"Money Sir. I've no need of your money."
"Take it and be grateful damn you."
"Oh no Sir, I think you know, Sir, that I intend to take much more than mere money from you Sir."
Blackwood stands. He puts his pipe away. He leans in close. With the locket in his possession he feels his old assertiveness return. "An end to the matter," he says, slowly, emphatically. Then he turns and exits the inn.
But Martha follows him out. He had not thought her drunk but he thinks it now. She harangues him in the street. A calm dry night with the moon in the estuary. Her voice carries. It rattles him. I will have what's mine, she tells him. Again she makes mention of Alicia, how she begs and how she moans - how she sounds when consumed with ecstasy. She imitates her - the perfect rendition of a sound Blackwood has never heard.
Despite everything, he is quickly, violently, aroused. He would take this woman even now, fuck her like an animal right here on the quays, right here in the moonlight. But what he does … what he does is this. He strikes her. He beats her to the floor. She springs back up, animated by pure animal fury. She tries to gouge his eyes but Blackwood slaps her back and then lands a blow to her face which floors her again. Then he kicks her in the stomach. She lets out a long groan and then she is still. Blackwood, breathing hard, comes back to his senses. Then, seeing what he has achieved, he flees.
He takes the little night-skiff across the river. Shaken by events, by what he has done, by his violence and, yes, by the fact that he has brought his passion to such a passionate end, he pays the boatman twice as much as usual. Crossing the river, his thoughts clear and calm a little, reassemble themselves. He has a coward thought - one which contains murder. He has no doubt that Martha does indeed know men who'd cut his throat. And no doubt too as to her powers over such men. But then, a little more calmly, he thinks of his standing, his position in society, and he knows that there are few men in town who'd dare pay such a fine gentleman as himself such a deed. His other thought - more alarming yet - is the knowledge that he'll never sleep with Martha again. The pain of that forces from him an audible groan - such that the boatman enquires as to his well-being.
What Blackwood does then - having disembarked from the skiff - is walk up the path through the moon-blanched woods to his office. He takes a brandy and then, as odd as it may seem, he lights an extra lantern, sets it on his desk, and then commences to go over that month's accounts. But, soon after starting, he begins to weep.
When he arrives back at the house Alicia is not there. He walks down to the boat-house, the gravel road pale here, dark there, in the moonlight. He enters. Alicia is lighting candles. There is an expectant, eager smile on her face as she turns at his entrance, but of course, it falters then dies on seeing him. She blows out the taper.
"She will visit here no more," Blackwood says. He tosses the locket to her. It bounces once on the floor boards and comes to rest against the side of her shoe. She declines to pick it up. Her head falls.
Blackwood turns and leaves the boat-house. He has walked barely fifty yards when he hears such a shriek, such a wail of loss you would think all the world's grief distilled into that one place, that one moment, that single broken heart.
He stops his ears with his fists, but his pace does not falter.
He waits for Alicia at the house. When she arrives, after an hour or more has passed, she takes herself straight to bed. A little later he listens at her door and catches the sound of a restrained sobbing. It is distressing for him, but nothing as compared to that animal wail of grief to which he'd been earlier subjected.
He moves quietly away from her door.
In the morning they eat breakfast together. There is a kind of formal, considerate politeness between them. Blackwood, on a whim, suggests a trip. They leave for Exeter.
Once there, they talk. They hedge around. But they make some progress. Blackwood takes blame on himself, accurately proclaiming that it was due to his weakness that events were set in motion. No mention is made of precisely what these events were - they are referred to as just that; events. As to Alicia, the abnormality of her behaviour is put down to an aberration of mood resulting from the change in the season, the weather, the isolation. They could add to this the peculiar power of the physician's prescription, but this alliterative factor is not included in their discussion.
In short then, they make up. And, though they both know - having tasted such a thing; having supped from the same cup as it were - that there is unlikely ever to be anything approaching passion between them, they resolve to be friends. And, furthermore, they conclude that they will be able to function on a sexual level which, however mechanical, will be sufficient to produce children. Not that they put it as plainly as this. In fact, listening to them talk - all distanced allusion and verbal politesse - you would not have known what on earth they were talking about. But they know. And that is all that matters. That, and that they leave Exeter in considerably better shape than when they arrived.
Ah, Melanie says. Bless.
Not so, Moira says.
They return home. They enjoy several days of calm. Blackwood, suffering from mild melancholia, resumes his old working patterns. Alicia, meanwhile, begins preparation to redecorate the house. This is something which Blackwood encourages - despite the cost, despite the fact that the house does not need redecorating - because he feels that it is good for Alicia to have something to occupy her mind. In addition, the enterprise has a purgative quality to it - and so will help effect a fresh start between them.
But one night, another stormy, rain-lashed night, with Alicia long retired and Blackwood - with his newly-recovered assiduousness - going over some papers in the parlour, there is a knock at the door. Blackwood stands to answer it, even as another loud knocking rattles the house. He crosses the lobby, trepidation in his heart. Along with his sporting weapons there are pistols in the house and he almost fetches one but the knocking is so loud, so insistent that he fears it will wake Alicia if he fails to answer it immediately. Besides, it is not necessarily the augury of something sinister - for could it not just as easily be the knocking of some traveller seeking shelter or assistance?
The lamps are still burning in the hall but Blackwood is carrying a candle nevertheless.
He unbolts and opens the door. The wind snuffs the candle and leaves scurry across the floor. Even in the dark, Blackwood knows who it is out there beyond the threshold - he knows because of the hooded cape, not in spite of it.
And before he can stop her - if indeed he could; there is even yet a strong impulse, a desire, to take her and kiss her - she is past him.
"You dare come here?" he says in a lowered voice, setting aside the dead candle.
She slips back the hood. She doesn't look at Blackwood. Indeed, she has her back to him as she looks appreciatively around the lobby like one who'd returned to a beloved home after a long voyage.
And when she does turn, she says: "Oh Husband, dear, I dare do much more than this."
"What do you want damn you?"
"I want," she says, "what I was promised. Nothing more. Only that."
"I promised nothing," Blackwood says quickly, but he cannot meet her eye.
"No? Oh, but passion makes sport of memory. Do you not find it so? You remember nothing of your promises? Oh but they were sweetly drawn; sweetly offered."
Still he cannot meet her eye. Then, thinking to offer her money - a substantial amount this time, an amount far in excess of the sum which he had arranged to be delivered to her lodgings, an amount far beyond the wildest dreams of this simple country girl - thinking that he may yet be able to resolve this situation without waking Alicia, he invites her into the parlour.
But it's too late.
Footsteps on the landing - a soft patter of bare feet. Alicia.
"Jeremiah? Jeremiah? I heard knocking!"
She descends the stairs. Her hair is loose and she is dressed only in her night gown. She stops. She sees Martha and she stops. The lam
plight catches her features. Her shadow is thrown up the wall. Alarm gives way to surprise. A smile teases the corners of her mouth. Then, when a look of joy lights her face, gifting her again that ethereal beauty, Blackwood knows that, whatever comes next, he is damned.
Alicia cannot contain herself. All of their talk, their resolve, their plans for a new beginning count as nothing when confronted with the fact, the material presence of Martha.
"Oh my love," she exclaims, "you have returned to me."
She continues a hurried progress down the stairs and Martha rushes toward her, easily evading Blackwood's impotent attempt to seize her.
They meet at the first turn of the stair, Alicia's arms already held wide in anticipation of embrace.
But there is no embrace for Alicia, because Martha, from the folds of her cape, produces a hand-axe, and, with a single, well-aimed blow buries it up to the blade's thick wedge into Alicia's skull. It hits her between the eyes and a fan of blood sprays up the wall. She half-raises an arm. Her eyes roll up through a mask of blood as if to see just what it is that has intruded into her brain, and then she slumps and falls with no more life than a sack.
Blackwood is transfixed with horror. He makes not a sound; just stands in awed, stunned silence.
Martha puts her boot on Alicia's face and prises free the axe - a dry creak attendant on the action. Then she turns. She looks at Blackwood and she smiles. She descends the stairs very slowly, step by step, and then casually tosses aside the axe. It clatters and skips across the lobby floor. She wipes the blood from her face onto her sleeve. "Now, my husband. My sweet, sweet husband. Now I can come home."
She walks to him and he is as silent and as un-flinching as a stone. She clamps his face in her strong hands, streaking his cheeks with blood. And, when she kisses him, Blackwood, God help him, responds.
But when the kiss breaks - when Martha releases him - Blackwood sinks to his knees and lets out such a howl that it wakes the roosting birds.
Jesus! Drunken Melanie exclaims. I knew there was something about that fucking staircase….
"Get up," Martha says. "We must be rid of the corpse."
Blackwood looks at Martha with slow comprehension. That moment when the real is seen to be real and the past irrecoverable. "We are damned," he says.
"Damned we may be - but we will not pay this side of the grave. Will you not stand? Will you not act like the man I took you to be? Will you husband? Will you not help me see to it that we shall not hang?"
You would think the river. You would think: let the river take her; let the river take her out to sea, beyond the jurisdiction of all potential discovery. But no, because tonight the bailiffs are on the river. Martha has seen them.
Blackwood fetches blankets from Alicia's room. As he is doing so he spies the locket on top of the jewellery box, which is where it has remained since its recovery. Alicia had ceased to wear it, a decision to which Blackwood had silently assented - its connotations too overwhelming to bear. Nevertheless, it lay in the room like a silent rebuke. He takes it. He looks at it for a long time. And then he puts it into his pocket. And as he does so, something happens inside him. His heart turns hard. His heart turns cold. These preparations, which he has engaged in willingly enough, to dispose of his wife's corpse have negated all other possibility. There will be no confessions and appeals for clemency (or so he thinks). He has, with these actions, given his dark blessing to the murder; bound his fate to that of the murderer. So what use sorrow? What use guilt? This is survival.
They scrub the wall and stairs clean of Alicia's blood, and then wrap the body in the blankets, a children's parody of mummification. Outside of the stable there is a general-purpose cart, used by the grounds-men for carrying pruned limbs up to the fire pit, for gathering firewood, and sometimes for fetching supplies. He keeps a fiddle-headed cart horse to pull it and so he now hitches the cart to the horse and drives it to the front of the house. They load the corpse into the cart and Blackwood breaks open a bale of hay which he'd loaded in the cart and covers the parcelled body with loose hay.
The rain has stopped but the wind blows still and clouds scurry across the moon and the loose hay is whipped up around the cart in a little storm. They climb up onto the cart and drive away from the house.
They drive for most of the night. Passing cottages with blind windows, a flicker of lamp here and there, the wind-scurried clouds and the sky all broken up before them. They drive out onto the moors. The wind has long since torn the leaves from the trees and the trees are wind-tortured, twisted and malevolent things in the moonlight.
They drive off the road. A desolate spot before dawn. The wind worn out to a low murmur of breeze, sheep bleating down in a valley, the babble of a brook close by. Blackwood begins to dig, the scraping of the shovel against thin soil and stone like some whispered malediction. He digs on. Martha stays on the cart, huddled in her cape. She begins to sing. The moment feels like a void where madness rushes in like flood-water. And Blackwood digs on.
He carries the corpse single-handedly to the hole - a resistance here to calling it a grave, un-sanctified as it is in this wild place - holding Alicia hard to his breast like you'd carry a sleeping child. He lowers her in. He steals a glance at Martha now, a silent silhouette like some mendicant from another age. Carefully, surreptitiously, he takes the locket from his coat. He teases back the throw of the blanket to reveal Alicia's face. Dawn had crept in barely without notice so that Blackwood can see the awful wound like a shaven pudendum in Alicia's forehead. He slips the locket inside the blanket so that it rests against her breast. Her lips brush the back of his hand and a shudder of pure horror passes through him. Gingerly, he re-covers her face with the blanket. He stands and begins to back-fill the hole as the moorland birds begin to sing all around. He pats the turf down flat with the back of the shovel.
"Don't fret," Martha says. "If a dog should dig her up her identity will not be revealed. This is hungry ground - it devours its meats quickly enough."
Vomit rises in Blackwood's gorge and he retches against the wheel of the cart. Then they drive away. They part at a fork in the road. A yellow sunrise.
"We cannot risk being seen together," Martha says. "But soon, my husband, when your poor lost wife is acknowledged dead, we may meet again. And this time, we will not part. Not ever." She kisses him, vomit-reeking breath or no, and Blackwood, if such a thing exists, feels a black joy dancing merry around his heart.
"Meanwhile," Martha continues, "you might wish to return home and set the discarded clothes of your sleep-walking wife down by the river. For didn't you tell me that caught up in some trance she was wont to go swimming by moonlight? Did you not say that she was somewhat afflicted of mind and taken to strange behaviour? Me-thought you did my husband. Indeed, me-thought you made mention of a visit to a doctor for treatment of just such a condition. Now, Jeremiah, I will make my way back easily enough. Take care my sweet. And should you weaken, remember what you yourself have done this night."
"Oh you little witch," Blackwood says. "You damnable little witch."
Blackwood's grief is both real and affected. For days after Alicia's disappearance men drag the river with hooks and nets in search of her body. Would such efforts be expended on a town girl? A country girl? A Martha? We cannot say for sure. Certainly the reward offered by Blackwood for the retrieval of his wife's body must be taken into account. And the fact that the putatively drowned woman is the lady of the big new house built by the fine gentleman from Bristol must certainly be a factor in the drawing of the crowd which gathers on Blackwood's property. Fishwives from the town. Land labourers' wives from the village. He is powerless to drive them off. Such is the force of the lie that Blackwood half expects the poor, bloated, fish-bitten corpse of his wife to be discovered at any time. He is viewed without suspicion by the town constable, and is comforted by the minister. Blackwood's brother arrives from Bristol but Blackwood sends him away after two days - they were always uneasy in each other's compan
y.
One morning, a full week after the search began, Blackwood walks down to the river. The search had, in that week, progressed down to the estuary and back again - some arguing that the corpse might have snagged before it could be carried further, others, subscribing to a more general consensus that the first night's ebb had taken poor Mrs Blackwood out to sea. So now there are men throwing hooks downstream of the Blackwood property, but they are fewer in number and it is evident that the search is faltering.
Nevertheless, a small crowd has again gathered on the little beach at the river, standing hard to the boathouse, and can you guess who is numbered amongst them?
Blackwood stands aloof from the crowd and makes anxious study of the searching boatmen as if any moment he expects to hear the cry of discovery which will end his anguish. Martha detaches herself from the crowd, comes to him brazen and smiling.
"Are you mad?" he says, taking care not to raise his voice, to animate his limbs. To speak from the side of his mouth.
"I merely come to offer condolence to a fellow music-lover. To a man in distress. Those sheep, those cattle; they're more interested in a drowned woman than a live man. Do not concern yourself."
"You know the risk damn you! We cannot force the time on this matter. You have said so yourself."
"The locket Jeremiah. I have come for the locket. I had meant to take it when last we met but she did not wear it and you were so unmanned that it slipped my mind."
"You damn little fool. Is it your intention that we should hang?"
"I will have the locket Jeremiah. I will have it as guarantee of everything we have spoken of."
"That, I cannot do," he says. He turns from her as if to make way back to the house.
"Should I sing for you my husband dear? Should I sing a sweet confession? Should I sing now in front of this mutton-head crowd. Should I chorus your part?"
Suzerain: a ghost story Page 18
