The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

“Yes,” said Mr. Ogilvy. I thought he was about to start rubbing his hands with glee. “Thekla thought she could outrun her blood, but it can’t be done. Can’t be done!”

  “I beg your pardon. Did you know my mother?”

  “Know her? Dear boy, I almost married her!” He began to laugh again, a croaking, rasping, vile sound that made me want to stop my ears with my fingers. “Murchisons can only marry each other,” said Mr. Ogilvy. “That’s our curse. Thekla thought true love could carry the weight of death, but she was wrong. Wrong!”

  “Mr. Ogilvy,” I said, and I was astonished to hear how level and even my voice was, “I believe you have not been honest with me.”

  “I’ve lied only by omission. I was Regina’s lawyer, and I most certainly did search for twenty years without finding a trace of Thekla. ’Course, I didn’t know she’d been dead for three years when I started. The only thing I didn’t tell you, Kyle my lad, is that the M in my name stands for Murchison, just like in yours.”

  I felt as if I was drowning in his pipe smoke and his hideous revelations. It was just as well he did not wait for a response from me, for there was no response I could imagine making.

  “There’s even a legacy, though I don’t imagine it’s going to do you much good.” He grinned, revealing an array of yellow, crooked, corroded teeth. “The truth. The curse of the Murchisons. Did your dear departed mama ever tell you stories about her family?”

  “No.”

  “Poor stupid Thekla.” He sighed, but it was as fake as the tears of a crocodile. “So, then, you need some family history.”

  “Mr. Ogilvy, I really don’t think—”

  “Sit down.” Involuntarily, I sat.

  “An ancestor of yours, Geoffrey Murchison, married a woman named Alabaster Whalen. Mary Anna and Claudine always maintained that Alabaster was from Salem, but they were a pair of romantic ninnies, and I say it as their cousin. In any event, there seems to have been a good deal of coercion involved, and their only child, your five times great-grandfather, John Whalen Murchison, was conceived by rape.”

  He paused, giving me a sly look to see how I was taking all of this. I do not know what he saw on my face, but it must have satisfied him, for he continued: “Alabaster Whalen Murchison died in childbirth with her only son—whom she had never wanted—and she cursed both son and father with her dying breath. Regardless of Alabaster’s origins—Salem witch or some other kind—her curse was effective, and it has transmitted itself to all of her descendants, including,” and he gestured with his pipe at my hair, “you.”

  He stopped there, waiting, his eyes like a crocodile’s judging the strength of a drowning man. I wanted to walk out on him, to deny him the satisfaction he sought, but the story had hold of me, and I could not.

  “What was the curse?”

  “Murchison men kill their wives; Murchison women kill their husbands. If your hair goes white before you’re twenty-five, your spouse will be dead before you’re thirty-five. And they all die like your father did, Kyle: a mysterious ailment that slowly saps the vitality. No doctor can understand it or halt its progress. Geoffrey Murchison survived his wife by about six months. John Whalen Murchison’s first wife died when he was thirty four. His second, third, and fourth wives each lasted about five years. Divorce can’t save you, and the absence of children is an iffy protection at best—and don’t think that immorality will save you, either. It’s been tried. Your great-great-grandparents were second cousins who each had the white hair when they got married; they lasted well into their sixties. That’s the only effective counter-measure we’ve ever found: bad blood balancing bad blood. But then we found, in our generation, that there weren’t enough Murchisons to go around.”

  He blew another enormous cloud of smoke and peered out of it at me like the cruel dragon in a fairy tale. “Thekla thought that if she cut all her ties with the family and married a man whom she loved beyond words—as she put it in a letter to Claudine—then Alabaster’s curse would miss its grip. Guess she was wrong, wasn’t she, Kyle?”

  “Did he know?” I said, my mouth numb and ashy.

  “Of course he knew. Perfect love means perfect honesty, that was what Thekla thought. She told him the whole thing before she consented to the engagement.”

  “And he married her anyway.”

  “He was a fool,” Mr. Ogilvy said, his mouth twisting further with contempt. “Just like Thekla.”

  I remembered my father well enough to know that he had never been foolish. He had simply loved my mother enough to make the gamble. But perhaps, in Mr. Ogilvy’s lexicon, that was the same as being a fool.

  “We’re almost all dead now,” he continued in a quieter voice. “Thekla was right enough about that. Three generations of marrying your cousins, and most of the vitality goes out of the stock. There’s me, and there’s Mary Anna—she’s in a convent in Ohio—and there’s Claudine’s kids, but the boy’s half-witted, and poor Mavis is as barren as salt. Planning on getting married, Kyle?”

  No one calls me Kyle, and I hated hearing my given name from this mummified toad, but telling him so would only please him. Mr. Ogilvy did not like me any better than I liked him; I wondered if it was on my mother’s account.

  “No,” I said. My voice was rusty, shrill, little more than breath. I could feel Alabaster Whalen Murchison’s hate, and I suspected I would go on feeling it for a very long time, perhaps forever. But there was no love left in my life which she could kill, no happiness which she could blight.

  His eyebrows went up, but he said, “Well, no matter. Now, since it seems that you are indeed Thekla’s son, Mavis would like to meet you, and give you that daguerreotype of Thekla I mentioned in my letter.”

  “Mavis?”

  “Your cousin, Mavis Murchison Davenant.”

  “Oh. I, er . . . ” I wanted to run, to bolt out of the smothering red velvet warmth of the Belfontaine like a fox who hears the baying of hounds. But I also, painfully, wanted to see my mother’s image. “Yes, very well.”

  “She’s down in one of the lounges,” Mr. Ogilvy said, getting up. “Come on.”

  I am a fool, I thought despairingly. But I followed him.

  I felt my cousin as we came out of the elevator, before I saw her, a pocket of black stillness in the midst of the bright jubilation. I turned my head and there she was, standing beneath the lobby’s enormous clock. Mrs. Davenant was easily a half-foot taller than Mr. Ogilvy, her white head rising from the black collar of her dress like a funeral lily. As we crossed the lobby toward her, I saw that she was near my own age; she wore her hair unfashionably long, seeming almost to flaunt its whiteness with the heavy braids that crowned her skull. She had a narrow, high-cheekboned face, very medieval, and her dark eyes were myopic and dreamy. She looked like Julian of Norwich, as painted by Millais.

  Mr. Ogilvy said, with unwholesome chirpiness, “Mavis, my dear, this is your cousin Kyle. Kyle, this is Mavis.”

  We shook hands. Her grip was firmer than I had expected, although her long, narrow hand was as cold as it was pale. “How do you do?” she murmured.

  I bit the inside of my lower lip and managed a perfectly unexceptionable, “I am pleased to meet you.”

  “You are troubled,” she said gently, not quite a reprimand but definitely a correction. “You did not wish to come. You are angry at Cousin Luther, and frightened.”

  I looked involuntarily at Mr. Ogilvy; he shrugged and smirked, deliberately unhelpful.

  “Mrs. Davenant, I—”

  “Please, call me Mavis. The spirits have told me so much about you that I feel almost as if we were children together.” Her smile was lovely, dreamy, and did absolutely nothing to quell the cold shivers of dread along my spine. “Come. Let us go someplace that we can sit down and talk.”

  I could not have claimed that I wished to stay in the lobby; the crowding and the noise were already increasing the tension in my neck and shoulders. I followed Mrs. Davenant and Mr. Ogilvy into a small lounge off the main lobby,
deserted except for a dark, heavy-set young woman who was seated in the exact middle of the plum-colored Chesterfield, her feet planted squarely on the floor, knitting. She looked up at our approach, and her muddy hazel eyes, fixing on Mrs. Davenant, lit like bonfires. She put her knitting aside and rose.

  “Edith, darling, this is my cousin Kyle. Cousin Kyle, may I introduce you to my dear friend, Miss Edith Locksley?” The muddy hazel eyes fixed on me, and Miss Locksley produced a wholly unconvincing simper.

  I shook hands with Miss Locksley because this ghastly contretemps was not her fault. But my unease was growing stronger, my sense of being a fox pursued by ardent hounds; I said, “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Davenant, Mr. Ogilvy, Miss Locksley, but I’m afraid I cannot stay. I have—”

  “Cousin Kyle,” Mrs. Davenant said reprovingly. “We have traveled a great distance in order to speak to you, and at great inconvenience to ourselves. Please, sit down. A quarter hour of your time is surely not too much to ask.”

  My skin scalded with mortification; I found myself sitting on the couch between Mrs. Davenant and Miss Locksley, while Mr. Ogilvy claimed an armchair. Miss Locksley picked up her knitting again, and I tore my gaze away from the needles, shuddering. They reminded me too much of Mrs. Siddons.

  “Mrs. Davenant,” I said, “please—”

  “Cousin Kyle,” she said, smiling and placing her hand on my knee, “do tell me about yourself.”

  I gritted my teeth and did not tell her that I hate to be touched. She smelled strongly of incense. “I, er, I work in a museum. With old books. I . . . er, I . . . that is—”

  “Are you married?”

  I felt myself tense, and I knew she could, too. “No,” I said in barely more than a mumble, “I am not.”

  “Have you objections to the married state?” she pressed, and the solicitude in her voice might have been mockery or might not, and I could not tell which was the more unpleasant thought.

  “Considering what Mr. Ogilvy has told me, I am amazed that you can ask.”

  “Cousin Luther?” she said past me, cold and stern.

  “Seems I forgot to tell Kyle the most important part.” My head turned, unwillingly, stiffly, and he gave me a small smug smirk. “The curse wasn’t the only thing Alabaster passed on to her descendants. You don’t have it. Neither do I. But your daughter would.”

  It took me a moment to realize what he was saying, to understand why the Murchison line had not died out over a century ago. “Oh God,” I said, my voice strange and hoarse and hollow in my ears. “Oh God, no.”

  “Squeamish, Kyle?” said Mr. Ogilvy and leered repellently. “You shouldn’t be. It’s the power that matters. Your daughter could drink demon’s blood. She could call on darker gods than yours, and they would hearken to her call. She could unbraid the future, feel death in her hands. She could hear the voices in the earth.”

  “No,” I said. I was on my feet somehow, shaking. “Never.”

  His eyebrows went up. Not a toad, but a serpent, the serpent who knows that Eve lies when she says she has never wondered about the forbidden fruit. “Never?”

  “I will not . . . I cannot—”

  “Don’t turn your back on your family so quickly, Kyle.”

  “And you should not be so hasty to dismiss marriage.” Mavis Davenant’s cold hand on my arm, pulling me back down onto the sofa. “For the spirits tell me it is your destiny.”

  Then either she or her “spirits” lied, for if I know anything about myself, it is that I was not designed—by nature or benevolent Providence or any other force—for the matrimonial bed. “Mrs. Davenant,” I said, “please remove your hand from my person.”

  In the shocked little silence that followed, Mr. Ogilvy started laughing, hard enough that he seemed likely to choke.

  “Cousin Luther, please,” Mrs. Davenant said in genteel exasperation. Her hand was still on my arm.

  “Mrs. Davenant,” I said, “I was quite—”

  Now there was a hand on my knee on the other side. I turned my head, my flesh crawling, and saw that Miss Locksley had set down her knitting to place one plump hand on my knee, the other splayed starfish-like on her bosom. “I can tell that you are not a believer, Mr. Booth,” she said, and her voice was low and unpleasantly throaty, “but do you not feel it?”

  “Feel what?” I could hardly help feeling her hand; it was heavy and, even through my trouser-leg, hot. I suspected it was also damp.

  “The connection between us!” she said in accents more suited to one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines.

  “I, er . . . that is . . . No.”

  “You will,” she said, the muddy hazel eyes boring into mine. “The spirits have shown me. Oh, they do not speak to me as clearly as they do to dearest Mavis, but I could not be mistaken in this!”

  “Miss Locksley,” I said desperately, “I assure you that you could.” I wanted to rise, but Miss Locksley seemed to be leaning more and more of her weight on the hand that rested on my leg and Mrs Davenant had a remarkably strong grip for such a frail-looking woman. “Ladies—Mrs. Davenant, please. I have told you that I—”

  “You are very noble, Cousin Kyle, but Edith is aware of the danger and is entirely prepared to face it.”

  “The danger?” I said, my voice rising into a squawk; the understatement was too much to be borne.

  “The curse,” said Miss Locksley, her expression uplifted.

  “It would be murder!”

  “Edith is a distant cousin, and we think she might—”

  “Doesn’t have the hair,” Mr. Ogilvy struck in.

  Mrs. Davenant ignored him loftily, and I wondered how many times they’d argued the point already. “We think she might have sufficient Murchison blood to withstand the dark energies.”

  “And, in any event,” Miss Locksley chimed in, “I don’t mind.”

  I could not help staring at her. “You don’t mind?”

  She was looking very pure and noble and reverent, and I was conscious of a desire to slap her, an urge which I had never felt toward anyone before in my life. “My daughter will bear the power of the Murchison women. She will be a Queen of the Unseen Realms. And I know that Mavis will care for her as she would for a daughter of her own. Truly, I cannot complain if I lay down my life, so long as it is in the service of my destiny.”

  “Miss Locksley, this is not your destiny!”

  Both women looked at me reproachfully, and I shrank back, feeling my face heat.

  “Cousin Kyle, you shouldn’t argue with the spirits. Much is revealed to them that we on this plane cannot see.”

  “Mrs. Davenant—”

  “Family, Cousin Kyle. This formality is very sweet, but really not necessary.”

  No matter what powers Mrs. Davenant controlled, she was not going to make me call Mr. Ogilvy “Cousin Luther.” “Cousin Mavis, I don’t at all wish to be rude, but . . . ”

  “This comes to you as a shock. I understand that. And no one’s asking you to get married today.” She and Miss Locksley both laughed, a celestina of bones underscored by the cries of swamp frogs.

  “No, it isn’t—”

  “Today we are asking for something much simpler.”

  Oh, dear God. We need a human heart for our rites, Cousin Kyle. You won’t miss it, I promise. I licked my lips. “What?”

  Mrs. Davenant smiled, and I saw the hate and power and madness of Alabaster Whalen shining in her eyes. “The bone key. Where is it?”

  For a moment, I truly believed she had lapsed into some other language, Chinese perhaps or ancient Sanskrit; I could make no sense of what she said. Even when, fighting panic, I replayed her words in my head, they were meaningless. “I . . . I beg your pardon?”

  “The bone key, Cousin Kyle. I want it back.”

  “Mrs. Davenant—er, Cousin Mavis, I’m afraid you must—”

  “Don’t bother with the protestations of innocence, Cousin Kyle. We know Aunt Thekla took it. And it doesn’t belong to you. It has always been the talisman o
f the Murchison women.”

  “Made from Alabaster Whalen’s own arm bone,” Miss Locksley said dreamily.

  Dear God, I thought, no wonder we are cursed.

  Mrs. Davenant gave Miss Locksley a yes, dear, but not NOW, look, and said to me, “It will do you no good. Aunt Thekla should not have taken it.”

  “I have nothing of my parents’, as I think you know very well. Does the daguerreotype Mr. Ogilvy mentioned even exist?”

  She allowed herself just the barest hint of a martyred sigh as she opened her handbag and produced a small, flat, rectangular object wrapped in black velvet.

  “Thank you.” I unwrapped it only long enough to be certain that it was a daguerreotype and that the girl portrayed was not inconsistent with my memories of my mother, then rewrapped the velvet and tucked it into my inner breast-pocket.

  Mrs. Davenant said, “The bone key, Cousin Kyle.”

  “I wasn’t negotiating,” I said, incredulous and indignant. “I honestly don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about.”

  “A rod about two inches long—it would look like scrimshaw if you didn’t know what it was.”

  She saw the recognition on my face before I could school my features. “You have seen it. Where? When?”

  “The last time was at my mother’s funeral. In her coffin.”

  Mrs Davenant’s mouth thinned. “And where is Aunt Thekla buried?”

  I stared at her in horror. “You can’t . . . ”

  “The bone key is mine by rights, and I have no intention of leaving this city without it. Where?”

  “No. I will not help you desecrate my mother’s grave.”

  “But you already have, Cousin Kyle.” She smiled at me sweetly. “The spirits are urging you to speak. Listen to them.”

  “I told you because I thought . . . I never imagined you would . . . have you no shred of decency?”

  Mr. Ogilvy said, “Murchisons mostly don’t.”

  “Cousin Luther,” said Mrs. Davenant warningly, and then turned back to me. “Cousin Kyle, I mean no disrespect to Aunt Thekla. But you must know, all that lies in her coffin is the remains of her mortal shell, the shackles she has cast off. Listen, Cousin Kyle, and you will hear her say so!”