When at last she turned back, he was gone. The hole was large, the edges scorched black and the shattered stones jagged as teeth in a dead mouth. Pain crept across Alice’s flesh. She would be scarred but he was gone. And her daughter was safe.
* * *
Dresses, Three
I live, now, in one room.
The rest of the huge house is quiet around me; nothing runs along its artery-like corridors, no life. Perhaps that is why it seems to be dying. There is only me and I have taken up residence in the library, napping on the once-resplendent but now lumpen couch when sleep will no longer be denied. I bathe once a week, just before the woman from the village, who comes to ‘do’ for me, arrives. I, myself, don’t find the smell of an aging man offensive, but Mrs Morgan made it clear she did, so for her sake I weekly wake the plumbing, and the pipes screech their protest. The water runs pale russet into the claw-footed bathtub; I lower my carcass down, and splash about in the lukewarm fluid for a time, like an ancient bird.
Mrs Morgan does the laundry, tidies the house, and dusts the furniture with such enthusiasm that some days I fear she will dust me if I stay in one place too long. She admires the many, many pieces of fancywork, embroidery, doilies, runners, littering the house. She makes enough meals for a week. I feed most of it to the stray, once-scrawny cat who is now very fine indeed, fat, shiny, contented. It’s not that I don’t like her cooking, but why feed a body that has no desire to go on?
Over the past months, I have moved methodically through the house, gathering all the bits-and-bobs pertaining to my life: reacquainting myself with them, reminiscing and, finally, systematically destroying them in the library fireplace.
I found, this morning, the last of the oddments to which my memories cling. From the upended envelope floated a peacock feather; a pair of butterfly wings; and a piece of paper, a list of words embedded into its onion-skin fineness with a calligraphy pen, traced in a very fine hand. Three things, three things upon which once hung life, freedom, and quite possibly a soul.
Finn watches his mother, her head bent over a piece of fabric; a paper-thin woman, and not quite right. Cerridwen has white fluff-hair that belies her youth, and pale blue eyes; she barely strings two words together, but sings in a sweet, sad voice that doesn’t seem to belong to her. Her sole skill, her only resource, is her talent as seamstress. Cerridwen can spin a dress from air and spider silk if need be, and this is how she keeps them fed, clothed and housed. They do not travel by her volition, but are passed from hand to hand by rich women, wives of mighty men who can afford their helpmeets’ expensive tastes for exotic frocks. The women offer each other ridiculous bribes for use of Cerridwen; she is, essentially, purchased. The boy wonders, some days, if she wishes for freedom, either for herself or for him, for a chance to not be passed from hand to hand like a strange pet.
He remembers no other kind of life, having been born into the erratic flow of his mother’s travels. They have always been in ‘big houses’, she sewing and he wandering through halls and wings, attics and cellars. An old governess in the big house before last, freed of nursery duties and with time on her hands, taught him to read, and so he added libraries to his stock of places to haunt.
Cerridwen is eighteen when they come to the De Freitas townhouse in Russell Square; the boy, Finn, is nudging seven. They are installed in an attic room that is better than it should be for an itinerant seamstress and her fatherless son: the room is wide and high with tall windows through which pours pure white light. There are two feather beds, three trunks for clothes (they need only one), a place to wash up, and a large multicoloured Turkish rug, like a fallen stained-glass window, on the floor to keep the cold out of the bare boards.
Finn and Cerridwen come when Aurora De Freitas turns seventeen. One of her great-aunts hands them on—Aurora had demanded three special dresses for her Season and no one but the little Welsh seamstress could create them. Cerridwen makes sure she and Finn stay out of sight, sticking to their rooms as much as possible. Sometimes Finn slips away to explore when his mother is caught up in her work, her mind elsewhere.
Aurora De Freitas is different from other women. In fact, she simply strikes Finn as being not quite like anyone else, female or male. She has long black hair, straight and sleek as an Oriental, and heavy-lidded, slanted, pale green eyes. She does not walk, glide, prance, dance, or float; Aurora stalks. She has the gait of a hunting animal and a habit of flicking her eyes side to side, so she never misses a thing. It will be many years before it occurs to Finn that this was a survival mechanism. She is tall and straight-backed, but fine-boned and pale.
Aurora lives with her guardian, Master Justin De Freitas, a paternal uncle. They are in the Russell Square house for the Season; for the rest of the year, they reside in a grey stone manor down in Kent. Master Justin is obsessed with his niece. A portrait of Aurora’s mother, Celeste, hangs in the library; Aurora looks very like her and one wonders if the obsession has merely been transferred from mother to daughter. Finn hears the whispers of the scullery maids that, although Master Justin has kept her to himself in the grey stone house, he has held himself in check. But she is seventeen now and has demanded a Season. They mutter darkly as they conjecture how she convinced him, what she promised him, how he will be rewarded after her time in London. He would never, everyone knew, let her leave him and marry.
Master Justin is not an ugly man. On the contrary, he shares Aurora’s intense beauty, the raven-black hair and pale skin, but his eyes are darkest blue. His niece is the same height as him, and perhaps this has contributed to his patience, his caution: the fact that she is not a tiny girl who can be easily overcome. Perhaps it is important to him that she surrender.
They whisper that she does not lock her doors at night, but sometimes, when sleep does not come, Finn wanders the shadowed corridors and finds Justin at her door, whispering at the heavy wood, trying to convince her to let him in, let him in, only for a moment, only for a hug, a sweet avuncular kiss, only to smell the lavender of her hair, to feel its silk against his palm, only for a moment and then he will leave her in peace.
She does not open the door, at least not on the nights when Finn watches from the darkness, tucked behind a suit of armor, an old chair or chest, the long velvet curtains. She does not answer her uncle, merely lets him chew on her silence until he leaves, empty-handed, empty-hearted.
“You worked for my mother, didn’t you?” Aurora’s voice, if a voice could be said to do so, stalks the listener. Cerridwen dips her head but does not answer. Aurora continues, “Seven years ago, was it not?” Her eyes flick to Finn, sitting on the edge of his bed, legs swinging, shadowy blue eyes fixed on her; she takes in his tousled black hair.
Cerridwen says nothing except, “What kind of dresses would you like, miss?”
“The first dress—and understand this, I must have precisely the dresses I ask for or my bargain will not be fulfilled.” She waits until Cerridwen nods her slight bobbing nod. “And so, I will make a bargain with you. If you give me exactly what I ask for, I will give you your freedom. A house, money, everything to live and you will never need to sew again.”
Cerridwen’s eyes are wide and she forgets to hide behind her dullard’s stare. Finn ponders his mother, knowing she’s not as fey or as stupid as people think. He wonders how she can bear to be thought of this way.
Aurora smiles and nods. “So.”
The first dress she demands is to be made of peacock feathers. Aurora cares not at all for the design, only that it be made of the specified feathers. Cerridwen, who never sketches anything, never uses a pattern, sees the dress in her mind, finds it fully formed. She does not take Aurora’s measurements; she has seen the girl and that will be sufficient.
The dress lies like a second skin. The eyes of the peacock feathers are everywhere; they bow and sway, viewing everything around them, seeming to move even when Aurora is still. Above her head soars a great spray of feathers, the fan of a peacock’s tail, stitched just
above the curve of her buttocks and just below the small of her back, on a band of whalebone to hold it firm. When she moves, it sways in time with her steps, dips as if nodding. The green in the feathers picks out the green in her eyes and makes them glow. She is fantastical, exotic, bizarre, unique, bewitching. She regards herself in the mirror, almost grudging in her approval.
“It’s perfect, Cerridwen. Utterly perfect. Thank you.” She sweeps out of the room, down to join the sounds of the ball, swathed in her outrageous dress that will briefly stop all movement, talk, and time when she appears. She will create a scandal. Her uncle will burn with desire, jealousy, but he must not reveal himself. It’s bad enough the servants whisper about him; it would not do for people of his own class to know the truth.
He does, however, take his niece’s arm for the first dance, holding her close, mesmerized by the feathered eyes of her dress that seem to watch him constantly.
Finn, sitting at one of the library windows, a book open but unattended to in his lap, watches Aurora through the thick glass. At her insistence, three targets are lined up behind the house, in a space too small, really, for archery practice. She has been besting three of her suitors for the past hour and they still seem to find it charming—she is beautiful and rich, after all, and a man can briefly forgive many things when these two virtues are so in evidence.
A hard hand clamps down on Finn’s shoulder. He starts, the book falls from his lap and onto the foot of Master Justin, who does not let the boy go. He glares, his mouth set in a hard line, Finn’s in a trembling one. In the ghostly mirror of the window, they look rather alike.
“You. You belong to that little Welsh bitch?” Justin spits, turning the boy this way and that, examining him like something to be held up to the light.
“Cerridwen is my mother. She is Welsh,” says the boy obliquely, wishing himself big enough to hurt this man.
“How old are you?”
“Seven.”
Justin lets him go, dropping him as a dog does a bone it suddenly finds boring. “Stay out of my library.”
Finn scrambles to the door, opens it, is stopped by Justin’s next question. “What is your name?”
Finn does not answer, knowing there is power in names, and escapes down the corridor as fast as he can. Justin doesn’t follow. He stands at the window, watching his niece torment her beaux.
“Butterfly wings,” says Aurora. “A dress of butterfly wings, Cerridwen?”
Cerridwen nods slowly, formulates one of her rare sentences. “I will need a net.”
“The housekeeper is to give you whatever you need.” Aurora smiles at Finn as he huddles on the bed, not calmly sitting on the edge this time, but curled against the wall, as if this is safest. “Did he scare you much?”
Finn shakes his head, wonders how she knows.
“You look like us, that’s all,” she says. “It scares him.” She turns again to Cerridwen. “Doesn’t he, Cerridwen? Doesn’t he look like a De Freitas?”
Cerridwen chooses not to answer, opens her box of threads to select the bobbin of her finest silk. She pulls at the loose end, reels it out a little and holds it up, examining the miniscule thread. Aurora contemplates the pale fluff of hair for a moment, then, flicking Finn a strange smile, she mouths little cousin and leaves.
In his short life, Finn has occasionally speculated about his father’s identity, about how Cerridwen came to have a child so young. He doesn’t ask her, so she never tells.
Finn marvels at his mother; he cannot even begin to think how she gathered so many butterflies and persuaded them to give up their wings, let alone how she coaxed them all into the dress that now drapes Aurora’s tall form. It hangs like silk, an empire waist this time, and a foot-long train that seems not to touch the floor, but float above it, carried by still-fluttering wings.
Aurora’s black hair has been piled onto her head, then teased out on either side. Jeweled butterflies from London’s finest jeweler nestle there, catching the light and throwing it back out.
“Thank you, Cerridwen. Once again, it’s perfect. Goodnight. Goodnight, Finn.”
Finn awakes to the sound of a struggle. A figure leans over Cerridwen’s bed and he can make out in the moonlight his tiny mother, fighting fiercely.
“Give it up. Give it up, little whore, you didn’t fight this much last time!” The voice is lustful, frustrated.
Finn throws himself at the shadow-man. Justin curses and kicks him aside, but Finn surges forward once again, fiercely determined, ignoring the pain of Justin’s blows.
Justin gives up, shakes the boy off and backs away from the bed, re-buttoning his trousers. He points at Cerridwen, bathed in moonlight and so pale she might be a ghost. “I can take him away any time. Remember that! Any time!”
He slams the door behind him and Finn climbs into his mother’s bed. She holds him tightly, rocking; neither of them falls asleep.
Aurora asks for her final dress, a dress made only of words. Cerridwen shakes, balks, refuses to meet the girl’s eyes. Aurora drops to her knees beside the seamstress. She takes the tiny, needle-scarred hand and whispers, “They say the Welsh witches are the most dangerous, because it’s so hard to tell who they are.”
She stands. “A dress of words, Cerridwen. Everything hangs on this, for both of us. You know the words but I shall write them down for you, so you do not forget.”
In the deepest part of the Common, far away from the house in Russell Square, Cerridwen sits on the night-damp ground with a piece of parchment beside her. She has collected thistles, spider webs, and a bottle filled with moonlight from a night long ago. She piles the three ingredients onto a small pyre of twigs and kindling, and lights them with a tinderbox. She begins to sing, her voice light, beautiful, fine as the spider webs, bright as the moonlight, and sharp as the thistles. She knows the words by heart, barely looks at the piece of parchment as she sings, conjuring the dress from air and moonlight and words. It forms like a ghost, coalescing above the tiny fire, eddying in the evening breeze.
Finn, having crept out of the house to follow her, watches from behind a tree trunk as she takes a thin knife from her pocket, draws it across her palm and sprinkles blood over the already-dying fire. The dress solidifies, hangs in the air over the smouldering coals as if caught on an invisible hook. It shimmers like gossamer and, if he concentrates, Finn thinks he can see words flying around inside it, whirling like stars being born and dying, creating a universe all within the warp and weft of the dress.
Cerridwen seems smaller; this has cost her much.
The newspaper reports of what happened that night vary, but they agree that Master Justin De Freitas died horribly.
His niece entered the ballroom, all eyes upon her. She wore a strange gown, grey and shimmering, a fabric seemingly alive, but it was hard to tell; the dress defied the eye. Many of the guests had simply wanted to see what she would wear next; tales of her dresses had echoed throughout Society, and they found this one strangely disappointing. All most witnesses could say was that it was grey.
Aurora stood at the top of the great curved staircase, smiling down at the assembly. Master Justin waited at the bottom of the stairs, staring up at his niece in a manner some described as “adoring”, others as “inappropriate”. She began to descend and by the time she was mid-way down the staircase, those nearest him noticed smoke coming from Master Justin's jacket. At first it seemed to be steam but then the odour of smoke (of sulphur, some said) began to tickle noses. It took Master Justin himself some time to notice, but when the first flames licked from the tongues of his shoes, then up his trousers, shirt, and frock coat and finally reached his cravat, it most certainly had his attention.
His screams were awful, as was the smell, overpoweringly brimstone, and, some said, something even less savoury: the scent of spilled seed.
The immolation happened all too quickly, there was nothing anyone could do. The guests departed rapidly, so there was no one to see the tiny Welsh seamstress and her fra
gile son creep down the stairs behind Aurora and peer at the smouldering heap of charred humanity and once-fine green velvet frock coat.
“Was he my father?” I asked, but Cerridwen did not answer—she no longer had words. She used them all in the making of Aurora’s dress.
That night, Aurora spirited us away, to the grey stone house in Kent. The same Aurora who came to us ten years later, tired of her travels and eager for a quiet place to rest. Cerridwen, worn out by her spell and spending her final years on endless fancywork and embroidery, succumbed and died soon after. The same Aurora who, although my cousin by some counts, stayed with me and lived as my wife these past seventy years.
The very same Aurora De Freitas who died six months ago and left me alone in the grey stone house with only my memories, a peacock feather, butterfly wings and a scrap of parchment.
* * *
The Girl With No Hands
The Devil reclines on the rails of the old bridge, picking at his teeth with a long fingernail.
He’s well dressed, handsome, looks like a feckless youth with nothing better to do. In many ways, it’s the truth. A fallen angel, a disinherited son, he must pass his days as well as he can, taking not-so-subtle revenge on his father. Today, though, things are a little different.
The Devil has it in mind to take a bride. Not just any bride, but one as pure as she is beautiful, kind, gentle and pious. He could have his choice of glorious succubi, but what he wants is the thing he cannot have. He has chosen his playing field, set his pieces, and is waiting on the bridge for the pawn to arrive. He does not have to wait long.
The man is short, stout, balding. He is bowed under the weight of a sack, and leaves a thin golden trail behind him as wheat pours pitifully from a torn corner. The Devil smiles as the man looks up. The old man nods as well as he can to the handsome youth and continues on.
The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales Page 12