The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

  Mildred Truelove Stapleton had not kept a diary her entire life. The stroke she had suffered at age sixty-five had left her hands too palsied to write. She had continued to dictate poems, to her secretary, to her son, until her second stroke at seventy-three had made even that too taxing. But her diary writing came to an end with her ability to bend her hands to their appointed labor.

  There were also long stretches of time (I discovered as I worked) when she had either made no entries or made entries so short that they were clearly token gestures. It would be a good project for one of the younger archivists (I thought and made a note of) to correlate those gaps with her working manuscripts and what else we knew of her life—the births of her children, her periodic separations from her husband and his eventual death—and see what pattern, if any, emerged. They might even get a monograph out of it. But at the moment, I was looking for something else.

  Mildred Truelove Stapleton had begun her diary when she was thirteen; that first diary, bound in worn blue calfskin with DIARY stamped on the cover in flaking gilt, was inscribed on its inside cover, Mildred Caroline Truelove, in a tremendously ornamental hand which mercifully did not extend into the diary entries themselves.

  She wrote in the diary at first as if she were writing letters to a girl of her own age, recording in a breathless gush details about her family, her friends, her schoolwork. She even explained how her godmother had given her the diary for her thirteenth birthday and exhorted her to write in it every day (carefully underlined in thirteen-year-old Mildred’s careful copperplate), which Mildred had promised faithfully to do. Father says that since they know I am a Budding Authoress, he and Mother will look forward to discovering what I feel worthy to be written down. And that, I thought, explains the gush.

  That bright, impenetrable surface was maintained for a little less than a year, until (I gathered) both Mildred and her parents had grown rather bored with her diary. There was a hiatus of four months, and when Mildred resumed, it was in a very different mood.

  I have read in books (she wrote, almost broodingly) of diaries which people keep and do not show to anyone else. I think I should like this to be that sort of diary. I shall have to hide it from Georgy, because she will read it and tattle, but I know a place she won’t think to look.

  From that point on, the diary became a more honest and helpful vehicle. Tentatively at first, then with greater confidence, Mildred Truelove began to write about herself without censoring her real opinions. The differences at first were minimal; I could see that the sunny enthusiasm of her first entries had not been hypocrisy or even conscious deceit, simply, through anxiety to please, an exaggeration of those qualities in her which her parents found most acceptable. She wrote sadly about her growing realization that Georgiana was their father’s favorite, crossly about her wish that her parents would not insist on reading every play, story, and poem she wrote. As she became more honest with herself, her writing matured, so that one could catch glimpses of what would emerge from its chrysalis as a poet’s genius.

  Knowing that Georgiana had died young and was thus the prime contender for Miss Stapleton’s “girl without eyes,” I paid particular attention to Mildred’s remarks concerning her sister. Before her death, Georgiana featured in Mildred’s diary mostly as an irritant. She was three years younger than Mildred, blonde and charming and pretty. Their father spoiled her, their mother cosseted her “delicate sensibilities” and took an inventive joy in dressing her which she had never displayed toward Mildred. Georgiana was adept at getting Mildred to do what she wanted, either by pretty pleading, threats to bear tales to their father, or deploying their parents with the cunning of a Machiavel. And her tantrums were the terror of the household. The picture that emerged from Mildred’s entries was of a pretty, charming, willful child, who was accustomed to get her own way with the confidence of an empress.

  Georgiana died on June ninth of the year she was fourteen and Mildred seventeen (recorded in small, lifeless handwriting: Today my sister Georgiana died). For many months after that, Mildred made no entries in her diary at all, and when she resumed, it was at first without reference to the tragedy. I waded through several weeks’ worth of long, chatty entries that reminded me forcibly and sadly of thirteen-year-old Mildred’s diamond-plated gush. And then, on May third of the year following Georgiana’s death, the entry consisted solely of the sentence: I saw Georgiana again this afternoon.

  There were no entries for a week after that, and when she next wrote, on the eleventh, her writing was very even, very calm, and filled with a desperate anguish that echoed chillingly for me with the sonnet sequence she would write when she was in her forties, called Prayers for the Trapped.

  I know that I see Georgiana [she wrote]. I am not dreaming, not hallucinating, not indulging in flights of fancy. This morning as I was pinning up my hair, she was standing behind me in the mirror, looking exactly as she did on the day she died, except that now her eyes are nothing more than hollow sockets.

  She smiled at me—although it was not her true smile, only the charming fake which served her purpose most of the time—and said, very softly and very clearly, “Wait for me, Milly.” When I turned around, there was no one there, as I knew there would not be.

  I cannot tell my parents. And I am afraid that anyone else in whom I confided—if they believed me at all—would say it is a judgment, that it proves my guilt in Georgiana’s death.

  Maybe they would be right.

  After reading that entry, I had to leave my office and walk up and down the corridors until the crawling gooseflesh on my arms and back subsided. There was the girl Miss Stapleton had seen, complete—or incomplete—in every detail. Even the same words. And somehow it did not surprise me that the girl who had smiled a fake smile at Mildred Truelove fifty-nine years ago would try to kill Mildred’s daughter now. But I still did not know why Georgiana was hostile, nor where Mildred’s alleged guilt lay, and in the end it was my infernal curiosity, my overmastering need to resolve conundrums and mysteries into logic and truth, that drove me back to the diaries.

  After May eleventh, Mildred’s calm, despairing prose recorded a series of encounters with Georgiana in mirrors and incidents of hearing her voice in the hall outside her room—which had been left unchanged since her death—crying, Wait for me, Milly. There was no escalation at first, merely this relentless haunting. On May twenty-ninth, Mildred recorded with grim amusement one of her friends asking her why she avoided her reflection in shop windows. I did not tell her that it was not my reflection I sought to avoid, although she admitted that she had never seen or heard Georgiana outside the Truelove house.

  Then on June ninth, the anniversary of Georgiana’s death, the haunting burst into bloom like a upas-tree. To please her parents, Mildred had agreed to spend some time alone in Georgiana’s room, as if it were a meditation chapel. My distaste grew for the Trueloves père and mère. I could not tell what Mildred’s feelings were; she merely recorded their request and her obedience, her attention being focused somewhere else.

  She had gone into Georgiana’s room and sat down on the bed. The maids dusted and changed the sheets once a week, so the room was, as Mildred put it, dead, but not corrupted, like an Egyptian pharaoh.

  I sat there for I suppose ten minutes [she wrote], and I was just wondering if that was enough to please Father when I heard Georgiana, much more loudly than I had ever heard her before, though she said nothing different.

  I got up to leave, no longer caring whether I pleased Father or not. If I had thought about what I was doing for even a moment, I swear I would have crawled out of that room on my hands and knees. Standing, as I started toward the door, I passed directly in front of Georgiana’s vanity, and my peripheral vision caught her shape in the mirror.

  I cannot explain why I turned to face her, except that she was my sister and it was I whom she wanted. I looked in the mirror; she stood just to one side and slightly behind me as she always did, wearing the dress she had died in,
her fair hair gleaming, and her eyes an abysm.

  “I’m here, Georgy,” I said.

  I do not know if she heard me; I do not know if she perceives anything of the living present of this house. She said, “Wait for me, Milly,” as always, and her face wore its same simpering mask.

  It was worse somehow in the vanity mirror—perhaps because it had been Georgy’s mirror, and I had seen her living reflection in it so many times. Or perhaps, now that I think about it, it was her mirror in some other sense.

  As I stood there, staring, the vanity began to rock.

  It had always been unstable, and I still think that was why she fell as she did. But now it was rocking, like the table at one of my mother’s horrid séances, and when Georgiana said again, “Wait for me, Milly,” it hit me all at once what she meant, what she wanted, and what she was about to do. I ran from the room like a rabbit, kicking the doorstop aside in my panic. I heard the door shut and lock behind me, as it always does now that Georgiana is dead. But I did not hear the vanity crash to the floor, so I shall be spared attempting an explanation to my parents. I locked myself in my own room, where I have cried now for an hour and a half. I had not realized before that she wants me to be dead, too. I will not go in her room again.

  Here the writing changed, becoming wobbly, hesitant, fully of blots, although the prose remained as stately and clear as ever. The contrast was worse than a babble of unfinished and unconnected sentences would have been.

  Later—I underestimated Georgiana’s cunning, as I always did. Or perhaps she simply had a tantrum; she could never bear to be thwarted.

  Father has just been in, and I have been accused of every sin in the calendar, right up to the edge of murder. I knew he thought I had as good as pushed Georgiana out that window, because he could not face blaming himself—or her. But I did not understand before that he thinks I would have pushed her if I’d had the chance. Father and I have never been truly amiable, but now I am afraid we are beginning to hate each other.

  He had been in Georgiana’s room and found it in chaos. Her books had been dragged off the shelves and thrown across the room; her bed had been violently unmade; every bottle and knickknack which had stood on her vanity had been knocked to the floor and broken. He had heard me, he said, run out of the room and slam the door behind me, and since only he, Mother, and I have keys (had, I should say, for he made me give him mine), he knew none of the servants was to blame.

  And then he stood and looked at me in that vile way of his, more in sorrow than in anger, a man more sinned against than sinning, and waited for me to explain myself.

  There was nothing I could say. He would not believe any protestation of innocence, and the macabre impulse to say, “Georgy did it,” as I had said so many times in the past, I luckily recognized as incipient hysteria and did not yield to. In the end, I said only, “I am sorry,” which was true, and Father shook his head sadly and left, saying that he would have to discuss with Mother and Rev. Braithwaite what was the best course of action. I am left feeling very much like a Christian martyr awaiting the lions—assuming that the martyrs were angry and guilty and nauseated with fright.

  I wonder what he would do to me if I broke my mirror.

  After this bleak and frightening entry, there was another, longer hiatus; in fact, that diary volume had been abandoned altogether. When Mildred resumed her diary nearly three years later, it was as a junior at Radcliffe, and her entries concerned themselves with her classwork, her poetry, her circle of friends. She recorded her dreams carefully. But she did not write about her sister or her parents or the house she clearly no longer lived in. Nor did she write about what had happened in the intervening years. I thought that she was laboring to recreate herself, and I, who had never managed to do as much, admired her for it.

  I skimmed rapidly through the next several years; it was almost four o’clock, and at six I would have to go home and shower and shave in order to be presentable for the museum staff. Mildred began to publish her poems, graduated from Radcliffe, met and married Vincent Stapleton. She mentioned her mother’s death in passing, with no details—although, to be fair, she gave scarcely more space to the birth of her first child, Amelia.

  When Amelia was three, and Mildred’s second child, Martin, an infant, Mr. Truelove died, leaving Mildred sole heir to his estate. She wrote sardonically that although her father had become more friendly toward her after the birth of his first grandchild, she believed that the will was intended primarily to spite her Uncle John, who had been assuming odiously and loudly for years that the estate would go to his son, Mildred’s cousin Frederick Truelove.

  The Stapleton family fortunes were at that point fairly rocky, as Vincent Stapleton was proving himself to have no head for finance; thus they were profoundly grateful both for the money and for a house large enough to contain their growing family. Mildred had a long, anxious, conflicted entry about the house, in the course of which it transpired that she now, some ten years after her encounter with Georgiana’s ghost, believed—or was trying very hard to believe—that she had suffered a nervous breakdown and that this was somehow vaguely all right, because it was the sort of thing one expected of poets. It was unusually woolly thinking from Mildred, although she ended the entry by saying clearly and firmly, although without antecedents: I shall not put anyone in her room.

  They moved into the Truelove house, and it began its long metamorphosis into the Stapleton house. There were no incidents. Mildred remained adamant about not using Georgiana’s room, and as I skimmed years of entries about poetry and children and finances, I wondered if Amelia Stapleton had simply had the bad luck to be the first person to look in that mirror since Mildred had fifty-nine years previously.

  Martha was born, and then Charlotte; Mildred’s poetry began to attract critical attention; she quarreled with Vincent, forgave him, quarreled with him again. Such stupid arguments, she wrote drearily at one point, and I thought of Mr. Lucent and myself arguing in the bedroom, Mr. Stapleton and Mrs. Hilliard arguing in the front hall, the constant bickering and spite we had witnessed all that week between the Stapleton heirs. I had assumed the bad feeling had been caused by the fight over the will, but now I was not so sure.

  But there was no mention of Georgiana (as I skimmed more and more rapidly, knowing I would have to leave soon and that if I put the diaries aside now I would never find the nerve to come back to them) until a day in mid-April the year that Amelia was thirteen. Then Mildred wrote, veering abruptly out of a dreamy essay on her garden greeting the dawn:

  At breakfast, Amelia was complaining about her little sisters [Martha being at that time eight and Charlotte six]. I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention—Amelia is always complaining about something, poor lamb—until she said emphatically that she was tired of waiting for them to finish buttoning their boots, and she wasn’t going to wait for them any more, no matter how loudly they screeched down the hall after her.

  “But we didn’t!” Martha said indignantly, and Charlotte shook her head so vigorously that her curls momentarily resembled the aureole of a dandelion.

  “You little liars! I heard you!” And she mimicked viciously, “Wait for me, Melly! Wait for me, Melly!”

  I intervened then—much too sharply, I am afraid—and made them talk about something else. I don’t think I finished my breakfast, although I may have; I simply have no memory of it. After the children were safely in Miss Underwood’s care, I went and stood in the hallway outside that bedroom and listened for a long time, but heard nothing. Maybe Martha was lying; maybe it is just a coincidence. I hope so. But no power on Earth could make me open that door.

  I stared at that entry for a long cold moment, and then had a sudden moment of insight, almost an epiphany. I knew that if Mildred had ever written frankly about Georgiana, there was only one date worth checking. I flipped ahead to June ninth:

  She died of being locked in a room.

  That is melodramatic and not strictly accurate, but it i
s what comes to me when I think of Georgiana’s death. There are all sorts of other causes and explanations, but for me, in the end, she died because that door was locked.

  It was the day of the annual Episcopalian Youth Circle picnic, as young people from all the parishes in the diocese gathered together to flirt, and to play croquet, and to paddle on the river if they were so inclined. Georgiana had been excited about it for weeks because it meant a whole new crop of boys for her to flirt with. She had been particularly bumptious all morning—”bumptious” was Nanny’s word and Nanny had been the only person who could deal with Georgiana when she was like that. Mother murmured ineffectually; Father all but encouraged her. She and I fought like cats and dogs.

  But that June 9th she provoked Father at lunch. I can’t remember what she said; I have merely this shatteringly clear memory of the expression on her face, that bright, sparkling look she got when she knew she was being naughty and was going to get away with it—because she always got away with it.

  Except that time she didn’t. She must have said something that Father felt threatened his authority—I wish I could remember what she said, but I just can’t. He became towering in his wrath—a pose he was fond of but usually only got to exercise on me—and forbade Georgiana to go to the Youth Circle picnic.

  Georgiana was almost never punished or scolded, and she was never forbidden things. She went white with shock, and then she exploded. She pitched the worst tantrum she’d ever pitched, but Father was practically in a tantrum himself, and the upshot of it all was Father locking her in her room “to think about her behavior.” By the time I came upstairs to change my dress, she had quit screaming.

  As I passed her bedroom door, she said, “Milly?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t go yet. If you wait an hour, Father will change his mind.”

  She spoke with absolute confidence, and although I wish I didn’t, I still remember how angry it made me. “And let you wiggle out of a richly deserved punishment again?” I said. “I’m not waiting.”