She saw them all as sisters.
The Seven Sisters.
Nine, with Allegra and Edith, a threefold set of Weird Sisters, with treble the power, the Dibbo Daughters comprehensively vanquished by their ignominious failure to achieve a full complement of muses. She had been the younger of the twin girls, and her unnamed older sister had died. It would have been the only time that Papa would have shown an interest in gardening, as he laid the bodies beneath the earth, patting down the soil in a way that looked like, but was not, affection, Mr. Spade, the Gardener, burying his children in the darkness. Beside him, assisting him by the flickering light of lanterns, was Mrs. Spade, the Gardener’s Wife, and – the sole surviving offspring – Master Spade, the Gardener’s Son, and Miss Spade, the Gardener’s Daughter. All of them wielded their gardening implements – dirt-encrusted, well used and worn, not new and glinting in the circles of illumination – with the eagerness of Treasure Island fortune seekers. They were Burkes and Hares frantically hiding bodies beneath the soil, not unearthing them to sell, Dante Gabriel Rossettis burying the poems that must never be read, Injun Joes and Muff Potters piling more earth on Hoss Williams’s body as young Dr. Robinson lunged despairingly toward it with his bright dissecting knives, his shadow huge across the gravestones in the moonlight. Papa looked as though he would rather be using his bare hands than a spade, eager to feel the dirt sliding between his fingers and pushing beneath his nails, in the way that she had preferred to grasp weeds when she was gardening, liking the faint tug of resistance from the roots. Sounds would be muffled and furtive: the rattling slide of metal into gravelly ground, hissed whispering. The tiny skeletons would have been like those of chickens after a farmhouse meal, the fragile bones stripped of all flesh.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Years later, after she had read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, remembering these thoughts, she had imagined – in the far corner of the garden, beyond the apple trees – a line of Keelwell’s Marmalade jars, each with its little bunch of flowers, at the head of each grave, as neatly arranged as if they were on a shelf at Comstock’s Comestibles. She should collect all six jars together, and recreate the geometrical exactness of a Comstock’s display, the positioning that of circus tumblers: three jars on the bottom row, two jars on the middle row, and one jar on top. On top of that one, precariously aligned, there would be a seventh jar, her jar. She would be on top. She would be like Pip in Great Expectations, studying the grave of his father and mother, late of this parish, and the five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, that were arranged in a neat row beside it, in memory of his five little brothers. Her thoughts traveled out to the marsh country, down by the river. She saw it as she had seen it many times before, a churchyard that was a bleak place overgrown with nettles in the midst of a dark flat wilderness, and the tiny graves of Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias – without an angel – and Roger. She saw a sixth little lozenge, a sixth tiny grave, the one for her baby sister, the one without a name.
The angel Raphael helped Tobias to overpower the king of the demons, and to marry Sarah.
“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice. “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!” and Magwitch rose up from amongst the graves, the king of the demons returned to seek revenge. “What fat cheeks you ha’ got,” he said. “Darn Me if I couldn’t eat ’em, and if I han’t half a mind to ’t!” He tilted Pip further and further, and the church rolled right over. His heart and his liver would be tore out, roasted and ate. Perhaps if Pip forestalled him, ripped out his own heart and liver and roasted them himself, the awful stench might drive Magwitch away. He’d be heartless and liverless, but otherwise unharmed. It had worked for Tobias with the demon Asmodeus, though the name Tobias on that little stone lozenge was a worry. Perhaps the young man had got him. There was a young man hid with Magwitch, in comparison with which young man he was an Angel. Even the angel had abandoned him, led him down into his grave. The young man had a secret way, pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. A boy might lock his door, might be warm in bed, might tuck himself up, might draw the clothes over his head, might think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man would softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open. He was a Dorian Gray, a Mr. Hyde sort of young man, small in stature, tenacious of purpose, with long thin dangling fingers, artist’s fingers. Magwitch picked his way among the nettles and brambles, eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.
Marcus Stone had illustrated Great Expectations, as he had illustrated Our Mutual Friend. She’d often tried to imagine what the five little gravestones for Pip’s brothers had looked like, but Marcus Stone had not illustrated this scene from the novel. It became very important to see it, but all she could see was an unillustrated whiteness, the graveyard buried beneath untrodden snow. In her mind, the little lozenges became tinier and tinier, the size of cachous to fit into mouths for sucking, to set pink foam dribbling down into beards.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Alice studied the long lists of children who had not survived childhood, carved out on the tombstones of other families, and tried to believe that the Pinkertons were fortunate, with only one acknowledged loss. Charlotte and Linnaeus had two dead little brothers, and a little sister. Some assumed that the more children that were lost, the easier it became with each new death. They were wrong. The Reverend Goodchild, one such assumer, made his feelings clear at funerals with small coffins, rattling through the service at a great rate. Babies couldn’t understand what you were saying, could they? Why take your time?
Next one, please!
Bring on the next one!
There was always a next one.
Quickly!
After she had read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, she had thought back to her secret visits to her sister’s grave when she was a little girl, the time when she had been like Tess Durbeyfield sneaking out in darkness to visit her baby’s grave, the shameful secret buried amongst the nettles in the shabby corner by lantern light, with the drunkards, the suicides, all those that were damned. It was the way Mama had looked – like someone ashamed (there was something wrong that, clearly, was all her fault) – when she had gone (always alone) to the grave with a posy of flowers in her hand, taking a trowel and a wooden basket – there was a special name for it that she couldn’t bring to mind – as if she were going gardening. Gardening was – indeed – what she did, tidying the tiny plot in the corner beside the wall, digging out the moss from the letters in the gravestone with the edge of the metal implement so that they could still be read. Alice, unseen, had followed her, watched her, and found the gravestone that bore her own date of birth, a sister of whom she had never heard, her silent, nameless, stillborn twin.
She saw Dr. Vaniah Odom – flinching fastidiously – leaning over the pinched face of a dead child, scooping his hand down into the blood-filled font, belatedly christening the child without a name.
“Ask, and ye shall have,” he was saying, not making it sound very likely, “seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you …”
He gabbled the words in the same way that he gabbled the words for weddings and funerals (though he enjoyed funerals more), an actor who had grown tired of the part he was playing, speaking the same words over and over, in a run that had gone on for far too long. He was a Reynolds Templeton Seabright weary of gesturing. “I see hell!” he was rumored to have shrieked absentlymindedly at the Comstocks’ wedding as Sibyl lifted her veil, allowing his attention to wander for a small, but vital, moment. He was also the seventh child of a seventh child, a member of the freemasonry of the prophetic, a seer gifted with a special insight into what the future would bring.
Her lost sister had been one of the great secrets of her childhood, something she had not told t
o Charlotte. She had wanted to talk to Mama about it, to ask her about her sister, but Mama had never taken her to see the grave, as she had taken her to Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s. Her sister had never existed.
“So give now unto us that ask; let us that seek find; open the gate unto us that knock …”
They knocked on the green-painted door, and the Reverend and Mrs. Goodchild jack-in-the-boxed out of it, teeth a hard white blur. “Welcome, Pilgrims!” they chanted in unison. “Have your money ready. The Celestial City awaits! This way, Pilgrims! This way!”
Why had they never spoken about her dead sister?
For a while, a particular time, she had gone to stand at the grave, not to talk – she had seen Mama’s lips moving, though she had never been able to make out what it was she was saying – but to stand and look at her own date of birth. Sometimes she had laid her hand upon the stone. It had been a time of the year when the stone had usually been sun-warmed, as it had been on some of the times when she had been searching for Annie, laying the side of her face against the outer walls up on Hudson Heights. She had tried – her hands upon the stone, she had to kneel down to touch it – to feel something, to think that she had already lived and died, that she was a ghost come back to earth.
She tried to think of a name that could be a name for her nameless sister, as she had later tried to think of another name for herself instead of Alice. “Victoria,” she had sometimes said, or Ruth, or Rebecca, or Maggie, or Jo, speaking the name as she touched the stone. If she said the right name, she might bring her sister into being, like Mrs. Alexander Diddecott speaking in a séance, and would hold the tiny speechless baby in her arms. For a while, after she had read The Comedy of Errors, snow on the ground outside the window as she read, the name she spoke had been Alice, summoning herself back from the dead. They were twins, identical in every way, even their names the same. At the very end of the play Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse had at last met the twin brother that each of them had long given up for lost. Dromio of Ephesus had taken his brother’s hand, refusing to walk in front of him. “We came into the world like brother and brother,” he had said to him, “/And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.” They were the last words spoken in the play.
Linnaeus would not be rising. The Reverend Goodchild had not allowed him to be buried at All Saints’ because he thought there was something ambiguous – that was his choice of adjective – about his death. He had refused point-blank when Charlotte begged him, so that Linnaeus could be buried with his parents. “Ambiguous …” he had repeated. “Ambiguous …” – the dot-dot-dot was unspoken, but audible, inviting her to answer an unasked question in the lingering silence after the word had been spoken – and he had scarcely showed his teeth at all when he said it. “No. Quite out of the question.” There had been nothing whatever ambiguous about what he had to say, or of the manner of his saying it. The place for Linnaeus would have been amongst the empty marmalade jars, a place of nettles where the damned were, the uncared-for corner where Sunday visitors dumped dead flowers as they tended graves and where the untrimmed branches of the trees hung down close to the ground so that there was bare earth and the grass did not grow, a place for smoky bonfires as darkness fell. There was no place for ambiguity in the neat well-tended places, where the graves were all facing the same way in mathematically correct lines between carefully raked graveled walks (you could see the marks made by the prongs of the rakes), where the grass was short, and the flowers fresh and prettily arranged.
The death of Linnaeus – like the death of her sister – was something that she and Charlotte had never discussed, though they had hovered on the verge of the subject once or twice recently. They had been close to saying something in church that morning, after the service. Charlotte and Linnaeus had lived on in Delft Place since the deaths of their parents, and now Charlotte lived alone in that huge house, with her brother’s paintings on the walls. When she thought of them together, she thought of them as wearing mourning, the black clothes for the deaths of their parents, the white, shocked faces. They had been very young when it happened. When you saw them in the street, you could not forget the reason why they were wearing black.
Wide-eyed, his mouth slightly open and surprised, Linnaeus always had the look of someone startled from sleep.
30
In the course of the day, and now of the night, the shape of the unbuilt streets had changed, was changing, and it was as if what was in her mind could also be smoothed away, obliterated, reshaped into unmarked whiteness like what was outside, the mind itself as transient, as temporary a thing. It was, somehow, like twilight, the time when darkness had entered the house gradually, and the words on the page in front of her gradually became unreadable in the dusk. The shadows grew longer and thinner, and unnoticed details sprang briefly into unusual prominence, seen for the first time. The shapes of the furniture around her, the shapes of the trees outside in the garden, fuzzily blurred in the way that they did when she removed her spectacles, and then – slowly – assumed darker and more solid substance, quite unlike what they were in daylight. They were almost like the moments before sleep, that letting go of control, those quarters of an hour, those half-hours, before the lamps were lit, and the light returned. She’d sit, unable to read anymore, feeling the darkness silting in, wrapping itself around her. Now in the falling of the gloom/The red fire paints the empty room:/And warmly on the roof it looks,/And flickers on the backs of books. She thought of desert sands advancing to bury a lost Ozymandian city, or, again, of the snow transformed into ashes descending to bury Longfellow Park like Pompeii.
The ashes were not like the small, light residue of a domestic fire, the sort of ashes that Annie had been instructed to collect and use again to start a fresh blaze, kneeling on the rug before the grate in her long sacking apron, gathering them like a harvester into a special bucket, Tess Durbeyfield laboring at some repetitive task, bent over in the drab desolation of Flintcomb-Ash. These ashes would not have hurt anyone, just left a dusty mark on their clothing like a symbol of sadness, a sackcloth-free mark of mourning. The other – lethal – ashes (ashes grown monstrous) fell from the darkened sky like a shower of meteorites, thundering, shattering, collapsing. The fleeing population was being stoned to death for sins of Old Testament proportions, after Bearded Ones had passed pitiless judgment upon them, beaten about the head with the very stones on which the Ten Commandments were neatly inscribed like the lettering on expensive gravestones.
Here Lies …
“Liar! Liar!”
They were from Sodom.
They were from Gomorrah.
They must die.
The rocks pounded down like the toppled debris of earthquake-shattered structures, as those without sin enthusiastically seized upon one of the perks of their condition, casting the first stone with tremendous force, hurling the baseball during a vital league game. Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt have no other gods before me, Honor thy father and thy mother, Thou shalt not bear false witness broke in bloodstained fragments as they smashed upon skulls and fragmented limbs. Honor, Thou shalt, and Kill were now the words on rocks all by themselves, seized – they were such handy smite-sized chunks – and used again, and again.
Honor.
Honor.
Honor.
Thou shalt.
Thou shalt.
Thou shalt.
Kill.
Kill.
Kill.
Commit adultery. (Though they would rather – if it were all the same – kill.)
Steal. (Killing would be better.)
Bear false witness. (Killing would be far more enjoyable.)
Exodus XX, XXI, and XXII (all those exes in Exodus, as God marked them out for destruction with a cross, like rotten trees in a corrupted orchard) fell to earth, homicidal hailstones blackening the sky, and the piled bodies of an overwhelmed city were lost from sight and buried beneath them.
A finer ash pattered and sifted down, drifting through the apertures, and filling every remaining space.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
A hit!
A very palpable hit!
The crowd roared.
Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.
Miss Swanstrom had not killed The Last Days of Pompeii for Alice. It had been dead already when she had first read it, interested to find the faults that had made Mrs. Albert Comstock declare that Lord Lytton – together with Sheridan Knowles – was her favorite playwright. (If she couldn’t find one of his plays, she’d read one of his novels.) It had soon become clear that a major part of his appeal – it could not have been based upon his subtlety as a writer (not that Mrs. Albert Comstock would recognize subtlety) – was that (like Tolstoi) he possessed a title. Almost as impressive, his other name – Bulwer-Lytton – employed a hyphen. English lords – as Shakespeare’s history plays confusingly demonstrated – seemed, like characters in Russian novels, to possess two or three different names, usually simultaneously. Alice had had to draw up a list of characters, and their various names, on her bookmark when she had read War and Peace, and family trees had sprouted like the spidery multi-rooted notes of an amateur gardener.
The names of the characters in Lord Lytton’s novel – they existed more as names, as labels, than as characters – were in her head. After nearly seventeen centuries – Lord Lytton had written, in the final chapter of his novel – the city of Pompeii was disinterred from its silent tomb all vivid with undimmed hues; its walls fresh as if painted yesterday – not a hue faded on the rich mosaic of its floors.
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