by Paula Guran
We found her in the privet grove that had been planted around the grave of Emmeline Beaufort, Beloved Wife and Mother. We didn’t know what to say.
Justina looked at us with the still, pale face of a statue. She had never looked so beautiful, so like a Balfour. “I shot her,” she said. “She tried to strangle me—she said she saw the Devil in my eyes. But I had Grandpa’s gun, I’d been carrying it in the pocket of my robe for weeks, and I shot her through the heart.” Then she half sat and half fell, at the same time, slowly, until she was sitting on the grass, leaning against the gravestone.
“But the masked man—” said Rose.
“And the silver—” said Emma.
“That was Zelia,” she said. She looked at her hands as though she did not know what to do with them. “Zelia scattered the silver before she went to get Dr. Hewes. She told me to lie still, and that there’d been a thief. But there was no thief—only me!”
We were silent, then Melody said, “She must have been going mad for a long time. You could have told us.”
We heard the privet shake. “Don’t you pester her no more,” said Zelia. “Allons, ma fille. Your duty here is done.” She helped Justina up and put a shawl around her shoulders, then led her away. But just before they left the privet grove, Zelia turned back to us and said, “And don’t you forget to stop the milk!”
The next day, as we hid behind an overgrown lilac in the Caldwells’ garden, Emma told us that Justina was gone. “To Italy, to find her father, I think. Papa saw her off on the train. Zelia was going with her.”
Melody said, “I warned you about eating with witches. First Mouse and then Justina. It’s as though they’ve disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“Italy’s not off the face of the earth,” said Emma.
“It might as well be,” said Rose. “And it’s all her fault—Miss Gray’s. I wish she’d never come to Ashton.”
Eventually, when it looked like the thief who had killed Mrs. Balfour, whether or not it was old Sitgreaves, would never be found, we were allowed into the cottage again. The first thing we did was look into the mirror—it was the only mirror we could look in, all three of us, without arousing suspicion. “Show us Justina,” we said, and we saw her on the deck of a ship, looking out over the Atlantic, with the wind blowing her hair like a golden flag. But when we said, “Show us Mouse and Miss Gray,” all we saw was a road through a forest of birches, with a low mist shifting and swirling beneath the light of a pale sun.
We practiced, at first. But Emma’s mother decided it was time for her to come out into Ashton society, so she spent hours having dresses made and choosing cakes. Emma said that the latter made up, in chocolate, for the boredom of the former. And Melody said that she had to prepare for school, although she spent most of her time scribbling on bits of paper that she would not show us. Rose practiced the longest, and for the rest of that summer she could fly out of her bedroom window, which she did whenever she was sent to her room for punishment. But eventually we could no longer talk to birds, or turn gold into pebbles, or see the Battle of Waterloo in a mirror. We realized that we would never be witches. So the next summer, we became detectives.
In traditional fairy tales—at least as we know them today—witches are invariably evil and they are usually old and ugly. Since we know those stories so well, this anthology intentionally avoids stories based closely on fairy tales. There are, however, two exceptions. One is Margo Lanagan’s “The Goosle.” This, from talented newcomer Cory Skerry, is the other. Both involve great cruelty. Skerry’s story offers some explanation as to how his “witch” was, perhaps, driven to her savage psychopathic actions.
Those accused of witchcraft in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries could seldom be considered insane by modern standards, but their accusers—those who claimed to be bewitched or possessed—may well have suffered from mental disorders. Those who persecuted the alleged witches (and, similarly, conducted the Inquisition or killed those they considered heretics), were, in their day, considered pillars of their faith and community. From our perspective they were sadistic torturers and murderers. Like the woman labeled as a witch in this story, they believed they were doing the “right thing.”
The World Is Cruel, My Daughter
Cory Skerry
I still have their eyes in jars, on the shelf in the kitchen. Every morning the beads on my necklace clank together while I fry myself a fishy concoction of duck eggs and marsh tubers. Behind me, light pours in through the large hole in the side of my house and illuminates the staring eyes. They are three colors—blue, brown, and green—and it is the last of these that accuse me while the others stare cattywampus at the floor and ceiling.
I could shake the jar with the green eyes, so they look elsewhere, but I don’t.
When my daughter was one year old, I loved her for her smile. Anything could tempt her to joy—my own smile, the noises of cooking food, the proximity of the black kitten I gifted her upon her arrival.
What a fool I made of myself, contorting my face and making unladylike sounds. All I needed was another giggle and the game would go on. She couldn’t yet ask questions I couldn’t answer and was delighted by the information I volunteered. “Kitty,” “No, it’s hot,” and “Boo!” all brought smiles. Even when she disobeyed me, I never struck her. My disappointment was enough to bring her to tears and she would pour herself dry on my bosom before looking up once again with a hopeful smile. Did I forgive her?
Of course I did.
When my daughter was five, I loved her for her eyes. They were the impossible purplish hue of forget-me-nots. We don’t have them in the salt marsh where I built our tower. Her eyes told me what she would say before she said it. But sometimes she still surprised me.
I bit my tongue when she asked me why our house had no windows on the bottom floor. She still hadn’t conceived of a “door.” I knew she would ask some day, but then, on that cool April morning, I wasn’t prepared.
“The sea rages in the winter, poppet. We don’t have room for her to live with us, do we?”
My daughter giggled and returned to her innocence, but her question haunted me for years, until she was twelve and I loved her for her hair. It hung lustrous as silk, curled at the ends like pumpkin tendrils, glinted like sunlight caressing the sea.
This is when her questions grew children of their own, broods of what-ifs and how-comes. One day it was, “Why haven’t you any hair, Mother?” She stroked her own golden locks, which now swept her ankles, as she waited for an answer.
I let my fingers stray up over the gnarled mass of scars that capped my skull, most of it numb, some of it still tingling with ruined nerves if I pressed it, as if it yet burned. “It wasn’t as beautiful as yours,” I said. “I don’t need it.”
“Yes, but what did you do with it?” she persisted.
For an instant I regretted having given her a library. I’d selected each book with the intention of keeping her life beautiful. But in choosing only the sweetest tales, I’d inadvertently given her the idea that the world was a beautiful place, one she perhaps would be permitted to explore. Now was my best chance to make it clear to my daughter that this was not so.
“Someone else wanted my hair,” I lied, “so she carved it from my head while I slept.”
My daughter was horrified, but it didn’t stop the questions. “But didn’t you awaken?”
“She fed me an herb which forced me to sleep.” My daughter had seen me take tea for my aches and accepted this.
And oh, how I bitterly wished I had been unconscious! Sometimes I still wake from nightmares of fire, my robe tangled and spongy with sweat, surprised I’m not held in the flame with the same pitchfork that left the scars across my back. But my daughter only knew of the false deaths in tales in which the princess is revived by a kiss or justice is dealt to wicked stepmothers. Wicked stepmothers, but not witches. There were no witches in my daughter’s books.
She shook her head. Her sw
eet blue eyes watered. “But why? Why do something so terrible?”
“We are like the stories in your books,” I said. “But other people are not this way; they will value your hair as gold. They’ll steal it and leave pain in its place.”
To distract her from the books, which she would now doubt and scrutinize, I revealed the fourth floor in the tower.
Until she was eight, my daughter only had the run of the first two floors: the kitchen, scented with bunches of shallots, garlic, and fresh herbs; and the room above wherein the gleaming copper tub and waste chute took up one half and the garden and balcony took up the other. At ten, I allowed her into the library on the third floor, a circular room with an abundance of windows.
The fourth floor, the second-to-last, held a variety of musical instruments. We dusted and shined them. She learned to read a second time. The notes came to her easily, as I’d known they would, and she composed songs in her own spirited voice as often as she played classic tunes on the flute, lute, or harpsichord. The latter I had acquired at great expense, commissioning a man to assemble it inside the room before I stabbed him through the heart and buried his corpse under a driftwood log deep in the marsh. If you sit at the harpsichord and look out the window, you can see gulls and terns perched on the log as you play.
By the time my daughter was fifteen, I loved her for her talents and wit. She sang melodies on the spot, making gentle fun of household tasks or the elderly cat’s occasional accidents on the kitchen flagstones. Neither of us begrudged Utney his infirmity; he’d been a loyal companion.
He was her fateful introduction to death.
Over the course of fifteen years, the estuary had migrated to the north, leaving the southern marsh more shallow. At the height of summer, our tower now had toes of exposed mud. It was during this summer heat that my daughter’s heart was broken.
She put down a dish of broth for the cat, but Utney stayed curled by the fire. Her delicate fingers trailed along his neck, but he didn’t lift his head to scratch his chin against her nails.
I held my sobbing daughter, my hands tangled in her golden hair, which now trailed behind her on the floor if she didn’t bind it up in loops or braids.
Some children ask for a new pet when the old one passes on, but to my daughter, her cat was a fixture of the world, as irreplaceable as a piece of the tower. If the roof were torn off in a storm, we’d have no roof—likewise, there were no cats in our vegetable garden, no cats come up on our fishing lines, no cats in the bird traps I hung out of the music room windows.
He was the only cat in the world and he was dead.
I’d never seen her blue eyes so raw. They shone with an arterial flow of tears, bruised where blood vessels had burst. I was almost afraid the grief would kill her.
I boiled the carcass and made her a necklace of Utney’s bones, whispering that his spirit still lurked there and would love her for all her days. She wore the gift gratefully, but it only quieted her sorrow. In silence, his death still burned her the way my nightmares burned me.
And so I climbed out the window in the night and trudged through four miles of dense sawgrass, marsh bramble, and sucking, salty mud.
There are always unwanted kittens.
The boy from whom I got the kitten suggested I choose one of a different color, in case she wanted to separate the memory of her old pet from her new one. He had eyes like my daughter’s but lighter, like cornflowers. He refused to look at me any longer than he must. I chose a ginger kitten, with clever eyes and unruly fur.
When the water and mud became very deep on my return journey, I held the kitten over my head. I treated my daughter’s gift as carefully as I would have treated her.
I climbed back into the tower with difficulty, the kitten dangling from my mouth the way its own mother might have carried it. And so, with my clothes full of mud and my mouth full of fur, I spilled into the second floor. I coiled the rope and hid it under the box of brambles I keep for firewood. I scrubbed myself and my clothes. And I said nothing of my journey.
“But where did he come from?” she asked, when I gave her the kitten. One finger tapped the scarred table just ahead of two determined, orange paws.
“We are like the stories,” I said, smiling. “We are the only good in the world, and the world appreciates it. It provides for us. He came up in my fishing net.”
The next day, my daughter sang again. It was a sad song, an ode to Utney, but beautiful nonetheless. It was the final clue needed by that little blue-eyed bastard to track us. I had made the mistake of mentioning I had a daughter “about your age” who’d lost her cat—and now, of course, he wanted to rut.
I was drying tomatoes and grapes on the balcony, waving a broom at gulls that dared swoop too close, when my daughter’s song stopped mid-note.
“Have you named your kitten?” the lusting cur called. The mud I’d tracked through the dry streets of town must have led him to the marsh, his eyes must have led him to the tower, and now his ears had led him to lounge beneath her window.
I imagined him clambering into our world and ripping the lovingly sewn dress from my daughter’s nubile form; stabbing her innocence with thrusts of his pimply, adolescent body, tossing her aside, bruised and soaked in seed and sweat and shame. It was why I was there, why I would always be there: so the world couldn’t happen to her the way it had happened to me.
To her credit, my daughter didn’t speak to the scum—she ran to me, and I met her on the ladder, her forget-me-nots staring wild. “Mother, there’s a boy outside!” she said.
“I heard him,” I said. “He’s after your hair.”
“He only asked about my kitten—”
“Quiet! Take Sunshine to the kitchen and stay there until I come for you.”
I had never raised my voice to her, and she began to cry. It couldn’t be helped; I could soothe her feelings later, after I’d removed the threat.
“I only wanted to look at her,” he gasped, drooling and coughing as I pulled the knife free. Scarlet life fountained into the morass of human waste that marked the northern face of the tower. This year, the winter storms could feed on his blood with our refuse.
I placed him with the harpsichord builder and the glaziers, but I hated him too much to leave him buried in peace. I hacked apart his body and spread it for the eager gulls. I kept his eyes, because of his final lie. You’ll look at the inside of a cupboard, I thought.
When I’d finished bathing away the traces of my ordeal, I descended to the kitchen. My daughter crouched by the hearth, red-eyed and nervously stroking Sunshine.
At the time I thought she hadn’t seen what transpired, what her mother had done.
But sometimes I wonder.
My daughter’s sixteenth birthday arrived in the hottest days of summer. When I revealed the attic, the fifth floor of the tower, I expected one of her questions, but not the others.
Windows ringed the room as with the third floor library, every one of them wrought in fantastic rainbows of color. Light streamed in, rays of blue like her eyes, gold like her hair, orange like her growing kitten. The scenes in the windows would have cost me more than I could afford if I had paid the glaziers instead of putting them to rest by the driftwood. Fairies and unicorns, noblemen on a fox hunt, a castle haloed in a striking sunset . . . these I’d commissioned for my daughter. It was a room fit to live a life in.
“Is this—just for me?” she asked. Her eyes shone with the realization of how much I loved her.
“Yes,” I said.
And then she ruined it, tore this precious moment apart by asking me if, for her birthday, she could go out into the marsh—into the squelching mud, where we fished only in the turbulent winter to avoid ingesting our own refuse, where frogs and mosquitoes filled stagnant pools with their slimy spawn.
Where I buried the unworthy criminals who would have prevented her paradise.
My ultimate gift wasn’t enough for her.
The finality of my answer cracked her bel
ief in my love, and I watched trust bleed out of an innocent heart. I retreated to the kitchen.
Loudly, she wept above in an ocean of colored light, nestled in folds of her silken hair; quietly, I wept below on a hard stool, clutching a jar containing two withered eyes. I stared at those unseeing lumps of flesh and directed my hate at them. The eyes, and the world.
It thirsted for my daughter, but I wouldn’t let it hurt her.
I take some responsibility for leading Cornflower to the tower, but not Dirt. That foul tom came of his own volition.
I could barely hear my daughter singing, from where I cut shallots in the kitchen, and when she stopped I assumed she was napping again. She’d been sullen those last few weeks, curled in the window seat or reading on her new bed, a hammock strung from the exposed rafters.
I happened to run out of rosemary. I climbed to the balcony, intending to cut some, but at the sound of a male voice, I froze. He was pleading, but I couldn’t hear the words clearly. I edged onto the balcony and crouched while I strained to hear their conversation.
“But don’t you want my hair?” she asked, doubtful.
The boy laughed, a muddy jackal baying for her blood, but of course she didn’t know. “I’ve got my own, lass. Whyever should I want more?”
“Well, it’s golden, and there’s an awful lot of it,” my daughter said. “Mother says you’d find it valuable.”
She must have shown him; he whistled. “Wowee, miss! I could just about climb up on that!”
“You mustn’t climb up! Mother would be furious.”