She smoothed it with uncertain fingers before, feebly, she began to take it apart.
First the cloth came free and fell to the floor. Harriet’s stomach contracted at the crude shape of the body beneath, the legs, the arms, so clumsy and yet so terrifyingly human.
Frances, her gaze as blank as ever, began to crumble the wax beneath her fingers. She started with the legs, then the arms. Tears began to trickle weakly down her cheeks.
Annis said, “She’s crying. Frances is crying.”
“I see,” Harriet said. “That hasn’t happened before, has it?”
“No, but… Oh dear God, Aunt Harriet. It’s so awful. She’s aware. She knows what’s happening, but she can’t—she can’t do anything about it.”
They watched, helpless, as Frances scrabbled at the torso of the poppet, unsteadily crumbling it into bits. When Frances reached the head, Annis gasped.
Harriet peered at her. “Do you feel something, Annis?”
Annis’s voice was thin. “In a way I do. I feel—it’s odd, Aunt Harriet, but I feel her sorrow.” Her fingers fluttered up to her throat, where the moonstone rested. “It hurts her,” she said. “She has lost everything, and it hurts her.”
“Oh, Frances,” Harriet said, shaking her head. “Poor Frances.”
Frances gave another moan, a thin, formless sob. Her tears were tiny dull droplets that carved crooked paths down her face. With a convulsive movement, she tore the tuft of hair from the wooden bead that formed the manikin’s head and dropped the bead into her lap.
There was no human shape left at all now, no hint of what the figure had been, nothing left but a little gray mound of shredded wax. Annis gently wiped the tears from Frances’s cheeks.
The second manikin soon followed. It seemed Frances needed no prompting, though her fingers fumbled blindly at the task. Her whimpers grew louder, and Harriet had the sickening feeling she wanted to speak, to say something about what she was doing, perhaps about what she had done. The sounds never became words. Frances was locked in her body as surely as if she were shut into a prison cell.
It must be, Harriet thought, a living hell.
They watched Frances pull apart James’s manikin, much as she had Annis’s. She fumbled the bead that represented his head, with its painted eyes and curl of fair hair, dropping it to the floor. It rolled out of sight under the bed.
When it was done, Frances’s head lolled against the high back of her armchair. Her tears had stopped. Her eyelids drooped as before, and her mouth sagged open, as if the brief moment of energy had never happened.
“Can you help her, Aunt Harriet?” Annis asked in a small voice.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I’ll do all I can.”
“I’ll be back to help,” Annis said. “We’re going to Seabeck after the wedding, but I’ll be back in the fall to work with you.”
“I will look forward to that.” Harriet struggled a bit to get to her feet, feeling stiff and old and tired. “Why don’t you gather up all that wax, and we’ll dispose of it in the herbarium. I’ll fetch Velma so we can get to work.”
She found Velma hovering in the corridor, awaiting her summons. When they came back into the bedroom, Annis was just folding the linen over the remains of the manikins.
Harriet forgot all about the bead that had rolled under the bed. When she came back for it, later in the day, it was gone.
49
Annis
James wired his mother, and Lady Eleanor sailed posthaste to New York to be present for the wedding, arriving at Allington House with all the dignity and fuss of a great ocean liner claiming her berth. A lady’s maid and a footman and dozens of trunks and hatboxes and suitcases trailed in her wake, a show of status that would have made Frances weep with envy. Lady Eleanor held out one black-gloved hand to George Allington, and in a gesture that made Annis’s eyes widen, he bent over it as if they were in Victoria’s court.
Lady Eleanor began her visit with her customary icy demeanor but thawed swiftly in the warmth of her host’s easygoing hospitality. Annis, though she was up to her chin in dressmakers and florists and bakers, watched this with bemusement.
“My father,” she told James, on a day when they managed to escape for a ride through the park, “is quite taken with Her Ladyship.”
“My mother has that effect on people,” he answered. “When she chooses.”
“I like her very much,” Annis said. “I believe, once we’re married, I will address