The Unsuitable

by Molly Pohlig

  Iseult could feel her mother writhing inside her and hoped it didn’t show. It didn’t, but a hot blush crawled up her neck, out of her collar, and clutched at her jaw like hands. Iseult’s free hand twisted the napkin in her lap until she thought it might rip apart.

  “Yes. I think we could do that.” Iseult nodded, a small, sharp bob, and stood up, knocking her chair over with a bang and startling the entire table. “You must forgive me; I feel slightly unwell.”

  Without a backward glance, she walked out of the dining room with as measured a pace as she could muster, narrowly avoiding slamming into Mrs. Pennington and Sarah, who had been eavesdropping behind the door. She raced up the stairs to her own room, flung herself at the ivory basin by the mirror, and threw up everything she had just eaten.

  When every trace of her lunch was gone, she pulled “The Unsuitables” from underneath the mattress and prepared to make an entry under “J.” She sat at her desk for close to an hour, pen in hand, before admitting to herself that she did not have the heart to make the entry, on anyone’s account.

  10.

  Iseult spent the next two days locked in her room, pleading illness. Mrs. Pennington cajoled and begged, but she was not let inside. The rumblings in the house caused by her father stomping and slamming doors made the case that he was angry, or possibly more confused than angry. The only true predictor of Mr. Wince’s anger was a deadly silence.

  For those two days, Iseult sat curled in the corner of the room. She was in her nightgown, in a nest of blankets, but she did not sleep. The sun rose and set, rose and set, and she watched the shadows chase each other across the walls and ceiling. She had her small army of tools laid out in front of her: hairpins and hatpins, sewing needles and bits of wire, embroidery scissors, penknife, and even a nasty little cheese knife. Iseult liked it because it had both a serrated edge and two little prongs on the end, ostensibly for spearing a piece of cheese, not for jamming into one’s flesh. But to each his own.

  The current hiding place for her little bundle was inside a large bouquet of dried flowers, a souvenir Elspeth had given her from a wedding Iseult had not been invited to. At other times she hid her tools inside the lavender sachets in her dresser, in her stationery set (hiding needles in the inkpot had resulted in a permanent spot above her knee), or behind the back lining of a painting of geese that hung on Iseult’s bedroom wall.

  She lined them up and then she rearranged them, as if it mattered to someone besides herself. From smallest to largest, from pointiest to least pointy, from aesthetically pleasing to merely functional. From the least silver to the most.

  Perhaps she would never see Jacob again. Perhaps she minded that, perhaps she didn’t. It was hard to tell at this point. This exercise in complete on-her-own-ness was meant to determine that. What would happen after that determination was less certain.

  She did know that she needed her mother to be quiet so she could get her own thinking done. There was an eerie almost-silence in her head already; the only sound was a rasp that told her that her mother was drawing in her breath before a tirade, the way a small child will inhale deeply to increase the power of an impending sob.

  * * *

  no, mother. i am cutting you off before you begin.

  iseult! iseult. iseult

  * * *

  When you have said a word too many times, it begins to lose its meaning, its shape, its very wordness. Try it. Say “orange” aloud. Say it again and again. Write it down and stare at it. It has morphed into something unfamiliar, an arrangement of letters you cannot recall having seen in that particular formation before. If you were to see an orange right next to the word, then connecting the two would be a guess rather than a certainty.

  Beatrice said Iseult’s name over and over, questioning, threatening, pleading, until it became just a statement, and one that no longer had any relevance for her daughter. It was the middle of the night; Iseult propped a small mirror up against the enormous window looking out at the back garden.

  Nothing was really in bloom. Nothing was ever really in bloom. There were a few elderly, wizened trees, a sickly rosebush planted by Beatrice, a lone violet pansy in a flower bed sporadically tended by Mrs. Pennington.

  Weak moonlight spilled into the room, but it was enough for Iseult to see by. She opened the neck of her nightgown and yanked it down to her shoulder, while her mother continued to drone her name.

  She started with the hatpin. It wouldn’t inflict gratuitous damage. If a little would suffice, then it would. There was no need to overdo things.

  She jammed the hatpin into the seam of the original scar, relishing the reassuring sting that radiated farther than the needle could reach.

  iseult stop. stop please. you needn’t. we can talk, surely.

  Not working yet, then. Move onto the next. She pulled the hatpin out. It slid easily through the scar tissue and left only the tiniest speck of blood. She put it back in its place, at the beginning.

  Next was a delicate penknife she had taken from an old desk of her father’s, which he had obviously forgotten to check for contraband. She felt along her shoulder for a softer spot, fingers tapping up and down, listening for a less hollow sound, something fuller, more swollen. She found it in a dip in her crooked collarbone.

  wait wait iseult wait

  She gave the knife a swift, sharp tug, wondering if her father had ever imagined this while he cut the pages of a book or opened letters. The bead of blood became a bubble that grew over a ridge of skin and then trickled downward, edging toward her pristine white nightgown. Too late to take it off now; she would just have to wash it out herself. She waited.

  And still. She could hear Beatrice repeating her name. Her voice was softer, perhaps, but still petulant and insistent. Iseult had thought silencing her might be easier. Maybe this was all more important than she had realized. Her hand hovered over several implements in their tidy row, rejecting each. No need to overdo it, but prolonging the process was not practical either.

  The embroidery scissors. She had been allowed to keep them, because what young lady is complete without her embroidery tools? Iseult felt compelled to dedicate herself to immaculate sewing, in thanks to the gods of social niceties, whose praises she did not often sing.

  She wiggled her left arm free of the sleeve to have more space to maneuver. She glimpsed a flash of her breast in the mirror and shuddered. Her body largely disgusted her, although she was not entirely sure why. She had received the usual sex education of a moderately privileged Victorian woman—that is to say, none. Having no mother, she couldn’t even expect a timid lecture on the eve of any forthcoming wedding night. She hadn’t had the luxury of whispered conversations among schoolfriends. No one ever whispered to her, unless it was to pass on a rumor that accidentally made its way back to her ears.

  She had found some pictures hidden away in a book in her father’s study about financial practices in the Far East. Her suspicions that her father would hide his worst secrets from her in what he imagined she would find the dullest place were well founded. She scanned the shelves until she found the most deadly title. Odd proof that she and her father thought alike.

  These were hardly scandalous pictures. Not that Iseult knew that, though. She peered at them through squinted eyes and slatted fingers with a mixture of revulsion and … something else. It wasn’t actually as bad as all that. A few heaving bosoms, uncorseted; one or two plump coquettes looking over their shoulders at their bare bottoms.

  Mostly, she didn’t understand what these pictures had to do with her father. Mostly, she didn’t want to know. She tucked the pictures back into the book and thenceforth avoided that particular section of the study.

  Now there were two voices to silence: Beatrice, and the voice that sometimes spoke to her of those pictures, and of what they might mean.

  She wiped the scissors on her nightgown, to rid them of any tiny snips of thread that clung to them. She wiped her hand across the cut made by the penknife, smearing t
he half-clotted blood across her chest. She would tidy up later. She opened the scissors slightly, with her first two fingers gripping the handles.

  The points of the scissors touched her skin; she raised them, about to strike, but then her nose itched and she had to stop to scratch it. It didn’t do to be distracted. She could be scattered, yes, but she was not sloppy. If she meant to do something, then she meant to do it well.

  Nose scratched, she returned to the task at hand, completing it with the least fuss. She liked the one-two punch of the scissors, liked that there was a formula to be followed. Stab snip, open stab snip, open stab snip. The proper order must be observed. Pins were easy, uncomplicated. Any type of blade was tricky, ambiguous. Could easily go wrong. But the scissors. If you followed the formula you had nothing to worry about.

  She stabbed snipped and opened five times. She liked even numbers, but also fives. A heaviness was beginning to settle on her head, pressing her down, warming her neck and shoulders and beyond. She pressed a towel to her shoulder and curled up on the floor, making sure none of the blood would get to the rug. As said, Iseult learned her lessons. Once she had made a mistake, she did not make it again. Unless she chose to make it.

  She could hear Beatrice still, but far, far off. She thought. No. Not far off. A place that was close but sounded far. One sailor to another on cantankerous voicepipes on a ship in the middle of the sea; they had seen nothing but the sea for days and days and they were too bored to listen to each other, too bored to say anything of consequence. That was how Beatrice sounded. Far off but still somewhere in the ether around Iseult. Inside her.

  * * *

  Iseult woke up the next day to silence, still curled up on her towel. She could tell by its crunchiness that getting up was going to be a trial, so for the moment she decided to stay put. There was an emptiness in her head and in her body—not loss or hunger, but lightness, as if gravity had only the merest hold on her. She could still hear Beatrice like a hovering bumblebee, but the bee was stingerless, the kind you could walk by and go about your day. A stingerless Beatrice. Oh, that was dreadful.

  Iseult heard the scraping sound of another envelope underneath her door. Merciful heavens, what was it to be this time? Dinner with a man with no eyes? A man with fur? Siamese twins?

  She could hear Mrs. Pennington panting away down the hall. She could tell by the fragment of color on the floor that the envelope was not from her father. It was gray. No. It was silver.

  She jerked upright, knowing what a bad idea it was the whole time. She quashed a small “mrmphl” of pain with her right hand over her mouth. Her left hand was all rubbery pins and needles. She had tried to bring the towel with her, but part of it was wrenched away, the dried blood sticking to her skin and the floor in unequal measures.

  A voice seemed to rise up over the wheezing pneumatic tube—not her mother’s, for once, but her own.

  Jacob? Could it be Jacob? Surely silver was too obvious. Was it Jacob?

  She awkwardly crawled to her knees, then her feet, using her elbow to rise against the chair as a toddler might, armful of half-stuck towel coming with her. She shuffled barefoot across the floor, flinching as rug gave way to chilly wood.

  As she bent to pick up the envelope, she heard a shrill shriek from Beatrice. “Oh, hush,” she said aloud.

  It had her name on it, Iseult Wince, but no address, so he must have come to the house. She hadn’t heard the bell, but she hadn’t been paying attention.

  It was an ordinary envelope, just silver. As Jacob was ordinary, but silver. The handwriting was ordinary, apart from a marked disparity between the size of the first letter of each name and the rest. The result was ostentatious and stylized, and Iseult frowned. Jacob received his first minus in a list of pluses. She turned the envelope over. He had sealed it, which gained him a plus. Secrecy was a good sign. And he’d obviously come when Mr. Wince was out; otherwise the seal would have been broken.

  She shuffled back to sit in the armchair and plucked a knife from her little arsenal on the floor. She slit the envelope’s edge. She peered inside, sniffing the paper experimentally. No great clue. It smelled papery. Before pulling the letter out, she checked her fingers for bloodstains. Clean.

  It wasn’t technically long enough to be considered a letter. More like a memorandum. There was no salutation; her name was absent. Unorthodox, Iseult thought, not sure whether that was a plus or a minus.

  I shall wait on the bench by the butcher in St. James’s Square at two o’clock every day this week. Jacob.

  And that was all. She turned the card over. Nothing. She held it up to the sunlight, not sure what she was expecting to see, but whatever it was, she didn’t see it.

  She assumed he was insinuating that he would be waiting for her arrival. That was plain enough. After all, she had been the one to suggest it at dinner. But she hadn’t been thinking then, had she? If they went walking, they would be expected to converse. She had never been alone with a man other than her father. She wouldn’t know how to behave. Would she be expected to take his arm? How would she know which arm?

  She squinted at the small clock on her vanity table. It was after one. She couldn’t be expected to go today. There wasn’t time. And perhaps she didn’t even want to go. She hadn’t decided yet. She would decide tomorrow. Or the day after that. There was no rush. He said he would wait all week.

  Iseult glanced down at her nightgown and saw the caked dried blood. It would have to be thrown away, along with the towel. She took the nightgown off, replacing it quickly with a dark robe, stuffing the ruined nightgown and towel underneath her mattress until they could be disposed of properly. She slid the letter in there as well. She moved toward her array of tools to hide them away, then hesitated. Maybe the letter should go under her pillow? No, that was too intimate. It would stay under the mattress.

  It was only Monday. She had plenty of time to decide. And Beatrice was held at an appreciable distance for the time being. Iseult went off to scrub the blood from her skin, feeling a rare sense of self-satisfaction. Someone was waiting for her decision, and for once, the decision was entirely hers.

  11.

  The rest of Monday passed quietly for Iseult; still pleading illness with Mrs. Pennington, she rested and read, her mind feeling uncluttered. Tuesday she awoke and wondered whether she should go and meet Jacob at the bench by the butcher in the square at two o’clock, but she didn’t want to come across as fast. Her shoulder was sore, but Beatrice had fallen completely silent, so she forwent her usual walking, preferring to nestle in the puddle of sunshine at her window and embroider. She liked to embroider with the same needles she used for other purposes. Not that she didn’t clean them in between—she wasn’t an animal—but there was a sense of putting a secret something of herself into her work, and any compliments on said work seemed instead to be directed at a crucial part of her Self, rather than at a mere means of combining fabric and thread.

  Wednesday’s dawn was so sluggish that it was only just recognizable as morning. The soupy sky put her in no mood for company. It did put her in the mood for walking, though. At one o’clock she slipped furtively out the front door and bolted in the opposite direction from the bench by the butcher in the square. She walked in as straight a line as possible, marveling at the silence in her head, reveling in it. She let thoughts of Jacob in, but only a little bit. It was still only Wednesday.

  She would have been hard-pressed to describe how she was thinking of him. He was there, in her mind. The way Beatrice was, but also not like that. More benign. He wasn’t a strong presence, more of an infusion. He was background. She saw a group of businessmen trickling out of a restaurant, slapping one another on the back. Jacob was one of them. A crowd of tourists craned their necks at a cathedral dome; he was one of them too. When Iseult paused to take in the bright colors of a sweet-shop window, she could see Jacob’s reflection, next to the lemon drops. He was everywhere and nowhere, and Iseult walked on.

  She wasn’t re
ady to turn around when the skies unleashed a downpour. She tried to hurry home, but she had walked so far, and a pedestrian with an umbrella somehow moves faster than a pedestrian without. Iseult seemed to be the only one without. She was jostled by a hundred scurrying shoulders, and doubly drenched by the dripping from their black umbrellas racing past.

  One of her cuts had been red and puffy since the evening before, and now it began to ache fiercely. She passed a nondescript church with a decrepit graveyard, and took advantage of the fact that the congregation clearly did not employ a regular gardener. Picking her way through wild shrubbery that slapped at her wet skirts, she reached the patchy cover of a small weeping willow, and perched atop a ledgerstone, murmuring her apologies to a certain Mrs. Thistlethwaite. Surely Iseult wouldn’t have minded if the situations were reversed, and a wet and weary traveler sought shelter over her bones. Welcome! she would shout up through the clay.

  She didn’t think of suicide often, and then only abstractly. She would have been surprised to hear someone suggest that she might consider it. She saw no connection between what she did and a genuine desire to die. She wanted to live, of course; who didn’t? She just wanted to live in a different way, and it was difficult to achieve, and most didn’t understand the means to her end.

  It had been mentioned to her over the years, by cruel schoolmates (and her father), that her death would be more beneficial to others than her life. She’d never cared much when other girls sneered this at her, and from her father she took it as a challenge to live as long as possible.

  The rain showed no signs of stopping, but she was largely protected underneath the tree. Soggy rain spots on her black dress looked like seeping blood, although possibly only to Iseult. She tried to think about marriage. She honestly didn’t know much about it, hadn’t witnessed many marriages firsthand. Her father had not, to her knowledge, even considered remarriage. Mentions of Mr. Pennington were few and far between, as well of being devoid of much detail. Her aunt Catherine had a husband, Fordham, who was wide and overbearing. He behaved toward everyone with a forced familiarity that made Iseult squeamish, and whenever she had to submit to a kiss on the cheek in greeting or farewell, she would leave the room as soon as possible to wipe away his saliva. He often chastised his children publicly in a way that embarrassed those who witnessed it. Mr. Wince found him boorish. It was one of the few opinions that father and daughter shared.