I come to in the stables. I do not recall how I have come to be in the stables. I lie on my back on the cold stone floor, horses snorting politely behind me. I turn my head toward them. The word ‘EVIL’ is finger-painted in blood across the haunches of Mr Pounds’ stallion in the corner stall. I look at my hands. They are clean. What have I been doing.
On the floor next to me lie scattered a pair of wrought-iron sugar nips, engraved with the Pounds family crest. There is something sweet lodged between my teeth at the back of my mouth. I presume it is a sugar lump at first, but when I pluck it out it turns out to be a loose carious molar, mine or somebody else’s. It is sticky – did I extract a tooth with the sugar nips? I really shouldn’t drink port after dinner.
I stumble outside into early morning, the wind whistling at my face, my arms breaking out in gooseflesh under their sleeves. The Grim Wolds church bell tolls five. There’s still time before the guests wake, though some servants will be up already, wringing chicken necks for lunch.
I hide the tooth under the earth in the south-west garden.
I re-enter the house through the kitchen, where the cook confronts me with a dramatically bloodied nightdress she has found stuffed behind the boiler door. ‘Mrs Able says tha’ didn’t give us a nightdress to wash this week,’ she says, ‘so this ’un must be thine.’
‘Yes,’ I say, taking the nightdress, heavy and crusted, in my hands. ‘Thank you.’
The cook looks at me, surprised at my accepting the soiled item so readily. I sigh at the unnecessary effort I must now exert. ‘I thought it was too stained, you see,’ I explain, ‘and it would have been too humiliating to draw attention to it. So I tried to hide it.’
‘But . . . the blood?’
‘Natural occurrence, you know. A woman’s ailment.’
‘But it is all over the neckline . . .’
‘Yes,’ I say brightly, as if that settles it.
‘Miss Notty –’ the cook begins, her face setting into alarm.
I feign a fainting spell. I find fainting spells the most rewarding of performances.
A GIDDY LIGHTNESS swoops up my stomach as I am lifted and carried through the house by the servants, who, afraid they will be blamed for my indisposition, plop me on a chair in the empty dining-room and hope for the best. When their footsteps have receded, my eyes flutter open. I reach out for a fish croquette.
‘Ah, Miss Notty. Are the children awake?’ Mrs Pounds asks, entering the dining-room.
‘Mm,’ I say, and let Mrs Pounds gather from that what she may.
‘Good,’ she says.
I bare my teeth at a spoon. None of my molars seem to be missing. I wonder whose I just buried. I wonder if I buried any other body parts. I suppose I’ll find out shortly. I stare at the door.
The guests start appearing, one after the other. Marigold first, twirling a ringlet in her finger. Her mannered husband enters next, also twirling a ringlet in his finger. After a pause, Mr Fancey, enveloped in a smell of cheap, powdered horsehair wig that makes one’s eyes water. Mrs Fancey, in pale-blue crepe. The Dowager, scowling all around, breasts hanging low, one of them resting on her coral cane pommel, the carved cherubs stoically bearing the burden.
The number of possible deaths reduced considerably, I wait.
A small silence is followed by Miss and Mrs Manners, who walk arm in arm everywhere, and consequently always have trouble fitting through doorways. Mr Pounds dodders behind them, trying to get through or around them and failing miserably.
Andrew’s needy, throaty cries pierce the air outside the dining-room as he complains, once again, of having to come down for his breakfast, claiming his porridge tastes better upstairs (he likes to lick it off the nurse’s fingers, sometimes). He appears in the dining-room in a cross stupor, as if dazed by his own capacity to loathe.
I look at the dining-room doorway, which stares back, revealing nothing but the bluish light of the dark passage outside it.
There is a shifting of air before the listless shape of Drusilla materializes, fully recuperated from being shot at, and curtseys at everyone with a ravishing smile before taking a seat beside me.
They are all accounted for, then. Barring the servants. Who don’t really count. I sigh, relieved.
‘Ah, look,’ says Art Fishal, shaking the newspaper. ‘They’ve caught the man behind the Cutlery Murders.’
‘It’s fascinating, isn’t it?’ says Mr Pounds. ‘They’ve measured his skull to find an enlarged organ of impulsiveness. Clearly, phrenology should be used to catch all murderers.’
There is some widespread groaning around the table.
‘Come, now, John, how can you justify their claims that his organs of benevolence and conscientiousness also happened to be “extremely large”?’
‘Well, to be fair, he didn’t commit any murders until his thirty-sixth year –’
‘Didn’t he eat his own children with a spoon?’ asks Marigold’s husband.
‘Hush now, Robert, we mustn’t upset the ladies.’
I fail to understand why men think talk of violence will distress women. Women, who bleed all over themselves every month, who rub blood clots between their fingers and burst them like insects, and sometimes can’t because they’re not blood clots, they’re tongue-coloured strings of meat from the womb. Women who burst open in childbirth, vagina splitting and anus sagging, tiny, hardening fingernails clawing inside of them, placentas like thick filet mignon. A chortle gets stuck in my throat, like the skin of a grape, and Mr Fancey automatically hands me his handkerchief, which is crusted with dry snot.
‘Wishing to understand the particular workings of evil is tempting, but good men such as ourselves could never get to the bottom of it,’ says Mr Fishal, to loud agreement from the other men. ‘Evil can only be comprehended by evil.’
I ponder this as I finger the raised embroidered initials on Mr Fancey’s handkerchief. On days when I took to my learning or darning in the parlour of the parsonage, I overheard our servant telling Mother stories. Once she related a tale about a chicken on her brother’s farm. It was wicked, everyone said. It pecked at the other animals, which generally tried to avoid it, because engaging often culminated in bleeding hind legs or pulled-out feathers, at best. It pecked out another chicken’s eyes, continuing to peck at them once they’d been pulled out, as if they were baby shallots (‘it’d had enow to eat, it weren’t hungry’), then a whole rabbit – ‘pecked it to death, with its insides twisted like them barley legs in the washstand in thy bed-room.’
‘What did you do?’ Mother asked.
‘What can tha’ do?’ The servant had replied. ‘Sometimes evil is born in one of the Lord’s creatures and there’s nowt to do about it, nowt at all.’