by Octavia Cade
“Just showing her her job,” said Whitechapel, and Bluebeard’s wife started.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“That favor you owe me,” said Whitechapel, dragging her gaze away from Pandora’s own deliberate look. “There’s six buildings I want here, so that’s six stones to mark ’em with. I want you to pick ’em for me, and I’ll help you with your names.”
“I can do that,” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“You’ve got to see it before you can choose,” said Whitechapel. They were standing, the two of them, outside a small and rather filthy lane, while the great hospital loomed before them, a few short minutes away.
“Let’s get a little closer,” said Bluebeard’s wife, but Whitechapel gripped her elbow, held her back.
“I’m not going near that place again,” she said. “Not ever. They were kind to me there, but I’ve seen all of it that I want to. You go on, though.”
“Where will you be?” said Bluebeard’s wife. “How will I find you again?”
“I’ll be here,” said Whitechapel, and her voice was low and soft and distant, and she was staring at a small gate. “Knew a woman who died here, I did. Had her throat cut from ear to ear, and more besides. You go on, girl. You’ve got the box, you’ll be all right. I’m going to stay here and pay my respects.”
“Very well,” said Bluebeard’s wife, uncertain but unwilling to intrude. She squeezed the other’s hand. “I’m sorry for your loss.” It was an anemic thing to say, a sympathy of bread and milk, a sop to grief that Bluebeard’s wife knew instinctively the other did not want to show, but there was nothing else she knew to say.
Bluebeard’s wife circled the hospital: once, twice and again. She’d even wandered through it, pretending to be visiting a sick friend, but there was nothing in the walls or the roofline or the hard floor that spoke to her. Discouraged, she found a bench up against the stone walls of the hospital and sighed. She knew better than to return to Whitechapel and suggest that same stone as the metaphor within those slender corridors of books. Surely something so simple was too simplistic. She was just opening the box to retrieve a small snack—Pandora had made sure to send her off with a number of little treats to nibble on—when the streets before her shimmered slightly and a woman’s voice interrupted her staring.
“Excuse me,” she said, “might I join you?”
“Of course,” said Bluebeard’s wife, shifting over to make room. The woman was older than herself and thin as the beggars on the street, though her clothes were well-made and she sat as solid as brickwork. Bluebeard’s wife cast about for something to say; it seemed to her impolite to ignore the other. “Nice night, isn’t it?” she said, lamely.
The other woman raised an eyebrow at her. “It can’t be that nice if you’re crying in it,” she said, and Bluebeard’s wife was astonished to find that her face was wet.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping at her cheeks with a cold hand. “It’s just . . . I had to . . . ”
“I think I understand,” said the woman. “I’ve seen your type before—the look of you, that is. You’ve been visiting the hospital, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I had . . . I have a friend who was taken there. She was hurt rather badly, I’m afraid.”
“Will she live?” said the other woman, then screwed her face up slightly. “I’m sorry. That was graceless of me. Perhaps it upsets you to speak of it.”
“That’s all right,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I don’t mind, really. But yes, she’ll live. I don’t know why I’m carrying on so.”
“It’s the shock of it more than anything, I expect,” said the woman. “Try not to worry too much. The nursing here is the best you can find anywhere. I should know!”
“Are you a nurse?” said Bluebeard’s wife, and the other woman laughed.
“I wish,” she said. “I’m still a student. Strictly probationary, which means I spend most of my days scrubbing floors and cleaning bandages. Still, it’s good training, you know, and I’m sure it will all pay off in the end.” Her hands were red and cracked about the knuckles.
“Here,” said Bluebeard’s wife impulsively, offering up the open box. “Have a pastry. They’re very nice, really. There’s almond paste and apples in them.”
It was hard to miss the leap of delight in the other woman’s eyes, but she held herself back. “I really shouldn’t,” she said, tucking her hands under her shawl as if to resist temptation. “There’s half a hundred things that you can be dismissed for here. Eating on the doorstep is probably one of them.”
“It’s hardly the doorstep,” said Bluebeard’s wife, coaxing. “And it’s pretty dark already. No one will see you if you’re quick. I don’t imagine you get many almond pastries here . . . ”
“The food is very . . . plain,” the other woman admitted, taking a pastry and devouring it in quick, neat bites. She gave a wry look. “There’s a lot of porridge.”
“I see,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “You’d better have another one, then.”
“In for a penny,” said the woman, laughing. “My name is Edith,” she said.
“Ada,” said Bluebeard’s wife, stealing the first name that came to mind. It didn’t feel as if it fit her at all, but she only had to answer to it for a short time. “Are you already in trouble?” she asked, and Edith laughed again.
“I should be tucked up in bed with the rest of them,” she said. “I’m so tired—we go morning to night, you see, and often there’s no break at all. So many women leave, they can’t stand the strain. But today . . . it’s been so close today, inside the hospital; I felt all steamed through, so I just had to get out for a breath of fresh air. As fresh as it gets here, anyway,” she continued, looking with ill-concealed dismay over at the run-down tenements surrounding the hospital.
“And something to eat,” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“And that,” said Edith. “And that too.”
On her own again, and still no wiser, Bluebeard’s wife sighed and gave up for the night. She would go back and find Whitechapel, admit her failure, and do her best to try again tomorrow. She fumbled with the box as she walked, opening it one last time to empty it of crumbs, and the street before her shimmered again—and this time, the road was full of strange horseless carriages, and there was a round blue plaque on the hospital wall.
She did not know the last name of the woman who saw her crying and came to sit with her, but the first name was the same, and the blue was hard and cheerful and set the box to thrumming. Carefully, glancing from side to side to see if she remained unnoticed, Bluebeard’s wife tightened her grip on the box and reached for the plaque, her body a current between them. Together, they showed her everything.
There are so many of them. Soldiers from all sides and she treats them in her hospital in Brussels just the same, because what good is a nurse who picks and chooses, who leaves some to suffer because she can? To refuse to choose is also a choice, and a nurse is not a soldier. There is some high ground in that, and perhaps that is why she is left to get on with it, even behind enemy lines as she is. Her country might be at war with theirs, but she is seen to make no distinction.
But there are so many of them: Belgian and French and British, wounded and derelict and looking to escape from the Germans. And they are so young, and when they look up at her from their beds and their bandages she understands that one choice is not enough. So Edith hides and harbors and smuggles them away to England and out into a safer world, knowing that a choice that is secret is still a choice, knowing that for some choices, the only consequences are bad.
Bad or not, the choices that led to those consequences are hers, and she would not make any others. And when they interrogate her about her choices, in a court that is not her own, during a war that she did not choose, she admits her guilt because she would do it again and because she is not sorry. And when she is called a traitor and a collaborator, she thinks to herself that there is more to betray tha
n countries, and that she will not be party to.
She spends ten weeks in the prison of Saint-Gilles, the last two of which are solitary confinement. Edith does not know why they do this: is she expected to use the time to learn to regret her choices? She does not. She has seen death very often: it is familiar to her, neither strange nor fearful, and she does not shrink now from the choices she has made. To do other than she had would make her other than she is, and there is nothing so very wrong with her that she wishes that.
She is told, in the end, by a chaplain who is at once her enemy and her friend, what the morning will bring. Part of her, the part she has managed to stifle down to almost nothing, is surprised it has come to this. Most of her is not. There is hope, and there is expectation, and Edith knows the difference. She has always known it. So she packs herself up into a small handbag so that none would have to do it after: her clothes neatly folded, her hairbrush put away. The little gas-flame lights her cell before dawn, and the dusty smell of old flowers from the two bouquets, ten weeks old each, seems to her new and fresh again. Perhaps she is just paying more attention now, while she can.
When she is bound to the pole, there is a brief shallow relief at having something to lean upon and still the trembling. There are quick deep breaths as the blindfold is tied gently over her face, and the knowledge now that if she cries the fabric will mop up the tears and no one but he who put it on her will know she is less brave at the end than she could have been. At least this way she does not have to look at the rifles. It has been difficult to look away from them as they bound her, difficult not to remember what those rifles—and those like them—have done to the men who were once her patients and how she packed their wounds with gauze to stop the bleeding.
There are eight of them, and they are only six paces away. Edith feels sorry for them. She is old enough to be their mother. She does not know they have been told she is not a mother herself; told so that it might be easier for them. She tries very hard not to think of her own mother, eighty years old and not knowing this morning where her daughter is. She hopes someone will break it to her kindly, that she will not read about it first in the papers.
She does not hear the order over the beating of her heart.
It is over quickly. A bullet through the forehead, the others through her heart, and they leave her with holes in the back of her body like axe-wounds.
“I think I know,” said Bluebeard’s wife, roaming through the aisles of the geological section and peering into glass cases. “That is . . . Pandy?”
“Yes, dear?” said Pandora, who was following behind, crunching on an apple and making pleased noises as familiar rocks came into view. She didn’t suggest anything; merely came along to keep company.
“Do you think it’s possible to cheat at this?” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I know what I want, but it isn’t accurate. Not strictly, anyway. Do you think that matters?”
“I think Whitechapel wants the feeling of it and not the fact,” said Pandora. “Like you with your name. ‘Bluebeard’s wife’ is a fact, but it isn’t your feeling, is it? And I don’t think that you can convince her if you can’t first convince yourself.”
“I know what I want,” said Bluebeard’s wife again. “I know what I’d find convincing.” She was very tired, and her feet hurt. She wanted to cry. “I just can’t find it.”
“Let me help you, dear,” said Pandora, sliding one arm about her waist and cuddling her close. “I know this room better than you. If you tell me what you’re looking for, I might know where to find it and you can be tucked up in bed that much quicker.”
“Flint,” said Bluebeard’s wife, sagging against her. “I want flint.”
“I know where that is,” said Pandora. “This way, darling.”
The flint case had a number of specimens in it. There were bracelets and little striped gemstones like waves, nodules and paramoudras and old, old tools: flakes and hammerstones, flint rods for fires—and axe blades. “That,” said Bluebeard’s wife, pointing to the last. “That’s what I want.”
Pandora made quick work of the case with her hairpin, and then Bluebeard’s wife had the axe in her hand. She admired the way it fitted into her palm, the way her fingers curled around it.
“Is that for you or the hospital?” said Pandora gently.
“I think it might be both,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I met a woman while I was there, and I saw what happened to her. She was shot, Pandy, shot for standing up. I don’t know what they shot her with, though I’ve seen something like it before, I know I have. My husband had a rifle, a flintlock rifle. Oh, he was so proud of it, you should have seen the time he spent cosseting the thing. It wasn’t what they used to shoot her, it wasn’t, any more than his axe was stone instead of iron, which was why I thought it might be cheating, but it was nearly the same. It had the same feel—all death and choice and consequence. That’s flint, it is.
“Do you think Whitechapel will like it?” she said, and Pandora nodded—and Whitechapel did.
“It’s like a knife,” she said, testing the edge with her thumb and drawing the barest line of blood. “Still sharp.”
“Like a scalpel, too,” said Pandora, with a long look that Bluebeard’s wife could not interpret.
“All the more reason to keep it where it is,” said Whitechapel, and, kneeling, she placed the axe blade within the looming square of books prepared for it.
“It looks too small, almost,” said Bluebeard’s wife, seeing the tiny blade overshadowed in the space around it and remembering the solid weight of London Hospital upon the earth.
“It’s as big as it needs to be,” said Whitechapel, “and I thank you for it.”
INTERLUDE the FIRST
Anne of Cleves came frequently to visit her daughter. Pandora was more than happy to ferry her back and forth to the museum with her box—especially as doing so meant more visiting hours for her, blowing on the baby’s tummy and teasing her with little wooden animals. “I almost feel like we’re all raising her together,” Pandora said.
“We are,” said Anne. “Sibylle wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you—if it weren’t for all of you. You all helped.” And it was true. They did, and not grudgingly. Sibylle couldn’t be described as a pretty baby—she was long, with awkward pudgy knees and carrot hair that Whitechapel tried to bleach with diluted lemon juice, but she smiled a lot and took an interest in everything about her, and that was enough to make sure she got visitors frequently.
But when Anne and Pandora and Bluebeard’s wife had left the museum for their respective homes, Whitechapel would prop the baby on her knee and read to her from the mountain of books she had shifted into the aisles between specimen cabinets. The library was next door to the geology section, through a great stone archway, and Whitechapel had ransacked it. Rather, she had ransacked a tiny portion of the final section of it. The library itself dimmed into distance, and only the Z section, and the end of it at that, was within an easy day’s walk.
“Look at what I’ve found, popsy,” said Whitechapel, snuggling Sibylle closer into her apron. “A nice book for you! And no more of them fairy stories either.” Sibylle, in her nanny’s opinion, heard entirely too many of them. “Not that I don’t say there’s nothing to them, my delicious little rabbit,” continued Whitechapel. “I like a good fairy tale myself, but too many of them and it’s like eating nothing but the hardtack those sailors used to try passing off on me, instead of good honest coin. Never lift your skirts for hardtack, Sibby pet, I can tell you for once and all it ain’t worth it. Variety, that’s what you want.”
Sibylle drooled pleasantly under her chin, gumming on her own fingers.
“What have we here?” said Whitechapel. “Look what nice bookums Nanny has for you! It’s on zygotes, it is, Sibby. Zygotes, like you once was and I once was and so was your dear mummy. A zygote is what a sailor might give you if he’s got pennies instead of hardtack, and there were more than a few of them made on street corners I can tell yo
u. Not that that’ll be your future, I hope, but you should know just in case. So, Sibby, here we are: Zygotes, Their Form and Function. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
And Whitechapel read, in the emptiness of the museum. Read aloud of haploids and diploids and gametes, read of meiosis and mammals and archegonia. Read book after book, until the museum floor was scattered with them and she arranged them in long lines like corridors beneath the display cases.
MARY PRINCE
“I have been at market before,” said Bluebeard’s wife. She was being led about almost by strings, and it had left her a trifle testy.
“Beg pardon, miss,” said Whitechapel. She had a large basket on one arm and was fingering produce as she walked, testing leeks and cabbage and carrots for freshness.
“You don’t need to treat me like a child, is what I’m saying,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I used to do all the shopping before I was married. Then people who wanted to sell their things came to me.” She took a deep breath, inhaling fruit and flowers and the damp sweet undertone of animal flesh. “It wasn’t the same, after.”
And it hadn’t been. Marriage had given her freedom in some respects—she’d climbed the ladder, definitely, and Bluebeard’s wife hadn’t been sorry to be spared the scrubbing and the pig feeding, but it had also brought standards and expectations that left her lonely, sometimes, in a rural castle with servants who didn’t look her in the eye and a husband who spent too much time watching for mistakes. Trotting down to the square of the local village had been out, and even if her old home had had the new respectability of Spitalfields market, with its bright brick building, several stories high and spread over a block, almost, she would have been discouraged from going there.
Marriage meant forgetting the peasantry she came from. Marriage meant them forgetting her as they’d forgotten all the wives before her. She and her sister wives had passed beyond, in a way, and the status that came with Bluebeard’s ring made them separate from the people they had come from . . . no longer fully human, to be chatted with and gossiped with and friendly to. She had no longer been their friend, their neighbor. Instead she had been her husband’s, to do with as he liked.