by Octavia Cade
“Not quite,” said Bluebeard’s wife, craning her head to see if Sibylle had picked up anything—she had no desire to explain to Anne why her daughter was asking about street corners. But Sibby was babbling away happily while Pandora sponged dye out of her hair, revealing the red, in preparation for their next experiment in hairdressing.
“The color of it, darling!” she was saying. “We should have named you Pyrrha, for your fiery little mop . . . ”
Satisfied, Bluebeard’s wife took up the box and travelled with Whitechapel to the mission, then opened the box again and found herself outside the music hall. The door was unlocked, so she wandered about inside a little, charmed with the barley-twist columns; the high, vaulted ceiling; the ornamental plasterwork; and the bright, pretty chandeliers. She was even more charmed to see the stage had been set as for a play, and that several racks of costumes were set off to one side, waiting for rehearsals or performances.
They were clothes, after all, and Bluebeard’s wife could never resist clothes. There was no one about, so she quickly whipped off her own dress and slipped into a frothy, sparkling confection clearly meant for a faerie princess of some sort, or perhaps a queen. Giggling, Bluebeard’s wife skipped up onto the stage and began to play at Titania, curtseying and flirting with strange and imaginary creatures. She even danced a bit, holding up the box at arm’s length as if it were a partner. When she swung around to discover she was dancing a pattern with a woman wearing the same dress as she—better constructed, of finer materials—Bluebeard’s wife shrank back, awed. The creature assessed her, imperious, and Bluebeard’s wife hoped she would not be faulted for mockery.
“Come,” said Mab, holding out a hand so thin it was nearly translucent; all of a piece, fleshy and without bone. Bluebeard’s wife suspected that if she were to bite it, the consistency would be the same all through. “Come dance with me, and I’ll tell you what it is you want to know.”
“No, thank you,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I know what happens when you go dancing with faeries. It’s all good times and gaiety until you think you’ll just pop home for a bit, maybe sleep in your own bed. But when you get there it’s a hundred years later and everything’s gone, and you’re left to be old and alone in the shack that used to be your home, all tumbledown and with a leaky roof, wondering what happened to the people you left behind. It’s a difficult business, dancing with you.”
“If you want to follow your dreams, you take your chances,” said Mab. “I can give you a name that would break mountains in half and have wild animals come eat out of your hands. It’s a piece of rare luck, a name like that.”
“And all I’d have to give for it is my time,” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“So suspicious,” said Mab. “Did you think it would be free?”
Mab rides hard, rides for hallucination and hearts, through brains thick with sleep and a dreaming miasma like the fogs of London, and each mind is tinged a different color for what it likes best. Lawyers have dreams that are colored with coin, and ladies with kisses, and soldiers with blood, and she bleeds herself into them until they dream all the brighter for her.
The soldier dreams of swords and ambushes and the quick-pained flash of battle, the cries of men and horses and sinking ships, of amputations and cannonades and drowning men. He dreams of cutting throats, until his own is cut dreamtime and he wakes with the sound of his own heart like drums in his ears, until the red fades away and his sleep is quieter.
The lady dreams of vermilion and cochineal and madder, dreams of her maid painting her up, the concentration on her face, the furrow between her brows and the way that she bites her lip as she traces and fills and blots, and how it would be if she were to lean forward and kiss her until all the color is rubbed off—and then she wakes to the snores of her husband and wonders if she can find the strength to send her maid away.
The lawyer dreams of sovereigns, of papers and compensations and arguments that turn words into gold and offices into courts, into banks and judgments and gambling on a system that pays off. His fingers scrape the coverlet as if counting, until the threads catch in his nails and he wakes to panic, to thoughts of thieves and empty hands and poverty.
And Mab smiles, for the waking is the price of the dream, and they are so ready to dream to begin with.
“It sounds an awful lot like blaming the victim to me,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “You don’t have to take their time away for a dance. Why do you have to be so cruel?”
(“What the hell is wrong with you, anyway?” she’d said to her husband, as she unlaced her bodice for his axe.)
“I don’t have to be, I choose to be,” said Mab. “And only some of the time at that. But you are confusing choice with chance.”
“If you’re trying to tell me your dreams come by accident, I don’t believe you,” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“I’m telling you no such thing. You assume that coming to dance with me has a time-price, and often it does. Those are the ones you hear about. It makes a good story, doesn’t it? A life danced away while the wife’s left on her own, wondering where the body’s buried and how she’ll feed the children. It’s a better story than coming home an hour late with a tale no one will believe, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “Is that what would happen to me? Would I come back in an hour with a name and my shoes danced through?”
“I don’t know,” said Mab. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“How is that supposed to convince me?” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“It isn’t,” said Mab. “That’s the point. You can decide for yourself easily enough—but you can’t decide for anyone else. You never know how someone else will react. Oh, you can calculate the odds as best you can and make your decision on that, but you’ll never truly know before you take the chance.
“If it were only choice, it would be too easy,” said Mab. “Why do you think you have luck, if not to get a reaction out of you? How else are you supposed to know yourself?”
She slid from sight, her body dissipating into smoke, only to reappear behind Bluebeard’s wife. “He could have laughed,” she said. “He could have scolded, he could have been hiding your birthday present in there. You didn’t know, and you took the chance that his choice would be something different. No blame to you, dear. Chances are, if you’d done nothing at all, he would have found a way to change his luck. And do you know why?”
Bluebeard’s wife said nothing. All her attention was tied to the breath in her ear, chilled like a night in the snow with the moon just bright enough to see footprints and the burning heat of tongues.
“Because killing you was all he dreamed about,” said Mab, her mouth close enough to brush the skin behind the ear of Bluebeard’s wife.
There’s never been a midwife that looks like her. To be faerie is to be metamorphic—an eternity of change, because she births inspiration and that comes in many forms.
Men tend to think her tiny—all agate stone and grasshopper carriages and chariots made of hazelnuts, like she spends her days hollowing them out and rides through the night with chunks of ready nut for snacks. And why not let them dream that way if it pleases them? She can lighten her hair and lengthen her body, fill it out with air and sunlight and reflected desire should she wish, and that’s what will be told of her. She can be heavier than oceans, she can sit on a daisy and not bruise it. She can plait horses’ hairs together, she can plait her own into elflocks if she pleases. She can be very, very old, and so thin the moon shines through her.
“I’ve always had some sympathy for changelings,” said Mab, tracing the green-painted land of the stage backdrop with her fingers, and Bluebeard’s wife snorted.
“No you haven’t,” she said. “Poor little things are snatched out of their own world and dumped into another, and for what? Entertainment? Poke them and prod them and see how they’ll react?” She thought of Sibby; of how she would feel if the baby were taken from her little bed in the museum
, taken away to a place bereft of rocks and books, to be tormented and petted and ignored in turn by people who were not her own. It made her want to hit someone, to hate and hurt and murder.
“I’ve sympathy for you,” said Mab. “And what are you if not a changeling? Look at you, bouncing between places, between times that aren’t your own. If your own people knew what you were up to, child, you’d be burnt at the stake for devilry, just the same as if you had faerie blood.”
“My own people would do no such thing,” said Bluebeard’s wife, thinking of Pandora and Anne of Cleves and Whitechapel, thinking of little Sibylle and the dead women waiting for her in the dungeon of her husband’s castle. “They’ve no objections at all.”
“Not the folk you were born to, then?” said Mab.
“There’s more than one way to make a people,” said Bluebeard’s wife.
(“ . . .I could find women like me. Like you. The don’t girls.”)
“Well then,” said Mab. “You see? You are a changeling after all.”
Mab is past and present and future. She is ever-changing nature, the way the world spins by will. “If it’s utopia you want, I can show it you,” she says, to poets and playwrights and girls who fall asleep on their couches waiting for a lover.
But utopia doesn’t happen on its own. “Come here,” she says. “Come watch your dreams with me, see ignorance and ill-health and greed make of your dreams a nightmare.” She doesn’t have to sift very hard. The reptile dream is in everyone—consumption and sun-baking and self—and it doesn’t take much for them to dream in terms of war and poverty and being cut off from those that they love. Lawyers and soldiers and ladies dream too, she’s said it before, and their dreams are made of clay: of the earth and malleable.
“I can give you the dream of a perfect life,” she says, and there are more than enough ready to hear her, once they’ve waded through the dreams she shows them first, the dreams of their past—imperfect, else they wouldn’t be so subject to her special brand of wish-fulfillment—and the present that anchors them to earth. She teases with the future, because she’s a faerie creature and can’t help flirting, and her flirtations draw blood.
“Shall I give you dreams of lovers?” she says, “of medals and parades and golden judgment? Shall I give you dreams of axes?”
“I’m trying to help,” she says. “Don’t you want to see what you can do, the future I can show you?”
Mab makes Bluebeard’s wife feel as if she is a raw material. “Don’t be dense, child, of course you are,” she says, when Bluebeard’s wife objects. “You’ll be raw until you die. Look at you, bleeding for your choices, like you’re not quite cooked through. And how could you be?” said Mab, as old as iron, as old as armor. “You’re still so very young.”
“I could be on my deathbed, a hundred years from now, and you’d still think I was a baby. Too young to know what I was talking about, and maybe you’d be right. Compared to you, I am a silly little thing. But it takes real effort to be silly forever,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “And once I saw what my husband was keeping in his dungeon, a good chunk of young and silly got chopped out. And that’s what fascinates you, isn’t it? The change that comes with being alive and knowing it won’t be forever. I can change and you can’t.”
“You think I can’t change?” said Mab. “Me?” And her hair darkened and straightened, her skin changing to the color of a deep and fertile earth, and Pandora was standing in front of Bluebeard’s wife. Pandora in all ways but one, for her breath was ice.
“That’s not real change,” said Bluebeard’s wife, forcing down the shudder in her spine, the urge to both recoil and to run at her with her arms held open before her and ready. “It’s not real! It’s no different than me changing clothes. You’re still the same inside: all dream and desire and not interested in anything other than want.”
“Your want, and not my own,” said Mab. “I don’t give dreams that aren’t already waiting inside you. You know what your problem is? You’re change, that’s all. Change brought to life in little soft bodies, but you don’t embrace it. Oh, you all go on as if you do, but it’s all talk. You try to fool yourselves into thinking that you’re one person inside, and you never are. There’s too much want in you for one, too much for anything but an endless well of little fragments, all screaming to be first, to be the stage lead, to wear the best costume. I only look like what you are.”
“Even if that were true,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “It doesn’t give anybody the right to exploit it. Not even you. But I don’t believe it is true,” she said. “I know who I am.”
“You don’t even know your own name,” said Mab.
“A name isn’t a person,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I’m not what you think I am—a little fractured thing all broken up for playing parts.”
“No,” said Mab. “You’re worse. Try telling it to someone who doesn’t know your dreams, dear. You think I haven’t seen them, that I haven’t helped grow them? You dream of axes. Past, present, and future, it’s all axes for you, and you don’t even know yet . . . ”
“Know what?” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“That you,” said Mab, almost close enough to kiss, “are just the same as the man you married.”
“I would never be like him!” said Bluebeard’s wife, wrenching away from Pandora’s face and Pandora’s body and the old, old malice of Mab seeping out through her eyes and her breath and her tongue. “Never.”
“So you say, dearie,” said Mab, and her voice rose with the grinding of glaciers as Bluebeard’s wife backed away from her, from what she was saying. “Certainly, if you’d come home a different way from market that day, he never would have seen you, never would have wanted you for his wife. And you never would have dreamed of axes, but chance wasn’t in your favor, was it? And you changed for him and to him and now axes are all you dream about, axes with bloody blades and golden handles and the flint in your hand for vengeance.”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what you dream about!” Mab called, but Bluebeard’s wife was already running, running past the backdrop and the props and the costumes, running as fast as she could away from the Queen of the Faeries and toward the self she most thought she was, the self that was more than her husband reflected and her hand tied to his in marriage.
Bluebeard’s wife, fumbling with the box, had barely run out of the mission, away from the music hall, before she staggered into Whitechapel, knocking both of them to the ground.
“Are you all right, miss?” said Whitechapel, and Bluebeard’s wife wiped her face dry and stared at the other woman, at the dress that was gently spattered with blood.
“Me?” she said. “What about you? Are you hurt?”
“Just a few scrapes,” said Whitechapel, showing off red palms and raising her skirts a little so that Bluebeard’s wife could see a grazed knee. “I was running, I was, and had a little fall. Scraped all the skin off.”
“Were you . . . Whitechapel, were you chased?” said Bluebeard’s wife, for the other woman was shaking slightly, and her eyes were as damp as those of Bluebeard’s wife.
“There are some bad people here, miss. We should probably be heading back,” said Whitechapel, frowning, and she patted absently at the handkerchief covering her throat. “I told you this place was a dump.”
“Someone should really do something to clean it up,” said Bluebeard’s wife, disapproving. “I don’t know why you want to remember it, frankly.”
“It’s home, isn’t it?” said Whitechapel. “I don’t want to be one of those who forgets where they came from. That can change a person. This place taught me to survive,” she said. “I don’t want to chance letting that go.”
“That does seem to be the theme of the day,” said Bluebeard’s wife, wearily, and back in the museum she wandered past the geological displays until she found a case of feldspar, of adularia and oligoclase, of albite and orthoclase together, of hecatolite. There, she found a necklace made of moonstone, th
e beads strung together and displayed on a blank bust. Moonstone, for fortune and foretelling and transformation.
“It looks like her head’s been cut off,” said Whitechapel of the bust, shuddering, but she accepted it in the square of books reserved for the music hall.
“Do you think I’ve changed, since we met?” said Bluebeard’s wife, afterwards, to Pandora, as they admired the way the stones sparkled in the light.
“Darling,” said Pandora, “I think you’re as wonderful as you ever were.”
“That,” said Bluebeard’s wife, “is not really an answer.”
INTERLUDE the THIRD
“They won’t be so nice to chew on, dumpling,” said Anne, “so be careful with your toothy little self.” Sibylle was teething, and her collection of wooden animals was suffering for it. There was an elephant all over tooth marks, and a crocodile had had its tail gnawed off—which wouldn’t have been any sort of disaster if Sibylle hadn’t burst into tears every time she looked at it.
“I can’t stand that sad baby face any longer,” Pandora had said, and she had chivvied them all to the silver cabinet, where a collection of cunning little animals sat amidst the coins and the candlesticks and all manner of interesting things. “Look at all the pretty animals, Sibby!”
“Look at all the pretty jewelry,” said Bluebeard’s wife, seizing a pair of long, spiraling earrings and a bright round hand mirror to admire her new acquisitions. “There’s enough for all of us!”
“I think Sibylle’s a little too young, still,” said Anne, and Whitechapel also begged off.
“They’re not really suitable to wear round the baby,” Whitechapel said. “Not when she’s in the snatchy stage, the monkey. I’d have my lobes pulled right off, I would!” But so no one would go away empty-handed, she consented to take a knife from the cabinet for cooking. “This should do the trick,” she said. “I’ve just broken my good blade. Got careless with the pork bones, more’s the pity. Her little ladyship’s in no mood for soft stuff.”