Chapter 14
The Widower's Daughter
Dorothea stood behind me at a respectful distance, holding a small bouquet of white chrysanthemums. She had not asked why we were visiting the cemetery.
Dorothea did not ask questions. It was one of her most useful qualities and the reason she had remained in my employ for four years.
A servant who does not ask questions is a servant who does not find answers, and answers are dangerous things in a household like mine.
The cemetery was empty at this hour. I had chosen the time deliberately: ten o'clock on a Tuesday morning, when the fashionable mourners had finished their visits and the working mourners had not yet begun theirs.
The paths were damp with overnight rain, and the frost had silvered the grass, and the headstones rose from the earth like teeth, row upon row of them, the dead of London arranged in neat alphabetical rows beneath a sky the colour of old pewter.
I had not visited the grave in two years. I did not visit it out of grief or duty or any emotion that could be mapped onto the expectations of normal human behaviour. I visited it when it served a purpose, and today it served the purpose I had designed for it.
I had told Sebastian about my mother at the Ouroboros.
The telling had been a strategic performance, constructed to produce a specific effect: the transformation of my image in his mind from calculating predator to damaged victim.
A woman who kills three husbands is a monster.
A woman who kills three husbands because she was raised by a mother who could not feel, in a household where emotion was treated as a tool rather than a truth, is a different creature entirely.
She is a product. She is a consequence. She is, in the language of the progressive thinkers whose journals Edmund's tutor sometimes left lying about the house, a victim of circumstance.
I was not a victim of circumstance. I was the circumstance. But Sebastian did not need to know that.
The next phase of the operation required that my mother's history become more widely known, not through direct confession but through the osmosis of social conversation.
London society operates on the principle that information shared privately becomes, within a matter of days, information shared publicly.
A sigh here, a reference there, a carefully placed word in the ear of a woman who cannot keep a secret, and within a week the story would be everywhere: Lady Ashworth's mother was in an asylum.
Lady Ashworth was raised by a madwoman. Lady Ashworth is, perhaps, not entirely well herself.
This last inference was the one I wished to encourage, because it was the one that would most effectively undermine any accusation Sebastian might bring against me.
A woman suspected of murder because of a pattern of inheritances is dangerous.
A woman suspected of murder because of a pattern of inheritances who is also known to be the daughter of a certified lunatic is not dangerous.
She is pitiable. She is tragic. She is a woman who needs help, not prosecution.
The legal system, for all its flaws, is uncomfortable with the prosecution of the mentally damaged, and the knowledge that I carried my mother's diagnosis in my blood would soften the impact of any charge and complicate any jury's willingness to convict.
I knelt before the headstone. The gesture was awkward, my knees pressing into the damp grass, the cold seeping through the fabric of my dress.
I placed my hand on the stone and let my head bow, and Dorothea, behind me, shifted her weight from one foot to the other with the discomfort of a woman who knows she is participating in something false and cannot say so.
Vivienne Blackwood. Born 1831. Diagnosed at the age of twenty-six, after the death of my father, with what the physician at Bethlem Royal Hospital called "moral insanity with hereditary features.
" The diagnosis was accurate, if incomplete.
Vivienne was not merely incapable of feeling.
She was incapable of understanding why feeling mattered.
She viewed the emotional lives of others the way a mathematician views an equation: as a system that could be analysed, predicted, and exploited.
She understood love as a chemical dependency.
She understood grief as a social performance.
She understood loyalty as a transaction, and friendship as an investment, and marriage as a contract whose terms could be renegotiated at any time provided one possessed sufficient leverage.
She had taught me everything.
I remember the lessons with the clarity of a mind that does not forget.
I was seven when she began. The first lesson was delivered in the drawing room of our house in Kensington, on a rainy afternoon when my father was away on business and Edmund was napping upstairs and the house was empty except for us.
Vivienne sat me in the chair by the window and stood before me with the stillness that was her hallmark and said, "Cecilia, you are going to learn something today that most people never learn. "
"Yes, Mama."
"People are predictable. They believe what they want to believe, they feel what they expect to feel, and they respond to stimuli in ways that can be anticipated and controlled.
Most people go through their lives governed by feelings they do not understand and cannot manage. You are not going to be most people."
I had not understood, at seven, what she meant.
I understood now. Vivienne was not teaching me to be cruel.
She was teaching me to be effective. In her worldview, and now in mine, the two were not synonymous but they were adjacent, and the adjacency was close enough to make the distinction academic.
The lessons continued for five years. She taught me to read faces, to identify the micro-expressions that reveal genuine emotion and the tells that expose performed emotion.
She taught me to modulate my own expressions with precision: the eyebrow raised exactly three millimetres to suggest surprise, the lower lip trembled at a specific frequency to convey distress, the tears produced on demand by a breathing pattern that stimulated the lacrimal glands.
She taught me to cry, and the crying was a technical skill no different from playing the piano or speaking French, and I mastered it with the same diligence I brought to all my studies.
When I was twelve, she was taken away. My father, who had endured her with the bewildered resignation of a man who did not understand his wife and had long since stopped trying, had finally been compelled to act after an incident at a dinner party where Vivienne had, in front of fourteen guests, calmly dismantled a woman's reputation with a series of observations so precise and so devastating that the woman had left the room in tears and never returned to society.
The incident itself was not remarkable by Vivienne's standards.
What was remarkable was that she had done it openly, without the subtlety she normally employed, and the openness suggested either carelessness or a desire to be caught, and my father, who was not a perceptive man, had recognised neither possibility and had simply acted out of social embarrassment.
The asylum was in Hertfordshire. I visited her twice.
The first visit, when I was thirteen, was a performance on both sides.
Vivienne sat across from me in the institutional parlour and smiled and asked about my lessons and commented on my dress and said nothing of significance, and I smiled back and told her about my lessons and complimented the institution's gardens and said nothing of significance, and the entire conversation was a charade conducted for the benefit of the attendant who sat in the corner, watching us with the suspicious attention of someone who has been told to watch.
The second visit, when I was fifteen, was different.
Vivienne was deteriorating. The medications the asylum administered had blunted her, not her intelligence, which was indestructible, but her energy, which had been the engine of her performance.
She was thinner than I remembered. Her hair, once a vibrant auburn like mine, had faded to a dull copper.
Her eyes, which had always been her most formidable weapon, were clouded with something that might have been medication or might have been the first encroachment of the heart condition that would kill her within a year.
"Cecilia," she said, and her voice was weaker than it had been, but the precision was still there, every word placed with care. "Have you been practising?"
"Yes, Mama."
"Show me."
I performed for her. I performed grief, the grief of a daughter visiting her mother in an asylum, and I performed it perfectly: the trembling lip, the bright eyes, the voice that catches on key words, the slight tremor in the hands that suggests emotion held in check.
When I finished, Vivienne looked at me for a long time, and then she smiled, and the smile was the most frightening thing I have ever seen, because it was perfect, and it was empty.
"You are better than I was," she said. "Be careful."
It was the last useful thing she ever said to me. She died eight months later, in the asylum, of heart failure, and they buried her in Highgate, and my father, who had not visited her once, paid for the headstone and did not attend the funeral.
I stood up from the grave. My knees were damp.
The cold had seeped into my bones, and I could feel it in my fingers and my toes and the small of my back.
Dorothea stepped forward and offered me the chrysanthemums, and I took them and laid them on the grave with the precise gesture of a woman performing a ritual she does not believe in.