The Book Collector

by Alice Thompson

  She put the book back on the shelf and ran upstairs to their bedroom. She snatched the small brown medicine bottle from her bedside table – it was still at least two-thirds full. She knew she would have to act quickly. Archie was on a trajectory to complete the pattern on the book. Tonight might be her final chance.

  She looked again at the bottle in her hand and her heart went cold. She could not go through with this. She should contact the detective. He would help. But would he believe her? She had been put in an asylum – twice. It was her word against her husband’s and the doctors’ and even the capable Clara’s. No one had believed her before. They would not believe her now. No, the detective would not help her, there would be no prince coming to her rescue. She had to finish this story herself.

  She was no longer sure if what she was about to do was for revenge or self-preservation or both and she hardly cared. She only knew that this story had to be completed. She was acting in a purely intuitive way as if her imaginative reading of ‘The Constant Tin Soldier’ was the only source of truth and reality. Lucid thought or logic would only serve to obfuscate her, confuse the moral rightness of what she had to do. For fairy tales had their own morality, their own cruel sense of right and wrong that pierced any mundane surface.

  That evening, Violet dressed for dinner wearing her favourite red satin gown and tied her hair up. It would be the first time Clara would formally dine with them. Violet took the small bottle of laudanum from her bedroom table and hid it beneath the sash at her waist. She went down to the kitchen where the cook was preparing dinner and, while her back was turned, took out the bottle from underneath her sash. She carefully poured all the liquid contents into the tureen of spinach soup.

  As husband and wife waited at the table for Clara to come down, Violet could see her husband looking at her admiringly in the candlelight. When Clara entered the dining room, to Violet’s surprise her youthful surface looked slightly dulled. Violet had imagined she would look triumphant. It was as if that now her affair with Violet’s husband was no longer secret, Clara had lost some of her magical power and vigour.

  She wore a blue velvet dress and her hair was pulled tightly back so that her features looked heavy and insolent rather than seductive. Violet wondered if Clara cared that she would never be able to replace Rose in Archie’s heart.

  The cook poured out the soup. While Violet pretended to sip hers, she watched as her husband and his lover finished every last drop from their bowls.

  ‘How was the soup?’ she asked Archie.

  ‘Delicious,’ he replied but she could see his eyelids beginning to droop.

  ‘You look tired, my darling,’ she said.

  She turned to Clara whose head was nodding forward.

  ‘I think you both need to rest.’

  The cook came in to clear the bowls. Violet realised she had to get the servants to leave the house. They were innocent. She saw the cook notice how dazed Archie and Clara were beginning to look.

  ‘I think we are all tired. We have had enough to eat. Is there not a dance tonight in the village?’ Violet asked.

  The cook smiled, a large woman who was still relatively young and had great enthusiasm for small pleasures. Her plump face creased up in a wide smile.

  ‘There is, Lady Murray. In the hall.’ The cook glanced up at the mantelpiece clock. It said nine o’clock.

  ‘It’s just beginning,’ the cook said, hopefully.

  ‘Why don’t you take yourself and the housemaids off for the evening? Have some fun!’

  The cook looked doubtfully at the uncleared table. ‘What about the table, Your Ladyship?’

  ‘Leave it until tomorrow. The dishes will still be there in the morning.’

  Violet looked down at the ancestral plates, the empty soup bowls with the Murrays’ crest. She remembered the one she had broken. Was that how this had all started, like the pricking of a finger on a spinning wheel? How long ago it all now seemed.

  ‘Lord Murray and Clara do seem tired,’ the cook added, rather anxiously.

  ‘Don’t worry. I will take them up to their rooms. It’s been a long day for all of us. I am going to retire early, too. I’ll leave the front door unlocked for you. I don’t expect you to be back before midnight.’

  ‘Many thanks, Lady Murray.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  The cook looked startled. Violet realised she had sounded too final. ‘Have a lovely time,’ Violet added cheerfully.

  ‘Good night, Lady Murray.’

  Violet remained sitting in the dining room until she heard all the servants leave, laughing and slamming the door behind them. Archie and Clara were still propped up in their chairs, now barely conscious, like apparitions of death, she thought. They were both in their finery as the candles were burning down and the silver knives were twinkling in the flickering light. Their faces had grown pale like ghosts and their eyes glassy, just like a tin soldier and toy ballerina, she thought.

  ‘I need to take you up to the bedroom now,’ she said.

  Clara murmured, ‘I love you, Archie,’ in a way, Violet thought, that she had never murmured to him. With such an intense knowledge of him, born of passion. Violet, in contrast, had mostly loved him like a dependent child.

  Violet stood and went over to Clara and gently pulled her up from her chair. The blue velvet of Clara’s dress brushed gently against her bare arms. Clara’s arms looked so white compared to hers. Violet led her – how meek she was – upstairs to their marital bedroom, undressed her and unlaced her corset, releasing her breasts.

  Violet pulled back the heavy brocade coverlet of their bed and laid the sleeping naked Clara down in it. The bed where Rose had given birth to her stillborn child, where Violet had given birth to Felix. Had Clara, too, been in this bed before, she wondered? Perhaps when Violet had been locked up in the asylum.

  Violet returned to the dining room. Archie had now slumped forward on the table, his chestnut curls dangerously near a still-burning candle. She moved the candlestick away.

  ‘Be careful, darling. You don’t want to catch fire,’ Violet said softly.

  Mustering all her strength, she pulled him to his feet, enjoying the warm heaviness of his masculine body leaning against her.

  ‘Clara is waiting for you in our bed,’ she said.

  As she and Archie climbed the stairs together and he leaned on her for support he muttered, ‘You have been such a good mother to Felix, Violet. I know you have always done your best.’

  ‘But have I been a good wife?’ she asked.

  ‘You are a wonderful wife, Rose. You are the love of my life.’

  ‘By any other name,’ Violet replied softly.

  She took him into the bedroom, undressed him too, and laid him next to Clara.

  ‘This is where you both belong, now,’ she said softly.

  She intertwined their arms. How in love they looked, she thought. She gently pulled the coverlet over their unconscious bodies. In the flickering gas-light they both looked dead, she thought, when really they were just in a deep sleep. She shut the door behind her and locked it with the key.

  She went downstairs to the library. She pulled out some of the books from the shelves and built a pile of them in the middle of the floor until it reached her waist. She perched the fairy tale book on the top. She took a match and lit its cover and watched as the circular moon of the pale skin inserts turned black and shrivelled, as the gilt-edged pages of the book then also caught fire. Soon the green dye began to run, revealing the pale skin of the binding. The colours of the illustrations melted into one another. The white flare of paper burning grew larger, the pages of other books in the pile rustling as they caught fire, one by one. Soon all the books in the pile were burning, the heat in the library growing intense and the room becoming an inferno of light and fury.

  The heat at last drove her out. She fled the house, into the cold moonlight. Only when she reached the end of the driveway did she finally look back. The entire lower floor of their
house was on fire, the flames licking up towards the second floor and the roof and into the night sky.

  Violet turned away and started to walk down the road to the village. She needed to collect Felix from his friend’s. She looked down at her blackened hands covered in soot and burns. She would not mention the book of fairy tales to anyone, for she knew that if she did, they might return her to the asylum. She looked up at the full white moon in the sky and wondered what it saw.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery, and to Jenny Brown, and to Regi Claire and Ron Butlin. And to my mother.