by Mark Morris
And the body was glowing; glowing with the same green luminescence that had shown Isobel her location.
Isobel remembered at last that she’d seen such exquisite corpses before, in places where the wealthy venerated their dead and turned them into glittering saints. Old families and High Church.The Wollstonecrafts carried both in their bloodline.
And Isobel, comprehending at last where she was, began to scream.
* * *
The room, the Master’s Chamber, is redolent of stale alcohol, spent seed and strong tobacco or perhaps incense. Some kind of drug? Isobel notices a kind of pipe in one corner, perhaps three feet high, made of blown glass in colours that have the same sheen as oil on water.There are silken tassels and a mouthpiece and tubing. She’d heard of such things at St Dymphna’s: Hepsibah Ballantyne had averred it a fine way to poison someone. Mistress Ballantyne had always said that to best murder another, you should discover their habits and run parallel to them, insert your lethal blow into the usual flow of their life, so that way the difference you made would most like not be noticed.
Isobel looks to the bed, which is located beneath a bank of diamond-paned glass. In said bed, so enormous that it might fit six, she sees three figures. The covers are thrown back, as are the window shutters, for the eve is balmy, moonlit; one of her nannies always said that sleeping in moonlight let madness in. How many Wollstonecrafts have slept thus?
Summer, she thinks, as it was when I married. A summer bride, lying winter-cold for so very long. No mourning for Adolphus, she notes, and no sleeping alone.
Her husband lies between the recumbent figures of Cousins Enyd and Delwyn, their dark Wollstonecraft locks spread tousled across crisp white pillowcases, their naked forms on crumpled sheets. Two girls Isobel had thought friends, or like to become so.Their slumber is that of the well used.There can be no mistaking it; the dead bride did not lie. She did not need to when she’d said, The Wollstonecrafts breed only amongst themselves and they are prolific, hiding those whose parents are too closely related in attics and cellars, those who show too much the double, triple, quadruple blossoming of blood.
Isobel thinks, memories flooding now, of all those Wollstonecrafts at the wedding feast, watching her so avidly. She wonders how she ever thought their eyes gleamed with love and happiness, their lips curved in welcome, not avarice. Perhaps she could not see their greed because her own was so intense as she gulped from the bridal cup held by Adolphus, offered so generously to her first—against tradition!—a sign of his devotion, his love for his young wife. She has, even now, no recollection of falling asleep at the table, of drifting into what her new family thought was death.There is only the memory of the cup, the dark liquid within, her husband’s tender smile.
Nor does she even now recollect crossing the wide room, yet somehow she is standing beside the great bed, staring down at Cousin Enyd whose tiny waist she’s always admired; on Enyd’s left wrist is a diamond bracelet that had belonged to Isobel’s mother. Isobel’s hand goes to the back of her own head, fidgets beneath the friable veil and finds the hairpin that was the final gift of Orla and Fidelma Meyrick.The gems and metal are cool against her fingers and the pin comes out with no complaint. Isobel looks at it carefully, remembers the instructions from one of the weaponry classes, then gives a nod of satisfaction.These three have been drinking, smoking, heavily; all of them snore.They’ll not wake easily.
She leans over Cousin Enyd, lowers the hairpin point-first to the cockleshell of the ear facing her, then depresses the left side of the daisy’s centre.A single tiny drop of paralytic poison, so powerful she fears to get it on her own skin, oozes from the tip of the pin and drips into the shadowy coil of Enyd’s ear. Isobel waits for a count of five, then swiftly plunges the shaft into the narrow canal; her fingers push the right side of the daisy design and the length of the pin splits into four very fine, very sharp, very tough lengths which tear into the brain. Cousin Enyd hardly moves, giving just the tiniest of shudders as she voids her bladder and bowels, but the stink of it barely registers above the other rich scents in the room.
Isobel creeps softly around the other side of the bed and repeats the process on Cousin Delwyn, whose rich thick curls she’d often envied; around this one’s swan-like neck is the emerald and pearl locket that had belonged to Isobel’s grandmother. Delwyn dies no more noisily than did Enyd, though she is fleshier, larger, there is less poison and the paralysis is not so entire; she twitches, kicks too close to Adolphus and Isobel must swiftly grab at the limb, hold it in place until the tremors still. Isobel feels a twinge of pride; the time at St Dymphna’s was neither wasted nor its lessons lost. Orla Meyrick herself couldn’t have executed these deaths any more tidily.
Adolphus still has not stirred.
Isobel slips her stolen jewellery into the hidden pocket of her dress, then steps away, takes up position between the bed and the door. Her breathing remains steady—it did not change even as she slaughtered those false cousins—and what she feels moving through her is a cold thing, a passionless fury, a determination to one end. She takes a breath and begins to sing.
* * *
“Are you quite finished?” came the voice when Isobel at last ran out of breath and fear.“Pride of St Dymphna’s you are.”
“How do you know—”
“I’ve had twelve months to wander around in your sleeping mind—no point looking like that. I’m bored and have been for a very long time.A saint couldn’t have stopped herself. I can’t do anything else, can’t move from here. I’ve only got a little energy and I’m saving that for something rather more special than comforting you or a mere haunting.”
“How did I get here? How did you get here?” wept Isobel, stung by the corpse’s callousness.
“Our husband, you little fool! Adolphus Trajan Wollstonecraft.We’re not the first brides he’s disposed of for the sake of their fortunes, but you were the first one who was supposed to kill him. And failed to do so quite spectacularly. Imagine all the trouble you could have saved. No doubt, there’ll be more betrotheds after us when his goodly period of mourning is done, and all your wealth run through!”
“How many?” asked Isobel, shocked out of her sobs.
“Four. Buried on the other side of the altar. I’m sure they’ve got fresh new maidens picked out to take up residence beside us in the fullness of time.”
“But you can talk, make this light…”
“And small, bitter consolation that it is. As I said, I can’t haunt anyone. Hepsibah Ballantyne knows her business too well for that.”
Isobel startled at the name, thinking about the poisons mistress who came to St Dymphna’s and taught the girls to brew dark potions.There were whispers that the woman was a coffin-maker, too, and indeed that was where her renown lay; the facility with poison was a happy coincidence and a secret for St Dymphna’s headmistresses and students. A lucrative habit born of her more-than-passing interest in death.
“My, what interesting things you keep hidden in your heart and head. I only knew her name from conversations I’d heard Adolphus and his mother have as they crossed the floor above my tomb—they’ve a fondness for plotting in the chapel; perhaps it makes them feel justified and holy.” The corpse sounded sad.
“Poison,” said Isobel.
“And there are these jewels, of course. Not content with paying a premium for death-beds to keep us beneath, they laid these cursed gems over us.”
Isobel prodded at the attachments to her canines, and the dead bride said, “Those are to stop us from becoming vampires or some other such blood ghosts. They made us saints against our will, the ecstatic dead to cover their crimes, to keep us from haunting them, from ever getting vengeance.”
“But I’m not dead,” said Isobel softly.
“No, indeed you are not!” Gleeful now. “None of the chains the living have placed upon you have taken, sweet Isobel, and you are fit for my purpose!”
Isobel listened, watched the still form; there was onl
y the sickly pulsing green light to tell her she wasn’t truly alone, that the voice wasn’t simply in her head. But what if it was? What if the light was a hallucination too? Perhaps this was her punishment.
Punishment for what?
For leaving St Dymphna’s the moment her mother died?
For denying her duty?
For falling in love with the man she was meant to murder?
For being so foolish as to trust?
“Why did you do it? Trust him? You were better off than any of us.You were trained.You had a goal, a duty.”
“Get out of my head! I’m conscious now and I don’t appreciate you using it as your playground!” Isobel shouted so loudly that her ears hurt in the confined space.
“I’m sorry,” said the dead bride. “There’s little call for etiquette down here, so I forget.”
“For him. He was older by a little, funny, sweet and smart. He didn’t care that I was fat. He was… kind. I met him before I was sent to St Dymphna’s. I knew almost from the cradle what I was meant to do, that the very point of my life was to destroy another’s—to avenge an ancient and dusty death, that of an ancestress of mine murdered at the hands of his forefathers.” Isobel paused. “But I met him and I loved him from the first even though I knew I shouldn’t. I thought… I thought I might draw it out, put off taking his life until after my mother died, until there was no one left to care.Then he and I could be happy, the past forgotten, dead and buried.
“Then my mother did die, sooner rather than later, before I’d even finished my schooling. I left St Dymphna’s the very day after the news arrived. I went to him, went to his home, we planned our life together.”
“They’re not as fabulously prosperous as they appear, you know.There’s much tat and shine for show, but the vaults are empty, more often than not with but a few pieces of gold, candlesticks and crested salvers. The family silver has been pawned and redeemed time and again—the silversmiths of Caulder know the Wollstonecrafts of old.”
“But—”
“Rich brides are this family’s business. We’re lambs to them, meat on the table, money in the bank, brides in caskets. Did you not wonder that there were no friends invited to your nuptials? None there but Wollstonecrafts? That they live so far from anything despite their supposed wealth? It’s hard to keep secrets in cities where everyone’s watching to see what move you make, where the well-to-do keep better track of their daughters.” A long sigh. “You signed over everything, didn’t you? All the riches your mother gathered, the businesses she built, all the prosperity and majesty that clever merchant queen reaped from her investments over the years, and you signed it away for a piece of cock.” A giggle, rueful.“Don’t feel too great a fool; I did the same, and brides before me and thee who were otherwise reckoned clever. I… I was ugly, yet he convinced me he loved me, that he cared not a jot for beauty.”
“But Adolphus loved me. He didn’t know what I gave up for him, that I put his life first.” But she thought of the tiny moments, the signs she’d ignored: all the occasions when plans for what came after the wedding were put off, discussions avoided. Don’t you worry about that, my dear, we’ve plenty of time for that later.Yet how quickly he’d begged she sign documents that transferred her ownerships to him in case of a dreadful tragedy, which would of course never happen.
“You think not?The poison he used came from Ballantyne, who knew you at the school, who outfitted this very coffin- tomb, this death-bed just as she did the others—she’s not so skilled with stone as wood, but she did a good enough job to trap me.You let him live, Isobel, but no good deed ever goes unpunished.” The skeleton gave a rueful chuckle. “And I doubt you’re the first poison girl to flee that venerable institution, to choose love over duty.”
“I was, you know. The Misses told me with great relish and umbrage,” confessed Isobel.
“Ah. My tale is your tale, or at least so close that the differing details barely matter. But at last something can be done.” The voice rose like a victory hymn.
“You’re dead,” said Isobel, toneless, lifeless. “You’re dead and I’m trapped. Even if he’s betrayed me”—if?—“nothing can be done.”
“Do you have the engagement ring he gave you? An enormous sapphire, if memory serves correct, blue as a hot afternoon sky?”
Isobel examined her fingers, looked to where the item in question should be, but there were only the ornate rings joined to each other by golden chains, the things meant to hold her in place. She pulled them off, added them to the glittering pile beside her.
“No. Just the wedding band,” mused the dead bride.“The same for all of us. No point in wasting an engagement ring when you can reuse it, like a dog collar. They don’t want to trouble themselves with a costly replacement, and they can’t use these”—Isobel knew she meant the cursed things—“Gods forbid anything should happen to the lamb before the wedding, before the Wollstonecrafts get the fortune for which they’ve worked so hard!”
Isobel looked at the other’s skeletal hands, wrapped around a posy of dead yet somehow intact roses. A strong breeze would interrupt their carefully held structure. On one finger she could make out the dull gleam of a ring identical to hers.
“I’ll die here,” she said. “I’ll starve as a trusting fool deserves to. I’ll suffocate.” Suddenly the air felt thinner, staler, her lungs more demanding.“But I’ll go mad first.”
“And what a delightful change that will be,” sniggered the dead bride. “You’ll not likely starve any time soon, although you’re looking thin, yet not so thin as I.There’s plenty of air, you silly bint.As for madness, sometimes taking refuge in it is the only way to maintain a modicum of sanity.”
Isobel realised then that her own dress—with all the ribbons and frills and bows meant to make her beautiful, but which just made her look even more enormous—was terribly, terribly large on her. That none of the weight she’d carried around all her life, that drove her mother and nannies to despair, remained. Reading her thoughts again, the dead one said,“Bet you never expected you’d be grateful for that fat! What do you think kept you alive all these months?”
“I don’t want to live,” wailed Isobel, knowing it was stupid as soon as the words were out.
“Ye gods, the stock at St Dymphna’s is poor. A man betrayed you and you want to die?”
“No. I… I betrayed my mother, my teachers, by trusting him, by choosing him.” Isobel thought of the Misses Meyrick and their steely countenances.
“And you think dying is the choice they’d want you to make? You, upon whom so much effort was expended to make you more active?” The dead bride tut-tutted. “It would be easier, certainly, to expire, but St Dymphna’s girls, as I understand it, aren’t made for easy paths. You weren’t descended from milksops or weeping maidens; the women before you carried sword and shield, they fought in the open, their blood was red and rich and violent! It’s in your veins, Isobel, so pull yourself together!”
“But I can’t get out—”
“Of course you can; there’s a way, a way for the living.”
Isobel sat up as straight as she could and stared at the unmoving form.“How?”
“Ah, now that’s information for which you must bargain, Isobel girl.”
“Tell me now or I swear I’ll scatter your bones, I’ll grind them to dust even if it makes my fingers bleed!”
“That’s the spirit! Now calm down. In return for my very useful knowledge, you will make me a promise, a promise by which you’ll set more store than any ever before or so help me—”
Isobel did not pause.“I will promise you anything, just get me out of this tomb!”
* * *
The song is one the dead bride advised, tried to teach until Isobel comprehended that she already knew it from her old life, a tune sung by this nanny or that governess. Her husband does not stir, so she sings louder still for there’s no one to wake but Adolphus. She wonders how he’s spent his days since her death, then decides she
can probably guess. Sings more loudly, more sweetly, until her patience runs out and she fair shouts,“Adolphus!”
He sits up, stunned, blinking in that strange mix of darkness and moonlight and receding sleep that render him blind for long moments. He does not notice the still bodies of his cousins on either side of him, does not spare them a glance. He sees only Isobel.
She imagines she must look close to the spectre he tried so hard to make her. She smiles and follows the script. “Adolphus, my love, fear not.You’re simply dreaming.”
She can see him struggling to recognise her and she remembers how changed she is from the lumbering lumpy girl he said he loved above all others. That all those places he caressed and fondled and fingered are so much easier to find now.
“It’s Isobel, my love. See you dream me how I truly was, how I truly wished to be. Still you know my heart!”
“But you’re dead, my Isobel.” Fear silvers his tone.
“Oh yes! So very dead and you do but dream me, but there is something I must tell you, something that threatens your very house and future. My love has drawn me back.Will you follow and see?”
“But of course! That you should still care for me beyond death! It warms my heart,” he says and creeps to the end of the bed so as not to disturb his cousins’ rest. He reaches for her and Isobel holds up a warning hand.
“The living cannot touch the dead, my love! Lest you be drawn down to lie beside me.” Adolphus nods. Isobel smiles. “Then come and allow me to render you this last service.”
The moment she turns her back she knows it for a mistake, but she was brimming with confidence that her deception had worked, that she’d won. She can almost feel Orla and Fidelma’s disapproving stares just as she can feel the steel of her husband’s fingers closing around her left wrist.
“Little fool, little bitch! Do you think I’ve not created enough ghosts to know one? That I cannot tell the smell of warm blood from cold? ‘My love has drawn me back.’ Gods, what a lackwit you must think me, as much of a one as yourself.”
