The Spider- Chapter 7&8

Confessions

Chapters 1-4|Chapters 5-6

Here are chapters 7 and 8 of my newest serial novel The Spider. Last week, you met the Bryant family as they settled into their new home in the city. This week, Frances comes clean about what’s bothering her.

7

Beatrice Larkin had arrived just after lunch on the Wednesday morning following Frances’ brief illness. On greeting her daughter in the hallway with a swift kiss on the cheek, Mrs Larkin’s first remark was about the ghostly paleness of her face. “You look dreadful, my dear.” She allowed Maggie to take her coat and hat and hang them up, briefly acknowledging the girl and immediately turning her attention back to Frances.  

“I have been unwell,” Frances said firmly. 

“You should have sent for me.” 

“I was asleep for most of it.” 

“John should have sent for me then.” 

“Perhaps,” Frances agreed, “but it is all in hand.” 

“It’s terribly lonely in that cottage with you and the little one gone. Don’t ever think you can’t send for me.” 

“I won’t, I promise.” 

“Where is your husband, anyway?” She craned her neck to look around the large, empty hallway. 

“He is out at a business meeting. He will be back for dinner.” 

Beatrice tilted her head, casting her heavy-lidded eyes down her stern face. “And my granddaughter?” 

“She will be back in an hour. She is still out at the park.” 

Beatrice harrumphed. “Did anybody know that I was coming?” 

“Of course. John is working. I thought we could have some tea together first.” 

She seemed pleased by the suggestion and followed her daughter into the parlour room where Mrs Mckinnon had just laid a tray of tea and cakes out. Frances hadn’t seen her pass, but the teapot was hot to the touch. 

“This is a fine house, Frances,” she said matter of factly as she sat down on the sofa and studied the decor with raised eyebrows. “I must say, I am impressed.” 

Impressed by what, Mother? The fact that John isn’t the cur you thought he was? Frances decided not to bite and instead, smiled at her mother as she poured tea into two china cups. “Thank you. It still feels like a dream to me.” 

“I’ll say. You must be rubbing shoulders with the gentry out here.” Beatrice plopped two cubes of sugar into her cup and stirred until she had a little terracotta whirlpool in her hands. 

“Not quite. At least, I haven’t met any of the sort,” Frances said, passing her the milk jug. 

Beatrice dropped no more than a splash into her cup and placed the small white jug back on the tray. “Have you met your neighbours?” 

“Some of them,” Frances shrugged. “We have a doctor, a couple of businessmen and a solicitor. That’s who I’ve met so far at church.” 

“What’s the church like?” 

“St Bride’s? It’s very good.” 

“Looks like a pagan temple to me– don’t slouch, Frances.” 

“I suppose it does, yes.” Frances, straightening, focused on her drink and desperately thought of something else that they could talk about. “Would you like me to give you a tour of the house?” she asked, not really wanting to move. She still felt exhausted. 

“I’d expect nothing less, dear girl,” Beatrice said with a wide smile. 

As they toured the Percy street home, Beatrice, unable to disguise her delight at the grandness of the house, made several approving noises accompanied by the occasional “oo” and “ahh” as she inspected ornaments and brushed her fingers across surfaces. “Isn’t it grand?” she asked at what seemed to Frances, every time they reached the next yard’s worth of house. Frances nodded, silently waiting in the hallway for Beatrice to see the bedrooms. 

Her mother stopped at the window of the master bedroom and eyed the church across the street. “It’s just a bit… different isn’t it?” 

Frances came to the window and looked down at the stone pillars that fronted the white building. “Yes, but it’s still a church inside. It has its pews and things, you know, all the bells and whistles you’d expect.” 

Beatrice let out an approving grunt and turned on her heel. “I take it the nursery is upstairs?” 

As soon as she had fixed her eyes on the nursery, Beatrice gushed. “Oh, Frances,” Beatrice said with her hands on her face, “it’s delightful.” Beatrice walked along the row of dolls and tapped the rocking horse. “How lovely.” 

Frances, relaxing a little, sat down on Elsie’s princess bed and watched her mother flit about the room, fiddling with toys and nosing out of the window. Frances, knowing that the view from Elsie’s window was no different to the view from her window downstairs, rolled her eyes slightly. “It’s only the same view, you know,” she said. 

“I know. Lovely though isn’t it?” Beatrice moved away from the window, crossed the room and stopped suddenly at the wardrobe on the partition wall, rubbing her arms as though she’d walked through a draught. “Cold over here.” 

“Is it?” 

Beatrice looked down at the section of floor that was warmed by the afternoon sun and shook her head. “Yes,” she said, turning to look at her daughter. “Like there’s a door open.” Frances looked around, feeling nothing. 

“There’s only one door. Sarah sleeps in there,” she said, pointing to the alcove that divided the room. Beatrice stepped into the space. 

“Warm in here.” 

Frances wanted to retreat. “How odd. Shall we go back downstairs?” 

“Just a moment,” Beatrice said, sticking her nose behind the wardrobe. “It’s cold behind here.” 

“Please don’t,” Frances said. “We should go back downstairs. John can move it. Please don’t hurt yourself.” 

Beatrice withdrew from her investigation and followed her silently out of the room, casting a look behind her in case of surprises.

“How long has John had this house?” she asked calmly, standing at the foot of the third floor staircase. 

“Only a few months. Why?” 

“How old is it?” 

“I don’t really know. Ten years or so?” 

“Hmm,” her mother said, folding her arms. 

“What is it?” 

“Probably nothing, my love.” She shook it off. “Probably nothing.” 

Later, after Beatrice had played with Elsie and insisted on helping Sarah to tidy up the toys, she came downstairs to dinner. Mrs Mckinnon had provided ample food for their special guest. “Well it’s just lovely. Thank you so much for having me,” Beatrice said, laying a napkin on her lap. 

“You are welcome, Beatrice,” John said, raising a glass. As he settled into his thirties, John Bryant was devastatingly handsome, even more so in a dinner jacket. Frances watched him charm her mother from across the table and smirked. Beatrice seldom had any words to say to her son-in-law outside of civil pleasantries, but she couldn’t get away with not smiling every now and then. He was magnetic. 

“You are looking very lovely, Beatrice,” he said. 

“Thank you, dear. I must say, I do love the house. You’ve done so well, young man.” 

“It is the least Frances deserves, I should think,” he said. 

Frances held her breath for a moment. There was, and she felt always would be, an awkwardness when it came to talking about her marriage, and his absence soon after Elsie’s birth. Frances, although now civil and in want of a relationship with her mother, still bore the emotional scars of her parents disowning her at twenty-one, when she ran off with John Bryant, a common farm labourer. Since she had met him, he had gone on to find his fortune first in the Australian wool trade and secondly, as a prospector. Her father, the vicar of the local parish, hadn’t approved of John’s proposal, and wanted him hanged for taking his daughter to Gretna Green in the summer of 1886. 

Unbeknownst to both Reverend Edmund Larkin and John Bryant, days before proposing to Frances, he had inherited a small amount of money originally intended for his late mother— an illegitimate daughter of the otherwise childless landowner she had worked for. She had died several years before the will had been enacted, leaving everything to her only surviving child, John. Frances felt it was more than ironic how the boy with noble blood was spurned by her parents, yet hosted her mother at his table as though she were his own. 

There was no need for Frances to fear. Beatrice agreed and, almost tearing up as she said it, declared that “you have given her the world, and for that I am grateful, John. I could not have wished for more from a son.” 

He had done it. After years of hard labour both in the goldfields and in the conversations with Beatrice Larkin, he had done it. Frances sipped her wine and smiled. All would be well. 

Later that night, Frances showed her mother to the guest room. Beatrice, having indulged herself in John’s tour of the drinks cabinet, adjusted her affections accordingly and squeezed her daughter in an embrace only a mother could give. 

“Ring the bell if you need anything from Maggie or Mrs Mckinnon,” Frances said breathlessly.

“I shall. But you must tell me something, and be truthful.” 

“What is it?” 

Beatrice stepped back and held Frances’ shoulders, looking into her face searchingly. “Do you believe this house to be haunted?” 

“What? What do you mean?” 

“Greenwood women have the sense, Frances. I thought it had skipped a generation with you but… but now I’m not so sure.”

Frances shook her head. “I don’t… I… haunted? Do you believe that?” She thought of the bird, the ornaments, the dolls, the dresses, the errant hair in the teacup, the sense that she wasn’t in her own home. Her chest tightened. “Mary,” she said. 

“Who?” 

“Elsie said something about someone called Mary. She said ‘Mary isn’t a doll, Mummy. She’s a lady,’ and I know that a small child can have a wild imagination but she said it with such conviction.” Frances shuddered. The dark is when she’s alone. 

“Well,” Beatrice began, brushing her skirts, “if you need me to do anything, you know that you simply have to send for me and I will be here.” 

“That won’t be necessary–” 

“I have been back to that nursery, Frances. Something is amiss in there. Sarah can’t sense it, else she would have told you. Elsie certainly can. That child has seen things.” 

Frances couldn’t deny it and dropped her shoulders with a deep sigh.  “Last night,” she said, “I wasn’t feeling very well and Mrs McKinnon– well, I thought it was her anyway– Mrs Mckinnon helped me up the stairs. Then I turned around and she wasn’t there. She was still in the drawing room. I felt a hand on my back and someone breathing heavily behind me.” 

Beatrice had sobered at some point during the conversation, looking at her with wide eyes. 

“What else has happened?”

“Well, nothing yesterday but… I don’t know, this house, it…” 

“Tell me again. Do you suspect that it’s haunted?” 

Frances, alarmed at her mother’s concerned directness, straightened. “Haunted?” 

Beatrice nodded. “You said about the bird, then the hand on the back, then the breathing. Tell me, Frances, do you think your home is haunted?” 

The word escaped out of Frances’ mouth before she could even think about her response: “Yes.”

8

Frances lay awake for some time before John came to bed. He had strongly encouraged his mother in law to sample the drinks cabinet with him and as a result, was also incredibly happy to see Frances. 

Whether it was the alcohol or the fact that they were still readjusting to living together, his body seemed strange to her, almost as though she hadn’t touched it before. Every time he touched her, she felt a buzz of electricity. “My mother is in the next room,” she whispered as he kissed her neck. 

“I know. Makes it all the more exciting, eh?” 

Any response she had thought to give had been reduced to a small gasp. She couldn’t refuse him. 

 His sinewy back muscles tensed as she writhed beneath him. Her body recorded every tender kiss that landed, making their marks on long-forgotten territory like lashings of rain on the sleek pavement outside. She fantasised then that she didn’t really know him; this made her enjoy the moment all the more. 

When they were finally too tired to go on, she lay in his arms and listened to his heartbeat. 

“What was it like in Australia?” she asked casually. 

“Hard work.” 

“I can only imagine.” 

“And let’s keep it that way. I don’t want these beautiful hands to ever harden.” He held her hands in his and kissed them. “I thought about you every day.” 

“As I did you.” 

“I even named a sheep after you.” 

“John!” she slapped his chest and rolled out of bed, slipping her nightgown back over her body. 

“I’m teasing,” he said with a deep, dry chuckle. “Although, some of the types I’ve met definitely would have… you know…” He raised an eyebrow. 

“Oh, that’s disgusting.” 

“Hardly any women out there.” 

“Really?” she curled up beside him and rested her head on his chest. He knew why she was asking. The tinge of disbelief in her voice betrayed her feigned indifference.

“Frances Elizabeth Bryant, you listen here,” he began, “Queensland could have been the capital of the entire female population and there would be none, not a single one, that could turn my head the way you do.” 

She laughed. 

“I mean it. I counted down the days until I could come back to you.” She looked up at him. “It’s rough out there. I wanted nothing more than to be here, but not until I could secure our future.” He brushed her hair away from her forehead. “I used the money that had been left to me to buy passage to Brisbane and a decent sized flock. Twelve months on, I was selling wool to Japan. The money earned itself after a time. A friend encouraged me to get out into the goldfields and… well– your bit of rough’s a gentleman now, ‘owd you like that?” 

“How did you come by the house?” 

“It’s not the most interesting of stories, but it was an elderly gent called Mr Ellman, who owns the shipping company. He sold it to me on the way home. Why all the questions, anyway, are you not tired any more?” he asked, stroking the outline of her hip with a finger, “because you just say the word and–” she laughed again and pushed him off. 

“I am tired. I suppose I just wondered if you wanted to talk about it.” 

“I swear to you, it was mostly uneventful.” She studied his eyes once more. She sighed and realised that if there were any lies hiding there, she would never find them.

After extinguishing the lamp at her bedside, she slipped down under the covers and leaned in to him, drifting off to sleep in his warmth. 

Her sleepiness didn’t last. Frances tossed and turned all night, finally waking when she felt tiny, cold splashes on her face. She lay on her back and opened her eyes, looking into the pitch blackness. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the darkness but the ceiling seemed as white as always. The curtains had been left open, letting the moonlight peer in. The shadows seemed longer, darker, more ominous. She looked up again to see a small black circle, widening with every blink. The splashes grew heavier, landing in her eyes and on her lips. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, only to find more to take the place of those that had been smeared. She sat up and reached for the matches in the bedside drawer; she lit the lamp on her bedside table. 

While she adjusted the intensity of the flame, the circle on the ceiling above her head was growing wider, losing its shape and spilling into a shadowy pool that began to gush. She felt it trickling down her back, soaking her nightgown. She turned around to look at it. It was blood. 

John woke to the sound of his wife screaming in the corner of the room. “Fan! What’s wrong?” he asked, almost shaking her. She pointed to the ceiling. 

“Blood. There was so much blood!” 

He looked in the direction of where she was pointing and shook his head. The ceiling was white, as were the blankets on the bed. He went over to them and smoothed his hands over the sheets. “They’re dry,” he assured her. She stood up and followed him to the bed. “Come back to bed. You’ve had a bad dream.” 

She lay down once more and looked up at the ceiling. There was nothing there.

Next chapter ⇢