Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  The door, which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained. The fire burned in the grate; a lamp was set lighted on the chimney-shelf, for even in the house the fog began to lie thickly; and there, close up to the warmth, sat Dr. Jekyll.

  The fog thickened, seeping through the cracks in the glass roof above the dissecting rooms. Alice was the female on the dissecting table, and she looked up, up past the pale faces of the peering, bearded men, feeling curiously listless, devoid of will or energy.

  “This is the female …” the voice of the lecturer intoned, describing her malady as much as her sex.

  She studied the jagged threads in the dirt-encrusted glass, seeing shapes in them, like the shapes you saw in lines and stains on ceilings (or in clouds). After Tess had murdered Alec d’Urberville at The Herons in Sandbourne, the lodging house in the new-sprung city of pleasure beside the sea, his blood had drip, drip, dripped through the floor of the bedchamber, and on the ceiling of the room below the redness grew from the size of a wafer to the size of the palm of a hand, held out for its fortune to be read. The oblong white ceiling, with the red stain at its center, had looked like a gigantic ace of hearts. It wasn’t spades that brought death, it was hearts. “Off with her head!” shrieked the Queen of Hearts, and Tess bowed down on the morning of her execution, allowing the rope to be slipped around her neck in the prison at Wintoncester. From West Hill, Tess’s husband and sister – Angel Clare and, ‘Liza-Lu – looked down toward the red-brick building with its rows of short barred windows, and as they watched, a black flag – like the one Captain Nemo had unfurled at the South Pole – moved slowly up the staff of the flagpole. They bent themselves down to the earth, speechless, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless. The lines and stains opened out into faces, landscapes, cracked like the surfaces of old oil paintings, or old glass negatives, as if she were lying beneath the conservatory in a decaying, abandoned house.

  As a little girl she had always confused the two meanings of the word “conservatory,” and had imagined that music students studied inside glass-enclosed structures, bent over their instruments like the mediæval women over their tapestries, their dark-clad bowed bodies reflected in the gleaming glass above and around them as they sang their scales, tuned their instruments, practiced. She heard the music now, faintly, in the distance, the voice of a soprano – Almina, the sleepwalker, clad all in white – singing an aria from La sonnambula. The fog was swirling in, circling around the gaslights, darkening the room, blurring the boundaries, thickening the edges out of focus as if in the moments before sleep, and she saw shapes in these, as she saw shapes in clouds. It was – indeed – like having clouds there inside the room. The fog had got into the house, all right, confusing the eyes, confounding the mind, and the fallen clouds had smothered with their shifting shapes.

  This was what she saw all the time when she removed her spectacles and everything became misty. She had bad eyes. They were eyes that saw bad things, things that weren’t really there.

  Lead us not into temptation.

  Forgive us our sins.

  Wash away our iniquities.

  5

  Saturday morning fog.

  Mist rolling up the Hudson.

  Shapes in the clouds.

  It was a few weeks after Mary Benedict had departed with her family for Lac Qui Parle.

  Mama was in her own room, the door purposefully closed. Dr. Twemlow had already been that morning, and would be there again. Alice would soon – very soon – have a baby brother or sister, just like Charlotte had Linnaeus, and Myrtle Comstock had Oliver. Allegra and Edith were at Grandmama’s and Grandpapa’s, and she had luxuriated in their absence. She had been practicing on the piano under the eyes of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, quietly, thinking of Mama. She would go and fetch the sheet music she had put on one side to loan to Charlotte.

  It had been the music for “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” – then a fairly recent song – in a collection with other James Bland songs, the one from which Mama had been playing the night before, the one with “Oh Dem Golden Slippers,” the one with the cover illustration of the monstrous caricatured man and woman with the small sharp teeth and crocodile-jawed boots. Her revulsion at the illustration had come later. She had no recollection of its having made any impression upon her at the time. The book – in any case – was probably folded back to a particular song, with the cover illustration hidden. All that mattered was the music and the words. “Oh Dem Golden Slippers” was not a song Mama played with any frequency.

  Alice, as she picked up the sheet music, had found herself at the back window of the schoolroom. She looked up toward Hudson Heights. All morning, the bluffs had been shrouded in fog, and as she watched, they began to reappear – little by little – reclaimed from vagueness as the mists faded. She looked up and became aware of something missing, a gap in the sky. It had been a little while before she realized what had happened.

  The tower of the Shakespeare Castle was no longer there. It had been a Potemkin palace – built of paper, built of ice, beautiful but transitory – to surprise and delight Catherine the Great. The paper – an appropriate image – had been ripped and torn down, destroyed by the winds; the glittering pleasure domes and pillars of ice had melted away into rippled pools, a dirty detritus of gold and red paints muddied together into a desolate nothingness.

  She stared for a while, wondering if her eyes had become even worse than usual overnight, and polished the lenses of her spectacles, thinking that might help. She focused carefully, as if there was just one stubborn area of fog that was refusing to move, hoping that the tower might spring back into being with a snap, like a mirage in the desert taking detailed form, studying the blurred, shifting sky as intently as if – even then – she was seeking for shapes in the clouds. The tower, however, remained not there, and smoke was billowing up from above the trees. Alice thought of all the possible permutations of literature contained in thirty-seven pinkish panels.

  She came to a decision.

  “I’m venturing unto yon Hudson Heights, to espy Mistress Charlotte, O menial one,” she informed Annie, who was arranging some drooping white flowers in a vase in the parlor. Mama usually arranged flowers, but Mama had done little in recent weeks, made fragile by the carefulness needed in carrying an unborn child. Even the weight of a flower might be too heavy for her to lift. Alice had known where to find Annie. She had listened at the fireplace in the schoolroom, and heard her singing.

  Annie made an elaborate curtsy, and assumed an expression of vacuous servility.

  “Verily, your ladyship. Wouldst thou honor mine humble self by accepting a simple token of my esteem?”

  Annie held out a pleasingly mediæval-looking hothouse lily, her head bowed, abashed to gaze into the splendor of the face of the lady of the manor, the Lady Alice.

  “It p-p-pleaseth me well,” Alice informed her, with an imperious gesture, and took the lily. She had been cultivating her imperious mien for some time, and Annie was always willing to abase herself before it. “Thou hast done well, O simple but loyal p-p-peasant.”

  “Verily, I am not so enthusiastic about the use of the word ‘simple,’” Annie added.

  “… your ladyship,” Alice corrected her.

  “Verily, I am not so enthusiastic about the use of the word ‘simple’, your ladyship.”

  “It seemeth to me the p-p-perfect choice of adjective for one as low as thou art.”

  “And few could be lower, your ladyship.”

  Annie warmed to her rôle, once they got going.

  “How true that is. Farewell, menial but p-p-pleasing p-p-peasant.”

  “Farewell, your ladyship. Cook hath prepared thy favorite viands for the banquet. Be not late.”

  “I shall return in good time, and in splendor. P-P-Perchance I shall encounter thee again this day.”

  “Verily.” Annie tended to overdo the verilys, but her curtsies were splendid.

  Holding her
lily, and a copy of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” – she was humming “There’s where the cotton and the corn and taters grow” – Alice swept from the room, out through the front door, and up past the orchards toward Hudson Heights, and the pillar of smoke by day.

  And the ruins of the Shakespeare Castle.

  6

  The gates were wide open, and she walked through them to find herself amid ruins, walking into the remains of Thornfield Hall, and within her memories of Jane Eyre. She looked with timorous joy toward a stately home; she saw a blackened ruin. No need to cower behind a gatepost, indeed! – to peep up at chamber lattices, fearing life was astir behind them! No need to listen for doors opening – to fancy steps on the pavements or the gravel walk! The lawn, the grounds were trodden and waste: the portal yawned void. The front was, as she had once seen it in a dream, but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking, perforated with paneless windows: no roof, no battlements, no chimneys – all had crashed in.

  For a moment she had a picture of Reynolds Templeton Seabright on the roof, standing, waving his arms above the battlements, shouting – some of the more declamatory passages from King Lear might have been a good choice of text – his hair streaming against the flames as he stood, giving his very last performance. Then she realized, after a while, that the castle had not been destroyed in a fire. It was being demolished, rapidly and methodically, and this must have been going on for weeks. Timbers were lined up along a low wall, organized in size and usability, and other materials were stacked all around the wreckage of the garden: tiles, bricks, paving, but not the windows, not the panels. Scavengers had been waiting to pounce, besiegers to burst through defenses.

  The smoke was billowing out of a huge bonfire in the middle of where the topiary had been, a half-blackened ragged knight rearing through the haze. There was no sound of peacocks. They were probably barbecuing on spits at the bonfire, an exotic feast for the workmen, of whom there was – she noted – no sign. They must have just left. They had probably gone to find some fine wine to complement their newly acquired taste for peacock flesh. They’d sit there with the feathers stuck attractively in their hair (bold pioneers of the æsthetic movement), youthful King Lears with peacock feathers instead of flowers, munching on meat. The whole place seemed abandoned to ruin and destruction, as sacked as Troy.

  For the first time, she walked up the shallow flight of steps, and through the flung-open front doors. For the first time she walked on the decorative tiles of the hallway she had never seen before, open to the sky, and broken glass crunched under her feet. She looked up to where the tower had been. In the late afternoons and evenings of fall and winter, the setting sun had caught and reddened the glass in its windows and she had looked up at them. The windows had been of leaded stained glass, and it had been difficult to make out what the figures in them had been from a distance. They were too high up. She’d always meant to ask to borrow the Finches’ telescope, and now it was too late. The arches had been clouded in greens, reds, and blues, like the high windows of All Saints’, the figures taking on the luminescent radiance of saints or angels.

  She was walking on the fragments of the stained glass, the narrow sad-eyed Burne-Jones and Rossetti faces, the flowing hair and gesturing hands, the attenuated bodies of Imogen, Titania, Hermione, Portia, unidentifiable faces and figures. All around her were the broken pieces of the panels, the scattered figures, and – she knew with certainty – they would not be there for much longer: Juliet, on her balcony, like a prisoner behind bars, but no Romeo; Henry the Fifth’s head; Antony reaching out to embrace a dismembered Cleopatra; Prospero without his staff. She wandered round the shattered walls and through the devastated interior. Winter snows had drifted through that void arch, winter rains beaten in at those hollow casements, upon those drenched piles of rubbish, those stones and fallen rafters like a desecrated church.

  She imagined Rochester in the ruins. She knew that Jane found him at Ferndean Manor, but she thought of him as at Thornfield Hall, sitting unseen in the cool darkness. His blindness, his mutilation, would be hidden in the shifting shadows thrown by the branches of the trees. The fire had destroyed the hall at harvest-time the previous year, but the trees had been growing amidst the ruins for years, and their leaves hissed, sea-like, wave-like, as the wind blew in from the Hudson through the blackened and broken walls and the crumbled mullions. Rochester would emerge stumblingly, advancing slowly and gropingly, pausing, as if he knew not which way to turn. To him all was void darkness. He seemed to wish by touch to gain an idea of what lay around him: he met but vacancy still. He tried to walk about: vainly – all was too uncertain. He stood quiet and mute in the rain now falling fast on his uncovered head.

  Fragments of partially burned paper fell down on her from the bonfire, a blizzard from a blazing library, flames roaring up walls of books. She picked a piece from her shoulder, charred but readable. …The sun/Has turn’d to ice! – There is a haze in the sky,/Chilly and thick, that ne’er will clear away!/The earth is wither’d grass, leaves, flowers, and all! … This seemed very apposite. Perhaps Mrs. Alexander Diddecott was right. This was one of the ways she had – there were many – of discovering what the future had to bring. She would open a book at random – the Bible was the best choice – and read the message lying there for her within. Mrs. Albert Comstock probably utilized Marie Corelli novels. Alice had tried this once with the Bible, but the message – …The families of the Gershonites shall pitch behind the tabernacle westward. And the chief of the house of the father of the Gershonites shall be Eliasaph the son of Lael … – had not been very helpful. She seemed to have wandered into Carlo Fiorelli statuary territory. She caught another piece of paper as it floated down in front of her. …Hold on, old Robert! That’s the mood! Hold on! Rail at her! Spurn her! Curse her! Drive her mad! … Hmm. Not very encouraging. The next fragment that fell seemed to be the handwritten opening of a story, “Templeton the Phrenologist”. It was the winter of 18-—, and I found myself …

  She stood there in the ruins amidst the broken figures, the shattered glass, with the burned pieces of paper falling upon her. She was filled with an urge to rescue something, but there seemed to be too much to do, and she did not know where to start. What was still there would not be there for much longer. Her imperious mien would have to be at its mienest. The workmen would soon return, and she wanted no witnesses to what she was going to do.

  She went back out through the gates and set out for the Finches’ house, further along the Heights, running, still clutching the lily and the sheet music, her hair and shoulders confettied with blackened paper, a guest fleeing a sad wedding. She tried to hold her lily in the style adopted by the angel hoisting Little Nell in the final illustration in The Old Curiosity Shop. The tiny, nervous-looking waist-high angel in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin stood alongside a lily that was as tall as he was. It was placed in a vase on top of a stack of huge books, rigidly upright. Dante Gabriel Rossetti seemed to have a supply of sturdy specimens. Lilies, too often – especially in warm rooms (though there was hardly this excuse here and now) – drooped sloppily over, dragged down by the weight of their heads, like ill-postured pale consumptives, like – indeed – pale-faced, thin-limbed angels. Those haloes could be heavy. Perhaps they were singing the song she was singing now. She visualized the stiff-stemmed lily being utilized as a baton, keeping strict time in the heavenly choir. They were carrying Little Nell back to Old Virginny, to the cotton and the corn and the taters. What a surprise that would be for her. “Taters!” she would exclaim, as her eyes fluttered open to glimpse her first view of heaven. “The very things of which I dreamed!” (Dreaming of potatoes, brings incidents often of good.)

  “Carry me back to old Virginny,

  There’s where the cotton and the corn and the taters grow,

  There’s where the birds warble sweet in the spring-time …”

  There were no birds singing now. The sedge had wither’d from the lake, and no birds
sang. (To dream of rotting potatoes, denotes vanished pleasure and a darkening future.) Here – near the ruins of a castle – was where she would meet a knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering, dreaming of pale kings and princes, pale warriors. She could be a Belle Dame sans Merci if the need arose – well, perhaps not very Belle, but most decidedly sans Merci – holding her lily with emblematic coolness, like a drawn weapon.

  “Have at thee, varlet!”

  She made merciless thrusts with the flapping white-fleshed flower.

  Verily.

  “… Carry me back to old Virginny,

  There let me live till I wither and decay,

  Long by the old Dismal Swamp have I wandered …”

  She and Charlotte were singing the same song as they emerged from Delft Place ten minutes later, side by side, pushing Linnaeus’s baby carriage with no Linnaeus inside, running back toward the ruins of the Shakespeare Castle. Any witnesses would have feared for the imperiled speeding infant they supposed was inside. When Mama produced her baby brother or baby sister, she and Charlotte could have races with the baby carriages. It must have been then that she first had the idea of reenacting a scene from the Reverend Goodchild’s awful (but Alice-free) novel The Curse of the Colosseum (1876), the two chariots hurtling round in front of the baying crowds of Ancient Romans. The only things worse than Ancient Romans – in the poison-soaked, stab-mutilated world of the Reverend Goodchild’s novels – were modern Romans.

  “Hasten unto the castle!” Alice cried, still thinking of her conversation with Annie.

  “Pray heaven we come not too late!” Charlotte could pick up a cue quickly.