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Alan McMichael is a friend, but he is also a doctor. He sets Edith’s bones, he stitches the cut on her cheek. The night they spend in the village is quiet and without incident. She seems uncomfortable about sharing the post office bed with him, which he respects. He takes the armchair without complaint. When he wakes that night, it is to the sound of her tossing in the bed. She murmurs her husband’s name.
He has learned over the years to put himself aside. Her husband loved her, he knows, but it was a violent, self-consuming love. A weight that pulled him headlong into his own destruction. His own love is an explosion, or like ripples in water after a stone is dropped in. He’ll neglect himself, as long as Edith is happy. He knows she doesn’t need him to, though. They’d been friends long before Alan had ever admitted to himself that his feelings went far beyond casual affection. He knows her so well. And he certainly knows better than to insult her by helping her when she has no need of it.
Her murmuring grows louder, her tone fevered. In the darkness, he sees one hand fly out to the side as if to touch something, or hold something back. Standing carefully to avoid aggravating the clumsy wound in his side, he goes to the bed and kneels just as carefully. She wakes immediately when he touches her hand.
“Where am I?” she mutters.
“You’re in the village. At the post office.” He tucks the covers more closely around her. “You’re quite safe, I promise.”
“You won’t leave me, will you?” she asks.
“No. I will be right there, in that chair, should you need me.”
“Thank you.”
He presses a chaste kiss to her forehead and turns to return to his armchair, but she says from the bed --
“I’m sorry I brought you here.”
She is as stubborn as anything. Alan knows she will never listen to him if he insists that none of this was her fault. Still, he tries.
“The ones who should be sorry are gone.” He touches her shoulder gently. “They cannot touch you, Edith. Go to sleep. I’ll be here when you wake tomorrow.” Edith shifts and seems to squint in the near-darkness at the clock on the wall.
“It is tomorrow,” she says finally.
“Sleep anyway.”
The next time he wakes, weak sunlight shines through the gap in the curtains and falling in a pale slice across the bed. The light just brushes the tip of Edith’s chin as she stirs. Alan stands gingerly.
“How are you?”
“Sick,” she says, pressing a hand to her belly. She had been lent a nightdress by the postmaster’s wife, Rachel. The villagers had led them inside yesterday evening, talking amongst themselves in confusion, wondering at their wounds, at the blood and red clay sprayed across Edith’s once-pristine gown. The postmaster wrapped his coat around her and quickly brought them both inside. An offer was made to contact the law, but Edith had flatly refused.
Alan sits beside her on the bed and checks her eyes and tongue.
“It’s likely the poison working through your system,” he says. “That should end soon enough.”
She hesitates and then leans her head against his shoulder.
“They’ll want me to speak. To tell the authorities of everything that’s happened. I must --” she sighs, lifting her head and rubbing her temples, gingerly on her injured side. “-- I must be presentable.” She tries to put back the covers and go to the wardrobe, but her legs fail her. After pulling herself back onto the bed, she covers her face with her hands. “I... I must... my clothes... my things are all back at the house.” There is silence.
“I’m sure Rachel will lend you something to wear.”
She nods, swallowing. The sun is coming up, and it affords him a better look at her. She is dangerously pale, the cut on her cheek dark and ugly. Her eyes are puffy. Frowning, she rubs at her belly again.
“How does it feel?” he asks. She shakes her head, brow furrowing. Then her face goes an unpleasant shade of yellow-green and she lurches over the other side and vomits. Immediately, he catches her hair and pulls it back from her face. He expected something of the kind.
Footsteps sound outside the door and Rachel knocks and then enters breathlessly.
“Is everything alright?” she asks. Edith’s heaving has ended and now she lies across the bed, weak and drained.
“Lady Sharpe is taken ill,” Alan says, rubbing circles into her back. He does not miss the woman’s mildly disapproving look. “If you would bring us some cold water and rags, and then help me clean up,” he added. Rachel nodded and departed swiftly.
When the work is finished, he and Rachel tuck Edith back into bed and Alan passes a cold rag over her face. Lying against the pillows, her long hair framing her face limply, she seems a ghost of the girl he’d known back in Buffalo. There is so little left of his best friend growing up, of the irate eight year old who had gone after the other boys when they’d taunted Alan for playing with a girl.
“What are you thinking of?” she asks softly, her voice cracking.
“Nothing.” He turns to Rachel, who hovers by the bed. “If you could find us a light breakfast --” he glances back at Edith, who blanches at the mention of food, “-- I’d be grateful.”
“Of course, sir.” She hesitates. “Should I call a doctor, sir?” she adds uncertainly. Alan smiles.
“Not necessary, I am one.”
“No, it’s just that...” Alan follows her gaze downwards. Oh. A red stain had spread across his shirt to join the one from yesterday. He must have reopened his wound some time during his rush to care for Edith. Now that he is aware of it, however, he feels its acute pain. He sinks back onto the bed.
“That won’t be necessary, madam. But thank you. Just bring the remaining rags a little closer -- thank you.” Alan presses two of them into his side. The linen is quickly stained scarlet.
“I’m sorry,” Edith says once they’ve assured Rachel there is nothing more they need. Alan touches her hand with his unbloodied one.
“You’ve no need to apologize. How do you feel?”
“Still ill,” she says, shifting.
“At least we know that your body is rejecting the poison.”
Edith gathers the coverlet more closely around herself.
“Back at the house,” she says. “I would... cough up blood. I thought it was the clay at first. That it had some kind of effect on me. But... I wanted to believe everything was going to be alright. It was, sometimes,” she adds. She leans back, looking around the room.
“What will you do now?” Alan asks. He is now changing his old bandages for new ones.
“I don’t know,” Edith confesses. “Go back to America, I suppose. I don’t like this climate. Try and start again. It feels so... I feel as though at any moment the door will open and he’ll be there.” She shakes her head to clear her thoughts. “Perhaps I’ll move. I’ve always wanted to go to Baltimore.”
“The water might do you good.”
They lapse into silence.
“Perhaps you could come with me,” she adds. “I don’t think I’d like to travel alone. We’ve been distant, I think, since you returned from London. I miss the old days.”
“Perhaps.” Alan swallows and looks away. “It could only be for a little while. I’d be leaving my practice.”
Edith tentatively touches his hand.
“I know why you hesitate,” she says gently, after some hesitation. “You don’t have to come if it would... if it would be too close.”
“Edith--” he begins in protest.
“Listen to me.” She gives him a weak smile. “You must do as you see fit. As must I. And you know that I--” She stops and begins again. “I do not -- it has never been my intention to mislead you, or -- or to hurt you in any way.”
“I know,” Alan murmurs. “Please know that I expect nothing. You always have a friend in me, you know that. And whatever you wish to do, I will support you.”
“You always have. Even when you shouldn’t.”
“And I always will.”
Alan scoops up the small, wounded parts of his heart, and soldiers on.
There are investigations and trials and newspaper reports enough to paper the walls of a small townhouse. Edith’s name is cleared through pleas of self-defense. There is no way to keep the story’s details from coming to light. But she makes no mention of the exact nature of her husband’s relationship with his sister. She will give him that last dignity.
The poison has destroyed her immune system and her overall health. She vomits every morning and is bedridden for weeks. She and Alan move to London for the inquiries and stay there for almost a month. People talk, but everything they say is unfounded. They may sleep in the same bedroom, but in separate beds. They must have someone to wake them from their personal nightmares. Edith is plagued with them and sleeps fitfully. She does not speak of what she sees, and Alan does not press her. He has horrors enough of his own.
He knows it must only have taken seconds, but every moment of his stabbing is elongated into hours in sleep -- Sir Thomas approaching, knife in hand. The creeping fear and certainty of what is coming. The harsh and urgent whisper (show me where). Taking the knife’s handle and pushing the thing against himself. The moment it bit into flesh.
The Sharpes’ affairs are concluded. The house is to be left alone; Edith does not wish to live there. As far as she is concerned, the place may be left to sink into the clay and be forgotten.
Sir Thomas’ machine is a different story. She hires several engineers to continue work on it. It must be at the Hall as the machine cannot be moved.
“He was a genius,” she says late one night. “He’ll want to see it completed.”
Sleeping in the same room engenders no frustration on Alan’s part. When he wakes and sees Edith asleep in her own bed, he is not filled with the urge to possess. His love for her is not carnal. He sees them in his mind’s eye -- living together, himself with his practice, Edith with her typewriter and her manuscripts. But she would not be content with that, and he does not want to force her into something that would give her little pleasure.
Slowly, she relearns walking. Her clothes have been sent for from the house, but they are of little use to her. She’ll be in morning until the spring at least. Alan privately estimates longer. It will not be easy for his friend to recover from her loss, or her experience. Sir Thomas was an extraordinary man, by her own account. Much of her time in bed is spent trying to make sense of the hurricane that had been her marriage. Of her husband’s betrayal and the attempts he’d made to right his own wrongs.
“He loved you, Edith,” he assures her, and the words feel only a little ashen in his mouth. “He was desperate to see that you got free.”
“I wish I understood,” she says, her hands curling into fists in her own frustration. “There’s so little I truly understand. About them. About their history.”
“Some things we may never know,” Alan tells her, taking her hands and squeezing them gently. “We have to accept that.”
“No, we don’t !” she insists. “I want to know. I want to know everything.”
Even after she regains the use of her legs, she vomits. Every morning and then less violently through the rest of the day. She faints too, and sweats at night. Eventually, Alan summons up his courage and broaches his private suspicions.
“Edith,” he says one afternoon. They sit in the parlor, and his friend’s face is pallid and sweaty. “Edith, please know that I ask this as a physician and not as --”
“Alan, just go on,” she says tiredly.
“Um. Your -- your courses. They have not been regular, have they?” His friend frowns.
“Honestly, I’ve hardly thought about it,” she confesses. “But… I suppose that’s a no, isn’t it? I would have noticed.”
Alan gives her a cup of coffee -- she never drinks tea, as Alan learned the day he offered it to her without thinking. She’d knocked the cup from its saucer with an involuntary shriek. And her coffee is always black. Sweet things make her sick; Alan suspects the Sharpes had filled her tea with sugar, to mask its bitterness. He waits until she has taken a few sips. His next question is harder.
“And… again, I ask not out of self-interest,” he hesitates, and then forces himself to continue, “but… your marriage with Sir Thomas… was it… consummated?”
A long silence, and then Edith slowly nods.
“Once,” she says. “Just once.” She has that sad look in her eye again, a look that Alan has grown all-too familiar with. Not for the first time, he wishes her husband were alive, so he could make him pay for bringing Edith into his world. For turning her into this husk. She is wiser now, but her grief outweighs what she has learned.
“Edith” he says, gently drawing her attention back to the present, “I…” he sits down across from her. “I believe you may be with child.”
She is silent for a long time, sitting in her black lace on the chaise. The only sign that she has heard is the way her eyes fill with tears. Her voice is low and hollow when she speaks again.
“Do you know,” she says carefully, “how much I’ve prayed that this would not happen?”
“Edith --”
“No, listen to me,” she interrupts. “How can I raise a child like this? And this…” she stands and goes to the windows of the parlor that overlook the street. “What if --” she begins her sentence again. “I’ve suspected for a while. I didn’t want to admit it to myself.” She sighs. “What if it’s like them?” Her voice shakes.
Alan rises and takes her hand, but she doesn’t seem to notice his presence.
“We don’t know that it will.”
“But how can I take that chance?” Now she faces him. “How can I raise a child and explain who its father was? Why it lives fatherless? And without a grandfather? What do I say?” The fire leaves her abruptly and she sags against Alan. He holds her as if she were made of glass, afraid that one harsh word or too-strong touch will break her. “I would carry it if… if I could be sure.”
“I know what you want to do,” he said. “But as your friend and your physician --”
“Alan --”
“You could die, Edith.”
“Death and I are well-acquainted by now, or had you forgotten that?” she snaps. “And did you ever consider that perhaps there are days when I long for it?” Immediately, she covers her eyes. “I’m sorry, I didn’t --”
In answer, Alan gathers her even closer, presses his lips into her hair, and lets her weep into his shoulder.
Some part of her wants to keep the memory alive, so she keeps the child. That, or she fears what the effects of an abortion could be.They remain in London and time passes. Little by little, her frocks are let out as her belly grows. The vomiting eases and then stops altogether, to the relief of everyone.
At breakfast, halfway through August, she receives a letter from one the engineers now working at Allerdale -- Sir Thomas’s machine is perfected and in full operation.
“I hope that he can see that it is completed,” she says, with a weak smile.
All Alan can do is nod.
He is patient. If Edith never reciprocates his feelings, he can survive it. He will wait for his entire life. Stay as long as he is needed. It never occurs to him to make any offer, any proposition. He does not wish to seem forward.
Her companionship is enough.
Late one autumn night, he is roused from his bed by Edith. Her belly is large and round by now, and she presses one hand against it. Her face gleams, her eyes wide.
“Time,” is all she says.
She has been ill for so long that labor is long and difficult. But a little over a day later, she is sleeping in her bed, her small daughter swaddled by her side. She has named her Philippa -- Pippa for short. The maid who comes upstairs to check on them finds Alan dozing in the armchair beside the new mother and her child. She’d swear he was the father, if the little girl looked a thing like either of them.
A month later, Edith, Alan, and baby Pippa board a steamer to New York. The baby is a handful, even for a newborn. She never seems to cease crying. Sometimes Edith cries along with her. The resemblance to her aunt is more than startling. Both adults are run ragged with caring for her.
Back in Buffalo, Alan takes up his old practice and they both try ignore the wagging tongues. Of course they talk. When Alan McMichael runs away abruptly across the Atlantic and returns nearly a year later with his widowed childhood friend and her new baby, how could they not? The fact that the latter two now live with him, and live in sin, does not help.
Money rolls in from the clay mining. Edith worked up the motivation to pick up her pen again several months before and now, despite her doubts that it can live up to the original, her second manuscript is published. Crimson Peak is devoured enthusiastically by the public, although critics are skeptical of a woman’s forays into this violent side of literature, and denounce the book as overwrought and unlikely. Edith seems to take it in her stride.
“The readers themselves are enjoying it,” she says. “That’s what I care about.”
Alan is roused late one night by a soft rapping at his door.
“Come in.”
It is Edith, Pippa in her arms. The hem of her night dress skims the floor as she slips inside. Pausing at the side of Alan’s bed, she brushes back a stray lock of her blonde hair.
“May I?” she asks. Pippa is quiet for once, sleeping deeply with her head against Edith’s breast. Alan moves to one side of the bed and allows her to climb in beside him, laying the baby between them.
“Hello,” he whispers. She does not reply, but she finds his hand beneath the covers. It is enough.
They don’t speak of it in the morning, but take breakfast together as usual. Pippa is getting just old enough to become interested in grabbing. She stares around rooms and at people with large, blue-green eyes, and reaches out, eager to touch and explore. When she gets to be too much of a handful for Edith to eat her own breakfast, Alan scoops her up and lets her bat at his face. He looks over at Edith to find her watching them and smiling.
“I mentioned a long time ago,” she said, “that I’d like to go to Baltimore. Would you like to come with me?”
They begin packing that day.
They find a court house there in Maryland. The certificate is filled out quickly, and if any of the staff disapproves of Pippa’s presence, they make no sign of it. Alan kisses Edith on the forehead instead of the lips.
The pier overlooking the Chesapeake is dotted with people. They walk arm and arm, Pippa in a stroller. The breeze ruffles the folds of Edith’s lavender frock and disturbs the curls that stray from beneath her hat.
It’s love, of a kind. Comfortable and sure. Alan knows that something will always pull her back. She may never feel the same way. Likely will not. But Alan is bedrock and has patience enough to wait out the world. Edith laughs as her daughter waves her tiny hands at the ducks that float by. She is smiling and it is enough. Good God, it’s enough.