by Octavia Cade
“Take it,” said Mary. “Please take it. It’s mine to give, no matter what they say—mine and no one else’s.” And as she spoke, her hair thickened briefly into a rich, deep chestnut, and the high cheekbones were again covered with soft, perfect skin, her teeth bright and unbroken. For a moment she was glorious, and then her body faded back into rags of flesh, and Bluebeard’s wife covered her face.
“Go in peace,” she said. “Go and be free.”
The third wife was tiny and delicate, and her bones were black with blood. “I never even tried this dress on,” Bluebeard’s wife confessed, as she and Pandora clothed the body in bright yellow. “It was so pretty but so small I knew I’d rip it if I tried to wear it.” But they got it on, eventually, onto the woman for whom it was made, and Bluebeard’s wife imagined her alive and tripping through the castle in her little slippers, happy, perhaps, for a while.
“Your name is Mab,” she said, kissing her. “After the queen of the faeries. Mab for chance and change.”
(Elizabeth, a bare whisper in the darkness.)
There was a brief silence, and Bluebeard’s wife watched for movement, but she was still taken aback when Mab began to giggle, her whole body rattling with it.
“Chance and change,” she said. “That’d be a fine thing, it would. I thought I was so lucky when I came here, so lucky to have a nice home and pretty things and a husband who was so kind to me. And he was kind, in the beginning.”
“Yes, he was,” said Bluebeard’s wife, as gently as she could.
“I suspect it was all a farce,” said Mab, “all a show he put on until he could get what he really wanted.” She giggled again, began to tear up of it. “And my life was so changed from what it was, and I thought what luck! I didn’t know then, see,” she continued, “that luck could be bad as well, that not all changes were for the better.”
She offered up her finger to Bluebeard’s wife, and for a moment she was beautiful, with black, black hair and skin like cream, with pretty, plump little hands. “Chance and change,” she said, still laughing, and now the laughter was not entirely bitter. “Luck and life to you,” she said. “And with my blessing, such as it is.”
“It is a grand and wonderful lot,” said Bluebeard’s wife, and meant it.
“I don’t know what to say,” said Nell after Bluebeard’s wife had kissed her and named her awake.
(Kiss me, Catherine.)
“I named you for truth,” said Bluebeard’s wife, trying to smile. “Tell me some of that.”
The broken body twitched, the broken face turned away. And then it turned back, and Bluebeard’s wife saw Nell as she had been in life—auburn hair that curled like her own, clear brown eyes, and a forehead just slightly too large to leave her perfectly beautiful.
“I always ordered hats to be made a size too large,” said Nell. “I wanted them to fall down a little, to cover up my brow. I suppose I was a vain, silly thing.”
“You’re not the only one,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I spent most of my time in the castle changing clothes. I even tried on your hats.”
“You would,” said Nell, and Bluebeard’s wife had no idea how to respond to the faint hostility she heard in the other’s voice.
“The truth is,” said Nell, “I’m jealous of you. You got to live, didn’t you? I think I even hate you a little for it.” There was a pause, and then, slowly, as if not believing it herself, Nell reached up to offer her finger, and the slow dawning smile on her face was a grace that beat back, briefly, the horror of the dungeon. “But even so, I think I’m glad. Glad for you, glad in a way that drowns out the jealousy and the hatred. Glad that one of us survived . . . ”
With that admission, the smile faded, and so did the color and the beauty of her, the small spark of energy that so briefly illuminated her death. “So . . . very . . . glad,” she said.
The bodies became worse as she went along, worse not only because they were less skeletal, but also because they were more broken. With each wife, Bluebeard had become more violent. “You can see he was getting a taste for it,” said Bluebeard’s wife, sick to her stomach at the sight of number five. Still, she wrapped the body carefully in silk painted with birds, silk lined with feathers. “I knew there was one who liked feathers,” she said. “And she’s the only one it fits.”
She wrapped the hands separately. She had to.
“I name you Priya,” she said, “because I will always remember you, so part of you will live while I do.”
(Mary Jane.)
And Priya’s eyes opened, and then shut again, tighter than before. “You shouldn’t remember me,” she said. “I don’t want to be remembered. I don’t deserve it.”
“You’ve done nothing wrong,” said Bluebeard’s wife, stroking the ravaged cheek, the dusty hair.
“But I have!” Priya cried. “I got them killed, it’s my fault. I should be punished for it.”
“I don’t understand,” said Bluebeard’s wife, looking helplessly at Pandora. “You got who killed?”
“My brothers,” wept Priya. “They never wanted me to marry him. I never wanted to either—four wives gone before me, I was so afraid it would happen to me too. But Father waited until they were gone before he brought me here, and when they came back it was too late. I’d already used the key.”
“I could hear them,” she said, “beating on the front door while he was dragging me down to the dungeon, and he heard them too. He had the servants take them and bind them and bring them here, and he bricked them up alive and made me watch.” She opened her eyes, and they held such misery Bluebeard’s wife could barely look at her.
“And after he’d done… what he did to me… he cut off my hands,” said Priya. “Cut them off and burned the stumps with hot iron to stop the bleeding, and left me here with them, when I couldn’t do anything to get them out.”
“You remembered,” said Bluebeard’s wife, near choking with the horror of it. “You remembered them, darling, and that’s what’s going to get them out.”
I know people, Whitechapel had told her, but I don’t know stone. Bluebeard’s wife had never thought she had known stone either, until the day she disobeyed her husband and walked into a butchery. That day she had understood how stone could blank screams and bury secrets and make tombs deep within the earth, and she had known stone at that moment so thoroughly and so well that she would know it for all time. And she had known, too, that there was something wrong with the dungeon, something beyond brutality and blood, though until Priya she had not known what.
“There,” she said, pointing at one corner. “That’s it, that’s what’s wrong with the place. Do you see it, Pandy? That wall’s been added—it’s skewed the proportions all off.” And Bluebeard’s wife took up her husband’s axe and, using all the strength in her arms, she beat into brick and mortar with the heavy blunt iron of it, and when she was done there were two more bodies, curled in and cramped and with their hands clasped together.
(Not everyone is terrible, Mary Prince had told her, and Bluebeard’s wife had blown her off, really, as if Mary knew nothing, as if her own man was the worst and only and no one else could better him.)
“Put mine with theirs,” said Priya, “please.” And when Bluebeard’s wife tucked Priya’s small hands safely into those of her brothers, the left ring finger came loose in her hands, and Priya smiled at her. Briefly she was all golden hair and blue eyes and dimples, and briefly her brothers’ hands clenched around her own as if they had never forgotten her, not for one moment of their long, slow deaths together, and then together they were gone.
Bluebeard’s wife wrapped the last body in soft cream linens, and when she was done she sat back on her heels, her hands folded in her lap. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she said. “I don’t know if I should.” She looked up at Pandora, biting her lip and trying to blink the tears from her eyes. “Help me,” she said, and Pandora swooped down beside her and held her close, pressing her beautiful head—so beautiful, Blueb
eard’s wife thought, even in the dark misery of the dungeon—against her own.
“They’re not the same, darling,” said Pandora. “And it’s all right for them not to be the same. You didn’t need any of the others to match up exactly, did you?”
And she hadn’t. Bluebeard’s wife had named the other wives for women she had met, for what she had felt, for the kinship between them. And yet Edith, wrapped in green, was not the Edith who was wrapped to a stake before a firing squad, and pretty, yellow Mab was certainly no faerie creature: she had cried and bled too much for that.
“You named them for what they meant to you,” said Pandora. “For what they meant to this place, and that’s all right. You don’t need any other reason, and no one can say you’ve done wrong. And if that’s not enough for you, remember that she gave her name away, and the woman you knew was not the woman she once was. Do you understand, dearest?”
“I understand,” said Bluebeard’s wife, and leaned forward to kiss the final body with trembling lips. “I name you Ada,” she said.
(I was Ada most my life, but there came a point where it didn’t fit no more.)
Ada’s lungs had been ripped from her body, her head severed, and though Bluebeard’s wife had carefully wrapped her head atop her neck, packed the lungs back into the remains of the ravished cavity of her body, she had been too destroyed to speak. Instead, she stared at Bluebeard’s wife with eyes full of tears, her left hand shaking with strange, mute effort. When Bluebeard’s wife took the ring, her finger came with it, and that was enough to soften the misery in her eyes.
“It could have been any of us, under other circumstances,” said Bluebeard’s wife, to the sudden clear complexion, the delicate ears and bronze hair and beautiful swan neck. “It could have been any of us. We’re not so different. Close your eyes, go on now. You’re going to sleep, and you’re going to dream of a long, quiet life, with someone who loves you and a passel of beautiful children and the woman you could have been, and everything is lovely, and it will never be dark again.”
And then it was still, and it was dark, and Bluebeard’s wife turned from the last of her predecessors and wept on Pandora’s shoulder, wept for all of them, wept for Ada and for herself.
“It could have been me,” she said.
At the last there were eight headstones instead of six, as Bluebeard’s wife, Pandora, and Anne of Cleves buried Priya’s brothers beside her, buried them under stones marked Love and Loyalty. Bluebeard’s wife planted the graves all about with pansies, purple and red and yellow, the flowers bright and pretty and graceful on the hill.
“What are you going to do with them?” said Pandora as Bluebeard’s wife stood before the graves, holding the bones of half a dozen ring fingers in her clasped hands as if they were a bouquet.
“I’m going to make them my own,” she said. “They’re part of me, really. They always were, even when I didn’t know it. We were all Bluebeard’s wife, once upon a time. But not anymore . . . not anymore.” She thought of where she had found them, where she had found herself, in a dark, forbidden dungeon, in axes and consequences and cruelty, in blades and stone.
“Call me Bone,” she said.
PANDORA
Every room in the house was hers—hers to come and go in as she pleased. It didn’t take her long to go through them all, though, and after she had done that, they began to bore her.
Mostly, she spent her time spinning, spent it sewing and hemming and weaving. The house was full of clothes that didn’t fit: clothes for men that were too big around the waist and too long in the leg, and all in gaudy colors. She tried them on anyway, but trying on clothes was a pastime that palled when you looked as good in a sack as you did in even the finest chiton.
“What did you expect?” said Pandora to herself, trying to stitch wool into a garment that didn’t hang upon her as her husband’s clothes did. “You are the first, you know.”
They were more impressed with her naked, truthfully, but Epimetheus soon put a stop to that. Pandora supposed it came from never having seen a woman before, except for the goddesses they couldn’t touch and the sirens they shouldn’t. Not that it stopped the half of them, but Pandora wasn’t so indiscriminate. She was more impressed with herself than with anyone else, to be honest—it might have been immodest, but once Epimetheus brought her home a mirror there was no hiding who was the looker in that relationship. She’d watch him dress himself of a morning, all greasy-faced and flat footed and having a back with more wool than the sheep, and it was hard not to admire her own self in comparison.
“I wouldn’t mind one like her,” said one of her husband’s friends. Pandora had agreed, and loudly. They’d thought she misunderstood, of course, made patronizing comments about little heads and little sense, but Pandora didn’t need a mirror into their skulls to know that she was the brains as well as the face. She’d thought it exciting, she had, on her wedding day, to enter a house where she would be wholly mistress. Deep down, however, when she saw the clothes that had been laid out for her—his clothes, and old ones at that, offered up until she had a chance to make her own—she had had an inkling that the life that she wanted was not the life she had been made for. Somewhere, Pandora was sure, there was a catch.
Funny sort of wedding present, she thought, having geared herself up for jewelry and gotten the box instead. She wasn’t spoiled enough to be ungrateful—being cobbled together out of bits of dirt and water had ensured that pretension would never be part of her character—but a girl could dream, couldn’t she? Oh, it was pretty enough, small and compact and made of sweet-smelling wood, light enough to be carried around with her.
Before she’d been married a month, she discovered a couple of uses for it. Trying to get stains out of wool was no fun, and the thought of the subsequent washing was almost enough to stop Pandora from gathering bits of flowers and pretty things in her skirts when she went for a walk. The box was the perfect size. She could run down to the beach and collect whatever shells she liked without getting wet sand all down her front, and the box was just right for interesting little bits of rock and shiny, wave-polished pebbles.
It was also a beautiful place to keep her hairpins. They were long and sharp, and kept her hair from falling in her face when she was out, but she always tucked them safely back into the box before going home. Her hair looked prettier a little disheveled, she thought, and when the pins shook in the box, everyone about her paled.
The rattling might have been a lie, but Pandora didn’t care.
“I’ll open it if you’re not careful,” said Pandora. “I’ve had enough of you telling me what to do, so just watch out!”
She was sick of being told how beautiful she was, sick of being followed and patted and slobbered over, as if she was no more than a new and pretty sheep. Epimetheus kept sheep, and they had not impressed Pandora. Silly creatures, they struck her as being more likely to run away than to bite. In contrast, the shark she had seen wash up on the beach, still living, had taken off the foot of one of her husband’s servants when the poor creature got too close.
Pandora bandaged up the wound as gently as she could, cooed in sympathy, and practiced the shark’s smile in the mirror every night.
When Pandora opened the box she shouldn’t and found herself standing in front of a door and a long, smooth tunnel, she thought she might have been expected to scream. If she’d been a real little milksop, she would have squealed and run back home, but home was spinning and sweeping and the same boring rooms and it made sure she would never run away from anything exciting ever.
Yes, the suddenness of the tunnel was surprising, and the soft, smooth walls pulsed slightly under her fingertips, and that was slightly disconcerting if she had to be truly honest. But Pandora was used to sudden—she had been the earth after all, sun-bathed and full of pretty little creatures, and then dim consciousness had been thrown off and there she was, two arms and two legs and some rather nice breasts, and a wedding bouquet had been shoved into he
r hands without so much as a by-your-leave. Compared to that, a tunnel was nothing.
And if anyone expected her to cower and squall as all the crawly little sins of the world flung themselves up and outward, well, clearly they had never felt the little green beetles scuttle over their surfaces, or had themselves aired out by little ticklish worms who snuggled down in the warm earth and squirmed more delightfully than any sin.
Had she been a milksop, she would have screamed. But Pandora, opening her box to discover other times and other troubles, had only one reaction, and it was that of every daughter and granddaughter and descendant who ever found themselves created for someone else’s pleasure and wanting a way out of it.
“I’d like to see them try to hush this up,” she said.
Every time she turned up in Bluebeard’s dungeon, he kept calling her Barron. Pandora tried to make him understand that it wasn’t her name, but her experiences of marriage had taught her that men saw what they wanted to see and it was no use trying to explain to them that you weren’t a pretty dolly or a fount of wickedness if that’s what they were determined to believe. Epimetheus was funny that way, but at least he’d never come after her with an axe. That was a point of difference, but she’d heard all the demon talk before.
“I summon you, demon!” Bluebeard said, and often, with a red axe in his hand and a new wife at his feet.
“Who summoned you, demon?” said Epimetheus, totally fed up with a wife who had decided she didn’t much care for being handed over as a present for him to do as he liked with.
Neither of them seemed capable of understanding that she wasn’t there to make their lives all milk and honey, wasn’t there to warm their beds and whisper sweetly in their ears. Neither of them much approved of the fact that she wouldn’t just do as she was told.
Both of them preferred to make rules, and preferred to have her follow them. It hadn’t taken long to find that following their rules meant capriciousness and drudgery and endless silly little tests. “It would be one thing,” she said, “if they were there for a good reason and for everyone, but no. It’s one set of rules for those who think they’ve got power and one set for everyone else. Listen up, do as you’re told, when in the end they don’t listen to anything.”