Rogues' Wedding

by Terry Griggs

  Nights, with only her hand for company, she had gotten to know herself very well—better than most women of her station, she suspected, whose bodies were usually buried beneath mounds of cloth, and whose minds floated in some other realm when necessary, heads and bodies severed. She had taken a real interest in herself, a lover’s charged interest in which no physical feature was too insignificant for a fond inspection. She conducted a census of her moles, freckles and toe hairs, and concluded that she was populated, especially in her rural regions, with a pleasing density of human insignia. She traced veins, contours, dips and mounds. She explored every orifice—aural, nasal, vaginal. She might have been a cartographer, a physician … or simply a shockingly indecent woman. She licked her kneecaps. She trailed a pinky over her lips, then ran it up her nose. She smacked herself soundly on the behind, then glanced slyly over her shoulder at her own lovely, blushing bum. (He might not be perfect, but she was darn close.)

  With such physical knowledge and bravado it’s no wonder that Avice so casually terrified any number of gentlemen as she blazed a trail through the province. The current one, her fellow diner, did not appear to be one of this timorous brotherhood. He had lowered his newspaper and was watching her closely, almost as if her private thoughts were flickering visibly through her head, a peep show in a kinetoscope.

  Waking from her self-starring reverie, Avice realized that she was being observed, and so she observed right back, sending the man that bold and icy look of hers that usually did the trick. Although not this time. He inclined his head in a slight bow and parted his lips, as if to speak. No words came out, but she watched, more fascinated than appalled, as something else did. A fly emerged from the man’s mouth—a large, glistening, blue-black, fully disgusting fly. Once it had crawled out, and over his lips, it progressed through the thicket of his moustache, then walked slowly up his cheek. He didn’t flinch, only looked steadily at her.

  Avice wanted to scream with laughter, but he did frighten her a little, this man. He was strangely dressed, she now noticed, all in black: his suit, his cape, his top hat on the chair beside him. He had black, slicked-back hair, and his moustache was waxed to bull’s horn points. He looked overdone, contrived and artificial, not quite real, as if he had just stepped out of some book or someone’s overwrought imagination. Hers, for example.

  And there was something else about him besides. A secret. One she would do well to keep to herself. Or rather, she would do better not to keep it at all, for she had no idea what it meant. It was this: she knew from reading the leaves in her teacup that this man, with his mephitic, if stagy, odour, was in her future. He might even be her future. She had read the portent, had seen his face staring up at her from the bottom of the cup, belligerently, even as it now stared at her from across the room.

  No. She wouldn’t have it.

  Avice stood abruptly, knocking her chair over and snagging the tablecloth, which made the cutlery and porcelain tremble. She snatched up the teacup, then threw it with force onto the floor, where it exploded into flying splinters and shards. Then she marched out of the room.

  If he was real, let him pay the bill.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Hugh

  He was in-kneed, cack-handed and hircine. An unusual migration had occurred on his person, in that he had a mound of orange pubic hair growing on top of his head while a silken straight-as-a-gut sporran bewigged his manhood. His facial features were like parasitical entities that had nuzzled into his skin and clung there with a bat-like tenacity: flame-rimmed eyes, nose-stump, mouth-slash, ears that rode as flat to the head as scabs. Generally speaking, if he was a horse, you’d pass him by, a goat and you’d say no thanks, a dog, you’d head in the opposite direction.

  But he was a man, and of all the men Avice could have chosen, she chose him.

  He saw himself as a piss artist and a real piss-cutter, but he was really just a pisshead. A dumb cluck born in a garboil, plucked out of a tumult, a chaos of flying boots and fists that in other circles is known as a family. He was too mean for a name.

  “C’mere you,” his mother would say as he tried to skulk out the door.

  It was almost impossible to get by that brute of a woman without receiving a ringing clout on the head. It’s no wonder he was so physically contracted. His stature was foreshortened from ducking, his ears flattened protectively close to his head, his nose retracted telescopically into his face. You, that’s all he ever got; a pronoun knuckle-dusted into his skull, which at least evolved over time out of the pre-nominal muck into Hugh. A proper noun, if not a proper gentleman.

  He looked solid enough, was built of enduring material, and was covered in freckles that overlapped like mail. But he tended to slosh when he walked, like a half-empty bottle. He leaked. Water ran out of his eyes, his nose. He drooled. He sweat. He pissed cataracts in the morning. (He woke piss proud.) She thought of him as containing a lake, the pressure of it bursting though his seams, the damp impression he left on the sheets, which was a bit too poetic for her to think, and for him to be. He was well lubricated was all; and she called it out of him, made him weep like a boiler, with pain mostly. Her rising heat, her prickly female dander, made him gasp and sneeze. He was a beached carp on the hard shore of her.

  Avice found him behind a blockade of bottles in a dark back corner of the Mansion House barroom. She had to step over a dead man to get to him, and cut her way through a layered curtain of smoke. Not to mention the obstructing stares of the other patrons, tough, bruised, beak-faced locals, mill hands and sailors, who were stunned by her sudden presence among them. A female. How easily she strode through the door, how coolly she surveyed them all. The dead man, well, they were used to him, but she trailed trouble after her like a widow’s black, entangling weeds.

  “You,” she said, sinking her fingers into the russet wool on Hugh’s head and jerking it roughly upward, pulling it into what thin annunciatory light there was, to peer into his face. “All right, you’ll do. Come with me.”

  They all marvelled. Pat Sloan, the farrier, crossed himself twice—forwards and backwards—appealing to whatever deity, God or devil, might be attending.

  How did she know his name?

  He should have swaggered back in afterwards, hitching up his trousers with a satisfied manly yank, giving his recently buttoned fly a fond pat of approval. A virgin, after all, and a lady. How many times in one man’s low life does he get a piece of that? But Hugh tried his best to be inconspicuous. He shuffled back into the bar like a stick of furniture shifting on the sly. He couldn’t quite figure it. He attacked the problem over and over, using his brain like a blunt instrument. What he finally figured out was that she took something from him, and not the other way around. He didn’t know how she did it, or even what it was. (Not his virginity. Heck, Uncle Nort got that years ago.) He had the sneaking suspicion, though, that it was something important, something he hadn’t even been aware of possessing before she took it. But what?

  Hoity-toity bitch. Fucken hore. As this was all his quiet moment of reflection had to offer, Hugh walked over to a man drinking at the bar and served up his fist into the guy’s empty face like a portion of pig knuckles on a plate. He felt better then.

  Her pucelage, she dealt with it.

  More to the point was how she had found her way to the Mansion House, to the island and port town, the x on the map, the stitch (if not the kiss) that would soon reunite the sundered and drifting couple. Fate had nothing to do with it. Grif could have been caught in its ensnaring strands as he wandered along, thinking himself entirely free, but Avice was more independent and resourceful than that. So. Where does one go in the late nineteenth century when looking for a needle—or needlehead—in a haystack? Where else but to a spiritualist.

  Fleeing down the walk after quitting the Collingwood Inn—and Avice did bolt once she was out the door and beyond the avid, mocking eye of that strange man—she ducked quickly down a side street, casting about almost desperately for some p
lace to hide. She suspected, rightly, that he might follow. In a small, tidy clapboard cottage she noticed a sign propped in the front window that read: Mrs. Betsy Wolf—Theosophist, Clairvoyant, Hydromancer. Mrs. Wolf evidently had many eerily vibrating strings to her bow, but as long as she had a curtained and concealing room, Avice was content. She dashed through the door of the cottage and locked it behind her.

  She had entered a sparsely decorated front room—presumably an interior design preference of the dead and immaterial, as she had once for a hoot visited a similar psychic lair with one of her sisters. The only appointments were a round table, two plain wooden chairs, a pine trunk pushed up against one wall, curtains of a heavy maroon cloth that dressed the room’s two windows, soon to be dramatically drawn on the scene within. On the table sat a single unlit candle in a pewter holder and a clear glass bowl filled with water. Lowly props, but sufficient in their modesty.

  Three doors led into the room from the other parts of the house. All were closed, and Avice tried to guess the one through which Mrs. Wolf was to make her entrance.

  She waited … longer than she liked. Surely if the woman was clairvoyant, she would know she had a customer.

  She ran her hands up her arms, a chill seeming suddenly to pass through her. She was reminded of her sisters quaking in the darkened parlour at home, while one produced raspy scritching sounds by dragging a bow across violin strings and another whispered ghost stories. It was the best she could do at the time not to ruin the mood of the evening with her sceptical, spell-breaking tongue. Silently she endured their wide-eyed amazement as they breathlessly described the uncanny happenings that occurred at seances they had attended, or what it was like to have their vibrations read, or how they had seen with their own eyes evidence of the supernatural in spirit photographs. Hook, line and sinker, they swallowed it all, including palmistry, levitation, spirit rapping. They had even tried automatic writing, taking dictation from deeply anonymous authors. Fakery and fashionable nonsense. All the same, Avice knew that mystery had to reside somewhere if life was to have any thrill at all, and she was willing enough to seek it here.

  Whether Mrs. Betsy Wolf could pull it off was another matter. The plump and matronly woman who finally appeared—and not through the door Avice had guessed—had an air more of domestic dabblings than of otherworldly ones. She had a smudge of flour on her cheek and was wearing an apron, on which she wiped her hands before taking it off and tossing it across the back of one of the chairs. A distinct aura of liver and onions trailed after her, and there wasn’t even a speck of foaming ectoplasm left bobbing in her wake. Her dress was a plain brown serge, her white hair gathered up hastily into a knot, her smile kindly and slightly hesitant.

  Avice tipped her nose up and held it at a disapproving angle. The theatrical demands of the profession were not being met here. She had been expecting someone sleek and unsettling, with Romany black eyes, pale skin and a hot red mouth full of tangly foreign syllables. She did not want to consult her mother, or any of her mother’s substitutes at large in the world.

  “What is theosophy?” she challenged, skipping even the most cursory of pleasantries.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, my dear.” All business, Mrs. Wolf dug in a pocket and produced a match, which she ignited by striking it on her front tooth. She lit the candle, then walked over to each of the windows and briskly snapped the curtains shut. “Not much call for it in these parts, you see, but one has to make a show of keeping up. To be quite honest, I’m just an old-fashioned fortune teller.” She took a seat at the table and motioned for her client to do likewise. “Now, what can I do for you, dear? Wait, don’t tell me. You are looking for a man.”

  “Yes, I am,” said Avice, surprised enough to take the offered seat. But then, all the women who came here probably were looking for “a man.”

  “Your husband.”

  Not a question, but she nodded anyway.

  “Are you certain you want to find him?” Mrs. Wolf herself was thrice widowed. (Mr. Blair, an unfortunate accident, Mr. Dunlop, ditto, Mr. Wolf, “something” he ate.)

  “I do.”

  “In that case I had best have a look at your hand.” Mrs. Wolf took Avice’s strong, resistant hand in her own warm and pliant one (which felt lovely to Avice, and comforting—maybe she did want her mother), and announced after a brief, concentrated study of her fingernails, their high burnish in the candlelight, “You are a virgin.”

  Avice gave a little gasp, more impressed than taken aback.

  “And not a very nice one, either.”

  She had to smile at this. Perhaps the old bird did know a thing or two.

  Mrs. Wolf did not necessarily know that much about ony-chomancy, a rare form of divination, for she had only been reading the obvious: the dirt caked under those nails! She turned Avice’s hand over and began to study the lines scored in her palm, which were more deeply etched than was usual for someone of her age; perhaps the girl clenched her fists overmuch. No immediately useful information was available there in any event, for the fortune teller sniffed and said, “I don’t see him. Not a trace of him, not even in your heart line. We’ll have to look elsewhere.”

  “All right.” Avice withdrew her hand and sat back.

  “Do you believe in spirits, my dear?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Good, then you should have no objections if I try to contact one. Some of them are nothing more than disembodied gossip floating loose in the world. You never can tell, someone may have spotted him. He might even be a spirit himself by now. Save you the trouble, if you know what I mean.”

  She did indeed know, and had begun to warm to this plain-spoken and homey medium. “What must I do?”

  “Oh, I do most of the work, you simply ask the questions.”

  Mrs. Wolf closed her eyes and let all of the expression, and colour, drain from her face and down the thick spout of her neck. Inwardly, she had opened her mind wide enough to accommodate whatever unengaged spirit might happen by—and with the recent disaster of the Echo, a mind as expansive as a ballroom might even be needed.

  No sooner had she begun this exercise than Avice became aware of a strange noise in the room, a thumping and scratching that was coming from the vicinity of the pine trunk. A light, apprehensive shudder rivered up her back.

  Mrs. Wolf cocked open one eye, then both, which she turned—balefully—in the direction of the trunk. Huffing with annoyance, she got up, marched over to it and flung open the lid. “Luther,” she said, “scat!”

  A white cat, a puritan if not a phantom shade, shot out of the trunk and through the one doorway that Mrs. Wolf had left open when she entered the room.

  “My apologies, dear.” She resumed her seat. “I never know where that one will turn up next. Let’s proceed, shall we.”

  Avice shrugged, her interest in this whole business seriously diluted. Likely there were other little helpers on hand to knock on walls or rattle chains, and she chided herself for being gullible enough to consider that something might actually be revealed here. This session better be entertaining, she thought, if nothing else.

  It was, but only in the way that Hugh, still in her future, was to become: a dire amusement.

  While Avice sat and smirked and nothing much happened, Mrs. Wolf once again sank into a trance. And then it happened with bewildering speed. The air began to tighten around her. She felt a pressure instantly building, as an embracing force pushed her eyes back into her head. It tried to ram her jaw up into her skull, to crush her ribs, to flatten her legs like sheets of paper. She was pinned to the chair. She couldn’t move or speak—and she was absolutely terrified. Her skin was about to burst open, and her bones explode, and her frozen blood shatter.

  Horrified and helpless, she watched as the lit candle flew out of the holder as if hurled by an unseen hand. It struck her on the chest, and landed in her lap. A flaw of fire zipped up the front of her dress. She heard an unearthly scream—had she made it?—then a w
ave of water hit her and she was standing, shaking, drenched but free of it.

  Mrs. Wolf was also standing, the empty glass bowl clasped in her hands. She used water sometimes for scrying. It was like a liquid tarot that could be swirled and swished, a handy lubricant used to unlock a few of the secrets that the future so tightly held. This time it had served the present better, leaving a wet, unreadable splatter on the front of Avice’s dress. Mrs. Wolf, a workaday medium, was accustomed to a more civil and prosaic association with the otherworld, as if the Dominion of the dead, the Canadian contingent of the supernatural, was likewise populated with the polite and reserved, spirits who were content to rap on the table or rustle the curtains as required. Never before had she been host to such a vicious presence. Old world, she thought, with an axe to grind.

  “My,” she said, gamely enough. “I think we’ve both earned a good stiff drink after that. I wouldn’t take what happened too seriously, dear. The mind can do strange things. You’re too smart to believe in this hocus-pocus.”

  Avice nodded, still a bit dazed, and meekly followed Mrs. Wolf through the open door into her kitchen at the back of the cottage. There, as the day wore on, and the greenery outside the window swayed with increasing animation, and a top-hatted stranger knocked on the front door and rattled the knob, trying fruitlessly to gain admittance, the two women communed with another spirited substance altogether (for Mrs. Wolf had another string to her bow: she was the town bootlegger).

  One thing leading to another, the fortune teller eventually suggested that Avice travel to the very port town where Grif was headed—but not because she could see him going there. It was more a joke prediction, a glinting piece of warped, but hundred-proof, lucidity that she had inadvertently conjured up. It was a lover she saw, not a husband, and her description of him had them both in hysterics: the hair, the face, the walk, one knee on a crash course with the other. They giggled and snorted like schoolgirls. At one point Avice slipped right out of her chair and accidentally sat on Luther, who howled loudly enough to protest for all mankind. Oh, that stump of a man, that hilding, that affront made flesh.