Pinkerton's Sister Read online

  In the subterranean caverns of the mountain upon which the palace was built, the goblins lived. They were dwarfed and misshapen, they had strength equal to their cunning, and they planned to dig their way up into the palace and carry Princess Irene away to be a mate for their grotesque prince.

  Alice watched the shapes, shifting and changing, never at rest.

  The Shape of the Clouds.

  It could be the title of a novel.

  She tried to hide this away in a corner of her mind, to remember it, and moved Annie’s ring — she always thought of it as Annie’s ring, as if it were something she had borrowed in perpetuity, not something she had been given — from her middle finger to what she thought of as her wedding finger, to nudge her memory. Sometimes, if an idea came to her in the night, she would do this, or drop her handkerchief onto the floor, so that she would know — when she awoke — that there was something to remember. Annie’s ring, the little mirror, reminded her of what she ought not to forget. She collected titles, names for characters, ideas for her writing.

  Below her, in the early-morning darkness at the back of the house, lines of gas-lamps stretched away through the snow, marking out the lines of the streets that had not yet been built, the new developments where the fields and orchards had once been. It was strange to see the gas-lamps there before the houses had been built. They seemed to stretch away in a long perspective to infinite distances, and — because they were lit — they made the empty streets that were not yet streets emptier and lonelier than ever. The great emptiness outside the window was not as great as the emptiness she felt inside herself. Here — in the outer emptiness, in the inner emptiness — was an unformed place of desolation and shadows, a place to populate with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dorian Gray, and Sherlock Holmes. There they hid, there they scuttled and squatted, just out of sight of the corners of the eyes. It was as if it was night, and not morning.

  My tea is nearly ready

  and the sun has left the sky;

  It’s time to take the window

  to see Leerie going by;

  For every night at tea-time

  and before you take your seat,

  With lantern and with ladder

  he comes posting up the street …

  A Child’s Garden of Verses had been published the year before The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and she had bought a copy for her little brother. She must have been about seventeen or eighteen, and yet — when she had read it — there were lines that were as deep and as dark as anything in the later adult novel. It was a book about children, rather than a book for children: this was how she had tried to explain away the painful effect it had had upon her. It had awoken memories that she had wanted to remain undisturbed, memories in which she had partly been herself gazing at the little girl she had once been, and she had partly been the little girl, aware of being gazed at by someone older.

  She had opened the book at random. “The Lamplighter” was the first poem she had read, and this — like so many of the other poems in the book — had awoken very powerful memories.

  For we are very lucky,

  with a lamp before the door …

  The opening lines of the last verse had proven what she had already known, that the poem was about 7 Chestnut Street. There she was in the front parlor, sitting in the darkness, waiting for the lamplighter to bring light. Gradually, one by one, the lights would be lit, coming closer and closer toward her, the street brighter and brighter, until the ladder clunked against the lamppost — she heard it distinctly — outside their house. A glow sent the pattern of the windowpanes across the floor, and light crept a little way into the darkness of the room.

  O! before you hurry by

  with ladder and with light,

  O Leerie, see a little child

  and nod to him …

  — Or her. Or her —

  … to-night!

  If he saw her face at the window, the lamplighter never showed that he had noticed, as if she wasn’t really there.

  The second poem had been “Windy Nights”.

  The book had not been illustrated. Why hadn’t the publishers commissioned Arthur Hughes to illustrate it? After his illustrations for the Christina Rossetti books Sing Song and Speaking Likenesses, the George MacDonald novels she remembered so well, The Princess and the Goblin and At the Back of the North Wind (why hadn’t he, another puzzle, illustrated The Princess and Curdie?), and Tom Brown’s Schooldays, he would have been the perfect choice. There had, however, been no lack of illustrations in her mind as she read the poems; they had been drawn up from within her. She saw the scenes in front of her like pictures on a page.

  Whenever the moon and the stars are set,

  Whenever the wind is high,

  All night long in the dark and wet,

  A man goes riding by.

  Late in the night when the fires are out,

  Why does he gallop and gallop about?…

  This was not a man who brought light with him; this was a man who brought darkness. This was a man with the face of her father.

  If you tell anybody, the wind will get you.

  These were the words her father had said to Annie. It was the sort of thing an adult would say to frighten a child, and Annie had been a child. Her father had known it when he had done what he had done to her. The use of these words proved it.

  This was a man with the voice of her father, the voice that had made her frightened of the wind and the moon, frightened of many things. Thoughts of Sing Song brought the words of one of its poems into her mind.

  Who has seen the wind?

  Neither you nor I:

  But when the trees bow down their heads

  The wind is passing by.

  She shivered, as at the touch of the cold wind.

  Curse him! Curse him! Curse him!

  These words — the words of Alfred Hardie in Hard Cash, also addressed to a father — were words she often whispered, as if they were secret endearments that no one should overhear.

  Outside, the wind-blown snow gusted within the little pools of light, and the whole window seemed to groan, the loose pane in the top left-hand corner rattling. The weather had been like this on the day that her father died.

  … Whenever the trees are crying aloud,

  And ships are tossed at sea,

  By, on the highway, low and loud,

  By at the gallop goes he.

  By at the gallop he goes, and then,

  By he comes back at the gallop again.

  In the wind, and in the darkness, the unnamed man galloped past, but he always turned around and came back. He never stayed away for good.

  10

  It was time to wander about the house, ignite a few bed-curtains, rend a few wedding-veils, that sort of thing. Another busy day in the life of a madwoman. All this, and the Reverend Goodchild too. Mrs. Albert Comstock yesterday; the Reverend Goodchild today. And Dr. Vaniah Odom! What wond’rous Life in this I lead!/Ripe Apples drop about my head;/The Luscious Clusters of the Vine/Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine … She might even manage an enthusiastic demoniac laugh as she staggered berserkly about, though it would be wasted in the absence of visitors. If she had never started the attempts at finding some sort of a “cure” for herself (she heard the quotation marks click cozily into place around “cure” like comforting hands patting shoulders) — Dr. Severance of Staten Island, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster (above all, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster) — perhaps she would not have been thought of (by some people) as being a madwoman. She was surely well within the permitted range of strangeness, particularly when she paused to compare herself with some of the people she knew, the acquaintances around her, the neighbors? (The word “neighbors” had something folksy and apple-pie about it that was at odds with the reality.) Mrs. Goodchild had chattily informed her that there was madness in the family — watching her reaction closely (you could tell that she had been saving this up for quite some time as a little, well-deserv
ed treat) — as if mentioning a propensity to freckles or premature baldness. She could never lapse into broken inertia, as Lady Audley had done at the end of the novel, as she looked around the suite of apartments that was to be hers for the rest of her life in the private lunatic asylum, dreary in the wan light of a single wax candle. She really ought to have a candle in her hand as she went downstairs, to continue the Lady Macbeth motif that had come into her mind earlier.

  Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

  The solitary flame of Lady Audley’s candle, pale and ghostlike in itself, was multiplied by paler phantoms of its ghostliness, which glimmered everywhere about the rooms; in the shadowy depths of the polished floors and wainscot, or the windowpanes, in the looking-glasses, or in those great expanses of glimmering something which adorned the rooms, and which my lady mistook for costly mirrors, but which were in reality wretched mockeries of burnished tin. They were fake mirrors, in which the reflections were blurred and indistinct, as fake as the fake books in Hard Cash, and made of the same material. Lady Audley would look into them, and she would not be able to recognize herself, just as Alfred Hardie would not be able to open those books, books in which no words were printed.

  Looking-glass, looking-glass, made out of tin,

  Whose is the face that I see within?

  Amid all the faded splendor — splendour — of shabby velvet, and tarnished gilding, and polished wood, the woman dropped into an armchair, and covered her face with her hands. The whiteness of them, and the starry light of diamonds, trembling about them, glittered in the dimly lighted chamber.

  Rochester had told Jane that the Bertha Rochester she had seen in her bedchamber had been the creature of an overstimulated brain. Alice had the same problem. It was what she had been told over and over again. A woman should not overexcite her brain. It was injurious. It — ahem — interfered with her — ahem, ahem — womanly functions. Ahems sometimes overwhelmed everything else in any discussion of this — ahem — delicate matter, particularly if it were Dr. Twemlow doing the talking. He was a man who’d blush if a woman removed her hat. There were more throat-clearings than in a consumption clinic. Books should be laid aside for the health’s sake. Dr. Severance of Staten Island and Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had both agreed on this. They set down what came from her, to satisfy their remembrance the more strongly.

  What’s done cannot be undone.

  To bed, to bed.

  And not to read.

  And not to write.

  To bed, to bed, to bed.

  And not to think.

  And not to talk.

  To bed, to bed, to bed.

  And not to sew.

  No stitch-stitch-stitch.

  Just sleeping.

  Just dreaming.

  Drifting listlessly away.

  Like the Lady of Shalott down the river.

  She has a lovely face.

  That was what Lancelot had said.

  You thought that he’d have said “hath.” That’s what knights in poetry tended to say.

  Drifting.

  Nothing else.

  Because nothing else mattered.

  She could talk about the clouds.

  She could talk about the pictures.

  She could talk about the dreams.

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  She talked, and they wrote.

  If she talked she would be better.

  The thump, thump, thump of Rosobell preparing the fire in the parlor rattled up through the schoolroom fire-grate. Alice had kept this fire burning all night. Hearing Rosobell meant that it would be a little after 6. 30. She had forgotten to wind her pocket-watch the night before — it was usually the last thing she did before going to bed — and it had stopped in the early hours. She had noticed the silence from her watch-stand, the absence of the tick, tick, tick. She would take it downstairs with her, and set it from the kitchen clock.

  She picked up the tongs and added one large piece of coal right in the middle of the fire, one that would slowly burn through in the course of the morning, so that the room would still be warm when she returned from church. The little Old Testament figures on the Dutch tiles around the fireplace flickered, appropriate small-scale animation on a Sunday morning. Adam and Eve stood hand in hand at the side of the tree, as if choosing the best fruit to pick for a pie. Noah and his wife stood on the deck of the tiniest ark imaginable — probably just large enough to save two white mice and a small and solitary rabbit from the flood — as the dove flew toward them, weighed down with an olive leaf the size of a tree. Like Breughel’s biblical scenes, like Shakespeare’s Romans, they were dressed in the fashions of the time in which they were created. If she listened at the fireplace, she could hear whereabouts people were in the house. It was especially clear in the summer, when no fire was burning.

  As a little girl, she would kneel down, looking at the crumpled newspaper pages in the grate, the engravings of bearded faces, soot whispering and trickling down, gathering in the rucks, and listen to Mama playing the piano, Annie singing, fragments of conversation. Sometimes she’d hear sobbing, far away, suppressed. Sometimes it was Annie, and sometimes it would be Mama. Mama cried in the same way that she played the piano, quietly, shyly, hoping not to be overheard. Alice had lain awake and heard her, in the evenings, in the small hours of the darkness. Knowing that you had heard someone else cry gave you a special feeling toward that person. She’d dab her fingers in the soot, wipe them across her face, and look at her minstrel-like face in the mirror above the mantelpiece, moving her mouth like someone singing. “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers.” She’d open her mouth very wide, flare her eyes. “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers.” She used to imagine that Joel Chandler Harris and the writers of coon songs applied blackface make-up before they began writing, and that their manuscripts were marked all over with burned-cork thumbprints.

  There was a burst of fire as she jiggled the poker, and the figure of Isaac in one of the Dutch tiles seemed to writhe in flames as he lay bound on the altar upon the wood. Abraham leaned over him, enthusiastic to slay his son with the knife. The angel, peering out from the middle of a cloud, did not appear inclined to do much to interfere. This was one of the Bible stories that seemed designed to test the faith of the reader as much as God had tested Abraham’s. It made it difficult to like God very much. She did not feel guilty for thinking this. This made her feel guilty.

  “Don’t do it, Daddy!” the little boy pleaded. “Don’t do it!” But Daddy wasn’t listening. He had his mind on quite other matters, and sharpened the keen edge specially, vigorously stropping the blade on the sole of his sandal like Shylock whetting his knife, keen to start carving Antonio, wolfish, bloody, starved, and ravenous.

  “Typical!”

  You could just hear Mrs. Albert Comstock commenting loudly in the theatre, her head nodding up and down in delighted disgust. (How on earth had Ben survived an evening crammed into a box with her and the others? She could only hope that the music had been very loud. That might have given him a chance.)

  “Typical! Just as I expected!”

  (“It only goes to show!” That would be her next comment, unless she opted for “You can’t be too careful!” It would be one or the other.)

  “… wolfish …”

  Nod.

  “… bloody …”

  Extra-enthusiastic nod on this.

  “… starved …”

  Slightly more dubious nod here.

  “… ravenous …”

  Enthusiasm resumed for this nod.

  The head went up and down so rapidly that (a merciful release, you couldn’t help thinking) all the features blurred, all chins and wattles wobbling. It was rather like seeing her in her automobile — well trussed-up in plaid blankets and impenetrable veils, like a kidnapped Scottish beekeeper the size of Ben Nevis — as the engine was cranked up (if that was the correct expression), vibrating vigorously, with considerably more than one pound of fles
h in mountainous motion. Every part about her quivered. Alice had once seen — it was just before Mrs. Albert Comstock’s fortieth birthday, the day on which her ten-year-old self had destroyed Sobriety Goodchild with the words of Shakespeare — a sign with the words Youth Restored By Electricity While You Wait. Mrs. Albert Comstock would not have been able to resist, and Alice had visualized her plugged into the mains, shuddering in just this way, with the added bonus of sizzling sounds, and smoke rising from some of her outlying regions. When, more recently, the electric chair had been introduced as a means of execution, the image had returned to tantalize her, the murderous instincts of childhood not yet fully quelled. “Just sit here, Mrs. Comstock,” she’d say, soothingly, as her victim gazed dubiously around her at the unsumptuous surroundings of the execution cell. “Just sit here, and your youth will be restored. All I need do is pull this switch. Just sit here.” It would soon be Mrs. Albert Comstock’s sixty-fifth birthday. It might be a good time to sing of the wonderful benefits that could be obtained by the application of electricity. Powerful currents of electricity. Mrs. Albert Comstock had recently re-read She. She’d be in receptive mood for any talk of miraculously eternal youth. She’d just sit here with no hesitation whatsoever. She’d be urging, “More power! More power!” as the great arcs of electricity pulsed blue-white around her. Frankenstein’s creature had been lonely for far too long. It was time for him to meet his mate.

  Mrs. Albert Comstock had been the first person in Longfellow Park to possess an automobile (she’d made quite sure of that), and had taken possession of the vehicle well before Samuel Cummerford had arrived to set up his business to cater for fashionable automobilists. Alice couldn’t remember the name of the manufacturer of Mrs. Albert Comstock’s automobile, but its owner had been careful to inform everybody that it was exactly (invariably in italics) the same as the one Edith Wharton — the authoress of The Decoration of Houses and The Greater Inclination, a woman of impeccable pedigree — had purchased. Whatever its correct name, Mrs. Albert Comstock invariably referred to her automobile as Dimmesdale, investing the word with all the grandeur of Mrs. Elton boasting of her sister’s barouche-landau in Emma. The name was possibly a provocative literary reference to Hester Prynne’s secret lover in The Scarlet Letter. “I shall climb aboard Dimmesdale,” she would announce grandly whenever a visitation was threatened, as if the guilt-ridden minister hadn’t suffered enough already. Imaginations buckled with boggling.