The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  I look at it doubtfully. The marvel is ancient, the stone and mortar around it is crumbling; spiders lurk in its crevices, I’m certain of that—and I have a terror of spiders. Furry spiders, black ones, small ones with sacs of venom under their eight little legs. Spiders can move fast; some spiders can jump. What if there’s a whole nest of them eyeing my approaching eye? Nip, nip, do spiders have teeth? I can sense those tiny hungry mouths, just waiting to suck all the jelly from my eyeball. I imagine being blind, being eyeless… “Get on with it. I haven’t got all day,” Bella says. “It’s only a room,” she says, and I can sense scorn, gathering impatience. “Born in that room, you were—right by the middle window. I told you that story often enough. I thought you was a boy then—but I must’ve been wrong. It must’ve been a girl I was holding, some little scaredy-cat girl.…” And, to reinforce this insult, she gives me a pinch.

  That does it. I apply my six-year-old eye to Bella’s marvel. The marvel has a name. It’s a Squint.

  I’m very afraid I’m going to see nuns. Skeletal nuns, maybe—nuns with a nasty vitality, though they’re umpteen centuries dead. Last year, on my fifth birthday, a team of archeologists turned up at the Abbey. They had written permission from the Mortlands, then in New Mexico, for a dig. They dug in the cloister, finding not very much. They dug in the moat—and found bugger-all, as Bella had predicted they would. They turned their attentions to Nun Wood. There they exposed the foundations of a small round building, finding evidence of a fireplace, of clay pots and some domestic use—but no altar or signs of worship, which, as the head archeologist said, was odd, since—according to documents—this structure, beyond the nunnery confines and dating from the mid–fifteenth century, had been used by the order as a place of meditation, prayer, and retreat.

  Nick and I were already losing interest. We’d had hopes of this archeology—it was a novelty, at least, and in Wykenfield anything remotely new and different was a treat. But it took an age, digging trenches, sieving earth, brushing dry clay off terra-cotta fragments of nothing much. We’d been hanging around, hoping for something really grisly, and bits of what looked like old flowerpots weren’t it. Then, their last week in Nun Wood, the team dug one final trench, at right angles to the building’s foundations. Two feet down, they hit stone. And under the flagstones—there were three flagstones, and they were smooth edged, small, and lozenge shaped—they found…

  They found what I’m very afraid I’m going to see now. Three skeletal babies. Three ancient skeletal babies with rosaries in their bony little hands and with thick, well-preserved leather thongs around their bony little necks. Nick and I were there, avid and appalled, as the team took their soft brushes and eased earth from the eye sockets. One baby had a nest of worms in its ribs. The head archeologist swore; his female second-in-command said, I don’t believe this, surely the nuns couldn’t have—Dear God, look how tiny they are, they’re newborn, they can’t have strangled them, surely? And then there was a kerfuffle and a whispered conference, and Nick and I were turfed out. All of which was twelve months ago, and I still don’t understand, because while I may not know much about nuns, I know one thing: They’re not like other women, and they can’t have babies.

  So whose babies were these? Who killed them, and why? I’ve asked everyone—and I’m none the wiser. I think Nick, who is three years older than me (and the son of a doctor), may know the answer. I’m certain Bella does, and my father—but they aren’t telling. I wish they would. If they would, this trio of nun-babies might disappear from my dreams instead of dangling there, like charms on an evil bracelet, the minute I close my eyes at night. I’m going to see them now, in the Squint, I’m certain of it. Those little white faces, with loose jaws and blind eyes, with their tiny fishy spines and broken, bead-clutching hands—that’s what I’m going to see at the bottom of this dark tunnel. Given my surname, I think of them as brothers and sisters: I can smell them, and their sour infant malevolence, wafting up. My eyes are still tight shut (Bella can’t see that), and I don’t intend opening them without protection of some sort. A prayer might do it, but I haven’t got a whole lot of faith in prayers—they’ve never brought back my mother, Dorrie, and I’ve prayed for that often enough. So I try a charm instead. It’s a Romany charm, one Ocean taught me. It’s sibylline and sibilant, a snaky whisper of words that I only half know, only half understand: I say it under my breath, three times, one for each murdered baby, then I open my eyes.

  And it’s worked. No nuns. No babies. My astonished gaze angles down a tunnel that works a bit like a periscope in reverse. I see an unastonishing room, the Mortlands’ library. Its every detail is familiar to me, not surprising in view of the fact that I’d been there ten minutes earlier with Gran, helping her dust the disused tables, shake out the white sheets on the fat armchairs, and rearrange the white paper pleats in the sooty fireplace. Bella’s spat on the silver photo frames, then polished them on the sleeve of her jumper. It didn’t get the tarnish off, and even I can see Gran’s getting slipshod—but does it matter? The Mortlands are absentees. They left Suffolk toward the end of the war, when Guy Mortland was invalided out of the Royal Air Force, and they’ve been on the move ever since, grandfather, son, wife, and—as of now, according to Bella—two daughters who are called Julia and Finn. They’ve been in the Isle of Wight, Scotland, Switzerland, and—latterly—Canada and America. None of these places has cured Guy Mortland, who has something wrong with his lungs—and other problems besides, Gran says, tight-lipped. Who knows when, if ever, this family will come back?

  So what can I see of the Mortlands now? I can see a dead lioness rug with a broken-toothed snarl. I can see a stuffed cobra rearing up to support a brass tray, on which Grandfather Mortland liked to place his evening glass of whiskey. I can see huge hulking pieces of furniture that came from Elde Hall, the grandfather’s childhood home; these are known as the “good pieces,” and Bella’s supposed to wax them. I can just see paneling (one panel slides back to reveal a staircase, but it’s disappointing and leads nowhere much) and regiments of books whose leather covers smell moldy—I’m allowed to flick them with the feather duster occasionally, but not to read them yet. The Squint has an angle, so I can’t see the best part of the room: I can’t see the marble fireplace that’s been inserted on the east wall—where the nuns once had their altar, Bella says. And I can’t see my favorite objects, the ones I lust after, which rest on the mantelpiece.

  These are three hollow carved ivory spheres, made by some Chinese magician-craftsman; they’re peopled with coolies and dragons and junks, and each has seven, eight, nine smaller spheres inside the others. All of them, even the innermost—and that’s tiny, the size of a pea—are carved with these hieroglyph creatures, and all of them can rotate. How did their creator contrive that, when each sphere was carved from a single tusk, when there’s no way in the world of opening them and never was?

  I try repositioning myself, squinting this way and that, but no matter how I try, I cannot see that part of the room. So I inspect the evidence of the Mortlands instead—I like doing that, because this family’s story is so richly familiar. I’ve been hearing snatches of it for as long as I can remember; I like to put their history and their possessions together and see how they match. At home, we have bits of England, acquired when Gran was a girl and still traveling; we have scraps of Ocean; we have Dad’s plowing certificates, precious to me because they remind me his artistry is inherited—Joe’s grandfather worked these fields, and his grandfather before him. With luck, I’ll inherit it, too; meanwhile, I can go and talk to these quiet men, who are lying in the churchyard. But here… well, the whole world’s in this room. It’s like looking at the big map on the wall at the village school and seeing a pink empire, a pink India, a pink Africa. There’s the lioness some uncle shot in Botswana, and the cobra table another uncle admired in some Calcutta bazaar, and the magical spheres that a trading great-great-something brought back from the Opium Wars—whatever they were. All this, plus
those hulking “good pieces” waxed by decades, centuries of Gran-equivalents… I can see it makes our cottage, even with the tarot and the plowing certificates, a bit limited.

  Meanwhile, looking down at the room from this angle is giving it new interest. It’s like a dolls’ house, and I can arrange the Mortland dolls where I decide they fit. The grandfather—who Angus McIver says knows less about farming than his arse—fits on the sofa, drinking a whiskey eternally. The father, Guy, now ill but once a white hope, fits with the collection of miniature signed cricket bats. The elder girl, Julia, who’s as pretty as a picture and a right little madam, Bella says, fits by the looking glass on the far wall. She has golden hair and is dreaming of a prince—possibly me, I feel—who will one day come and rescue her. The younger girl, Finn, is a bookworm. That’s all I know about her. I put her by the bookshelves. The mother, Stella, doesn’t seem to fit in this room, but Bella says she’s a good cook, so I whisk her off to the kitchen. Which leaves—the son. There isn’t a son yet, but they’re trying for one.

  And—thinking of the son who’s being attempted, what will he look like; will this family ever come home, so I can actually make friends with them (I’m short of friends apart from Nick; at school they pull my hair and call me a pikey, a dirty Gyp)—I turn my eyes at last to the windows. These windows have been cut in half by the floor Grandfather Mortland installed, but they’re still huge, three, four times my height and more, soaring up to pointed peaks and crowned with motherly angels. The clear panes are set in lead, and they’ve been altered, so they open. On the smooth stone of their sills and on the smooth stones each side of them, stones that are called quoins, I can see, yes, I can just see the familiar bullet grooves.

  And it’s with these grooves, which I love to touch, which I like to rub superstitiously and fit my fingers in, that I enter this room. I enter it with a flourish, via a tragedy. Aged six, I’ve already given this drama a fine name: It’s called Danny in the Lion’s Den.

  These bullet grooves, four in the sill, five in the quoins, were spat out from a Messerschmitt’s guns. It was spring, it was wartime. One minute all was somnolent English calm, with Gran and her daughter, Dorrie, dusting away in the Mortlands’ library. The next, there was the drone of a fighter plane’s engine. An insect-size speck of silver glinted in the sky, the far side of the valley—and my father, who was in the cloister below, rested on his spade. He squinted, trying to identify the plane. Not a Spitfire, he thought, and bent to pick up the packet of Cotter’s Early Giant carrot seeds that he, an essential worker, was about to plant in the trench he’d just dug. Not one of ours, he realized, straightening up, watching the insect become a bird, climb, and approach closer.

  Then he glimpsed the wasp yellow nose cone, the blunt-edged wings in profile. Messerschmitt, he thought, or shouted, as the plane commenced a fabulous dive, out of the sun, over the orchards; but if he did shout, the whine of the engine drowned his voice, and he could do nothing, just stand, silent and disbelieving, watching the plane open fire, watching it aim its guns straight at the Abbey, straight at its many-windowed south face and straight at the heavily pregnant figure of my mother, Dorrie, who—at that moment, at that exact, illfated moment—had put down her duster, turned away, and leaned out of one of those wide-open windows, perhaps to call to him.

  With my six-year-old eyes, I squint at that moment of destiny and catastrophe. I know what happened next. A miracle happened next. The bullets missed Dorrie. They missed me, curled up snugly in her womb, lazing away the last amniotic fortnight of a trouble-free pregnancy. The German pilot of the plane, a plane Gran persists in calling a Mister Smid, was less lucky. He banked, turned, attempted to regain height, failed, and, having misjudged the speed and angle of his dive, or perhaps blacking out from the G-force, plunged into a herd of Friesians in Acre Field. There he incinerated himself and four cows in a conflagration that burned for two days, a conflagration watched on and off by the entire village, with the exception of Dr. Marlow, his wife, and his infant son, Nicholas, all of whom, according to Gran, disapproved of this sport—but then what could you expect, they were from Cambridge; they were stuck-up, they were newcomers.

  That verdict seems a bit hard to me. Consider the consequences of that gunfire. For what happened next? Dorrie went into labor, that’s what happened next—brought on two weeks early by sheer fear, and her waters broke there, right there, between the lionskin rug and the middle window. I watch the familiar scene: There’s my unknown mother, collapsing; there’re the shouts and cries and my father running for help. There’s Bella, kneeling grimly and professionally between her daughter’s spread legs—and all ought to be well, because Bella is one of fourteen children, she’s assisted at no fewer than six of her mother Ocean’s confinements, and childbirth holds no mysteries for her. But this birth doesn’t obey the rules; it starts breaking them. For although this is Dorrie’s first child and she’s a slender creature, little more than a girl, so Bella’s been expecting a long labor, this baby doesn’t intend to hang around, and inside of fifteen minutes, less, when there’s blood leaking everywhere, I’m crowning. Then whoosh, out I come: Exit one tiny alien from the escape hatch.

  One little pointy-headed Martian, slithering into Bella’s hands. The alien’s slippery, I’m slippery, and by then—there’s a great wash of blood—Bella’s frightened. She drops me, and I land on the lion-skin. A fearsome sight, infant Daniel, apparently: black Gypsy hair, muscled arms, a fierce face, clenched with pain and indignation; my bloodied hands are gripping the thick purple cord of the umbilical.

  I’m performing a version of the Indian rope trick. I’m climbing back up the umbilical into the womb—and when I fail, I announce my frustration in a way Bella won’t let me forget. First, I open my eyes, click, like the shutter of a camera. Then I open my mouth, wide, pink gummed, and tragic. No need for a shake or a slap on the back: I open my mouth, and I give one anguished, epic yell—only one cry. Bella’s never heard the like of it. It echoes around that huge room in that huge religious house, and it chills Bella’s blood. Supernatural powers, she senses it at once. The Gift, passed down the female line from Ocean to me. This Roma newborn knows that his mother, slumped back on the parquet, is busy dying. This cry is prescient. He knows he’s killed her.

  At which point, fetched as quickly as possible, but too late, enter that village newcomer, Dr. Marlow. He arrives in his Ford motorcar, my white-faced father beside him. He races up the stairs to the library-cum–Lady Chapel. He cuts the umbilical. He wraps me in Bella’s petticoat, and he tries to stanch the hemorrhaging. He doesn’t succeed. My silent mother dies—and I still don’t know where. I didn’t know when I was looking down that Squint with my six-year-old eyes, and I still don’t know, several centuries later—several millennia, is what it feels like—sitting on this bench beside Dr. Marlow’s son, in a London gallery.

  Did Dorrie bleed to death on the parquet or on the way to the Deepden cottage hospital or in a ward at that hospital some hours later? I know I killed her, but I want to know where. It might help, somehow. Bella used to say: In the hospital, silly. She was holding that little white prayer book I give her, the one with the leatherette cover, she would have it. And when she was gone, Joe and I dressed her in her wedding gown, which was hard for him, I hate to see a grown man weep, childhood sweet-hearts they were, and that dress wasn’t a year old, ten yards of slipper satin, it used up all our coupons. And then we laid her out in the front room, and the whole village come to pay their respects, and when the Mortlands heard—Joe wrote and told them—they sent a telegram, and there it is, on the wall, I framed it—poor Dorrie, she thought the world of them, always looked up to them, she’d have wanted it to be there.

  But did I believe that? Do I believe that? I used to hunt for Dorrie in her white slipper-satin dress. I used to think that if I crept and peeped and spied, I’d find her, and she’d tell me what really happened. She’d tell me she forgave me. She’d explain why she abandoned me. She never did—an
d the facts weren’t much help. I was born on V-E Day—no argument about that, it’s there on the birth certificate. And my mother, Dorrie, died on V-E Day—as attested to by my best friend’s father, who signed the death certificate. So, a historic day—and a historic birth: A war-and-peace birthday, Gran used to say when trying to comfort me. It was the Messerschmitt’s fault, not mine, I must always remember that. If it hadn’t been for the plane, it would have been a normal birth and Dorrie would still be here to care for me. Stop that sniveling, Gran would say, giving me a pinch. Think, Danny, just think—how many babies get to be born on a lionskin?

  A fine tale. Better ignore the more pedantic queries, perhaps, such as, What was some rogue German fighter plane doing circling Suffolk fields that particular May? Why was Gran’s helmeted Hun hell-bent on eliminating one nineteen-year-old pregnant Englishwoman, fondly watching her husband planting carrots? (Cotter’s Early Giant—there was always too much detail here; it was the excessive detail that first made me suspicious.) What was this belated kamikaze mission? The war in Europe was over. Besides, this story was always subject to slippage—like most stories, Bella told me. When she’d been at the Mackesons’, that Mister Smid could transmute; one time it was a Dornier.