrial chaos was out of place in the yard of the great old house. A hodge-podge. But looks could be deceiving. The chaos reigned in the house. The arrangement of the equipment was actually quite efficient and logical, and would yield the best results once the new clay shales could be extracted.

Thomas was a visionary, a man who could see things that others did not. She reminded herself that he loved her, and that he was her husband, and his duty was to protect her. She would go to him. Perhaps she could make sense of her own visions by asking him about the history of the house.

Alerted by her rumbling stomach, Edith went down to the kitchen and nibbled a piece of bread and jam as she made some sandwiches, helping herself to rye bread that had gone a bit stale, cold ham, and cheese. Her stomach was not much better, and she was beginning to get a headache so she brewed some of the terribly bitter firethorn tea. Steadfastly, she packed a hamper and went outside.

Snowflakes fell gently from the steel-gray sky. The air was briskly chill, and she knew that the hot tea would be most welcome. The dog trotted briskly, bounding into and out of the snowdrifts, and Edith watched Thomas hard at work on the full-scale model of the machine he had demonstrated in Buffalo. Had Father not been so overly protective of her, he would certainly have funded the invention.

“Edith, my sweet,” Thomas greeted her. He was attempting to connect a part of the machine with the rest of it. By the look of frustration on his face, it wasn’t going well. “What are you doing here?”

“I want to see you,” she answered. “I need to talk to you.”

He looked from the machine to her. Finlay appeared to be stoking the engine. They were both very busy.

“Of course, of course,” Thomas said.

“I don’t know where to begin.” She took a breath. “Thomas, has anyone died in this house?”

His answer was a quizzical smile. “Of course, darling,” he said. “What manner of question is that? The house is hundreds of years old. I would venture that many souls have come and gone.”

“I understand,” she said patiently. “But I’m talking about specific deaths. Violent deaths.”

He blinked. “This is not a good moment, Edith. This infernal contraption won’t start. It’s a complete fiasco. We’ve been at it all afternoon.”

He returned to his task. But she would not be deterred.

“Can we take a moment, Thomas?” she said more urgently. “I brought you some sandwiches and a bit of tea.”

“Tea? You made tea?” He made a little face and returned to his work. She recalled a comment he had made while in Buffalo—that Americans had no idea how to make a proper cup of tea. It had something to do with boiling the water or steeping the leaves just so. “What tin did you use?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What tin did you use?” he repeated. “The red or the blue one?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s all the same, isn’t it? Tea is tea.” Well, except for if one was English, she supposed.

“Try it again, Finlay,” Thomas told his man.

Finlay stoked the fire on the steam engine and turned a valve. The machine rattled. Some gears gyrated a little bit but then spasmed violently. Edith was reminded of the bathtub taps and, despite being thwarted in her desire to speak with him, she crossed her fingers that this tremendous racket would resolve. Thomas grabbed onto a valve and held tight.

Work, work
, she told the machine.

The rattling increased tenfold, and still her husband did not let go. Then sprays of hot water and steam began to jet from seams between the pipes, then from the valve itself. Thomas held on tightly, trying manfully to hold the machinery together with his bare hands. She could see that it was hurting him. Yet he held it fast. His face was growing red from the exertion. Then a geyser of steam hissed violently, spraying Thomas’s hand; he jerked back, pale face twisted in anguish as he screamed.

* * *

With Finlay’s help, Edith conveyed Thomas to the kitchen. He was covered in red clay that looked like blood and she fought to remain calm as images of her dead father swirled through her mind. Even with the clay cleaned off his right hand, his skin blazed scarlet from his burns.

As was the case in many English country homes, the Sharpes kept a larder of salves and remedies, and Edith dutifully applied what was brought to her to tend her husband. She was reminded of Cook once mentioning to her that back in Ireland, they used honey for burns. In her mind she saw the ants crawling all over the butterfly during their promenade in Delaware Park, and she pushed away that macabre image as well.

“That should do it,” she told her beloved patient as she finished bandaging his hand.