Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite)
Page 9
And then, he said, “We live our lives as ordinary men, don’t we?”
6
Pocket Speaks of Dark Deeds
We live our lives as ordinary men, don’t we? We watch train wrecks, hear of murders in distant places, understand the notion of insanity, but we never think of these things in terms of possessing them. I can’t tell you everything I know, for not all of it would make sense. It doesn’t really make sense to me. Matilde was a beautiful child. She was five years old when I first saw her. Her mother would bring her, and your father, who was then nearly eleven, into the village. The major construction on Harrow had not really begun. Do you know what it was like then? It already had begun to get the look of a castle. A stronghold against the world.
Your grandfather had done much of the construction on the main house. He brought in stones from distant places, and the wood was carved by the best craftsmen of the time...I recognized early that your grandmother, whom everyone then called Jenny, did not find Watch Point or Harrow to her liking.
But she adored your grandfather, and she made the best of it, at least for a brief period of time. She went back and forth from her other house, and tended to arrive at Harrow for summers and part of the fall. Matilde, owing to childhood illness, rarely left the house.
Your grandfather originally had an entire area of the house just for her daughter, and her needs. She had nurses watching her day and night. She had trouble breathing, and seemed to go in and out of fevers constantly.
With epidemics running through the cities, and even along the shore, it was thought that Harrow was the best place for her, particularly while she was so young and fragile. The Gravesends brought doctors in to examine her. A specialist from New York arrived and stayed several months, living at the house. He was an unusual doctor, with an unusual practice. He spent most of his days pushing Matilde’s wheelchair around the grounds, when the weather was good. She could walk some days, but others, she would become dizzy and need the chair. I asked him once about her condition.
You see, I was at the house quite a bit. I was somewhat smitten with one of Matilde’s nurses, a young woman named Irene who had come down from Boston to work in the house. She was a handsome woman, very strong and very upright.
She did not like me hanging out at her place of employment, but would often meet me after work to go for an evening’s stroll.
I was little more than an errand boy to the constable, and I had far too much time on my hands.
So, once, when Irene was upstairs with one of the other nurses, fumigating Matilde’s room as was the custom, I sat with the little girl and this specialist. What he told me made me wonder at why Matilde was not in an asylum of some sort.
Yes, even a girl of five. Those things were done then. They may still be done. Locking children up who are beyond our understanding. Separating the sick from the healthy, like that.
This specialist said that she had exhibited signs of somnambulism.
Sleepwalking? said I.
Apparently she did things while walking in just such a state. She was, he felt, in grave danger if she remained at the house.
But such a little child, I said. Surely, this is some infant disease that will pass as she grows older.
He looked at me with extreme gravity of feature, and told me that in all the books he had read of the mind and its forces, Matilde Gravesend was unique.
He told me that, having studied at Prague, and then in New York, he had seen hysterical children and behavior that was both abhorrent and abnormal.
But he had never witnessed what this girl—little more than a baby—had done.
I pressed him for details, but he was secretive. He did say that she was dangerous to herself and to others, and that she would be best confined to what was then called Northcastle, up the river, near Albany, or down at some asylum near Baltimore, where she would get the best care. I shuddered, thinking about this, how this sad and beautiful child might be shut away with the insane and the disturbed. No one left those places in those days. No one. I could guess what her fate would be, should this specialist decide that she best be placed at Northcastle.
I asked Irene, the girl I loved, about Northcastle that very night. She evaded my questions, until finally, she had to admit that it was essentially a dungeon for the insane. “There is no one there who has not been violent, no one there who behaves decently, and not a soul who resides within the walls of Northcastle who survives many years there.”
Ailments would sweep through the halls of the asylum, and many would die. Those that did not die from epidemic, often killed themselves, or were killed by their mad brethren. When I told her what the specialist had mentioned to me, Irene was horrified.
At first.
Then, she told me something that caused me to rethink my sympathy for the child. Matilde, it seemed, had tried to murder her brother—your father—a few months before. Your father, shy, lonely boy that he was, kept to his room most summers, reading. He rarely went out to the gardens and was almost never seen in the village. One afternoon, he’d fallen asleep in the study.
As he later told the nurses, he awoke to see his sister standing over him, a large stone in her small hands.
It was aimed for his face.
He moved swiftly, and narrowly avoided having his head bashed in.
Irene told me that the stone was too heavy for any of them to pick up alone.
It had come from the construction, and she had carried it from the garden, into the house. She had lifted it above her head, with no help from anyone.
She exhibited great strength.
And she told me of the field mice, and how they’d been found, torn as if by a cat. At first, they thought it was a cat—the feral cats have always lived in these fields alongside the house. But then, one night, when the straps from Matilde’s bed had torn loose, Irene herself awoke to see the little girl doing something that does not bear repeating. Something that Irene told me I must never tell anyone, for she herself could not fathom it and might lose her job over gossiping about the Gravesends. But when Matilde finished her blasphemy, she turned, grinning, to Irene.
Between her teeth, a small mouse.
I was chastened in my opinion of the little girl, then.
Yes, she was beautiful and sweet and pitiful in her own way, when I saw her in her chair among the flowers.
These stories were almost too much to be believed. Yet, I understood that the diseased mind might take on aspects that none of us could predict. Justin Gravesend, one evening, seeing me waiting for Irene to take leave of the house for the night, called me to him. We sat and had some port, and he asked my opinion on some matters. First, he talked of the house, incessantly. Harrow. His true love, I thought then. The house and his plans for it.
After much port and more talk of building and designing, he confessed to the terror that was his daughter.
He loved her, you see.
He loved her more than he loved his son, I am sure of that. His father ignored the boy, your father, for much of his young life.
Justin became consumed with Matilde, with her needs.
He told me about how he had done terrible things when he was young. Things that had now come back to roost. He swore me to absolute secrecy. I promised that as long as he lived, anything he told me was safe within my soul.
He began to chatter about his wife, and how she had never touched Matilde, not from the day she was born. How he had to do the caring for the child, but he was ill-equipped for the task.
He supposed that this might’ve accounted for the fact that Matilde never had cried as a baby, at least not from hunger or need. She had been silent, and, he felt, she had watched him.
Once, he caught his wife slapping the baby, and had to pull her away. His wife had screamed that there was something unnatural about the child. His wife then had turned on Justin, and had shrieked that it was because of him, because of what he had done, that their daughter had turned out to be so unnatural.
Finally, he told me that he used to watch her, when she was a baby, in her sleep.
I asked him, “Because she did not cry?”
He shook his head. “She did things,” he told me, “that babies should not do.”
I asked him, “What sorts of things?”
And then he regaled me with words that had no meaning to me. They were a jumble. He could apparently not sort out what he meant to say, and what came from his lips seemed utter nonsense. I would not have been the first man to doubt his sanity, but I felt very strongly that he was a good and kind man, and loved his child dearly.
Clumsily, I told him that the very ill often behaved irrationally. My great-aunt had wasted away with consumption for years, and she often said vile blasphemies.
“She knows what she’s doing,” he said. “Of course, it sounds insane to anyone who has not known her since her birth. Of course, it must seem monstrous for me to have done these things. Of course, we seem like a terrible family to anyone who has not lived through what we have. I blame myself,” your grandfather said. “I was too interested in things best left alone as a young man. I wanted the wealth of the world,” he said. “I suppose,” he told me in that most private and terrible of moments, “that I sold my soul to the Devil as much as any Faust ever did. And now, my daughter pays for it with her sanity.”
I laughed at this, of course. Made light of it. The heaviness of his voice, the gravity of every word, seemed too serious. The pact with the Devil joke was ludicrous. I tried to point out the reality: that he was despairing because he had an ill child.
“I have heard of doctors in Germany who - “ I began, but he interrupted me with hollow laughter.
“You have heard of fools!” He said. “They would hurt my child, they would give her diseases and yellow fever to cure her of this madness. They would kill her with their cures!”
And then, he whispered something thrice, a word, an invocation.
I said to him, “What prayer is that?”
And he smiled briefly. “I am going to make sure my child is safe from this world.”
And that, sir, is when my Irene came down the stairs, and we left the house.
Irene and I quarreled soon after and broke off our friendship. She eventually left Watch Point to work closer to the city.
It was the last time I came to the house until Matilde had died. At least, they said she had died. I saw her in her small casket, and yes, her body was cold, and the doctors had been summoned.
The specialist from New York had arrived, and with him, a strange physician I had not met before. He was what they used to call a Mesmerist, and even when she was dead, he passed magnets of some kind over her body. He seemed nearly a priest.
Oh yes, and Father Gleason was there, for Matilde had been baptized in St. Christopher’s in Parham before her death. Yet, by then, even your grandmother would not come to the funeral. It was thought best that few arrive, for the little girl had been ravaged by fevers and all manners of illness that in those days...well, the fear of contagion was too much. I was told to keep a handkerchief over my mouth and nose at all times, so as not to breathe the air of the small room where her body lay.
I helped carry the small casket, through a gloomy day of overcast skies and later, a terrible rain. We laid her to rest in the vault.
I thought that was all there was to it.
Harrow was growing by this time. It was as if an acorn had taken root and had grown in a few years to a vast oak with full branches. In the village, they called it the Madhouse. Your grandfather had lavished his fortune on it as a way of hiding from the grief that his daughter had brought to his life.
Your father and grandmother rarely visited after that. Even when they did, they never stayed overnight at Harrow, but would go to one of the inns by the highway.
Of course, I thought it was finished.
Matilde, poor child, was dead and buried after all.
But years later, when he first offered me the cigar, he finally broke down and confessed the secret that had been eating away at him for those many years.
The Mesmerist had put Matilde under using his magnet, and one of the treatments the specialist had given the little girl was an injection of some terrible fever. Under the magnetism used, she did not feel the pain of the illness. She had exposed to some hideous disease - in order to cure her. The shock of the disease would bring her back to the world. That’s what he told me. Even that had not worked, and then, something more terrible had occurred.
Something that sounds as if it came from a medieval text.
They performed the rite of exorcism over that beautiful little girl, while she struggled in fever. I asked him why an exorcism, and he was evasive.
All I could learn from him about it was that his daughter had no sense of who she was. Finally, it was too much for her small body. Her breath gave out, but the priest told them that at least she had found salvation at the last. Your grandfather wept as he spoke of her death. He said the priest was shocked that she had died, as were the specialists that he had brought in. None pretended this was a victory over the sad life of a little girl.
“But then,” your grandfather said to me, his eyes growing ever wider, “Two nights after we put her in the vault, I went to sit in the crypt with her, to talk to the stone that held her. And as I stayed there late into the night, praying and talking and saying words that had no meaning, I began to hear a scratching from beneath the stone cover.”
7
“Dear God,” was all Ethan could muster, and he set down his cigar. The corridor had become overly smoky, and he went to open one of the small arched windows. “Dear God.”
He didn’t say anything else for a long while. He glanced outside, at the dark world and the firefly glitter of lights in the village; beyond the village, the river of night.
After what seemed like several minutes, Pocket said, “Your grandfather built Harrow to keep her safe from the world. That night, in the crypt, with his bare hands, he pulled back the stone. That night, he brought her back with him to Harrow. They had buried her alive, but he had rescued her. He had not lost her, after all.”
Ethan watched the distant lights, taking in deep breaths of air. “This explains some things.”
“Does it?”
“Yes, for me it does.” But even then, Ethan could not say what it explained, other than the mysteries that seemed to swirl around him as a child when he visited Harrow. “Not anything concrete. Just the things I felt in this house. When I was a boy. Why my father hated my grandfather so much.”
“Do not misjudge your grandfather,” Pocket said. “He was a good man. He did what he thought best. He had no one to guide him in this. He could trust no one. It was a different world then. It is hard to imagine it, the place this world was, back when I was a very young man. How you would keep a secret like this your entire life rather than let anyone know it. How the scandal would kill. How the opinions of others might destroy. How you could not imagine your own child in the viper’s nest of a place like Northcastle. In some ways, it was better that folk thought her dead. Better that your grandmother and your father thought her dead, as well. I suppose I am the only man who knows this. I suppose your father never knew. I can only guess that your grandmother never ventured into Harrow very much after that.”
“But I was here,” Ethan said, turning. “As a boy. I was here.”
“She was here, too, sir,” Pocket said. “But he built within the house itself a hidden world. And he sealed her there. He cared for her there. Until the night she died. In that room. Upstairs.”
8
Pocket stood slowly, setting the last of his cigar—snipped at the end—into his breast pocket. “I suppose we should go up now,” he said. “If you’d rather remain behind...”
�
��No, I’ll come.” Ethan felt his blood pounding in his ears, and the curious nausea returned to him. He wanted to sit back down. He didn’t want the thoughts or images in his head. Not the pictures that were forming of Matilde in her small casket. Of the vault out in the crypt. Of the Mesmerist passing magnets over her body, or the priest reciting Latin at the foot of her bed...
What in God’s name had he inherited?
A small voice seemed to answer:
Madness.
9
Ethan went ahead, up the narrow stairs to the small room. Once Pocket had negotiated the stairs, Ethan pointed out the portrait of the saint. “Do you recognize that?”
“The painting?” Pocket asked.
“Is it her?” Ethan asked. “Matilde?”
“Of course not,” Pocket said. “It’s just a painting, sir. I presume the body’s in there?” He took a step across the rubble, grabbing up one of the long candles. “Do you have a better light?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, this’ll do for now. Bring two in. I want a good view of this.” Then, Pocket caught his breath for a moment.
“Something wrong.”
“When one finds a body in a room, something is generally wrong, Mr. Gravesend,” Pocket said rather testily. Then, he calmed. “It’s the scent. I haven’t smelled it in years. Not in years.”
Ethan wasn’t completely sure, but it seemed as if the constable had a tear in his eye. The man was an enigma. A large cape-wearing enigma, and Ethan was too confused to get trapped in the puzzle.
Pocket said, “It’s not her smell. It’s not even the smell of a corpse, sir. It’s a scent that was always here. Always in these rooms. I’m surprised you don’t recognize it.” He added, nearly a whisper, “The day she died, I smelled it. The day I helped put these bricks in place. And it’s still here.”
Then, he took his jacket off and went over and laid it across the body, swiping at the thick cobwebs that grasped at the corpse.