The Shape of Darkness

by Laura Purcell

  Even now, the air is leavened with the scent of carbolic soap.

  There are no bottles or medicines in sight. Where in this large room would Simon keep the keys to his cabinets and drawers?

  She spies two inkpots standing on the left-hand corner of the desk. Picking each up in turn, she shakes them beside her ear. Metal tinkles in the second one. As she suspected, it is empty and washed out to hide a small brass key: a very simple ruse. Simon has become too used to living alone.

  Down the street, the music soars. Morpheus tilts his head comically each time the organ surges into life. She listens, absent-mindedly unlocking the drawers one by one. The single key opens them all. How little Simon must have to hide.

  She pulls out the first drawer. It reveals an almanac and newspaper clippings advertising vacancies for medical officers at the workhouse. Simon has scribbled names upon them – no doubt they are people he means to recommend for the positions. She sifts through orders to apothecaries. Under them is a glass vial with Oil of Vitriol written on the side.

  In the second drawer she finds only a box of matches and some sticks of sealing wax. Where can the laudanum be? She opens another, finds a whole sheaf of letters tied up with string. Most are from other medical men, detailing cases and sharing news; she notices some from Scotland. They must be the doctors Simon studied with.

  She gazes over the names. One occurs more frequently than the others: Tobias Dudfield.

  The organ in the Assembly Rooms reaches a crescendo. Agnes yawns and a letter slides from the pile, landing directly beneath the light of the glass chimney.

  Dear Carfax,

  It gave me great pleasure to see you on Thursday – albeit a pleasure which I would rather have enjoyed under more auspicious circumstances. The difficulties of your situation inspire my deepest sympathy.

  I undertook to write you my honest opinion, and so I shall set it out.

  To gain an estimation of your wife’s character on so short an acquaintance is next to impossible, and she is of the taciturn nature that yields precious little fruit even to the keenest observer. I could detect nothing of incipient insanity other than that she appeared to watch me suspiciously, and served me a peculiarly bony piece of fish.

  I have no doubt in the veracity of your claims about her violence, nor in our ability to confine her, should we choose. However, we must question whether it is the best course of action for either you or Mrs Carfax’s kin.

  Your scruples, I fully comprehend, arise from what became of your patient Mrs B, and do you credit. I doubt there ever was such a regrettable case as hers, although I will maintain that none of the fault can lie at your door. Mrs Carfax does not strike me as similar in the slightest degree; I cannot comprehend her innocence being taken advantage of by unprincipled attendants, nor her refusing sustenance to the point of being force-fed. I could furnish you with details of two or three private establishments I have visited personally and found the inmates to be treated with the utmost respect. However, as you say, one is obliged to surrender a degree of control to another physician, and the fee for doing so is not inconsiderable.

  My own inclination would be to agree to the proposed separation in an informal capacity. If Mrs Carfax has family who are willing to receive her and the boy, it is all to the good. Provide her with an ample allowance and wash your hands of the matter. Whatever high terms she proposes, you will in all likelihood still find yourself in a better position, both financially and with regards to your good name, than you would should you choose to commit her to an institution.

  Having said thus much, I hope there is no need to assure you of my full support and assistance, whatever resolution you should arrive at. I remain, Carfax, your sincere well-wisher &c,

  T Dudfield

  A ripple passes over her, like wind moving across a lake. She puts the letter down.

  She knew nothing of this. Simon never told her he had seriously contemplated having Constance committed.

  Morpheus sighs and flumps down beside her feet.

  What could have prompted it? What did Constance finally do, that was too much? She remembers the dead dogs, Simon’s anguish.

  Constance had a talent for cruelty, there was no doubt of that. But the idea of committing her to an asylum is somehow … revolting. A primal, protective instinct flares inside Agnes’s chest. She was her sister, after all.

  Is there anything else? She turns the pile upside down, rummages through the later letters. There is another in the same hand, although not nearly so neat.

  Carfax,

  My distress on receiving your last you can well imagine. Embarrassment to oneself may be endured, but when threats are made to the safety of those dearest to us, urgent action is required.

  The boy’s reputation must undoubtedly suffer, yet better that than what you apprehend. I have fresh cause to lament you did not follow your heart and elect to save only the elder sister from the original scandal – it would leave you both now in a position to quietly adopt and raise the child. But I will not make you bitter with regrets.

  Rest assured all shall be set in motion this end. I will send you word when you may expect the two inspecting physicians to assess the lady.

  Yours &c

  Dudfield

  The note is dated about a week before Constance’s death.

  She drops it as if it has bitten her.

  The room falls completely silent. Both the organ and the choir melt away; the concert must be over.

  She sits glaring at the letters, shocked, astounded. Finally she separates them from the others and tucks them down the front of her dress. She must keep them. Keep them and present them to Simon, to make sure that they are real, not a chimera.

  He has betrayed her, though. It hurts to think he would contemplate something as serious as committal without even consulting her feelings. He has never mentioned it, in all these years. Perhaps he does not want to tell her about the awful thing her sister threatened, that inspired this letter from Dudfield? It is possible. But such a long silence suggests something else: it suggests concealment and guilt.

  Constance must have known something of this. It must have been one of the reasons she hated Simon so much. Her determination to punish him, to ruin him financially, starts to make some sense.

  Agnes cannot stop thinking about what would have happened, were it not for the Accident.

  She will admit there were times in her life when she would have been glad to see Constance sent away. But the reality of it … Agnes tries to imagine men putting her sister into a strait-waistcoat and hauling her out the door. Mamma would still have died. She would have died from shame instead.

  She has a strange sensation of passing outside her body; of watching events unfold from her sister’s point of view. What would Mr Dudfield have made of Agnes, had she sat at that table for dinner instead? If he had witnessed her delusions in action, watched her talking to the empty chairs that she thought housed Mamma and Cedric?

  Two inspecting physicians.

  A voice within whispers, ‘How long before Simon turns on you?’

  He would not. Could not; he loves her. He has tended to her in a deluded state for two years. He will have a good explanation for these letters – she will ask him as soon as he comes home.

  Shakily, she returns the other correspondence to the drawer. Two silver items glint at the bottom of it. One is another key, tied upon a red ribbon; the other is a pair of surgical scissors.

  Agnes takes them both.

  Maybe she can calm herself by cutting practice waves in sable paper; rolling out onto that ocean of black …

  But there is something else that will help her do that much more quickly: laudanum. She came here for laudanum. Everything will look better after she has drunk it, slept, and talked over the troubling letters with Simon.

  She glances around the room, but it is still unclear where the medicine is kept. The key on the red ribbon must open something besides the desk; perhaps one of the various cabin
ets?

  Her eyes fall upon a heavy leather trunk beside the window that she has not noticed before. It makes her feel … odd. The surface looks worn with much travelling. She imagines it tied to stagecoaches, trundling up the cold roads towards Edinburgh. The people and places it has seen have left their mark, and not just on the leather.

  The trunk has an aura, like Miss West spoke of: a tension in the air around it.

  Agnes does not want to go near it, but somehow she finds herself kneeling down, trying the key in the lock.

  It clicks.

  A low growl rumbles from Morpheus’s chest.

  He watches her intently as she pulls up the lid. The hinges creak like the timbers of a ship.

  Inside are two large hooks.

  She puts a hand to her forehead, trying to hold things in place. These are the hooks tied to ropes, which Simon used to fish coffins from their graves. Cedric told her about them.

  But Cedric was dead.

  She imagined that conversation. Unless it really was the ghost of her nephew …

  It feels like she is peering into a coffin now: she has the same sensation of fear and disgust. Her fiancé has robbed the dead, sliced up cadavers … She endeavours to remember it was a duty of his employment a long time ago, and he was forced to do it.

  There are other items in the box. Surgical tools – or perhaps implements for prising open coffins: a crowbar, a mallet, a saw. Her stomach sours.

  She does not want to see any more.

  It is only as she reaches to close the lid that she catches sight of a familiar face; or not precisely a face, but its outline, empty inside.

  The monochrome shape she recognises as her own art.

  Pushing rusty nails aside, she closes her fingers around the edge of the shade and pulls it out.

  Ice pricks her skin.

  The black foolscap has peeled a little at the corners. The white stock card is scuffed and tiny spatters of a dark liquid mark the chin. None of that matters. She would know this piece anywhere, even without her name emblazoned in the corner.

  It is the hollow-cut of Ned.

  CHAPTER 39

  At dawn, Agnes unlocks the street door and takes down the iron bar. She puts Morpheus in the kitchen, sets out the remains of the ham beside his bowl and shuts him in the room.

  Next, she returns to Simon’s consulting room and sweeps everything off the desk. It makes a satisfying crash. In place of the lamp, the inkpots, the pens and Simon’s various paperwork, she lays out four items: the two letters from Tobias Dudfield, Ned’s silhouette and the pair of surgical scissors.

  She waits.

  There are a thousand conundrums that could be teasing her mind right now, but she finds herself oddly focused. All she thinks about is Pearl.

  That little girl was kind of heart, and bright, in her way, but she was kept back; a seed never permitted to rise above the soil. Everything Pearl thought that she knew, her sister had told her, and she believed it. She believed it without question.

  The clunk of the street door opening seems to fall right through her. Simon’s voice calls out: ‘Good news, at last! They are both safe. A healthy girl, named for the Queen.’

  Morpheus’s paws scrabble in the kitchen, but there is no other reply.

  ‘Miss Darken?’ A note of alarm. She hears his footsteps clipping across tiles. ‘Agnes, are you there?’

  He pounds up the stairs, throws doors open. By the time he returns to the ground floor and bursts into the consulting room, he looks half wild.

  His face is drained of colour and shiny, like wax. The clothes he has worn since yesterday morning are crumpled, sweat-stained and smell faintly sour. In his arms he clutches an incongruous gift: a set of travelling paintbrushes and watercolours.

  Prominent in the tired death mask of his countenance are his blue eyes. They knock from one object on the desk to another, settling on Ned’s silhouette.

  He does not move.

  ‘Miss West did not kill my clients,’ Agnes announces.

  ‘No.’

  She expected at least some denial. ‘But you are going to let her hang for it. A crime she did not commit.’

  He closes his eyes, takes a breath. ‘I would gladly have put myself forward to die for the real culprit.’

  And then he starts to cry.

  Agnes stares, confused. She cannot recall him weeping like this, even when his family died. But she must not feel pity: this display in itself could be a manipulation.

  ‘You did it, to scare me,’ she asserts. ‘To put me in your power. You wanted me to have no other choice but to marry you.’

  He chokes. ‘No! Miss Darken, I would never harm another soul—’ Dropping the paint set, he starts forward, but stops when he sees her flinch back in the chair. ‘I tried so hard to protect you.’

  ‘From whom?’ She concentrates on Ned’s silhouette and the spots of blood that mark it; she cannot trust herself to look at her friend’s face. ‘I wonder you did not burn this. It is not like you to be sloppy, Simon. But I suppose you had your hands full.’

  ‘You said it was your best work …’ He breaks off, runs a hand across his sweating forehead. When he recommences, he sounds calmer, resigned. ‘No, you are right. I should have burnt it. I should have dissolved the bodies, too, rather than hiding them, but I thought their families deserved something to bury. I did not have time to think it through … It all started to happen so quickly.’

  She should feel frightened of him, but she is strangely numb. ‘What did?’

  He puts out his hands like he is trying to placate a rabid dog. ‘Do not worry, Miss Darken. We will find help. We will stop these spells of disassociation … I was wrong to attempt to handle them alone. My emotions got the better of me. I have a friend …’ He takes a step closer. ‘It is not your fault. You were not in control. After the pneumonia … there were times you were not yourself. You were more like …’ Another step. ‘I thought that if I got you away from Bath, to Switzerland, it might stop.’ His face seems to collapse. ‘We were so close to being happy. I could have made you well.’

  ‘Me?’ she disputes. ‘Do not try your trickery, Simon; do not try to turn this around on me, you are the one who has lied—’

  ‘It must be in the blood,’ he mutters to himself. He is so near now that she can smell the birthing chamber on him. ‘A taint. I never thought you and your sister anything alike, but when it comes over you, I see her again …’

  Agnes scuffs her chair further away. ‘Stop there. Right there.’ She snatches up the letters and brandishes them at him. ‘I am wise to your game. Now I know of your guilt, you will try to send me away, pretend that I am mad.’

  ‘What have you …’ For the first time he seems to understand what the letters are. His eyes slide across the desk.

  Stop on the scissors.

  A chill runs over her skin. She remembers how Ned and Mr Boyle died: a single laceration to the throat.

  Simon reaches out a hand.

  ‘Stay back,’ she snaps.

  ‘Miss Darken, let me take those scissors.’

  ‘I’m warning you, Simon!’ Her voice rises, beyond her control.

  Simon puts a foot forward. ‘You cannot be trusted with them,’ he explains. His blue eyes flick between her and the open blades. ‘When it has possession of you—’

  ‘You are lying! I could not hurt a fly!’ She is screeching. It sounds like her vocal chords are being worked by someone else.

  He wets his lips, inches closer. ‘You can. You do. You lose hours, and I—’

  ‘Stay back!’

  Simon’s pupils lock on hers.

  They both lunge for the scissors at the same time.

  There is a sense of retraction, of snapping back into herself. Her eyes pop open and she is standing alone in Constance’s bedchamber, watching the sun set in a riot of pink and Etruscan red.

  A pitiful whine comes from downstairs.

  Perplexed, hollow, she wanders from the room. The carpet on
the stairs is marked with paw prints; Agnes follows them to the kitchen where she finds Morpheus whimpering like a human child. At first, she thinks the dog is hurt, but when she picks up his little black feet to inspect them, they are uncut. His paws seem to be stained with a dark substance that is not his own blood.

  ‘Silly boy,’ she says.

  He shies under the table.

  The house has a comfortable hush. It is empty, yet occupied. She feels free, but not alone.

  She finds a newspaper sitting on the doormat and has a quick leaf through the pages. The journalists speak of great wars abroad and plans for 1855; everywhere the old is being effaced and replaced with the new.

  Leisurely, she strolls to the consulting room. Her feet kick against glass; more empty vials of oil of vitriol lie scattered across the carpet.

  ‘What has happened here?’

  The lamp upon the desk is lit. By the light of its chimney, she sees that someone has left her a piece of paper. A painting, in fact – a shade.

  The sitter is Simon: there can be no doubt of that. His likeness has been taken as skilfully as if she had done it herself. But this profile has not been brushed with her usual blend of ink and soot; the paint is thicker, rusty in hue. She runs her finger over the bridge of Simon’s nose. It feels like a crust.

  Words are written beneath in the hand she recognises from the notes: Now he will never part us.

  She turns her head. A shadow stretches up the wall, created by the failing sun: a slender woman wearing her hair in a chignon.

  It is not Agnes, although it is similar.

  She has no doubt now. She possesses the Gift.

  The shadow holds out a hand.

  ‘Oh, Constance,’ she sighs, pressing her palm against the wallpaper. ‘Whatever have you done?’

  Acknowledgements

  The first germs of this story came to me during the 2016 Jane Austen Festival in Bath. My friends and I attended a wonderful talk and workshop with silhouette artist Charles Burns, who was kind enough to let us loose on his own physiognotrace – with hilarious results! Charles Burns’s instructive book, Mastering Silhouettes (Fil Rouge Press Ltd, 2012) also proved a key resource for me in writing about Agnes’s work. I cannot thank him enough!