Black Body

by H C Turk

  • • •

  “Your words are exceptional, but your enunciation is archaic, as though you were reared in a swamp. An angry swamp, for you always seem prepared for distress. Ladies, however, are never perturbed.”

  I had asked to learn of writing; Mrs. Natwich insisted that my speaking improve as well. Any books on witches you got? I mildly inquired. But the tutor had learned to ignore my extremes, lest she become distressed, which she properly could not, being a lady. Being a sinner. Delighted she was, however, to ply me with lessons: grammar and enunciation, English history, household guidance, handwriting (despite the student’s desire thereof), family economics, composition, and the lot.

  “Cor, missus, and a right genius you are to be teaching me everything known to mankind.”

  Following this comment came another lesson in posture, and strange was my way to learn proper speaking by having a stick stuck against my spine.

  “Could I inquire, kind and glorious Mrs. Natwich, what this ‘composition’ entity might be?”

  “An arrangement of words, Alba,” the tutor described. “A set of described events which transpire in the real or in the writer’s imagination.”

  “What might the purpose of a composition be besides writing poetry, which is scarcely more useful than pimples?” I wondered.

  “Having the ability to form a coherent composition aids one in conversation, in forming a clear response to a difficult query. Another value is in describing how the events of one’s days have passed, as spoken or set down in a journal. The Bible itself is not only a composition, but a collection of compositions. A more recent example is the opera libretto, whose story is a composition, as are the stories of nonmusical theater pieces.”

  “Theater of the street I saw in my previous settlement of Jonsway,” I mentioned. “Truly I hope not to learn how to stand on a wooden platform and shout.” Then my recollection improved. “My mother well loved theater,” I admitted, immediately suffering a longing I could not grasp.

  “Ladies might well enjoy theater, Alba, but they do not compose it. Their tasks are of the home, not of so expressive a public art as theater. But fear not, for part of my task with you is to aid in your finding the best place in English society for the individual who is Alba.”

  “Out the flipping back door is best for me,” I muttered.

  “Alba!” Natwich returned sharply. “You must learn at once not to be mumbling so. Not only is the sound offensive and common, but if you have nothing to say, you should retain your silence.”

  “If people retained silence when not having something valuable to convey, most of England would be permanently mute.”

  “Alba!” she intoned, then taught me again with her stick.

  • • •

  Into the air came autumn, and into our (our?) home came the tutor, though more often than a season, nearly every day. Though Natwich taught me without Rathel’s presence, the head of this household was known to all, her instructions of a strength to guide activities at a distance. Wise was the mistress to understand that humans of any kind were uncomfortable in her presence.

  The tutor was no discomfort to me. Elsie was more responsively comical, but Mrs. Natwich lacked Rathel’s revenge, her only goal to provide London with an educated lady suitable for the city’s pride.

  She would not come on the Sabbath. Though I had no desire to save my worship for a day selected by sinners, the grand cathedral remained a desired experience; whereas the sweaty, incomplete example was but a curiosity. Come the Sabbath and I was set to voyage to St. Nicholas, despite the required carriage journey fit an explorer. Guiding my dressing with grumbling, Elsie threatened hideous crimes against my person because against that person I refused the choking corset, though Elsie insisted it was necessary to make so wild a torso svelte by eliminating rearmost waddling due to an uncouth lass’s refusing to wear sufficient petticoats and et ruddy cetera.

  Moderate was the city on Sunday, its populace of unnatural folk out only for church services, no toil seen, little flying filth, most of the dandies dressed in reduced attire, though the sinners seemed more ornamental than pious. Due to this lessened intensity of personal glare, the journey itself was more discreet, the witch thankful for her senses’ being less affronted by style and more confronted with facts. Though London was no realm to be comprehended separate from its creators, the city might reveal itself in degrees to me if all its aspects did not attack simultaneously. Thus, on this Sabbath I was able to notice privet hedges and fences before family dwellings, cavities in the streets where water had washed away the substrate, the vast accumulation of building glass—and how was this material made?

  I remarked to Lady Amanda, “A tremendous building or conglomerate of buildings I saw in the vicinity, with roofs resembling, er, glass onions.”

  She thus instructed the coachman to hie to the Regal Pavilion. Past this expansive edifice we rode, that portion seen from Rathel’s roof—only the upper reaches—more impressive than the building proper, with its glassy busyness and excess excess. Nevertheless, I prayed God in thanks that this pavilion was no house of worship, else I would have found another absolute edifice for my awe.

  Such awe is not appropriate for my kind. The passion of profound mountain views is not a grandeur fit witches, who cherish all the small parts of God’s domain, deriving worldly appreciation in constant, moderate portions, not in flashes like a sinners’ fever. Souled folk save their awe for occasions in which they are not occupied by commerce and thus can partake of items so meager as God’s glory manifested in His physical realm. With its divinity of godly salvation and worldly consumption, where was the rightful place of the great cathedral in my life? Where should a witch fit within this style of worship except to recognize that in their passion to know the true world and their need to mock it, only sinners are both profound and pretentious?

  • • •

  I remain uncertain whether my next sight of St. Nicholas was equal in splendor to my expectation. Though thrilled again, I was not startled as I had been initially. Certainly, my renewed experience lacked some measure of the previous esteem; for upon approaching St. Nicholas, I found it surrounded by sinners. Though not boisterous, the accumulation seemed insufficiently holy in their common conversations to be worthy of the glorious creation they neared. Then dejection came with the awareness that this same species had formed the creation with their labors. Perhaps not this exact type of sinner, I next thought, but some special members less in opposition to Earth, attuned more to God than tea societies. Then I recalled the brilliant creatures complaining as they hacked away at rocks that would eventually form Christ’s Cathedral, these thoughts increasing my regard for Rathel’s basement.

  Green was their color. Out of the coach and into the cathedral’s entry hall stepped the lady and I, finding that the prevalent hue this Sabbath was a pale green, not unpleasant except for its being satin instead of fern, the ladies here not so extravagant of bodice as they were in greater London when farther from God, with scarcely a bosom leaping forth. Somber in deep browns and greys, the men flaunted not the first red shoe. So conservative were these sinners in meeting Lord God that they sucked no smoldering pipes, those unable to resist Satan through his instrument of tobacco modest enough to keep their snuff stashes tiny and well concealed behind a gum, with nary a dribble from a lip, though even an untalented witch could smell the fetid crop with every respiration.

  Too many characteristics inconsistent with God’s house had they for me to catalogue, from vapors of recent liquor to talk of the neighbor’s unseemly guests. Their one day for being godlike, yet who was humble here? The assemblage seemed a mellow ball, not earnest worship. Then I became a member of the party as Rathel found acquaintances who of course would meet the new daughter.

  They flocked around me as though otters at a salt lick. Hungered these ladies appeared as they stared at me and radiated delight toward Amanda, my mother. My mother? The conversations came so quickly that I could not
follow them all, though the mistress remained nonplussed. Not since spring I’ve seen you; meet the grandmama; and you’re the lady who destroys evil? How courageous—how British. So, Amanda, this is the new girl, taken from a hole in the ground, she was? No, from a cave, I hear. No, from cannibals in the Borneo jungle. No, from mere witches in Wales, the place for them. All the ladies had to touch me, applying fingers to my cheeks while saying how sweet I was, grasping my forearm to insist my comeliness was complete, squeezing my wrist while declaring me more fortuitous than beautiful to be living with so fine a lady in so fine a city in so fine a nation, and et cetera, although I was so cold—you come from Iceland, dear? Being a young lady in education if not nature, I knew it proper to acknowledge these comments, if not all the fondling. Here I applied the moderate speaking taught by Mrs. Natwich, aware that no advantage would befall me from extending a prolix insouciance. Therefore, I brought my response to them like a city horse its carriage box forced to do the work of sinners. “Pleased to meet you,” and avert the eyes, curtsy at these ladies and their names.

  Next came men, a lot that had been lurking on the outskirts of the womanly mass. In comparison to their ladies, these males seemed starving, prepared to eat my presence; and I did not trust their nearing smell, for they emitted a faint, disturbing odor. As though smelling this herself, Rathel became adoring of her new lass, moving against me to wrap both arms around my shoulders. In fact, this was not the loving mother, but the knowledgeable expert protecting me from that smell.

  I was sated with these sinners regardless of gender, wishing only to pass them and enter the cathedral’s nave, hopeful to find God somewhere in the building. His men were an unholy barrier that Rathel bypassed, pulling me away from the more aggressive males. Was she socially correct to press away this cuff and that wrist nearing her daughter? Her daughter? No embarrassment had she—and neither did the malefolk, though their ladies no longer smiled to look down to those reaching hands, then upward to the attached faces of their husbands. The women became protective of their own families, gently pulling their men away. And here was the height of society, for Rathel, these ladies, and even the gents all smiled as a lustful scenario was avoided, then to the minister’s services, exchanging Satan in the foyer for God in the nave.

  The nave had changed, that mass of living persons reducing the chamber’s grandeur. The vast interior seemed greater when filled with my imagination instead of odorous sinners. Even worse was the sound, a tittering gossip that was Satan’s screaming compared to the holy silence I had enjoyed when alone here with God.

  And so the services advanced, the process no more than a louder version of Sunday in Jonsway. Their organ had been portative; this was permanent, commensurate in volume with the edifice’s entirety. The ministers were identical. I inferred that the presiding holy sinner knew in his experience the proper interval to keep his flock away from their smoking and liquor before they rioted. Lengthy enough were the services for me to lose my feeling of drudgery and look upward to the vaulted ceiling, so far away as to seem another land, countless paces above the nearest sinners, a breach they could not close even with vision, for only the witch looked. Only the witch understood that the glory of the cathedral remained, that the sinners’ taint was literally beneath the true grandeur available. Without this mass below, might not space be made for those special members who had manifested God’s potential by constructing this edifice? Then, in a revelation fit this holy place, I came aware that this building was older than my mother, and though the ancestors of its builders built anew, why should a godly person believe them equal? Could the society of that previous era be as evil as the current? Though Rathel might believe Christ’s to equal St. Nicholas, was she judging not these buildings but her own era, and therefore herself?

  The end of a church service is ever the same, regardless of the grandeur of the edifice within whose bounds God’s people meet to worship Him and dip snuff. After the minister’s, the choir’s, and the congregation’s benediction, these again-average people proceeded to mill about the pews, gossiping and politicking before returning home to attempt survival while plotting amongst their peers in the normal machinations of society. The difference here was that seldom are young ladies molested in church.

  While I had been viewing the cathedral’s vaults, the men below had been assessing me. Having noticed this examination, Rathel quickly hied me outside, maintaining to her friends that this girl new to society grew faint from the thick interior air, and—oh—breathless I attempted to appear. Despite our efforts to flee, we were met by folk whose curiosity had not abated: some appreciative of Rathel’s presence, some offering new friendship toward me. One man, however, was offering his navel. The brother of a lady friend of Rathel, Mr. Georges Gosdale introduced himself with his smell; for as this mature sinner smiled and made to take my hand, I sensed a distinctive odor rising from the pit of his body. Since I refrained from accepting his hand due to my breathlessness, Mr. Gosdale offered words, stating that as well as a lovely face I had “quite a voluptuous fundament, yet without excessive girth.”

  What a silence he drew with that commentary. With shame staining his face, Gosdale made to explain himself by reaching to grasp that mentioned rump and say how prideful a lady should be for having an appearance as vital as this. He did not, however, manage to gain this, for all the ladies assisted Rathel in intervening between Georges’ grasping hands and my derriere. The remaining men poorly demonstrated their dismay, for with Gosdale’s reaching, they began to smell the same as he. And the sinners made a composition with their movements, only one aware that the central person was no beauty, but a witch; the cause not an evil she created, but a wickedness released, held by men as lust, not sex, the latter godly, the former satanic, dark as the devil. In this scene, sinners disseminated both unavoidably, the witch so bland as to have no pity for their conflict, so selfish as to desire only retreat. God would instruct them if they could hear Him above Satan’s call, the sound of their reaching for my body, black body.

  Miss Elsie had known all along, and what guilt I had for not harnessing my rear with her laces. The next Sabbath found me yet without corset as I prayed in the basement, preferring God’s mildew to His men.

  Chapter 8

  The Final Idea

  On her knees, she absorbed burnt blood on the planking, for what could ink be but the charred fluid of some innocent plant? I discerned no smell of cooking from this material, however, only a soil odor as though it had been drawn from the ground—but what satanic niche of Earth could issue springs so black? But I had greater concerns in learning the ways of ink. Primarily, I had to retain the stuff within its well and not go spilling it upon Miss Elsie’s floor, for with a dedication fit to build a cathedral she now scoured the smooth lumber. When I offered my assistance, Mrs. Natwich rejected my amends with a lecture on Miss Elsie’s becoming a destitute heathen eating cheese rinds on the street if I usurped her chores; and under no circumstance was an English lady to be found upon her knees.

  Becoming more contained in my use of writing materials, I was pleased to gain the ability to settle my words upon a lasting sheet. Less satisfying were the words of my lessons; for whereas Rathel allowed me to reject the intrusion of Latin into my education, I nonetheless had to write poetry and Bible verses and historical dates instead of words of my own imagining. But what loss here when I had nothing to write but descriptions of leching men and nightmares of dead family?

  Amanda allowed me a certain influence over my schooling. Music would not be a part of my curriculum after I heard Natwich blow into a hollow tree limb while attempting to insert her fingers into holes bored along the stick’s length. Pleased was Elsie to hear this beaked flute; and, yes, it did sound like a duck having fingers crammed into its orifices. By no coincidence working in the library whenever Natwich and I were present, Elsie was told by the witch that she would be on the streets eating cheese rinds if again she usurped my job as student; and under no circumstances
would this evolving lady be found sucking sticks.

  Numerals were not to my liking, and the very concept of separating existence into packets of time seemed pointless when the general moment was ever available. Philosophy I appreciated because its purveyors raved on endlessly with their entire vocabulary, but why read these sinners’ phrases when the witch had her own lexicon, her own ranting? Politics I considered the mediocre work of Satan, and my posture I hurled to Hell whenever the topic was broached.

  Geography I found entrancing, the forthcoming lady an attentive pupil to learn of the world’s great mountains and equivalent ditches called canyons, of multiple oceans, of dry beaches called deserts. Herein I learned the value of art, in that Natwich brought for my perusal etchings of the landforms of Asia and the Americas. I made these lessons useful by pulling myself away from Africa and again to England. Of this area called London: where are the nearest lands wild enough to discourage cities but not so dead as to reject animals? Thus, I was shown maps, seeing London as a drawing, and Man’s Isle, the Irish Sea I had crossed, crossed in my sleep, the River Thames, which I refused to cross, though this traversal was unavoidable certain nights. I was shown textures representing marshes, angled lines symbolizing hills, and was told of Wales. Perhaps Rathel might convey me there once I proved her notions foolish, once I let her victim grasp my fundament and leer at my face as though it were meat for consumption, his hands and mouth molesting me, eating me….

  Rathel’s opinion of my murderous capacity seemed less foolish in light of that sub-navel smell of males. Less foolish, but no more accurate, though I knew that disproving her theories would revolt me, for contact with a sinning male would be required. And again I saw Gosdale’s leer, which seemed fundamental to him. Rathel’s response was even less comforting.