Her attention is drawn away by footsteps. Footsteps and muttering; nothing intelligible, but determined. She puts an eye to the split between the curtains and watches the Viceroy pace, his back to her, to the chairs and their pannikins and pitchers. He kneels, grunting and groaning like a grandfather and pours the contents of a jug into a pan, whispering all the while.
A mist rises, swirling into a tall tower that takes on the shape of a man. The Viceroy moves to the other pan and, while the first thing is coalescing and firming, begins the process anew. He lifts his head and Nel sees his face in profile: the Viceroy, yes, with all the peaks and valleys of the features she knows, but old, so much older than he has presented himself. Furrows in a skin blotched with age and malign intent. Nel, understanding her time is short, slips out of the alcove and through the open door.
Her mouth is dry as paper, her throat closed over as she sneaks from the house. A sudden breeze pulls the door from her numb grip and slams it. Nel is used to little magics, the tiny enchantments to help things along, the harmless brushes of conjuring; what the Viceroy has done—is doing—is beyond her understanding. She runs down the cracked steps, behind her she hears the front door pushed back against the facade of the house, and two sets of stumbling feet, as if their owners have just woken. Nel darts into the undergrowth, fear of what she knows is chasing her greater than that which she imagines might be lurking in the garden. She tiptoes through dank detritus, glances over her shoulder and in the process trips over an ill-covered lump, wrapped in a mouldering blanket.
The smell of something else is worst here, right by this thing, this cylinder-shaped thing that feels soft and giving beneath her shaking hands. Before she summons the courage to unwrap it, however, the sound of footsteps grows louder, more confident, rushing through the leaf-litter, following her tracks. The moment before they appear, the Viceroy’s golems, there is a whisper and a sigh—no, whispers and sighs—and Nel is surrounded by grey, wispy women, made wan by death. Through them she can just make out the potato-faced minions, their heads moving back and forth, back and forth like confused bloodhounds. They cannot see her; the women have shielded her. The men servants shuffle off, back towards the path and the house.
Nel soughs her thanks, but the girls do not reply, merely watch her with sad, sad eyes. She glances at them, at the swirling number of them, trying to fix their features in her memory, until her eye lights on a face she knows too well. One for whom she packed a knapsack with warm clothing and food and drink; for whom, not six months since, she’d silently unlocked the door and watched as the other disappeared into the fog of the early morning. One she’d thought free of Breakwater and the house by the Weeping Gate.
She runs to her mother, not to the Constable, not any of the other council members. She runs to her mother, with the spectre of Iskha at her heels. To Dalita because she is the most powerful being Nel has ever known. No matter that there is no love there, Dalita loves Asha and Dalita will not allow her chosen daughter to be harmed.
Nel, propelled forward by the force of Dalita’s large hands, keeps her balance until the final few steps. Then she trips and sprawls.
Her fall is broken by damp fabric; felt, soaked with water. There is the sharp, briny smell of salt.
“You will not ruin this for me!” Dalita howls like a cat impaled upon a hot poker. Her rage, her disbelief, when Nel told her what she had seen, what she feared, was something to behold.
At first Nel thought it directed towards the Viceroy, then a ringing blow to her head and a second to her face made her reconsider. While she was disoriented, her mother grabbed her by the hair and dragged her, half-crawling, half-walking through the house, then into the kitchen and down to the cellar. Nel was unsure what enraged the woman most: the idea that Nel might endanger the wedding or that she had helped Iskha flee.
“Liar! Ingrate! Knave! Bitch!”
Dalita threw open another door, in the floor—a sub-cellar.
And the terrible truth of this place is becoming clear, after Nel’s drear hours in the dank dark room: this place is tidal.
There is a gap at the base of one wall, she can see, where the sea comes in, but there’s no hope of escape: there is a crosshatch of bars across the opening. The water is rising, rising, rising.
Wailing and shouting have not helped—no one can hear her through the cold thick rock of the walls and ceiling. Anyway, her sisters are all a’flap with celebrations—there was no pause for them in the evening, business as usual, but today they wear wedding finery and act the dutiful daughters even though the streets will be filled with people who sneer and laugh at them behind their backs.
The hours have done nothing but make Nel colder, to bring her closer to despair; her teeth chatter, she shakes so badly she can no longer stand and beat at the wood of the trapdoor, which is sodden, but not soft, not rotten. Her hands are bruised and fingers bloody from that hopeless endeavour. There is no lock which she might finagle into compliance.
And the water has continued to rise mercilessly; inevitably; inexorably.
A wash of waves pushes Nel, and her bluish lips and nose scrape against the rock-carved ceiling. She tastes salt and metal; she smells mildew and death. In moments, the sea will replace the last tiny pocket of air and she will drown. It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
With this realisation she feels her body suddenly very heavy, her spirit suddenly very light. She ceases to fight, ceases trying to stay afloat, gives herself up to the water, and she bobs about, heedless as seaweed. The tide pushes against her again, once, twice, thrice and she feels this is the end.
Hands.
Hands, strong and insistent, many of them; and voices, crying, angry, relieved. Many voices, all at once and Nel is hauled upwards. Behind her the trapdoor is slammed back into place, the bolt shot as loud as a lightning strike.
And her sisters, all her sisters but one—but two—gather around her, clamouring, demanding, groaning with fear and relief, wanting to know what happened, where has she been, was this why she missed the wedding.
And she tells them, choking on seawater and bile and vomit; shivering and shaking and desperately trying to pull her soul—which she so recently was preparing to let go—back into her body.
And they believe her; they believe her because she has never lied and because they know their mother and the length, breadth, and height of her ambitions.
Nel hopes Asha is safe, that there is time.
‘The Viceroy insisted they pay their respects to the morgue dead after the ceremony, while the city feasts.’
The mortuary, thinks Nel, so full of lost souls and spent lives, of untapped power. And as they sit there, the seven of them, they hear in the distance the sonorous clang of the death-bell. Not a rhythmic beating, but a desperate clamour, a cacophony. A cry for help. It stills them, voices, faces, hands trying to dry Nel off. It stills their hearts and their minds for precious seconds. And then they run, all of them, even Nel in a halting, stuttering fashion.
They run up the stairs, through empty rooms. They tumble down the front steps like kittens released from a box; they process through the cobbled streets, fast and fleet and trailing diaphanous fabrics and long tresses behind them like banners. They run through the night streets like glorious, terrified ghosts, flashing past windows and open doors, glowing in the lamplight as they pass from shadow to light and back again.
Not far from their destination, the air is split by a rumbling and the lash of a whip; they are almost run over by a black carriage and four, ebony plumes waving in the air. In a blinking moment, Nel glimpses the Viceroy slumped inside, his white wedding attire bloodied and torn, his true age writ large upon his face. Then the conveyance is gone, on towards the city gates, and the sight gives wings to Nel’s feet.
The sisters run until they merge with the gathering crowd outside Breakwater’s black marble and cardinal brick mortuary, threading their way through folk who, minutes ago, were celebrating all
unawares.
Upwards the girls rush, pushing past the fat Constable and his slack-jawed deputies, along corridors embedded with the smell of death: mortification and preservation. Finally they crowd into a room, the room where all will one day go, lined with alabaster tables, each bordered with gutters and silver tubes leading to channels in the floor, stained rusty with all the years of bodily fluids. A room laid out not unlike their own attic sanctum. A room with windows set very high in the walls so no gawkers might peek at the frailty of the dead.
A room with a roughly drawn scarlet circle laid out before them, a star etched inside it with a bottle at eleven of its twelve points. Bottles filled with a churning red-grey mist, some fallen on their side as if collateral victims of a struggle, but none of them broken; none but the empty one lying beside Asha, who is draped across one of the tables.
Her wedding gown is worse for wear, and her tiara is askew and missing some of its pins. As the sisters approach, they notice her makeup has smudged and run, the lip wax is smeared, the kohl and mascara lie in lines across her face, her eyes seemingly bruised by the mess of dark smudges. One earlobe is torn and bloody, its earring gone.
The others stop; these are steps they cannot take. But Nel continues, her feet bare and muddy (her shoes lost in the depths of the sub-cellar), her dress saturated and still dripping on the cold marmoreal floor. Her soles jerk with the shock of being cut—glancing down, she sees shards of yellow, the crystal the Viceroy once wore, now destroyed. She notices that her sister still breathes laboriously, crimson vapour travelling on the exhalation. Nel gathers her up, heedless of the heart’s blood spilling from the tear in her chest. Nel leans close and catches Asha’s last words, “I can see Iskha.”
As her sister relaxes into death, Nel lets her lie back down. She arranges Asha’s limbs and clothing, gently closes her lids over staring eyes, tries to tidy the wildly dishevelled tresses. Clenched in Asha’s right hand is one of the missing pins, the diamond-tipped one. Its long thin shaft is covered with rapidly congealing blood. Nel does not believe this is her sister’s and she wraps the spindle in a piece of fabric torn from the wedding dress and buries it deep in her own pocket.
She then notices, around Asha’s body, an aura, a silver shimmer that pours off the dead skin; a voice in her head says no, but she ignores it and touches once more the morbid flesh.
There is nothing. No bolt of lightning, no arching pain, neither scream nor shout nor moan. Nothing, but a kind of itch, across her scalp and her own skin, her own face. Nothing that hurts, nor is even uncomfortable, but simply the sensation of a change creeping on, slowly.
“A soul clock,” says Mother Magnus, her voice tunnelling through the dim front parlour of the house by the Weeping Gate. All the rooms have been dark for some weeks, all business dealings postponed, all noises hushed. Nel stands, staring out through the gap in the thick curtains. The view of the street has not changed, although there is a carriage waiting, not too fine, not too ordinary, simply one that will draw no attention. She lets the old woman reel out her explanation. Nel occasionally asks questions and wonders if the cunning woman should have—or did—notice the signs.
“Why girls? Why not boys?”
“Vanity? Convenience? Soft skin? Who looks for lost girls of suspect morals?”
“And Asha? Why Asha?” Nel’s voice trembles but does not break.
“Who was more beautiful than Asha?”
Nel realises she is wringing her hands; she shakes them, stills them.
“He was aging—I saw him. I think he was getting desperate. He was getting sloppy, stopped bothering to hide them.” Nel rubs her face, still getting used to it. “I wonder what he’ll do now, where he’ll go.”
“Like I said, hen, you can track him with this, if it’s his blood.”
Nel nods, because she is sure. She wants to be sure. She takes the item from Magnus. “He won’t recognise you, but it will be harder for you to hide.”
“I know,” says Nel, skin all goose bumps at the thought of being seen. “What about the other ones?” the old woman asks.
Nel turns. Mother Magnus is pointing to the eleven bottles, now empty. Nel hopes the wisps of souls will forgive her. It will not be long, she tells them in her heart, and prays Iskha will intercede for her.
“Home,” she says. ‘They went home.’
Upstairs, Nel can hear her mother’s ruckus and she takes her leave of the cunning woman. Dalita, having disappeared after being given news of her darling’s demise, was found hours later screaming at the Viceroy’s mansion, yelling obscenities at the top of her lungs, banging at the doors and breaking the windows with anything she could find to hand. She has been a’bed ever since.
The first time she opened her eyes and saw Nel she recoiled, gibbering. Now she will take food only from this daughter’s hands.
For it is Nel, but not Nel alone.
The plain daughter is transformed. She is not the great and terrible beauty Asha was, but something of the dead sister has passed over to her.
Her hair is now a decided black, her eyes are larger, but still grey. Her mouth has blossomed into something that demands attention, and her figure has filled out, hips and breasts growing wider, just a little, and waist pinching in without the aid of a corset. She is dressed in Asha’s clothes for her own no longer fit.
She is a different girl, touched somehow by the magic left on Asha’s skin. She is no longer a girl who can live in the shadows, and she feels this loss. Nel no longer feels safe for there is nowhere she can hide from the gaze of those who would drink her in.
This morning, dressed in a grey velvet travelling dress (once Asha’s favourite), a beaded purse hanging from one wrist, and a black lacquer fan which, when open, shows mermaids and sailors, on the other, she gives instructions to Carin, who insists upon interrupting.
“And what do we do,” asks Carin (now rounder than she was and determined to become rounder still), “when she asks for you? When she refuses to eat?”
“Mix a little of the valerian in her food, it keeps her calm. Tell her I am doing what I must and she needs to be patient.” Nel pulls on kid gloves fastened with jet buttons.
“When will you come home?”
“When it is done.”
Her single carpetbag waits by the doorway. When she is in the shadowy confines of the carriage, when she can feel the rock and sway of the vehicle and knows they are beyond the city’s boundaries, Nel will take the diamond-topped spindle from her reticule. She will place it on her palm and wait to see which way it spins, until it finds the direction she must follow.
Nel takes a deep breath, steeling herself to step outside, to move through the world and be seen.
See here? See this girl?
She is a very fine girl indeed.
St Dymphna’s School for Poison Girls
“They say Lady Isabella Carew, née Abingdon, was married for twenty-two years before she took her revenge,” breathes Serafine. Ever since we were collected, she, Adia, and Veronica have been trading stories of those who went before us—the closer we get to our destination, the faster they come.
Veronica takes up the thread. “It’s true! She murdered her own son—her only child!—on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, to wipe out the line and avenge a two-hundred year old slight by the Carews to the Abingdons.”
Adia continues, “She went to the gallows, head held high, spirit unbowed, for she had done her duty by her family, and her name.”
On this long carriage journey I have heard many such recountings, of matrimony and murder, and filed them away for recording later on when I am alone, for they will greatly enrich the Books of Lives at the Citadel. The Countess of Malden who poisoned all forty-seven of her in-laws at a single banquet. The Dowager of Rosebery, who burned the ancestral home of her enemies to the ground, before jumping from the sea cliffs rather than submit to trial by her lessers. The Marquise of Angel Down, who lured her father-in-law to one of the castle dungeons and locke
d him in, leaving him to starve to death—when he was finally found, he’d chewed on his own arm, the teeth marks dreadful to behold. Such have been the bedtime tales of my companions’ lives; their heroines affix heads to the ground with spikes, serve tainted broth to children, move quietly among their marriage-kin, waiting for the right moment to strike. I have no such anecdotes to tell.
The carriage slows as we pass through Alder’s Well, which is small and neat, perhaps thirty houses of varied size, pomp, and prosperity. None is a hovel. It seems life for even the lowest on the social rung here is not mean—that St Dymphna’s, a fine finishing school for young ladies as far as the world-at-large is concerned, has brought prosperity. There is a pretty wooden church with gravestones dotting its yard, two or three respectable mausoleums, and all surrounded by a moss-encrusted stone wall. Smoke from the smithy’s forge floats against the late afternoon sky. There is a market square and I can divine shingles outside shops: a butcher, a baker, a seamstress, an apothecary. Next we rumble past an ostlery, which seems to bustle, then a tiny school house bereft of children at this hour. So much to take in but I know I miss most of the details for I am tired. The coachman whips up the horses now we are through the hamlet.
I’m about to lean back against the uncomfortable leather seat when I catch sight of it—the well for which the place is named. I should think more on it, for it’s the thing, the thing connected to my true purpose, but I am distracted by the tree beside it: I think I see a man. He stands, cruciform, against the alder trunk, arms stretched along branches, held in place with vines, which may be mistletoe. Green barbs and braces and ropes, not just holding him upright, but breaching his flesh, moving through his skin, making merry with his limbs, melding with muscles and veins. His head is cocked to one side, eyes closed, then open, then closed again. I blink and all is gone, there is just the tree alone, strangled by devil’s fuge.
My comrades have taken no notice of our surrounds, but continue to chatter amongst themselves. Adia and Serafine worry at the pintucks of their grey blouses, rearrange the folds of their long charcoal skirts, check that their buttoned black boots are polished to a high shine. Sweet-faced Veronica turns to me and reties the thin forest green ribbon encircling my collar, trying to make it sit flat, trying to make it neat and perfect. But, with our acquaintance so short, she cannot yet know that I defy tidiness: a freshly pressed shirt, skirt, or dress coming near me will develop wrinkles in the blink of an eye; a clean apron will attract smudges and stains as soon as it is tied about my waist; a shoe, having barely touched my foot, will scuff itself, and a beribboned sandal will snap its straps as soon as look at me. My hair is a mass of—well, not even curls, but waves, awkward, thick, choppy, rebellious waves of deepest fox-red that will consent to brushing once a week and no more, lest it turn into a halo of frizz. I suspect it never really recovered from being shaved off for the weaving of Mother’s shroud; I seem to recall before then it was quite tame, quite straight. And, despite my best efforts, beneath my nails can still be seen the half-moons of indigo ink I mixed for the marginalia Mater Friðuswith needed done before I left. It will fade, but slowly.
A Feast of Sorrows, Stories Page 10
