Her voice was level, and had heft, as if weighted like a sling with a chunk of rock or glass—something that might hurt if she lobbed it at you. It belonged to a woman he had not encountered the day before, and unless she was the unobtrusive servant finally showing herself, it could only be Hattie, the missing sister, the “shy” one. If she had been hiding behind the wood stove, it must have been on account of its iron-hearted companionship, or to enjoin its heated force with her own, for she did not fear company by the looks—or sound—of her.
Grif had come down early to the dining room, dream-driven, and doctored—scored, cupped and bled dry—his face pale and his hands shaking. The table had not been properly cleared from the night before, and on it were the congealed remains of a roast, a tower of greasy plates, a scatter of smeared cutlery, skirts of solidified wax encircling the bases of the candlesticks. The door that led to the kitchen was closed, but he could hear someone banging around in there and wondered if there was any hope at all for a cup of tea. Master Rumwold was back in his bucket, inert as a block, and it occurred to Grif that the child might be addled, despite its black and avid eyes.
He took a seat at the table and cleared a space for his journal. This he set before him and opened to a page empty as a fallow field. He still had nothing to write with, and the inclination to do so was beginning to drain out of him. His hand hung over his book like that fern—what was it called? … dead man’s fingers. He glanced at the cherrywood sideboard and caught sight of a mouse skittering beneath it, then watched as it hustled along the base of the wainscotting. A nervy and surreptitious hunter of crumbs. Like himself. He thought how, with the right instrument, he could lift the little creature right off the floor, right out of its scant grey existence, and set it free in his book. A writer’s harmless fantasy.
“There’s a fine waste of time.” A curt nod toward the journal. “You would do better to get yourself some breakfast; no one else will.”
Hattie. She had come into the dining room quietly enough, but the lead sinkers in her voice struck hard and cold in his ear. Grif stood. Had she come from the kitchen? He hadn’t noticed. He did see that her features were unmistakably Cormany ones, even though the eyes were smaller, the mouth larger (she was what his mother would call muckle-mouthed), the colouring darker. Physically, she seemed to be putting up resistance to the family design, straining her body away from the rest in opposition. The Cormany charm had soured in her, the sunniness dimmed. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why this might be. Master Rumwold was her child; that was obvious. He surmised that whatever humour she once possessed had drained straight through him and disappeared, as through a sinkhole. But who was the father, and where was he?
“I can’t write …” he began to explain.
“How unfortunate,” she cut him off. “Then you might as well breakfast. You’ll find something in the larder.”
With that, she walked out of the room, and shortly afterwards he heard the stairs complaining as she ascended in her sharp buttoned boots. He glanced at the baby, as if for an explanation of his mother’s surly behaviour, and found no joy there. Master Rumwold was like a tightly sealed wallet in which a cache of worry and pain had been securely stored. Of the two of them Grif knew that he, Grif, was the more likely to break down and cry.
He had not forgotten Polly’s claim from last evening, and so didn’t doubt that he would find something in the larder. Not that he believed her—it was preposterous, you didn’t lay your granny out in the larder like a wheel of cheese—but an image had been evoked nonetheless. He had encountered it in his harassing dreams, and found on waking that it was not made of the usual ephemeral material. Like a stubborn ghost, it had refused to fade with the morning light. Closing his eyes, he could see the corpse still: an old woman, naked, stretched out on a narrow slatted shelf, her hands tied together with black ribbon, as were her knees and ankles. A silk handkerchief, slash red, was looped around her head and jaw. Grif had never in his life seen a naked woman, and had to wonder that he could make one up in such detail. He knew he was making one up, though; not because he doubted the details, which had a convincing plausibility, but because the woman, despite her body’s slack and loosely worn skin, had a face that was unmarked by age and still animate with Cormany beauty.
Was this how it began, the mind losing hold, with these sorts of visions moving into your head and taking on an undismissible authority? With the screen between what was real and what not becoming worn and permeable and letting anything imaginable drift in? He didn’t know, and was not so hungry for the truth, or even for breakfast, that he was going to enter that larder and find out. The very word larder chilled him, as did such other—root cellar, ice house—damp underworld spaces with trap doors that locked from the outside.
Grif took one more look at the baby, who was boring a hole through his head with its hard little eyes, and fled from the room.
His destination was the front door. Some air, a morning walk, would do him good, especially if it was a long walk to the next town, and onward. He knew that what he really hungered for this morning was the vast blue relief of the sky, the lane that rolled out straight as a runner to the main road. But in passing by the open door of the front drawing room, he noticed Polly seated by a window, sewing, or about to. In her lap lay a square of blue cotton set in an embroidery hoop, and in her raised hand she held a bright needle from which dangled a piece of thread long and black as a hair.
She looked up quickly, and smiled warmly at him, shadows from the lace curtains brindling her face. “Mr. Smolders, good morning.”
He apologized for interrupting.
“Please do,” she said. “Come in, come in. This needlework, believe me, is not my idea. I haven’t the faintest notion where to begin. I’d rather be out climbing trees or playing tennis. Or canoeing on the lake. Do you know, I took an absolute header the other day, got thoroughly soaked. Buckets of fun, though. Do you canoe, Mr. Smolders?”
“No,” he said, driving the word like a nail into the floor between them. She disconcerted him. She might speak with the candour of a child, and wear a dress that belonged to a twelve-year-old girl, but she was mature enough in figure to make his collar stick to his neck. He tried to keep his attention to her physical presence light and delicate, observing only as much of her as decency permitted.
“Did you notice these?” she said, pointing at her chest as she leapt up to face him, letting her embroidery slide to the floor.
He immediately took an interest in the maidenhair fern in the corner, then in the collection of bird skulls that were arranged on a library shelf according to size, from raven to wren, like the descending notes on an avian scale. He began to read titles of books shelved below the skulls: Chatterbox for ’96, Little Women and Good Wives, Wild Animals I Have Known, The Untempered Wind, The Turkish Messiah.
“Mr. Smolders?”
“Oh, sorry, Miss Polly. I was just … reading.”
“Do you fear them?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“These. Spiders. I understand that some people have a dreadful terror of them.”
“Spiders? God, so they are.”
Polly laughed, and gave the embroidery hoop a good kick. It shot under a sofa that was upholstered in a material pink as a tongue.
He saw now where her real sewing skills lay. Her necklace was more a kind of charm. Threaded through the abdomens, bodies clenched, a few legs trailing raggedly, were about twelve or thirteen spiders. Common house spiders, orb-weavers and a few harvestmen were all snagged in a web like none that nature itself would be perverse enough to devise.
She laughed again, delighted by his dumbfounded expression. “Quite mad, I agree. But honestly, it does work.”
“Work?”
“For ague, chest colds. You see, I caught a chill last night. I’m afraid Father does not put much stock in modern medicines. You won’t find any Cosmoline or electric liniment in this house. Consider yourself lucky that you didn’t wake up with a sore throat.”
“The treatment is worse than the affliction?”
“Indeed. For that one, he makes you swallow a slice of bacon with a piece of string attached to it.”
“Argh, don’t tell me—he then pulls it back up, and makes the victim swallow it again until the sore throat goes away.”
“Right. Or until he runs out the door.”
Grif was beginning to feel more at ease. “I have a cure for colds you might want to try.” He did, too, a “prairie cure” that Jean had passed on to him. “I hope you have a hat, Miss Polly. You’ll need one for this.”
“Certainly, doctor.” She mimed twirling one on her finger, a phantom hat. “Go on, please.”
“First thing, you place your hat on a table. Next, you have to take a drink from a very good bottle of whisky. Then another drink. Then another. The thing is, you have to keep at it until you see not only one hat but two. At this stage in the cure, you must go to bed and stay there until completely restored to health.”
“Wonderful!” Her laugh was full and deep. “That one does bring to mind Mrs. Motely, from the village. She’s president of the Ladies’ Temperance Union, and tenacious on the subject, absolutely terrifying. But she’s pickled most of the time herself, as she’s a great believer in Dr. Pinkham’s Elixir for Female Complaints, which is constituted mainly of gin, Mother says.”
“Ha.”
“A dreadful woman. With a moustache. Did you know, by the way, that if you take a dried and powdered frog and mix it with water to form a paste, that it makes an excellent depilatory?”
“Perhaps I should try it.”
“Father once lured several flies out of Edgar’s head by holding a lit candle up to his ear.”
She smiled, but his faltered.
“He is a doctor, you know. Some of his treatments are considered … unorthodox. At least where we came from. Where we used to live.”
And left in a hurry, Grif didn’t doubt.
“Every night before bed we strip completely and Father curries us with a brush. A flesh brush it’s called; it stimulates circulation and purifies the blood. It’s most invigorating, Mr. Smolders.”
Grif did not need his blood stimulated, as it had all rushed up into his face. In his experience a young woman, well brought up, veered with expert precision away from indelicate subjects. That a woman had a body at all, and attendant bodily functions, was not widely acknowledged, let alone considered to be subject matter for civilized discourse. Avice’s sisters, he recalled, would not eat apples in company, supposedly for the unseemly noise made chewing them, but he suspected it had more to do with the spectacle of full lips on ripe fruit. Avice herself had no such compunction. Nor did Polly Cormany appear to have any qualms about tackling the forbidden head-on. Unless of course she was just a child, an innocent.
“Do you know what a man must do,” she said, unperturbed, “if he has a bone caught in his throat?”
“Eat a slice of bread?”
“No. He must repeat thrice nine times the words, I buss the Gorgon’s mouth.” She herself then proceeded to repeat this, several times, her intonation incantatory and sibilant.
Such play-acting. He tried not to grin. He also tried to look appropriately intrigued, and why not, for here was an antique remedy, a physic that might have come straight out of his own journal, a prescription penned in the spidery hand of his fellow author. Then—damn, he remembered, the journal. He had left it in that wretched dining room.
Polly made a move toward him, out of the lacy shadow cast by the curtain, and she was twiddling that bright needle of hers between thumb and forefinger. For a moment he thought she was going to stab him with it, and he took a quick step backwards.
“Whatever is the matter?” he said.
“You’ll never find me,” she said, her voice catching, as though she were the one with a bone stuck in her throat. She then moved briskly around him and strode through the door, slamming it behind her as she went, its crystal knob rattling loosely.
Grif was flummoxed. Something had transpired, but he had missed what exactly it was. More Cormany games—a challenge, a taunt, a bit of fun, didn’t the mother say? This one a grownup version of hide-and-seek, down corridors, in a back bedroom. With a flesh brush.
What Grif did not guess was that Polly might be telling the truth. Not the simple truth—the design of it twisted too much out of shape for that—but the truth nonetheless. Once she passed through that door, she was as good as gone, and he didn’t find her ever again.