Esther Bligh

by Diana Powell

  Murderer. Killer. Some amongst the letters blamed me for her death – something else to add to my sins. No, I had nothing to do with that. There was no need – she went so quickly. The doctor himself said there was nothing to be done, there was no hope, she was old. See how the letters lie? If they lie about that, can they not lie about anything? Why should anything they say be true? Yes, I was glad. I can’t pretend otherwise, though I pretended it then with Edmund, as I pretended so many things. There were tears, even – I was a regular Lilian Gish. But, beneath, my heart was soaring. I could not believe my luck. I would be able to become the mistress of the house now, the path to my escape had become clearer. So, yes, it was what I wanted, but no, I did not lay a finger on her.

  Strange, though, I felt almost deprived of victory because she would now not witness it. Still, even if I could not gloat over the flesh, I could work to dirty her memory, and relish that, instead.

  It was then that I burnt her bible, while Edmund was still burning in his fever. I had already thrown the precious lectern out the back, laughing as I had hoped to laugh at her, but now it was the turn of the book itself.

  ‘I need to keep the stove going, my dear,’ I told him. ‘For your broth. For boiling the sheets.’

  I sat in the kitchen, feeding the pages into the stove. And I could not help wishing she was looking down at this moment, even though I did not believe, as she did. I smiled, too, from pleasure at the warmth – that her bible was warming me, when she had worked so hard to deprive me of heat, that her words were feeding the flames, not of Hell, but of hearth – my hearth. I saved the leather-bound cover till last, and watched as her family went up in flame and smoke – the family that did not include me, because she had never added that ‘m.’ followed by my name.

  ‘It is the end of them now,’ I thought. ‘The end of the Blighs.’

  He had told me there were no others; he, the only child, his parents only children, no cousins. No one. No more now. Good riddance, I thought, to her and all of them, to whoever was begat by whoever, who married whichever, and died whenever.

  And then, God Almighty, he recovered.

  The doctor said there must be an inner strength that his frail and puny body belied, while Edmund babbled about his wonderful nurse, and how love had the power to keep the spirit fighting. Halle-bloody-lujah. I nodded and smiled, as I always nodded and smiled, as I sat beside him, yet again, with my sewing.

  ‘What are you doing, my dear?’ he asked.

  ‘Just some repairs,’ I said. ‘Nothing fancy.’

  I had gone through the house, gathering all her handiwork as I found it, anything with ‘M.B.’ sewn in the corners. Some I put on the fire, after the bible. But I could not burn it all, so I unpicked the tiny stitches one by one, and rubbed away the shadow they left. Then I stitched my own initials in their place. ‘E.B.’ – far neater, I thought, more cleverly fashioned, declaring my ownership of the piece, the house, and him.

  Look. Look. How fine the work is! Still so plain to see, so easy to read. My writing was, of course, so much improved by then. Elegant, curling initials… not so different from the script of the letters, yet worked in thread, not ink. So much harder, in, out, in out, yet so well executed. E.B. Esther Bligh, mistress at last.

  Still, all this was no more than a stop-gap, to make my insides warm, as the flames of the bible burning made my flesh warm; to make my heart flutter. After all, I had no desire to stay in that house, even if I ruled over it. But at least I had hope; I had a plan. If Edmund wouldn’t die, well then I must leave, some way or other, but I needed money to do that, I wanted money, it was my due. Why else had I married him, but to get some comfort in life? With his mother gone I would be in charge of the house-keeping, and yes, I, despite ignorant of my letters, had always been sharp with numbers, seeing them as pounds, shillings and pence, needing to be added and subtracted, and, if I was lucky, multiplied and saved. I would work on Edmund and his bank account, I would sell whatever I could. And then, when I had enough, I would go. Yes, I would have preferred him dead – there would have been more money then, because the house would be mine, mine to sell – and how I would love that moment when I got rid of their precious ‘home’. But still, I would make do with the leaving, as long as I had enough money. For yes, that was my due, for the time I had spent in this soul-suffocating fortress, with a fool for company.

  Here I am still. The fool was me, not him. I had thought I was so clever, when I lay with him. I had thought I was strengthening my power over him, above her. That was all, my only intent. And then she was gone, and I had those few weeks of feeling my way, stretching my authority, planning ahead. I lit fires in every room then – not just the kitchen, or where he lay. True, the house did not fully warm. It had been cold and wet for too many years – cold to its bones, the same as I was. But it was better. And I began my inventory of the valuables of the place. Not near enough as much as I hoped. The porcelain tea-set, so proud on its dresser, was full of secret, spreading cracks. The silver cutlery turned out to be plate. And a woman such as she, one so plain and joyless, did not indulge in jewellery, except for the wedding and engagement rings buried with her (yes, lying in her coffin with her, so that I could not even claim those!). So there were no treasures to be found hidden in little boxes and cubby-holes, small and easy to pawn. Still, I was sure it was simply a question of time and perseverance, and…

  … the bleeding. Suddenly, I became aware that there had been no bleeding, this month… or the last. There had been so much going on that I had not thought of it, the first time I missed. But now…

  The way I had lived in London… I needed to know such things, where my body was at, what steps needed to be taken. Strange that I was caught before with him, marrying when there was no need. And now, here it was again! I could not believe it! How could I be so unlucky? How could I be such a fool?

  Still, there were ways and means, tried and practised many times over. Mind, they had let me down before, until nature had played its dirty trick on me as it was doing again, now. And so it began. The boiling-hot baths – not easy with such plumbing. If the gawping maid was not around, I would resort to the zinc tub in the kitchen – saucepan-fuls from stove to bath. Wearisome work, but I had done it enough times in the past. I wanted pain, then, yearned to feel the wrenching of my insides and then the warmth between my legs. But, no, there was nothing.

  Gin. I must try gin. But there was none in the house, the resident widow having been uninclined to ruin, and how could I get it? Oh, how the tongues would be set wagging, if I appeared in the public house, wanting to buy gin. I could not plead it for Edmund – gin was not the invalid’s tipple. So, no, I could not use gin, just as I knew there was no-one I could turn to to ‘help’ me. Of course, there would be someone here, just as there was in the back streets of London. They existed in every place, even one as remote as this. Here, it would be a witch, living in a half-ruined cottage, up on the mountain, or in the wood – if there was a wood. Some old crone, a dried-up, gossipy old woman, like those in the Square gathering her herbs and making her potions. But who exactly, and where exactly, I had no idea.

  I tried my own concoctions, filling the house with their smells, so that even Edmund got wind of them. ‘I am trying a new medicine for your chest, Edmund, something I read of. I’m afraid it isn’t working.’ And it didn’t. I retched and retched, until there was nothing left inside me – except a baby. The weeks went on. I tried jumping down the stairs, falling, even. How glad I was, then, that the mother had gone. She, no doubt, would have known what I was up to.

  There were crueller methods, of course… the needle. There was bleeding, then. But it was the wrong sort, I knew at once. The child kicked in protest in my womb, and burrowed itself tighter.

  The child… A child. A brat. Growing inside me, until I could hide it from Edmund no longer. Oh, I tried as long as I could, pretending I was getting fat, taking out all my dresses. But, in the end, I had no choice but to tell him, f
or I knew the maid would know it soon enough. And the doctor was still calling every week, and the nurse, who had been employed to come every day. And then… the joy. I couldn’t believe it, I could not fucking believe it.

  ‘A miracle,’ he said. Well yes, that one such as he was capable of fathering a child.

  ‘My wondrous Esther!’ As if I had given him all the treasure in the world, or made all his dreams come true. That was what he said, blathering on about his life now being fulfilled, that he, who had been so lucky, to have such a beautiful, caring wife, was now to be fully blessed with a child. Marvellous, beautiful, wonderful, incredible – there was no end to his over-blown outpourings.

  And it rallied him again. Something else I could not believe.

  ‘I am determined to be well for the boy, Esther. It will be a boy, I am sure of it. I, we, will have a son. And I will be well enough to be a proper father to him, to do the things a father does with his son. I promise you!’ Someone else to collect birds’ eggs and shells with, to teach to read, to talk about stones, and seaweed and clouds with. Such a lucky child!

  Endlessly he carried on about our future, how wonderful it was going to be, in this perfect house, in this marvellous place. Our wonderful family. Years ahead he planned, years and years stretching out before me.

  There was a day when I walked down to the beach again. ‘I need some fresh air, Edmund. The sickness, you know.’ The sea was its usual grey. I had come to know by then that it was a nonsense to describe it as blue. It was the same with the sky, in this place, at least. ‘It is the mountains,’ he told me. ‘They cast a shadow, and gather the rain to them.’ Yes, well, that wasn’t what he told me before we got there.

  The water weltered towards me. A spring tide. See, I had learnt that from him – that the sea was high, now, and it was nothing to do with the season, but the state of the moon. How lucky I was to have been given this knowledge by him, and all else he had given me besides. So much to be thankful for… I took a step closer to the waves.

  It was just a moment. It was not for me.

  But what was for me? A child. A husband. In this place. How could I endure it? How could I possibly survive?

  I prayed. I prayed, I suppose, to the Devil that he would end it. A miscarriage, like before, was it too much to ask? And I still tried the various ways, even in the knowledge that it became more dangerous with every week that passed. I did not care. And if I succeeded, well, surely the grief would finish him off, so that I would be free – two birds with one stone, you might say. But each attempt I made was answered by another frantic kicking from within. ‘Edmund is right,’ I thought. ‘It must be a boy. Another man abusing my body, making use of it for his own ends.’ Already, I could not believe what he had done to me. I would stand naked in front of the mirror, and gaze on my bloated stomach, cradle my hands round my aching breasts, see the life sapped from my hair, feel the spirit draining from me. That I had come to this…

  Yet all this turned out to be nothing compared with the birth. Oh, how he punished me then, this boy, this ‘perfect baby boy’ – that was how they introduced him to me as I lay there half dead after the hours of birthing, the fight we had endured. It was as if he knew, knew that it was safer to stay inside. But out he came in the end, pulled, pushed, coaxed, threatened. And breathed. And cried. And lived.

  Mother. Another word from the letters. Another word from before. I had one, once, for all the good it did me. And then, when I came here, another was dumped upon me. And now I had somehow become one… But it was something I could never be. The letters made it plain, and it was something they spoke the truth about. ‘What kind of mother are you?’ they said. ‘How can any mother do that?’ ‘You do not deserve the name of “mother”!’ Well, I hadn’t asked for it. I didn’t want it. I hated every moment of it, whatever the doctor, the midwife, and Edmund – most of all Edmund – thought, with his ‘you will be so wonderful, such a caring mother, just as you are so caring to me!’ I, who could hardly bear to enter his room now that there were other warm spaces for me; I, who let the nurse attend to his needs whenever she was there; I, whose skin puckered and squirmed at his touch, and insides spewed at his words.

  That moment they put the child in my arms, when my face was supposed to light up in adoration despite my weakness and pain, when all my former anguish was supposed to dissolve into love – well, it didn’t bloody happen; nothing changed at all, not a thing. I still simply wanted it to go away. Did the doctor see it, and the midwife, with her shifting eyes and flapping ears? Because for once I had no energy for play-acting, and I found myself glad Edmund was not there, until I remembered how blinded he was by his foolish passion.

  Still, he came soon enough, and oh, the ecstasy! That it was a boy… ‘My boy, my son, my Esther, my darling, my baby, my son’. Until his words were lost in the tears he shed, as he held the child, making the doctor banish him again, afraid of effect on his nerves, afraid that it might kill him.

  And I was glad, then, of my own weakness, that I was deemed too frail in those first few weeks, to look after it, so a wet nurse was brought in. Thank God for that – why should I want anything to do with a crying, squalling, messing creature? Why should I have any pleasure in that? I was simply not born to be a mother. What is so wrong in that?

  The child was puny, sickly at the start, no wonder, perhaps, considering what it had been through in the womb. Yet all too soon he began to grow stronger. The nurse was doing her job well, Dr. Pritchard told me. But a thriving, blooming brat was not what I wanted. I told the woman I was feeling better, so there was no further need of her. I wanted her gone, I wanted to be alone with the child, to… I did not know what I wanted, or what I was thinking. I swear I had no plan just then.

  Of course, Edmund was there. But he was lost in his land of make-believe, with his fairy princess and his son, the prince, Edmund the second; the land where they all lived happily ever after, for ever and ever.

  He did not notice that the weight the baby had gained was lost again. The doctor saw it, of course, frowned over him, prodded him here, pinched him there, asked if he were feeding well.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, he is fine.’

  She sat there, with the child in her arms, looking at it. ‘It’ was what she called him, when no-one else was there. Strange, how it would nuzzle close to her, when she had never fed it on the breast. Stranger, still, how it would look at her, the same way as his father, needing, wanting, always asking something of her that she could not give, until she could stand it no longer. She would lay it back down, then, and the crying would begin. ‘Colic,’ she told him. ‘He has eaten too much, too fast. That is all.’

  He was there; he was gone. He was christened; he was buried. It was not so strange, with the men coming back from the war unmanned, and the Spanish flu, and the other flu, and the eternal bitter, damp air of this place, even in summer time. It was not so strange, besides – there were always babies who died amongst those who lived. More, surely.

  LIAR.

  LIAR

  ‘Liar’ written in capitals, yelling from half the page. LIAR inside my head.

  Lies. All lies. There was no pillow, there was no poison slipped into his milk. No ‘accidental’ fall. A chill, nothing else, that his frail body could not fight. That was all.

  They took him in a box to the graveyard where his unknown grandmother lay and all his ancestors lay. I thought ‘It will finish Edmund now,’ as he leaned against me, thinking to support me, when it was I who must stop him throwing himself into the hole after the coffin. I thought ‘It is better this way. He should never have existed. He was a mistake, and mistakes must be put right.’ I thought lots of things, but I did not think of the child.

  Oh, what doom was called down upon us now. Whatever gloom I had thought reigned over the house, it was nothing to the despair that engulfed our ‘family’ after the death of ‘our beloved son’. That’s on his gravestone. That’s what he was in Edmund’s constant mewling. The curta
ins must be kept drawn at all times, and the morbid clothes not long forsaken in our mourning for his mother must be put on again, without respite, and, since we could not possibly have appetites, on account of our grief, our meals must be reduced to bread and water, and, and, and – whatever misery could be thought up, so must we embrace it, so that the days when his mother ruled the roost began to seem almost cheerful by compare! Our little excursions to the beach or the mountain were remembered as pleasant interludes! Edmund was returned to his bed almost permanently now, and I was not to leave the house, because why should I want to, when I was so sad?

  There was one place I could go. I was allowed, encouraged even, to visit the little grave. ‘Take flowers for him, Esther. Sit with him. Tell him how we love him. Tell him I am sorry I cannot visit.’ As if this bloody life-sucking child still existed and must be spoken to, when all I had wanted was that he cease to be.

  So off I would go, black except for a small white circle of face, and make my way passed the harridans in the Square, up to behind the church, on the slope of the mountain. Strange how the women looked at me differently, then, nodding towards me, with no hands raised to their mouths, a doleful look in their eyes. Pity. I knew it for pity, thinking, as they did, with my baby dead, even one such as I deserved sympathy for that. Was I supposed to be grateful for that? Was I supposed to return their nodding, approach them, even, and thank them for their condolences?

  Pity – something I hate as much as hurt, more, perhaps. That anyone should think I needed pity, wanted it, when there were so many more desirable things in life. Such as the things I wanted from Edmund when I met him. Money, jewels, clothes, material goods, not his ‘Poor, poor Esther’, not his watery eyes. And certainly not his child.