by Octavia Cade
Behind them, Bluebeard’s wife emptied the goblet in large, unhappy gulps.
“I think,” said Bluebeard’s wife, “that I might have been a thing my entire life.” She and Pandora were cuddled up together under the blankets, listening to the rain on the roof and gossiping. That is, Pandora had been gossiping, mostly as a means to fill the silence. She didn’t mind silence, usually, but Bluebeard’s wife had been looking grim, and Pandora was willing to do anything to make her happy again, and mindless chatter usually did the trick—especially if it was about clothes. Pandora had earned two whole smiles due to sashes and belt buckles, but now it seemed that Bluebeard’s wife was ready to stop ignoring her problems and start talking about them instead.
“You’re not a thing to me, darling,” she said.
“Then why don’t you call me by my name?” said Bluebeard’s wife. “You never do.”
“Possibly because I don’t know it,” Pandora agreed. “You’ve been rather close-mouthed about it. I just assumed it was something awful and you never wanted to hear it again. Hortense, maybe, or Agatha.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard it myself,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “Isn’t that terrible? But my mother died when I was very small, and I don’t remember her.” Died from cold and loneliness and exile, come out of North Africa and into France for love and buried far from her native soil in the ashes of a marriage gone to hell over difficulties too many to be breached. Bluebeard’s wife had visited her grave, of course, had laid flowers and talked in one-sided conversations, trying to make a picture in her head, trying to see the woman who had given her darker hair and warmer skin than most of the neighbors and who had taken all knowledge of names with her.
“As for my father, he always used to call me ‘girl.’ You know: ‘Peel the onions, girl; don’t let the fire go out, girl,’ That sort of thing. The only time he ever called me anything different was when I’d snared myself the baron as a husband, and then it was ‘my good girl.’ Not much of an improvement, if you ask me.”
“You must have heard it at the wedding, though,” said Pandora.
“Not much of a wedding either,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I expect he’d been through it so many times before, another one would just have been a bore to him, and of course no one asked me what I wanted. The priest just said, ‘Do you consent?’ and my father said, ‘Of course she does’ and that was it. Then I stopped being ‘girl’ and started being ‘wife.’ The servants never called me anything but ‘milady,’ but I don’t suppose I can blame them. They’d already learned a lot of names. I was number seven, after all.
“Come to think of it,” said Bluebeard’s wife, “I don’t know any of their names either. I know one liked to wear yellow, and one liked feathers over flowers, and one never bought any shoes that weren’t red. I know two had waists bigger than mine, and three had legs that were shorter. I know one of them must have had a truly enormous head, because whenever I wore one of her hats, it always fell down over my face. I know two of them had smaller fingers than I do—their rings didn’t fit, see. And some of them liked emeralds more than rubies, and one wore nothing but pink. There’s a whole room of it—pink stockings and skirts and petticoats, pink ribbons and sashes and silks.
“I know all this,” she said, “but I don’t know their names.”
“Would it make you feel better if you found them out?” said Pandora.
“I’ve tried,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I really have. But the servants have all gone. I don’t think they knew what to do with a wife that didn’t die, a wife who knew they hadn’t warned her. So they scarpered, the lot of them. And the families have moved away too, if they ever cared to begin with—I mean, you could forgive the first one or two, as they didn’t know what they were getting their daughters into, but you’d think it wouldn’t have been long before the others knew they were sending their innocent little chicks off to die, no matter how much gold covered it up. And it’s not like there are any gravestones. The poor things are still rotting in that nasty dungeon.”
“That can’t be healthy, darling,” said Pandora. “You can’t just leave them there! It’s indecent . . . ”
“Well, I can’t bury them without names, can I?” said Bluebeard’s wife. “What am I supposed to put on the gravestones? Numbers? Here lies wife the first, who liked low heels on her slippers and diamond hairpins and embroidered lilies of the valley on her bodice . . . ”
“Maybe you could give them names,” said Pandora.
“How can I name them when I don’t have a name myself?” said Bluebeard’s wife. “Even Sibylle has a name. Pandy, I envy a baby.”
“Oh, quit your bitching,” said Whitechapel, slurring through pins in her mouth as she changed Sibylle’s napkin. “If you want a name so bad, give it to yourself. At least that way you’ll get something you like, something that fits.”
“I suppose that’s how you got yours,” said Bluebeard’s wife, stung.
“Surely so,” said the other woman. “Do you think my old mother named me ‘Whitechapel’? Of course not. I was Ada most my life, but there came a point where it didn’t fit no more. So what could I do? Wander about the streets like some sort of spooky ghost, chained to the name of a dead woman? Because make no mistake, miss, the Ada Wilson that was is long dead and gone I can tell you. Ask your lady, if you like. She was the one that found me. Came for my poor dying body, she did, got it taken straight to London Hospital.”
“What was wrong with it?” said Bluebeard’s wife, resting her head on her hand. “With you, I mean,” she corrected herself, blushing.
“Got stabbed in the throat with his knife, I did,” said Whitechapel. “Twice, the dirty bastard.” And she pulled down her neckerchief, showing Bluebeard’s wife the scarred expanse of skin beneath her jaw.
“God,” said Bluebeard’s wife, disgusted. “What is it with men and sharp edges? Mine came after me with an axe.”
“Well la-di-dah,” said Whitechapel. “An axe. Ain’t you special? A knife’s good enough for me, though I was just a poor seamstress and no lady like yourself. It did the job well enough and all.”
“And Pandy saved you?” said Bluebeard’s wife, too interested to rise to the bait.
“Heard me screaming and came running, she did. And when I woke up in the Hospital, there she was, sitting by my bed and making up to the nurses like they’d met at a theatre instead of an establishment of the medical persuasion. And we talked a bit, and found that underneath we were much the same. Not on the surface, of course—”
“Nobody’s surface is like Pandora’s,” agreed Bluebeard’s wife, with feeling.
“But down underneath where it counts. I asked her, later, after it had all kicked off and he’d started in on those other women, why she hadn’t gone to help them. Why she’d only come for me. And you know what she said?”
“That she wanted someone who wasn’t afraid,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “Someone who could open the box—or the dungeon, I suppose—and not hide under the covers afterwards.”
“And that’s the truth,” said Pandora, emerging from behind a display case of basalt rock and the teetering piles of books that Whitechapel had lugged in from the library beyond the geological section. “But it’s not all of it.” She dropped a kiss on the baby’s head, and another on the cheek of Bluebeard’s wife. “It took me a while to figure it out, the box,” she said. “It hears an awful lot of no, that box, but what it mostly hears is I didn’t mean it. Anyone can say no. Anyone can say don’t. Anyone can go look in a dungeon, or be ambushed in the street. It doesn’t take much of anything to object to that.” And she smiled at them all, her perfect shark smile, white and gleaming.
“When your husband’s first wife went to the dungeon, I saw her go—but only dimly, a sweet-cheeked little shadow I couldn’t touch. Because when he found out she had been down there, you know what he expected?”
“I know,” said Bluebeard’s wife, remembering how he had reprimanded her in that s
ame dungeon, surrounded by the bodies of his wives and her predecessors into death. “There’s screaming and crying and begging,” he had said, “and lots of I’m sorry and I’ll never do it again and I wish I hadn’t done it. You’re supposed to be screaming!” And she had looked him straight in the eye and hadn’t regretted it, not for a moment. “At least this way I know what I’m married to,” she had said.
“I know,” she said again.
“I can’t come all the way through if they regret it,” said Pandora. “If they look at what they’ve done and shudder, if they run away and hide and can’t take the consequences. I can’t come if they’re sorry. And most of them are sorry sooner or later. But not all of you.” She laughed, cuddling up to Bluebeard’s wife and kissing her soundly with her perfect red mouth. “And I’m so glad about that.”
“But,” she continued, nuzzling into the neck of Bluebeard’s wife, “it’s why I can’t tell you their names, darling. I never spoke to them, see. I simply couldn’t. There wasn’t enough of them there to speak to.”
“That’s all right, Pandy,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “It’s not your fault. Besides, Whitechapel knows all about names, don’t you?”
“I do at that,” the other woman agreed. “Ada Wilson that was might have thought she knew a thing or two, but she didn’t know half what she thought she did. I could feel sorry for her now, I could, when she opened the door to the knife. I tell you, I woke up knowing a whole lot more about myself than I did when that man stuck the knife in me. What I learned was that I was very hard to kill, and that I needn’t stand about like a little lambkin and wait to be slaughtered like I was on the block at market instead of . . . instead of where I was. Ada’s no name for a woman like that. I tried keeping it for a while, but it weren’t right. And when I got my new name, I got something else to go alongside it.”
“What was that?” said Bluebeard’s wife. She was slightly disconcerted to see the predatory smile that rose from the good plain depths of Whitechapel’s face. There was something in it that reminded her of Pandora, of hairpins and instructions and axes.
“I got my revenge,” said Whitechapel, rocking little Sibylle against her.
“Good for you,” said Bluebeard’s wife, thinking of her husband stone dead on the floor of his own dungeon. “He deserved it. I did the same thing.”
“Did you now?” said Whitechapel. “And you think one little death is justice for all that’s happened? Do you think you could do it and have it over, just like that? He may be dead, your man, but he’s still got your name. He still has that over you. The scales ain’t equal until you’ve gotten back all he took.”
“Then tell me,” said Bluebeard’s wife, chilled even with Pandora’s arms around her, her hot breath in her ear. “Help me! How do I get my name?”
“If I help you,” said Whitechapel, “what will you give me in return?” She took up a shawl that had been resting atop a pile of books and wrapped the baby in it. “There’s something I want,” she continued, “and you can help me to get it.”
“If I can I will,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I promise.”
“You’ve got to go back to the beginning, see,” said Whitechapel as she visited the home of Bluebeard’s wife. “Not your father’s place, not the home where you were born. But where it began for you, the beginning of where you found yourself.”
“That would have been here, then,” said Bluebeard’s wife, opening the door to the dungeon. It made her shiver, even now—both from memory and from chill, for the dungeon was buried deep in the rock beneath the castle and was unheated for all its braziers. “At least it keeps the stench down,” she said. “Can I offer you a blanket or anything?”
“I’m used to the cold, miss,” said Whitechapel. “I was a seamstress, I was, and that don’t pay well enough for a heap of coal in the London winter, and neither did standing on street corners looking for sailors to hem, if you catch my drift. We’d bundle up good in all the clothes we owned, me and the girls, ragged skirts and dirty too, not like what you’ve got here.”
Her tone was slightly amazed. Whitechapel had been shown the extent of the upstairs wardrobes, and it was clear she’d never seen so many fabrics in her life, even living as she’d done with Anne of Cleves during her pregnancy, kept demure and silent out of discretion and as unimpressed by Flemish clothes as Bluebeard’s wife had been. (“I’ve no doubt they’re warm,” she had said to Anne, “but you ain’t going to attract nobody with those, milady.”)
“All those clothes didn’t do them much good, did they?” said Bluebeard’s wife grimly. It didn’t feel right to bury the women without names, but she had straightened their limbs, those that were still attached, and reunited body pieces as best she could, put pretty handkerchiefs over their faces and arranged them all in what seemed to her an order of decomposition. “I think she was the first, poor thing,” she said, pointing to a green handkerchief with bright satin stitching. “I don’t know what to call her. She doesn’t look like a Jeanne or a Blanche or a Marguerite.”
Whitechapel lifted the hanky and grunted. “She doesn’t look like much of anything with her face all destroyed like that,” she said. “I’ve seen worse, I have, but not by much. Besides, you can’t just give her any old name, like you’re matching up odd stockings. A name’s important. You get the right one, and it lasts, it does. They’ll still be remembering it a hundred years later, and shuddering as they walk past in the dark.”
“I’ll settle for one that could be remembered in this time,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I don’t care about a hundred years from now. You said I had to go back to the beginning to find my name. It stands to reason I have to do the same for her. I don’t even know where her beginning is.”
“Here, I would have thought,” said Whitechapel. “Same as you.”
“She ended here, I’ll give you that,” said Bluebeard’s wife, straightening the handkerchief so as to better cover the poor, mutilated face. “I don’t know that I can say she began here.”
“She’s Bluebeard’s wife, same as you,” said Whitechapel. “Same as all of them, poor dears. Where else did she begin but this place? This is where you’ll find it, mistress.”
“I’m not naming her after anything here,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “She’s not an iron maiden or an agony pear or a thumbscrew.” She thought harder, beyond the heavy walls, dark and dank and skewed, somehow, up into the upstairs rooms of the castle, the bedrooms and dressing rooms and wardrobes. “I could call her Lily,” she said. “I know that she liked them; they were embroidered over all her things.”
Whitechapel rolled her eyes. “I like eel pie,” she said, biting. “And is that what I chose for me? Better to have stuck with Ada—at least that had some history to it. It’s a thin thing to hang a name on, liking.”
“What else is there?” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“There’s truth, mistress,” said Whitechapel. “Truth of what you are—of what she is. You don’t have to find the name here, but the name has got to fit here. You see a pale pretty name like Lily fitting in with this place, with your maidens and pears and whatsits?”
“No,” admitted Bluebeard’s wife.
“No,” said Whitechapel. “And once you understand that, once you use that understanding to find her name, to find all their names . . . then,” said Whitechapel, “then you will know your own.”
EDITH CAVELL
“I can hardly move through here, now,” complained Bluebeard’s wife, edging her way through teetering corridors of books.
“Don’t be such a baby,” said Whitechapel. “It’s not like they’re taking up the entire room—just one little corner of it. And Pandora can still get to those glass boxy things at this end. I made sure of that.”
“But what’s the point of it all?” said Bluebeard’s wife, coming, frustrated, to a dead end and standing on tiptoe, trying to spy a way forward. “I can help you put them back, if you want.”
“I don’t want,” said Whitechapel.
“And I’d thank you to leave well enough alone.”
Bluebeard’s wife scrambled onto a display case of granite, looking down on the mazy lines of reconstituted library to get her bearings. “Whitechapel,” she said, suddenly struck, “the gaps between the books, the little corridors. They look like roads.”
“Of course they do,” said the other woman. “Roads is what they are. It’s my home, it is. That there’s Dorset Street, and that’s Hanbury, and that’s where the Ten Bells should be.”
“Oh,” said Bluebeard’s wife, sympathy welling in her. “I didn’t think about you being homesick! Pandy could take you back, I’m sure she would, like with the rest of us. I’ll look after baby Sibby so you can have a holiday, if you like.”
“I’m not homesick, miss,” said Whitechapel, coming to help her through the maze to the cradle. “The place is a dump, believe you me. I’d rather cut me own throat than live there again. It’s just a reminder, it is. Most of it anyway. See,” she continued, “there’s parts of it as I can’t get right.”
They stopped in an open space between the books and the half-smothered cases. “Like this,” said Whitechapel, in dissatisfaction. “London Hospital, it is, or should be. Where they took me after it happened. But I’ve got nothing to mark it with, I don’t.”
“Maybe we could build a model out of books,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I’m not very arty, but I’ll do my best if you tell me what it looks like.”
“Books is roads,” said Whitechapel. “Not buildings. I thought of using rocks—Lord knows there’s plenty here—but I want a rock like a name, one that means something.”
“Can you not find one you like?” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“I know people,” said Whitechapel, “but I don’t know stone. There’s not enough blood in them for me to make at match-ups, there isn’t.” And she led Bluebeard’s wife away from the empty space and to the cradle, where Pandora was playing with the baby.
“I thought you’d gotten lost,” she said. “I turned around and back again and you’d wandered off.”
