“Each time,” Alonso says. “Each time, it is miraculous. That is why there is nothing new to say about such things.” His hand warm on me. The scent of worn leather. I do not want to think about each time.
“Always reading,” I say. I am light, and I keep the sabre sheathed, for now. “What?” But of course, I see it—the diary on the desk. That man. My brother—in name. Never gone, always lingering, a fly stuck in the corner of the eye. We touched one another in death. It is not enough to set against all the years he left me alone. Venom fills the back of my throat. Alonso sees my look.
“It is the only reason I knew to come for you,” he says. “To that farm. Because he wrote it. He asks it of me. So do not despise it too much.”
“Oh, I know!” I say. “You are very constant in your duty. And even to make me your wife! Painful devotion indeed.” I mean to hurt. How have we come to this? Spite is in me like a blade. We were happy once.
When first I came to Rawblood, I was a child of fifteen. Alonso came to the Bantrys’ like a great hawk, lifted me from my old life into the new: it was a savage and sudden immersion. Rawblood was a dream; I had never before seen anything larger than the hovels of Grimstock. Its very existence was miraculous. All these high ceilings, room after room, running on and on from one another, seemingly in perpetuity. Profusions of passages and little doors. I was a slip of a thing, too slender, often lost. I slipped through the cracks in things. Now, the house fits around me like a glove. I sit flush against this stone, this mortar. Rawblood, my house, my blood. My life began here. What came before cannot be called living.
My brother died here. But what I felt when I first looked down on the house from the crest of the hill, saw it gray and golden in the low light, was envy that he saw it before I.
I drew the servants back. I could not bear to think of Alonso all alone while I was sent away to school. And to a hungry hedge snipe from Grimstock it seemed a fine thing to have servants. A little chalk, a feather, a toad buried in the garden. Easy enough. People will forget bad things if you ask in the right way. They long to forget.
School—a horror I had not dreamt of. I ran away from them all. Alonso pretended to mind, but he did not. He missed me. I was always asking him to marry me. It was many years before he would listen. It was on the night of the irises that he said yes.
We were happy for a time. Then there came the other times: pain like knives, loss, and the white walls of a sickroom. All those sad, small things. Lost before they drew breath. Grief is a strange beast. It lives in one like a worm, curls and uncurls at will. I take it everywhere I go. At the heart of it are my memories of those three small forms wrapped in linen. Each time, I thought they were strong; each time, they would not stay long enough within me. Small, pale faces like wax, too perfect to live. Unnamed graves, all. Somewhere. We were happy once, but now all I see in Alonso’s face are my dead children.
Three times over, Alonso held me through the days and nights after, plaited my hair when I could not, fed me broth spoonful by painful spoonful. I fought him and bit him, and sometimes, I wept. I will never tell him how much I needed the great trees of his arms around me then and his rough face against mine. I will never let him see that everything between us now is colored by those times—a drop of black ink spiraling in clear water. If he knew this, I would be a beached fish, belly up on the alien shore.
Now, I rest my hand on the great cartwheel of his shoulder, a peace offering. He plays with my little finger, the lamps of his eyes lidded.
He says, “Your skirts are wet, my love.”
“I have been walking on the grass,” I say, “in the rain.” It is something I would do. I keep two secrets from my husband. Robert, and then of course there’s the other, which is her.
I never know what Alonso knows or does not know.
“Do you remember,” I say quickly and touch him with my lips, “that night? I had run away, once again, from that school …”
“Yes,” he says, dry. “I tried to do right. You would have none of it.”
“I came to your club in St. Martin’s Lane. I walked from Kent into London.”
“I saw you from the window. It was very foggy,” he says, and an old feeling passes across his features, wind in an oak tree. Alonso is afraid of mist and fog. “The porter would not let you in. I could have killed him. To leave you so.”
“But I waited.”
“You did. Barefoot under the gaslight.”
“I brought you flowers. ‘The irises are blooming in Kent,’ I said.” We are dancing, now, to a familiar refrain. In this story, we are lit by theatrical lights. The dark is held at bay.
“They were no more than wet stalks,” he says, prompting.
“The blossoms wilted off,” I say. “I walked all night and part of a day.”
“I had never laid eyes on anything as lovely as those bare stems,” Alonso says. “I thought I might die then. It was beyond anything I had known, the sight of you.” His long, beautiful hand is light on my face like a moth. I breathe his palm.
“If I were allowed a choice of how I am to die,” I say, sliding onto his knee, “I would wish for you to do it.”
“Would you now?”
“I would. Think: what perfect union.”
He says, “I would do it quickly. It would be like this.” The pen barks and splinters in his hands. The sound travels through me like shock.
“But looking at me,” I say. “Always into my eyes. It would be so mournful and classical, just like a Waterhouse painting.”
There comes the rough cough of his laugh. “My Meg,” he says. “You could not look like anything so vulgar.”
“How could you?” I say. “Waterhouse is risqué. It will be vulgar next year.” I smile and slip my arms about his neck, and now we are contained within one another again.
This is the choreography of our love. It is and is not the truth. But I never know what Alonso knows or does not know.
He breathes my neck. “Lilies,” he says. “Everywhere you go, the scent of lilies lingers after like a ghost.”
What would he do, could he see my thoughts and my plan? Would he fix me with his stare and say something that would cleave to me all my days—before showing me the door? Would he seize the letter opener on the table and slide it clinically, kindly, past my sternum, into my heart? Would he shrug and turn again to his book? The last would be the worst.
• • •
It is past midnight when I leave Alonso sleeping, a peaceful dune in the dark bed. There’s a wind up. Outside, things shudder and whisper. In here, it is still. The only sound is my bare feet on the great stairs, the stone flags. As I go, I think, I’ll see her now. I look for her shocking white face in the shadows and behind doors. I stop for a moment as I cross the echoing hall. I stand, waiting for her kiss. But the house is quiet. The air is just night air. I am alone.
The red parlor is warm, the coals low and bright in the grate. Robert is crouched by it, feeding pinches of dry moss, twigs, and kindling into the heart of the fire. He looks up and smiles, then returns intent to his task.
I sit on the ottoman and watch. The fire lends him a glowing halo. Gradually, the greenish, brackish flame licks up; there comes spitting and the scent of apple logs.
His arm steals around my shoulders. The fire sings and cracks.
He says, “I meant it, Meg. You’ll wither away here.” He hasn’t called me ma’am, which is a blessing.
I say, “I won’t.” Rawblood doesn’t wither me. But Robert is earnest, pleading, alabaster in the firelight. “Think of this one,” I say. I rest my hand on the taut mound of my belly. “Only think, what would we do?”
“I would take care of you,” he says. His gaze falters. “I would. Not like this, of course. Is it all these nice things that keep you here, maybe?” He waves an angry arm at the room, where somewhere in the dark lurk marble velve
t, Aubusson carpets, gilt clocks. “Is it that you do not want to be a butler’s wife?”
I cannot help but laugh. It has not been so very long since I ate shoe leather. “A butler’s mistress, perhaps,” I say. “I am married; it’s done these sixteen years. And talk by night is very bold. The day brings other cares.”
“I will say this only, then,” he says. “If you think the rest of your life is to be spent here, then go up to your bed. I will not speak of it again. I will go elsewhere for work. I am a valuable man.” He stares at me, then shakes his head and makes a small sound like a click, looking sad.
“Come,” I say. I kneel and pull his stockings from his feet. I stroke his fine-boned instep, his heel. I warm him with my palm. I nibble a toe, playful. When he’s not looking, I slip the thin crescent of toenail from my mouth to my pocket.
“You should not be with him,” Robert says. “He tried to kill me when I was a child.”
I regard him. I am wary.
“He refused to treat me,” he says, “when I was poisoned. My brother Henry came and begged him. He turned us away. It was luck and your brother that saved me.”
“We will not speak of Alonso so,” I say.
“You know that they were unnatural,” Robert says. “The two of them.”
I turn my witch-eye on him. You are not fit to lick his boots. He drops his gaze, stares at his lap like a frightened child.
“Forgive me,” I say quickly. “I am so frightened…” I talk on in a useless, pretty way. I cannot lose him now. He recovers soon enough. He thinks he holds the advantage. He is very handsome. I have been careful to seem mad for him.
When Robert leaves, I burn the toenail with my blood and a sprig of rosemary that scents the air. I eat the ash. I sit in the lengthening shadows.
I no sooner laid eyes on Alonso and on Rawblood than I loved them; both cavernous animals, grumbling, all their sounds and peculiarities, their good, thick skins of stone. They were wreckage when I found them, and I was wreckage too. I made us all three whole and good.
We lost one another somewhere along the way. But I can do it again. I will heal us: Alonso, Rawblood, and myself.
It is some time before I notice the sound beyond the red parlor door. Soft, heavy, with a scratching in it. The image leaps easily to mind. Some weight, heavy skirts, perhaps, are being dragged through the great hall, catching on the rough flags. A murmur comes, like stone grating on stone but very far away. A moment of quiet, and then the approach. A creak, almost inaudible. She stops outside the parlor. I watch the door. On the other side, something brushes the panels lightly; there is a clicking, as of fingernails tapping the brass doorknob. The murmur comes again, suddenly loud and elongated, whistling into the room where I sit. She has her mouth at the keyhole. Come, I tell her silently. Her breath fills the room, light and cold. The sound of stone rubbing on stone. I feel her waiting, white and dead, on the other side of the oak. Come.
The blow to the door is like thunder. The hinges rattle, and the wood screeches with the force of it. Her voice fills my ear, vast and anguished, words spoken in the language of broken buildings, shattered bone, sorrow, and loss. All her grief rolls through the air like mist, rolls over me, into my flesh. I am wild with it and shaking.
Thick silence follows.
“Come, please,” I say. The tears course, salt, down my cheeks. “You need not bear it alone.” But she is gone. The red parlor settles back into shape, the fire dead and black in the grate. The wind taps the windows and roars in the chimney. I am bereft, shivering. I will never be warm again. My sleeper kicks. Her tiny fists and feet hammer me from within.
“Hush,” I say to her. I stroke her lightly. “Hush, Iris. I will never leave Rawblood. Grow, rest. All will be well.” Somehow, it will.
Somewhere in the dark beyond, she is walking.
She likes fire, though she cannot get warm. Fire draws the solitary traveler. I saw her first in the dead winter. I had heard the tales. The truth was beyond all imagining.
I was alone before the great hearth, large enough to drive a carriage through. The flames leaped high. The hall towered above me. Alonso was abed.
I knew that it had come about again. It was the fourth time. I did not know if I could bear it—the hope, the crisis, and then months lived in the great black pit. I knew it was a girl. They are all girls. I read terrible things in the red fire. I was alone, alone.
When I raised my eyes, the ghosts of the flames danced in them. Behind them was a white, dead face, inches from my own. The sensation that ran through me was so far beyond anything I had known—it does not fit to call it fear. It was falling through air, braced for the smash on the rocks. It was a wind stirring the deep roots of the soul, which must never, ever be touched. Her black corpse eyes held me, holes in the world. Her flesh was old, white cheese. The scars on her head stood out, gray valley rims in the flickering light. I have never beheld anything so terrible. I saw you in the water, I tried to say. All those years ago…
The black eyes widened, and in them, I saw eons. The maw began to open, the raw, white lips parted like a rent in a piece of paper. Between them was the black ache of nothing, nothing, long years of nothing. There was the sound of stone grinding on stone. The sorrow was so thick it had a taste; it filled my mouth like bitter wool. She yawned wider and reached toward me; a hand unfurled like wizened driftwood and reached toward my heart, toward my belly, that gentle rise at the center of myself. I cried out then; I was to be carried into it, carried into her, the expanse of empty grief. The claw came on, the fingers brittle sticks; it hovered a hand’s breadth away and stopped. The white fingers fluttered, odd and delicate. Then withdrew. She sat, impassive, her dead eyes dark and unreadable.
I felt something stir within me. I placed my hand upon the mound. There was no mistake. The gentle push came again—a long and sleepy motion, content. A small hand reached, as if to touch the white husk before me. My sleeper moved for the first time.
We stared at one another, the living and the dead. I will remember it all my days. What is that phrase? Like calls to like. I have seen the marks of cruelty on her. I know not what she is or where she came from. But she has been brutally used beyond what a person can stand and live.
I can well believe that those who see her are destroyed. To see her is to know emptiness. But I saw that emptiness when I was very young. They called me a witch in Grimstock, and Samuel Bantry took what he thought was his due from a witch. The hand heavy on the back of my neck, the straw pressed to my face. The sound of the belt sliding out of the buckle. He called me a witch. He made me one.
There was, in that look between she and I, both knowledge and acceptance. Something was exchanged. Something of mine is carried by her. In that look, she took into herself my pain, my fear. I took hers.
And that is when I had the idea. I saw what I must do, and how we would be saved.
All those years ago, in that valley by the spring, I asked, Who will help me? And I saw her. The water told me true. It is because she walks, dreadful and suffering, that Iris will come into the world. So I look for her in deserted passages. I turn my cheek upward on stormy nights, waiting for her touch. I listen always for her dead voice, which is like stone crushing stone. My ghastly savior, my whipping boy.
I went to Robert that night for the first time.
• • •
Chloe is brushing my hair. In the glass, my face is milky and thin. Silks rustle gently, out of view. Eliza is laying out clothes, vast balloons of fabric to be draped around my bulbous self.
Chloe is cross, but tenderness is in her; it moves through her fingertips, through my hair. It is not meant for me, this tenderness, but it comes to me anyhow, and I am grateful: for the smooth motion of the brush; for Chloe’s slender form, reflected solid behind me; for her blue, black, and cream beauty—for she is very beautiful and it is comforting—for the touch of her clever fi
ngers.
“Don’t fidget so.” Chloe tosses her shining head, from which dark strands are escaping. Chloe can never keep her hair tidy. “Ma’am,” she adds.
“Less pert,” I tell her, “or I’ll pull your hair.”
In the mirror, Chloe blanches and bites her lip. She fears me. Wise of her. The Eye comes on strong and sudden as it does in these late days, and I see that Chloe is in the same state as me. I do not think she knows it yet.
When I feel it, I send them away. “I will rest,” I say. They go.
I take the cloth from the drawer. It is dark with Robert’s blood. His ear bitten, as if in play… He cried out. Don’t think of that now.
It will be today. Everything will be decided now. It is not right to be within walls, even Rawblood’s. I know where I belong for this, and it is not here. So when Chloe and Eliza’s steps have died quiet in the hall, I ease my swollen frame from the stool. My shift is wet through. So is the stool. They will see that, I suppose, but by then, I will be well away. Through the window, the world is gray and lowering. I feel the coming dusk. It lies on my skin like love.
Down the stairs, through the narrow back passages. From below, the sound of the servants’ dinner. A voice raised in one line of song, ending in laughter. Past the study that hums with Alonso’s presence within and into the yellow parlor, where the fire isn’t laid yet for evening, which has the window with the loose catch. I worm my way out into the late afternoon, into the air. The grass is a cool carpet. I take my shoes off. Across the top of the hill, rowan berries are a red shout against the brown. I am pricked with sweat, chafed by cotton. The air is hot and awful. But the cave will be cool. I am so heavy. I carry a small world before me, filled with flesh and movement. Yes, she is coming. The cave is so far off. The pain begins, an orchestra tuning.
• • •
By the time I reach the foot of Sheeps Tor, my whole being is singing, loud and lusty. Colors are interchangeable. I stop and retch under the wide umber sky. Just a while, I tell her, a little while longer. Rain begins to fall in cool, plump drops. Thunder grumbles far away. The light will be gone soon. I climb. Of a sudden, it is dark as the inside of a coal scuttle—I blink, but it makes no difference. I’m blind. The old, familiar dark. But this time, it will be different. I walk, listening to the tumult inside me. My feet are sure. I feel her breath on me, that other one. Even in this cold, it is colder.
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