Picture the Dead

by Adele Griffin

  “You do have some, yes,” he answers. “A tiny bit that’s coming to you when you turn eighteen. Father is the executor of your trust, and he didn’t think you needed to know, or you’d start grasping for it. But it could be drawn if we were wed, as I’m of legal age.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard of a trust.”

  “What does it matter? Mine would become yours, yours would become mine. As it happens with any husband and wife.”

  The blow to my head is taking its toll. I blink, dizzy, my knees seem to lack strength, my vision blurs.

  My own money. A “tiny bit.” Yet significant enough that nobody has ever confided it to me.

  It is too much deception, all at once. I’m all out of fight. I lean back against the struts of the bridge, as far away as I can get from Quinn without inciting him.

  “Jennie, it’s not a queen’s ransom, believe me. Besides, I’d love you if you didn’t have a penny.” Quinn closes the space between us. “How can you doubt my love? Think of it this way. It was the luckiest thing in the world for both of us that you’d thought Will wrote that stupid confession. On some level of your unconscious mind, I think perhaps you secretly wanted Will to have written it, to absolve me. To put the war behind us and start fresh. With me.”

  “No, that’s madness…” Uttering this word, I am fearful of it, for it seems too apt a description.

  Quinn waves me off. He speaks with utter conviction. “I’d assumed you’d gone a bit off anyway. Burying your own necklace, drawing on the windows. I wanted to help you. I still do.” His hands grip my shoulders in entreaty. “In time, I’d hoped, you’d grow to love me for it.”

  The necklace, the heart, the presence in Pritchett House. All along, Will has been trying to warn me. “You were never going to tell the truth,” I realize aloud. “You’d have taken this secret of yours to your death.”

  Quinn’s grip intensifies. “You promised we’d be happy again,” he says. “You promised.”

  “With you?” I have to laugh. Unwise, I gauge, too late.

  “Have you been playing with me all along, then?” Something in him has died, gone empty. His tone is as cold as his eyes. “It makes me wonder, how could you have cared for me at all if you can turn venomous so quickly? I’ve been a fool.” He releases my shoulders to catch my wrists with hands rough as rope. “Suppose it’s a mistake we’ll both have to live with.” He shoves me back, as if shaking out a handkerchief. “Not that yours will be a particularly long life.” As my spine slams against the guardrail, fresh pain breaks through my body. “But I’ll think of you a little, Fleur. I promise I will.”

  “You’re hurting me!” But he won’t stop. “Let’s go home,” I find myself saying. Pleading. “Where it’s warm and dry, and we can talk like sensible beings.”

  Quiet astonishment passes into his face as he considers this. If there is a moment when he hinges between this suggestion and another action, it is far too short. His brother, ever the rescuer, steadfast in his desire to do right by his loved ones, hadn’t realized what he was up against. He had been the same young man right to the end. And the Quinn standing before me now was the same Quinn. The beast he always was. Determined to have everything he wanted and sure that he was entitled to it.

  I have seen him every day since his return. And yet I’ve not managed to see this.

  “No more talking. I’m tired of your tricks, and I won’t live a life where you wrangle your stupid secrets over my head.” He turns faintly seductive as he caresses the side of my cheek. “You never did learn to swim, did you, Jennie?” He smirks. “Don’t worry, love. When you’re closer to death, it won’t be as painful as you think. In fact, I believe it might be a bit like falling asleep.”

  “No…you wouldn’t…”

  “And then you can join them both. Your twin and your beloved.”

  He will kill me. No doubt about it. He has killed before. And killed and killed. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “What I am doing,” he responds, dulcet as a choir boy, “is playing the part of your bereaved fiancé. Not a soul will argue that your suicide was caused by heartbreak…after all, you still love my poor, dead brother. You visited that preposterous spiritualist often enough everyone’s borne witness to your endless melancholia. Marrying would have gotten me the money. But so will your death, almost as easily. My father is your next of kin, after all, and he is not as young as he once was. I’ll inherit all the same. I’ll just have to wait a little longer for my fortune than I expected…or maybe I can speed that along as well.”

  His grip is squeezing out my breath. My eyes float closed. I can’t bear to look into a face that has deceived me so utterly.

  “You’ve figured out everything, haven’t you?”

  “I’d never planned on loving you, Jennie. I never planned on a that. It made everything so complicated. And, yes, I do blame you for it. But your spell on me is over, my dear. I’ve decided I don’t want my brother’s used goods after all.”

  Then Quinn dips forward and kisses me, licking the blood from my split lip down to my chin before he pushes me backward over the bridge with such brute intention that I hear the splintering, then the crunch and snap of wooden railing as I lose balance and fall.

  29.

  My own clothing is my coffin. My heavy hoop wire, the whalebone corset, the layers and layers of underskirts. Pinned and hooked and buttoned to my body, they drag me under. My arms and legs twist in helpless panic as water closes around the crown of my head. I’m sinking, drowning, imprisoned in my cage of finery.

  Swim. The word terrifies me. Once I saw an old man’s body washed into harbor. His bloated flesh and lips blue as meat have held in my memory ever since and are what I see in my mind’s wild eye. My legs and arms flail; my skirts billow up over my face.

  As if it is being tugged by invisible fingers, I feel my ring loosen from my finger. I open my eyes and watch it drop, a chunk of red and gold light through black water, and then out of sight. So this is my death.

  Any consecrated space. The ruined sketches, the stain of ink. Will had wanted me to remember his fury. That afternoon had been the angriest I’d ever seen him. He’d come to me in rage, not guilt. Betrayed by a brother who, in the end, had been a stranger to him. A stranger to us both. A murderer to us both. Will’s fate is now mine.

  Water is heavy like sand, and it is pushing me deeper. I’m insignificant as a pebble down a well. My death will be silent. No screams, no wailing witnesses, no grip of hands hauling me to safety.

  I imagine Quinn leaning over the rails, the moon catching the reflection in his dead wolf’s eye. His hands loose in his pockets as he turns away from me, just as he’d turned away from his brother. His mind carefully, detachedly preparing his alibi.

  Quinn is doubtless correct, in every word, about how my death will be perceived. Alas, poor Jennie, she never did move past her grief perhaps it is all for the best.

  Maybe they’re right. What use is my life if I’ve been wrenched from everyone who meant most to me? I have lost so much. Love made me mad with pleasure, but loss has made me mad with grief. What a pleasant sleep my death will bring. Unplagued by nightmares or grim reawakening.

  But this is not the way it will be. For he is here, as he always has been. Pressing colder, pressing upward. I can’t perceive, I can’t touch, I can only sense the overriding force of his protection and love. Enormous and quick and unexpected, it lifts me sharp under my arms as if I’m being offered to heaven itself. Forced up against the current, I rise in a rush of vertigo.

  A spy must… A spy must…

  I open my mouth to cry out, and water rushes in to fill the scream. My story is not over, and today is not my death day after all. I break through the surface of the water, gasping and reborn.

  30.

  A ghost will find his way home. But I am not a ghost. And this house is not my home.

  My feet are frozen and blistered and bare. I hardly feel the pinching pain of the grave
l. My hand on the front door is a muddied bird claw. My sodden skirts drag along the carpet runner, then the polished parquet floor, as I tread steady, a sleepwalker, down the familiar hallway and into the drawing room, which overspills its gilded jewel box of assembled guests.

  After so many hours in the dark and pouring rain, all this heat and light, the spiced and fruited perfumes and powders, the voices richly lacquered in wine and laughter, seem to wrap over me in a bracing clench of humanity.

  Their awareness is gradual. And then I am the entire performance. All jaws drop mid-gape. All eyes round. Fingers lift to press over mouths and chins.

  Scandalized murmuring, whispering, but ultimately silence becomes the disease, spreading through the room and infecting everyone. Oh, but I am a sight worth seeing. I find the full specter of myself in the mirror above the mantel. My face is ghoulish, as deadly as the Du Keating girl. My eyes are fear-gored, my skin is scraped to blood. My hair has fallen from its pins to hang in a dripping shroud. Mud and scum streak black marks over my neck and arms.

  And in my own expression, I see my beloved. That hot August day. Will’s face twisted in fury. His sketches wet and streaming, ruined. As angry as I’d ever seen him. It is the core of that rage that shoots through the ether, a jolt of his life energy pumping through my own outraged blood.

  “You’ll be true to me forever?” he’d asked me once, almost with anger. No, not anger. Passion.

  “Always and forever,” I’d answered. “With my whole, entire heart.”

  In the mirror I am one of Will’s ruined sketches. And yet I have survived. I have lived to avenge the betrayed, to damn the culprit.

  I’ve sensed him from the moment of my entrance. Moments before he became aware of me. There is something in the way Quinn stands. Perhaps it is the angle of his head, or maybe it’s just the luck of an opportune moment, cozied into a corner and basking in Aunt’s attention. How could I never have seen it? That inexorable devotion, that primal and insistent blood tie between a mother and her only son?

  Who was I to ever think I could come between them?

  Who was I to them?

  “Careless, careless. I suppose you were anxious to get back to playing host.” My words are to Quinn, and my voice carries through the room, a clarion call for everyone to hear. “But such sloppy work, Quinn. You ought to have held my head under the water for three minutes. Or checked my pulse to make sure it had stopped.”

  “Fleur, darling,” says Quinn, forcing a smile as he stands and steps away from Aunt. I can see and smell his fear. It is palpable to me, no matter how intently he tries to look both unconcerned and dutiful. “You’re not well. Come, I’ll take you up to your rooms myself.”

  “How very kind of you. But unnecessary.” My gaze flicks to Uncle Henry. “Am I to presume that the bill for this party you cannot afford will be subtracted from my trust?”

  Uncle looks so startled and abjectly shamed that I want to laugh. Good. Let him crumble. Let him be the talk of Brookline, of Boston. Let his worst nightmare of public scandal come true.

  “Jennie, I must insist.” Quinn, ever the actor, signals to Doctor Perkins, who half stands despite being pink with drink. Quinn knots his hands together while furrowing his brow, trying to look helpful, though his good eye has a cast of madness to it. “Sir, my apologies. I ought to have engaged you sooner,” he says, “for I’m afraid that our dear Jennie has been very ill.”

  “If I am sick, it is only with disgust.” I speak quietly, but the silence in the room picks up my every syllable.

  The Wortley sisters, tucked into a far corner of the drawing room, are stupefied. Finally they are eyewitnesses to the event of the season. How it will be gnashed on and licked up in parlors and sitting rooms all over Brookline and beyond.

  But none of this interests me.

  “I can only stay a minute.” I steel my eyes to Quinn’s. Every ear listens for what I am going to say. “I’m here to collect Mavis. And then I must go.”

  “But…what has happened?” Aunt Clara blinks at me as though seeing me for the first time. Her eyes are wide and childlike. So overwhelmed, she cannot take any ownership, not just yet, of what in days and weeks to come she will recall in horrific detail and brutal shame. Thankfully, she will have plenty of time to reexamine every moment from the self-imposed exile of her boudoir.

  But now all she can do is blink, her voice piping with feigned, girlish innocence. “What…what has happened to you?”

  “I am alive,” I say simply. “That’s all.”

  And that’s enough. The night is over, but my own journey has only just started.

  Epilogue

  Mavis didn’t come with me that night as I’d hoped. Rarely does life work out so smoothly. I took the cat instead. Mavis endured another fifteen thankless months at Pritchett House before breaking free one crisp November afternoon in a storm of tears and a full season of unpaid labor to arrive last week at my modest doorstep.

  This is good timing. For I am eighteen years old now and newly landed in the bed of my inheritance. Or at least my worth is enough to move from Madame’s Broussard’s upstairs spare room into tasteful apartments of my own on Beacon Hill. And I have the space and money to keep Mavis, for which I am grateful. But I will continue to supplement my income doing fine lacework for Madame, even though sitting for so long drives me to distraction, not to mention the strain it puts on my eyes. It’s an honest living, and Madame and I enjoy a cordial relationship. We’re busy, too. Now that the war is over, the city wants to heal. It is taking down its crepe, bravely lifting its chin, and starting to feather itself with new money.

  I’d heard the gossip, but it is Mavis who brings me the first official news of Pritchett House. “Miss Jennie, I have left that house a ghost of itself” is how she describes it.

  I’m not surprised. I’ve always thought of it that way. Apparently, Aunt has not spent another penny on its upkeep. Mavis says that the roof won’t last another winter. “It’s a nightmare, Miss. There’s mice in the piano seat cushion, and water stains on the ceiling in the dining room, and more chips than china in the tea set.”

  According to Mavis, Aunt herself ventures out only for church and the occasional Boston Ladies’ Aid function. She is too shamed, too poor, too wrecked to do much more. I highly doubt Brookline society mourns her absence any more than they celebrated her presence.

  Uncle Henry is much the same, but I knew that, too. He still trundles back and forth from Boston regularly once I passed him on Fulton Street and he stared right through me, though his cheeks purpled and he immediately took out his waistcoat watch to study. No matter. We have nothing to say to each other.

  Finally, Mavis brings news of Quinn, who has yet to take a position at his father’s bank. His retreat has been utter and absolute. A hermit prone to midnight walks and endless card games where he is the only player. Last winter he reconfigured all of the gardens himself, hauling down shrubbery in the dead of night and uprooting Aunt’s plantings.

  “But he refuses to chop down that dratted butternut tree,” Mavis tells me. “’Spite that lightning split it in two last summer, and the wood is mostly dead and rotting. Many’s the evening I’d look out the window to see him sitting beneath it, gazing out at nothing.” She shivers. “Oh, but he’s a haunted man, for sure. The day girls never stay hardly nobody has nothing to do with him, save that silly Miss Wortley.”

  Quinn doesn’t have to live this way. It’s common knowledge that he’d only have to clap his hands and he could be betrothed to Flora Wortley, thus ending any Pritchett financial woes. Mavis tells me that poor Flora calls every other Tuesday, her ringlets plump as pickles, her hopes as exposed as her décolletage. “Mister Pritchett is always courtly,” Mavis reports, “but he never shows any particular interest in her bosom or her bank account.”

  Strange what we are capable of, and what we balk on.

  Quinn might not have peace, but I’ve got mine. Will led me to the truth. Once that truth was known,
he let me go. In the same spirit, Toby has receded to the burnish of my fondest memories. I wear my locket, and I keep their photographs beside my bed, but time is fading the tonal papers to ever lighter shades of gray and brown. It’s a natural process and inevitable. Both boys had delighted in the joy of life. For me to fall into grief would not have pleased either of them.

  So I try not to dwell on what I have lost as I take my place in the to and fro of city life. But in the art of photography I have yoked my present to my past. For my last birthday I bought myself a Dallmeyer, shipped all the way from London. My parlor doubles as a studio, where I fashion simple images certainly no phantom spirits. Rather, I pay local children to pose for tableaux vivants, or recreations of poetic works, or studies in truth and beauty.

  The years will tell if I have any talent. Foremost, a photographer needs a teacher. Which is why I’ve brought some plates to Geist today.

  “Miss Lovell.” He greets me as amiably as ever.

  Viviette’s greeting is more reserved, but I know she’ll have tea and fresh Irish scones waiting an improvement on Geist’s stale sandwiches of last year. The birth of little Seamus and maybe her new position as lady of the house has set her mind at ease and clears her to do what she does best.

  “A lovely day,” I mention as I hand Geist my plates and follow him into the sitting room. He will look at my efforts later. Right now there is other business to attend to. It had been Viviette’s suggestion when she’d run into me earlier this morning at the fish market. Viviette is a woman of few words, but when she speaks, I have learned, it’s always wise to listen.

  The day is sunless. A cold, shy wind rattles the dying leaves. It’s a perfect day for a séance. If anyone can find a passage over to the other side, it is Viviette.

  And if anyone can follow her there, it is I.

  As we sit at the table, her hand grips mine, soft but tight.