by C M Muller
Apr 8-9
Midnight—
I hear the church bells tolling, the passing of the mail coach. An old man sings his way home, and a young girl weeps in the alley. In the silence of this hour, each sound recalls to me my shame and the solitude that followed. Days and nights in that bedroom with the curtains drawn while Mr Orne kept watch outside and Mother walked the halls, screaming.
From the bed I watched the curtains change in color from gray to yellow to crimson. On cloudless nights the moon shone through the fabric, flesh-white and glistening with grease, making stains on the bedclothes and running like an oil in the blood—
For months I listened for the swollen creek, fat with autumn rain, white water roaring as it fell. Sometimes I thought I was dying. Other nights I was certain of it. In the evenings, I heard the winds blowing outside, and Mother weeping, and Mr Orne ascending the stairs—
Then one night he unlocked the door and entered the room with his bible under his arm and the usual prayers upon his lips. He knelt beside me and took hold of my wrist. He said some words. There was a sharp pain, then, and a light washed over me, cool as spring rain or the touch of God’s breath on my forehead, and finally, I slept.
Apr 11
Sunday, no church—
I will not go. Mr Carr is away on business, and for all of her coaxing, Bridget could not rouse me from the bed. She is a Catholic girl, of course, and quite devout. From the window I watched her hurry off to mass, wearing her Sunday hat with the brim pulled down to her ears.
Then I dressed myself in the blue silk he had loved and sat by the window with my diary in my lap. As I write, I watch the birds circle the rooftops opposite. I admire their ease, their lightness. They drift like bracken on the churning current, carried this way and that with the wind through the chimney-pots, dropping like stones when they sight the river.
The ice is out of the Charles. Every morning reveals a surface more degraded, riven with forks of liquid water. Last week Mr Carr walked home with me after church. He was meeting a client after lunch, a young man of my own age, and was in rare good spirits. The day was fair and warm and we took the bridge over the Charles.
Halfway across, I paused and gazed down at the river with its plains of blue-gray ice and glimpsed the creek behind them like the words in a palimpsest. I could hear the falls, too, over the clatter of wheels and footsteps, and recalled the garden at night. The rush of water spilling over rocks, foaming far below. The answering hum of the blood running through me.
Mr Carr joined me at the railing. I asked him of what the ice reminded him. He thought for a moment and said that it resembled a map.
Yes, he said, more confident of himself. It is much like a map of the city. Do you see? he asked, pointing. There is my street, my house.
April 11th and the ice is gone and Mr Carr’s map with it. Beacon Hill has dwindled away into the black water, and soon my father’s house will follow. There will be only the river, only the creek, two channels feeding the same sea. I must go back—
Apr 15
This morning at breakfast I raised the matter of the house in Walpole and asked Mr Carr for his leave to travel there. At first I thought he had not heard me, for he did not answer, and did not wrest his gaze from the newspaper.
I must see it, I said. While it is still standing.
He turned the paper over. He continued to read.
Hmm? he murmured.
Father’s house, I said. Our neighbors, the Bosworths—
Mr Carr slapped down the paper.
His cheeks were flushed. They had darkened to purple and the pores stood out below his eyes. We have been married three months, but I have never before seen him angry.
And how is it you have heard of this? he demanded.
Uncle Edmund, I said. He wrote to me.
Is that so? How interesting.
He reached for his coffee cup. He sipped from it, seemingly lost in thought as a carriage passed in the street outside, rattling the buds on the trees.
He shook his head slowly. When he spoke, his voice was low and level.
He said: It is entirely out of the question.
I will be discreet, I said. Say nothing—
He slammed down his cup. The saucer cracked beneath it, upturning the cup and sending the hot liquid spilling across the table. He leapt up and called for Bridget. The girl appeared in the doorway with her eyes downcast, looking terrified.
Clean this up, he said. He indicated the mess before him.
Yes, sir.
He glared at me. Leave us, he said.
And I left—but I listened outside the door.
Mr Carr was furious with Bridget. He hissed and spat at her and threatened her dismissal. It would seem he believes that she sneaked a letter to my uncle on my behalf. The good Catholic girl, Bridget did deny the accusation, but bowed her head and accepted this punishment as her due, speaking up only to voice her agreement, and later, her apology.
See that it does not happen again, he said. Good day.
Bridget swept out in her apron and skirts. She scurried past me with her face in her hands, reaching the staircase at a near-run.
For his part Mr Carr pushed back his chair and vanished through the opposite doorway. I heard the front door shut behind him, his footsteps on the stoop.
He will visit his club when the working day is done. He will not return for hours.
Bridget
[The next page appears to have been removed.]
I still think of it, that first sight of the Atlantic. When I was sixteen, we visited the coast south of Portland and stayed with Uncle Edmund in a cottage on the sea.
Evening fell, and we followed the reach of the shore beyond the lighthouse. By then the tide had gone out, leaving the dead fish piled all round and the great ropes of seaweed like sheaves in a summer field, waiting to be taken up and carried in.
The stench was overwhelming, sour and sweet and sharp with the tang of the sea. Father fell ill. He broke from me without warning and stumbled to the water’s edge where he emptied his guts into the ocean. Afterward, he lay feverish on the cobble and muttered to himself of the battlefields of his youth: Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville.
I held his hand. I listened. The waves went out from us as the rains moved in, sweeping the shore and eclipsing the light on the rocky headland. There was thunder, then lightning, and Father stirred, moaning with the dark that lived inside him.
I shook him, gently. Father, I said.
He opened his eyes.
Apr 19, 5 o’clock—
I have seen to everything. It can do no harm now to write of it.
The carpet-bag is packed and secreted beneath the bed, and I am alone, waiting for Bridget to return. She left the house at noon to pawn my wedding ring. With the money she will purchase two tickets for a northbound train that will bring us to Walpole in the morning.
Tomorrow! I am frayed and shaking, a cord drawn taut. I can smell the old garden, the roses. The scent is more vivid in memory than it was in life, mingled with the perfume of soil and damp and that of the blooming linden. I close my eyes and hear the creek, sending up spray where it drops beneath the bridge, and remember the great clouds of dragonflies and the way they drew near us at dusk, wings flashing—
Later—
I am locked in. The door is shut, the key turned fast.
Bridget has betrayed me. She now keeps watch outside, walking up and down the hallway and singing to herself in Irish. Moonlight spills in a fan across the floorboards, shining on broken glass and specks of hanging dust. I had time only to hide this diary before Mr Carr stormed inside with Bridget following him meekly.
He was livid, incandescent with rage. He swept the bottles of my medicine from the dressing table and stomped down on the remnants, grinding the glass beneath his shoes.
Bridget retrieved the carpet-bag from under the bed. At first I thought she meant to spare it his fury, but instead, she merely placed it wordlessly into his hand
s. He snarled and tossed the bag on the fire. The fabric caught light, then the clothes inside, the blue silk Father loved—
I threw myself at the fireplace, but Mr Carr caught me by the wrists and pushed me to the floor at his feet. Throughout this time he said nothing, but his eyes were black and shrunken to points, like those of Mr Orne, when he ministered to me in the dark of that winter, or those of my mother when first she found us out in sin—
Mr Carr produced his ring from his coat-pocket and jammed it down the middle-finger of my left hand, forcing it past the joint so I knew I should not be free of it.
You made a promise, he said. To me as I did to your mother. We mustn’t forget that.
Come, he said to Bridget, and they were gone.
Apr 21?
Mr Orne is here. He paces beyond the door. In his tread I hear the echo of steps from long ago and imagine the house in Walpole where I watch the faceless mourners come and go.
Some hold dresses or kitchen implements, bed-sheets caked with red and yellow filth. One man carries the charred remnants of my carpet-bag while another walks with fistfuls of broken glass, blood dripping from his hands. They proceed with unearthly slowness, with all the gravity of pallbearers: rolling up the rugs, wheeling out the cradle, carrying off the materials of home like the seashell spoils of some god-conquering army.
Now the house stands empty. It is a ghost of itself, an absence made visible, like the clothes Father wore that morning, when he left the house, and which the Bosworth boy found above the falls. They were neatly laid out, the boy said, the pants folded in quarters, the wedding ring left in his shoe.
That ring: its smoothness on my skin. Whatever became of it? After the funeral, when the mourners had gone, Mother plucked the band from her own finger and flung it into the creek, as though to sink Father’s memory with it, and now I am her cousin’s wife.
The lamp is dim. Mr Carr’s ring glitters. It casts a white smear on the wall, an inverted shadow which moves in time with the rhythm of my hand on the paper so that I think of the moon in Maine as it rose over the headland, dragging the waves behind it, water and light trapped in the song they sang between them until at last you woke and looked at me—
Dusk when I reach Walpole. From the station I walk to the house, lifting my skirts and sprinting when I hear the singing creek.
I am too late. Little remains save rubble. The floors have been torn out, the walls collapsed into the cellar, and the garden, too, has been plowed under.
The flowers are gone, the rosebushes. Uprooted and piled on the brush heap. Burned. The smell of wood-smoke lodges like cotton in my throat, stopping the air in my lungs. I can’t breathe—can’t walk—a fever is on me—
It pulls like the spring current. It drags me through the ruined garden on hands and knees and down the path that leads to the footbridge. Here the water ripples, waves within waves. The creek is running high. Below the falls the waters teem with light, the glint of gold like the flash of drowned skin. Mother’s ring—or yours—and my blue dress charred and floating—
This was where it happened, where they found you.
Alfie is in the hall. I hear him scratching. I must
The diary ends there. The remaining pages are blank.
In those days, my interest in the abnormalities of the human brain took me to Danvers at least once a month. On my next visit, I sought out the nurse who had sent the diary.
She was a young woman of pretty coloring and sensitive disposition. She was, in fact, nothing at all like the matronly figure I had imagined. I gathered that she had been quite close to Isabella Carr and considered herself to be something much nearer a friend than a caretaker. She thanked me for coming, and for my kindness in reading the diary, and showed me into the room, as yet vacant, in which Mrs Carr had lived out the final years of her life.
From the nurse, I learned that Mrs Carr had been committed by her husband following an incident in their Beacon Hill home in which the family’s Irish maidservant had been attacked and nearly killed. Edmund Ashe had contested the committal order on his niece’s behalf but his efforts failed when evidence of opiate dependency came to light.
Throughout her time in the hospital, Isabella was never seen to write letters or keep a diary but instead spent her days beside the window, absorbed in silent contemplation of the grounds below. When she was twenty-eight, she sickened with pneumonia and died. Afterward the nurse found the diary tucked up inside the lining of the feather-bed, where it had languished, apparently forgotten, since Mrs Carr’s arrival at Danvers some years previously.
“I’m not ashamed to say that it gave me the chills,” the nurse said. “For a moment I even imagined that she had wanted me to find it. Nonsense, of course. She was ill. Probably she had hidden it inside the bed and forgotten about it. Of course it should have been sent to her family—her mother, if not her stepfather—but after reading it…well, it didn’t seem right, somehow. And Edmund Ashe is dead these two years.”
“Had she no other family?”
“No,” she said. “She hadn’t.”
Her eyes moved over the empty walls and she was suddenly far away.
“It’s sad, really. As I said, her uncle tried to fight the committal order. In the courts it emerged that Isabella had mothered a child some years previously, a little boy. She was unmarried at the time, and it had all been hushed up. Her mother and stepfather conspired to hide the pregnancy from their neighbors and married her off to Horace Carr soon afterward. He was Mrs Orne’s cousin, as you know, a man of certain habits, and it was rumored that the marriage had not been consummated.”
“And the little boy? What became of the child?”
“He went to an orphanage. A woman came by and carried him away. I don’t believe Isabella ever recovered from that—though I was often uncertain of how much she remembered. In any case, the poor babe didn’t see his first birthday. Cholera, I believe it was.”
“What was his name?” I asked. “The baby’s.”
She did not answer me immediately. Instead, she went to the window and closed the curtains halfway, drawing a shadow across the bed. She filed from the room but paused in the doorway to address me a final time.
“The child’s name,” she said, “was Alfred.”
She disappeared into the hallway. Her footsteps retreated down the corridor. The sun broke through the parted curtains, and I was alone with my thoughts.
The Keep
Kirsty Logan
We started with a ring. We thought she would like that. When she opened the drawer and saw the ring there, reclining gleamingly on a hank of pink silk, her face opened up sunny-joyful. We knew that she thought it was from him. That couldn’t be helped.
She put it straight onto her finger. We watched her toy cattish with it for the rest of the day, twisting it to and fro as she swooned and hummed around the caravan. When she’d first arrived she’d moved slyfoot, placed teacups down with fretting care, each step tightroping. We knew why. When we’d first arrived, we’d seen the way the little tin caravan sat high in the tree, bound to the thick oak branches, hung flimsy-like over a fast-flowing burn. We’d all moved slyfoot then too, at first. We did not want to make the caravan fall clatter-crash out of the tree. But soon we settled, just as she was settled, and her steps fell hard as hail. That was when we crept out of our hiding places.
To and fro, to and fro she twisted the ring. She cleaned in time with her songs, finding pretty nooks for all the things that needed tidying away. A pint of milk, a pink slinking nightgown, a dustpan, a pair of toothbrushes. The caravan was a labyrinth of hidings: drawers and cupboards and little sneaky nooks. Finally she felt the words spark scratchy on her skin. She frowned, pulling off the ring to peer at its innards. Until I die. She rubbed where the etched words had caught her. If we had had breath, we would have held it.
We watched her frown a realization, then release it in fear of wrinkles. We knew as well as she did that he would not stand for wrinkles. Perhaps th
e ring was not a gift from him after all. Perhaps she’d stumbled on the remnants of old loves. But whose? Until I die—he was still alive.
She tried to open the drawer and re-secret the ring. But that drawer would not open again today. She tugged and she coaxed, but the drawer stuck fast. Finally she hid the ring in her face-cream, dropping it in and shaking the little pot until it was submerged. We watched as she opened and opened and opened the bathroom cupboards until she found one the perfect size, its edges kissing the face-cream pot as she slid it in. Such tininess in the caravan, but always somewhere to be secret.
When he came home, she greeted him with neat kisses. We hid in the smallest cupboard and listened. There was no talk of gifts. Her finger was swollen where the words had scratched, but he did not notice. Outside the caravan, the rain shushed and the wind throbbed and the moon blinked bright. Inside, time stopped. The chattering burn stole all sound; the spreading leaves took all sight.
After dinner, he used his petty magic to transform the couch into their bed. They lay together. We wished that we still had hands, so that we could cover our ears.
The next day, after he had left, we tried again. A hair ribbon. Plush velvet, thick as wolf-fur, red as a heart. She found it while trying drawers in search of washing-up gloves. She forgot about the dishes and reached for the ribbon. It curled lovingly into her hand, and with a turn she bumped the drawer shut with her hip. She pulled back her conker-shining curls with one hand, the other ribbon-busy.
But—a tickle on her fingersides. She stopped and peered. Three hairs twist-tangled in the ribbon, ever so long and ever so blonde. We watched her look at the hairs. We watched her stroke the blood-red ribbon. We watched her fingers come away wet. With a cry she dropped the ribbon and kicked it away from her.
She didn’t try to open the drawer again this time. She knotted and knotted and knotted the ribbon and she opened her underwear drawer and pushed it right to the corner, covering it up with her fripperies and frills.