Fitcher's Brides

by Gregory Frost

  Indeed, for modern prose versions of Bluebeard we must go not to the children’s fairy-tale shelves, as we do for other stories by Perrault. We must go to the shelves of adult literature, where we find a number of interesting re-tellings. Foremost among them is Angela Carter’s splendid story “The Bloody Chamber,” published in her short story collection of the same name, in which the author gives full rein to the tale’s inherent sensuality, and expands the role of the bride’s mother to wonderful effect. Bluebeard’s Daughter by Sylvia Townsend Warner is a wry, sly, elegant tale about the daughter of Bluebeard’s third wife, with her own abiding interest in the locked room of her father’s castle. Margaret Atwood’s fine story Bluebeard’s Egg, published in her collection of that name, is a contemporary, purely realist tale of marriage and infidelity that draws its symbolism from both Bluebeard and Fitcher’s Bird. Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut and The Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman are both contemporary novels that make use of symbolism from the fairy tale in intriguing ways. Vonnegut’s book is the tale of an artist with a secret in his potato barn; Hoffman’s novel is the study of a seemingly perfect man with a mysterious past. “Bones” by Francesca Lia Block is a brief but thoroughly chilling take on the Bluebeard story, concerning a lonely girl and a wealthy young man in the L.A. hills. It was first published in her fairy-tale collection The Rose and the Beast (2000). Neil Gaiman draws upon Robber Bridegroom legends and the English tale of Mr. Fox in his haunting prose-poem “The White Road,” first published in the fairy-tale anthology Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears (Datlow & Windling, eds., 1996). Bluebeard poetry ranges from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Bluebeard” (Renascence and Other Poems, 1917) to Anne Sexton’s “The Gold Key” (Transformations, 1971) to Gwen Strauss’s “Bluebeard” (Trail of Stones, 1990).

  In “The Wife Killer,” Lydia Millet reflects on Bluebeard’s potent, enduring allure. “Blue Beard retains his charm,” she writes, “by being what most men and women feel they cannot be: an overt articulator of the private fantasy of egomania. At first glance he is simultaneously what we can never be and what we long to be; by implication a sadistic killer, by extension a sexual hedonist, and at the least a particularly earnest misogynist, he is the subject that takes itself for a god. He is omnipotent because he accepts no social compromise; he acts solely in the pursuit of his own satisfaction.” She goes on to remind us that “between an egotist with high expectations and a sociopath stretches only the fine thread of empathy and identification.”

  Her words apply to the Bluebeard at the heart of Gregory Frost’s new novel: the controlling, calculating, charismatic Reverend Fitcher, ruling over his flock of true believers in nineteenth-century New York State.10 The author draws upon Fitcher’s Bird, The Robber Bridegroom, and other related “murderous stranger” tales to spin a story in which faith (like curiosity) is a two-edged sword. Like Bluebeard, the story that follows is about illusion, transgression, and carnal appetites. Like Fitcher’s Bird, it features a traditional fairy-tale heroine: the third and youngest daughter, clever, disobedient, and courageous. Like The Robber Bridegroom and Mr. Fox, it warns us: Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest your life’s blood should run cold. Beware of strangers in the wood…and of gentlemen in the front parlor.

  We hope you’ll enjoy this latest edition in the Fairy Tales Series. With the help of the good folks at Tor Books, we have more Fairy Tales novels in store for you. (Publication information will be posted on the Tor Books Web site: www.tor.com, and on my own Web site: www.endicott-studio.com.) To learn more about Bluebeard and other tales, and to see classic Bluebeard illustrations, visit the SurLaLune Fairy Tale Pages Web site edited by Heidi Anne Heiner: www.surlalunefairytales.com. For further reading on the subject, I recommend the following books: From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers by Marina Warner, Spells of Enchantment edited by Jack Zipes, and The Classic Fairy Tales edited by Maria Tatar.

  TERRI WINDLING

  The Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts

  Tucson, Arizona, and Devon, England

  Prologue

  CRACK! GOES THE WHIP. SHE flinches at the sound.

  Crack! and the animal jumps. Crack! The lion leaps to a perch. Crack! The lioness paws at the air.

  The tamer wears jodhpurs and thigh-high boots that fold at the top. She has never seen boots like that before and wants a pair of her own, but she does not like what he does with that whip and would snatch it from him if he came near.

  Her mother is there beside her, saying “ooh” and “aah” with the crowd, and also at her as if to say, “It’s a trick, dear, a game. It doesn’t hurt the animals.”

  This is the last time her mother will be able to go anywhere with them. Even now she gives a little cough and clutches the handkerchief in a ball against her mouth. The cough is inaudible over the noises of the crowd; the lurch of her shoulders gives her away.

  When her mother slides the handkerchief down, it leaves a smear on her face, like bright clown makeup wet and shiny from her lip to her jaw. Mother doesn’t know it’s there because she looks and smiles tenderly to each of her daughters as she buries the handkerchief beneath her where they won’t see, so they won’t know.

  Crack! Crack!

  It’s only a game. It’s only for show. No one is hurt.

  She peeks again at the stripe on her mother’s chin.

  Three months hence her mother will lie in a casket on a bier, her hands folded. Her father will sit beside her as if the bones have been torn out of his body. Outside the black-draped parlor, the world she knew will have stopped.

  Crack!

  One

  THEY CLIMBED THE GANGPLANK to the steamboat, the three Charter sisters. As the eldest, Vernelia led them, followed by Amy, and finally Kate, the youngest at sixteen. The plank was wet but someone had thrown a layer of grist onto it so that feet could find purchase in the climb.

  In the middle, halfway between land and lake and part of neither, Kate stopped and turned for a final look at the town of Geneva.

  The wharf and streets teemed with people, more than the girls had ever seen gathered in a single place, even on the commons in Boston on the Fourth of July. Certainly all of the people below had not come down the Cayuga & Seneca Canal with the girls, their father and stepmother: No canal boat could have held so many. Even the steamboat that would carry them to the southern tip of Seneca Lake could not have held this many.

  Spencer coats and shawl collars bumped up against buckskins, carriage dresses, cloaks, and bustles; polished beaver and stovepipe hats, gipsys, capotes, and lace cornettes flowed around bales and boxes, wagons and valises. The girls’ journey across the wharf had been a clumsy, dodging stumble behind their father and stepmother; yet from the higher vantage there was a liquidity of purpose, as pockets of activity swirled like eddies in the bend of some greater human river. They had spent but a day in this town, knew nothing of its secrets, but Kate was compelled to unriddle the place in a final glance, and she might have done if Amy hadn’t grabbed hold of her from above and hissed, “Kate, you’re holding everyone up!”

  Indeed, below her everyone was staring, and reluctantly she continued her climb.

  Vern had already stepped off. Amy reached the top, then clumsily descended as if she might topple; but a hand caught her elbow and steadied her.

  A young gentleman in a sharp blue coat stood on deck and, taking Kate’s hand, helped her climb down on three boxes. “Mademoiselle,” he said. “Welcome aboard the Fidelio, the finest steamboat in New York State.” He couldn’t have been much older than Vern—nineteen or twenty perhaps, and his French accent was not very believable. He had a little strip of a mustache on his lip that looked more like a line of ash than hair, but Kate was too polite to let her opinion show. She smiled demurely and thanked him for his assistance, calling him “Monsieur.”

  He bowed, the gallant knight, and answered, “Charity never faileth.” Amy stood tugging at her green wool pelisse, but she looked up from beneath her bonnet and blus
hed as he spoke, as if the comment had been directed at her. Then she said, “Come now, sister,” and took Kate by the elbow. The young man had already returned to his duty at the head of the gangplank.

  It was the early spring of 1843, and much of New England was on the move. People headed west in droves, into new territories, some running to keep ahead of civilization, others intending to drag civilization into the wilderness. Still others had been swept up in one or more of the religious frenzies that had burned across New York State, one upon the other, for over half a century—one of which had dislocated the lives of the Charter sisters.

  The two girls meandered across the deck, past bales of cotton and wool, and trunks and bags toted by servants, and families gathered around their belongings, and even at one point three men kneeling in an open passage and playing at dice. Amy averted her eyes but Kate watched shamelessly until she was pulled away. “It’s not ladylike to stare that way,” Amy instructed.

  “But—”

  “Just wait till I tell Vern.”

  By then they had spotted their elder sister. She stood beside their father and stepmother just ahead, at the rail. Mr. Charter stared out across the lake at the crisp blue sky.

  Vern saw her sisters and called out, “I swear I cannot turn my back a moment. If you two should ever get lost, what would I do?”

  Lavinia, their stepmother, pushed forward like some black-garbed ghoul, blocked Vern with her body, and spoke over the girl’s words: “Young ladies do not mill about! How is it that from dockside to ship you could not keep up with your own kin?”

  Vern stared daggers at the back of Lavinia’s head but said nothing, leaving it to Amy to account for herself; but the middle sister had never been able to express what she felt to her stepmother, and barely to her older sister, who had acted as mother to the two younger girls for most of the past six years.

  In the silence into which no one could insert a response, their father turned finally from the rail. His heavy-lidded eyes expressed a rooted weariness until his gaze settled upon his three girls, and then his face composed a smile, though the eyes somehow did not participate—eyes that had borne such iniquities, such calamities, as the girls had no appreciation for.

  Mr. Charter had lost his savings in the financial panic of ’37, and it was Lavinia’s money which now, six years later, kept the family afloat. Lavinia was paying for their relocation to Jekyll’s Glen from Boston. Lavinia had secured Mr. Charter’s new position. When the girls married, it would be up to Lavinia to provide them with a dowry. They didn’t believe she ever would, just as they had come to accept, in traveling here, that they were probably never going to marry. Nevertheless, the girls maintained a polite if chilly truce with this stepmother none of them had ever desired.

  If Lavinia had made their father happy, they might have rejoiced, or at least accepted her. Instead, she had stolen him from them as surely as if she’d replaced him with a changeling. It was Lavinia who had led Mr. Charter to the tent of Elias Fitcher, where his brain began to burn with the twin lights of judgment and salvation. It was she who had brought the end of the world into their house. And it was she who, by manipulating their father, now brought their household to the end of the world.

  The three girls leaned on the rail and watched the blue waters of the lake slide swiftly by. The shoreline moved slower at a distance. The smell of pine rode the blustery wind across Seneca Lake from the trees that hemmed it in all around. The hills above had been cleared for farming, and even now tiny figures were visible there, though the ground couldn’t be much past spring thaw.

  Beneath their feet the deck thrummed with the chugging engine, vibrating up their legs. Behind them various people strolled the boards, and snippets of conversations flitted by.

  “A sick philosopher is incurable—”

  “I hear’ed news of a gold strike a’way out west in Ohio.”

  “And will you be goin’ there yourself?”

  “He is among us even now, I tell you. Cast about you…”

  “Landed gentry? Why, how can we be when we’re on water here.”

  Sometimes they glanced back, if the voice was pleasant and sounded young enough that a handsome man might be at the end of it. Often they played a game of imagining who they would marry, how life would be, how many perfect children they would bear. “It has to be a tall man,” Amy would say. “He must be clean, too, well groomed,” Kate would throw in. Then they’d both look at Vern until she put in something of her own: “And we’ll have six children, all girls.” From there they would refine the description, change the number of children or detail the color of the phantom husband’s hair, or else pick a city to live in and describe the house they would manage. They had played the game back home in Boston and to pass the time on the slow canal boats that had brought them across the state to Geneva, and the lake, and their advancing destination. Their fancies flew in the face of the very reason for their journey, which made the need to pretend all the more poignant.

  Then abruptly as the Fidelio crossed the middle of the lake, the breeze blew colder, as if they had passed into some deep moist cavern of air. The two oldest girls stood in the partial shadow of the pilothouse and stack, and they drew their cloaks and shawls tighter around their shoulders. All three trembled for a moment, glanced at each other to see if the sensation was shared, and discovering that it was, traded their uneasiness. Then, as if each had heard her name called, they turned slowly about.

  A man stood a few feet away, considering them. The girls squinted and shielded their eyes to see him, but he’d chosen to stand so that the morning sun seemed to ride upon his shoulder. Its rays flared across him, blinding them to all but his general shape.

  He wore a long gray coat, and a white cravat. He was tall and rail-thin, and his hands at his sides curled and uncurled slowly. Beyond that the girls couldn’t make out more than the shadows of his features.

  While she shaded her eyes, Vern said, “Sir, is there something you wish of us?”

  Vern’s stance spoke more defiance than her tone, while Amy, true to her nature, blushed and glanced down at her feet. The two of them held hands in mutual support. The wind blew Kate’s fair hair into her eyes. She tucked it back under her silk bonnet and continued to squint at the interloper.

  “Oh, no, young miss, not the slightest.” His voice was dark and smooth as syrup, delicious, as if Kate could taste it. “But you are all such beautiful creatures, aren’t you, that one has to stop and take you in. I simply cannot help myself, as what man could? You must pardon me.” He bowed, and this afforded Kate a momentary glimpse below the dazzle of the sun, of a long, severe face and blue eyes as cold as stars. He continued. “Pardon me as I have beheld the fruit of the garden and found it delectable. But is it wise for three such as yourselves to travel into this undiscovered country unchaperoned?”

  “Our…father,” Vern began, “is just across there.”

  The stranger did not turn his head to where she pointed, but asked, “You are none of you married, then? Are the men of this world so blind?”

  Now Vern blushed.

  “I will see you again, I hope. In this life surely before the next.” He bowed slightly again, then turned and walked off.

  They watched him weave through the crowd, and it wasn’t until he was out of sight around the far side of the pilothouse that they found the sense to react. Amy pleaded, “Kate, let us move down so that we’re in the sunlight with you. We’re freezing.” They shuffled along toward the nose of the boat, clinging to the rail as if they couldn’t stand without it. The sunlight was reinvigorating.

  “Who was he?” Kate asked.

  “He was dreadfully forward,” replied Amy, “whoever he was.”

  “I think I’ve never met anyone like that in my life,” said Vern, and the tone of her comment—as if made in private—caused her sisters to glance her way in alarm, for she sounded as if she had enjoyed him. She laughed when she saw their looks. “You don’t know, my dears, but
you will one day, what it is that we women need in men.”

  Amy stood dumb, uncomprehending.

  Kate shook her head, dismissing the avowal in a gesture. She focused her attention across the deck, after the stranger.

  She had acted her eldest sister’s confidante many times—a role that Amy was ill-equipped to handle—and she was fully informed of Vern’s notions of womanhood, of sundry insubstantial claims, but mostly of Vern’s one great indiscretion, after which the pretense of sagacity had given way to blind panic until, after some delay, Vern’s monthly flow had arrived. She loved her eldest sister dearly, but found the wisdom dispensed on the strength of one hasty and ill-chosen congress most absurd. Who was she acting the queen for then—Amy? Still, there had been about the stranger something beguiling, Kate admitted. His voice had shaken her as well.

  She determined that she wanted a better look at him. She excused herself then and headed for the pilothouse. Vern called after her but Kate didn’t acknowledge that she heard. She pushed past men and women in their travel clothes, saw her stepmother look up and nearly catch her eye, and ducked her head and drove quickly through the crush, into pockets of odor, of bodies that had traveled long in the same clothes, of cigars, of pine tar, of water-soaked wood, past the moist spray and hiss of the turning wheel. She came up for air far enough away that Lavinia would not see her, then strolled ahead with purpose. She could not find him. Then, as she approached the back of the pilothouse and stepped through a gap between two crates, she brushed up against the young man who had helped her onto the boat deck.

  He regarded her with shy amusement, head turned slightly down as if he knew he’d been forward earlier and now must account for himself. But Kate didn’t care about that. “You—why, you helped everyone on board today, did you not?”

  It certainly wasn’t the question he’d expected, or perhaps hoped for, and he hesitated a moment before answering almost in defense, “It’s my job.”