The Pierced Heart: A Novel

by Shepherd, Lynn

  Ever since I learned that Dora had no mother, I have kept studiously from that subject, knowing how much it pains me to talk of my own, but there was no such reticence in Bourne House—the late Mrs Holman smiled down benignly upon us from her portrait over the mantelpiece, and was talked of by them all without the slightest awkwardness. It was as if they kept her alive by the simple expedient of treating her as though she were still among them, and it seemed to me that the house was the happier for it. And when they told tales of their many elderly and eccentric relations, it struck me that I knew hardly anything of my own wider family, and resolved to ask my father of them when I returned. After our meal, young Mr Holman offered to escort me back to the cottage, and I found myself blushing in quite the silliest way, and I know I must have looked very stupid as I assured him that I was quite happy to walk the few yards home alone.

  I was still preoccupied by this exchange—going through it again in my mind and wishing I had the saying of it over again and more sensibly—when I turned my key in our own lock, and heard the sound of voices. My father’s voice and another man’s, speaking low, so that I could not hear what it was he said. I closed the door silently behind me and went towards the sitting-room. The door was ajar and I could see my father standing by the fire, and opposite him, on a hard-backed chair, a tall man in a dark coat with thin grey strands of hair and a blotched and haggard face. I took a step back then, hardly knowing what I did, and my father looked up.

  “Lucy? Are you there?”

  I did not move—could not move.

  “Lucy?” my father said again, coming to open the door. “It is unlike you to skulk in the passage like a housemaid. Come and meet our distinguished visitor.”

  I looked at Father in sudden apprehension—if I was behaving in an uncharacteristic fashion then he, too, was speaking in a way I had never heard before. He took my hand—I might almost say roughly—and drew me after him into the room, and stood me before the man in black.

  “This is my daughter, sir. This is Lucy.”

  I have sat here now, for near half an hour, my pen in my hand, trying to find the words to express the effect that man’s presence had upon me. His appearance was unprepossessing, of that there is no doubt, but I am not so easily disquieted by the surfaces of things, knowing from experience how deceptive they can be. There was something repellent about him, but even that repellence had in it a quality of compulsion. I knew at once that this man had the power to compel the gaze—draw it and hold it until he himself chose the moment of dismissal, and I thought, for the first time since we left Vienna, of that spinning glass ball and how it would seize tiny pieces of metal in its invisible grasp, and hold them so hard they could not be torn away.

  I stood there, staring at the floor, as my father introduced the man by some grand title that I did not catch, and explained to me, slowly and deliberately, that he had come expressly to see me—that we were fortunate that His Excellency was in England, having disembarked at Grimsby only a few days before. That he was an eminent scientist and had made a study of cases such as mine and might hold the key to my recovery—

  “But I am already recovered,” I said quickly, looking up at my father. “I am quite well now—I have no need of another doctor—”

  “I am not a doctor, Miss Lucy,” said the man, in a low rasping voice.

  “It was our new spectacle,” I continued, still staring at my father, “the ball of glass—that was what ailed me—I have not walked in my sleep once since we left it behind—and now I no longer need perform ever again—”

  “I’m afraid you are mistaken,” said my father quietly. “I brought you here to convalesce and recoup your spirits, but there will come a time not far hence when we will return to our former life. When we will have to return.”

  “But why?” I cried. “I am happy here—I am well here.”

  “Now you are being self-indulgent. And, indeed, selfish. Where do you think the money comes from to pay for this house? For your clothes? The food on the table? We have to earn our bread, Lucy, and the only way we may do that is by the exercise of our craft. You have a duty to yourself, and to me, to return in due course to Vienna and play your full part—your full and usual part—in the success of our enterprise. I invited our visitor here with that end in mind, and I expect you to give him whatever assistance he needs to effect it.”

  He had never spoken to me so sternly before. It was as if some monster had taken my darling father’s place, some monster with no care for my feelings—no interest in my happiness. As if someone else was giving voice to my father’s words, just as we gave sound to our counterfeits of the dead.

  “What must I do?” I said at last, my voice small.

  “It is not so very daunting, my dear young lady,” said the man. “We will start with questions only.”

  “What questions?” I said, looking for the first time into those strange silver eyes, and feeling my heart begin to beat harder.

  “About yourself. About the nature of your indisposition. When it occurs and the form it takes. What seems to exacerbate it. Questions such as these. That is not so very distressing, I believe?”

  I looked away. I did not want to talk to this man about myself, knowing by some instinct that he had the strength to prise from me all my secrets—that he could force into words those hidden fears I have striven so hard to suppress, and which, once uttered, I might no longer have the capacity to quell.

  “I will try,” I said, a little sullenly.

  “Good,” he replied. “Now we may hope to make some progress.”

  He told my father, then, that he must absent himself from the room and draw all the curtains close. I saw my father start a little anxiously at this, but the man insisted that these preparations were indispensable to the success of his method, and my father eventually nodded and did as he was bidden.

  The man then drew one of the hard-backed chairs to the centre of the room and had me sit upon it. I hesitated a moment and then complied, whereupon he drew a matching chair, set it close before me, and sat down. He said nothing for some moments and I did not raise my head, and then suddenly he reached out and took my fingers in his own. I gasped at the touch of his dry and scaly skin and attempted to draw back, but his grip was strong, and he began to press his thumbs hard into the palms of my hands.

  “Look at me,” he said softly. “Look at me.”

  I raised my head at last and looked into those eyes, lit now only by the embers of the dying fire, and so pale there seemed scarcely an iris at all, only the deep black of the pupils, drawing me forwards, as if down a tunnel leading to the dark. And all the while the push, push, push of his thumbs in my palms.

  And then he began to question me, and I heard my own voice answer as if it were not my own. A voice distant and slumberous, and as dull in tone as of one deeply drugged. I told him things I had forgotten, or did not even know I knew. I told him of the sleepwalking, and how it afflicts me always at the fullness of the moon, when my bleeds come. I told him, as I had told my father, of the Influencing Machine and the colours that rise from my fingers, so beautiful and cold. But I did not speak of the nightmare, and of that he did not ask.

  And when it was over and he released me and let in the light, I sat shivering by the cold hearth, my body burning and my senses so heightened that I could hear my father talking with him in the vestibule, even though they spoke in whispers and the door was pulled shut.

  “So what have you concluded? What is it that ails my daughter?”

  “It is early to make a definitive diagnosis. But I do not believe her to be afflicted by some mental defect, such as I know you have feared.”

  “But what other explanation is there for such delusions—those colours she says she saw? Only the mad see things that are not there.”

  “It is one explanation, certainly, but not, I believe, the correct one in this case. It will be necessary for me to treat your daughter further—to enquire more profoundly into the deeper past. Q
uestions such as the circumstances of the onset of her somnambulism. From what she has just told me it was exactly coincidental with the commencement of her first bleeds—is this true?”

  “Both events occurred within weeks of her mother’s death. It affected her deeply. Too deeply.”

  “Indeed. And your observation is apposite. There is something—some profound distress connected with her mother which is more than mere grief, and which I have not yet fathomed. But I do not believe it was the cause of her sleepwalking, or these new colours that she now sees.”

  “So what is the cause? Forgive me, Excellency, but you must appreciate the strain all this has placed upon me. I have even considered placing her in an institution—there were doctors in Vienna who advised it, not only lately but some years ago, when I found her one night in the street, half-dressed and acting like some common whore—”

  “You may be assured that I will do my utmost to penetrate to the heart of the mystery. All may soon be elucidated. Good day to you.”

  14 APRIL

  And that has been my life, this last week. I have spent my mornings in the air and the light with Dora, and my afternoons shut away, hour after hour alone in the dark, and with this man. Each time it is the same, the same questions, the same sense of departing from myself, and yet each time I have the sensation that he is drawing me deeper, probing me more intimately, laying me bare. And now when I dream, I dream of him, of those strange eyes, and those dry pressing hands, and the electric energy that seems to flow between us. And three times now, to my shame—I have dreamed so vividly it is more real to me than memory, of his body above me, and his face closing against mine, and that cold mouth sharp upon my neck, and I have woken to the sound of my own voice moaning, and a tingling wetness between my legs that has me twisting into my fevered pillow, with my own hand at my thighs.

  I know it is wrong. I know that normal people do not dream such disgusting dreams, or find such pleasure in vileness, and when I walk in the bright breeze with Dora, talking of innocent daylight things, I have to turn my burning face away when the memories come unbidden of what I have done in the dark. And I understand, now, and for the first time, that abhorrent painting we brought to life in our lantern, and the girl who gasps with pleasure at the grinning demon’s touch.

  MIDNIGHT

  Eight o’clock it was when he left me, saying I was almost ready—that the first phase of my treatment was nearly over, and within a few days he might consider me advanced sufficiently for the next to begin. Though he would not, despite my pleading, tell me what that entailed. I closed the door at length behind him and went to the window, watching him away down the street until he disappeared. My father was absent, having explained there were further possessions of ours that had not yet arrived and he wished to make enquiries at the custom-house. With nothing to do but await his return, I lingered there at the window, restless and dissatisfied, as the rising moon made the town into a tessellation of black and slate and grey. And then as I gazed I thought I saw something amid the abbey walls. It was so far away I could not be sure, but I thought I glimpsed a flicker of white, and I wondered at once about the tale they told of the woman who was said to haunt that place. The night was so beautiful, and the moon so near the full, I felt a sudden urge to drench myself in that bathing light, and I took my shawl and left the house as the church clock struck the half hour. There was hardly anybody abroad, and I crossed the bridge and climbed the steps towards the graveyard and the turn in the path where the abbey first lifts into view. I looked up towards it, but there was nothing, just the empty cloisters black against the sky and the clouds running over the moon. I stopped for a moment to catch my breath and caught a movement on the far side of the graveyard. My eyes had not deceived me. There was a woman all in white sitting on the bench, looking out to sea. And bending over her, the figure of a man. A tall man, in a long dark coat.

  I hastened forwards as fast as I could, my heart beating against my ribs, and for several minutes the graveyard was hidden from my sight. And when I gained the gate at last and looked across, the moon slipped from behind the last cloud and flooded the graveyard in a sudden dazzling light. The man had gone. The woman was alone, and it was Dora.

  I have sworn to tell the truth in these pages, and so I will confess it. All I felt that moment was a terrible overwhelming jealousy. I had thought myself his only charge—his only care—and now I found they had both been deceiving me. Was he treating her, as he was treating me? Why had she not told me that they were acquainted? And what had the two of them been doing here, alone, in the darkness, and without a chaperone? My heart was now pounding so hard I could scarcely breathe, though whether from the effort of the climb or from bitter rage I could not have told. I strode towards her through the gravestones, but as I approached my pace slowed. Her head was thrown back against the bench, and her lips were parted. Her handkerchief was in her lap, and on linen, breast, and skin there was a trail of blood.

  “Dora!” I cried, kneeling before her, and taking her in my arms, all my jealousy forgotten in remorse, “Dora!”

  She stirred then and opened her eyes, looking at me confusedly, saying that she had been dreaming.

  “Where is he?” I demanded, grasping her frozen hand, terrified, because she could not walk, and I could not carry her. “He cannot be far away. He must help us.”

  She frowned at me, as if still half-dazed. “Who are you talking of? There is no-one here. No-one but me and Jip.”

  But when I looked about me I could not see the little dog anywhere.

  “Wait here,” I said urgently, taking my shawl from my shoulders and wrapping it tightly about her. “I will find help.”

  It was ten agonising minutes before I returned with the landlord of the lodging-house at the foot of the steps. I feared that when he opened the door to see my wild face and bloodied hands he must have thought me the victim, or even the perpetrator, of some violent misadventure. But he proved, once reassured, to be both kind and capable and went immediately back into the house to fetch blankets and a small flask of brandy before following me up to the burial-ground. We chafed Dora’s cheeks and gave her sips of the liquid, but nothing seemed to warm her, so the man wrapped her in the blankets and carried her down the stairs to the town, saying as he lifted her that she was so light she seemed hardly heavier than his little grand-daughter of eleven. When we reached Bourne House at last we found that Mr Holman had already sent the servants looking for Dora in the streets thereabouts, and had been on the point of going himself to the graveyard, but only in a last desperation, as it was impossible she could have managed that climb alone. But manage it she had, for the Holmans’ donkey-cart was in its accustomed place. Nor could anyone account for why Dora should have left the house alone, and in the dark. I thought I might know the answer to that question, but when I hinted I may have seen someone with her, it was clear that none of them recognised the man whom I described. The doctor then arriving, I took the opportunity to slip away, reaching home only a few minutes before my father. I told him I felt unwell and retired at once to my own chamber. And tonight, for the first time since we came here, I woke in the dark shivering at my window, and there are scratches on the glass that look like the marks of claws.

  15 APRIL, NOON

  I have just returned from Bourne House. My Dora slept badly, they tell me, complaining of the noise of some great bird battering at the shutters, though neither her sister nor the nurse heard anything untoward. They told me I could not see her, but when Mr Holman saw my distress he relented, saying only that she had at last fallen into a fitful slumber and I must promise not to wake her. And so I crept softly to her bedside, and stood watching with her sister Emily, as Dora shifted and moaned in her sleep, murmuring once or twice, but in no words I could understand. I have never seen her so pale; her lips were almost white and the hand resting on the coverlet hardly darker than the sheet.

  “Where is Jip?” I whispered as we left, seeing the little basket empty
at the foot of the bed.

  “No-one has seen him since yesterday. Tom has gone out to find him—Dora would be distraught to wake and find him missing.”

  We closed the door quietly and went slowly down the stairs, and as we reached the hall the front door opened and young Mr Holman appeared in the doorway, with a bundle wrapped in sacking in his arms. But when he saw the two of us, his eyes widened in horror.

  “No,” he said quickly, backing away, “no.”

  But it was too late. Emily had already seen a small brown paw hanging down and rushed forwards. “But Tom, you have found him!”

  And before he could stop her she had lifted the sacking and seen what lay beneath.

  “Oh!” she cried, her hand to her mouth. “Who could do such a wicked thing to a defenceless little creature—it is horrible, horrible!”

  I put my arm about her and turned away. But I had seen—and I still see now—the raw and gaping wound where some beast many times its size had torn open the poor dog’s throat, and it had lain unseen and undiscovered until it had bled its life away.

  18 APRIL

  The morning after they found Jip, Mr Holman came to tell me Dora was dying. That the doctor could not understand why her condition should have worsened so suddenly, but no treatment he had attempted seemed to have made any difference and it was doubtful she would live past nightfall. I wept then, in my father’s arms, and begged him to let me go to her. He was reluctant, at first, fearing I had not yet recovered my own strength, but at length he agreed.

  I was horrified at the change in so few hours. If she had been pale before, I had no word for how she appeared to me now. Even her hair seemed ashen, and her face so translucent above the ruffled neck of her nightgown that I could see the thin blue veins beneath. Blue, not red, for there seemed no blood left in her, and the spots about the pillow were too vivid to have come from her exhausted frame. I could barely hear her breathing, but as the afternoon drew on and the light faded, her breath came in low heaving gasps, and her breast rose and fell as if in pain. And at the moment she passed from us I saw wings beating against the window, and heard that humming in my ears that has always been a harbinger of woe, and I was overwhelmed and knew no more.