ALSO BY ARTHUR PHILLIPS
The Egyptologist
Prague
Angelica
Angelica
A Novel
ARTHUR PHILLIPS
f
ra ndom house
new york
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Arthur Phillips
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-601-6
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING - IN - PUBLICATION DATA
Phillips, Arthur.
Angelica: a novel / Arthur Phillips.
p. cm.
1. Spiritualism—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.H45A84 2007
813'.6—dc22 2006040632
www.atrandom.com
Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette
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Scientific examination of the spiritual or “occultist” experience demonstrates that haunting
can emerge from the forgotten depths of our
own past, and assume physical and externalized
form, now independent of the memories that
spawned it, as Athena sprang from the head of
Zeus, of him but at once free of him. Memories
and ghosts are not so easily distinguished as previous generations have assumed.
— S I R E V E RET T D’OYLY, 1 8 8 9
Contents
PA R T O N E
Constance Barton
PA R T T W O
Anne Montague
PA R T T H R EE
PA R T F OU R
Joseph Barton
Angelica Barton
1
145
199
307
PA R T O N E
Constance Barton
I
I
suppose my prescribed busywork should begin as a ghost story, since
that was surely Constance’s experience of these events. I fear, however, that the term arouses unreasonable expectations in you. I scarcely
expect to frighten you of all people, even if you should read this by
snickering candle and creaking floorboards. Or with me lying at your
feet.
So. A ghost story! The scene opens in unthreatening daylight, the
morning Joseph cast the child out of their bedroom. The horror tales
Constance kept at her bedside always opened peacefully, and so shall
hers:
The burst of morning sunlight startled the golden dust off the enfolded crimson drapery and drew fine black veins at the edges of the
walnut-brown sill. The casement wants repainting, she thought. The
distant irregular trills of Angelica’s uncertain fingers stumbling across
the piano keys downstairs, the floury aroma of the first loaves rising
from the kitchen: from within this thick foliage of domestic safety his
coiled rage found her unprepared.
“I have suffered this insult too long,” he said. “I cannot countenance a single night more of this—this reversal of nature. You encour-
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arthur phillips
age this upending of my authority. You delight in it,” he accused. “It
ends now. Angelica has a bedroom and shall sleep in it. Am I understood? You have made us ridiculous. Are you blind to this? Answer me.
Answer!”
“If she should, my dear, after all, call out for me in the night?”
“Then go to her or not. The question is of no significance to me,
and I strongly doubt that it is of any to her.” Joseph pointed at the small
bed, unobtrusive at the foot of their own, as if noticing it for the first
time, as if its very existence justified his cruelty. The sight of it refreshed
his anger, and he kicked it, pleased to see his boot spoil the bedding. He
had calculated the gesture to affect Constance, and she retreated. “Look
at me when I am speaking. Would you have us live as a band of Gypsies?” He was shouting now, though she had not contradicted him, had
never once in seven years contemplated such rebellion. “Or are you no
longer capable of even a single act of obedience? Is that, then, where we
have arrived? Move her before I return. Not a word more.”
Constance Barton held her tongue before her husband’s hectoring.
In his imperial mood, when he imagined himself most English even as
he strutted like an Italian bravo, reason could sustain no hope of gaining a foothold. “For how long would you have delayed this, if I did not
at last relieve you of the womanly decision?” Against the acquiescence
of her silence still he raved, intending to lecture her until she pronounced him wise.
But Constance would have been seeing farther than he was: even if
Joseph could deceive himself that he was merely moving a child’s bed,
she knew better. He was blind (or would feign blindness) to the obvious consequences of his decision, and Constance would pay for his intemperance. If he could only be coaxed into waiting a bit longer, their
trouble would pass entirely of its own accord. Time would establish a
different, cooler sympathy between them. Such was the fate of all husbands and wives. True, Constance’s weakened condition (and Angelica’s) had demanded that she and Joseph adapt themselves more
hurriedly than most, and she was sorry for him in this. She always intended that Angelica would be exiled downstairs, of course, but later,
angelica
5
when she no longer required the child’s protective presence. They were
not distant from that safer shore.
But Joseph would not defer. “You have allowed far too much to
elude you.” He buttoned his collar. “The child is spoiling. I have allowed you too much rein.”
Only with the front door’s guarantee that he had departed for his
work did Constance descend to the kitchen and, betraying none of her
pain at the instruction, asked Nora to prepare the nursery for Angelica,
to call in a man to dismantle the child’s outgrown bed and haul the blue
silk Edwards chair up from the parlor to her new bedside. “For when I
read to her,” Constance added and fled the Irish girl’s mute examination of her.
“Watch, Con—she will celebrate the change,” Joseph had promised
before departing, either failed kindness or precise cruelty (the child celebrating a separation from her mother). Constance ran her fingers over
Angelica’s clothing, which hung lightly in her parents’ wardrobe. Her
playthings occupied such a paltry share of the room’s space, and yet he
had commanded, “All of this. All of it. Not one piece when I return.”
Constance transmitted these excessive orders to Nora, as she could not
bear to execute them herself.
She escaped with Angelica, found excuses to stay away from the disruption until late in the afternoon. She brought her weekly gifts of
money, food, and conversation to the widow Moore but failed to
drown her worries in the old woman’s routine, grateful tears. She dallied at market, at the tea shop, in the park, watching Angelica play.
When they at last returned, as the long-threatened rain broke and fell
in warm sheets, she busied herself downstairs, never looking in the direction of the staircase but instead correcting Nora’s work, reminding
her to air out the closets, inspecting the kitchen. She poked the bread,
criticized the slipshod stocking of the pantry, then left Nora in midscold to place Angelica at the piano to practice “The Wicked Child and
the Gentle.” She sat across the room and folded the napkins herself.
“Which child are you, my love?” she murmured, but found only sadness in the practiced reply: “The gentle, Mamma.”
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arthur phillips
As the girl’s playing broke and reassembled itself, Constance finally
forced herself up to the second floor and walked back and forth before
the closed door of Angelica’s new home. No great shock greeted her inside. In truth, the room’s transformation hardly registered, for it had sat
six years now in disappointed expectation. Six years earlier, with his
new wife seven months expectant, Joseph had without apparent resentment dismantled his beloved home laboratory to make space for a nursery. But God demanded of Constance three efforts before a baby
survived to occupy the room. Even then it remained empty, for in the
early weeks of Angelica’s life, mother and daughter both ailed, and it
was far wiser that the newborn should sleep beside her sleepless mother.
In the months that followed, Constance’s childbed fever and Angelica’s infant maladies ebbed and flowed in opposition, as if between the
two linked souls there were only health enough for one, so that a year
had passed without it ever being advisable to send the child downstairs
to the nursery. Even when Angelica’s health restored itself, Dr. Willette
had been particularly insistent on the other, more sensitive issue, and
so—Constance’s solution—it seemed simplest and surest to keep Angelica tentatively asleep within earshot.
Nora had placed the chair beside the bed. She was powerful, the
Irish girl, more brawn than fat to have hoisted it by herself. She had
arranged Angelica’s clothing in the child-sized cherry-wood wardrobe.
Bleak, this new enclosure to which Angelica had been sentenced. The
bed was too large; Angelica would feel lost in it. The window was loose
in its setting, and the noise of the street would surely prevent her sleeping. The bedclothes were tired and dingy in the rain-gray light, books
and dolls cheerless in their new places. No wonder he had kept his laboratory here; it was by any standard a dark, nasty room, fit only for the
stink and scrape of science. The Princess Elizabeth reclined in a favored
position atop the pillows, her legs crossed at the ankle; of course Nora
knew Angelica’s favorite doll and would make just such a display of her
affection for the girl.
The blue chair was too far from the bed. Constance pressed her
back against it until it clattered a few inches forward. She sat again,
angelica
7
smoothed her dress, then rose and straightened the Princess Elizabeth’s
legs into a more natural position. She had raised her voice often at Angelica during their day out, barked sharp commands (just as Joseph had
done to her) when kindness would have served better. The day she was
destined to lose a piece of her child, the day she wished to hold her ever
closer and unchanging—that very day, how easily Angelica had irritated her.
This shift of Angelica’s residence—this cataclysmic shift of everything—coming so soon after her fourth birthday, likely marked the birth
of the girl’s earliest lasting memories. All that had come before—the embraces, sacrifices, moments of slow-blinking contentment, the defense
of her from some icy cruelty of Joseph’s—none of this would survive in
the child as conscious recollection. What was the point of those forgotten years, all the unrecorded kindness? As if life were the telling of a story
whose middle and end were incomprehensible without a clearly recalled
beginning, or as if the child were ungrateful, culpable for its willful forgetfulness of all the generosity and love shown to it over four years of
life, eight months of carrying her, all the agony of the years before.
This, today, marked the moment Angelica’s relations with the world
changed. She would collect her own history now, would gather from
the seeds around her the means to cultivate a garden: these panes of
bubbled glass would be her “childhood bedroom window,” as Constance’s own, she recalled now, had been a circle of colored glass, sliced
by wooden dividers into eight wedges like a tart. This would be the
scrap of blanket, the texture of which would calibrate Angelica’s notion
of “soft” for the rest of her life. Her father’s step on the stair. His scent.
How she would comfort herself in moments of fear.
A stuttered song usurped unfinished scales, but then it, too, stopped
short, abandoned in the midst of its second repetition. The unresolved
harmony made Constance shudder. A moment later, she heard Angelica’s light step on the stair. The girl ran into her new room and leapt
upon the bed, swept her doll into her arms. “So here is where the
princess secluded herself,” she said. “We searched high and low for Your
Highness.” She ceremoniously touched each of the bed’s dark posts in
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arthur phillips
turn, then examined the room from ceiling to floor, playing a prim
courtier. She visibly struggled to ask a question, moved her lips silently
as she selected her words. Constance could almost read her daughter’s
thoughts, and at length Angelica said, “Nora says I shall sleep here
now.”
Constance held her child tightly to her. “I am very sorry, my love.”
“Why sorry? Must the princess stay up with you and Papa?”
“Of course not. You are her lady-in-waiting. She would be lost upstairs.”
“Here she shall be free of royal worries, for a spell”: Angelica unknowingly quoted a storybook. She crossed to the tiny dressing table,
dragged its small chair over her mother’s protests, stood upon it to peer
out the front window. “I can see the road.” She stood on her toes at the
very edge of the chair’s scarlet seat, pressed her hands and nose against
the window’s loose pane.
“Please be careful, my love. You must not do that.”
“But I can see the road. That’s a chestnut mare.”
“Come to me, please, for a moment. You must promise me that if
you need me, you will not hesitate to call or even come and rouse me.
I will never be angry if you need me. It shall be just like it was, truly. Sit
upon my lap. Yes, the princess too. Now tell, are you pleased with these
arrangements your father has dictated for us or no?”
“Oh, yes. He is kind. Is this a tower, because of the window?”
“Not a tower, no. If it is a tower you desire, you slept in a higher
point with us, upstairs. It is I, up in the tower.”
“But you have no tower window looking at the horses far below, so
this is the tower.” So the child was happy.
“Will you not be frightened to be alone when you sleep?”
“Oh, Mamma, yes! I will! It’s very frightening,” and her face reflected the thought of her dark night ahead, but then brightened at
once. “But I will be brave as the shepherdess. ‘When the woods crow
dark / and by faint stars impale / God’s light leave its mark / then does
her heart wail / God’s light leave its mark. . . . When the woods crow
dark . . .’ ”
angelica
9
Constance smoothed the girl’s hair, touched the small soft cheeks,
brought the round face close. “ ‘When the woods grow dark / and by
faint stars and pale / does God’s light leave its mark / then does her
heart quail. But . . .’ ”
“ ‘But her faith’s like a lamp,’ ” Angelica interrupted proudly, but
then stumbled again at once. “ ‘And God . . . God slow, God sl . . .’ I
can’t recall.”
“ ‘And God’s love is brighter . . . still . . . than . . . ,’ ” her mother
prompted.
“Shall I see a moon through the tower window?”
II
A
ngelica’s excitement was unmistakable as night approached.
Twice she looked closely at Constance and said with great seriousness, “I am frightened to be alone tonight, Mamma.” But Constance did not believe her. Angelica claimed to be afraid only because
she could sense—for reasons beyond her understanding—that her
mother wished she were frightened. Her claim of fear was an unwanted
gift—a child’s scribbled drawing—offered in perceptive love.
Still, those transparent lies were the exception to her candid anticipation. Constance washed her, and Angelica spoke of the princess’s adventures alone in her tower. Constance brushed her hair while Angelica
brushed the princess’s, and Angelica asked if she could please go to bed
yet. Constance read to her from the blue chair, and in mid-sentence
Angelica uncharacteristically claimed fatigue, then sweetly refused her
mother’s offer to sit with her until she fell asleep.
“Should I leave the door open, my love?”
“No, thank you, Mamma. The princess desires her solitudary.”
Constance likely waited in the narrow hall, tidied the linens in the
armoire, straightened paintings, lowered lamps, but heard no protest,
only muttering court intrigue until that, too, faded.
angelica
11
Downstairs Joseph had still not returned. “Is all well in the child’s
bedroom, madam?” the maid asked.
“In the nursery, Nora. Yes, thank you.”
When Joseph did arrive, he did not inquire but assumed his dictates
had been smoothly instituted. He spoke of his day and did not mention
Angelica at all, did not even—as they extinguished the downstairs gas
and rose to the third story—stop on the second to look upon his child
in her new situation. His cold triumph was understood. “Angelica resisted the new arrangements,” Constance allowed herself in mild rebellion.
He showed no concern, seemed even to take a certain pleasure in
this report or, at least, in Constance carrying out his will despite resistance. She was curious if any description would inspire him even to
mere sympathy, let alone a retraction of the deadly orders. Besides, the
child’s actual satisfaction tonight was surely temporary, and Constance
wondered what sort of response he would offer when the child’s
courage finally broke, and so she said, “Angelica wept herself to sleep,
so isolated she feels.”
“She shall adjust, I imagine,” he replied. “No choice in the matter,
and where there is no choice, one adjusts. She shall learn this readily. Or
not.” He took her hand. New whiskers were emerging, a spreading
shadow at the edges of his beard. He put his lips upon her brow. He released her hand, rose to the basin and looking glass. “She shall adjust,”
he repeated and examined himself. “Further to all this, I have been giving thought to her education.”
It seemed he would not be satisfied with his victory today, as a dam
that has held for years before yielding to its first crack will then collapse
in minutes. “Surely there is no urgency to act upon that as well,” Constance attempted.
“Surely I might speak before you indulge your passion to contradict
me.”
“I apologize.” No longer regretting her lie, wishing only that his
child’s weeping could cause him any pain at all, she occupied herself
with a hairbrush.
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arthur phillips
“I have not concerned myself sufficiently with her education. She
has achieved an age where her formation as a thinking person should be
monitored.”
“You believe she has suffered under my eye?”
“You must not start at shadows, my dear. More of her father’s influence is necessary. I mean to give more thought whether a tutor is in
order or if she should go to Mr. Dawson’s. I will decide presently.”
“You would have her spend her days away from me? She is too
young.”
“I cannot recall opening a debate on the point.” He crossed to her,
took her hand. “The day may yet come when she considers me her
friend.”
“When she considers me her friend”: a familiar phrase, spoken as it
had been to a stationer’s girl not so many years before, though Constance had then had the face of a woman far younger. “You may in time
consider me a friend,” Joseph had said to the girl he meant to win.
And he gazed at her tonight, his desire unblinking. This then was
how rapidly he meant to breach their long-standing agreement—this
very night. Though the child wept below stairs (as far as he knew), he
would charge hungrily forward, no thought for Constance’s risks, betraying by his very appetite the absence of all tender love for her.
“I must look in on Angelica,” she said. He did not reply. “It is her
first evening separated from me. From us. She was upset. She will be a
bit adrift, you must be patient with her.” He did not speak—his intent
to charm her likely wrestling with his irritation—but he made no move
to stop her. “You are quite understanding,” she concluded, and left
when he turned away.
She sat below and watched Angelica sleep. Surely he could not intend so soon, so purposefully, to menace Constance’s safety. Surely a
fatal disregard for her was not possible. Yet he had long been losing interest in her; indifference even to her well-being could certainly result
from such extended coldness.
Constance returned when she felt certain he must be asleep. She
watched him silently from the threshold then lay down beside him. She