Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  It was time for …

  Three

  THE WICKED SHADOWS

  … The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp,

  The shadow of the child that goes to bed —

  All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp,

  With the black light overhead.

  From Robert Louis Stevenson,“Shadow March,”

  A Child’s Garden of Verses

  1

  It was time for Alice to go to bed. She had survived the combined forces of Dr. Vaniah Odom and the Reverend Goodchild – it had been a near thing – and now it was time for bed.

  It had been a little later, a little darker, than she had imagined when they had said goodbye to Ben, some time ago. The darkness had made it seem later than it was. Kate had been there, wearing the Roman scarf that Ben had brought back for her from the time he had been in Italy with Joseph. Vivid in crimsons and blues, it had added a little color to a dull day. Ben had promised to bring back each of them something pretty from Japan: a screen, a vase, a kimono.

  As she walked upstairs, A Child’s Garden of Verses was in her head again, as it had been that morning. She had gone down in darkness, and now it was dark again as she made her way back without turning up the gas. The darkness had barely lifted all day, and the lack of light had oppressed her. She had gone down without candlelight in the dark morning, but now candlelight accompanied her on her way back up the stairs. She had lighted it from the pilot light. The almost full moon shone through the colored glass of the landings, but drained away all the color.

  The moon has a face like the clock in the hall.

  That was how Robert Louis Stevenson had described it, a clock-face that was brilliantly illuminated, but so far away that the time could not be read.

  All of the things that belong to the day

  Cuddle to sleep to be out of her way.

  This clock-face had no II. No IIII. No VI or IX, and no hands with black ace-of-spades-shaped tips – like miniature versions of the railings outside Miss Iandoli’s house – moving round and round the dial, muted chiming every quarter of an hour. Lewis Carroll ought to have written an Alice story about time, beginning with Alice searching for a missing kitten – it would be the black kitten, and not the white kitten – by stepping inside the tall case of a pendulum clock. Lewis Carroll would play with the concepts of memory and things already seen: he’d rehearsed this in Alice’s conversation in the dark wood with the White Queen – every single thing crooked, all over pins – in Through the Looking-Glass. Strangely reduced in size, as if – yet again – she had drunk from the little bottle labeled “DRINK ME,” she would stand in the echoing wood-scented darkness of the base, with the dimly glinting machinery of the weights, chains, and pendulum suspended high above her, as Alice entered the world of Edgar Allan Poe.

  “… Ninety years without slumbering …”

  – she sang under her breath (terrible dreams shook them nightly, they were troubled with thick-coming fancies that kept them from their rest, the written troubles of the brain weighed upon the heart) –

  “… Tick, tock, tick, tock,

  His life seconds numbering,

  Tick, tock, tick, tock,

  It stopped short

  Never to go again,

  When the old man died …”

  No tick.

  No tock.

  Silence.

  The old man had so much blood in him.

  She should have been stained first red, and then green, and then green, and then blue. She studied her hands, the hands that were filled with darkness in the flickering candlelight and should have been changing color, step by step; she studied her shadow. The moon was big and bright, but the sky seemed utterly black, as empty of stars as the angel-guarded ceiling of All Saints’. The wind had barely abated all day, and was still howling around the house. The candleflame fluttered. She’d memories of Lady Macbeth-like moments on the stairs, wandering up and down, like someone sleepwalking, carrying a candlestick.

  “From breakfast on all through the day,

  At home among my friends I stay …”

  – she was thinking, as she approached the schoolroom door –

  “… But every night I go abroad,

  Afar into the land of Nod …”

  Tick, tock, tick, tock.

  Nod was where Cain went in the Bible after he had killed his brother. He was the son of Adam and Eve, the first murderer. Adam and Eve stood hand in hand on one of the Dutch tiles around the fire, but they were pictured when they were still childless, before they were driven out of Paradise. The LORD told Cain that he was cursed from the earth, which had opened her mouth to receive his brother’s blood from his hand; when he tilled the ground, it would not henceforth yield unto him its strength; a fugitive and a vagabond would he be in the earth. Cain said unto the LORD that his punishment was greater than he could bear, because he had been driven from the face of the earth, and hidden from the face of the LORD. There was a mark upon him so that everyone would know who he was. Because they knew who he was, they would not kill him, not bring his suffering to an end.

  She had imagined him when she was a little girl, bent over in the land of Nod, east of Eden, his hands covering his face like someone ashamed to be seen. It was a desert place, where a reddish dust blew in the wind which darkened the sun and brought night closer, irritating the eyes so that tears ran down the dirty face of the man who had killed his brother, leaving smudged lines. In the land of Nod he dreamed bad dreams, and wept. No one would kill him, and he had to go on living.

  In Hard Cash, when Alfred Hardie was taken to the third private lunatic asylum, a huge old mansion fortified into a jail, he was conducted through passage after passage, through door after door, and along a covered way to the noisy ward, to the singing, the roaring, the howling like wolves. As he lay on his filthy truckle bed, one of the maniacs sang, and shouted, “Cain was a murderer! Cain was a murderer!” all night long, over and over again, the one thing he still knew.

  “… All by myself I have to go,

  With none to tell me what to do –

  All alone beside the streams

  And up the mountain-sides of dreams …”

  I had a dream last night.

  Tell me your dream, Miss Pinkerton.

  She stepped into the schoolroom. The drapes had not been drawn across the windows, and the cold moonlit pattern of the windowpanes was thrown across the floor, and angled onto the bed. A shadow moved before her. And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

  She lit the lamp, and turned up the flame, driving the shadows into the corners of the room, fading the moonlight.

  She blew out the candle.

  The curl of the smoke, its smell.

  Soon she would not hear voices anymore.

  Soon she would be still.

  Soon she would empty her mind of all thought.

  Soon she would sleep.

  And when she slept, she would dream.

  “… Try as I like to find the way,

  I never can get back by day …”

  She bent her head to one side, and then the other, as she removed her earrings.

  “… Nor can remember plain and clear,

  The curious music that I hear.”

  One Ash Wednesday, these words had gone through her mind over and over at Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s, in the way she used to repeat words to herself when she was memorizing them, or trying to shut out thoughts.

  “Listen to my voice,” he was saying. “Be still. Empty your mind of all thought. Sleep …”

  “Try as I like to find the way,” she was hearing inside herself, “/I never can get back by day,/Nor can remember plain and clear,/The curious music that I hear …”

  Curious Music. That was one on her list of titles. Another one, from “Keepsake Mill” was A Sin Without Pardon. “Here we shall meet and remember the past” was the last line of this poem, as if the place existed only as a sour
ce of memory, and would not be there without the weight of what once had been.

  It was night. It was windy.

  Here he came again.

  “Whenever the moon and stars are set,

  Whenever the wind is high,

  All night long in the dark and wet,

  A man goes riding by,

  Late in the night when the fires are out,

  Why does he gallop and gallop about?…”

  Her fire was not out. Rosobell had newly laid it, to give her warmth and flickering light in the darkness.

  Now in the falling of the gloom,/The red fire paints the empty room …

  If you tell anybody, the wind will get you.

  “… Whenever the trees are crying aloud,

  And ships are tossed at sea,

  By, on the highway, low and loud,

  By at the gallop goes he.

  By at the gallop he goes, and then,

  By he comes back at the gallop again.”

  All night long, he would be there.

  Ben had thought that a child had written the verses, just as she had thought that a girl had painted herself standing at an unseen window, totally absorbed in reading a letter. They were words spoken with the voice of a child, not of an adult.

  Down in Chestnut Street a grotesque little figure, wearing clothes too big for it, was bringing darkness to the street, doing things the wrong way round, his feet crunching through the snow. Gradually, one by one, the lights were being extinguished, the darkness coming closer and closer toward her, the street darker and darker, until the ladder clunked against the lamppost outside their house. The misshapen figure scuttled spider-like up the ladder, and put out the light. Put out the light, and then put out the light. She did not want it to look up and see her at the window. She did not want to see Leerie’s leering face, staring up at her, illuminated in moonlight.

  “… And now at last the sun is going down behind the

  wood,

  And I am very happy, for I know that I’ve been good …”

  That was from “A Good Boy.” It was like a prayer written for children.

  “… I know that, till tomorrow, I shall see the sun arise,

  No ugly dream shall fright my mind, no ugly sight my

  eyes …”

  Behind his back, the good boy had his fingers crossed. “I’ve been good,” he said aloud, repeatedly, as if it was his task to convince someone. “I’ve been good. I know that I shall see the sun arise. I know. I shall see the sun. No ugly dream shall fright my mind, no ugly sight my eyes. I know.”

  Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

  Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

  “I know,” Macbeth repeated. “I know.”

  She had – more or less (rather less than more) – kept darkness at bay throughout the day. Not for much longer. The darkness she had tried to escape was now around her, inside her, and the silence made it darker. It was time for the ugly dreams, the ugly sights.

  (“No more sights!” Macbeth had begged.)

  The wicked shadows would be coming, tramp, tramp, tramp.

  2

  Halitotic Herbert had been the first person she had actually heard calling her the madwoman in the attic. He was, in fact, the only person she had heard call her the madwoman, but he had said it several times, often in gatherings where he smiled at her in the most obsequious manner. His enormous artificial grin was too large for his mouth, as if he had swallowed a smile that was trying to escape from the hostile vessel of his body: he shared his wife’s delicious sense of fun. How their house must rock with laughter!

  As he grinned his gigantic fawning grin, his teeth were misaligned, so that his smile was facing to one side, like a squint in the teeth. It was oddly disconcerting, and she tended to lean to one side, to balance things out a little, when she found herself being talked to by him. With the Reverend Goodchild, one did not experience a conversation: one was talked to, talked at.

  His filthy teeth – it had never occurred to him to clean them since he had purchased them; they were as furred and thickened as limestone rock formations in a damply dripping cavern – were the exact same dirty yellow as the Goodchilds’ toilet bowl. Long yellow-brown streaks ran down and through Edwardson, Boyd & Sons, Sanitary Appliances, and she half expected to read these words printed across his grin whenever it expanded hugely before her. The blue lettering – a little washed away and faded – looked like veins just discernible beneath the skin, old tattoos on the point of vanishing. G. G. Schiffendecken clearly failed to provide long-term care for his products in the obsessively possessive manner of Samuel Cummerford, the owner of the first automobile showroom in the area. Samuel Cummerford sold his products sulkily and reluctantly, giving the impression that he parted with them against his better judgment, and under great duress, to those who were unworthy of possessing them. He was like the parent of a spendthrift son, brokenheartedly compelled to auction cherished family heirlooms after years of his increasingly uncontrollable profligacy. Even after he’d sold an automobile, he’d still maintain a jealously proprietorial interest in it. He carried a large soft cloth and a tin of polish around with him in an inner pocket, and always stopped to inspect his automobiles – they remained “his” automobiles, even after being sold at handsome prices – whenever he came across them, to ensure that they were being maintained in a manner that met with his approval. They never measured up to his strict requirements. Out would come the cloth, out would come the polish, and the owner would emerge from the shop, or the church, or – indeed – his own home, to discover his automobile gleaming, the polished brass dazzling in the sunshine, and a little gold-lettered card – Samuel Cummerford, for the Aristocrats of Automobilists – prominently displayed upon the windshield. (I trusted you, and you let me down! was the unspoken accusation.)

  If only G. G. Schiffendecken could be persuaded to emulate these praiseworthy standards of care! He would not be able to resist stopping the Reverend Goodchild in the street whenever he came across him, and – without saying a word – peeling back the lips from the grubby grin, breathing heavily upon the teeth thus exposed, and polishing away with a soft cloth in a vigorously circular clockwise motion, whistling tunelessly all the while. When he’d completed the job that clearly needed to be done – a final, head-on-one-side, critical appraisal, to ensure that the correct intensity of gleaminess had been achieved – he’d let the lips snap back with a reverberating elastic twang, and continue on his way with a spring in his step, and the satisfied air of a man at peace with himself, a man never known to let his high standards slip. The Reverend Goodchild, his beard vibrating with the aftershocks, would be left clutching a card that had mysteriously appeared in his hand. G. G. Schiffendecken. Purveyor of Grins to the Gentry.

  The smell of the Reverend Goodchild’s breath – a (Teuch!) potent combination of cabbage and tobacco (Great heaven! Had she stumbled across the secret ingredients of Griswold’s Discovery?) – reinforced the lavatorial image in a repellent multi-sensory experience, to which might be added the sense of touch. He tended to touch the back of her hand caressingly as he talked, and his fingers had – the image of the toilet bowl seemed to lead her irresistibly to this image – the faintly disturbing clammy warmth of a recently vacated toilet seat.

  She was not destined to be a genteel lady, or an Ideal Mother, when such thoughts came unbidden into her mind. She would banish such vulgarity, simper at her clergyman, yield flutteringly to his flattering blandishments.

  “Tee-hee, your reverence!” she should snicker shyly at his effortful flirtatiousness, holding out her mama’s best china teapot to offer him a refill for his cup, coyly averting her eyes. That’s what spinsters were supposed to do, wasn’t it, launch themselves into blushful vicar-snickering? “Tee-hee!”

  Ha!

  She most certainly would not!

  She did not revere this Reverend.

  The madwoman in the attic.

  That was w
ho she was.

  That was what she was.

  She heard the phrase, in the accents of the Reverend Goodchild – she had been at Mrs. Albert Comstock’s – as clearly as if it had been the only thing said in a silent room, the way you could hear your name spoken in a room crowded with speakers, and she knew that it was describing her. She had instantly seen the creature in the inner room, the hidden door behind the tapestry, and it was like facing the wrong side of a painting or a mirror, like (she had that feeling again) the underside of the gold-embroidered purple coverlet that concealed the portrait of Dorian Gray.

  She was in the room without windows, she was the thing that scrabbled and bit, the sound on the rising gale of a dog howling at a distance. She was the figure in the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, the thing that ran backward and forward, that groveled on all fours, that snatched and growled like some strange wild animal covered with clothing, that had its head and face hidden, the clothed hyena that she knew had her face: dark-skinned, pocked with smallpox scars, hairy. Words once spoken were spoken forever, and she listened for it again all the time, straining to catch her own name, her own description. As a minister with a high opinion of his own preaching he was unused to speaking in lowered tones.

  For a while she had suddenly seen herself through the eyes of someone else, and had faltered. Then pedantry had taken over.

  Not the attic: the schoolroom.

  Not the attic: the schoolroom.

  That had been her foremost thought, as if he were more wrong about the room than about the madness. Grace Poole had given Rochester a cord, and he had pinioned the arms of the madwoman behind her, and bound her to a chair with more rope.

  “Now that I have your full attention, Miss Pinkerton, we may begin …”