The Shape of Darkness

by Laura Purcell

  ‘I’m not saying the séance weren’t good.’ Myrtle wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. She’s rolled her sleeves to the elbow and there are purple splotches all down her forearm. ‘She was pleased as you like, that Mrs Boyle. But we can make it better for when the Society come. Can’t we?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Pearl mumbles.

  ‘Well, we can. People want a show. Don’t matter to them you’ve got a genuine gift. They won’t believe us unless we dress it up in tinsel.’

  ‘But I can’t control it! How am I meant to make it better? I don’t even know what’s happening to me.’

  Sighing, Myrtle drops a blackberry into a bowl and crushes it beneath her spoon. ‘I’ll rig something up, won’t I? I’ve been reading Missives from Summerland. Some places in London have these things they called apports.’

  A cow lows from the street. Pearl turns to look. It’s a dun-coloured beast, objecting to a man running his fingers down her legs. Does he want her for milk, or food? She’s surely too pretty to be made into beefsteak.

  ‘Pearl? Are you listening?’

  She blinks, draws her eyes away from Walcot Street. ‘Yes. What’s an apport?’

  ‘You drop them from the ceiling. Fruit, feathers, petals. Like a gift from the spirits. I could make that happen.’

  ‘You don’t think …’ Pearl wobbles on her chair, struck by a terrible thought. ‘It won’t just happen, will it? They won’t just start giving presents through me?’

  Myrtle considers this while she inspects a blackberry. ‘I dunno, Pearl. Don’t think so. Seems to me real ghosts are more subtle than that.’

  Pearl recalls the way the spirit matter flowed from her mouth and it makes her stomach cramp in panic. What else might come on that luminous tide? She might vomit forth objects. Manifest limbs. Anything could spew from between her lips and she wouldn’t be able to stop it. She wouldn’t even know it had happened.

  ‘What about the fire?’ Myrtle pounds into the bowl again. ‘I could toss some coloured dust into it. That would go down well.’

  ‘I hate it when you do that! It hurts my eyes.’

  A sound of irritation escapes her sister, a harsh tssssk. ‘Well, work with me, then! Think up something you can stand.’ She’s pummelling the berries so hard that the bowl shifts. ‘I’ve got enough on my plate trying to work on my gift. Mesmerism ain’t easy, you know. Don’t you want to help me? Don’t you want your father to get better?’

  This stings sharper than the firelight, and Myrtle knows it.

  Pearl grits her teeth. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then act like it. Cudgel your brains.’

  ‘I’m trying, but it’s hard. Lifting the veil makes me feel sick. Did it make you sick at the start?’

  ‘’Course it did,’ Myrtle says, more kindly, putting her spoon down. ‘But you don’t see me whining, do you? Buck up, my love.’

  She envies Myrtle’s strength. The spirits are right: her sister is vital, magnetic. Even in their shabby kitchen, wearing an apron, she vibrates.

  ‘Can’t the almshouse help Father?’ Pearl pleads. ‘While you’re learning to heal with Mesmerism?’

  Myrtle looks as if she’s bitten into rotten fruit. ‘Told you, they’re stuck up. Either you ain’t destitute enough for their help, or you don’t deserve it. Them do-gooders don’t consider “spirit medium” a good trade. They think we’re all atheists, hysterical women and lecherous men.’

  Pearl watches the smoke drifting from the chimney stacks outside, dark and free. How must she appear to those charitable workers? She didn’t choose this gift, any more than she chose her albinism, yet she’s punished for both.

  ‘The Dispensary, then. Don’t they help no matter what your religion?’

  Myrtle’s face shuts. ‘Blinkered ignoramuses. Poisoners. Do you want them touching him?’

  These fancy words are straight from the penny spiritualist paper, Missives from Summerland. The Society of Bath Spiritual Adventurers echo them in other forms. Drugs alter the natural flow of energy, Pearl is told. It’s the one topic she dares to nurse a different opinion on – but she keeps that to herself.

  The sun peeks out from behind a cloud. Even its watery autumn rays cause pain. Pressure masses beneath her forehead. She’s a terrible thirst upon her.

  ‘Too much light.’ Pushing up off her chair, she wobbles to the kitchen where a jug of water sits waiting. She drinks one glass, two. She’d gladly drink the whole thing.

  But that would be selfish. She’s being selfish, even now: not helping her sister make the jam, getting in the way of her father’s recovery. She gazes around the damp room and up to the sooty ceiling. Is Mother here somewhere, watching her disapprovingly?

  Myrtle goes on smashing the berries.

  Prodded by guilt, Pearl fills a fresh glass and totters down the narrow corridor to the sickroom. She can’t recall it ever being anything else. Father has always been ill.

  Not this ill, though. As she pushes the door ajar, a rotten stench twines out to greet her: bad milk, fly-blown ham. It takes studied effort to place one foot in front of the other and creep inside.

  Father lies on his back, fever-bitten. His head doesn’t rest on the pillow but twitches this way and that. Does he see her? She’s never certain these days. Whether he’s alone or in company, he produces the same jerky movements, the same liquid-choked moans.

  The curtains are drawn and the light is kind. Pearl edges closer. He’s thrown the sheet partially off his body, exposing his shoulders, chest and one atrophied leg. How thin he’s grown. A tortured shape, slowly disappearing into the mattress. He can’t take solid food any more. Instead, the disease feeds upon him.

  ‘D’you want some water, Father?’ she asks softly.

  He flings his head in her direction. Yes. She hears his voice clear as a bell, even though he can’t speak. Maybe this is part of the Gift. Maybe her spirit can commune with Father’s and they’ll have no need for words between them.

  With an unsteady hand, she reaches for the funnel. Father attempts to open what’s left of his lips for her, but he can’t control that black jaw. She wedges the spout in as best she can.

  Few teeth remain. They jut at impossible angles. The actual jawbone is dark and decaying. When he could talk, Father said he needed a surgeon to cut it out.

  Myrtle called them all butchers.

  Pearl tries to imagine how Father would look after such an operation: he’d be a strange, broken doll of a man. She shudders at the thought. Maybe Myrtle’s right about the surgeons.

  Carefully, she tips the glass. Water trickles slowly down the funnel. She sees it slide over his gums, and the flick of his poor tongue. Of course there are drops that run to wet the pillow, but she’s practised at this. She knows how to administer the liquid without choking him.

  Her own mouth is still dry, despite her earlier drink. Maybe it’s because of the nausea. Pearl listens to the soft flow of the water in the funnel and it becomes all she can think about.

  At last the glass is done, and she can remove the funnel. The end that sat in Father’s mouth is coated in something phlegmy. Pearl closes her eyes momentarily, sways on her feet. If only she was strong like Myrtle. Myrtle wouldn’t even flinch.

  Father looks exhausted by the short ordeal, too. She watches his eyelids droop, whispers, ‘Rest, now.’

  Pity wars with revulsion. She tries to focus on the parts of him that still look normal. His hair. It’s a sweaty tangle, turned grey from all his pain, but at least it still resembles hair.

  As she stares at him, something seems to shift and lighten. Pearl tilts her head. There. Behind him. It looks like an aureole of light. A glow disturbingly familiar …

  Spirit matter.

  Spirit matter teasing at his edges, seeking to claim him.

  With a muffled sob she turns and runs from the room, leaving the glass and funnel behind.

  Myrtle was right; she’s always right in the end, no matter how harsh she seems. Time is running out.
Father’s mortal life will end if they don’t find a way to treat him.

  She leans against the wall and slumps into it, letting her head rest on the faded paper. Help me. Help me, Mother. Tell me what to do. She closes her eyes, wills and strains with all her might.

  But Mother keeps her silence. The only image that fills Pearl’s mind is colourless, shifting water.

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘Agnes! Agnes!’

  Her stockinged feet slide across the floorboards. Dread clamps her chest in place of the corset she has left off fastening to hurry to her mother’s aid.

  But although Mrs Darken’s wail suggested fire or murder, the lady herself sits composed in the wing chair, a newspaper spread over her lap.

  ‘What is it, Mamma? Are you ill?’

  Mamma turns her face up to the firelight. Dropsy has made it rotund and ruddy-skinned, rather like the characters in the Gillray prints Papa used to collect. ‘They’ve put your advertisement in the paper, dear.’

  Agnes pants, out of breath from her dash. ‘I do not understand you. What advertisement?’ Now that she stops to consider, Mamma should not have a Gazette in her grasp at all. Only last Wednesday, she told the boy to end their subscriptions because she could not pay the bill. ‘Where did you get that from? We cannot afford …’

  Her voice disappears. As she draws closer, the print becomes less blurred. Murder in Gravel Walk.

  ‘If you can pay for an advertisement, you cannot begrudge me my papers,’ Mamma huffs.

  Agnes snatches the newspaper so fast that a corner rips off in Mamma’s fingertips.

  She holds it close to her face. It is just as she feared. Those insidious journalists have crept in like so many lice.

  The victim, last seen alive at Darken’s Silhouette Parlour, Orange Grove, was ostensibly killed by an incision at the throat, although he endured multiple injuries after death.

  What need had they to mention her premises? As if her little business were not struggling enough! It is as though they are trying to take away the one employment that gives her satisfaction.

  ‘Did you read this, Mamma?’

  Mamma fidgets her shoulders. ‘You did not give me the chance. I only saw our name and thought you would like to know …’

  While Mamma subsides into grumbles, Agnes tears the paper up, tossing the shreds onto the fire, where they twist and writhe.

  ‘Well, I never did! Whatever has got into you, Agnes? I might have expected this behaviour from Constance, but not you.’

  She closes her eyes, tries to fetch enough air into her lungs. It is not Mamma’s fault.

  ‘Forgive me, Mamma, but they really do print such trash these days. I will see if I can stretch to a magazine. The World of Fashion … But first you should eat. Where’ – she casts a quick, unhopeful look about the parlour – ‘where is Cedric? I thought we were to play backgammon. He is not out and about this early, surely?’

  Mamma plaits her fingers. ‘Ah, little Cedric. He’ll be begging ginger lemonade from the soda manufactory or spying on the girls in Mrs Box’s seminary. A wandering spirit, that boy. Just like his father – aye, and his grandfather before him.’

  Agnes flinches. Her mother does not observe it, for she is gazing into the past now, her eyes filmed over.

  ‘Lord, how he did drag me about, that papa of yours! If it wasn’t Gibraltar it was the West Indies, or some other godforsaken place at the ends of the earth. You are lucky he took his half pay after Constance was born. Who knows where we should have ended up otherwise?’

  A burn at the core of her chest, which has nothing to do with her bad lungs. ‘I should have liked to see the West Indies,’ Agnes replies softly.

  ‘Oh no you would not! That life would not suit you at all. The heat is like the bowels of Hell. It took all morning just to get a hint of curl in my hair. Then I could barely eat. I lost so much weight, I had to take in every one of my gowns, I remember.’

  Strange how Mamma can recall details like this, but not the pain her daughter has endured; how all Agnes’s hopes of happiness were once centred on a ship cutting through the surf and ports in foreign climes.

  ‘Speaking of gowns, I had better put mine on. I shall be back presently.’

  The stair treads yawn beneath her feet. Agnes echoes them, rubbing the grit from her eyes. As she stumbles onto the landing, her shoulder knocks against a frame hanging on the wall. There is a crash followed by the dreaded tinkle of broken glass.

  ‘Agnes?’

  ‘It is nothing, Mamma.’

  Stooping down, she turns the oval frame face up. Shards of glass fall to the floor. Behind them, unmarked, rests the profile of Constance.

  This is the only shade of her they keep on display in the house. It is blind, without the eyelash Agnes now cuts in as a matter of course, but it remains one of her best pieces. There is a depth to it that conjures up the woman herself.

  Indeed, time has softened the memory of Constance’s face to such an extent that these lines now seem to represent her entirely. A dark hole that you might stare into and accidentally fall down.

  In her bedchamber Agnes rests the broken frame upon the dresser and takes a gown from the press. Its dark shade calms her. Black: always ordered and neutral.

  Reliable.

  She notices something misshapen lying at the base of the cupboard. Her reticule. She chucked it hastily aside after the policeman’s visit, but it had rained that day; she ought to have turned the bag out in front of the fire. Bending, she tuts to see the material is pocked with water marks. When she untangles the strings and opens it, it is even worse; a mouldy smell assails her nostrils.

  ‘No, no, no.’ Flames of rust lick the blades of her scissors, still nestled inside. She owns another pair, but these ones are special instruments – they do not come cheap. As for the silhouette she cut of the naval officer in the park, it is utterly ruined: limp and turning to pulp at the bottom of the bag. She blows out her breath. At least it was not a good likeness to begin with.

  Frustrated, she throws the bag to one side and continues to dress. Her old governess always accused her of being easily distracted, and here is the proof: a smashed frame, rusting scissors and a ruined silhouette – all in one morning. She never means to abandon tasks. But there is so much pressing upon her mind. More than it can possibly contain. It is only natural that certain things should … slip out. Since her spell of illness it has only become worse: sometimes a whole hour will pass by without her even noticing.

  She fastens her hair. It is an unpleasant surprise to see the woman in the looking glass. The fine bone structure that Montague praised as ‘delicate’ now only serves to make her look drawn. And then there is that grey streak in her hair; a vivid shock down one side like the blue band in a magpie’s wing. That came after the pneumonia, too. She has still not grown accustomed to it.

  Her eyes dart to the broken frame and to Constance’s shade. Her dead sister has smooth, unwrinkled skin and her hair colour is without variation. All the spikes and bristles of her character are concealed safely behind black lines. She looks almost amenable in this form. It goes to prove that the silhouette really is the kindest form of art.

  Back down the staircase to the accompaniment of another mournful, weary sound from the treads. Mamma remains just as she left her, peering through her spectacles at the fire.

  ‘I am afraid you will have to take your breakfast tea without milk, Mamma,’ Agnes sighs. Her mother raises an ear trumpet to catch her words. ‘I shall have to go and fetch some more later …’

  ‘Oh, Agnes. Do you never keep your wits about you, dear?’

  ‘I did not forget,’ she explains irritably. ‘I used it all making Cedric—’

  ‘We won’t be able to afford milk or anything else, will we, if you carry on ignoring customers like that?’

  ‘Ignoring … ?’

  Mamma jerks her head in the direction of the window.

  Peering through the thicket of silhouettes tacked to the glass are
the startlingly bright eyes of a young man.

  ‘He’s been there for at least five minutes, knocking.’

  Agnes is aghast. Today is market day. The sound of his banging must have been swallowed by the general bustle from outside. ‘Why did you not call me?’ she demands as she dashes to the door.

  Mamma does not reply, but drops her ear trumpet and picks up last week’s newspaper.

  Agnes is old enough to be this young man’s mother.

  She feels antiquated, foolish, sat before him in her studio with her spare pair of scissors. Will he go to a coffee house with his friends after this, and joke about the old maid in Orange Grove?

  She can almost picture them: their checked waistcoats and greased hair. Laughing. Laughing like the magpies outside.

  But she is spoiling the experience for herself. This is her first chance to do a real piece of work since Mr Boyle’s appointment, and she should relish it. The youth has an attractive profile, worthy of a place in her duplicate book. She glances from the paper to his face, enjoying as she always does the crisp sound of that first cut.

  ‘You seem rather a young man, to be having your shade cut,’ she ventures. ‘I thought it was all daguerreotypes with your generation.’

  ‘Well—’ He turns to face her. Remembers, too late, that he isn’t meant to move. ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  ‘Never mind. Just look to the side again if you would, sir.’

  ‘Ned, please. No need to stand upon ceremony with me.’

  How strangely the young conduct themselves nowadays! He is asking her, a woman he has just met, to call him by his Christian name. Not even that, an abbreviation of the name. She pulls the paper towards the jaws of her scissors and works on his lips. It is a shame that she cannot capture the tentative beginnings of a moustache that sprout beneath his nose.

  ‘Ned, then. What prompted you to come to me for a shade?’

  ‘It’s my gran. She has a whole wall full of silhouettes. Every family member you can think of. I did give her my photograph, but the old dear wasn’t pleased with it.’ He laughs. ‘Bit of a blow to my pride, eh? She said it looked odd amongst all those shadows.’