Pinkerton's Sister (89 page)

She flexed her index finger.

Her
trigger
finger.

Bang!

Bang!

Bang!

“What horror is he in!” Belford had written of Belton in
Clarissa
. “His eyes look like breath-stained glass!”

She had often pictured eyes like breath-stained glass when she looked in mirrors. She had stared at the dark surface of night-backed windows, trying not to breathe, so that she could see.
Moving thro’ a mirror clear/That hangs before her all the year/Shadows of the world appear.

“His malady is within him,” Belford had written earlier, “and he cannot run away from it.”

Would there still be a luster on the gleaming dome, or would it have clouded over in death, become reflectionless breath-stained glass?

Out vile jelly! Where is thy luster now?

Lustre.

All’s dark and comfortless.

The raised foot stomped down, and passers-by disappeared under lumpy piles of squirted strawberry jelly. They licked their red-clotted lips, unable to stop themselves, and shuddered with delighted revulsion as they sucked the fruits from that unknown
orchard.

We must not look at goblin men, we must not buy their fruits.

Yum-yum.

Above them, at the window above the jelly-encrusted railings, the strawberry-smelling scene of carnage, one of Miss Iandoli’s pupils – a beginner – was falteringly making an overambitious attempt at
Narcissus
.

After a few notes, there was silence.

The pupil was bent over, looking at the hands that would not do what she wanted, that would not produce the music that she could hear inside her head.

She should find a looking-glass, hold it to her father’s lips, punish him, thrust him through into the Looking-glass House.

If she held it to his lips, and then looked into it and saw her reflection clearly, this would mean death.

Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror.

That was what Dr. Jekyll had believed, that image of breath-stained glass again. It was such a revealing image, this linking of the hidden inner monster with the picture of someone looking into a mirror, Dr. Jekyll seeing the reflection not of his face but of the being inside himself, hating and fearing the brute that slept within him. The mirror had the power of Dorian Gray’s portrait. With it he was able to follow his mind into its secret places. It was the most magical of mirrors.

The drug he took had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prison-house of his disposition; and, like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth.

That was how Dr. Jekyll described what had happened to him, though she wished that Robert Louis Stevenson had dispensed with all the apparatus of the drug. No drug was needed to draw out the darker self. It slept until it was woken, and then it roared forth. The mirror in which Dr. Jekyll looked was the perfect mirror for
all alienists to employ.

Look in this mirror, Miss Pinkerton. Tell me what you can see.

If she looked in such a mirror she would see her true self.

Dr. Jekyll believed that the evil would pass away, as transient as breath, as breathing, because life was such a fragile thing, lasting for so short a time.

She was alone in the house with a dead man.

Me and my Papa.

Me and my Papa can
…

Me and my Papa can
…

She could not telephone anyone. She had seen the fallen poles. Snow was piled up in drifts, darkening the lower windows, blocking all the doors of the house. She could not leave, was unable to seek help. There was no one to see her, no one to hear her, if she opened one of the upper windows and tried to shout above the noise of the storm.

(Lizzie.)

She had almost heard the name being called, a voice far away across fields, a voice from the upper room of a distant house. Her own faint voice calling, calling across time, and not distance.

(Lizzie Galliant.)

She almost called for Lizzie Galliant, summoning up herself as a child to call for the comfort she had craved from someone stronger than she could ever be. The time had come, the one time she could use her powers, like a bee defending itself and killing itself by the use of its sting …

She did not call out the name.

She was made out of frozen metal, weathered bronze, and should take her place upon Papa’s knee for
The Children’s Hour
, not moving for year after year, her breathing stilled, just aging slowly as the snow raged around her. He was there, high above her, ready, in the correct pose, waiting for her. There she stands a lovely creature, who she is, I do not know; I have caught her for her beauty.

She was one of the girls from the statue.

There should be a large book for Papa to hold, to complete the pose. Often, she had wished to read the words within the book, if words were there to read. Now she could choose the book. His account book would be somewhere close beneath the snow, its pages ripped out, its thick covers – wet and warped – closed upon emptiness. What had once been there was numbers, not words. That could be the book he was reading to her, teaching her all her lessons of addition and subtraction, all the calculations that needed to be made. He’d be more at home with numbers. One, two, three … He’d be Moses, reading the Ten Commandments as his bedtime story. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Honor thy father and thy mother,” he’d be saying in an unfamiliar once-upon-a-time voice. “Thou shalt not kill.”

“Why not, Papa?”

“Because it’s what it says in the book. You have to have things the same as they are in the book, otherwise they’re wrong.”

She sat beneath the flapping cloth, like a corpse covered by an enfolding sheet, as the snow steadily pattered upon it, deepening over their bodies, the three blind little girls and the blind bearded man frozen together, waiting in the darkness for another little girl to unveil them.

Brightness would fall upon them, and there they would be exposed, all of them dead, all of them blind, as an unseen crowd applauded, and – to the sound of the
idée fixe
, marching to the scaffold – the massed schoolboys of Otsego Lake Academy, their buttons glinting with the red glow of the setting sun, too many buttons to count, would chant the last verse of “The Children’s Hour.” The same red glow would shine from the bright, golden area of her breast, the worn part near her heart, as she listened to the words she could not read.

She saw the fortress rising high above her, dark, windowless, its many levels of stone blocking out the light.

As it crumbled, the grit hissed and pattered down upon her, crunching under her feet like spilled sugar, making her hair itchy, and her reddened eyes water, tears blurring her vision to give an underwater sway to everything she saw.

There he would keep her for ever, Yes, for ever and a day.

The first thing she had said to Mama, when she and her sisters and brother finally managed to reach the house, was “Promise me you won’t marry again.” She’d insisted that Mama make the promise, insisted that she sign a piece of paper.

Mourning had been a strain, remembering to look decorously sad, and speak in a low, brave voice. The black clothes of full mourning put on each morning – mourning for morning, mourning for night – were a useful reminder of what would be appropriate behavior, a tactful little nudge that no one saw happening, and the solemn expressions were assumed (a too-revealing choice of verb) with the dark clothes. It was like a ritual for which you had to wear special clothing, an assigned task. Soldiers wore special clothes to kill. Butchers wore special clothes to hack meat. Sweeps wore special clothes to clean chimneys. The Happy Families pack was a guide to appropriate fashions, miniaturized fashion plates helpfully gathered together. Miss Pinkerton, the Mourning Daughter.
LOOK SAD
she was reminded by the carefully ironed memento mori.
DON’T LAUGH. SIGH INTERMITTENTLY AND GAZE INTO THE MIDDLE DISTANCE
, as incipient tears poised in the about-to-fall
position. Sometimes she believed that she felt these feelings. Surely – as a demonstration of her real, deep, and sincere grief – she ought to have blacked her face as well, in decorously tasteful minstrel show mourning, applying the burned cork with slow, thoughtful movements between sighs? How those movements would have moved Papa and impressed Mrs. Albert Comstock, a suitable Symbolic act of homage.

– “…
de
days …” Mrs. Albert Comstock corrected firmly, but Alice ignored her –

– She might manage a sad little quaver in her voice –

(It began quietly, far away in the distance, but drew closer, became louder.

After a while, Dr. Severance of Staten Island was drawn on like more dark clothing. Then, heaviest and blackest of all – as thick as
winter clothing, but failing to keep out the cold – the deepest of deep, deep mourning, it was time for Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. Miss Pinkerton, the Madwoman in the Attic.

Twenty-five years ago, as a blizzard raged around the house, she had walked down the stairs in darkness to see Annie, and helped her find the woman who would kill her. Fifteen years ago, in another blizzard, she had gone downstairs to find her father’s body.

She had felt that she had watched all night during the 1888 blizzard – her short periods of sleep had been shallow – and some words of Robert Louis Stevenson had kept going through her head. She half drowsed as she sat and watched the storm, hypnotized by the featureless whiteness. In the morning – a morning scarcely distinguishable from the night; it was as dark, as bleak – the storm was raging as fiercely as ever, and the words were still in her head, like a tune that could not be shaken off.

There had been a profound silence inside and outside the house, beneath the sound of the gale. The obliterating snow was still hissing across as thickly as ever, looking as if it would never end. Chestnut Street was blocked, with a huge drift piling up toward their side, and Chestnut Hill, running downward beyond,
was impassable. The telegraph poles, the elements torn from their positions, lay collapsed all the way down the street like the masts and spars of shipwrecked galleons – a destroyed armada of
Hesperus
es and
Hispaniola
s in the midnight and the snow – crashed down through the ice from the sky into a lower, colder, element, their snow-thickened wires thrumming like storm-torn rigging.

The pole outside Miss Iandoli’s house had fallen right across the street to their house, dragged down by the weight of the snow, and she looked down upon it, expecting to see a frozen corpse, still clutching a telescope, staring up at her from a smashed crow’s-nest, its dead eyes all iced and glittering. She saw it as distinctly as a Doré engraving of the Ancient Mariner as he once had been, a young man leaning against a mast, his head bowed and his arms extended out from his sides, like an exhausted crucified figure.

She could lean down from her window, and press her lips against that cold face, so that they would freeze against it as she had once imagined them doing against the buttons of a uniform, against a bronze statue, as the snow beat against her, closed her eyes and mouth, and penetrated to the inner parts of her ears.

The skipper’s daughter, the salt tears in her eyes, was wrapped in her father’s seaman’s coat, and he had bound her to the mast with rope cut from a broken spar. He had lashed her tightly, though he had left her hands free.

Her hair fell and rose in the wind, as if her body was still breathing.

She kneeled down to be in the warmth close to the fire, and began to brush her hair. She hadn’t undressed yet, but wished to begin the ritual of counting, to drive all other thoughts out of her head.
She’d laid her nightgown on the chair beside her to warm. The wintry moon shining through the stained glass of the casement might have thrown a glory like a saint on Madeline’s hair as she kneeled in prayer on St. Agnes’ Eve – Porphyro growing faint at her purity, her freedom from mortal taint – but she certainly neglected its care, failing to brush it before she slept.

–
plough
(should it be “plough”?) –

“One, two, three …”

Time for the nighttime brushing of her hair to begin, the repeated one-to-a-hundred ritual that she completed automatically, without looking into a mirror. She found herself becoming anxious if she did not brush, tugging out the elf-locks, unable to sleep without removing them.

Looking-glass, looking-glass, on the wall.

“… twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven …”

It was soporific, counting up to a hundred, over and over, a certain soothing monotony, just right before bedtime, emptying her mind of everything but the repeated numbers, free even from the image of leaping flocks of sheep soaring over five-barred gates. Nothing but numbers. The poppied warmth of monotony oppress’d her soothed limbs.