Pinkerton's Sister Read online

She imagined the colors of their silks — would they have used silk, or would the material have been wool, cotton? — as being the same as those of her watercolors, the little squares of brightness within the wooden box with the brass hinges. She could visualize them with perfect accuracy, as if matching colors for a gown, or fabrics in a room: Chinese White, Viridian Green, Cadmium Yellow, Ultramarine (a Mediterranean light, sea-reflections playing across ruinous white Greek columns: each color had its own little picture), Magenta …

  As then, so now.

  Women bent over their cross-stitch, bent over their canvases, wasting the hours in filling wildernesses of whiteness, as if somehow attempting to occupy the vast unused vacancies of their minds with the bright gleam of a needle, the stitch-stitch-stitch of the endless holes puncturing the plainness. Stitch-stitch-stitch, as they sat unseen in the corner, sewing all day long. Beneath the tapestries were the locked and hidden doors that led into the rooms where the madwomen were imprisoned. Manganese Violet, Raw Sienna, Gamboge, Brown Madder …

  They should know all about Madder.

  Stitch-stitch-stitch.

  The hands didn’t tremble, but kept up the same action over and over again, like well-tuned machines, automatons designed by Isaac Singer, automatons with placid, unchanging, Dr. Coppelius human features, massed Coppélias, girls with enamel eyes. Sometimes she confused Coppelius with Copernicus, and planets swam unseen in their orbits around a night sky, above the bowed backs. They were sin-free Hester Prynnes, always sewing, always stitching, embroidering shrouds for burials, embroidering baby linen, the vestments of ceremony. They never embroidered bridal veils.

  Stitch-stitch-stitch.

  “… eighty-seven, eighty-eight, eighty-nine …”

  You became bored with embroidery, after a while. She and Charlotte had spent many happy hours of their childhood in devising different methods of killing Mrs. Albert Comstock. Heaven had indeed lain about them in their infancy. Well spotted, Wordsworth!

  The high stone narrow-windowed walls of the dark castles seemed designed to keep the women in, as much as to keep enemies out. Outside the castle walls, beyond the moats, the young men marched about, looking stern, bearing falcons on their arms like feathered musical instruments that they were about to play. Troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, and trouvÈres strummed on lutes, or lyres, or halberds, or whatever it was they strummed on. It was quite difficult to concentrate on the tapestries with all that strumming. It was all the women ever seemed to do, work at tapestries, or wave goodbye to departing knights from the battlements of their castles, wearing tall white conical hats like dunces’ caps. “My life is dreary,/He cometh not,” they chorused as they stitched. The rusted nails fell from the knots that held the pear to the garden- wall. The broken sheds look’d sad and strange. “My life is dreary,/He cometh not.”

  Stitch-stitch-stitch.

  The stitches were small and neat, barely visible, like stitches sewn by a surgeon after he’d ministered to a mind diseas’d, his well-washed hands rearranging the contents of the sleeper’s head in a more harmonious pattern, the pale skin smoothed and sewn back into place where the incision had been made.

  Best men are molded out of faults. That’s what Mariana had said.

  On long, empty winter evenings, with the winds whistling around them and rustling the wall hangings, flaring up the torches, they’d sit about competitively comparing the number of lachrymatories they’d managed to fill with their tears to show how much they missed their absent husbands or courtly lovers, those of them who had husbands or courtly lovers. It was their one excitement.

  “I’m on my twelfth bottle. I’ve had to send out for fresh supplies,” My Lady Sibylle would announce as her opening gambit, skillfully managing to temper quiet pride with a reasonable stab at overwhelming grief, and crushing all opposition. This was a woman who spent her afternoons, a peeled onion in each hand, listening to sentimental ballads — specialized performers catered for this market — with a lachrymatory applied to the inside corner of each eye, rather like a heavy smoker with two pipes. These were carefully held in place by specially trained maidservants to ensure that not one tear was wasted. The balladeer strummed with syrupy skill, his voice stressing the sad bits so that she’d be able to recognize them.

  “Out in ye churchyarde ye wilde breezes blowe,

  Seeming to echo ye heart’s griefe and woe.

  Softly she murmurs, while chills o’er her creepe,

  ‘Why did they dig Ma’s grave so deepe?’…”

  “Sniffle, sniffle!” sniffled Sibylle in record time, snapping her fingers as she sensed saturation approaching in her left lachrymatory. Time for a fresh container, Eleanor. (Number thirteen! That would show up My Lady Mabelle.) A row of the little glass bottles would be lined neatly across the top of her mediæval mantelshelf like a well-filled salt-tasting miniature-bottled wine cellar if the absence was an extended one, twinkling in the candlelight on assertive display. I’ve wept more than you’ve wept! I’ve wept more than you’ve wept! That’s what they were twinkling. That Hundred Years War had been hard going, squeezing them dry like ferociously twisted lemons. Enterprising entrepreneurs had offered ready-filled bottles for sale, with reduced rates for bulk purchases.

  “I’ve just started my ninth.”

  “My eleventh is nearly half full.”

  “I’ve only managed seven so far this week. I’ve not been very well.”

  “My life is dreary!”

  “He cometh not!”

  “He cometh not!”

  (They had to remember to repeat these last three lines at regular intervals, an antiphonal woeful chanting. When they couldn’t think of anything else to say, these were the lines to repeat.)

  The dunces’ caps leaned forward as they bent to their tapestries, back to the lions and unicorns, the kings and queens, the games of chess, the hooded hawks, the arrow-pierced stags. The unmarried were excluded from such conversations. The unmarried had no one to cometh not (if you couldn’t have a man who cometh, you were automatically excluded from having a man who cometh not), nothing about which to boast, and no reason to weep. The unmarried had extra-large tapestries to stitch as compensation. Another night of stitching lay before them. When they were completed, they would be hung upon the bare stone, and then they would begin more tapestries. There was always enough bare stone for more tapestries. There could never be enough tapestries. There was no one left to whom they might wave goodbye, and so they stitched, the married and the unmarried. They were like monks in a silent order, stitching away at illuminated manuscripts, bent over as if seeking out a brighter source of illumination in the candlelit gloom, day after day, night after night, words of prayer, words of renunciation.

  Stitch-stitch-stitch.

  “One, two, three …” she began again, tugging at her hair with the brush, with the grimly determined expression of a keen gardener pulling up strong-rooted weeds. You spent hours getting rid of them, and back they came again the following day.

  She’d been fond of gardening when she was a very little girl, doing her stint as Miss Spade, the Gardener’s Daughter. Miss Spade was one of the cards in Happy Families, the English children’s card game that Miss Ericsson had given her, and Miss Spade wielded her hoe with a look of murderous malice. All fifty-two members of the Happy Families looked like maniacal potential killers, and most held convenient weapons in threatening postures. It made you worry about English methods of child-rearing.

  She’d been no Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary (though she’d been willfully contrary herself, and had known a distinctly contrary Mary).

  She hadn’t nurtured silver bells, or cockleshells, and she had most certainly not nurtured pretty — ha! — maids all in a row. She’d hadn’t so much been fond of gardening, as fond of weeding, not quite the same thing. What she had nurtured had been weeds, carefully sought out, encouraged, and hoarded for the pleasure of uprooting them. That was how her garden grew. It was not so much the planting she enjoyed, as
the pulling up, the ripping away until every inch of earth was free of weeds, and there was nothing there that should not be there, nothing there but disturbed and freshly turned soil, dark and damp beneath the surface like a newly dug grave. It was the way she kept the schoolroom, or tried to — everything in its place, everything angled precisely in position — battling unceasingly with her untidy and unco-operative sisters. (That hyphen in “unco-operative” was one of her acts of rebellion against the dictates of Webster. This was a word that needed its hyphen.) The first thing she did, each time she entered the room, was to walk around straightening pictures and shifting objects — half an inch this way, a quarter of an inch that way — like someone with an image of perfection in her mind in which there was a predetermined area of unfilled space, definite as a cast shadow. She had followed the gardener about during his mornings in the garden, jealously insisting that all weeds were there for her to destroy.

  “There’s one,” he’d indicate helpfully.

  “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow!” she’d declare, plucking away with a two-handed will.

  “There’s another one.”

  “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow!”

  “What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug …?” said the gardener, a young man with a literary frame of mind. “There’s another.”

  They plucked away from the memory effortlessly, scarcely rooted at all, little crumbs of earth adhering, falling loose, pattering down. She sometimes suspected that the gardener planted the weeds there especially, just to give her pleasure. They always pulled away so easily — she preferred the sensation of tugging, grappling with tenacious roots, the breathless struggling — and the earth around them always seemed so watered and fresh, like that of plants for sale in an expensive florist’s shop, all the arts of horticulture devoted to their careful nurturing. Undaunted, she tugged away, plucking furiously, someone preparing a chicken for an emergency meal. She didn’t care what she plucked, as long as she was plucking. If there’d been silver bells or cockleshells they’d have been hurled into a heap, jingling. The pretty maids all in a row would have blazed in the biggest bonfire she could build, glamorously unarmored Joans of Arc sizzling en masse like an ignited beauty contest.

  “And another.”

  “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow!”

  She preferred to feel the doomed weeds in the palms of her hands as she plucked — quailing, wilting, vainly resisting — though sometimes she employed a hoe, becoming more like Miss Spade than ever, a Lady Macbeth bringing the daggers down with considerable force (she’d have had one in each hand), the impact jarring all the way up to her shoulders. This Lady Macbeth would have elbowed Macbeth aside, trampled over him, eager to have the pleasure of killing all to herself. “Give me the daggers!” she’d have bawled, before he’d ever set foot in the bedchamber. This Lady Macbeth would not have been shaken from her purpose by the resemblance of the sleeping Duncan to her father. It would have spurred her on to enthusiastic excesses. She’d have stabbed away, hacking his beard off and stuffing it in his mouth if she’d felt like it. And she’d have felt like it. The whole sinister-faced Spade family massed together — Miss Spade with her hoe, Mr. Spade and Master Spade with their differently shaped sharp-edged spades, and Mrs. Spade with her devilish three-pronged fork — looked like a peasants’ revolt (rarely had the peasants appeared so revolting) bursting through the palace gates and thirsting for blood, agitating their agricultural implements with threatening intent. The Royal Family would not be a Happy one for much longer. When she held a hoe she’d say, “Hoe, hoe, hoe, hoe,” as she dug out the weeds, the lugubrious laugh of the unamused murderer. This would be after an afternoon listening to Mrs. Albert Comstock’s humorless ha-ha-ha-ha-ing, when she was still feeling furious.

  “Hoe …”

  Stab!

  — the thin silvery blade of the hoe would shoot into the earth like the thrust of an assassin’s dagger —

  “… Hoe …”

  Stab!

  “… Hoe! …”

  Stab!

  “… Hoe!”

  Stab!

  (STAB ES.

  (She had seen the sign, this emblazoned summons to slaughter — STAB! STAB! — with its huge painted Belshazzarian writing on the outside wall above the entrance to Carlo Fiorelli’s studio. Who was this ES she was bidden to stab by the writing on the wall? There was only one possible ES, although there would soon be many others.

  (ENORMOUS SIBYL.

  (That was who it was.

  (STAB ENORMOUS SIBYL!

  (That was what was implacably demanded.

  (STAB ENORMOUS SIBYL! That was what was meant.

  (That was what she wanted it to mean.

  (The only difference between “slaughter” and “laughter” was the letter “s”, and “s” was for Sibyl.

  (It was so clearly, so unmistakably, a portent — she was all in favor of portents — that it would have been impolite not to obey it. Apart from the pleasure in the naughtiness of stabbing Mrs. Albert Comstock, there was the pleasure in the naughtiness of calling her Sibyl.)

  Stab!

  The hoe-hoe-hoe-hoeing and the stabbing were enormously satisfying, as if she’d achieved some hard-won victory against great odds, an Horatius of the kitchen garden.

  The gardener — who spent his afternoons working in Mrs. Albert Comstock’s garden (she was an exacting employer, quick to find fault, never praising) — enjoyed the hoe-hoe-hoe-hoe, and would encourage her stabbing, with shrewd advice on the best technique, like a coach inspiring his team. She’d hear muffled snortings and gigglings behind her (more authentically amused than Mrs. Albert Comstock’s hectoring ha-ha-ha-ha) and when she turned round — suspicious and accusing, the hoe held at a threatening angle — he’d always try to look serious, clutching his trowel with an earnest and professional technique, though his bright eyes betrayed him. He would eagerly produce the hoe unasked at every opportunity, an enthusiastic challenger in a duel — “Go on,” he would say, alluringly. “You can scarcely miss when you’re this close!” (his literary proclivities had left him with a keen eye for Symbolism) — but Alice preferred “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow!” It was a more impressive demonstration of her Shakespearean expertise.

  “Another.”

  “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow!”

  “Another.”

  There was almost always another.

  In those days it had seemed so easy to minister to a mind diseas’d.

  “Another.”

  It had been utterly painless to raze out the written troubles of the brain.

  “Another.”

  To find some sweet oblivious antidote.

  “… thirteen, fourteen, fifteen …”

  Tug!

  She pulled hard at her hair.

  Tug! Tug!

  Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow.

  Tug! Tug!

  The roots grew deep within her, coiled around her mind like sleeping serpents.

  To make something grow, you buried it deep.

  She often mused over this. It was something the young gardener had told her, imparting tips to improve her horticultural skills, as if attempting to convert her into a nurturer, discreetly displacing her destroying self.

  For some reason — she’d no recollection of ever having been told to do this, but it had become a necessary ritual — she brushed each section of her hair one hundred times each morning and night. It did nothing to improve its look, but she kept on doing it, becoming anxious if she failed to complete the necessary number. Perhaps she should increase her number of brushings, until the air crackled blue with static electricity, buzzing like a dentist’s illuminated electric sign, and her hair trebled in volume, rising up from her head as if in horror at some appalling sight. One look in the mirror should have the same effect — it would beat any sight seen by Dr. Jekyll — and save a lot of effort.

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


  She always thought of “looking-glass” as being written with a hyphen, in the English style, because of Through the Looking-Glass, and because — to her — all things she saw were looking-glassed, or so she felt, transformed into things that were unfamiliar, a reversal of what they ought to be.

  (Alice, the other Alice — the Alice Through the Looking-Glass Alice — was talking to the black kitten.

  (“… and if you’re not good directly, I’ll put you through in to Looking-glass House. How would you like that? Now, if you’ll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House …Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way. I know that, because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room. How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty?…Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it!”)

  She had this sensation of reversal most of all when she gazed into her own reflection.

  What she saw was not who she was.

  Other people did not seem to have this feeling. Allegra — laughing Allegra — seemed perfectly happy with what she saw in the mirror, reassured by the confirmation of her prettiness. She preened. She posed. She pouted.

  But not Alice. Alice had Dr. Jekyll’s mirror, not Dorian Gray’s, and the looking-glass was not her face. There were no beautiful things in Looking-glass House when she saw into it.

  You’d pull away the tapestry — Tug! Tug! — and there would be the reflection.

  Behind just such a tapestry Mrs. Rochester was hidden away, like Dorian Gray’s portrait behind its coverlet, like Mr. Hyde. Beside just such a tapestry Dorian Gray stood with a mirror in front of the portrait on the wall, comparing the face in the painting with the face in the polished glass, just as the emperor Domitian had looked at the reflections in the polished marble-lined underground corridors, looking for the face of his assassin creeping closer to kill him, the glint of a knife. This, to her, was an image of the novel: it was all polished surfaces, the mirror in the locked schoolroom as important as the portrait, like the mirror in Dr. Jekyll’s cabinet, in which he sought for the moment of change.