He turns. "For the love of God," he hisses, "can you not see the danger in your very presence here? It is a wonder that people do not speak of you already in connection with this ... turn of event. We may survive this nightmare yet but you must keep your head."
"I have told you before Jeremiah. Husband - "
"Don't call me that damn you."
"I have told you, husband," she says, the word spoken with calm, deliberate defiance, "that I will have what's mine. On that you may be certain. I will come for the locket tomorrow night. Better yet, you may bring it to town. Tomorrow I perform alone and you may drop it, with caution if you please, into my hat. Or perhaps you may prefer to leave it beneath the stoop of your office. I can retrieve it there, during darkness. There will be no danger in that. I am known as a night-walker. This thee well know. The choice is yours. Which is your preference?"
Blackwood, for the first time in a long time, is thinking clearly. He has drank little in the preceding week, knowing that one false word, the betrayal of a single inappropriate emotion, could bring crashing down the edifice of rightful grief. And so now it is he with the cool head, the calmed passions, and she, Martha, who has become the reckless fool. She has become dangerous to him. More than this, his heart is annealed, as perfect in its hardness as an iron hoop. Hardened against all.
He does not, of course, tell her that he no longer has possession of the locket. Such is Martha's obsession with it that he fears a return to the grave, a disinterment, a theft. Which would be very dangerous indeed. Besides this, the burying of the locket - however macabre - was the last transaction, the last intimate moment between himself and his wife and he will not sully it - even in the realm of this madness he will not sully it further. In a flash of cognition he knows what he must do.
"I see," he says, "that is fruitless to argue with you further. The locket shall be yours. If it will serve to calm you, if it will reassure you, the locket shall be yours. But you shall not receive it on my property. Neither will I bring it to town. No. Have we come so far to fatally stumble over such a small matter? No, you shall meet me in Plymouth in two night's time."
She considers this silently, her blue eyes alert for treachery.
"Do you not wish to sport another night?" Blackwood says. "Did you ever really believe that I could wait for months before touching you once more? Before loving you again? You cannot simply install yourself into my life, my home, without raising a dreadful suspicion. There must be - and this for the sake of the appearance of decency as much as anything - a respectable interval. Alicia shall not be declared dead for some time - not without a corpse; not without the exploration of other possibilities. I for one cannot wait so long before lying with you. And you? Are you resigned to wait?"
"You know well, Jeremiah. That I wish for nothing more than to be with you."
"Aye. And so it will be. Plymouth will afford safety," Blackwood continues. "You are known to travel - and I trust you will find the means. You absence will barely be noted. I am not particularly well-known there, but no matter if I should meet an acquaintance. I can construct a plausible reason for my own travel. A physician perhaps, to treat the symptoms of my grief. An investigator even. Perhaps I go simply on business. I have tradesmen dependent upon me after all; should all suffer for my grief? Does this not suit us well?"
"Now, my husband," Martha says, "now you are acting like the man I took you to be."
"It is agreed then."
"Agreed."
"Then meet me at the sign of the Turk's Head. Now, my little witch, go back amongst your mutton-headed friends; tell them how deep my grief. You have the arts for it."
"Aye. And which will serve us well."
"Till Plymouth then."
"Plymouth."
The weather is fair. Again he travels on horseback. Again he makes good time. He stables the horse and takes a room at the Turk's Head. Wasting no time, he eats a quick meal of bread and stew and then heads out into the evening throng.
In any seaport, then as now, it takes little art to find such men as Blackwood seeks, and, after searching several inns, two such fine fellows he has secured in his employment. He quizzes them as to the ships in harbour; their destinations and the malleability of their respective captains in the face of bribery. We need no more detail than this. What is important to know is that Blackwood has maintained his resolve to rid himself of Martha. Her murder might be easily arranged with such men in such a place but Blackwood will not have this on his conscience - which is, after all, already bearing a heavy burden. Besides, he does feel for Martha - how else would he have found himself in such a situation? - and her death is abhorrent to him. Indeed, the thought of her total and absolute removal from his life is of almost equal abhorrence, but she is dangerous to him and Blackwood has a duty to society and commerce to ensure that he does not fall.
Yet, for all that, he will have his night of pleasure.
She arrives as planned the following evening. They meet in the bar and, after a discreet interval, she comes to his room. It's like a damn breaking. They fuck with their previous vigour and ardour, and this time Blackwood feels her evil and it is darkly sweet; blackly delicious. Martha, of course, demands the locket and Blackwood tells her that it is deposited at the bank - so precious has it become - and that he will fetch it first thing in the morning and make a gift of it over breakfast.
They sleep. They sleep so soundly you would think them innocent of any crime, devoid of all apprehension. But Blackwood, who is of course habituated to do so, wakens before dawn, dresses without waking Martha, descends the stairs and steps out into the street. They are there, as arranged - two figures in the mist. He nods to them and they tip their hats and enter the inn, while Blackwood, with hardened resolve, with relief, removes himself for an early morning stroll.
Those who reported of it say there was a struggle - that the two men suffered scratched faces, that the taller of the two had almost lost his left eye. Others spoke of rape. To be sure, there was cussing and spitting and raised voices. Yet others say that a powerful drug was used - that the whore, Martha, walked passively out of the inn like a somnambulant in the company of her abductors.
Whatever the truth - and don't forget that I can choose - whatever the truth, Martha, by the middle of that day, finds herself, bound and gagged, putting out to sea in the hold of a ship bound for Canada. Canada! She and Blackwood will never meet again.
And what of Blackwood? Does he simply go through the business of grieving, the business of forgetting and then resume his life, his endeavours? No. The public act of grieving for the victim of a fictitious drowning, while mourning privately the loss of his wife's killer is too much. On top of this strain, a pall of gloom and suspicion hangs over the house. There are rumours of course - there always are - and some of them are uncomfortably close to the truth.
The only thing which Blackwood resumes with any conviction is his dissoluteness - which becomes complete. He drinks. He becomes addicted to opium. He sleeps with whores with more abandon than discretion, but none of them, young or old, English or exotic, are able to fill the void left by Martha. Inevitably he contracts syphilis. Inevitably this turns - blooms - into dementia and madness. Inevitably too this leads, a full three years after the event, to an indirect confession of murder. Which leads, less inevitably, given his time, given his standing, given the propensity of his class to close ranks, to investigation and formal trial. His brother seeks clemency on his behalf, which is granted - his lawyer successfully establishing Blackwood's madness retrospectively.
He dies in an asylum in Bristol. Before he dies he is visited often by Alicia's father who only wants to make sense of events.
Blackwood's brother takes the house and the business, but he has little aptitude for running it and it doesn't take long for both house and business to slip from the grasp of the Blackwood family for good and forever. This is all a matter of public record.
And Martha? Her story has just begun. Ship-board, she i
s grievously abused. Yet she remains tough and strong. She is sustained in part by the hateful fire burning in her breast. She resolves with insane confidence that she will yet secure for herself the Blackwood house. She will yet reside within its walls; she will yet bear and raise her children there.
Her adventures are too many to tell here. There are marriages of survival, marriages of duplicity. She retains her looks and her musical gifts for far longer than she has a right to expect - and these serve her well. She plots, of course, to return to England, to seize the house, not knowing what has befallen Blackwood. She must have money of course, yet all her efforts, the twists and turns of fate, conspire only to embed her deeper and deeper into that half-wild country, pushing her ever westward until, in the company of a fur-trapper and argonaut, her latest paramour, she finds herself on the west coast. In Vancouver they take a packet going northward up the coast for the gold fields in Alaska. By now she is a seasoned frontiers-woman and her looks are fading accordingly, but her hopes now rest more on gold than on her previous gifts.
But the ship is wrecked before half its voyage is done. Martha is amongst the handful of survivors. They have no food, have salvaged no weapons and possess only the clothes on their backs. Starvation is certain. Death the only visitor to this doomed camp. But even then, Martha's monomania holds sway and she swears by all that she will yet take the Blackwood house, which lies ten thousand miles into her past.
And that is the story of this house. That is the story I'm writing.
Do you believe in ghosts Melanie? Moira says. Frank didn't. Then he did. When he died, Frank was a true believer.
You're scaring me, Melanie says.
Really? Then I'll have to find some way of making it up to you. Soon.
Down in the valley, the owls hoot the hour.
The following night a closing door wakes Melanie. Then a light footfall on the steps beneath the window. The night is quiet and still with the full moon over the woods. She wakes suddenly - no yawning, no rubbing of eyes - swings herself out of bed to look out of the open window in time to see Moira slip through the white iron gate into the lane which leads down to the beach on the river. The gate groans on its hinges. Moira is wrapped in a towel and her bare shoulder, her legs, are blue in the moonlight. She wears flip-flops which flip and flop lightly as she walks. As she becomes lost in the shadow of the hedge she begins to sing, her voice becoming evanescent as she makes her way down the lane.
Melanie listens into silence and then she pulls on the combat pants and buttons up a light lumber shirt. She laces her boots quickly, without turning on the light, skipping some of the hooks. A long pause at her bedroom door. The silence hangs hugely in the stairwell. Two or three moths bother the electric candelabra. She counts to ten, then hurries down the stairs (not thinking of Moira's story, not thinking of murder) and out of the patio door at the end of the kitchen passageway. With relief she breathes in the moonlight, instantly filled with mystery and night. Something else. A kind of longing. As if yearning for a drug she's never tried; as if sensing some pentimento of delight from a former life. She descends the pale steps, through the gate and into the lane. The moonlight falls in blue patches between the trees. The lane curves steeply down to the river and the climb back up will be hard but she doesn't dwell on that. The air is warm, cool, warm, cool in patches. Smell of honeysuckle. Wild chives and river. Moira's perfume.
The tide is higher than on her previous visit and the beach is a narrow stroke of moonlight stretched between the boat-house and the woods. Sea-weed and driftwood, tide leavings of bottles - plastic and glass. A dead cormorant. Sparkle on the river and the light-wash of Yarlmouth further downstream. Thin wreathes of mist smoking off the surface here and there. The ferry docked for the night. She picks her way over the shale. The river laps gently along its edge. There is no sign of Moira.
A fish leaps.
At the end of the beach, in the shadow of the overhanging trees, is a raft or a pontoon or whatever, pulled up on the beach and chained to the bank, and she heads for that. There are night sounds which she has never heard before; cries and yelps and a hoarse-throated barking drift over the wide river. And singing. Low and intermittent, coming in swells the way sound carries at night.
"Moira," she calls, and her own voice feels like a violation of the night.
No answer. Silence. The night hushed to silence by her own utterance. Then far - impossibly far out - again, Moira singing. Not drowning but singing. Melanie doesn't recognise the song but it sounds old and traditional. It sounds like a Martha song.
When Melanie gains the raft, which stands as high as her shoulder, there is a large beach towel draped off the side of it. Moira's flip-flops cast off on the shale. She walks the few paces down to the edge of the river. The sea-weed is slippery from high tide. A crab scuttles over the shale close to her feet with a clacking sound too large for itself. Melanie lets out a little yelp and skips back. She fucking hates crabs.
She calls out again.
Moira's voice floats across the water. "Melanie? Mel? Is that you?"
"Are you - are you all right?" Melanie calls back.
"Hey, never better," Moira says. A splash. Laughter. "Wait there. Don't go away."
Then she sees her, where the slack water borders the current. Pale shoulders dipping and rising in the moonlight, swimming back to shore, briefly dimmed by mist here, pushing out moon ripples there.
Melanie walks back to the raft and leans against the river-smoothed timber. She wishes she'd brought her smokes. It's a perfect cigarette moment. She waits, breathing in the stars until Moira is a little closer. Then she picks up the towel and the flip-flops and steps with crab-induced caution down to the water's edge.
Moira emerges smoothly: throat, breasts, belly, thighs. There is a glow to her nakedness, as if lit from within. She brushes a strand of kelp from her shoulder as she steps out of the moonlight. You're beautiful, Melanie thinks, and she unfurls the towel in greeting, wraps her in it, laughs, all self-consciousness gone, wraps herself in the moment like wrapping Moira in the towel. Goose bumps and chatter of teeth and laughter.
"Hey thanks," Moira says, pulling the towel close to her throat. "Brrrr - it's a little chilly." She slips her feet into the flip-flops.
"Do you always swim at night?" Melanie says.
"I like to catch it before the tide turns. Means I can get further out. It's just running out now. Hey, want to help me dry off?" She turns.
Melanie rubs the towel against her back.
"God I love these nights," Moira says. She raises her head. Dries her throat. "I knew you'd come," she says.
"I heard you singing."
"I used to sing to the whales," Moira says. "Where Frank and I met, there were whales."
Melanie imagines this without comment: Moira singing to the whales; the whales singing back. Somehow they have moved closer, and Melanie is drying Moira's breasts, her face pressed to her wet hair, breathing it in. She feels the hardness of Moira's nipples through the towel.
Feeling Melanie tremble, Moira turns, her face unreadable in the shadow of the trees.
"Know what I think?" she says.
"No," Melanie says. "Tell me."
"I think it's time we got to know one another a little better. Don't you?"
"I've never done anything like this before," Melanie says. Meaning the moon. Meaning the river. Meaning Kelly. Meaning Moira.
Moira kisses her. She tastes of salt and river and night. Moira's hands clamp Melanie's head, delving into her hair, staying her from flinching, keeping her from backing out, stopping her from doing what she does with Kelly. And then Melanie responds, a thrill coursing through her, welling up from between her legs, finding its ultimate focus in the tip of her tongue which tongues against Moira's biting teeth.
Moira breaks away. She smiles. "We're going to have such fun you and I," she says. "And in the morning… in the morning you'll be different. Would that be cool?"
"That would be cool," Me
lanie says, breathing hard, trembling with fear.
Hand in hand, they pick their way back along the beach.
Moira doesn't turn toward the lane but instead she leads Melanie down to the boathouse. She leads her up the bowed wooden steps, warns her about the broken hand-rail and then, with the lightest pressure from her fingertips, she pushes open the door which creaks (as it should) on its hinges.
"Wow," Melanie murmurs, seeing the wash of candlelight, the flickering shadows of the roof beams.
Moira steps inside. She turns. "Come in, Mel," she says. "Let's keep out the night."
Melanie crosses the threshold. She looks at the candles which circumscribe a mattress with pillows and blankets. There is wine. There are glasses. The blue flame of a paraffin lamp licks a gentle heat against the flue glass.
"Is it how you imagined it?" Moira says.
"Just like," Melanie says. "Moira-"
"Don't be scared Mel," Moira says, closing the door. "You're in safe hands. I promise." She un-robes the towel and drops it to the floor. A deep shadow between her breasts, one half of her face dark and unknowable. "And to tell you the truth, in half an hour, you won't care. You won't care about anything at all. I'm going to make you come until your ears pop. Would that be cool?"
"That's cool," Melanie says, no longer sure, wishing she wasn't here, wishing she were drunk. Her mouth is dry, her cunt is moist. She wants this more than anything. She also wants Mum. Cocoa. "Can I have a drink?" she says.
"Sure," Moira says, "help yourself. It's already opened."
Melanie crosses the floorboards, steps inside the circle of candles. She kneels on the bed, presses the wine bottle to her forehead to check its chill, then she pours some into a glass. She drinks, watching Moira come to her, the draught of her passage guttering the candles as she enters the circle. She holds out a clenched hand and Melanie extends her open palm. Something heavy, compact and solid (and something else, something unconnected) falls from Moira's hand into hers. A locket. Silver and heart-shaped. The chain is new and bright; the locket is burnished but pitted with age. "Oh my God," Melanie says.
Suzerain: a ghost story Page 19
