Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  She picked up her night light and cautiously moved closer to the window that looked out from the front of the house, a lull in the storm suggesting for a moment that even the forces of nature quailed before the power of Lizzie Galliant. She saw her reflection glowing in the darkness of the window when she drew back the drapes, and realized that the tapping on the window was a snowstorm.

  She shaded the light and peered outside into Chestnut Street, her forehead against the cold glass. In the circles of light from the gas-lamps, huge flakes dizzyingly gusted and spun, and miniature drifts had formed upon the windowsill and in the corners of the window. Then she saw, lying on the sill, up against the glass like someone seeking refuge, a tiny red bird, a little tropical flame of warmth, its claws tightly gripped to prevent itself from crying out. Emboldened by the temporary cessation of the wind, she hurriedly opened the window, and reached through the bars to pick up the almost weightless scrap of color.

  Back in her bed, the window closed again, and the drapes tightly drawn, she – with a vague memory of something she had read or heard – placed the little corpse within the bosom of her nightgown. It had been as cold as a glacier-smoothed pebble, recovered after years buried deep within the ice. For several hours she had lain awake, like a young nursing mother, still, hardly daring to move, thinking that the warmth of her body might bring it back to life. It was what Lizzie Galliant would have done. A little pool of water gathered in the hollow at the base of her neck, and wet the edge of her gown.

  She was awoken suddenly by a tremendous crash, and leaped up in her bed as the wind screamed around the nursery.

  The wind will get you.

  She felt something leap within her breast, a tremendous beating of wings, confusedly remembered the red bird, and clutched at the front of her gown. Suddenly they had become huge wings, the wings of an eagle or a swan beating in her face, leaping up and away from her, blundering about the room, crashing against the mirror and thudding into the walls, sweeping the Shakespeare Castle figures and the fragments of glass to the floor with a smash, sweeping down the fallen golden stars, a sense of swarming shadows, the sound of deafening wings. The wind howled again, and she arched back against her pillows, the wings pounding against her chest. Then she realized that the pounding, the beating, was from within herself, was the pounding of her own frightened heart, and that the bird was dead – had been dead ever since she had lifted it into the room – its torn red feathers strewn all down the front of her nightgown and across her sheets.

  She began to pick at the red feathers down the white front of her nightgown – so many feathers for so small a bird – and found that what she thought were feathers was in fact blood. During her sleep – perhaps in holding the small body, fragile as an egg, comfortingly against herself, perhaps in unknowingly convulsing as the sound of the renewed storm increased – she had crushed it. The blood was everywhere, and the little corpse – seemingly made entirely of blood – had disappeared in a spray of redness.

  Holding her hands away from herself, a feeling that it was they that were stained, they that would mark what she wore (though they were clean, it was what she wore that was soiled), she slid out of bed on the side toward the squat, windblown candle. She was drawn toward the light, and made herself sit still for a moment, trying to decide which of the noise was from outside the house, and which of it was from inside herself. Gradually, her breathing and her heartbeat steadied, though looking at the rapid flickering of the little flame made her want to breathe more quickly. As she bent toward it, long shadows bowed around the walls and in the mirror. The fire was now ashes, burned out by the intensity of the wind, and the room was very cold.

  She didn’t call for Lizzie Galliant again. The right time had not yet come. There would be another time, a worse time, and then would be the time to call for her, the time for the two of them to face the stern summoner side by side, the time when strong men would fall powerless before them, and beards would burst into flame and flare wondrously. She held out her hands a little, palms upraised, to feel a faint warmth from distant flames.

  Annie.

  Alice picked up her night light, and moved toward the door. There was such a downdraft from the chimney as she passed the fireplace that she shielded the candle, and hunched protectively around it. The snow would come down there first and advance into the room, creeping forward, accumulating in the corners …

  Annie …

  She had not done this before, but she had not been alone in the house at night before with Annie.

  She wanted Annie to cover her warm, to pray to the angels to keep her from harm. She wanted Annie to tenderly kiss her, to fondly caress her. She wanted to fall gently to sleep on her breast, deeply to sleep from the heaven of her breast.

  She had read about it.

  Now she wanted to do it.

  She began to make her way downstairs. On the landings the storm seemed to be all around her. The night light gave such a small area of illumination. She could barely see down to her feet moving on the stairs, and had to feel her way downward. The house was a different place in darkness. She ought to have lighted a lamp. There were no colors on the stairs, no colors anywhere. She should close her eyes, find out what sleepwalking was like, gain an insight into Lady Macbeth, and impress Charlotte by her knowledge. Charlotte was a good friend, and always prepared to be impressed.

  “This is ‘slumb’ry agitation,’” she thought. It was always satisfying when words left the page and became real.

  “‘She has light by her continually; ’tis her command.’”

  That was another example. She was conscious of visualizing two sets of quotation marks for this sentence as she thought of herself speaking it, but there should only be one. The words had ceased to be an extract from a text; they had become a description of what she herself felt.

  She couldn’t rub her hands together without putting the night light down on the stairs, and she didn’t want to do that.

  “Yet here’s a spot.” There were many of those. She was a guilty woman after a bloody death. One set of quotation marks.

  “Wash the blood-stains from your fingers,” she chanted, interposing a little Longfellow into the Shakespeare. “Bury your war-clubs and your weapons.”

  The tiles of the hall, and then of the kitchen, were cold under her feet. She could feel the edges of the individual tiles, the rough lines of cement between the smooth tiles. She slid the soles of her feet about, trying to see if she could distinguish between white tiles and black, and feel which color was the colder. She imagined that the white ought to be the colder, the slippier. It was as if she was walking a great distance across a sheet of ice. She ought to be holding her hands in front of her if she was sleepwalking, but she held them out to the side, like a novice skater taking her first tentative steps out onto a frozen lake. Would she have been able to read words painted on the tiles with the tender skin at the sides of her feet, in the way that her fingers had traced the raised or incised letters of a gravestone?

  Infant Daughter of Lincoln and Lucinda Pinkerton.

  She slid the soft rounded edges of her feet – first one, then the other – gently across the cold surface in a long looping curve, attempting to balance herself preparatory to Mary Benedictine balletic cavortings.

  And by and by a cloud takes all away.

  You and I are past our dancing days.

  I know thee not, old man.

  The raised candle flame was reflected in the dimly visible cups and plates of the dresser, and in the glass of the kitchen clock.

  It ticked sonorously. When you couldn’t see properly, sounds were louder.

  “One, two; why then ’tis time to do’t.”

  One set of quotation marks.

  “Annie …”

  She started to say the name far too early, and said it so quietly that Annie would not have heard her in any case, but – as she felt when she called the name of Lizzie Galliant – she felt stronger for saying it. She wanted Annie t
o know that it was she who was coming, so that she would not hear a knock on her door, and think that it was Papa, come to take her out to die in a Sea of Coldness on the way to the Celestial City. It was a frozen sea in which the multitudes of the damned – their heads diminishing away into a distance too far to see – were enclosed in the ice up to their nostrils, unable to cry out, unable to call the name of someone who would come and save them. Their eyes were full of despair, of realization that this was what eternity would be like; this was all they would ever know, ever again.

  Hell is murky.

  No quotation marks.

  “Annie …”

  She had a name to call. She had someone who would save her. She would not cry out, “Help!” The word she would call would be “Annie.”

  She held the night light closer to her face, to prevent ice from forming in front of her mouth, inside her mouth, so that she could go on calling. There was a slight warmth, enough to free a Northwest Passage through the Arctic wastes. The center of the stumpy candle had all been burned away, and there was a thin, almost transparent, glowing wall of wax around the flame. She held it close to her eyes. It was like the moment when the surface of a long-frozen lake was on the point of dissolving into liquid. Anyone who tried to walk upon it would plunge through into darkness, icy coldness.

  Annie’s room was off a little corridor that ran away from the kitchen. Alice could see the outline of the door illuminated by candlelight from inside. Even though the wind was not quite so violent lower down, it was still keeping Annie awake. Good. She hadn’t liked the thought of approaching a door in darkness. If she had frightened Annie in awakening her, she would have frightened herself further.

  “Annie …”

  She said it again, louder.

  “Annie …”

  It was as if there were other people in the house, sleeping, and she could not raise her voice above a certain level.

  “Annie, it’s m-m-me, Alice …”

  She walked closer toward the thin flickering lines of light.

  Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

  No quotation marks at all.

  19

  Ten years or so later, a dark early morning during another storm, this nighttime scene had come into Alice’s head when she had pushed open the door of Papa’s study to find Papa’s body after he had killed himself.

  The 1888 blizzard had started the week before her twentieth birthday. Mama, and her brother and sisters, had been spending the weekend at Grandpapa and Grandmama’s, and had expected to return home on the Monday morning. The storm had started as Monday had started, and they had not managed to reach home through the snowdrifts and blocked roads until several days later, summoned by the news of a death.

  In the early hours of the Monday morning, as on the night when the birds were killed, Alice was awoken by the sound of a storm, though it was a storm far worse than the earlier one had been. In the glow of the night light – she still had a nightlight – she had looked at the time on her pocket-watch as it hung on its stand – three forty-eight, the minute hand edging towards the X – and gone back to sleep. She had been writing into the early hours, vaguely aware of the sound of the storm, and had fallen asleep only an hour or so earlier. Some hours later, she had woken again, and walked over to the window looking out from the back of the house. She had, for years now, kept all drapes firmly closed, to keep out the darkness (it would be a long time yet before she began to leave them open), and she bobbed down a little, to stand up inside the little covered space with the drapes resting against her back, the cold glass in front of her. It must feel like this for a photographer, bent over under his focusing cloth, about to take a winter photograph of bare trees. There was – she discovered, as she attempted to look out – no view to capture on this side of the house, no counting up to three or five. There was nothing to see. It would have been difficult enough at night in normal circumstances – there were no street lights yet on that side; it was still all fields and orchards – but the panes of the window were encrusted with snow that looked packed thick enough to keep out daylight. If she hadn’t seen the time on her watch – it was now a few minutes past six – heard that it was ticking, she would have experienced the slightly suffocating feeling that it was broad daylight, and all the windows of the house – the whole of the interior like the bottom of a well, all light excluded – blocked by snow.

  The fire was still glowing, and she added more coal before she walked across to the mansard window at the front, and, standing behind the drapes as she had done before, she was enclosed in a little alcove with a seat. She always felt like ten-year-old Jane Eyre at the beginning of the novel when she did this, a child needing to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner. Until she could speak pleasantly, she should remain silent, cross-legged like a Turk in the window seat, hidden behind red moreen curtains, studying a book with descriptions of the death-white realms of the Arctic Zone, those forlorn regions of dreary space, that reservoir of frost and snow, those firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winter, those scenes that were so like the scenes hidden deep inside herself, ice frozen for so long, and at so low a temperature, that it would never melt, the glass-like splinter of ice lodged within the heart.

  The scenes from the book, the scenes from inside Jane’s head, were the scenes outside the window, the white pages ripped from a book that never ended, and flung out to bury an entire landscape. A tremendous blinding snowstorm was raging down from the north, had been raging for some time, enveloping and burying the countryside. It was one of those great natural phenomena – like witnessing a comet or a meteorite shower – when those who saw it felt that they had to go on watching, because what they were seeing was so spectacularly out of the ordinary. Perhaps this was how people reacted during earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, unable to tear themselves away as the buildings collapsed upon them, the ash buried them, hypnotized and destroyed by the most intense moment of their lives, memorizing what they were seeing, believing that they would be talking about it for years to come, made interesting by what had happened to them. That was how they had died at Pompeii – arms guarding their heads, reaching out toward safety, rehearsing the words of witness that they would never speak – their whole lives reduced to the eternal gestures of their silenced bodies. The snow was not so much falling – the flakes were huge, flakes to bury, to smother, spinning and unfolding like leaves, they seemed to slow down time – as being hurled against the houses like a barrage of missiles by the gale.

  “The tumultuous privacy of storm,” she thought, enfolded in the little space between the drapes and the window, the pocket of silence. This was what Ralph Waldo Emerson must have experienced, to make him write those words.

  She sat on the window seat and watched the red-stained snow surge through Prospero’s cloak, and accumulate in red drifts against the house, across where Chestnut Street had been the previous day. The cloak vibrated slightly, and there was a humming, like a wineglass on a high note. You wet your fingertip, and circled round and round the rim, faster and faster. Mrs. Alexander Diddecott and Mrs. Italiaander reversed a wine-glass, and pressed their fingers against the upturned base. The wineglass slid with a squeaky sound across the polished surface of the table, faster and faster around the glass-enclosed white plaster arm in the center, impelled by a force outside the control of the lightly resting fingers. It spun from letter to letter of the alphabet spread out on cards in a circle around it, a concentric shape within the circle of the table, spelling out troubling, riddling Delphic messages from beyond. The sliding discordant stridency of the glass rim spelled out imperfect messages like flawed chalk, when the downward or the upward strokes did not mark the blackboard. The messages were elaborately analyzed, searched for secret messages. No harm. I have done nothing but in care of thee, of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter. The blood-colored snow piled high.

  The snow – wit
h the direction in which the gale was blowing – should have been drifting up against the opposite side of Chestnut Street (as it was, all the steps up to the front doors on that side of the street were already covered), but it was funneling round onto their side. Through the howling of the wind, she could hear a high-pitched humming – shriller than the sound made by the vibrating glass in the window – that kept changing in pitch.

  BEWARE, the wineglass message spelled out, sliding rapidly across from letter to letter with its piercing chalk-on-blackboard shriek. DANJER. DARKNES. The cards were always arranged – it was a little hushed ritual, Mrs. Italiaander clutching her necklace – in the same order, solemnly positioned around the table in a counterclockwise direction as if they were playing cards being dealt out before a game with high stakes. The little loosely curled white fingers of Archer Italiaander Junior always pointed – discreetly indicating a private communication – at the letter M. MAMA. Was that what he was saying? His mama did not seem to notice, but each time the fingers silently pointed. DETH. BLUD. That’s what the wineglass spelled out, but M was the real, the hidden message, the one that no one but she had noticed. They always drank red wine from the glasses first – it gave an uncomfortably holy communion sort of feeling to the ceremony – and some was always left in the glasses, dribbling down slowly as they were inverted, and leaving long wet streaks, quicksilver-like with their curved rims, across the polished table as they slid from place to place. It was like another hidden message – in handwriting this time – as the curved outer surfaces of the loops and swirls and beads of redness scribbled out across the table and caught the dim light.