Suzerain: a ghost story

by Adrian John Smith

  It's two days silence with Alicia - who declines to ask him where he spent the night - and two days without Martha before he attempts to steal the locket. Oddly, given her disdain for him, Alicia has worn the locket daily since receiving it. At night she takes it off and sets it on top of the jewellery box on the bureau in the bedroom.

  After a silent hour in front of the hearth, Blackwood sipping brandy, Alicia taking a cup of chocolate, Alicia retires to her room - which is how the bedroom is so designated now.

  Blackwood allows another hour to elapse. And then, carrying a candle, almost as if he wishes to be discovered, he creeps into her room. He takes up the locket but she wakes.

  "Husband?"

  "I was…" he's holding the locket now, "… admiring this. I'm sorry."

  "No," she says, her voice strange and full of sleep, "I'm sorry. I know - come and sit - I know that I have been less than a wife. I suspect also that you have been forced to take comfort elsewhere - no, please, don't protest. I understand. I understand more than you know. I want to talk. Let us talk about this matter my husband."

  Blackwood begins to sob. A broken wretch. He fastens the locket around Alicia's throat with fumbling fingers. He begs her never to take it off.

  "While I was away," she says, "I sought the advice of a physician. A gentleman I hold in the highest trust and esteem. He prescribed a treatment, a remedy for my nerves. My affliction. A powder he would not name - though his apothecary furnished me with a supply. I was resistant to it - the properties he ascribed to it seemed unfitting for a gentlewoman. But - in your absence the other night - I sampled it. It was - oh husband, I yearned for your return."

  Blackwood has heard of such remedies. His interest is piqued. "You have it now?" he asks her. "This powder? This remedy?"

  "Yes," she says. "Oh husband, let us try one more time. Let us try lest we abandon all hope for good and forever. Let us try one more time. Now. Tonight."

  He lays a kiss on her brow. "Yes," he says.

  "First," she says, "you must pour me a fresh cup of chocolate."

  She drinks the chocolate - the powder dissolved in it. It works for her. She sighs. She moans. Blackwood achieves a moist penetration. But the locket. The locket touches his cheek. Burns it. Making love - if this is what it can be called - he thinks of Martha, and there seems to be some essence of her, some aura, burning off the locket. No, he says. No. He cannot bear it. He cannot bear to climax inside his wife with the image of Martha in his mind. This is treachery doubled and folded back on itself. He climbs off. Alicia begs him not to stop.

  "It's that damn locket," he tells her, too distracted to lie. "I want you to remove it."

  Which she does. But it's strange: with the locket removed, his ardour, fake or real, vanishes. He leaves the room, slamming the door. From downstairs he hears Alicia break things - a mirror, a chamber-pot - in her frustration. He thinks of her as a slumbering tiger which it would have been better not to have woken.

  The following morning Blackwood wakes in his chair by the fire where he had drunk himself into a slumber. The hearth is cold. When Alicia rises, they make no mention of the previous night's incident. Nor is it alluded to - not in words anyway - at any time in the future.

  Early the following evening Blackwood crosses the river. He walks straight to the inn where he and Martha had previously met. She is there, singing for pennies at the bar, without her musicians, without even the accompaniment of her own guitar. Her voice is haunting enough to hush the room. When she ends her song, Blackwood takes her aside and they occupy that same booth.

  "Did you get what I asked for my love? My husband?" she says.

  Blackwood is sober. He has a dull headache still from last night's brandy and a prickly chill in his legs, but he is sober, and because he's sober he catches a mocking edge in her voice. My love, she mocks. My husband.

  "No," he says. "I did not."

  "You did not. But we -"

  "I did not and I will not."

  "So, Sir. You deny me good faith."

  "I deny you nothing. But I find that I am loath to steal from my own wife."

  She leans forward. Lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "I could make you do it," she says. "I could make you do anything I please." She laughs. Runs a drunken finger down his face.

  Blackwood feels her power then and it scares him.

  "Oh you witch," he says. "You witch."

  She puts a hand beneath the table to squeeze Blackwood between the legs.

  "Will you come to my office?" he says, his passion overruling any resolve he'd had of getting home tonight.

  "No," she says. "I cannot."

  "You would deny me? Because of the locket? I will buy you - I have said - a thousand lockets," Blackwood says.

  "Aye, and you will. But no. The autumn fair is in Newton Abbot and I travel tonight. I will be gone for five days."

  "Five days!" Blackwood exclaims.

  "Yes. Don't fret my husband. Five days is nothing in a lifetime. Will you think of me while I'm away?"

  "Always," Blackwood says.

  "My darling," she says. "My husband."

  He looks again for that tone, that sneer. But this time, it is absent.

  The following evening Blackwood drinks heavily. Again he sleeps in front of the fire and again he awakens to a cold hearth.

  When he meets Alicia over the breakfast table, she says: "I thought I heard singing in the night. Did you hear such a thing?"

  Blackwood starts, hangover or no. Is this the subtle introduction to a formal accusation? He feigns calm. Mild interest.

  "No," he says. "I heard no singing."

  "Yes," she says. "There was singing. Out there, beneath the trees. The sweetest song and the sweetest, purist voice."

  "A woman beneath the trees?" Blackwood says, as if indulging a child's playful lies.

  "I did not say it was a woman," Alicia says.

  "I inferred," Blackwood says as calmly as he is able. "You dreamed it," he says, and this is what he believes.

  "That is a possibility," she grants, "but if so it was very real. The strangest of dreams."

  The pattern is set. Blackwood works desultorily in the afternoons and drinks in the evenings. He thinks little outside of Martha. Walking back home one evening he again commits an act of onanism behind a tree, scattering his seed on the browning ferns.

  Oddly enough, when Blackwood applies himself to business - which occasionally, fleetingly, he is able to do - he finds that it is running quite smoothly, despite his lack of assiduousness. One of the reasons for Blackwood's undeniable success is the care he takes when selecting his various tradesmen. He values intelligence and initiative, and he keeps his workforce informed of any significant matters in so far as it pertains to them. Which means, in short, that he has carpenters who can carpenter, clerks who can clerk, sail-makers, metal-workers and caulkers who can work in his absence - or, at least, with little supervision. And so it is that in the short term, the business is able to take care of itself. Perhaps that is part of Blackwood's undoing - a crisis, a calamity, in the commercial realm of Blackwood's world may have served to pull him to his senses and forced him to attend to more quotidian matters. But there is no crisis; and so Blackwood, as told, thinks of little apart from Martha. Also, as told, the drinking continues.

  Again, Alicia speaks of hearing singing in the night. Again Blackwood dismisses it. The day after this it is Blackwood who mentions it; asks, almost by way of a joke, if she has again been woken by singing.

  No, Alicia says. But there is a look on her face which Blackwood has never seen before. A look which tells him that his wife has become the keeper of a secret. And Blackwood is afraid.

  That day, taking fancy to the weather - with a warmish wind routing the puffy white clouds - Blackwood resolves to reclaim himself. How many such pledges has he made to himself, second by second, since meeting Martha? But this time the resolve is seated in his more general mood, rather than in his hopeless re-calibra
tions of conscience.

  He keeps a small sail-boat in the boat-house - which he had had built almost as an afterthought; yes, the same boathouse which stands there today. He thinks to sail, or even row - he has yet to read the wind - up the river on the rising tide and around the flood of Flat Owers. He hasn't tasted the air enough, he thinks. He is not a great sailor or boatman but his occupation - his business - demands some knowledge, some competence, and through application rather than any God-given talent he has become an able boatman. But he doesn't sail that day.

  Because when he enters the boathouse he finds that it has been recently occupied. On the upper level there are candle stubs, a circle of them, melted onto the floorboards - a circle big enough to lie inside. There is a blanket he has never seen before bundled against the wall.

  The sight disturbs him. A candle or two - he may have dismissed it as a passing boatman caught in a storm. He hasn't been to the boathouse for some time and he is sure that there must have been such a night. And the liberty would not have exercised him much - after all, a boathouse is not a locked property and he would not wish any river-man to take a chill or else hit Anchor Stone while blinded by a storm when he could just as easily sit out the storm in the boathouse. No, despite the impression of Blackwood which may be formed from this narrative, he was a considerate and fair-minded man. He was, let's not forget, a gentleman.

  Anyway, surveying this ring of candles he knows this not to be the case. He walks halfway down the stairs leading to the river to check that the boat has not been stolen and there it sits. Gaining again the upper level he examines the oil stove in the corner of the room. The glass is blackened. He is quite sure that he has never had cause to use the stove, which he had installed should he ever return too wet and cold to walk on to the house without first warming and drying a little. But, with him being such a fair-weather sailor, this is an experience he has so far avoided.

  He exits the boathouse. He walks the beach. Lighting a pipe, he paces up and down, kicking at the tide leavings. The pacing, along with that warm breeze, soothes him a little but not enough. He feels some dark and premonitory influence at work. When he finally walks back up the hill to the house he pours himself a brandy. He looks for Alicia and finds that she has returned to bed. She is asleep, but she wakens.

  "Are you ill?" he enquires. There is a coldness to his question, his voice, which surprises even Blackwood.

  "No. Do excuse me. I am merely tired. I slept very little in the night. I had such strange dreams again."

  Blackwood leaves the room. Down in the parlour, he begins to drink.

  He drinks steadily into the early evening and then, as has become his habit of late, falls asleep in the chair by the fire. He wakes. It is very late into the night. The fire has burned out and the wind has turned sour and ugly and now lashes rain against the window. He is thick-headed from the brandy, his thoughts scattered and fumbled. Yet he is minded to go to Alicia's room, to see if she is able to sleep with the wind. He knocks very quietly, as drunk as he is. Receiving no response, he enters. The bed is empty. He calls her name on the landing and is greeted only with echo.

  The boat-house.

  She is at the boat-house, he thinks. Knows.

  He pulls on his coat and boots, intending to seek her there. But, at the threshold of the house, his courage fails him. What would he find there, were he to venture out? He will not go. Not yet. He will give Alicia an hour to return, and if she has not done so, then, and only then, will he seek her out.

  But he takes a drink and again falls into a slumber.

  He wakes after dawn. The wind has dropped but the rain falls heavily and a mist smokes off the brown and fiery woods - the leaves starting to fall now. He climbs the stairs. Alicia is combing her hair - which is wet - in front of the mirror. She pauses, catching sight of him in the mirror, but her glance dismisses him. She resumes the combing of her hair.

  "I sought you out in the night Alicia," Blackwood says.

  "But you did not find me," Alicia says, combing her hair all the while.

  "You know that I did not," Blackwood says, on the verge of exasperation - feeling, in fact, a rogue outrider to hysteria. "Where were you?"

  "I was out."

  "Out where?"

  "I was walking. I thought to take me a walk. My physician suggested it. He says it aids relief of melancholia."

  "In the rain? In the wind which you detest so much?"

  "I am over that now. I thought you knew that my husband."

  "Even so… to walk alone in the deepest hours of the night? Alicia, have you-"

  "There is something about the night which interests me," she says. "It need not concern you my husband. But there are things abroad at night which delight me. Will you satisfy yourself with this explanation?"

  "I don't know if I will damn-it!" Blackwood says.

  Alicia turns from the mirror for the first time. Blackwood is shocked. There is an ethereal calm to Alicia which he has never witnessed before - but what shocks him most is that this new quality, this calm, has rendered her beautiful.

  "I wonder," she says, "if it is wise, or even desirable, for us to delve too deeply into one another's affairs."

  Which of course plunges Blackwood into silence. He is forced to withdraw. He descends the stairs. He walks out into the rain and makes his way down to the boathouse. The candles have been added to, so that there are burned-down stubs, little more than pools of wax on the floorboards along with fresh candles barely burned down at all - lit and then snuffed, he surmises, shortly before dawn. The smell of the oil stove still lingers.

  He returns to the house. Alicia is taking breakfast. She asks him calmly if he enjoyed his walk.

  "Yes. Yes thank you," he says. He is in a state of mild shock. He has an idea of what it all means but he cannot let that idea form fully in his mind - cannot admit of the true nature of the situation. Because of course, whatever else it may mean, the scandal alone - where it to come to light - would be ruinous.

  Blackwood is lost. He looks at Alicia. He studies her carefully while she munches on a piece of sweetened toast. Then he notices something.

  "The locket," he says. "Alicia. Where is the locket?"

  She looks at him calmly while she swallows the mouthful of toast. She wipes her mouth on a napkin. "Oh. I am afraid that I have misplaced the locket. I was hoping to spare you the news. Forgive me. It doesn't matter."

  "It doesn't matter? With all that it symbolises? This house? It doesn't matter?"

  "It is a piece of metal. Amber. Stone. A material thing. It can be replaced. Should I pour you a cup of chocolate?"

  But Blackwood doesn't want any damn chocolate.

  "Oh Alicia," he says, "what have you done?"

  He seeks her at the inn. She's singing "Woody of Ivory". Her voice - especially so on this particular song - tests his resolve. He would like nothing better than to fuck her. Fuck her tonight; fuck her forever. To lose himself in her. He steels himself. He takes a jug of ale to the little booth - and it's a dark cousin of serendipity the way this booth is always available. He drinks his ale. He lights a pipe. Her eyes having been closed at his entrance, Martha sings two more songs before she becomes aware of Blackwood.

  She slips into the booth.

  "So," he says, "you've returned from the fair."

  "As you can see Sir," she says. Then, lowering her voice, she says: "Have you missed me my husband?"

  Blackwood will not answer. He averts his gaze. He draws on his pipe and gathers himself.

  "And did you do well at the fair?" he says.

  "Passing well," she says.

  "Only," he says, "I thought I saw you here in town. The other day - when was it? - the day before yesterday. A day I reckoned you to be at Newton Abbot."

  "Not I silly," she laughs. "I told you that I travelled to Newton Abbot and travel I did."

  Blackwood can see the chain threading out from beneath her hair and plunging thereafter into her cleavage. She catches his g
aze. She throws back her head and laughs a laugh which chills his blood. Yet, when he moves he does so quickly and deftly. He snags the chain with his finger, pulling the locket clear of her breast. It hangs there for a moment in the candlelight like a terrible secret, and then Blackwood slides his hand along the chain, grasps the locket and snatches it to him. The chain breaks. He has reclaimed the locket.

  She holds out her hand. Lifts her eyebrows. "Can I have it back now?" she says.

  "You cannot," Blackwood says.

  "But, dear husband, it was gifted me."

  "I know about that. Did you think that I would not?"

  "Oh no - you were meant to discover it. It was part of the game Sir."

  "Game? You little whore-"

  "Careful with your mouth, Sir. Dear husband. There are men in here would beat you like a dog - nay, would cut your coward throat were I to rise a cry now."

  "Then cry if you must," Blackwood says. "You sit there, a thief who I have just relieved of my wife's property, and you dare talk of games. You dare to make threats?"

  "Oh, I am no thief Sir," Martha says. "I told you that the locket was gifted me. And as to the game Sir, your wife was the most willing of players. And I would venture Sir, that no man could have afforded her such delights as she enjoyed in my company. You take my meaning Sir? It was a shame. Such a shame. I wanted her to fetch you. So that you too could enjoy the sport. But she would not do it. No, she would not give you up to me so willingly. Nor I to you. The locket though - that she gave. That and much more."

  "And now it is retrieved. This is an end to the matter."

  "Oh is it Sir? Alicia. I don't reckon that Alicia is ready for it to end just yet."

  "Now hear this: stay away from my wife damn you. This … entire adventure is at a close. I will send money to your lodgings. As recompense for your … trouble."