The Eileen O’Reilly looked at me, taking deep shuddering breaths.
I handed her my handkerchief, clasping her hand inside my own as I did so. It was small and soft, and it clasped me back.
We waited expectantly for Ida’s next pronouncement. She told us, ‘Now the moon is high and our neighbours are at their tables, not at their windows. We shall put Darcy to bed beneath the lime and above my poor Kitty, and then we shall go to bed ourselves.’
I lay sleepless on my mattress, letting images of the day dilate and shrink back inside my head. When my mind had eaten the colour and shape out of those pictures, I began to think of what had led up to them, and my own part in them, not just in the last days, but in all the years since my childhood. I had allowed Darcy to make money out of the troll who had tried to degrade me on the bridge. Thinking to escape, I fell in with Darcy’s desire to leave Harristown, but I had been more degraded than ever – letting Darcy take money from people who wanted to fondle my hair or own it or steal from innocent people using the image of it. Then I had found love but Darcy killed that too. Yet if she could kill it so easily, then it probably had not been worth having. Had I really loved Alexander? Yes – my pain alone proved it – but was there not a deeper attraction in the prospect of him? Was it not really the case that all I had ever wanted or needed was to get away from Darcy? And even now that she was dead, I was still trying to get away from Darcy, but my thoughts continued to settle on her like bats that return to flutter in the dark of their cave. I had watched Darcy kill Millwillis; now my mind’s eye saw her murdering our youngest sister, little Phiala, no bigger than a shoe dolly, and just as breakable. Had she thrown the baby against a tree, as I’d once watched her do with a rabbit?
I must have willed myself unconscious simply to escape the image, because in the early hours of the morning, I was woken by uneven footsteps on the stairs.
My mind, like a tongue to an abscess, flew to Darcy as I’d last seen her, head down, her legs up against the side of the well, the lime heaping over her.
It is Darcy come back, I thought in terror. She will never be finished with us. I should have known that Darcy would be stronger than death.
The steps grew louder and closer, and were accompanied by rasping breath.
The candle in my shaking hands threw canyons of shadow around its faint light. I hurried to the main hall in time and lit its pink-globed gas lamp.
Ghosts hate light, I told myself.
It was not Darcy but Ida whom the lamp illuminated – Ida stumbling through the portone. In her left hand she held the cleaver she had brought back from the asylum. From her right hand dangled a mass of dark bone, clotted blood and white powder.
‘I hope that’s not the poor cat’s bones, Ida.’
‘It’s not at all the cat’s bones,’ she replied. ‘We forgot! Of course we must have a harp of Darcy’s breastbone. I shall curve the spine over just so, and tie it to this thigh bone once I have cleaned the meat and washed off the lime. Oona will give me some hair for strings.’
She took a step towards me. ‘Manticory, there was something wrong with The Cruel Sister! I mean the operetta you wrote, The Cruel Sister. It was wrong that the good sister died and that the cruel sister won. We have made it right.’
The Eileen O’Reilly appeared, ghostly in Darcy’s nightdress. Quite a creditable cascade of light-red curls fell down her back. I wondered if they had started growing faster in the night as she lay in Darcy’s bed, breathing the air of Darcy’s pillow.
She pointed her candle towards the stairs where splashes of blood descended down to the androne.
‘Will ye be showin’ me where the scullery is? And the buckets and rags?’ she asked. In her other hand she held up Darcy’s frizzled fringe.
‘And a spade for buryin’ this in the garden? To do the business complete.’
I was uneasy with Eileen O’Reilly in the palazzo, yet absurdly happy with her company too.
My sisters clustered around her, seeking her conversation, especially about Harristown and all the other places of our childhood. I was afraid of claiming too much of her time, but her eyes always followed me over the tops of their heads.
Ida had insisted on cleaning the bones and stringing the harp with Oona’s hair. The articulations of Darcy’s spine curved just as Ida wished. The thigh bone stood straight, white, virginal. Of course it made no music. Oona’s hair was silent under Ida’s fingers, but she hummed nasally, impersonating the harp’s voice. Finally, she had been persuaded to put the gaunt instrument away in a cupboard. From there I quietly extracted it and hid it under a fringed armchair.
It thundered all through the next day and night, with the wind hurling the shutters against the walls. The Eileen O’Reilly stood at our window, transfixed by the drama on the canal, following the creaming tip of each wave with her blue eyes.
‘The Divil wouldn’t send out his dog on such a day as this,’ she whispered.
That night, when I closed my eyes, I imagined Darcy’s hollowed corpse struck by a long dry shaft of lightning all the way down in the lime pit. I saw her sitting bolt upright all white and powdery with the lime, and climbing up the stone shaft, while the moon shone through the gap in her upper torso where her breastbone had been. I saw her walking across the garden and then passing through our great oak door – as all doors are permeable to the dead – and mounting our lion-studded stairwell with dragging steps to arrive in my own chinoiseried bedroom. She stood over my bed. Her skull, the house of her bad brain, was broken. Its horns were fused to its bone.
At last, lying rigid with terror in my bed, I took responsibility for the words that I had written: I felt that I deserved Darcy’s retribution thick and threefold, more than any other Swiney, far more than Ida who had simply applied herself with pure literality to the story I had set up with my conniving, heartless words in the name of entertainment, to make money, to sell lies.
The Cruel Sister, I thought, she is me.
The next day passed in a sick swoon.
Deserving my punishment, that night I turned myself out of doors; I turned myself into bait to draw. Every sliver of innocent noise was the scrape of a blood-dripping shoe; every creak, the crack-knuckles of Darcy, the accomplished ghostly hammerer and filleter of Irish Goose Girls who pretended to be writers. Every gurgle of every wave was a mocking thing, the giggle of a murderous dead sister happy in her work of hunting down her real killer. Every knock was the dropped knot of Darcy’s handkerchief garrotte, every breeze the final breath I might draw before Darcy took me at last. I felt the rush of her hammer and knife at my neck.
But when I looked behind me, the only person I saw was the Eileen O’Reilly, finding me in the dark, just as she found me by the privy midden all those years ago. And just like that, she said again, ‘What is it, Manticory Swiney? Is ye took sick on yerself, is it?’
She was carrying a shawl for me and an umbrella. She wrapped the shawl around my shoulders.
‘Don’t be infuriatin’ on me for following ye on your private walk, Manticory. All day ye’ve looked haunted out of your seven senses and I was afearin’ for ye. I know ye do not sleep. How could ye? Ye’re so tired and kilt ye can hardly think, can ye? Let us be goin’ home. I wouldn’t be sorry for a cup of steamin’ tea in my hand, nor a toasted bun neither.’
‘No more would I,’ I agreed.
We linked arms and walked silently. Her side aligned against mine was warm; her hand on my wrist was firm. She did not press me for explanations.
She said, ‘Manticory, I have me own hauntin’ to keep me awake – I jest remembered I must go and fetch Millwillis’s ghastly manuscript, or desthroy it.’
‘How could we have forgotten that?’
‘I will go in the early part of the evening. I made a friend of the maid who turns down the sheets. She’ll let me in on the quiet.’
‘How will we live through the day?’
‘As we have done till now,’ she said. ‘In agony. As if in a dream.’<
br />
When we arrived at the palazzo, it was to the sound of nasal notes haunting the upstairs apartments. The music trickled down the stained steps to the androne, where I paused, and cursed.
No matter where we hid the harp, Ida always found it again.
‘Play the fiddle, Ida honey,’ urged Oona, ‘not that thing.’
‘You forgot,’ said Ida. ‘Darcy sold it to buy a lottery ticket.’
Ida lifted the harp. Of course, it made no music. But keening, shrieking sounds poured out of Ida as she plucked on it, flooding the palazzo with the memory of blood.
Chapter 52
The next day the Gazzetta ran a story about an English newsman discovered dead at the bottom of a laundry boat in Mestre. The police, it reported, had no credible leads in the case.
I fed on the sentences that said:
Although the gentleman bore signs of a contusion to the back of the head, this probably occurred when he fell against the hard surface at the bottom of the boat. The post-mortem has confirmed that he died of suffocation. All signs point to an unusual and unfortunate accident.
We had not killed him. The sheets had done it. My brain fell in love with that fact, finding all kinds of corners to hide in. The body had been made away with and had not been found in any proximity to us. I tried to give it similar distance in my mind.
That was not to be allowed.
For that same afternoon, before the Eileen O’Reilly could retrieve the manuscript, a policeman came calling at our palazzo.
A tall man, his jowls and his dramatic widow’s peak gave his face the look of a seven-pointed baroque shield. He introduced himself as Capitano Viaro.
He had some pretensions to English. So it was in broken English that he told us that he knew that ‘il giornalista morto’ had been writing about us.
‘The manuscript of a book,’ he said, ‘it was found in the hotel room, abandoned with all his possessions.’
As he spoke, he ran his eyes around, noting our poor clothing and the grandeur of the drawing room where we sat. He was no Brother of the Hair, this sober middle-aged man: he looked at our heads without wonder.
From his disapproving expression, this Viaro had taken a deep dip into Millwillis’s pages, and the writing had not been too sophisticated to withstand his linguistic skills.
Berenice said defiantly, ‘I still cannot for the life of me understand why you should want to talk to us about his death. I’ve never even been to Mestre. I believe none of us have.’
‘None,’ we chorused.
‘Mestre,’ I added hastily. ‘We know he was found at Mestre because of the Gazzetta.’
I held it up, blushing at its finger-worn pages, which betrayed the intensity of our interest in the death.
‘Signorina, I come here for information. We are afraid that there may be another victim. It is discovered that a young lady had been travelling with Mr Millwillis. She had been seen in the hotel, though she had no room of her own there.’ He paused significantly. ‘And we are finding that she disappeared a short time after the man’s death. Her clothes, they were still in that room. The hotel owner called us to take them away.’
In rapid Italian, the Eileen O’Reilly spoke to him. ‘I believe,’ she said, ‘that you speak of myself. I am she, Eileen O’Reilly of Brannockstown, County Kildare, Ireland. And I am here and perfectly safe and well.’
‘I took you for a Swiney sister,’ said Viaro. He counted on his fingers.
She interrupted, ‘I had been working with Mr Millwillis, it is true. But I discovered that Mr Millwillis was a bad man, a corrupt man, and I forsook his company—’
‘So you came here?’ The policemen frowned. ‘But I understand that you spoke very badly of these ladies to Signor Millwillis, and that he wrote down what you said, Signorina O’Railli. To sell, Signorina O’Railli.’
‘That is the very reason why I am here! I came here to explain to these ladies, and to apologise to them.’
I said quickly, ‘Of course we are old schoolfellows, with a friendship going back to our childhoods—’
Viaro was half listening, distracted. His eyes continually returned to Ida. Finally, he asked, ‘Where did you get that most unusual harp?’
Darcy’s breastbone, now grey and creamy white and strung with Oona’s hair, sat in Ida’s lap. She strummed a silent note.
Viaro asked again, ‘The harp?’
‘It is a part of our singing act, of which you’ve read,’ I told him.
‘The Cruel Sister!’ explained Ida.
‘This model of harp is called “The Cruel Sister” from an old Irish folk tune,’ I said hastily.
Ida said, ‘And doesn’t it look fierce like the breastbone of a sister?’
‘I could not say against that,’ said Viaro. He tore his eyes away from it with reluctance. ‘Now may I confirm this list of all the Swiney ladies who are here, for my records?
‘Miss Ida, aged twenty-two? Ah, it is you with the harp, thank you. Miss Oona, aged twenty-three? Yes. Miss Pertilly, twenty-four? You dress as a maid? Very well. Miss Manticory, aged twenty-five? Good. Miss Berenice, twenty-nine years? Thank you. I know your sister Enda is departed. My condolences.’
He frowned at his notebook. ‘So where is your sister, the eldest, the Signorina Darcy, aged thirty-one?’
‘She has been away in Dublin some weeks,’ the Eileen O’Reilly said quickly. ‘She’s contriving a new show.’
‘She’s a very contriving sort of girl,’ said Ida, strumming the harp, ‘with a very contriving heart inside her. Of course, that was in the old days, when she had a heart inside her.’
She laughed loudly.
The policeman persisted. ‘When exactly did the Signorina Darcy leave? Is she coming back to Venice?’
‘A bit of her shall always be among us,’ insisted Ida.
Oblivious to the rictus of anxiety clamping her sisters’ faces, Ida let her tongue clatter on, very far from sense, but close enough related to it that the policeman pulled out a notebook and began to make himself some tense little scribbles. The sun was setting but we made no move to light a lamp.
‘Our sister Ida,’ I said confidentially, ‘has episodes when she is not herself, as you can plainly see now. Do not let her distract you from your proper urgent investigations about the terrible fate of Mr Millwillis. Let me see you to the door—’
Ida interrupted, ‘For it’s getting evil dark outside and I am sure there are devilish crimes happening that need to be solved. You know what they say, the longer the hair, the closer to Hell.’
The policeman allowed himself to be guided out of the room.
‘I shall return shortly,’ he said on the threshold.
Ida cooed, ‘We thank you for your visit, and fair weather after you.’
‘Expect me tomorrow,’ he said, bowing, pale, determined.
‘Is that so at all?’ I asked but my voice wavered on the words.
Chapter 53
‘He knows we killed Darcy, the creature,’ wept Oona. ‘And he will work it out about Millwillis, too.’
‘We’re corpses,’ keened Berenice. ‘They have done for us. They have taken everything now.’
‘It is not all of us who are implicated,’ I said. ‘Only Ida and myself have anything to fear. At worst, the rest of you are just witnesses whose tongues were temporarily frozen by fear. If we devise a confession—’
‘But you and I shall not go alone, Manticory,’ said Ida. ‘The Swineys do everything in perfect synchronicity. We shall drop from our gallows at the same time. The Harristown crows will be calling for us soon.’
I looked into Ida’s eyes, seeing only clouds and shadows.
‘And we shall have our names to the very last!’ she said. ‘Our beautiful names! Berenice! Pertilly! Manticory! Oona! They never took those.’
Ida had uttered a truth. Our paternal gift of names had been almost the only thing about us that had not been changed along the way by those who had profited from us.
‘Bette
r to hang than to starve,’ laughed Ida. ‘Quicker that way.’
‘Ye are starving,’ said the Eileen O’Reilly. ‘It is true. I took a look inside the kitchen cupboards. What have ye eatable? Only a few grains of porridge in the house, is it not? Rainfleury and Stoker did this to ye? And Millwillis did his part, too, I know. With my own help.’
She looked down.
Pertilly said in a clotted voice, ‘We are not without a cup of comfort; I’ll fetch us something from the kitchen.’
I rose abruptly and went to stand by the window, on the edge of our declining Swiney world and the other place beyond it, with just a pane of glass between our desperateness and its indifference to us. The Eileen O’Reilly joined me. Oona and Berenice linked arms with me. Ida came last, and she gave her hand to Berenice, inserting herself between Oona and myself.
That evening, Venice was in a state of furious beautifulness, as perfect in herself as one of Darcy’s pure rages. The work boats were gone and the gondolas had not yet commenced their trysts. The steam vaporetto had retired for the night. The Grand Canal was onyx, stippled with rare shafts of white light from gas lamps and lanterns. It was the moment of dead tide, the turning point between ebb and flow, a sinister, passionless moment, a lost no-time.
‘Something to drink?’ Pertilly arrived with the only silver tray that had not yet been sold. On one side were glasses brimming with wine, and on the other a whole quire of blank paper. In the middle was a salver piled with coins and banknotes.
‘The money,’ she said, ‘I held back till this moment. I have something to explain. It is that—’
Her eyes flickered nervously from face to face.
‘I have been working at Almoro Pagin’s trattoria—’
‘While we were starving and starving?’ Berenice asked. ‘With a single candle between us?’
‘I fed you as much as I could,’ said Pertilly, ‘without making you suspect me.’
‘Why did you not tell us?’
‘Almoro made me promise. He was afraid that Darcy would gamble it away if she knew of it. I did not like to lie to you all, but I wanted to save enough to feed us while Manticory writes the book that will feed us better than I can.’
The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 42
