The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  I would have found out about it, I thought, and it would have broken me by whatever means the blow was delivered.

  ‘Perhaps you can make a ballad out of it?’ she asked. ‘Something about the poor abandoned backwoods girl from old Ireland? Who thought she’d ensnared her heart’s eternal love? But finds he’s just a great feckless fellow of an artist who had his eyes on her cash all the time.’

  I felt it again, afresh, as if I had just heard.

  I sank into one of the armchairs, clutching its damask arms, choking on dust.

  ‘By the way, Manticory, have you heard from Mr Sardou?’ Darcy asked at breakfast two days later. ‘I cannot imagine why he shuns our company so, when he used to be so fond of it. Of course he has other old irons in the fire. I don’t suppose we shall be seeing much more of him anyway. I have a feeling that he has fallen out of love with the idea of the busts.’

  No, I had not heard from Alexander. Three more days passed. I was running mad with his silence. I craved an explanation from his mouth. Surely I was worth that, at least? I could not accommodate how bloodlessly he had abandoned me. I could not accept what that ease told of his feelings for me, all along.

  Alexander’s silence was tangible as ice, brutal as a blow that repeated and repeated, automated and heartless. It had more intensity to it than his presence, clouting me into silence of my own.

  I settled into a gaunt misery in which hope refused to become utterly extinct; the wound was continually scraped of any healing closure. I told myself that two tiny minutes alone with him would undo the vicious lie that Darcy had stitched together out of several truths. All I needed to do was to find him. I wore my feet to blisters on circuits of the places where we used to meet, certain that his feelings for me would lead him to one or other of them, and that I’d find him there, a hopeful face raised every time the door opened. But Venice seemed empty of Alexander. Desperation devoured my dignity to the extent that I asked Signor Bon if he knew Mr Sardou’s whereabouts.

  He frowned, offering unwillingly, ‘I saw him in Caffè Florian yesterday.’

  Do you mean ‘them’? No one goes to Florian alone, I thought.

  ‘And I saw your sister Darcy coming out of a house where there is . . . forgive me, gaming, on a grand scale, where money is – ah, you do not wish to hear?’

  I did not wish to hear about Darcy. I thought only of Alexander, whose absence filled my bedroom every night; his lost voice filled up my ears when my sisters chattered about our imminent return to Dublin for a month – there was certain intelligence that Millwillis had been successfully duped by our advertising and was looking for us in St Petersburg.

  Enda came to me. ‘Why do you want to be free of us? Is it for Mr Sardou? But Manticory, my dear, he is not for you. You know that, don’t you? His wife is a noblewoman. Now that she knows he has dabbled with a Swiney, she will put a stop to it all. You will tell me that she does not love him. But she loves her social position and she won’t want it known that her husband has been . . . with one of us. So why leave us, Manticory? Where would you go? What would you do? Don’t leave us just for the sake of leaving Darcy behind you.’

  Enda lowered her voice. ‘I know you cannot hate him yet. That may take years. You cannot even believe that he is second-rate? You still think his love is just outside the door, don’t you? My poor darling.’

  I struggled out of her embrace. She looked at my face. ‘Very well, I shall talk to Augustus for you. Surely we don’t need to be bound by a contract after all that’s happened . . . I shall work on his better nature.’

  The fact that Enda still believed in Mr Rainfleury’s better nature made me turn away from her, stiff with pity for the both of us. We were both women who were not loved, but she still pretended while I was already deep into a translation of myself as a woman unworthy of love.

  Oona, also still pretending, shared my berth on the train. She was in a fever at the prospect of seeing Tristan again, full of wistful fantasies of a sweet reunion.

  I was glad of her company, and the distraction of her happy prattling, for I was terrified of the pain of being in the sleeping berth on my own, and of the memories it would bring.

  For once, I was glad to leave Venice. I was exhausted from false glimpses of Alexander, from trying to contrive ways to find him and turn myself back into the person he loved.

  There is nothing so cruel, I thought in those days, as a beautiful city that is determined to hide your lover from you.

  ‘It so hurts,’ Oona whispered to me from under her sheets, ‘doesn’t it? Can all the hurt girls in the world add up to a single happy one?’

  Chapter 41

  A meteor was seen in Dublin on the evening of 13 September 1876. The sky had faded to marine colours when it was pierced by a vivid light that pulsed more slowly than lightning. Then a streak of flame shot from the north-west to the south-east.

  At Number 1 Pembroke Street, there was a different conflagration.

  The gas pipe had failed out in the street and we were reduced to candles. Tristan had given Oona a brusque half-hour of his time in the withdrawing room, and left for an evening engagement. Mr Rainfleury was away on business – truly away and not just hiding with Berenice. Enda had returned to Number 1, as she always did.

  Whenever Enda was with us at Pembroke Street, we observed the old rituals, one of which was a mutual washing of our hair. In those times, we mostly dry-washed it, massaging a cleansing agent through our scalps and then using a towel to extract the residue that emerged. But once a month we performed the full wet wash and applied Liquide Antiseptique, a hairdressers’ solution of petroleum, to strip the grease. Darcy refused to remove her frizzled fringe hairpiece and washed it alongside her real hair.

  If any Brother of the Hair had been privileged to glimpse us on those occasions of follicular déshabillé, he would have been convulsed with pleasure. After washing the hair, each of us, in our tribal alignments, combed the hair of our preferred sisters while it still dripped, squeezing the excess water into the claw-footed tub. And then we carried our damp hair in cotton turbans to the green parlour, where we unwound it and laid it out on stools and chairs to dry by the hearth.

  We drank cocoa and talked while the fire – at a discreet distance – rendered the room cosy, and warmed the crisped the tendrils of our hair, from which the delicious petrol fumes rose, twisting up our noses like the spiked scent of lavender. Of course we knew better than to use the heated curling tongs on our hair until those vapours had evaporated. We had read of the risks in the Hairdressers’ Chronical and Trade Journal. So we would slowly and gradually allow our hair to dry in the warm air. And when we were sleepy from the fire and the hot drinks, we would ascend the stairs to our bedrooms.

  That night, as I have said, we were reduced to candles. By the uncertain light of those candles, Darcy, sitting awkwardly in her chair, had ordered us to sign some documents that were impossible to read.

  ‘Just a formality. Why would you be needing to read them anyway?’ Darcy chivvied. ‘You wouldn’t understand them.’

  ‘But I’d really like to know more,’ I said.

  ‘Well, good,’ said Darcy, handing me the pen and guiding my hand to the paper.

  Alexander would hate to see me doing this, I thought as I signed. But Alexander had not manifested in person or in letter since Darcy’s revelations. Whatever Alexander hated, now, that was what I would do. I felt too low to resist the rush of downward sensations in my ribcage as I passed the pen to Berenice.

  The signing done, each of us held a stump of wax in a japanned candle-holder, shielded by a hand, as we took to the stairs for bed. Pertilly led the way, followed by Oona and then myself. Next came Enda, chattering about her latest gift from Mr Rainfleury – a sable stole. She did not notice who was coming behind her. If she had seen it was Berenice, who had received only a fox, then she might well, unconsciously and instinctively, have swept her petrol-vaporous hair over the shoulder furthest from her twin’s flame.

/>   But she did not.

  ‘Enda!’ Darcy’s voice boomed from below. ‘Stop right there!’

  Then Darcy was galloping up the stairs towards her, pushing past Berenice, raging that Enda had forgotten to sign the document downstairs.

  ‘Or maybe not forgotten! Just too high and mighty to bother, is it, Mrs Rainfleury? Of course you think you know all about contracts now, you interfering little . . .’

  So Enda had broached the contract with Mr Rainfleury, as she’d promised. But he had betrayed her yet again, by telling Darcy. I threw her a grateful, compassionate look.

  ‘Supposing I don’t care to sign this particular contract?’ Enda said over her shoulder. She kept climbing the stairs. Darcy charged after her. My heart beat fast for her. Darcy was not above administering a painful slap, even to a married woman.

  Darcy pushed Berenice out of her way. Fugitive sparks from Berenice’s candle flew upwards. The fire started in the middle register of Enda’s hairfall, at the place where it covered her waist. It was simple but fatal misfortune, the inquest would be told later, that the moment the hair caught light, our maid opened the door to the coal man in the basement. The draught from the cellar door sent the ends of all our hair floating upwards. Having got vent, the fire travelled simultaneously along Enda’s length both upwards to her head and downwards to her feet, snatching her nightdress up in a gyrating fin of flame.

  It was too sudden for a scream. Enda’s own lips were sealed with horror. But it was not the fire that killed Enda, though a look at her burn injuries afterwards would make you wish a speedy death upon her. It was the fall. For somehow Enda tumbled over the banister from the height of the thirtieth step. It all happened too quickly, and in such a thick web of malodorous smoke, the unforgettable stench of fire devouring Swiney hair, for any of us to see how Enda managed to surmount the banister on her own. Why she would have done it was another question, when she was just steps from our bathroom and its stout taps of life-saving water.

  Although what led up to it had remained unclear, we would all have the image branded unforgettably on our eyes of Enda falling with her hair flaming above her, falling like a pale china angel, like a burning torch.

  And it was like a pale china angel that she broke on the broad stone flags of the ground floor. She lay star-shaped on her back, her neck stretched to an unnatural angle. Her hair fell about her with the flames making dance, the only part of her that was still alive when I arrived down at her side.

  ‘No!’ I screamed. ‘No!’

  Water drenched me as I bent over Enda: Pertilly, at the head of that file up the stairs, had dashed into our room and was now pouring the contents of our ewers down onto Enda’s burning hair. White columns of water wove down through the pulsing, stinking smoke.

  I beat out the remains of the flames and lay full-length in the puddled water alongside Enda, holding her in my arms. Oona threw herself down on the other side, our arms meeting around Enda’s unbreathing breast. Pertilly ran down and hovered in the outer circle of grief, her breath rasping. Mrs Hartigan was with us now, keening. Berenice was still up on the second floor, peering down the stairwell. Darcy stood next to her, motionless.

  ‘I cannot spare you!’ I wept into the ashes of Enda’s hair. ‘Not you too, not now.’

  I raised my eyes to Berenice’s stricken face hanging like a winter moon in the darkness at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Smile!’ I told her. ‘Have you not at last got what you’ve always wanted – not to be a twin?’

  ‘Hush, Manticory honey,’ sobbed Oona. ‘It does not help Enda.’

  ‘Nothing will help Enda,’ said Darcy crisply. ‘If only she’d not flounced off without signing those documents. I am sure it was the flouncing that carried that current of air up the stairs.’

  Alerted by telegram, Mr Rainfleury arrived back in Dublin the next morning, a destroyed creature.

  He removed his hat and showed us a shaved head, obscene and pink. His eyebrows were gone too, and the moustache.

  Pertilly rushed to inspect it. ‘Not a hair and not a hair’s friend, either!’

  ‘So the Egyptians, the gods of death themselves, honoured their loved ones,’ he moaned.

  ‘Are you in drink?’ asked Darcy.

  Even now, I thought, he aggrandises himself through Enda’s hair. His cranial growth had never been strong, more a suggestion of hair than an expression of it. I thought acidly that removing such a sparse growth as his made a disproportionately large claim of capillary bereavement.

  My bitterness could not be contained. I must have said something aloud, for he ducked his head and looked away.

  Berenice rushed to him, sobbing, but he had thrust her aside, demanding, ‘Where is my poppet?’

  ‘I am here,’ insisted Berenice shrilly. She whispered, ‘And I shall be here for you from now on, Augustus dearest.’

  Darcy muttered, ‘Better the leavings than nothing at all, is that it? You could show a drop of dignity yourself, Berenice.’

  When Berenice put a hand on his sleeve, Mr Rainfleury shook it off.

  ‘No,’ he said coldly, as if she were a street hawker, ‘I want my wife.’

  ‘Is it that you’re gone mad, dear Augustus?’ pleaded Berenice.

  ‘I am not. Grief has at last rendered me sane. Be gone from my sight, hussy!’ He raised a shaking hand and struck Berenice a blow on the face.

  The sweet foulness between the twins was what had kept him interested, I realised. One long-haired twin would be not half, but less than half, of what he had enjoyed before. He had loved the illicitness. Mr Rainfleury, that pallid, drooping man, had adored to creep around back staircases and to deceive. He loved to lie with Enda, knowing it would madden Berenice. And his trysts with Berenice were fuelled by Enda’s humiliation.

  A gentleman collector of female pain, that’s what he is, I thought. Alexander would – but I stopped myself. I no longer knew what Alexander would think.

  Blank with shock, Berenice swayed in front of Mr Rainfleury for a moment before Pertilly hurried her away. Pertilly and I sat with Berenice in her room for an hour, in which she did not move and the imprint of Mr Rainfleury’s hand slowly faded from her face.

  The undertakers had arrived by then. Messrs Gerty and Rorke of Baggot Street were making Enda’s as decent as a scorched body can be. A few hours later she was lying in a coffin on the dining table, her burned face covered with a lacy napkin and the remains of her hair fanned out around her. We sat vigil around her, in silence.

  Much of Enda’s hair had burned, but much remained – more than an ordinary woman would ever have. We were watching Pertilly perfecting the curls – one half was neatly ringleted, and the other still wild.

  Mr Rainfleury burst into the room, sank to his knees and drew the ringlets over his own bare head. His incorrigible ears poked out through the rich brown hair, clammy and trembling.

  ‘Dead!’ he keened. ‘Dead at twenty-eight. And me a widower at my age!’

  He looks like a hog in a wig, I thought.

  ‘Have a care!’ Darcy ordered him. ‘Do not rake at the hair. It comes off so easily now.’

  Mr Rainfleury vowed thickly, ‘I will make it live for ever.’

  In sobs, he explained that he had already summoned Professor Sukolov of Moscow University, who had mummified the famous Mexican Baboon Lady, Julia Pastrana, along with her furry newborn baby, using a secret technique of injections over six months.

  He enthused, ‘Julia Pastrana still looks so alive you think she’s about to break into one of her Highland Flings, and they say the embalming will keep her that way for ever. I’ve seen her myself at one of the travelling shows . . . “The Embalmed Female Nondescript”, they call her.’

  ‘A dead woman performs in a circus?’ I asked.

  ‘Her keeper, I mean her widower, rents her body out to portable museums and the like,’ explained Mr Rainfleury. ‘Professor Sukolov is halfway to Dublin. Unfortunately our old friend Millwillis is hotfoot behind him, f
or the news of my darling’s death has somehow got out.’

  ‘Is it witless you are?’ said Darcy. ‘Gerty and Rorke will do a perfectly adequate job of embalming her. We don’t need Enda to last for ever. It took six months to do Julia Pastrana? We have not got such time at our disposal, not with Millwillis on our trail.’

  ‘And nor,’ I said bitterly, ‘would we let you display Enda as another “Embalmed Female Nondescript”. You have finished making money out of Enda and making a sad spectacle of her as a betrayed wife.’

  For once, Darcy looked at me with something like respect. She jabbed at Mr Rainfleury’s ear with her finger. ‘Put him off at once, that Russian ghoul.’

  Professor Sukolov was ordered home to his Anatomical Institute before he even arrived in Paris. Darcy urged Gerty and Rorke to make the funeral hasty and private so the depleted Swineys could scurry back to Venice.

  But it appeared that our brother-in-law had no intention of promptly relinquishing the wife he had so thoroughly betrayed. Even when the undertaker’s men departed, even when the smell of chemicals subsided to a dull ache in the nostril, Mr Rainfleury kept Enda’s body by his side, now in a glass case designed to fit inside the oak coffin with its gilt mountings and carved shield. The glass case sat on a table beside the matrimonial bed. Meanwhile, the coffin itself stood upright like an Egyptian mummy down in the hall of Number 2 Pembroke Street.

  It seemed that Mr Rainfleury found Enda’s embalmed body a useful way of repelling Berenice, who would not enter the bedroom that contained it, though she continued to solicit uselessly for Mr Rainfleury’s tender attention every time he appeared.

  Oona was no more effective in squeezing affection out of Tristan. She confessed to me that she hoped that the pathos of her loss might arouse his compassion.

  ‘He might write a poem for poor Enda,’ she said. ‘He might mention her loving sisters. He might show his great heart and comfort me with it.’