Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  At the bottom of the steps, she paused. There was something wrong. She had known it when she first came down, and she had ignored it.

  She stopped to listen.

  It was partly something to do with sound.

  She thought of placing the ewer on the side of the bottom step, but held it against herself, both arms wrapped around it as if she needed to feel the warmth. She turned around, straining to see, and the candle-flame blew horizontally, almost snuffed out. She had to put the ewer down after all, doing it with extreme care, as if the stair was not level, and the jug might slide off. She was holding the candle in her left hand, and when she turned around, she cupped her right hand around the jumping, fluttering flame.

  It was partly something to do with what she could see, what she could feel.

  She held the candle higher, near the side of her head, peering forward, and it seemed that her cupped hand was protecting her eyes from the too-close flame, as much as it was protecting the flame from the draft, the distinct draft that was almost extinguishing it. She took a step forward, and then another, straining to see in the darkness, the reflected light in front of her confusing her sense of distance, confounding the near and the far. She concentrated to see so fiercely that little white stars pinged in the blackness of the hall, and she felt that it was snowing inside the house, pulsating pinpoint flakes suspended in the air in front of her.

  For a moment – only a moment – she thought that she was imagining this, but then she realized that it was really there.

  Her bare feet were walking through snow.

  It was snowing inside the house.

  She felt as if she had not slept all night through – concentrating unblinkingly on the white blankness of the drifting snow outside throughout the night – and this made her feel lightheaded, her surroundings become unreal and distant, retreating as she moved closer to them, a faint rising ringing sound in her ears. It was like the seconds immediately before a faint.

  The feet were moving. She watched them. Bare feet, like a penitent’s.

  They were her feet.

  She looked down, and behind her, seeing her footprints leading to her from the foot of the stairs, the imprint of her feet distinct in a thin layer of snow across the tiles, so close, so far away. It was her footprints in the snow – circling around and around Pettifar’s Orphanage, The House of the Magdalenes, and the North River Lunatic Asylum – never erased by later falls of snow, later sun, in all the years between.

  “Do you hear the snow against the window-panes, Kitty? How nice and soft it sounds!”

  This was what Alice had said to the black kitten, just before she had climbed up onto the chimney-piece and through the looking-glass. The snow this morning sounded anything but nice and soft, felt anything but nice and soft. In front of her, it was becoming deeper. It was moving, she realized, it was moving toward her. She stood still for a while, and felt wind against her feet and the lower part of her legs, felt the snow slowly accumulating. She would walk on, and into deeper and deeper snow, drifts inside the house like the ashes burying Pompeii. She would look up, and as the morning gradually lightened to a dull grayness, the snow would be black against the sky, flakes large enough and blown fiercely enough to hurt the eyes and blur the vision, like the windblown leaves at the Shakespeare Castle, the Celestial City. Her limbs, her body, would gradually be numbed as she sank down, stoned like St. Stephen. On the feast of Stephen she sank into the snow, lost, buried within the whiteness.

  Deep.

  Crisp.

  Even.

  Brightly shone the moon.

  It was coming from the direction of Papa’s study.

  She moved forward, through the deepening snow, like a paddler on a winter beach heading for the sea. There was a gap between the bottom of the study door and the tiled floor – they had to remember to be quiet when Papa worked in there – and the snow was being blown through this into the hall from the study, this room the source of coldness, the Snow Queen’s palace that froze the hidden chambers of the heart. Now that she was nearer, she could see the outline of the door illuminated by a flickering light from inside, too strong to be from a candle. The door seemed to strain in time with the gusts of wind from outside, and with each gust more snow was blown beneath it, and – she noticed – through the keyhole. A bank of snow had accumulated in the corner to one side, and there was snow right the way across the hall to the door of the front parlor.

  Behind that other door, Faithful would be waiting, still faithful after ten years and more. He’d always be there, always waiting, after ten years, after twenty, after twenty-five. He would turn to face her, half frozen, ice in his hair and eyes, looking yearning and hopeful (though Hopeful was in the other room), and she’d watch as the yearning and the hopefulness rapidly died.

  “You’re not one of the girls from the statue,” he’d say, disappointed and accusing. “You can’t be Alice.”

  He’d hold up his ice-covered hands to prevent her entrance, to drive her away. His eyes were iced over, and he gazed blindly, his head not turned at quite the right angle for seeing, not seeing yet knowing what it was he saw.

  “You’re too old.”

  It was toward the other door, the study door, that she leaned her head.

  “P-P-Papa …”

  She said it again, louder.

  “P-P-Papa …”

  She waited to hear a reply.

  She waited for “P-P-P.”

  20

  “Annie …”

  She said it again, louder.

  “Annie.”

  She waited to hear a reply.

  She thought for a moment, and then an idea occurred to her.

  “Annie, where art thou?” she sang.

  Annie would have heard the way that Charlotte greeted her.

  “Annie, where art thou?”

  The light quivered all around the door, seemingly on the point of being blown out into darkness. She cupped her hand around the night light, so that the illumination from the door would appear brighter. Most light spilled from beneath the door, and she moved her bare feet into the little pool of brightness, to warm them. One birthday-cake whoosh of breath, one wish, and the tiny candlelit area would be gone.

  “One year back this even …”

  Annie spoke the line, and her voice was so close; she was standing on the other side of the door, her head pressed against it as Alice’s was. The wood vibrated minutely, like the resonant fragile body of a violin. There would be a soundhole on either side of her head, inclined inward, one like an elongated “f” on her left-hand side, and one like a reversed drawn-out “s,” those old-fashioned esses in Shakespeare, with a horizontal line through the middle like an “f,” or a European “7,” on her right-hand side. Light would glow through them from some miniature inner room, close to the heart of the music.

  “… And thou wert by my side …”

  She spoke, also. The two of them spoke the alternate lines to the end of the first verse, conducting a conversation.

  “… And thou wert by my side …”

  “… Vowing to love me …”

  “… One year past this even …”

  “… And thou wert b-b-by my side …”

  “… Vowing to love me, Alice …”

  It was Annie who spoke the last line, and as she spoke it she pulled the door open. She had still used the name “Alice” in the words of the song, even though Alice had changed it to “Annie.” For the first time, Alice saw Annie’s room, and didn’t know what to say. She had not planned that far ahead. She ought to say something about the way in which they seemed to have been avoiding each other, the way they had stopped talking, stopped finding the meanings of dreams, the words of songs.

  “… Whate’er might betide,” she continued, after too long a pause, the next line of the song, and then added, “Annie …”

  “I art here,” Annie said, in answer to the question that Alice had sung.

  “Did I wake yo
u?” It was a silly question to ask, but she could think of nothing else. What would she say if Annie said yes? (Should she have said, “Didst I wake thee?”?)

  Annie didn’t say yes.

  “I was awake,” she said. “I was thinking.”

  She noticed the front of Alice’s nightgown.

  “Bloodstains,” she said. “Cold water. Salt.”

  She sounded like a maidservant who had been summonsed to obey her mistress’s command in the middle of the night, called out to solve an urgent problem with the laundry. Cold water and salt would have cleansed away the nightmares from Lady Macbeth, soothed away the candlelit walking in darkness, the rubbing of the hands. Cold tears from deep within her would have washed away the blood. The tears would not have been warm. They would not have fixed the stains irremovably in the hands. A little cold weeping would clear her of the deed. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s done can be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed. There she would sleep in dreamless sleep, curled up like a tired baby.

  Without the weeping there would be an eternity of sleeplessness.

  Weep, and then sleep.

  Weep, weep, weep, and be well.

  In silence, they watched as a red feather – it must have been caught up in Alice’s hair – floated down between them, spiraling around and around. It danced for a moment in the heated air above the night light, and then – like another small, doomed bird, an exotic moth – it fell into the flame, hissed briefly, and ceased to exist. There was no flare, no little spurt of light like a struck match. It just melted away.

  “Burned feather,” Annie said, as the acrid smell passed fleetingly between them, as short-lived as the sound of the hiss. “I won’t faint now.”

  She was pointing at the bloodstains. Alice doubted that Annie would ever have been in danger of fainting at the sight of blood, even without the smell of burning feathers. She was too practical, too down-to-earth, and would have stepped over massed piles of swooning Mrs. Goodchilds and Mrs. Albert Comstocks (more of a running jump than a step would be required for this latter obstacle; that, and a carefully angled springboard) in search of cold water and salt, in order to wash away the stains, resolutely failing to recognize any need to denude passing parrots of their plumage.

  Annie grasped Alice’s face gently, and peered closely at her nose, her mouth, searching for the source of the blood. Her breath smelled of tooth powder. She was wearing a fresh nightgown, and there were two sharp creases down the front – like shoulder straps – where she had ironed it. There was a smell of lavender, like something newly unwrapped, the way Mama sometimes smelled.

  She pressed the fingers of both her hands against the sides of Alice’s mouth, to open it up so that she could see inside, and the mouth became a long elongated oval. It was like being examined by a dentist.

  “It was a b-b-bird,” Alice began to explain, as another red feather spiraled down. It sounded like “It was a g-g-gird”; her mouth was so misshapen. It was a large, fluffy feather, almost weightless, and it moved slowly, floating across the air like something on the surface of water. (“Down, down, down the down descended,” Alice thought, experimentally.)

  “A gald gird, obviously,” Annie said, imitating the way she spoke to make her laugh, and not moving her fingers away. “A gald shivering gird.”

  She put one hand on Alice’s back, manipulating her like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and Alice moved jerkily, like Dum-Dum the Dummy.

  “The g-g-glood,” Alice explained. “It’s not my g-g-glood. It’s a g-g-gird’s.”

  “It’s like a murder,” Annie said. “All this glood everywhere.”

  “A very g-g-gloody murder.”

  “You need to wash your mouth out,” Annie said, seemingly shocked by Alice’s venture into controversial language. It made her sound even more like a dentist. She’d be asking her to spit next. There was always something mildly scandalous about being encouraged to spit by an adult, though Annie was no adult.

  The feather continued its slow descent.

  This time, Alice met the descending feather halfway, saving it from the flame, and caught it neatly between her thumb and first finger like the tiniest of fans. Thinking of this image, she raised her head at an aristocratic angle, and fanned genteelly away with the single feather.

  “Your ladyship,” Annie said, seeing her cue, released her hands, and curtseyed deeply.

  It was the first time she had done this for what seemed a long time. Alice looked at the crown of Annie’s bowed head, the hair all tied up with little white bows for bedtime, and – though Annie couldn’t see her – fanned the feather in her direction, a servant hot after hard work and needing cooling. Annie looked up, and – seeing what Alice was doing – closed her eyes, and leaned back at an angle, driven back by the force of a powerful gale.

  It was a room without windows.

  Like Bertha Rochester’s room.

  There should have been a tapestry hung on the wall to conceal the door and the little gleams of light, a keeper to control her and keep her silent.

  She was like something stored away in a cupboard – slightly larger (though not much) than most – like another item of equipment, a sewing machine (she was partly this), or a carpet sweeper (and also partly this). She had placed her candle behind the piece of colored glass from the Shakespeare Castle that Alice had given her, a figure that Alice thought might have been Marina, partly because she was in an attitude of singing, her hands held out before her. She had told Annie the story of Pericles, how at the end Marina had sung to her lost father on board his ship – he not knowing her, she not knowing him – and drawn him back from grief and silence. Music had brought him back to life, as it had brought back to life Pericles’ lost wife, Thaisa, Marina’s lost mother, brought back Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, brought back Lear from madness.

  “What song did she sing?” Annie had asked.

  “It doesn’t give the words. It just says Marina sings.” (“I am a maid/My lord, that ne’er before invited eyes,/But have been gaz’d on like a comet.”)

  “It’s a lovely story, but it’s sad,” Annie had said. “All those lost years.”

  “Fourteen years.”

  “Fourteen.”

  When his daughter was restored to him, Pericles had heard the music of the spheres – the music that Lorenzo and Jessica had been unable to hear, as they sat in the moonlit garden at Belmont – like a man who had been granted immortality, and the muddy vesture of decay had slipped from his mortal body. Soft stillness and the night became the touches of sweet harmony. He had fallen asleep, and seen a vision that had led him to the lost wife, the lost mother.

  A band of blueness was cast across Annie’s narrow bed and partly onto the wall through the glass of Marina’s gown. The color made the air seem colder. The white-painted wooden walls were bare, blue-tinged, and they were inside a room cut into ice, a little square-edged space of shelter contrived inside a glacier. There were no pictures from magazines pinned neatly to the walls, as Alice had once imagined, pictures of faces, faces that were not looking at Annie, but turned away from her, reading books that they held up before them, with a consciousness that they knew things that were unknown to her. She had forgotten her spectacles, and couldn’t see clearly. Everything was hazy. Perhaps it was like this when you couldn’t read. She didn’t know whether she ought to look on Annie’s one private place, but she looked around, memorizing, recognizing the clothes hanging on hooks beside the door. There was the dress Annie had worn when she had gone to see her brother the previous week. Her working clothes hung above the head of the bed, swaying slightly like a lonely suicide. They were both shivering, and Alice started to cough again, doubling up with her hand to her mouth. It really hurt.

  “Come on.”

  She climbed into bed beside Annie. There was not much room in it for the two of them. They were like Lizzie and Laura, the two sisters in “Goblin Market.”

  (“No,” said Lizzie: “No, no, no …”)

/>   “I was looking at Diamond,” Annie said, opening the copy of At the Back of the North Wind that Alice had loaned her. The book had been lying on top of the blue-tinted bedspread. They had to turn almost onto their sides to be able to face each other to talk. “This is the picture I like best.”

  She opened the book at Chapter XVI, the picture of Diamond sitting in an upright wooden chair – the back of his head just reached the top of it – with his baby brother on his knee, singing to him. His arms were wrapped tightly right around the baby as the infant faced him, and he was leaning forward toward him, almost touching foreheads. Behind them was a white-clothed breakfast table, set with a teapot and crockery, and there was a teakettle on the hearth in front of them. It was an image of domestic peace.

  “It’s the only picture in the whole book where he’s smiling,” Annie said. “Had you noticed?”

  This wasn’t true, but she knew what Annie meant. There was a picture of Diamond – still weak after his illness – being carried by his uncle to a pony-cart so that he could be taken down to the seashore for a few hours. The next picture after this one was of Diamond resting his head in his mother’s lap as she read a book on the sand beside the sea. He might have been smiling in both these pictures, also, but they were sad smiles, absent smiles; he was smiling at something else that only he could see, something that was not there, a memory of long ago. In the picture with his brother he was smiling into the baby’s face to make him smile, and there was no one in the world but the two of them. In this picture it was a real smile. In this picture Diamond was not being protected, he was protecting someone else. He sang like someone singing a lullaby.

  (“… And if that diamond ring turns to brass,