Sleep, Pale Sister

by Joanne Harris

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ I said. ‘There is no Marta. There never has been a Marta.’

  She ignored me. ‘Effie loved you, Mose. She trusted you. But she warned you, didn’t she? She said she’d never let you leave her.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’ In spite of my detachment I sounded defensive—and felt it. ‘I thought it would be for—’

  ‘You were tired of her. You found other women who asked less of you. You bought them with Henry’s money.’ She paused. ‘You really wanted her dead. It was neater that way.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous! I never promised—’

  ‘But you did, Mose. You did. You promised.’

  I lost my temper. ‘All right, all right! I promised!’ My anger drove a spike of migraine into my forehead. ‘But I promised Effie.

  I never said anything to Marta.’ My head had begun to spin like a child’s top and I was light-headed with fury and something like terror. I was shouting, unable to stop as the words spilled out of me. ‘I hate Marta! I hate the bitch. I hate the way she looks at me, the way she seems to see everything, know everything. Effie used to trust me, to need me; Marta doesn’t need anyone. She’s cold. Cold! I’d never have left you if it hadn’t been for her.’ It was almost true. I stopped, panting, the ragged headache pounding in my temples. I forced myself to breathe deeply: ridiculous, to lose control in a dream. ‘I never made any bargain with Marta,’ I said quietly.

  She was silent for a moment. ‘You should have listened to Fanny,’ she said at last.

  ‘What has Fanny to say to anything?’ I snapped.

  ‘She warned you not to stand in our way. She liked you,’ she said simply. ‘Now it’s too late.’

  Don’t laugh if I tell you that, for a moment, as I looked into her sorrowful eyes I felt a kind of fearful regret, a despair like Dante’s cold hell. For a moment I saw myself spiralling downwards in darkness for a dizzying eternity, like a snowflake blown down a bottomless well. Suddenly the beating of my heart seemed a terribly fragile thing; nothingness yawned below me and, in a flash of ridiculous association, I remembered that night in Oxford when a voice from the dead had spoken from the card-table: ‘I’m so cold.’

  So cold…

  In that instant it occurred to me that my certainty that I was dreaming was a little absurd; when had a dream been so clear, so intense, so real? When had I been able to smell the absinthe in her glass, to touch the table-top, still sticky with spilled brandy? To feel the hairs rise on my shivering arms? I sprang to my feet, grasping her hand across the table; it was cold, a blue-veined hand of marble.

  ‘Effie…’ Suddenly I knew that I had to say something to her, something of terrible urgency. ‘Marta. Where is Effie?’ Her face was impassive.

  ‘You killed her, Mose,’ she said softly. ‘You left her in the vault and she died, just as you told Henry. You know you did.’

  It was the wrong question. I could feel my time spiralling away.

  ‘Then who are you?’ I cried in desperation.

  She smiled at me, a tiny, cold smile like a hunter’s moon.

  ‘You know, Mose,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t damned well know!’

  ‘You will,’ she whispered, and when I awoke in the dark, clammy with sweat and aching all over, her smile remained with me like a tiny, tugging fish-hook in the nape of my neck; it remains with me even now as I fall into the inconceivable emptiness of a world without Moses Harper…I see it gleaming through silent space like a bright scythe. ‘Ni vue, ni connue…’ Between blindness, ignorance and the relentless momentum of annihilation a man could fall in love.

  And when they told me that morning that a woman’s body had been found in the Isherwood vault in Highgate cemetery I was hardly at all surprised.

  64

  You’d like to know, wouldn’t you? I can smell that hunger on you like sweat, hot and sour. Oh, you’d like to know all right. But I won’t tell you where I am—you’d never find me if I did—and anyway, all places look the same to the travelling folk: the farms, the towns, the little houses…all the same. I’m with the gypsies, now. It’s an honest life for the most part, and it’s safer to be always on the move. No-one asks any questions. We all have our secrets here, and our magic.

  It’s easy to disappear in London. People come and go, all wrapped in their own business; no-one noticed an old woman with her basket of cats as they made their way through the soft snow. I left all my things in Crook Street; I suppose the girls sold them when they finally understood I was never coming back: I hope they did; they were good girls and I was sorry to leave them. But life’s like that. Travel light and fast, that was my motto, even in the old days when Marta was a little chit—and we’re light and fast twenty years on, with the snow at our backs like the Angel at the gate.

  The Romanies took us without a word—they know all about hunting and hunted—they even gave us a wagon and a horse. Some of them still remembered my mother and said I had the look of her. I make potions and philtres to cure the gout—or a man’s hard heart—and I’ve got more friends than you ever had with your church and your preaching. They gave me a new name, too, though I’ll not tell it you, a gypsy name, and I sometimes tell fortunes at country fairs with my Tarot cards and my crystal ball and the green scarf draped over the light. But I won’t tell my cards for just anyone. No, it’s the young girls I like, the tender ones with their eyes shining and their cheeks flushed with fairy-tale hope; and maybe one day I’ll find a special one, a lonely one like Effie who can learn to fly and follow the balloons…

  We keep on hoping, Marta and I. Last time was so close, she tells me, so heartbreakingly close. And we are closer now than we ever were; the memory of Effie, the grief of Effie, binds us together, not with bitterness but with a gentle melancholy at what might have been. Effie, our little girl. Our pale sister. We loved her, you know, more than either of you ever did; loved her enough to want her with us for ever…and in a way she is with us, in our hearts; poor, brave Effie, who brought my lost Marta back home.

  On winter evenings I sit in my caravan with the blue candle burning and Tizzy, Meg and Alecto curled at my feet by the stove and I sing to Marta as she sits purring on my knee:

  ‘Aux marches du palais…

  Aux marches du palais…

  ’Y a une si belle fille, lonlà

  ’Y a une si belle fille…’

  We’ll find her one day, Marta, I promise her as I smooth her soft, midnight fur. A sensitive one with bright, innocent eyes. A lonely one who needs a mother, a sister. We’ll find her one day. One day soon…

  65

  It was Effie all right. They took me to identify the body as it lay in the morgue and they were polite throughout, with the quiet courtesy of the hangman. I could feel the noose tightening around my neck at every breath I took…She was lying on a marble block, slightly tilted, and in a gutter at my feet a strong disinfectant flowed, making tiny trickling sounds in the huge silence of the morgue.

  I nodded. ‘That’s Effie.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Sergeant Merle remained impassive, as if he were discussing some matter of little interest. ‘The doctor says that the body was in the grave for some time. Since Christmas Eve, or thereabouts. The cold appears to have slowed the…er…degenerative process.’

  ‘But, damn it, I saw her!’

  Merle looked at me expressionlessly, as if too polite to comment.

  ‘I saw her…days after that!’

  Silence.

  ‘Besides, if I had known she was really dead, why on earth would I have told you where she was?’

  The sergeant looked apologetic. ‘Mr Chester had already informed the police,’ he said. ‘The…er…responsibility, he said, was preying on his mind.’

  ‘Henry’s a sick man!’ I snapped. ‘He’s incapable of distinguishing fact from fantasy.’

  ‘The gentleman is certainly in a very disturbed frame of mind, sir,’ said Merle. ‘In fact, Dr Russell, the nerve specialist, feels that his mental hea
lth is uncertain.’

  Damn the man! I could see Henry’s game: Queen’s evidence, and the word of a well-known doctor might mean that he never had to stand trial for Effie’s murder. But I’d be damned if I let him pin it on me.

  ‘Have you seen Fanny Miller?’ I could hear the desperation in my voice but was not able to curb it. ‘She’ll tell you the truth. It was all her idea in the first place. Effie was staying with her.’

  Again the expression of respectful reproach. ‘I did send a man to Crook Street,’ said Merle stolidly. ‘But unfortunately the premises were empty. I posted a watch on the premises, but so far Miss Miller has not returned there. Nor has anyone else, for that matter.’

  The news was like a blow to the neck.

  ‘The neighbours!’ I gasped. ‘Ask them. Ask any—’

  ‘Nobody remembers seeing a young lady answering Mrs Chester’s description on the premises at any time.’

  ‘Well, of course they didn’t!’ I snapped. ‘I tell you she was in disguise!’

  Merle simply looked at me in mournful scepticism and I could not stop my hand from creeping up towards my neck. The invisible noose drew tighter.

  I suppose you know the rest of the sordid tale—everyone else does. Even here among the racaille I have achieved a certain fame; they call me ‘Gentleman Jack’ and speak to me with the respect due to a gentry-tyke facing the Drop. Sometimes my guard slips me a greasy pack of cards and I deign to join him in a quick game of brag.

  I always win.

  My trial was a good one as they go: actually, I rather enjoyed the drama. The defence was plucky but easily winded—I could have told him that his plea of insanity wouldn’t wash—but the prosecution was a mean-mouthed old Methodist, who dragged out all the details of my chequered career, including some episodes even I had forgotten, with a lover’s attention to detail. There were a lot of women there too, and when the judge put on his black hat his quivering old voice was almost drowned out by the sounds of wailing and sobbing. Women!

  Well, I got my three Sundays’ grace—and I didn’t see the priest on any of them—but at last he came to see me. He said that he couldn’t bear to see an unrepentant sinner go to the gallows. That was easy to solve, I told him: don’t hang me! I don’t think he appreciated the humour. They hardly ever do. With a tear in his rheumy old eye he told me all about Hell: but I remember my final triumphant painting, Sodom and Gomorrah, and I think I know even more about Hell than that old lecher. Hell is where all the wicked women go—I told you I liked them hot—and maybe from down there I’ll be able to look up the angels’ robes or habits or whatever it is they wear and discover the answer to that old theological question.

  I can tell you’re shocked, padre; but remember that if there were no sinners in Hell, there’d be no entertainment for the folk at the balcony—and I always said I should be on the stage. So put those beads away and have a drop of something warm—money buys anything in here, you know—and maybe a hand or two of brag, then, when you leave, you can tell them you did your bit. Give the girls a kiss from me and tell ’em I’ll see them at the dance. Well, I do have a certain reputation to keep up.

  But sometimes as I lie awake in the small hours I can’t help but wonder how they did it, Fanny and her dark daughter. And sometimes, as the seconds fall away relentlessly into nothing, I can almost find it in me to believe…in dreams, in visions…in cold little nightwalkers with light, freezing fingers and hungry mouths and hungrier hearts. In vengeful dreamchildren…in a love greater than death and stronger than the grave.

  And within that twilit border of sleep, a picture seems to emerge—I always was good at pictures when I was sober—a picture which, if I narrow my eyes, almost comes into focus: a picture of a mother who loved her dead daughter so much that she brought her back to inhabit the body of another girl, a sad and lonely girl in need of love; and the need and the love together were so strong, calling her across the dark spaces, that she came, longing for her chance to live again. Oh yes, I know all about that longing. And together, the unhappy pale girl and the lost, frozen dark one created one woman, with the body of one and the mind of both and experience beyond human imagining…

  At night, when such things seem possible, I think it very likely that that woman still walks the moonlit cobbles, though the body lies discarded in the morgue: she walks, still longing, still hungry…so cold…and so strong that, if she pleased, she could walk through walls and doors and limitless space to confront her murderers with scenes of black, delicate nightmare and rapturous insanity. She might spin stories of murder or paint visions of the pit…but behind the fury there would always be longing and a cold, despairing hunger. The dead are not forgiving.

  There is a pervasive logic in this line of reasoning—and a strange pagan poetry. I find myself remembering snatches of my Classical education, to which I paid scant attention when I was at school. Yes, I read Aeschylus too, and I know where Fanny took the names of her cats. And knowing that I can almost believe…in angels, in daemons, Erinyes…Eumenides.

  Almost.

  I do have my reputation to think of.

  Death

  Epilogue

  Manuscript, from the estate of Henry Paul Chester January, 1881

  The black angel stirs restlessly and I look at the sky, rimmed now with the livid cataract of dawn.

  Time.

  A sudden panic sends ripples down my ruined spine. I feel the tic which has already frozen half my face begin to twitch again, relentlessly, as if a tiny, furious creature were imprisoned behind my eye-socket, gnawing its way out. The last card of our game is Death…I knew it from the start, but although the looseness in my ribcage is relief, my brain rebels against annihilation, stupid tissue screaming out: no no no no! The lid of night is beginning to lift and beneath it is the Eye of God with its blank, blue iris and terrible humour.

  The tale is told and I am no Scheherazade, to slip away at dawn with the wolves snarling at her heels. The wolf is behind my cheekbone, curled in the hollow of my skull, waking…

  Hungry.

  The black angel reaches for her scythe. My last thought will be of Marta: my crown of thorns, Princess of Cups, hemlock and chloral, dreamchild and executioner, sorceress and penny whore. The pale light falls on the curved blade: lift it, Columbine, take my life, my words…but tell me this: Did you love, Scheherazade? Even once, did you love?

  Silence.

  Imagine a dead leaf drifting down a bottomless well.

  Imagine that, for a moment.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to everyone who helped to bring this sleeper back to life. First of all to Christopher, who liked it from the start; to Serafina, Howard, and Brie; to my lovely editor Jennifer and all my friends at William Morrow; to Graham Ovenden for the cover I always wanted; to the booksellers, reps and stockists who work to keep my books on the shelves, and finally to all those fans of my earlier novels who have written, railed, persisted, queried and clamoured to see this one back in print.

  About the Author

  JOANNE HARRIS is the author of Chocolat, which was nominated for the prestigious Whitbread Award. Joanne’s latest work is Jigs & Reels—her first ever collection of short stories. Her other critically acclaimed works include the novels Holy Fools, Coastliners, Five Quarters of the Orange, and Blackberry Wine, as well as My French Kitchen—a collection of her family recipes and reminiscences. She studied modern and medieval languages at Saint Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and taught French for twelve years at a boys’ grammar school. The daughter of a French mother and an English father, she lives in her native Yorkshire with her husband and their daughter.

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  Praise for the work of

  JOANNE HARRIS

  Jigs & Reels

  “Harris makes it look easy…. The stories deftly guide readers through a labyrinth of sensations from tenderness and sympathy to the bizarre to t
he humorous. Well-drawn, thoroughly believable characters populate this hugely entertaining collection."

  —Library Journal

  Holy Fools

  “Compelling…. A layered, mesmerizing gothic thriller.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  Coastliners

  “Harris develops her beguiling story in layers…writing with power and grace about the family ties that bind.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  Five Quarters of the Orange

  “Her prose reads like poetry, and it is a physical experience to fall into her imagery.”

  —New York Times

  Blackberry Wine

  “Harris’s voice is crisp and sure…. [Blackberry Wine] is a well-crafted escape into a world where lessons can be learned and evil is sometimes just dumb enough to be given the slip.”

  —Seattle Times

  ALSO BY JOANNE HARRIS

  Jigs & Reels

  Holy Fools

  Coastliners

  Five Quarters of the Orange

  Blackberry Wine

  Chocolat

  My French Kitchen (with Fran Warde)

  Copyright