‘Do you remember your stupid ballad, Manticory?’ she asked.
‘Which stupid ballad?’ I asked bitterly. ‘They were all condemned by you at one time or another, even the songs in The Cruel Sister.’
‘The one about the evil hack suffocated by the bales of Venetian laundry dropped on top of him,’ she said. ‘In a boat. After being hit on the head and pushed in.’
‘Leave it be, Darcy,’ I said.
I had not remembered it until this moment, but now I did, in every detail. How could Darcy have kept it in her mind all this time?
‘A crueller death than slow suffocation is hard to imagine,’ Darcy said happily. ‘Your Mr Sardou preferred a quicker end. And this death will come with a mighty headache on top, and no laudanum or brandy or a gun to speed and ease the end! The beauty of it is that we don’t even have to kill him,’ gloated Darcy.
‘Fetch it from your desk,’ she ordered me. ‘That ballad of the laundry, I know you keep all your little productions. No, I don’t trust you not to tear it up. I’ll get it.’
She returned a moment later with the paper folder I had marked Unperformed Drafts. How easily she’d located it! How often had she spied on my writing?
Reading it aloud, she stopped frequently to embroider my ballad. Instead of ‘the hack’, she substituted Millwillis’s name, lending a dreadful reality to the fiction I’d composed that long-ago evening in Venice when I had thought existence was properly perfect, our first night in this palazzo.
Darcy’s commentary ran on and on, substituting reality for fantasy. She was anxious to ensure that Millwillis was briefly stunned long enough to be covered with bales between the men’s departing with the clean sheets and arriving with the dirty ones. ‘We can let the bales’ weight do the rest.’
Oona said, ‘Well, Darcy, I am sure it was a great relief to you to picture all that murdering in detail, but what are we really going to do about that dreadful man so?’
‘It will be a great relief,’ repeated Darcy. ‘A very great relief.’
It was an August dawn already pulsing quietly with heat and the heat’s whining handmaidens, the mosquitoes, the morning that the deed was to be done. I sat on our slender terrace, with my hands around a cup of coffee I had made for myself. This was a skill I’d had a care to hide from Darcy lest she delegate me to serve it to her hourly and somehow produce the funds for the precious beans too. Below me men were already in their boats bringing ‘il latte, il burro e il formaggio’ to the shopkeepers of Venice. I loved those proper namings – not just any milk, butter and cheese but the milk, the butter and the cheese. None other would do.
Shirtless men rubbed their torsos with rags to blot the sweat. As the sky lightened, a suggestion of a breeze teased the hairs on my arms, but soon disappeared. Even the water did not pretend to be cool. Its feverish surface borrowed hot terracottas and molten ochres from the palazzi hovering above.
Our assignation was for six. Darcy had dictated the letter I had written to Millwillis at his hotel to say that I was ready to talk, but that this meeting must be out of doors and secret: My sisters are against this. So I must do this discreetly. I know everything, and anyway – better one visible, speaking, cooperative sister than seven invisible, silent ones.
He had agreed. I had not counted on that. I had been sure that Darcy’s mad plan would stop there, with the newsman too canny to fall for the bait.
After all, he knew what we Swineys were like. Or at least he’d written the words that defined us: savage, primitive, violent, backward.
You must come alone, but bring the manuscript, I had written. So I can help you with the material points.
He had agreed, so sure was he of himself. None of the Eileen O’Reilly with him, he assured me in his note. Of course I’ll bring the manuscript, and an open mind.
Not a steel-tipped knife or loaded gun, or a lifebelt, or a stout pole: just the manuscript and an open mind.
I could not believe it. I did not want to do so. I told myself he’d bring a guard with him.
One by one, Darcy, Oona, Pertilly and Berenice joined me silently on the terrace. The others were still in their wrappers, but Darcy was dressed and ready.
She raised an eyebrow at the empty cup of coffee.
Perhaps, I thought, there will come a day when I’ll feel strong enough to say no to her, to her face, instead of subverting her will only in secret, only in subplots, only for my own satisfaction and not for the good of the world.
It was our old routine – and it had never yet failed to stun.
I tried to tell myself that Millwillis was scarcely human. I had stood inches from him in Dublin; I had breathed the corruption of his breath, seen the misery he spread, not just to us but to the living and the dead, to living women in Paris to St Petersburg, to the corpse of poor Julia Pastrana.
When Millwillis approached the end of the calle he would find me waiting for him, just as he expected. He’d have his manuscript with him, of course, swinging in that greasy leather case of his. What he would not expect was Darcy, quietly walking behind him with her hammer in her pocket. I would keep my back to him, gazing at the shimmering spells the sun cast on the water. The glare would dazzle his eyes and make a debatable silhouette of me. As I heard the footsteps of Millwillis approach, I would let down my hair. It would be the first time he had seen it: in spite of all the reams he’d written on us, he’d never bothered with attending a Swiney Godiva show.
‘Come a trifle closer down the alley,’ I was to urge him, casting one of our famous looks over my shoulder.
And Millwillis would come closer, his eyes fixed on the red rivulets of hair. His sensibilities were too coarse to read a bloody warning in them. Millwillis was never a Brother of the Hair, but Swiney hair was now the meat and milk of his life, was it not? Whatever our hair made for us, it also made for him. He would want to get closer, to touch, even better to claim he’d had his fingers among us, and could write with palpable experience. He’d be happily fashioning the heat-charged adjectives even as he approached.
And as he leaned forward with an eager hand, Darcy would come behind him and deploy the hammer with one hand; with the other she would grasp his leather case containing the manuscript. Then, with her Gorgon’s strength, she would push him into the boat, covering him with an old sheet I’d carried folded against my chest all the way from our palazzo, cradling my frantic heartbeats in its softness. The sheet would make Millwillis invisible. Darcy and I would withdraw to the courtyard of the hotel, where the door, I knew well, was always open. The men arriving with the bales of dirty laundry would heave their burdens gratefully into the boat and turn their backs. They would bury him.
I imagined Millwillis waking at some point before he died, sucking the sheets into his lips, gasping on soiled white cloth, the damp bubbles of linen blowing inside his mouth. I imagined him remembering what had happened to bring him to this pass, and by whose hand it had been done. As he started to lose his sense of himself, he would realise that this was just what he had wanted to do to the legend of the Swiney Godivas. He had sought to bury us under dirty laundry, pulling endless soiled sheets of it from his imagination to swaddle and shroud us in sneers and lies.
And so he might muse and picture for a while but not a very great while. Every breath would be expensive and his little stock of air would soon be spent.
By the time they arrived in the laundry at Mestre, there would be no breath left at all in Millwillis’s body.
Chapter 50
I had done nothing more than write the letter and let down my hair in front of him.
Well, yes, I had also, at the last moment, been forced to help push Millwillis into the boat. I’d barely touched him. Yet none of my senses would permit me to conceal from myself that I had by the indiscretion of my imagination helped to author a man’s death and that it might have been for nothing, for Millwillis had arrived without the manuscript of his Swiney Godiva biography, even though he had left us exactly the way Darcy
had planned it and I had scripted it.
All the way home, walking through a world vacated by Millwillis, the heft of his shoulder clung to the tips of my fingers. I could feel the grease and harsh linen of his jacket still. I continued to breathe the sweat and stale breath of him, closer than they had been since our first encounter in the parlour at Pembroke Street. Nor could I forget the dull thud of Darcy’s hammer and his quiet grunt, the juddering of the boat as he fell into it, the waves that sniggered around the prow then, the air seizing the sheet as it sighed over him, so that his left foot remained visible, my wrenching off my white petticoat to throw over it just as we heard the portone of the Hotel Squisito open for the returning laundry men. I remembered Darcy’s breathing, and mine, as we waited behind the courtyard door, counting the fourteen heavy bales as they slumped on top of Millwillis and then the men leaping into the boat, the ropes slithering back onto its deck and the oars casting away from the shore.
My reliving of those moments was punctuated with a recurring vision of the incriminating manuscript in his hotel room, where the Eileen O’Reilly, who probably knew every word by heart, no doubt still had the wits and the malice to use it against us.
Millwillis had died for something he had not even delivered.
Yet Darcy refused to countenance the idea that our trouble was anything but over. She repelled my worries with ferocity. She forbade mention of Millwillis in the palazzo. Oona, Pertilly, Ida and Berenice were silenced with individual threats. The rest of the day passed in an awed hush. None of us ate.
Unable to talk about what I feared, the fears accumulated inside me. By bedtime they had bred new fears – about the contents of the manuscript, about the Eileen O’Reilly, about some witness to the crime hiding behind curtains at an unknown window of the Hotel Squisito. I couldn’t sleep. I rose and took to the streets, haunting the pharmacies until I found one where a lamp still burned. I would have spent everything in my purse to buy myself three hours away from my own brain. It was not just unconsciousness I craved but deep, bone-knitting, muscle-smoothing, skin-loosening sleep.
Millwillis’s death had solved nothing.
Nor had it solved the problem of what we were to eat, or of what we were to do with the Eileen O’Reilly the very next morning when she sent her card up the stairs to us.
We descended in a long silent row to meet her in the androne where Pertilly kept her under bare control by blocking the way to our stairwell with her entire body.
Darcy had quickly handed out various items of her own before we went down – a good shawl to me, a velvet jacket to Oona. Berenice and Ida were hustled into unpatched skirts.
‘Let your hair down!’ she ordered us. She might as well have said, ‘Gird yourselves for war!’
Then she rifled in a box and produced a single earring for each of us. ‘Just stay in profile,’ she warned.
The Eileen O’Reilly saw through our bare finery in a moment.
‘Darcy Swiney,’ the butcher’s runt marvelled. Her Italian might be polished, but when she spoke our native tongue, it still rasped with all the rough of Harristown. ‘Arsey Swiney and all her bastely little swine. It’s long years since I last laid eyes on ye and your nits. Those years’ – she looked us up and down – ‘ain’t been good to ye Harristown sows, I belave, not to look at ye anyways, Darcy Swiney, no they have not. I believe your guts are a thrifle thinner than a goose’s neck! Look at the great affluence of your hairs aich standin’ on end wid the hunger! I see grey, and thinning like the thinness of death there. And for your clothes, can I borrow ye the loan of a few rags?’
We stood wordless. The Eileen O’Reilly had not really changed – in spite of the tight dress in grey Scotch cheviot and the high breasts, she still had the small blue eyes, the meat-fed complexion and the freckles of a butcher’s runt.
She had not brought the manuscript with her.
She had eyes only for Darcy. She did not cast a single glance in my direction. Taking Darcy’s silence for defeat, she mocked, ‘Ye’ll not be showin’ me any splendid Irish hospitality then? Where is all the urgin’ for me to come up and take an air of the fire in this damp hole? Perhaps ye cannot afford a fire these days? What did ye dine on today? Air pie and a walk around, by the looks of ye. And I don’t hear ye askin’ if I have a mouth on me that might be moistened by a cup of tea? I’d pay ye a penny for it, Darcy Swiney – if I didn’t think ye’d murther me for it in your desperation.’
I exchanged a glance with Oona.
‘What do you want?’ demanded Darcy. ‘We’ll not be entertaining a butcher’s runt in our palace. The servants’ entrance is presently occupied by a dead pig for a local feast, which is the only reason why the likes of you is permitted this grand threshold and even its dust is too good for you to choke on.’
‘I want to know what happened to my employer, Mr Millwillis,’ declared the Eileen O’Reilly, quite uncowed. ‘I’d not put anything pasth ye, Darcy Swiney, even a kidnappin’. I picture the poor felly thrussed up in ropes, mumbling on a gag. I told myself, “I’ll see to that.” ’
‘Is Mr Millwillis in Venice, then?’ asked Darcy airily. ‘Fancy! And has he taken to his dotage, employing a brutal-looking thing like you about his business? That was an unlucky day for him entirely, for you’ve not the apparatus in your head to sustain a good lie like he has.’
‘Ye are standing in a grave shovellin’ dirt over yourself, so ye are. Now that ye’re poor and old, your ballyraggin’ is grown feeble wid ye, Darcy Swiney. It’s hardly worth liftin’ my tongue against ye. So enough of that. Ye know very well that Millwillis is gone missin’, so ye do. And where else would he be but here?’
Her voice had risen to the shrillness and phrasing of her schoolgirl days. She cast the arc of her blue eyes around our faces. ‘Tell me where ye’ve got Millwillis. Tell me, Manticory Swiney!’
I looked at the ground.
‘Haven’t seen hair nor skin of him.’ Darcy crossed her arms. ‘Nor smelled a whiff of him either. And we’d have noticed that.’
‘Do ye see the mark of a fool about me?’ ranted the Eileen O’Reilly. ‘I know you’ve done somethin’ wid him. I know the very thoughts of ye, Darcy Swiney, as well as if I was inside of ye. You’re holdin’ him against his will, so ye are, and it is a great shame, so it is. It is off to the police I am goin’. I give ye my hand and word I am on my way to them prasently. And if ye’ve done somethin’ to the man, Manticory Swiney will have to weave an enchantment of a story if your necks are to be saved from the noose.’
Then she drew herself up proudly and allowed a smile to spread over her face. She turned her smile on me. It was a smile from Harristown, from the days of our poverty and abasement, a time when we were prey for all hard tongues, and most of all hers. It was the smile of someone about to pour herself a bowl of cream and drink it. It was a smile that begged a blow, even with a hammer. But I did not, I truly did not want that to happen. I still remembered her small fingers handing me a corner of her smock to sob into. I remembered her kindness to Annora, our lessons in the hedgerow, the misplaced loyalty that I had allowed, by my silence, to grow into an enmity I’d never wished for, which had stretched through the years and found Millwillis as its last instrument of war.
Turning, I saw the vertical cemetery of the lime pit dilating in Darcy’s eye where her pupil should be. She took a step towards the Eileen O’Reilly. I put a hand on Darcy’s arm and a foot on the skirt of her dress. I could still tell myself that we had not killed Millwillis: the laundry had suffocated him. If Darcy moved on the Eileen O’Reilly, there were no sheets to do our work for her.
But the smile did not deliberately beg a blow. It was a smile that leaked out of a secret that the Eileen O’Reilly now chose to divulge. She chose. She chose to divulge then, when, if she’d had any desire to live at all, she would have backed away from Darcy’s glittering eyes and hard hands and desperation. But no, the Eileen O’Reilly insisted on saying what she said next.
‘Did ye bastely s
isters ever hear of a product called “Growant”?’ she asked. ‘Such an excellent thing in a bottle. If it’s not delightin’ the whole feminine public, makin’ them grow shags like bullocks off their heads, it’s no matter! No blazin’ wonder it has undercut the market for—’
‘The market created by us!’ barked Darcy. ‘Growant would not exist if not for the Swiney Godivas. I’ve heard it’s swill, too, so.’
‘True,’ simpered the Eileen O’Reilly. ‘True, ’tis arrant, arrant swill. And true it is too that I’d never have thought it up were it not for you Swineys and your great success. Growant would not’ve happened, ’twere it not for the thought of ye seven sisters aich seated on your great hairy curabingos upon velvet chairs in rooms where there was nothin’ but heaps of gold and silver snuffboxes, amoosin’ yourselves with apples and nuts and hot boileds and roasts while the rest of us starved back in Harristown. The vision of that has kept me company for years. Your success, we should toast it! For without it my uncle would not have been persuaded to put money into Growant. And I’d not have spent these years studyin’ how ye’ve done what ye’ve done, in order to do it betther than ye.’
Our silence seemed not to trouble her. She rattled, ‘It’s so long since ye’ve been back to Harristown, ye’ve never even seen our smart new Growant factory at the back of the estate. Your old hovel – it’s our stables now! The clover field – it’s where we turn the drays.’
A picture sprang into my mind of the horses trampling on the crossed spoons, crushing all evidence of the life and death of PS.
The Eileen O’Reilly continued, ‘We employ the boys ye used to enterthain. One of their first jobs was to paint a big sign on the wall of the factory. Do ye know what it says?’
We failed to answer.
‘It says,’ she chanted:
‘HARRISTOWN.
HOME OF HAIR.
The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 40
