by Terry Griggs
“That?” said Edgar, the elder brother. “What’s it called, Polly?”
“Why, Master Rumwold, I believe.”
“Fitting. He is a rum one.”
This sally provoked more laughter from the family, as if the ridiculous lay all about them, discoverable in the most unyielding places, even in Master Rumwold’s grave demeanour. Not that they worried the baby for any further entertainment; the full glare of their attention, especially the women’s, was turned upon Grif. He was offered tea, brandy, a cigar, a chair, a bed for the night, for as many nights as he wished. They pressed him for news of Ned and of his own travels, and listened with rapt expressions to everything he said.
They were such a lighthearted family, and so gracious, and yet he didn’t feel much at ease. More the opposite—a niggling sense of alarm was growing in him, a tiny screw of apprehension tightening in his gut. That baby, so sober and silent and unregarded, troubled him. Wasn’t Rumwold the saint who had preached a sermon when only three days old? This child looked as though he could easily be the guardian of some terrible secret that he would reluctantly but dutifully divulge to the world as soon as the shattering power of speech was conferred upon him.
At dinner that evening Grif was surprised to find the dining-room table cleared, set and displaying a range of savoury dishes that might well have appeared there by magic. After spending the early part of the afternoon with the Cormanys, he had not had the sense that work took up much of their day, nor had he encountered any hired help. Yet the room he had been given on the top floor was clean and pleasant. Someone had set out a change of clothing for him on the bed, and a bowl and pitcher filled with hot water sat on a pear-wood washstand, along with a bar of caraway-scented soap, an ivory comb, a pair of scissors, a silver-handled shaving brush and mug, and a straight razor. He took the hint.
As he laboured away, shaving, snipping, combing, divesting himself of his vagabond guise, watching with a sinking heart as the same old Grif Smolders showed his face in the mirror, he puzzled over the nature of this household. It was possible that the Cormanys did all the work themselves, but secretly, keeping the indignity of it hidden, as people kept hidden the pro-creative act. Given their manner, dress and possessions, they did appear to have a social position, or pretensions to one, but this was a remote place in which to enact it. He had expected to find stalwart homesteaders, or poor scraping farmers, or trappers living in windowless wattle-and-daub shacks, with a rifle slung on a peg in the wall, and a squaw for a wife. And mouths full of carious teeth, not at all like the ones that flashed at him throughout dinner and, frankly, had begun to give him a headache.
“Mr. Smolders, are you pained?” asked Victoria.
“Not at all, Miss Cormany. Only a bit fatigued, I think.”
“You should rub your head with an onion, then,” offered Albert.
“Oh?”
“Father’s cure for complaints of the head.”
“I thought that was your cure for baldness, Father?” said Maud.
“Bad dreams, my dear. A superlative cure for bad dreams.”
“Pop the old incubus on the noggin, eh, Pater?” This was Edgar, smirking.
“You know that ancient couple who live down the road …?”
“The Buckles.”
(Laughter.)
“Yes, the Buckles. They wash their feet every morning in the contents of their chamber pots.”
(More laughter.)
“Good heavens.”
“Polly, I don’t believe Mr. Smolders—”
“Are you sure?”
“You’re inventing.”
“It’s supposed to cure chilblains.”
“Can’t do much for their smelly feet. Or their souls.”
“Haw, haw. Albert made a joke, Mother.”
“Fancy that.”
The dinner conversation skimmed along in this nonsensical way, glib and quick, plumbing no depths. No talk of politics or worldly news. For all their teasing they did obviously take pleasure in their own company. How different this was from the dinners in his own forsaken home, which were achieved in complete silence as he and his parents shoved food heavy as earth down their throats—except that there was something equally airless and crushing here, perhaps just the relentless cheer itself. He had certainly heard more varieties of laughter, more range, than he’d thought possible in one sitting: booming, gulping, chuckling, samples great and small, a selection broadly peculiar enough for a lunatics’ museum. The baby might have been cleared out with the rest of the clutter, but a nursery atmosphere prevailed. At one point William Cormany had been chastised by his wife for not finishing his dinner—“No dessert for you, Father!”—and not long after Grif spotted him slipping a piece of ham into his pocket, and harrying a slice of turnip under his plate. When Victoria, the eldest daughter, began buttering a slice of bread, the activity so beguiled her that she didn’t stop until she had buttered her arm clear up to her elbow. This made Albert laugh so hard he snorted ginger beer up his nose.
“I’ve seen Albert squirt milk out of his eyes,” said Polly to Grif, as she wiped her face with a bun. “Do it, Albert.”
“Not with this stuff, it stings. Stop kicking, Maudie.”
“That’s not me.”
“’Tis so.”
“Mother, Edgar flicked a pea at Mr. Smolders with his knife.”
“Did not.”
“Children, children.”
“Mr. Smolders,”—Polly addressed him again—“aren’t you ever going to enquire about the two vacant place settings?”
Naturally, Grif had noticed them—the unoccupied chairs, the empty plates, the unused crystal and silverware sparkling in the candlelight—but he had no intention of setting himself up by asking who was missing. He had come to suspect that he had been welcomed so warmly into this household because what this family needed most was a dupe, a gull, some living fool to feed into the voracious maw of its humour.
“The one is for Hattie,” Polly told him.
“And who might that be?” he said.
“Our sister.”
“Another?”
“Hattie’s the shy one. She’s been hiding behind the wood stove since you arrived.”
“Oh.”
“The other setting is for Grandmother Cormany.”
“And she is …?”
“Dead.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” he said softly.
“Two whole days now.”
“I beg your pardon?” He knew she couldn’t be serious, that she was pulling his leg; otherwise the house would be swathed in crepe, and the women too. A wreath on the door, black ribbons tied around handles, all the usual paraphernalia that signifies a death in the house.
“Yes, we were all so fond of her. She’s in the larder. We didn’t know what to do with her. I mean, we always play games in the drawing room after dinner, so that wouldn’t work.”
“Darling,” said her mother, “you know very well that Grandmother Cormany is in Toronto.”
“As good as dead, then,” said Albert.
“Mother,” said Polly, her cheeks colouring, “you know she’s not.”
Grif glanced around the table into faces indifferent, unreadable, strange in the candlelight, while keeping the muscles around his mouth tensed for laughter, waiting for the joke to strike.
Readying himself for bed that night, Grif tried to concentrate solely on a pleasure that awaited him: oblivion. After sleeping rough for so long, he knew that stretching out on this feather tick mattress was going to be like sinking into a bed of cream. The servant who operated silently and invisibly in this house had even turned down the covers for him, and had placed a warmed stone at the foot of the bed. His clothing, washed and folded, had been set on top of a pine blanket box, along with the Reverend’s jacket, which looked as if it had been given a good thrashing with a rug beater. He might wonder if this shy sister, Hattie, was the resident Cinderella, but he avoided the thought, not wanting to b
e roused by perplexity. Wetting his fingers and pinching out the flame of the candle by the bed, he found sleep almost immediately, a pure self-dissolving dark, absolute as the night around him.
Not long after, however, he was awakened. Something small and soft, a paw it felt like, smacked him on the temple. He lay there, disoriented, blinking himself awake, listening closely. Whatever it was, he could hear it thudding into the walls, bumping up against the ceiling. It was not large enough to be a bat, he thought, but was likely a fair-sized moth, a noctuid of some sort. He knew he should light the candle and properly identify the creature, but only lay listening to its intermittent searching patter. His journal. He hadn’t turned to it once during the course of this unusual day. His reason for coming here in the first place—to borrow a pencil—was utterly ludicrous, like travelling halfway around the world to borrow a cup of sugar.
He pulled the covers up over his head, not liking the idea of that moth parking in his snoring mouth, and prepared again for sleep. He might have been close to it, too, his mind drifting off the path of logic, for he suddenly saw Avice. More particularly, he saw that pattern of moles she had on her left cheek, fast by her ear, and the few freckles that trailed onto her throat, the lesser stars in this constellation. More might even be concealed beneath the black velvet ribbon she wore cinched around her neck. The remarkable thing was how similar this pattern was, this insignia of imperfections, to the figure of O’Brien he had often watched striding across the night sky. How horrible. What if he were to gaze up into that sky henceforward and see not the glorious open space between the stars, an eternity of the undefined, but her, gigantic and lowering, the scattered diamonds of her wedding band embedded in her cheek, and her furious black eyes forever staring down?
After this, Grif tossed and turned in the bed until the sheets were wrapped around him like a tourniquet. When he did finally drop off, he was visited by dreams, brutal in their intensity and cunning, that pressed him to the very edge of wakefulness without granting him release.
CHAPTER TWELVE
the Gorgon’s mouth
Her voice was level, and had heft, as if weighted like a sling with a chunk of rock or glass—something that might hurt if she lobbed it at you. It belonged to a woman he had not encountered the day before, and unless she was the unobtrusive servant finally showing herself, it could only be Hattie, the missing sister, the “shy” one. If she had been hiding behind the wood stove, it must have been on account of its iron-hearted companionship, or to enjoin its heated force with her own, for she did not fear company by the looks—or sound—of her.
Grif had come down early to the dining room, dream-driven, and doctored—scored, cupped and bled dry—his face pale and his hands shaking. The table had not been properly cleared from the night before, and on it were the congealed remains of a roast, a tower of greasy plates, a scatter of smeared cutlery, skirts of solidified wax encircling the bases of the candlesticks. The door that led to the kitchen was closed, but he could hear someone banging around in there and wondered if there was any hope at all for a cup of tea. Master Rumwold was back in his bucket, inert as a block, and it occurred to Grif that the child might be addled, despite its black and avid eyes.
He took a seat at the table and cleared a space for his journal. This he set before him and opened to a page empty as a fallow field. He still had nothing to write with, and the inclination to do so was beginning to drain out of him. His hand hung over his book like that fern—what was it called? … dead man’s fingers. He glanced at the cherrywood sideboard and caught sight of a mouse skittering beneath it, then watched as it hustled along the base of the wainscotting. A nervy and surreptitious hunter of crumbs. Like himself. He thought how, with the right instrument, he could lift the little creature right off the floor, right out of its scant grey existence, and set it free in his book. A writer’s harmless fantasy.
“There’s a fine waste of time.” A curt nod toward the journal. “You would do better to get yourself some breakfast; no one else will.”
Hattie. She had come into the dining room quietly enough, but the lead sinkers in her voice struck hard and cold in his ear. Grif stood. Had she come from the kitchen? He hadn’t noticed. He did see that her features were unmistakably Cormany ones, even though the eyes were smaller, the mouth larger (she was what his mother would call muckle-mouthed), the colouring darker. Physically, she seemed to be putting up resistance to the family design, straining her body away from the rest in opposition. The Cormany charm had soured in her, the sunniness dimmed. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why this might be. Master Rumwold was her child; that was obvious. He surmised that whatever humour she once possessed had drained straight through him and disappeared, as through a sinkhole. But who was the father, and where was he?
“I can’t write …” he began to explain.
“How unfortunate,” she cut him off. “Then you might as well breakfast. You’ll find something in the larder.”
With that, she walked out of the room, and shortly afterwards he heard the stairs complaining as she ascended in her sharp buttoned boots. He glanced at the baby, as if for an explanation of his mother’s surly behaviour, and found no joy there. Master Rumwold was like a tightly sealed wallet in which a cache of worry and pain had been securely stored. Of the two of them Grif knew that he, Grif, was the more likely to break down and cry.
He had not forgotten Polly’s claim from last evening, and so didn’t doubt that he would find something in the larder. Not that he believed her—it was preposterous, you didn’t lay your granny out in the larder like a wheel of cheese—but an image had been evoked nonetheless. He had encountered it in his harassing dreams, and found on waking that it was not made of the usual ephemeral material. Like a stubborn ghost, it had refused to fade with the morning light. Closing his eyes, he could see the corpse still: an old woman, naked, stretched out on a narrow slatted shelf, her hands tied together with black ribbon, as were her knees and ankles. A silk handkerchief, slash red, was looped around her head and jaw. Grif had never in his life seen a naked woman, and had to wonder that he could make one up in such detail. He knew he was making one up, though; not because he doubted the details, which had a convincing plausibility, but because the woman, despite her body’s slack and loosely worn skin, had a face that was unmarked by age and still animate with Cormany beauty.
Was this how it began, the mind losing hold, with these sorts of visions moving into your head and taking on an undismissible authority? With the screen between what was real and what not becoming worn and permeable and letting anything imaginable drift in? He didn’t know, and was not so hungry for the truth, or even for breakfast, that he was going to enter that larder and find out. The very word larder chilled him, as did such other—root cellar, ice house—damp underworld spaces with trap doors that locked from the outside.
Grif took one more look at the baby, who was boring a hole through his head with its hard little eyes, and fled from the room.
His destination was the front door. Some air, a morning walk, would do him good, especially if it was a long walk to the next town, and onward. He knew that what he really hungered for this morning was the vast blue relief of the sky, the lane that rolled out straight as a runner to the main road. But in passing by the open door of the front drawing room, he noticed Polly seated by a window, sewing, or about to. In her lap lay a square of blue cotton set in an embroidery hoop, and in her raised hand she held a bright needle from which dangled a piece of thread long and black as a hair.
She looked up quickly, and smiled warmly at him, shadows from the lace curtains brindling her face. “Mr. Smolders, good morning.”
He apologized for interrupting.
“Please do,” she said. “Come in, come in. This needlework, believe me, is not my idea. I haven’t the faintest notion where to begin. I’d rather be out climbing trees or playing tennis. Or canoeing on the lake. Do you know, I took an absolute header the other day, got thoroughly soaked. Bucket
s of fun, though. Do you canoe, Mr. Smolders?”
“No,” he said, driving the word like a nail into the floor between them. She disconcerted him. She might speak with the candour of a child, and wear a dress that belonged to a twelve-year-old girl, but she was mature enough in figure to make his collar stick to his neck. He tried to keep his attention to her physical presence light and delicate, observing only as much of her as decency permitted.
“Did you notice these?” she said, pointing at her chest as she leapt up to face him, letting her embroidery slide to the floor.
He immediately took an interest in the maidenhair fern in the corner, then in the collection of bird skulls that were arranged on a library shelf according to size, from raven to wren, like the descending notes on an avian scale. He began to read titles of books shelved below the skulls: Chatterbox for ’96, Little Women and Good Wives, Wild Animals I Have Known, The Untempered Wind, The Turkish Messiah.
“Mr. Smolders?”
“Oh, sorry, Miss Polly. I was just … reading.”
“Do you fear them?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“These. Spiders. I understand that some people have a dreadful terror of them.”
“Spiders? God, so they are.”
Polly laughed, and gave the embroidery hoop a good kick. It shot under a sofa that was upholstered in a material pink as a tongue.
He saw now where her real sewing skills lay. Her necklace was more a kind of charm. Threaded through the abdomens, bodies clenched, a few legs trailing raggedly, were about twelve or thirteen spiders. Common house spiders, orb-weavers and a few harvestmen were all snagged in a web like none that nature itself would be perverse enough to devise.
She laughed again, delighted by his dumbfounded expression. “Quite mad, I agree. But honestly, it does work.”
“Work?”
“For ague, chest colds. You see, I caught a chill last night. I’m afraid Father does not put much stock in modern medicines. You won’t find any Cosmoline or electric liniment in this house. Consider yourself lucky that you didn’t wake up with a sore throat.”