by Octavia Cade
“The truth is,” she said, “I thought you were upset with me.”
“What!” said Anne. “Why on earth?”
“Well,” said Bluebeard’s wife, feeling awkward. “There was Nell, going on about being the mistress, and even though you didn’t love Henry you’ve got no cause to be fond of adultery. He could have had your head for his, if you hadn’t stepped aside so well. And then there’s me: a mistress myself. Pandora’s married, isn’t she? I wonder what he’d feel if he knew about me. And it’s not like I wasn’t already bound.”
“To an axe-murderer,” said Anne. “Who was about to use his axe on you, if I recall the story rightly. I don’t think you owed him any loyalty by then, do you?”
“Good point,” said Bluebeard’s wife, laughing herself. Laughing at herself.
“And Pandora wasn’t so much married as married off,” said Anne. “Like the rest of us. When she was able to choose, she chose you. You shouldn’t feel sorry for that. It wasn’t an ideal beginning, but you’ve got to look on the bright side. You’ve got Pandora!”
“And you,” said Bluebeard’s wife, “have Sibylle.”
They sat, for a moment, pondering, as the patrons and prostitutes of Saint Botolph’s wandered about them as refugees from a Gothic bestiary, their faces and physiognomies hidden, sometimes, by the shadow of the tower, flashing into brief prominence in moonlight, all eyes and mouth and leg.
“A is for adulterer,” intoned Bluebeard’s wife. “And assignments and actresses and animal passions.”
Anne spluttered briefly, smothered her giggles with both hands. “B is for brothel,” she said, “and . . . and bordello. And blockhead husbands and really brilliant breasts . . . ”
When they returned to the museum, Bluebeard’s wife dragged Anne around the cases until she found a small statue of a woman in orange marble, with a “come hither” expression on her face and her dress half off. Together they stood it in the space within the wall of books reserved for Saint Botolph’s of Aldgate and together they laughed and laughed.
INTERLUDE the FOURTH
“You’re a bloody wee thing, aren’t you pet?” said Whitechapel, chuckling, as Sibylle batted fat hands at the pages of her latest storybook, vividly illustrated with gore and grimaces. Zombies and their depredations were drawn on every page, open wounds and gaping bites and wet, red teeth. The little girl gazed upon the book, avid with interest, her little bald head—shaved close with a straight-razor, a previous purple dye proving too insupportable to be borne and too stubborn to remove—bent close over it.
“That’s the thing about zombies, Sib. Oh, they tell you it’s brains and more brains, and there’s all the shuffling, but I’ve seen shuffling, pet. Half twelve of a night when folks are coming out of the Ten Bells . . . you ain’t see anyone shuffle and groan till you’ve seen ’em the worse for gin, you haven’t. Not dead, of course, but you could hardly call ’em living either. They’re sort of in-between, until they’ve slept it off or sicked it up, and for half of them that’s time enough to begin again.
“Zombies, see, they stand for something more. For something that goes on even when no one wants it, that doesn’t die even if you hit it in back with a brick. I knew something like that once, Sibby. Someone. Oh, I’m not saying he couldn’t die. He did and he didn’t, I can’t rightly say. He died one way, I know, ’cause I’m the one that killed him. Better him than me, I say, and if he didn’t agree he should have done a better job the first time. Twice in the throat, and he still couldn’t knock me off. I guess old Whitechapel was tougher than she looked, wasn’t she, pet? As he found out, and it didn’t take me twice, it didn’t.
“I dumped the body, dumped it just round the corner with the pockets rifled through, and that was the best disguise that ever was, better than some poor wench facedown in the gutter. Always give people what they expect, Sibby. It’s as good as being invisible, it is. Dead as dead, he was, but he’s still walking the streets. Not in himself, pet, it’s nothing like that. He weren’t wandering about opening up skulls for his dinner instead of oysters. But people knew he was still around, still there in dark corners. They knew.
“They kept him alive, see, in their stories, in the darkest part of their minds and on the back of their necks where the little hairs grow all stiff-like. And forever after, when someone’s out on those streets when the lights are down and they’re all alone and there’s a noise behind them, even if they know the little scrabblings for a rat, they think it’s him. Just for a moment. That’s long life and coming back, it is, Sibs. That’s the real walking dead. He ain’t a zombie, not truly. But zombies is more than dead eyes and no butter sauce and no parsley. They’s lots of things. They’s lots and lots.”
PRIYA KHAN
“When will you pay me,” Anne sang to Sibylle, while Bluebeard’s wife wandered through the museum, through roads made of books, through zygotes and zugzwang, through zoos and zombies. “Say the bells of . . . ”
“Old Bailey!” screeched Sibylle in delight, giggling madly, as Pandora pinched her fat sides.
Bluebeard’s wife smiled to hear them as she walked, until she came upon Whitechapel at last, alone in a dark corner. “Where are we going today?” she said.
“Here,” said Whitechapel, indicating the blank space around her, the walled and empty square. “There’s a bell foundry here, there is. Been there since . . . oh, since long before I was born, miss. Not that I was ever inside it—the masters would never let the likes of me through the door, you understand. But we knew it anyway, all of us who lived round there; knew it for the bells it made.”
“Maybe we could get one of those bells to put here,” said Bluebeard’s wife, but Whitechapel shook her head.
“There’s too many,” she said, “and they all sound different. Big Ben boomed, it did, over the whole city. On a quiet night I could hear it as I made my rounds, and it weren’t the only one. That little ditty Sibby’s singing with her mummy . . . I used to sing it too, when I was a lass, and all those bells were different. I don’t want anything that feels like just one of them. I want something that feels like all of them, like all the bells ever made here.”
Bluebeard’s wife had become accustomed to traveling unnoticed. Yet when she closed the box for the second time that day—leaving Whitechapel outside the foundry of another time, to her own errands, her own visits—she knew at once that her appearance had been noted. Directly in front of her, half a moment from collision, was a woman with a dark braid, thick as her wrist, who was dressed in a bright swathe of silk.
“You weren’t here a moment ago,” said the woman. She reached out to Bluebeard’s wife, making sure she was real, something not imaginary.
“You must be mistaken,” said Bluebeard’s wife, but the clear dark eyes didn’t waver, and there was no doubt in them. When the woman’s fingers brushed against Bluebeard’s wife, a feather touch for all that it had certainty behind it, Bluebeard’s wife clutched the box, just a little, and knew her.
“I don’t think so,” said the woman. “There’s nothing wrong with my eyes.”
“Just confusion, then,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “Perhaps you should watch where you’re going.”
“Nothing wrong with my brain either,” she replied. “And I always pay attention. A few moments ago, when I was walking down the street, I passed a man with a green umbrella, a couple with two little girls—the younger one with her right pigtail coming undone—seven sparrows and, not three steps back, someone’s dropped a packet of candied peel. And then you, out of nowhere. Just like that.”
“Nothing appears just like that,” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“You do,” the woman replied, too observant. “Clearly. What are you?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Bluebeard’s wife, and the other woman laughed.
“Likely not,” she said. “You haven’t been too truthful so far, anyway. But you might as well come inside. I’ll make you some tea and be unbelieving out of the
rain.”
“I’m not much for lying,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “And I should warn you: the last person who thought they knew what I was going to say didn’t much like what they got instead.”
(“You’re supposed to be screaming,” he had said, before she shoved iron through his eye.)
The woman stilled at her doorstep and cocked her head, observing Bluebeard’s wife as if weighing what she had said on some private scale. Then she threw her head back and laughed, warm and deep and infectious, her laughter bubbling up out of pleasure and not of mockery, and Bluebeard’s wife was very nearly charmed.
Her mother tucks her in at night, settles down beside her for bedtime stories. Priya—for that is her name—likes the story of the dancing princesses best, because she dances enough for all of them. But her mother tells it differently every time, and she can never be sure what’s going to happen.
She asks her grandmother to tell it to her instead, and it is different again. “It’s different for everyone,” says her grandmother, “so you’d better get used to it. Stories are made of things that matter, and what matters depends on who’s doing the telling.”
“Come, then,” said Priya, handing over a towel so that Bluebeard’s wife could dry herself and putting on water to boil, turning on unfamiliar music that jumped and bounced and made Bluebeard’s wife want to dance. “Tell me all about it.”
“I came to find out about the bells,” said Bluebeard’s wife, trying not to picture what the water had done to her hair, concentrating instead on the many blinking piles that took up all but a single cozy corner of the foundry, the corner that Priya had ushered her into.
“You’re a bit late for that,” said Priya. “The factory closed down years ago.” She brushed past Bluebeard’s wife and threw open windows that were wet with fine mist. “But you can still hear some of them, some of the ones that were made here,” she said. “You’ve just got to wait for them.”
Priya served Bluebeard’s wife the tea she had promised, with small sweet snacks full of spices, of cardamom and saffron and cloves, of sugar syrup and rose water. When they were too full to eat anymore, she taught Bluebeard’s wife to dance the Charleston, until the hour struck and the bells of Whitechapel rang through the foundry rooms. “There,” she said, swinging Bluebeard’s wife to a dizzy stop. “Can you hear them?”
Bluebeard’s wife stood with her, stood at the window and looked down on horseless carriages, looked down on carriages that floated silently above the road, carriages from so far in the future that looking at them left her dizzier than dancing. She listened as she stood, and the sound of the bells ringing over the city anchored her to the foundry, to the hammer strokes and molten metal of it. “I can hear them,” she said, smiling with the pleasure of it, with the way they rang in her bones.
“Just think,” said Priya. “Some of those bells have been chiming for hundreds of years. The same sound, the same tone. And we hear them just as everyone heard them for the first time, when they were first rung, in their churches and palaces and barges.”
She turned to look at Bluebeard’s wife, a slow, steady gaze, a lazy blinking. “It’s almost like time travel, isn’t it?” she said. “Like resurrection.”
Priya sits on her mother’s lap, fat little fingers tapping at letters. She is telling a story. It is a bad story, because she is not yet five years old and her grasp of narrative is sketchy at best, but the machine listens and does not interrupt, listens with interest. When she is done, the machine asks if she would like to hear the first story her mother ever told it.
Her mother laughs and groans at once, and Priya squirms excitedly on her knee.
“It’s why I bought this place,” said Priya. “The history of it, the echoes through years. I wasn’t a bell-maker myself, not really, but it had the right feel for what I wanted. Does that make any sense?”
“You have no idea,” said Bluebeard’s wife dryly, sipping tea that was by now cold and wandering the aisles of stacked trays, running her fingers across unfamiliar geometries and strange configurations. “What are these servers anyway?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Priya, deadpan, and Bluebeard’s wife was forced to laugh.
“Fair enough,” she said. “Myself, I’m looking for a name. To get it I need to find something with the feeling of this foundry. A reminder, if you will, for someone who knew it long ago. Very long ago.”
Priya picked up the teapot, came to warm her cup. “I am also in the business of reminders,” she said. “A long time ago, a man made a machine, a machine called a printing press.”
“I know it,” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“I wasn’t sure,” said Priya. “People wrote things down before that, of course, and many times since, but the press was the first real machine to begin recording. It wasn’t the last. The machines became so large, and so capable, that eventually they were able to hold every recording that ever was, to store them and play them back so that people could remember through them what they could not remember for themselves. And the better the machines got at remembering, the less that was forgotten.”
“I could use something like that to keep track of gloves,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “And hats. And stockings. I’m always losing track of stockings.”
“The thing is,” said Priya, “if you tell enough stories, and if you tell them in the right way—even if you’re only telling them to a machine—then the thing you’re telling stories to can sometimes learn to tell them back.”
Priya is twelve, and no longer sits to work when she can dance. The machine obliges, plays her ragtime and swing, blue notes and big bands.
“Once upon a time,” the machine begins, “there was a little girl who liked to dance.” This also is a very boring story. The machine is on a realist kick. It describes what’s right in front of it, pretends a narrative from events. That way nothing it says can be wrong.
“You should try extending yourself sometime,” said Priya, hiking up her sari to kick above her head.
“Why would machines want to tell stories?” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“What else have they got to do?” said Priya. “I mean, there they are, and most of them can’t move about, and they don’t have to worry about food or clothing or breaking an ankle while trying to get en pointe. All they have to do is collect the information given to them.”
“You make it sound like a library,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I know a very good library, myself, but I’ve never seen it think. It’s just shelves and silence and books.”
“Not everything can learn,” said Priya. “But imagine if you had a machine that could learn, and all you did was feed it stories, until it collected all the stories in the world, everything anyone ever knew.”
“It can’t do that,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “It can’t know everything, because it can’t read minds, and because there are some things that are forgotten no matter how much you wish you knew them.”
“Perhaps,” said Priya.
“I’ll prove it to you,” said Bluebeard’s wife.
When the bell foundry closes, closes to uproar and the death of tradition, Priya buys it. The first thing she does is make sure that every scrap of the business she is replacing is fed into the machine—every clapper, every complaint, every note.
She can’t build bells herself, can’t melt metal and mold it, doesn’t even want to. But she can build something else, something new, something that knows more about what it replaces than those who protest the replacing.
It’s not everything, but it’s what she has to work with.
“Ask it my name,” said Bluebeard’s wife.
“It’s not psychic,” said Priya. “You’ll need to give more information than that.”
“All right. I was married to a man who had had six wives before me. They all disappeared, but no one cared. After we were married, he gave me the keys to the castle, and told me I could do whatever I pleased, spend whatever I wanted, but the only
thing I was not allowed to do was to go into the dungeon. He gave me the key, so it was my choice, and I went anyway, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to. It didn’t turn out well. So tell me, machine,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “What is my name?”
There was a brief silence, and then, “Your name is Bluebeard’s wife,” said the machine.
“That is a description,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “It is not a name. Try again, please.”
“Records are contradictory,” said the machine. “Bluebeard’s wife has been named as Anne, Ariane, Boulotte . . . ”
Bluebeard’s wife listened carefully, but none of the names felt like hers. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But none of those names are right, somehow.”
“Working,” said the machine.
Her mother gives her a necklace when she has finished school and come full-time to the family business. The necklace is thin and delicate, easily hidden under her clothes, and it consists of a pendant stamped with the letter G.
“G is for Giddha,” says Priya. “For ghosts and Ganesha and getting even.”
“G is for Gutenberg,” says her mother.
When she sees that same letter stamped onto the pretty little box brought into the foundry by Bluebeard’s wife, Priya smiles and says nothing, not then. But when the other woman leaves, Priya leans her head against a stack of servers, feels the warmth and thrum of them against her cheek and smiles.
“That rang a bell, didn’t it?” she says, thinking of the far future, when her daughters and granddaughters have built themselves out of business, built a machine that could know everything, store everything. A machine that could build a box to discover the things that fell beside, that could build bodies out of binary, bring back the dead to plug the gaps, to tell another story. “You really want to know, don’t you?” she says.
“Is this what you do?” said Bluebeard’s wife to Priya. “Feed that beastly thing all the time?”
“Not just me,” said Priya. “My mother did it, and my grandmother before her . . . there’s been a whole line of us, going way back. And it’s more than feeding, just like having a little baby is more than getting it to drink its milk.”