Chime

by Franny Billingsley

  The blood streams, weeps, trickles. Eldric’s lips are the color of clay. His eyebrow scar is the color of a rat. He opens his eyes. They do not shine whiter than white.

  You could say something. You could say, I lust you. You could say, I love you.

  I love you. The words are not unfamiliar. I believe I heard them more than once when I was little. Perhaps when you hear them over and over, the words stomp out a path in your memory: I am loveable. But what if you cease to hear I love you and start hearing Oh, Briony! We musn’t ever tell your father.

  Now you have an I am wicked path. And surely, the I am loveable path begins to fade.

  The swamp goes on forever, you go on forever. Your bones mutter curses. The rain turns to spit. Rain spits on Eldric. The edges of the world draw close, and closer. The world is gray and small.

  I do not see the bloodhounds until they begin to bay. We are the ferrets, Eldric and I. The constable is almost here. Now I may rest.

  I sink to the ground. I settle Eldric’s head in my lap. I bend over; I shelter his face from the rain. I do not think of the future, but I remember the past. I remember Stepmother’s vomit, streaked with bile and blood.

  Stepmother called for water. She was so thirsty, she tasted metal, she said. She must have water, she said. I turned away.

  “Briony!”

  “Eldric!”

  The figures come nearer. Father’s mouth makes a black hole in his face.

  It took Stepmother fifteen hours to die.

  31

  The Trial

  It’s the last day of my trial. The spectators have arrived early; the benches are almost full. Why, I don’t know. There will be no surprises. I’ve been a model defendant. I’ve confessed to everything. Everyone knows what the judgment is to be.

  Rose, Father, and Eldric sit in the front row. I don’t want to look at them, but my eyes are out of control. There they go, glancing over Eldric’s tie; over one tweedy sleeve; over a bulge of gauze, swelling from the cuff like a Christmas pudding.

  I will make my eyes obey. I look away, up at the windows. It is snowing. This trial has been a long one. We are drawing near Advent, season of surprise weddings. I do not, however, believe I shall attend any of them.

  “All rise!” My bird hands jump at the bailiff’s voice. A cold tide of faces surges below.

  I grow dizzy when I stand. Dr. Rannigan says I ought to be in sickbed. He says I’m not well. He says I ought to be in a warm bed, not in a damp bunk, not in a cold cell. Judge Trumpington gave permission for me to stay at the Parsonage. He said he could count on the reverend to bring me to my engagements at the courthouse.

  But I wouldn’t stay at the Parsonage.

  It’s one thing if a person learns you’re a witch. It’s quite another if he learns you’re a murderer. I almost forget I’m a witch now that I know I’m a murderer—murderess, actually. Murderess sounds so much worse.

  Judge Trumpington clears his throat. He is about to begin. I have grown horribly accustomed to the rhythms of his speech. The Brownie sits on the hem of my skirt. I like that. He holds me to the ground. I wish he could stay in my cell with me, but there are too many bars, too much metal.

  “As usual, in a case that involves an Old One, we have dispensed with the traditional formalities.” He looks at me. “I think I speak for all of us when I say we have been most impressed with the defendant’s candor.”

  When I told Dr. Rannigan I wouldn’t stay in the Parsonage, I told him I knew I was going to hang. And if one’s going to hang, what’s the point of recovering?

  “Aye,” says the Chime Child in her rough-and-ready way. “She be wondrous candorful. I never seen a defendant as confessed to such a quantity o’ wickedness.”

  I’d never seen Dr. Rannigan so angry. He shouted at me. He shouted that he knew exactly what I was doing. That I was clinging to every bit of strength I had in order to get through the trial. But that I’d really given up. That once the trial was over, I’d let myself die. Which was precisely my point. I’d rather die from illness than be hanged. But other than that, what’s the difference? I’ll turn to dust. The church bells will take an inventory of Briony Larkin: one chime for each year of life, eighteen chimes in all.

  “I knows I been getting old,” says the Chime Child. “I maked a grievous misjudgment on poor Nelly Daws. I doesn’t got the stomach for judgments no more. But there don’t be no one else, an’ the judge, he be desirous for my recommendation.”

  The spectators stir. It’s been a long trial, but at last, we’re getting to the end, which is bound to be satisfactorily gruesome.

  “All you as be here today,” says the Chime Child, “you heared the candorous confessions o’ yon Briony Larkin. You heared most o’ the story an’ I heared it all. Briony telled me the bits what be particular an’ private to her. I knows the whole story, but I doesn’t got no answers. I got only questions.”

  “Go ahead,” says the judge.

  “This question, it be tricky-like to answer.” The Chime Child looks at me. “Supposing it be you, Briony Larkin, you what be judge an’ Chime Child today. How does you pronounce on your own self, innocent or guilty?”

  I feel the press of spectators’ eyes as they wait for my answer.

  “You should hang me.”

  Why such mutter and stir? I’d been wondrous candorful, so what did they expect?

  “What be your reasons, Miss Briony?”

  “I told you about Stepmother and the arsenic. Isn’t that reason enough?”

  “But she be an Old One,” says the Chime Child. “There be times us allows the killing o’ them Old Ones.”

  “Not unless there’s a trial first,” says Judge Trumpington. “The system is flawed, we know that, but we can’t proceed without a trial. We can’t take the law into our own hands, Mrs. Gurnsey.”

  Mrs. Gurnsey. It’s queer to remember the Chime Child has a real name. A real name and a real life. That she’s married and has children, that her husband is a fisherman, that she plants poppies in her garden.

  “Us be at a trial right now,” says the Chime Child.

  “Let me make sure I understand you correctly, Mrs. Gurnsey,” says Judge Trumpington. “You suggest putting the stepmother on trial?”

  “Aye,” says the Chime Child.

  There follows a long discussion about courtroom rules and how the judicial system doesn’t allow you to try a person if she’s not present to defend herself. But finally the Chime Child puts an end to it. “It don’t matter nohow. The stepmother, she be dead. But Miss Briony here, she be alive. She be the one us doesn’t want to kill if there don’t be no reason.”

  Everyone’s sorry to have hanged poor Nelly Daws, but don’t let that prolong my trial. Please don’t. There’ll be no lastminute exculpatory evidence, I promise. Just let me lie down.

  For I’m sick at the heart and I fain would lie doon.

  “Did you never suspect your stepmother was one of the Old Ones?” says Judge Trumpington.

  “Never,” I say. “She was always very kind to us.”

  Something has happened. Judge Trumpington and the Chime Child look away from me, into the mass of spectators. Someone has risen. I see him only from the corner of my eye, but I know it is Eldric.

  He doesn’t offer up his name, or beg pardon, or say a word about pleasing the court. He is already stepping forward as he says, “I believe I can help.” Judge Trumpington nods and says, “Please.”

  Soon I shall be obliged to look at his face and I can’t bear it. Murderess. He knows me to be a murderess. I can’t bear it.

  I look away. The spectators’ faces are splats of snow. My head is filled with white.

  I don’t understand Eldric’s idea. He wants to make me a story. I will say the words, he will write them.

  I say nothing. Judge Trumpington says nothing. The Chime Child approves.

  Eldric lowers his voice. He speaks for me, alone. “When you wrote me into an understanding of Leanne, you’d a notion
there was something about her we had yet to learn, had you not? I’ve the same sort of notion about the late Mrs. Larkin. Perhaps I can do the same for you.”

  There’s nothing to understand. She was an Old One. I procured arsenic from Cecil, I poisoned her.

  Eldric stands at the defendant’s box. He lays a sheet of paper on the ledge. Rose has given it to him. I recognize it as twin to one she gave me in the library. She wanted me to make it into a story. I associate it with the smells of sawdust and paint and polish. The smells of hope and life.

  I face the Chime Child. Eldric faces me. The sooner I start, the sooner I end, the sooner I lie doon.

  Eldric taps the pencil point onto the paper. He asks me to speak of the time I was ill. Not the Dead Hand illness, the earlier one, the long one, before Stepmother died. He isn’t accustomed to writing with his left hand. He grips the pencil so hard his fingertips go red.

  What can I say about it? That I was ill, that Stepmother nursed me? Eldric taps at the paper. He taps it into a Tiddy Rex of freckles.

  “She was very kind,” I begin.

  “Let’s start with specifics,” says Eldric. “What sort of illness was it?”

  That’s easy enough. It wasn’t an illness as much as an exhaustion. I awakened every morning wearier than before. One morning I was able to rise, the next I was not.

  I pause frequently; I wait for Eldric to catch up. He writes like a child, dragging his left wrist across the paper. His fingertips have now gone white. He turns letters into spiders, sentences into valleys.

  No one offers to help.

  “What did she do to amuse you while you were ill? To help you pass the time?”

  I say that Stepmother brought me paper and ink. That she thought it might be healing for me to write. Healing, that was her word. So although I was often too tired, although the writing often wore me down, it was difficult to refuse. She was so delighted to help. Delighted with everything I wrote.

  “You’re saying, then, that the writing was not healing?” says Eldric.

  I suppose that’s what I was saying, although it feels like a betrayal to admit it. “It ground me down, rather. I felt as though I were a music box in want of winding.” Yes, as though I were a music box and the tune were my life, playing more and more slowly with every passing day. Finally, not even I could recognize it. The notes were stretched too far apart. They were no longer notes, they were plinks. I wound down to a plink.

  “You were unwinding,” says Eldric. “What then?”

  My gaze betrays me. It moves to Eldric’s face. He looks much as usual, in obvious, surface ways. A month must be enough time for a strong young man to recover from the loss of his hand. But he looks different in underneath ways. Gone is the pounce and bounce. His eyes are dark, and although he smiles, he doesn’t mean it.

  He hates me.

  “Then I got better.”

  He hates me because I murdered Stepmother. He hates me because the Dead Hand took my clumsy right hand and left me with my useful left. He hates me because the Dead Hand took his useful right hand and left him with his clumsy left. What’s a strong, fidgety boy to do without his dominant hand? What happens when there’s a Cecil Trumpington to knock about?

  “Tell me about the fire.”

  I know even less about the fire. “I can’t say why I started it.”

  “Not the why,” says Eldric. “Just the details. How did you start it?”

  I have two sets of memories about the fire. Both start with me dragging myself into the library. I hurry, best I can. I must do what I need to do before I am entirely unwound. My nightdress drags on the floor as though I’ve shrunk.

  I pause in my telling. Here, the memories diverge.

  “This is where you have to forget you’re Briony Larkin,” says Eldric. “Forget that you’re clever, that you always have the right answer. The only right memory is the one that first comes to you.”

  This, I cannot believe.

  But Eldric doesn’t care whether I believe. He just wants me to be as honest as I can, with the court, of course, but also with myself. This seems a peculiar thing to say, but I proceed.

  “I brought paraffin and matches with me into the library. I doused the books with paraffin, the piano too. I struck a match.”

  I pause, look into Eldric’s switch-off eyes. “The problem,” I say, “is that that’s not the true memory. I didn’t set the fire. I called the fire up; I know it.”

  “Are you sure?” says Eldric. “I remember a situation in which you were unable to call up fire.”

  Yes, just before I punched your nose. If I weren’t so weak, I’d do it again. But if you want the wrong story, you’ll get it. What do I care? Hanging is hanging.

  “There was a great whoosh of fire,” I say. “I stood there watching for a bit.”

  I do not say aloud that I watched the exercise books whoosh into flame. There went the story of the Reed Spirits. There, the Brownie’s story. There, Rose’s favorite, in which she gets to be the hero. I do not say aloud that this cannot be the true memory. Why would I have destroyed the stories I’d labored over so long? I’m wicked, not mad.

  “I heard my stepmother in the corridor. I suppose she smelled the smoke. She was almost at the door when I shoved my hand into the flames.”

  I haven’t expected there’d come a great gasp, that dark caves would open in those snow-splat faces. Father hid his eyes behind his forearm.

  It’s a waste of emotion, although regular people seem to have an overabundance of the stuff. I’m playing Eldric’s game, telling my false memories. But the truth is that I called the fire, which raged out of control and bit me.

  “I don’t know how Stepmother managed to make it to the library. I’ve already told you how I injured her spine.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t,” says Eldric.

  “But I saw Mucky Face strike her,” I said. This conversation is just between the two of us, too low for the others to hear. “If I didn’t call him, who did?” I shall wither him with sarcasm. “Stepmother?”

  “Perhaps.” Eldric writes for a long while. What exactly is he writing? My every word? When he looks up, his eyes shine with wet.

  “Stepmother assured me she wouldn’t tell anyone. She was terrifically loyal. She never told anyone the other wicked things I did.”

  “What other wicked things?”

  But I don’t care to discuss Rose in front of the entire village. For that matter, I don’t care to discuss Rose in front of Rose. There she’d be, under the magnifying glass, the butterfly with the torn wing, the whole village looking on.

  “Those wicked things are private. I told the Chime Child; they’re not for everybody’s ears.” Eldric knew, though. I told him the night of the bloody nose.

  “I’ll tell then,” says Eldric.

  “I told you that in confidence!”

  “I took an oath, on the Bible,” says Eldric. “I swore to tell the whole truth.”

  “But you have no right hand,” I say.

  Eldric’s eyebrows jump. He makes a line of his curling lips. I have wounded him.

  “In Italian,” I say, “the word for left is sinistra. ‘Sinister.’ It would be wrong to lay your sinister hand on the Bible.”

  Eldric does not respond. He is going to tell.

  I squeeze all the lace from my hand-bones. I turn my fist to cement. “Don’t you dare tell!” I whisper, so he has to draw close. I can easily reach that beautiful face of his. I jab, but I am weak and slow, and his left hand is quick—quick enough, at least, to catch mine.

  Eldric speaks very low. “Don’t throw your punch from your elbow.”

  “Stupidibus,” I say.

  He almost smiles.

  I refuse to listen. I put my fingers in my ears. But my imagination keeps following the story. What’s he saying now?

  When will Father know what I did to Rose?

  Does he know now?

  Now?

  What about Rose?

  Does she kn
ow now?

  Eldric taps my hand. He is done.

  No, I amend that: He is done for.

  I am going to kill him.

  Father has risen. He doesn’t know where to put his arms. You wouldn’t take him for a clergyman, accustomed to speaking in public.

  “I’m trying to sort through what happened here,” he says. “But one thing I do know: Rose was born who she is and she’s remained who she is. I know she sustained no injury that—”

  He searches for the mot juste.

  “—that compromised her.”

  Father is lying to save me. Stepmother was wrong. Father’s not so righteous that he’d have turned me over to the constable. I wish I could feel happy about this. Eldric, of course, thinks Father’s telling the truth.

  “I know it’s hard to believe,” says Eldric, in his just-between-you-and-me voice. “Do you remember how at first I couldn’t believe Leanne was a Dark Muse? It was too great a shock. I couldn’t accept that my feelings had clouded my judgment, and that my feelings themselves were the result of a spell.”

  I could hit him so easily. “Are you suggesting Stepmother was a Dark Muse?” More sarcastic withering.

  Father speaks into Eldric’s silence. “We were married a year before I understood she was a Dark Muse, feeding on my music. I absented myself as much as possible, so she’d have nothing to feed on.”

  My mouth tastes sharp and bright.

  “We have misunderstood the powers of the Dark Muse,” says Judge Trumpington. “She’s able to feed on girls.”

  I have bitten my tongue.

  “Happen,” says the Chime Child, “us never knowed the powers o’ yon lasses. The art they does, it be strong enough to feed the Dark Muse.”

  “Perhaps Briony misunderstood her own powers,” says Eldric. “Perhaps she’s not a witch at all.”

  Eldric’s voice again, now for me, alone. “You’ve gone whiter than I’d have thought possible. You ought to put your head down.”

  “I told you once to put your head down,” I say. I don’t recognize my own voice. “But you didn’t.” He’d gone all distant and wavy, as though I were looking at him through old glass.