The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  ‘You wouldn’t want to mind me,’ said Darcy. ‘You don’t, do you, Manticory? Good, I knew you didn’t. Carry on acting the tragedy queen till your heart bursts and showers us all with its giblets. But not in public, please. It’s not as if you were married. Even if he was.’

  God rains on the wet, they say, somewhere with a superior line in proverbs. So there were pictures of Alexander everywhere, to remind me of the pale hair on his head, the slanted shadow under his lower lashes, the perfect kite of his torso.

  Artist slaughtered in earthquake, wrote the Gazzetta. Young widow and son, distraught.

  I should have expected the and son, yet it hurt me like a fall on ice.

  Out of respect, no one overpasted Alexander’s billboards, and indeed many became shrines, with flowers and candles left underneath to remind me that I was of the common herd of Alexander’s worshippers. I did not attend the funeral. I did not wish to see Elisabetta playing his grieving widow any more than I had relished the thought of her being his wife.

  Did Elisabetta wonder what had become of his ring?

  I took the ring out of my pocket and slipped it on my thumb, the only finger it would consent to stay on. It had an attraction to plugholes and drains and would slip away from me if it could.

  By night now I dressed like a Venetian woman in my fringed sial and went to cafés and wine shops, begging credit so I could nurse a glass of sullen red wine at a corner table, watching how life was lived by those who thought it worth living. I looked at real families in which the men were little sultans surrounded by adoring wives and children. If any man tried to approach me, I showed him Alexander’s ring, and laughed until he skulked away.

  Until one night it was Saverio whom I saw when I looked up.

  ‘Come,’ he said quietly, holding out his hand. ‘There are better places than this. And there is work to be done.’

  Chapter 48

  A month after the earthquake, the post brought Matron Tar’s quarterly report about Ida.

  I was reading it aloud, over a supper I had brought home from Saverio’s studio, when I reached an item on the second page that stole my voice and made my hand tremble. The matron mentioned a visit by that kind gentleman, our cousin Matthew. I forced myself to read on.

  ‘The dear man was most distressed to discover your sister Ida in a condition of what he opined to be ‘lonely, cruel and humiliating’ confinement, and felt that you should have informed him. He considered her elegant accomplishments in the creation of hair ornaments to be ‘outright slavery’ and demanded to see the receipts of sales.

  I regret to say that Ida is at present in a state very much removed from reality, and she did not even recognise her own cousin. But he bravely persisted in his visit, and eventually she quietened, and listened to him, though she did not talk. However, I am afraid he also persuaded her to show him her work in the butcher’s kitchen. By the way, may I remind you that the quarterly fee is overdue by six months?’

  Darcy spluttered.

  ‘What Cousin Matthew?’ asked Oona.

  ‘You imbecile, it is either that wheedling fortune-hunter, the so-called Phelan Swiney, Mariner, or the bastardly Millwillis, impersonating a member of the family,’ snarled Darcy.

  ‘I thought you said Phelan Swiney was in prison,’ I reminded her. ‘For despoiling Pertilly’s hair.’

  ‘So it must be Millwillis then. The one time he came to Pembroke Street, Ida was in the music room. You and I were the only ones who laid eyes on him, so Ida wouldn’t recognise him now. At least Ida did not talk. He will have gone away without any fresh muck to spread. He won’t waste any more time with her.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I write to Matron to say that he’s an impostor and make sure he’s forbidden access to her?’ I fretted.

  Darcy snapped, ‘Ignore the letter. We are supposed to be in Russia again anyway, so how could we have received it yet? He’ll be long gone by now. Millwillis has no patience, and he’ll not want to spend hours in that hideous place, without heat, wretched and dirty, in danger of his life from twenty shades of homicidal delusionists and rapists.’

  Oona cried, ‘But, Darcy, you always said it was a lovely, gentle place there, with no dangerous patients, and no men, and just poor nervous ladies like Ida. You said we shouldn’t visit because she needed to remain in absolute tranquillity—’

  ‘I was thinking she was lucky to be there while we starved in Venice,’ said Berenice. ‘It was a comfort to think of her in luxury.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t want you in a state too, did I? Yes, it has its share of murderers, like any other establishment of that kind. And it doesn’t do to make these places too cosy, or the lunatics get used to it and think of all kinds of excuses to stay, putting a burden on their families with the expenses,’ Darcy said firmly. ‘No, old Millwillis won’t go back a second time. Was I ever wrong yet?’

  ‘We should fetch her away here anyway,’ said Oona. ‘She does not chew her hair any more, does she?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Darcy. ‘But where would I find the cost of train tickets at this time? When our luck turns, and when Millwillis has given up haunting Ida, I’ll fetch her.’

  But ‘Cousin Matthew’ proved most devoted. Matron’s next letter told us how he made a point of visiting once a week. Ida had begun to recognise him, or at least acknowledge him as her ‘old new cousin’. Her sense of time, Matron told us, was distorted by her illness.

  She has accommodated him as part of her childhood, and prattles to him of mutual memories that seem to make her happy.

  ‘God, there’s no knowing what she will spill. Once she starts talking, she’s as flowy as the cholera,’ moaned Darcy. ‘Manticory, write something to Matron that will have him chased away.’

  Dear Matron Tar.

  [I wrote.] As ever we remain grateful for all your kindness to our afflicted sister. I apologise for my slow response. As you know, we have been touring in Russia, and a Venetian acquaintance has only just brought us our post including your longed-for news of our dear Ida. I hasten to warn you that no ‘Cousin Matthew’ exists in our family. The impostor is known to us. His only wish is to do poor Ida harm. In the name of all my sisters, I formally request that you deny him access to her. But kindly do not unmask him. That could be dangerous. Please feign to respect him. If she has talked to him, you must assure this man that she is not capable of recounting the truth, and that he must not use her fantasies for any of his purposes, which, we suspect, are malign.

  Matron replied by telegram:

  REGRET FALSE COUSIN. BUT HAS NOW WILLINGLY REVEALED TRUE IDENTITY. SAYS HE IS IN POSSESSION OF ALL CRUCIAL FACTS. ON HIS WAY TO VENICE TO WAIT FOR YOUR RETURN FROM RUSSIA. DEEPLY SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE BUT FELT IT CORRECT TO SUPPLY YOUR PERMANENT ADDRESS. YOU MUST MAKE OTHER ARRANGEMENTS FOR IDA PRESENTLY. DO NOT WISH PUBLICITY.

  From the cold tone, we understood that Millwillis had shared ‘the crucial facts’ and that they had not been to Matron Tar’s liking.

  So now Mr Millwillis knew it all, the whole terrible sight of scandals, from the seven nit-ridden fatherless sisters to the fake Pertillys. From his first articles, it was clear he already knew about the fake locks sent out and the letters written as if from us in Mr Rainfleury’s factory. He knew about the ringworm. He knew what was in the essence, and the scalp food. He knew about the adulterous marriage of Mr Rainfleury and Enda. Now that he had talked to Ida, he knew the facts about Enda’s fiery end and even, perhaps, what and who had caused it. He knew we had fled to Venice to save ourselves from him. He would write of the seven sisters, who weren’t really sisters and who had not been seven for some time. He would write about the hair that wasn’t all theirs. Of course now there was the extra shame of poor Ida being confined in a sordid madhouse for him to gloat over. Ida had read Darcy’s black books – perhaps Millwillis would know what was in them now too.

  And there could be but two possible reasons why he had wished to empty Ida’s rattling head of all these matters – he wanted eith
er to expose us or blackmail us. He would write the Swiney Godivas up as quacks, adulteresses, liars, fakes and even murderesses – or we would pay him for his silence. He would no doubt plan to live off us for the rest of our lives. The one thing that Millwillis did not know about us was that we were now paupers who could never pay his price. About that one small fact he was crucially uninformed.

  As for Mr Millwillis himself, well, we could be expecting him in Venice at any time to put his torment on us, thanks to Matron’s idea of what was correct, which now also had Darcy tongue-cudgelling money out of Pertilly’s savings to pay for train tickets so she could rush off to England and fetch Ida back to us before she let loose any more candid recollections.

  Even as Darcy and Ida churned third class on bare benches across the Continent in the train, the next week’s post showed a taste of what was to come. Millwillis had already started publishing his new articles about us. He’d allied himself to an Italian psychologist, Cesare Lombroso, who was writing essays in which he argued (with deft and cunning recourse to the harmless Mr Darwin) that thick dark wavy hair was a sure sign of backwardness and a signpost to a subhumanly criminal, morally debauched nature. Abundant hair in women was condemned as a virile growth, revealing the hirsute female as nearer her ape origins than to civilised man. There were other psychologists ready to associate hairiness with madness, sexual incontinence, insensibility to pain, infanticide and degeneracy. Mr Millwillis found illustrations for all these phenomena in the Swiney Godivas.

  ‘Who is translating Lombroso for him?’ I asked. ‘Who?’

  For Millwillis was able to classify, compartmentalise and label each ‘criminaloid’ Swiney sister. Low-browed Neanderthal Darcy was sensual and violent, Berenice impulsive and vindictive; Pertilly had ears of a criminally large size; Enda had been guilty of a monstrous vanity; pale Oona was congenitally frigid; Ida was the passionate imbecile with a sloping forehead who played the fiddle as if the Devil were dancing for her. I myself was a monster of red-haired lust and cold rapacity. Millwillis also used Lombroso to argue that the Swineys, like all women, were more cunning and vicious than any murderer.

  Those girls have never drawn a breath, he wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette, but that they’ve used it to poison someone.

  Ida and Darcy had been home only two days when I caught my youngest sister waving out of the back window.

  ‘There’s Cousin Matthew!’ she told me. ‘Come all the way to see us. Shall we wet a pot of tea for him?’

  Chapter 49

  ‘I’d like to see him at the bottom of a lime pit,’ growled Darcy. ‘I’d pour the lime myself.’

  Berenice envisioned his skeleton prodding the mud at the bottom of the Grand Canal. Pertilly wanted him staked on a bonfire. Oona opined that Millwillis should be struck down by a highwayman. I kept my imagination away from him. My imagination had already done too much damage.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Manticory,’ hissed Darcy. ‘Got a scruple, have you? For a change?’

  ‘She is sad,’ said Ida. ‘Not in a killing mood, but a dying one.’

  When I embraced her at the station, Ida had given me a long look. She’d whispered, ‘I heard about Alexander.’ And she had offered the only consolation that seemed to stick for a moment because of the hideous sense it made: ‘You have been took bad by bad love and you’ll be a dirty long time dying of it. He was more lucky than you. Minutes, he had of pain, and then a clean ending. But Manticory, you should be happy. You have been dancing with a broom like the last spinster left at the ball, like the last spinster left on earth. Alexander, he was a broom; he had no more life than that, even when he was alive.’

  ‘The hack’s still here.’ Darcy was at the back window taking another look at Millwillis. ‘I hope your knives are good and sharp, Ida.’

  ‘Don’t be talking of knives, Darcy honey,’ pleaded Oona. ‘Or thinking of them.’

  The journalist passed unhurried hours in the calle outside our house waiting. His self-possession was admirable, especially in the heat. Besieged, when necessary we used a different exit, through a neighbouring deserted garden, past the lime pit that housed the bodies of the neighbourhood’s dead animals. It was necessary at least to get to the post office for our correspondence with Tristan.

  In defiance of Millwillis’s articles, or perhaps inspired by our new notoriety, Tristan was engaged in ‘one final bid to save your fortunes, ladies’. Given that Growant had entirely killed the market for Swiney Godiva Scalp Food and Hair Essence, he wanted to market a Swiney Godiva depilatory cream: something to remove those hairs where hairs should not be. He’d not so much asked our approval as informed us that the Swiney Godiva name was now doing the opposite of its normal work.

  AWAY! FROM ARABIA, Tristan called it. The Latest Swiney Miracle.

  And it was advertised as containing sandalwood, cloves, musk, red Cyprus and roses. When he threatened to use an image of the Baboon Lady, Julia Pastrana, to advertise it, we agreed to let him Swiney AWAY! instead. Saverio was invited to the palazzo to take some photographs of Oona and Berenice to illustrate Tristan’s caption: Will you run the risk of alienating the affection of a husband by not attending to the few unsightly hairs that have sprouted above those lips he once loved to kiss?

  Saverio Bon pursed his lips, asking me, ‘Is this really necessary?’

  But neither Tristan’s sudden slight rekindling of interest nor his enclosures of handbills could distract us from the unwelcome visitor who haunted our gates.

  ‘That wants solving,’ muttered Darcy, staring out of the window in a speculative way. Then she suddenly hunched her shoulders and cried, ‘No!’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, for her face was contorted with fury.

  But all my response was the winnowing noise of her skirts as she rushed to the kitchen. Following her, I saw her grasp Ida’s carving knife, which she tucked into her pocket alongside the hammer she used for nailing up the letters from Tristan and Mr Rainfleury.

  ‘Go,’ she hissed. ‘Look outside, and you’ll want to be fitted up with weapons too.’

  Hastening to the hall window, I saw what Darcy had seen.

  Mr Millwillis had a companion walking arm in arm with him, back and forth in front of our home. And that companion was the Eileen O’Reilly, every inch of her, no longer runtlike but quite the shiniest and most prosperous little piglet of a girl you ever saw. She would never make a fat corpse, and yet above her slender waist she had grown a prosperous pair of breasts, which displayed themselves at a jaunty angle inside a plaid waistcoat. Millwillis and the Eileen O’Reilly paused together in front of our garden gate, a few yards away from me.

  And the most amazing thing of all was to hear the very Eileen O’Reilly herself chattering loudly in Italian to a passer-by. Hers was much more fluent than my own. Of course it was! She was a lady of business now. Her uncle must have invested in her acquiring the tongue so that she could deal with the Italians from whom he bought his delicacies.

  We already knew that Millwillis had encountered the Eileen O’Reilly on one of his sleuthing visits to Harristown, where she still spent her Sundays, as Mrs Godlin regularly reported. Of course, the butcher’s runt would have thrust herself forward, being only too happy to share her many colourful old stories about Darcy. She’d probably embroidered on them. And now he’d rewarded her long tongue with a trip to Venice!

  No doubt she was the one who’d translated Lombroso on hair as a diagnostic of feminine depravity, feeding him information that served to fatten his mock-scientific theories. The Swineys, he had just written, show just that absence of self-control and civilisation that we regret in the savage beasts. Yes, he could see it that way and he would keep writing it that way, and there would be nothing we could do to stop it being printed in a book, a thousand times over. A book raised the stakes. A book was like a tombstone, for ever. Millwillis would be washing our hair in public for years to come; the filth of his insinuations would be indelible. People might dismiss newspapers as enterta
inment but everyone believed what was in a book.

  Darcy put her hand on mine. The veins on it were raised and livid. She said, ‘There is something we can do about it. Call everyone to the dining room.’

  Darcy treated us to an hour of the inside of her mind, as dark a place as you might imagine. There was a fairy-tale quality to the way she spoke of murder. It had a lulling effect on the rest of us. My sisters listened to her as they had so many times before, believing the worst of her violence to inhabit her tongue and just occasionally, these days, her hard hands. Only I thought again of PS buried in the clover field at Harristown. Had Darcy killed a man, in real life, not just in threats? I believed she had. Even as a very young girl, she had somehow contrived it. And then there was Enda, who had tried to use her influence with Mr Rainfleury against Darcy, and had not survived it.

  The lime pit was in the end dismissed by Darcy as impractical. How would we push Millwillis down it?

  ‘We?’ said Oona. ‘Darcy honey—’

  ‘It’s too shallow. Would he be buried enough down there?’ Darcy asked herself. She specifically wanted him wrapped in a winding sheet, coffined, lead-encased, with earth packed down around him. An open grave, even if a relatively deep one, would not be sufficient. And the other problem was, as ever, the Eileen O’Reilly.

  ‘Even if we manage to separate them, and to dispatch him,’ Darcy insisted, ‘the butcher’s runt will never leave off looking for her fancy man. She’ll be battering at our door in a hog’s grunt.’

  ‘Oh no!’ said Oona. ‘That just shows—’

  ‘She would follow us to Hell but she’ll have something out of us,’ muttered Darcy. ‘The corpse must not be found in our proximity.’

  ‘Better if not even in Venice, really,’ observed Berenice. ‘You’re still quiet, Manticory.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Darcy. ‘I’ve thought of that too.’ Her eyes were glittering with that dark light that they emitted only when she was in possession of an idea.