GRIMDARK MAGAZINE

- The Unwanted Women of Surrey -

Kaaron Warren

The first that Mrs Jacobs knew of the Grey Ladies were the ashen footprints she found on the front step. She blamed the chimney sweep, furious that he had come to her front door dirty like that, or at all. She sent her husband to the Chimney Master, wanting a name, wanting that child to come and clean up his own mess, but her husband returned to say no sweep had come knocking and if he had, two shillings sixpence were owed.

She got her husband settled by the fire before he bored her silly with the usual talk. Too late. “Awful man,” her husband said. “Should have been drowned at birth, most of them, and I mean that kindly.”

“Of course you do, dear,” Mrs Jacobs murmured, but in her mind’s eye she pictured the baby rats he’d drowned in a bucket last week. Dropped them in then forgot about them, and she was the one who had to scoop them out and bury them.

She had just put the broom away when she saw the chimney sweep through the front window. A tiny, filthy boy, and she lifted her broom to shoo him away. He’d left more footprints, she saw that, but when she raised her broom and saw him shrink away, her heart melted.

“Boy!” she said, “What are you doing here?” Her cheeks were pink from exertion and she had her mum’s old patchwork apron on.

“It looks so warm inside. The ladies showed me.” He bent forward onto his toes, making the loose plank on the front step creak.

He shook his head. “I’ve got none of those, nor a mother, neither. It was the grey ladies showed me.” He tucked his shoulders down, and pressed his hands between his thighs, as if cold to the bone. He stared inside. “You’re nicer than them, though.”

“Bath first,” she said, but his stomach rumbled loudly and he seemed weak, so instead she sat him in the laundry and fed him porridge.

“The grey ladies!” he said. He shivered, looking over his shoulders as if someone approached.

“Only they look at me as if I’m real,” he said. “But I don’t like them.”

Mrs Jacobs opened the laundry door, wondering as she did so how the ladies reached the door, being, as it was, behind their high brick surrounding walls.

Three grey ladies stood on her step. She could see the agapanthus through them, and they floated above the ground. They were tall and skeletally thin. Their skin was grey, flaccid, hanging off their cheeks in folds. They didn’t look at her, only at the boy.

One lifted her hand and Mrs Jacobs recoiled at the sight of long, sharp fingernails. They were silent as they turned, glided to the back wall and disappeared through it.

Mrs Jacobs stood staring, knowing she couldn’t tell her husband what she’d seen (Imagination is the indication of an unsteady mind, he liked to say). The boy shivered.

“You better be off. My husband will be home soon for his lunch. Come back in two hours and I’ll make you a plate.” She put the hob on to make bubble and squeak and took out the bread knife ready to cut a slab to go with it.

He didn’t want to move so she physically picked him up. He weighed as little as one of Mr Butcher’s chickens, no more. The morning had passed too quickly, though, because there was Mr Jacobs at the front door, staring at her as if she was a beggar on the streets.

“Oh, Alfred. He’s a poor motherless boy, that’s all. Let me just bathe him. He can spend one night here, after he’s clean. He’ll go after breakfast. We can’t send him out in the night.”

Mr Jacobs had no patience for children. Never had. If they’d been blessed, perhaps he would have changed his mind.

She had the boy help her heat the water in the cellar and carry it upstairs to the laundry sink. The boy stared at the water as if mesmerized. The afternoon was grey and they needed what light they could but still Mrs Jacobs pulled down the shutter. It was surely only shadow, but out there she thought she saw the three grey ladies, watching.

“You have a good scrub. I’m going to give my husband his lunch,” she told the boy. He stared at her. His eyes were ash grey and his skin had a grey pallor she hadn’t noticed before. His lips were drained of colour and she saw streaks of ash in his hair.

She tugged at his shirt, trying to help, but he shied away, so she called her husband, sitting waiting in the front room for his lunch, asking him to convince the boy he needed to remove his clothes for the bath and she left them to it, moving into the kitchen to ladle soup and slice bread for their meal.

Mr Jacobs walked into the room and sniffed at the soup a few minutes later. “Vegetable again?” he said.

“He’s not vermin, he’s unfortunate,” but something in her husband’s tone made her run down the hall and throw open the laundry door. He spoke like that when he’d bested an opponent and was pleased with himself.

The water was grey and murky. “He’s climbed out himself,” she thought, but then one hand floated to the surface and she plunged both hands in to pull him out.

She lifted him easily (was he lighter now? It seemed so) and she cradled him in her arms, holding him as if she could bring life back to him. She began to dry him tenderly.

She heard a rustle, a hiss behind her and turned, still holding the boy, to see the three grey ladies standing tangled amongst the raincoats hanging on hooks by the back door.

One bent forward and reached out as if to stroke the boy, but instead she worked her fingers between his ribs as if trying to pry something loose. Another stroked his hair gently, but the last knelt down and began lapping at his stomach, as if drinking something spilled.

Mrs Jacobs held the boy closer, trying to keep their fingers from him, but they reached through her with an ice-cold touch, and all she saw was grey.

“How did you know?” she whispered. “How did you know my husband would do this?”

She rocked back and forth. They kept still while their eyes followed, then she saw their faces change—they were aping her sorrow. They rubbed their hands together as if cleaning them, then went back to work on the boy, separating soul from body with long, sharp fingernails.

The grey ladies were once Julia, Amara and Magdalena. Pretty names for pretty girls, long since forgotten. How did you know? the woman asked, and they watched her, not answering her question. Truthfully, they did not know the answer and besides, they no longer spoke at all. Did they miss not talking to each other? Or had they no recollection of hours spent chattering?

They never knew where they’d knock. It was not their choice. Something moved them. It was death foretold by them, not delivered.

They knew they were doing good. A wise man (Wise. Cruel. Murderous.) told them often that one of the greatest gifts in life is to know when death is coming. It was a chance to prepare. To say goodbye.

If only people would listen. If they were stubborn, like the woman and her chimney sweep, no good was done to anyone.

She was colourful, that grieving woman, her cheeks pink, her eyes red. They were colourful once, these three.

They’d had a brighter life than many others like them, because their mother, Eliza, loved to travel, gathering friends like other people gathered pebbles or mementos. She’d been to finishing school in Paris, where she met all manner of girls from all manner of places she’d never heard of before, like Lucia from Romania and Dao from the Principality of Phuan. And she learnt that each of them had a different idea of how things should be. This benefitted her daughters, giving them more freedom of expression and behaviour than many others. Julia in particular thrived in this way, and as a girl, loved to climb trees and sit in the branches, when the neighbours weren’t looking.

There was less travel once Eliza married Phillip and the girls came along, but she had trunks of treasures to enjoy, and to share with her three daughters. “This blue one is for you, Julia,” she said, lifting out a delicate silk scarf. “To match your eyes. For Amara, this green, and for Magdalena, this golden.” The tiny girls wrapped themselves around and around until they were swamped in the lush material and they danced about the room with their mother spinning in the centre.

“What is this?” their father said. He pretended gruffness, but he wouldn’t have married her if he didn’t love her ways.

Eliza had written letters to her dear school friends, especially Lucia, for ten, twelve, fifteen years. They kept in touch, and then there were no more letters. “I miss you!” Eliza wrote. “I wish we could visit with each other and talk about foolish things.”

The girls would not remember his first visit, although their lives changed because of it. Their mother said he arrived in a large coach, with servants following behind. His voice louder than the most raucous of men in the village and his skin bright, glowing. He arrived on their doorstep with no announcement. He said, “I am the brother of the magnificent girl Lucia.”

He was not as handsome as Eliza had imagined (the girls had told stories under the covers when they were at school, squealing at the inventions) but he was charming and vulnerable.

“I bring sad news. My dear wife died in childbirth, and the baby as well. In my sorrow I am travelling the world until now, when I reach my sister’s dear friend and this beautiful land.”

Their father Phillip managed the project over the next fifteen years. This was his sole job, to build a mansion for the mysterious Romanian Mihai Adascalitei.

This brought success and financial security to the family, and each night Phillip insisted on raising a glass to Mihai, “Our benefactor.”

“Our slave master,” Eliza said, because Phillip worked twelve hours a day with little time for family.

Then it was done. Word came that Mihai would arrive to inspect, that he was traveling with a large retinue and that he was anticipating great pleasure on seeing his new home.

“He doesn’t mention Lucia but surely she will come,” Eliza said. “Perhaps she and I will go to London. She always said she’d love to go.”

“They can’t come,” Phillip said. He wouldn’t sit down but paced in agitation. “He can’t see his home. Can you imagine what he will say? He will be disappointed, to say the least.”

“What’s the worst that can happen?” Eliza asked. He looked at her. He didn’t say anything.

“And what if he wants to visit here? Look at our house!” He was not a wealthy man. “He’s going to think us very poor specimens,”

They all looked at their house. The fittings were shabby but solid and clean, well made. “You are the architect,” Eliza said. “The clever one. Let his financiers show him wealth. We show solid family love.”

Mihai was tall, broadly built, his clothes cut well to hide how large he’d grown. His cheeks were red and round, his teeth spaced out and yellowed, his breath like cheddar or, Julia whispered, like the Thames in summer. He had long hair brushing his shoulders (Phillip tried to hide his distaste at this), and he topped it with a small grey hat that was almost formless. He had blue lips, like a lizard’s and his eyelids hung low, making him look sleepy.

“Aah, your lovely ladies. So tall! So delicate in the limbs and colourful! All three like princesses of an exotic place. You must all come to dinner at my home now it is complete. I’ll have them serve beef broth and black pudding. That will get some meat on your bones.”

“You know I last saw these two older girls when they were tiny. Just born! All blue in the face and furious,” he said. “How well I remember!”

The three girls barely contained themselves. They chattered all at once, drowning him out, until he burst into laughter and bade them hush.

They all heard his stomach rumble, like a crack of thunder, and Amara giggled. “Oh, you must be ravenous,” Eliza said, “Let’s get you something to eat.”

“Phillip! So rude!” Eliza asked the cook to fix salmon en croute, because she knew they had leftover salmon from her order with the fishmonger. Some servants do it on purpose in the hope of taking the extra home but Eliza wasn’t having that.

The girls raced to their rooms, returning screaming with laughter. They wore salmon pink scarves, all three, to match their food. Even in their rush they exuded grace, their fingers long and delicate, their step light.

At dinner, Eliza couldn’t contain herself any longer. “And my dear friend Lucia? It has been so long since we communicated.”

Mihai shook his head. “I bring sad news. My dear sister died in childbirth. She did feel envy of your beautiful three, when she could have none. I’m sorry she no longer wrote to you. Perhaps hearing about your girls and their accomplishments became harder and harder as her years passed fruitlessly.”

“So sad that she should pass in the same manner as your wife,” Phillip said.

“Ah,” Mihai said, and Julia wondered at his eyes, how they shifted about, and how he smiled nervously, and how his hands shook.

“Your father is a clever man. My house is something to see,” he said, as the pudding was served, as if they hadn’t seen it five dozen times. As if every meal hadn’t been dominated by talk of this house.

“My philosophy: Take something to its basics and rebuild it. Hair will grow back differently on a shaved head.” Eliza thought he was dashing when he first visited, his hair a golden yellow, his shoulders broad.

“But hair grows back easily enough. By its very nature it is meant to fall.”

“Your house is certainly sturdy, if not very beautiful,” Phillip said. He had made many suggestions of design, all rebuffed.

“You know of the tulip?” Mihai said. “It grows weaker the more beautiful. There is little to be said for beauty, much for strength.” Mihai raised his hands and pressed his forefingers and thumbs together like a picture frame. “You are the strongest, Amara. That is clear.”

Eliza well remembered the 200 year old house he’d had torn down to build his home.

He had bade her stand there in the rubble. She was flattered, a young wife with babies; you’d think she’d lost all of her allure. But no, Mihai, the brother of her dear friend (and if she would only admit it, she had made up stories about him at school, when her friend spoke of him and his dashing ways) asking her to grace his home or the foundation of his home. “Stand there,” he said, and bade his man mark where her shadow fell. That was where the foundation stone was laid.

She had known of this curse but had forgotten. He giggled and did a little hop, odd in a man of his stature.

“It’s a blessing to you. Knowing when you’ll die gives you every chance to make amends, say goodbye, indulge your desires.”

“And yet you are not dead,” Mihai said, taking another large mouthful of salmon en croute, and he roared with laughter. “My blessing failed.”

“But look at my daughters. They are the true blessing. Magdala wouldn’t be here, and who knows what sort of young women Julia and Amara would have been, raised by their father and hired women.”

“What do you know of hired women?” Mihai said, standing up and laying his napkin on his plate. He nodded at Phillip, and the two men withdrew to Phillip’s study.

But the girls weren’t going to miss out. Julia crept into the room next door, the little-used storage space, and heard such things as made her sick to the stomach.

“There is a brothel,” Mihai said, “where the whores dye their skin blue. Glorious. Like the naked bodies taken out of plague houses, a sight I’ve seen and never anything so beautiful.”

Julia wondered how old is this man? Unless there was a plague more recently in Romania?

“These whores hold the same tinge and even more, as the blue fades it begins to look like bruising. Also beautiful.”

Julia noticed her mother kept her and her sisters close and allowed them no time alone with Mihai, whom she had always described as a fearsome man. Julia wondered what her mother feared. What power she imagined Mihai had.

“You could do worse than that man,” Phillip said afterwards, but what his four ladies said in return burned his ears and made him shrink into his collar.

“Are we going to have to poison you to stop you marrying our girls off to awful men?” Eliza said.

A week later they travelled for dinner at Mihai’s mansion. The winter chill had set in and even Eliza would have preferred to stay at home. But go they must, Phillip said, and he tried to keep them amused with stories until they arrived.

Outside was solid grey brick, with very few windows. “You see how I save money on the window tax? Your father chose his materials well,” Mihai said, though Phillip had little choice in the matter.

He said, “It will be named for you, Phillip. Your name in brass, over the door.”

Phillip was embarrassed by this. An honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work was all he asked for, and a good life for his girls and for his wife to be happy, because her happiness brought joy to his own life.

“One of your daughters, then. Julia, Amara, Magdalena. Which one?” and he rubbed his great beard, eyeing them off. Only Julia understood he was teasing them, like the old men in town who tossed foul comments their way if ever the girls walked together.

He led them (when truly he didn’t need to, because they knew this house as well as their own) to the massive dining room, with its table long enough for forty guests. It was set with dull gold, flat silverware. There were no flowers, no colours.

“Sit,” Mihai told them, spreading his arms. They clustered down one end, leaving the rest of the vast table vacant.

Course after course arrived. The food was rich and varied, aromas and tastes the girls hadn’t sampled before. Magdalena in particular devoured everything in sight; she was never one for holding back.

“More wine,” Mihai said. “More food.” The girls and their mother fell asleep as the two men finished bottle after bottle.

It was after midnight when Mihai arranged a carriage to take them home. Their father groaned and whimpered all the way, irritating the four women. Silly drunk man. He wasn’t amusing at all, just dull and malodorous.

The next morning Phillip did not rise. He was never a lazy man, always up with the dawn, even on the nights he was up well past midnight. But after the amount he drank it wasn’t surprising that he was still not risen by noon.

“Mother!” Julia said. The maid stifled a smile. As ever before she was always far too free with ears and eyes, Julia thought.

There was a loud crash, which startled them all. Mihai, entering their home. “What’s this I hear? A house of women left unattended?” he roared. “Where is Phillip? I expected him an hour ago to discuss further additions.”

“He is wine-ill, still in bed,” Eliza said. “He deserves a small amount of suffering for the noise he made last night.”

“Real men don’t suffer from the drink,” Mihai said, smiling, “and this is a man who can build a magnificent house. Leave me with him.”

In the bedroom, Mihai roused Phillip. He gave him a draught and when the man bent over double in pain he said, “I think that wife of yours has poisoned you.”

The maid gave evidence at Eliza’s trial for attempted murder. “Oh yes,” she said, “I heard them talking about poisoning him.”

With their father bed-ridden, their mother incarcerated in the women’s gaol, the girls had no one to watch over them.

Mihai made an arrangement with Phillip. If the three girls went into servitude for him, he would use his influence and all the money at his disposal to ask for mercy for Eliza. He would ask the authorities not to put her to death. “I won’t work your girls hard,” he said. “Think of it as finishing school.”

Phillip, never a strong man when it came to resisting Mihai, was in no state, physically or mentally, to resist him now. Phillip agreed to force his daughters into Mihai’s service. After their mother was, after all, put to death, the girls had little choice.

It was not what they imagined. Even in their worst nightmares they couldn’t imagine what Mihai had in store for them.

Mihai’s closest companion was a cruel, weak man called Cyril. He was the mayor of a town far away but he never seemed to be at home for his duties. Cyril and Mihai drank great goblets of wine, but the girls were given crystal glasses of blue water. There was scant art in the room, much of it dull, and the food served on plain plates. Only the enormous candles brought a warmth and a glow and the crystal wine goblets reflected tiny and numerous stars of light.

“Isn’t it a beautiful hue?” Mihai said. “Indigo water. A rare thing, rare indeed, but fitting for these beautiful tulip flowers I have before me.”

Later, in the lavatory, Amara screamed in terror and the older girls laughed to see how their water had turned blue.

“Look at your lovely ladies,” Cyril said later that evening, his dull eyes glinting in the candlelight of Mihai’s study. “You’d think they were dolls they are so lovely. Or puppets, perhaps. Dance for us, lovely puppets.”

So the girls drew out their scarves and danced. They brought the only colour to the dreary mansion.

“Have them dance on my grave when I’m dead,” Cyril said, and the two men laughed until they fell off their chairs.

Looking back, the girls would remember that as the best night of their captivity. The last colour they saw. As the sun rose, Mihai said, “And now.”

As he imprisoned them down below, in solid dark rooms, he stared dark and hard and Julia understood that he would not listen to reason.

Each girl had a cell to herself. The cells were bare—no bed, no chair, no window, no light. It took them a while to understand they were there to die. They wondered, did their father build these rooms? Didn’t he wonder what they were for? Or did he imagine coal, or wood, or wheat?

“How good I am to you,” he said. “What a gift I give to you. To know the truth.” He said this every day.

He allowed them water. He passed tall thin jars to them through small cracks in the doors and while they saw nothing in the pitch dark, they knew this water was blue. He told them so, he said, “Your insides will be such a lovely colour.”

Julia thought, this is because of the whores. He wants us blue like them. In her darker moments she thought, He can’t see us in the dark; it is our corpses he wants to see.

Julia could hear nothing of her sisters. The walls were dense, almost absorbent, drawing in all sound and most of the air.

She was so hungry. So very, very hungry. No moss or mould on the walls, no rodents, so day by day she weakened. Her sisters, too, she imagined. Amara would be the bitterest; she alone had believed Mihai would marry her and she would live a life of adventure. Julia pictured her crouched in a corner, her flesh loose, her eyes dull. And Magdalena. Bright, funny, passionate Magdalena; Julia pictured her weak and quiet, her cheekbones sharp.

When they were all three dead and spirit, they oozed through the grey brick walls, finding each other easily on the other side.

Julia looked back at their prison. She felt such fury at what Mihai stole from her. Not only her own moments of joy, love, success, but those of all the descendants she would never have. He stole her name, her family’s future, he ended her line, and this made her exceeding bitter.

She nodded at her sisters and they tried to re-enter. Julia wanted to terrify him, frighten him to death, but they could not pass through the doors or walls again.

“His time has not yet come,” she whispered. “We will return when that time is near.”

Instead they found a chimney sweep whose lungs were filled with black, and then a woman about to be thrown by a horse, and then a young girl boarding a train about to crash to die at the hands of a butcher, and then, and then, and then, and then. They gave each one the peace of mind that knowledge of death brings, and this sustained them more than anything in life had.

It was many years until the girls returned to Mihai’s mansion, drawn there by the knowledge, the scent, of his impending death. He had not looked after his home well; perhaps his fortunes had failed. There was no name over the door—Mihai had not even kept that promise.

The grey ladies pressed again the cold brick wall and then flowed through it and once more they were inside the walls of the grey mansion.

There was a great echo inside, as if it had been long abandoned. But no, they could hear moans from upstairs, where Mihai slept.

There they found him, enormous, bloated and repulsive. He rested in his filthy, broken bed, his chest rising and falling ever more slowly...

Julia felt something, the memory of hunger, the flickering sense of pain long since forgotten. She knew they were hers, and Amara’s, And Magdalena’s were there, beside this filthy mound of flesh.

He drew a thick, phlegmy breath. “You have come to tell me what I already know. My passing is soon and I will be in God’s arms.”

“No?” She heard uncertainty in his voice for the first time. She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. What was next. But she shook her head.

He wailed then, knowing as well as she did he’d done nothing to deserve a happy afterlife.

For a moment, a wash of red passed through them, the colour of love, perhaps, and for a moment they clustered, almost remembering, but then they were drawn away, drawn towards, and they found the next door and they knocked on it, and waited.

...ah, that great day, and exceeding bitter, when thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.

Exceeding Bitter