Alias Grace (50 page)

Simon assures him that his own curiosity is far from idle: he’s a doctor, and is making a study of Grace.

It’s a waste of time, says the landlord, because Grace was guilty. “She was good-looking woman,” he adds, with a kind of pride at having known her. “Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. You’d never have guessed what she was plotting, under that smooth face.”

“Only fifteen at the time, I believe,” says Simon.

“But could have passed for eighteen. A shame, to have got so wicked, at her young age.” He says Mr.

Kinnear was a fine gentleman though loose, and most people had liked Nancy Montgomery, even though she’d been living in sin. He’d known McDermott too; a prime athlete, and would have done well in the end, except for Grace. “It was her led him on, and it was her put a noose around his neck for him too.”

He says the women always get off easy.

Simon asks about Jamie Walsh, but Jamie Walsh is gone. To the city, say some; to the States, say others. After Kinnear’s place was sold off the Walshes had to shift. In fact there aren’t many left in the neighbourhood who were here back then, as there’s been a great deal of buying and selling and coming and going since; the grass being always greener on the other side of the fence.

Simon rides north, and has little difficulty in identifying the Kinnear property. He hasn’t meant to go right up to the house — he’s only been intending to look at it from a distance — but the orchard which was young in Grace’s time has now grown up, partially obscuring the view. He finds himself halfway up the drive, and before he knows it he’s hitched his horse to the fence beside the two kitchens, and is standing at the front door.

The house is smaller, and somehow dingier, than he has imagined it. The porch with its pillars is in need of a coat of paint, and the rose bushes have run wild, and show only a few infested blooms. What can be gained from looking, Simon asks himself; apart, that is, from a vulgar frisson, and the indulgence of morbid interest? It’s like visiting the site of a battle: there is nothing to be seen except in the mind’s eye.

Such confrontations with the actual are always a disappointment.

Nevertheless he knocks at the front door, then knocks again. No one answers. He’s turning to go away when the door is opened. A woman stands there, thin, sad-faced, not old but aging, soberly dressed in a dark print dress and apron. Simon has the sensation that this is what Nancy Montgomery would have turned into if she’d lived.

“You’re here to see the house,” she says. It isn’t a question. “The master’s not at home, but I have instructions to show you around.”

Simon is taken aback: how did they know he was coming? Perhaps they have a lot of visitors, still, despite what the innkeeper told him? Has the place become a grisly museum?

The housekeeper — for that’s what she must be — stands aside to allow Simon to pass into the front hall. “You’ll want to know about the well, I suppose,” she says. “They always do.”

“The well?” asks Simon. He’s heard nothing about a well. Perhaps his visit will be repaid, after all, with some fresh detail about the case, never before mentioned. “What about the well?”

The woman gives him an odd glance. “It’s a covered well, Sir, with a new pump. Surely you would want to know about the well, when looking to buy a place.”

“But I’m not looking to buy it,” says Simon, flustered. “Is it for sale?”

“Why else would I be showing it to you? Of course it’s for sale, and not for the first time neither. Those that live here never feel entirely comfortable. Not that there’s anything, no ghosts or such, though you’d think there might be, and I never like to go down to the cellar. But it draws the idle gawkers.”

She stares hard at him: if he’s not a buyer, what is he doing here? Simon doesn’t wish to be thought just another idle gawker. “I am a doctor,” he says.

“Ah,” she says, nodding shrewdly at him, as if this explains it. “So you want to see the
house.
We do get a lot of doctors who want to see it. More than the other sorts, even the lawyers. Well, now that you’re here, you might just as well. In here is the parlour, where they kept the piano, I’m told, in Mr. Kinnear’s time, that Miss Nancy Montgomery used to play at. She sang like a canary, so they say of her. Very musical, she was.” She smiles at Simon, the first smile she’s bestowed.

Simon’s tour is thorough. He is shown the dining room, the library, the winter kitchen; the summer kitchen, the stable and loft, “where that scoundrel McDermott slept at night.” The upstairs bedrooms —

“Lord only knows what went on up here” — and Grace’s little room. The furniture is all different, of course. Poorer, shabbier. Simon tries to imagine what it must have looked like then, but fails.

With a fine showmanship, the housekeeper saves the cellar till the last. She lights a candle and descends first, cautioning him against slipping. The light is dim, the corners cobwebbed. There’s a dank smell, of earth and stored vegetables. “He was found right here,” says the housekeeper with relish, “and she was hid over by that wall. Though why they bothered to hide her, I don’t know. Crime will out, and out it did.

It’s a pity they didn’t hang that Grace, and I’m not alone in saying so.”

“I am sure you aren’t,” says Simon. He’s seen enough, he wants to be gone. At the front door he gives her a coin — it seems the right thing — and she nods and pockets it. “You can see the graves, too, in the churchyard in town,” she tells him. “There’s no names, but you can’t miss them. They’re the only ones with pickets round.”

Simon thanks her. He feels he’s sneaking away after some discreditable peepshow. What sort of a voyeur has he become? A thoroughgoing one, apparently, as he heads straight for the Presbyterian church; easy to find, since it’s the only steeple in sight.

Behind it is the graveyard, neat and green, the dead kept under firm control. No rambling weeds here, no tattered wreaths, no jumble and confusion; nothing like the baroque efflorescences of Europe. No angels, no Calvaries, no nonsense. Heaven, for the Presbyterians, must resemble a banking establishment, with each soul tagged and docketed, and placed in the appropriate pigeonhole.

The graves he seeks are obvious. Each has a wooden picket fence around it, the only such fences in the graveyard: to keep the occupants penned in, no doubt, since the murdered have the reputation of walking. Even the Presbyterians, it appears, are not exempt from superstition.

Thomas Kinnear’s picket fence is painted white, Nancy Montgomery’s black, an indication perhaps of the town’s judgment upon her: murder victim or not, she was no better than she should be. They hadn’t been buried in the same grave — no need to endorse the scandal. Oddly, Nancy‘s grave has been placed at Kinnear’s feet, and at right angles to him; the effect is of a sort of bed rug. There’s a large rose bush filling almost the whole of Nancy’s enclosure — the old broadsheet ballad, then, was prophetic —

but no vine in Thomas Kinnear’s. Simon picks a rose from Nancy‘s grave, with some half-formed notion of taking it back to Grace, but then thinks better of it.

He spends the night at an unprepossessing inn halfway back to Toronto. The windowpanes are so grimy he can scarcely see out of them, the blankets smell of mildew; directly below his room, a group of raucous drinkers carouses till well past midnight. These are the hazards of provincial travel. He places a chair against the door, to prevent unwelcome intrusion.

In the morning he arises early and inspects the various insect bites he’s acquired during the night. He douses his head in the scant basin of lukewarm water brought by the chambermaid, who doubles as the scullery maid downstairs; the water smells of onions.

After breakfasting on a slice of antediluvian ham and an egg of uncertain age, he continues on his way.

Few others are abroad; he passes a wagon, an axeman felling a dead tree in his field, a labourer pissing into the ditch. Wisps of mist float here and there above the fields, dissipating like dreams in the rising light.

The air is hazy, the roadside weeds hung with dew; the horse snatches mouthfuls of them as it passes.

Simon curbs it halfheartedly, then lets it amble. He feels idle, remote from all goals and effort.

Before taking his afternoon train, he has one more errand. He wants to visit the grave of Mary Whitney.

He wants to make sure she really exists.

The Adelaide Street Methodist Church is the one Grace named; he’s looked it up in his notes. In the graveyard, polished granite is replacing marble, and verses are becoming scarce: ostentation lies in size and solidity, not in ornamentation. The Methodists like their monuments monumental; block-like, unmistakable, like the thick black lines drawn under finalized accounts in his father’s ledger book:
Paid
In Full.

He walks up and down the rows of graves, reading over the names — the Biggs and the Stewarts, the Flukes and the Chambers, the Cooks and the Randolphs and the Stalworthys. At last he finds it, over in a corner: a small grey stone, which looks older than the nineteen years that have passed.
Mary Whitney;
the name, nothing more. But Grace did say that the name was all she could afford.

Conviction leaps in him like a flame — her story is true, then — but it dies as quickly. What are such physical tokens worth? A magician produces a coin from a hat, and because it’s a real coin and a real hat, the audience believes that the illusion too is real. But this stone is only that: a stone. For one thing, it has no dates on it, and the Mary Whitney buried beneath it may not have any connection with Grace Marks at all. She could be just a name, a name on a stone, seen here by Grace and used by her in the spinning of her story. She could be an old woman, a wife, a small infant, anyone at all.

Nothing has been proved. But nothing has been disproved, either.

Returning to Kingston, Simon travels first class. The train is almost full, and to avoid the crowding it’s worth the expense. As he’s carried eastward and Toronto recedes behind him, and Richmond Hill and its farms and meadows, he finds himself wondering what it would be like to live back there, in that lush and peaceful countryside; in, for instance, Thomas Kinnear’s house, with Grace as his housekeeper. Not only his housekeeper: his locked and secret mistress. He’d keep her hidden, under a different name.

A lazy, indulgent life it would be, with its own slow delights. He pictures her sitting in a chair in the parlour, sewing, the lamplight falling on the side of her face. But why only mistress? It comes to him that Grace Marks is the only woman he’s ever met that he would wish to marry. It’s a sudden notion, but once he’s had it he turns it over, considering it. He thinks, with a certain mordant irony, that she may also be the only one who would satisfy all of his mother’s oft-hinted requirements, or almost all: Grace is not, for instance, rich. But she has beauty without frivolity, domesticity without dullness, and simplicity of manner, and prudence, and circumspection. She is also an excellent needlewoman, and could doubtless crochet rings around Miss Faith Cartwright. His mother would have no complaints on that score.

Then there are his own requirements. There is passion in Grace somewhere, he’s certain of it, although it would take some hunting for. And she’d be grateful to him, albeit reluctantly. Gratitude by itself does not enthral him, but he likes the idea of reluctance.

But then there’s James McDermott. Has she been telling the truth in that respect? Did she really dislike and fear the man as much as she’s claimed? He’d touched her, certainly; but how much, and with how much of her consent? Such episodes appear differently in retrospect than in the heat of the moment; nobody knows that better than he, and why should it be any different for a woman? One prevaricates, one makes excuses for oneself, one gets out of it the best way one can. But what if, some evening in the lamplit parlour, she were to reveal more than he would care to know?

But he does care to know.

Madness, of course; a perverse fantasy, to marry a suspected murderess. But what if he’d met her before the murders? He considers this, rejects it. Before the murders Grace would have been entirely different from the woman he now knows. A young girl, scarcely formed; tepid, bland, and tasteless. A flat landscape.

Murderess, murderess,
he whispers to himself. It has an allure, a scent almost. Hothouse gardenias.

Lurid, but also furtive. He imagines himself breathing it as he draws Grace towards him, pressing his mouth against her.
Murderess.
He applies it to her throat like a brand.

Thirteen - Pandora’s Box

Chapter 48

They wait in the library of Mrs. Quennell’s house, each in a straight-backed chair, each turned not too obviously towards the door, which is slightly open. The curtains, which are of maroon plush with black trim and tassels and remind Simon of Episcopalian funerals, have been drawn shut; a globe-shaded lamp has been lit. It stands in the centre of the table, which is oblong and made of oak; and they sit around it, silent, expectant, decorous and wary, like a jury before the trial.

Mrs. Quennell, however, is relaxed, her hands folded placidly in her lap; she anticipates wonders, but will evidently not be surprised by them, whatever they may be. She has the air of a professional guide for whom the ravishments of, say, Niagara Falls have become a commonplace, but who hopes to enjoy vicariously the raptures of visiting neophytes. The Governor’s wife wears an expression of yearning piety, tempered with resignation, whereas Reverend Verringer manages to look both benign and disapproving; there’s a glinting around his eyes as if he’s wearing spectacles, although he is not. Lydia, who is seated to Simon’s left, is dressed in some cloudy, shiny material, a light mauve shot through with white, cut low enough to reveal her charming collarbone; she exudes a moist aroma of lily of the valley. She’s nervously twisting her handkerchief; but when her eyes meet Simon’s, she smiles.

As for Simon, he senses that his face is set in a sceptical and not very pleasant sneer; but that’s a false face, as underneath it he’s eager as a schoolboy at a carnival. He believes in nothing, he expects trickery and longs to discover how it is worked, but at the same time he wishes to be astonished. He knows this is a dangerous state of mind: he must preserve his objectivity.