Sleep, Pale Sister (11 page)
I remember her cool,
strong hand against my hair. Her face in the lamplight, white as the moon. The sounds of her dress; the scent of her perfume, warm and golden with amber and chypre. Her voice, low and calm, singing without words in time to her rhythmic stroking of my hair.
Low adown…low adown
. Henry was a bad dream, melting away now into a million little teardrops of light. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked away a heartbeat stronger than my own: my heart was light as a dandelion clock, counting off moments into a warm summer night like silken seeds. My eyes were closed, gentle dream-thoughts spindling away into the welcome darkness of sleep. Fanny’s voice was speaking very gently, very sweetly, every word a caress.
‘Shh…sleep. Sleep, little girl…so sleepy…shhh…’ I smiled and murmured as the fronds of her hair brushed against my face.
‘That’s right. Shh…Sleep, my darling, my Marta, my love.’
Rocked in the cradle of her arms I allowed myself to drift gently. As she stroked my hair I watched my memories drift away like floating balloons. Mose…the graveyard…the exhibition…Henry…However bright the memory I could will it to float away and, after a time, I saw the bright cloud of balloons, strings entwined, colours glowing in the setting sun. It was such a beautiful sight that I think I spoke aloud, in a lost little-girl’s voice.
‘Balloons, Mother, all floating away. Where are they going?’
Her voice was barely audible against my hair. ‘Far, far away. They’re floating up into the sky, right into the clouds…and they’re all different colours, red, yellow, blue…Can you see them?’
I nodded.
‘Float with them for a while. Can you do that?’
I nodded again.
‘Feel yourself going up…up into the air with the balloons. That’s right. Shh…’
I realized I was beginning to rise without momentum simply by thinking about it. I rose right out of my body, drifting, the peaceful image of the balloons still in my dreaming mind.
‘You floated like this before,’ said Fanny gently. ‘Do you remember?’
‘I remember.’ My voice was no more than a wisp, but she heard.
‘In the fairground,’ insisted Fanny.
‘Yes.’
‘Could you go there again?’
‘I…I don’t want to. I want to go with the balloons.’
‘Shh, darling…it’s all right. Nothing can hurt you. I just need your help. I want you to go back and tell me what you can see. Tell me his name.’
I was floating in a sky so blue that it hurt to look. Over the horizon I could see balloons rising. Beneath me, a long way down, I could see the tents and the awnings of the fair.
‘Tents…’ I murmured.
‘Go down. Go to the tent and look in.’
‘N-no…I…’
‘It’s all right. Nothing can hurt you. Go down. What do you see?’
‘Pictures. Statues. No, waxworks.’
‘Closer.’
‘No…’
‘Closer!’
Suddenly I was there again. I was ten years old, curled up against the wall of my bedroom as the Bad Man came towards me with lust and murder in his eyes.
I screamed. ‘No! Mother! Don’t let him! Don’t let the Bad Man come! Don’t let that Bad Man come!’
In the red haze of my drumming blood I heard her voice, still very calm: ‘Who, Marta?’
‘No-oh-ohh!’
‘Tell me
who
?’
And I looked into his face. The terror peaked, a frozen eternity…then I knew him. The terror fell away and I awoke, Fanny’s strong arms around me, my tears soaking into the crushed velvet of her gown.
Very gently she repeated, ‘Tell me who.’
After a moment I told her.
My mother held me close.
I suppose a century
ago they would have called me a witch. Well, I’ve been called worse things, some of them true, and what people think has never been a worry to me. I can make up a broth that will calm a fever or brew a posset for dreams of flying, and sometimes, in my mirror, I can see things which aren’t reflections. I know what Henry Chester would call that: but then again I have my own terms for the likes of Henry Chester, and not ones you’d find in the Authorized Version, either.
If it hadn’t been for Henry Chester, Marta would have been twenty years old this July. I’m rich enough to have left her a tidy fortune: there’d have been no danger of her walking the streets. I’d have found her a house, a husband if she wanted one; anything she asked for I’d have given her. But when she was ten years old Henry Chester took her from me, and I waited ten years to take his Effie from him. I’ve not had much time in my life for poetry, but there’s fearful symmetry in that pattern, and that’s justice enough for me. Cold, to be sure, but none the less bitter for that.
I was young when I gave birth to Marta, in as much as I was ever young. She might have had thirty fathers but I didn’t care. She was all mine…and, as she grew, I took pains to shelter her from the kind of life I was living. I sent her to a good school and gave her the education I never had; I bought her clothes and toys and gave her a respectable home with a schoolteacher, a distant relative of my mother. Marta came to see me as often as I dared invite her—I did not want her to be exposed to the kinds of people who came to my house, and I never allowed any of my clients up to the little attic I made into a bedroom for her. I invited her to my house for her birthday and, although that evening I was expecting guests, I had promised I would make up for neglecting her. I kissed her goodnight…and I never saw her alive again.
At ten o’clock I heard her calling me and I ran up to her room…but she was already dead, lying sprawled across the bed with her nightdress around her face.
I knew the murderer had to be one of my clients, but the police simply laughed at me when I demanded they investigate. I was a prostitute, my daughter a prostitute’s daughter. And the clients were wealthy, respectable men. I was lucky not to be arrested myself. As a result my daughter was buried under white marble in Highgate cemetery and her murderer was allowed to forget her for ten years.
Oh, I tried to find him out. I
knew
he was there: I smelled his guilt behind his respectable façade. Do you know what hate is? Hate was what I ate and drank. In my dreams hate walked alongside me as I stalked my daughter’s murderer and painted the streets of London with his blood.
I kept Marta’s room just as she had left it, with fresh flowers on the bedstand and all her toys in a basket in the corner. Every night I crept up there and I called her—I knew she was there—begging her to give me a name: just a name. If she had given me a name in those early days I would have killed him without the slightest remorse. I would have gone to the gallows in Biblical glory. But in ten years my hate grew hungry and lean, like a starving wolf. It grew clever and slinking, watching everyone with the same suspicious amber eye: everyone, and one man in particular.
Remember, I knew him: I knew his eager, shameful appetites, his abrupt self-loathings, his guilt. The girls he asked for were always the youngest, the unformed ones, the virgins. Not that there were many of
them
, but I’d seen him watching the beggar-children in the street, and I’d seen his paintings, the old hypocrite: sick longings fit to make an honest woman choke. But he wasn’t the only one I suspected and I couldn’t be sure. I tried to reach my little Marta; at first with candles and the mirror, then with the cards. Always the same cards: the Hermit, the Star, the High Priestess, the Knave of Coins, Change and Death. Always the same cards in differing order: always the Hermit flanked by the Nine of Swords and the Death card. But was Henry Chester the Hermit?
He was clever, you understand. If he’d run I would have known for sure; but he was a cold one. He kept coming, not often, maybe once a month; always polite, always generous. I followed other quarry: men who, too abruptly, had stopped visiting after Marta’s death. A doctor, one of my long-standing clients, suggesting that my little girl had died of some kind of a fit; epilepsy, he said. I didn’t believe it for a minute. But pain and time eroded my conviction; I began to doubt the purity of my hate. Maybe it
had
been a fit, or an intruder, lured by the prospect of easy pickings. Inconceivable that one of my clients could have committed such an act and remained hidden for so long.
My vengeance slept. Then I learned that Henry had married. A child scarcely out of the schoolroom, they said. A girl of seventeen. Suspicion woke again in me—I’d never been sure of him, never—and my hate went out to them both like a swarm of wasps. What right had they to happiness when Marta was rotting in Highgate? What right had anyone?
I followed them to church one day, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bride, but she was all swathed in black, like a mourner, and I could only see her thin little face under her bonnet. She looked ill and I could not help but feel a drawing-towards her, something which was almost pity. She looked so like my poor lost Marta.
I’ve no liking for preachers: I’d come to see Chester and his wife, not to listen to the sermon, and so I was the first one to see her go. One minute she was listening, the next she was gone, her head tilting forwards like a child saying her prayers. Now, I’ve long had the knack of seeing things that most of you don’t, or won’t see, and as soon as Mrs Chester fell I could see that it was no ordinary faint. I saw her pop out of the body, naked as the day she was born, bless her, and, judging by the look of surprise on her face, I’d guess it was the first time it had happened to her.
A pretty thing she was too, not a bit like Henry Chester’s ethereal paintings, with a beauty natural to herself, like a tree or a cloud. No-one else could see her—and I don’t wonder, in all that army of churchgoers. No-one had taught her
that
trick: she must have learned it all by herself, and I guessed she had other talents she didn’t know about. Right there and then I wondered whether she might not know something that could help me…I called her, in my mind, and she looked at me sharp as a needle: I knew then that she was the answer to all my questions. All I had to do was bring her to me.
Her name was Effie and I watched her many times without her knowledge, calling her to me from Marta’s little room at the top of my house. I saw she was unhappy, first with Henry, then with Mose. Poor, lonely little girl: I knew it would only be a question of time before I brought her to me and I began to care for her like a daughter. I knew her mind, her haunts…and when I saw her at the fair I knew that this was my chance to talk to her alone.
The crystal-gazer was happy enough to give me her place for the price of a guinea: I sat in the shadows with a veil across my face and Effie didn’t suspect a thing. She was so sensitive to my thoughts that I didn’t even have to put her to sleep: she did it herself…but even so, it was not until she began to speak to me in my daughter’s voice that I truly realized how unique, how precious she could be to me. If she could bring back the voice so clearly, what else might she be capable of? My head was spinning with the possibilities: to
see
my little girl again, to
touch
her…why not? Believe me, I wished Effie no harm, but her reaction on being jolted out of her trance astonished even me. The girl was too precious to lose; I
couldn’t
let her go.
Sure enough, before I had to delve too far, she gave me the name I wanted. Henry Chester, the Hermit, the murderer of my daughter…
I was past the age now of wanting to scream my rebellion on the scaffold. If there was to be a sacrifice, this time it would not be me.
It was an accident,
I tell you. I never meant to kill her. I was going to tell you about it, but it was so long ago…
Her mother always made me feel uneasy: she was too
solid
. I felt dwarfed by her, fascinated and repelled by the abundance of her. She seemed barely human: as if beneath her rosy skin I should find, not the blood and muscle of an ordinary woman but some strange compound of black earth and granite, like an Egyptian idol with agate eyes. Her scent was a corrupt sweetness, like a million flyblown roses; a lingering, occult caress from all the secret places of her woman’s body to the shameful longings of my heart. And
that
woman had a daughter!
I saw her peering out at me through the banisters. Eyes as green as glass fixed me in the half-light from the landing and, as my own gaze focused upon her, she gave a little laugh and jumped to her feet, ready to disappear up the stairs if I moved. She was barefoot and the light outlined her body through the fabric of her nightdress. She had none of her mother’s fearful solidity: the little changeling was almost insubstantial, with straight black hair falling over a hungry, pointed face…and yet, there was a resemblance. Something in the eyes, maybe, or in the fluid grace of her movements: so might golden Ceres have been mirrored in pale Persephone.
I asked her name.
She tilted her head at me; her eyes filled with lights. ‘I’m not supposed to tell.’ The Cornish accent was light, almost imperceptible, like her mother’s, a soft blurring of the syllables.
‘Why not?’
‘I shouldn’t be here. I promised.’ If it had not been for her smile and the way her body stood out against the light I might have believed in her innocence, but I knew that, standing there above me, like a parody of Juliet on the balcony, whatever her age she was her mother’s creature, conceived in sin and bred to pray upon sinners like myself. I could almost smell her perfume from where I stood: a troubling, deceitful combination, like amber and swamp water.
‘I promised,’ she repeated, drawing away from the banister. ‘I have to go.’
‘Wait!’ I could not control my response. Hastily I began to climb the stairs, sweat prickling my temples. ‘Don’t go. I won’t tell. Look’—fumbling in my pockets—‘I’ll give you some chocolate.’
She hesitated, then reached out her hand for the sweet, which she unwrapped immediately and began to eat. Pushing my advantage, I smiled and put my hand on her shoulder.
‘Come now,’ I said kindly. ‘I’ll take you back to your room and tell you a story.’
She nodded solemnly at this and ran quietly up the stairs in front of me, her bare feet like white moths in the darkness. There was nothing I could do but follow.
Her room was tucked away under the eaves of the house, and she jumped on to the bed, legs tucked beneath her, and pulled the bedspread around her. She had finished the chocolate and I watched as she licked her fingers clean in a gesture so potent that my knees almost gave way beneath me.
‘What about my story?’ she asked pertly.
‘Later.’
‘Why not now?’
‘Later!’
The perfume was overwhelming now. She shook it from her hair like a fall of flowers, and in the midst of it I detected the rank smell which might have been my own lust.
I could bear it no longer. I stepped forwards and seized her in my arms and buried my face in her, drowning in her. My legs gave way and I fell with her on to the bed, holding on to her in desperation. For an instant she seemed awesomely powerful, her eyes widening like ripples into the darkness, her open mouth screaming silent curses. She began to struggle and kick, her hair like a flight of black bats fanning out over my face, smothering me with its weight. At that moment, with her lithe, serpentine body coiling against mine, her hair in my mouth and the sickly smell of chocolate in my nostrils, I was certain she was going to kill me.
There was a rushing in my ears and a terrible panic seized hold of me. I began to scream aloud in terror and disgust. I was the sacrifice, she the granite death-goddess gasping for my blood. With the last of my sanity I grabbed at her throat and tightened the grasp as hard as I could…the little witch fought like a demon, screaming and biting, but I found that my strength had returned…
God was with me then: if only I had had the courage to leave the house and never return, perhaps He would not have turned His face away from me…but even in the trembling aftermath of that dreadful battle I felt a kind of unholy excitement, a triumph, as if, instead of quelling the rising tide of lust within me, I had simply opened up the door to a lust of a different kind, one which could never entirely be slaked.
