The Grim Wolds church bell echoes through the dining-room as I blink at the breakfast table, stale wassail on my tongue and the lye scent of smelling salts lingering in my nasal cavities.
The guests are bleary-eyed and greasy from the festivities last night, quieter than usual, and as such eager to dispense with their habitual inconsequential conversation.
As they all rise from the table and disperse toward the drawing-room, I watch Mr Pounds excuse himself to retrieve something from the library. I follow.
In the short walk down the hall toward the library, Mr Pounds’ slim back turned to me a few steps ahead, I realize he has not yet perceived I am in pursuit. I glance down to discover I am not wearing shoes. My toes peer from underneath the billowing hem of my dress. An unusual sight – I am so unaccustomed to seeing my toes, they are beginning to look like fingers reaching out from below my skirts.
‘Mr Pounds,’ I say timidly as I reach the library and close the door behind me.
‘Ah, Miss Notty,’ he says as he sits at his desk to rifle for his cigar box. And he seems so happy to see me, so very happy.
‘I would like to give you your Christmas present now, if I may,’ I say.
‘Miss Notty! You shouldn’t have! I am quite moved. Quite moved.’
‘I do not have much, and so my present is made of words. But I confess they are quite important words, surely worth more than many material riches.’
‘I do not doubt it,’ says Mr Pounds, his attention diverted by his leather cigar case, which is refusing to open for him. Embedded into the leather is a woman, finely painted on a porcelain plaque. Her dress slips down her shoulders as she holds it up and smiles coyly at me from between Mr Pounds’ fingers.
‘Mr Pounds, I have been searching for you for a very long time.’
‘Alas, you are quite in love,’ Mr Pounds says, the beginning of an affability on his face, the beginning of a rush to his member.
‘I have worked for many men named John Pounds, hoping to find you.’
At this, Mr Pounds’ face falls slightly.
‘I am yours, Mr Pounds. I am your daughter,’ I say.
Mr Pounds swallows and tightens his grip on the cigar case, the leather strangling the porcelain lady, who does not appear to be smiling any more. ‘I believe your services are no longer required in this house,’ he says in a low, gravelly voice, his frown and defensive stance mimicked by the huge portrait right behind him. ‘You may leave on the morrow. We shall manage for the remainder of Christmas.’
‘My mother worked in the Pounds house in Harley Street,’ I continue, refusing to allow my mirth to slip from my face, which is seemingly distending. ‘She kept your letters until she died.’
After Mother went up in flames, the delirious Reverend standing over her, attempting to understand what he had done, I retrieved the letters, unharmed, from under the mattress, wondering if they truly were written by the devil, as they had not submitted to the flames.
‘I knew I had to follow the boar to find you,’ I say. ‘And I did. But I couldn’t be sure until . . . did you know? We have the same eyes.’
From my pockets, I take out the eyes of our ancestors, present them to Mr Pounds on the palms of my hands.
‘What the deuce – so you’re the one who defiled the paintings!’ Some reverence on his face, I believe, in the crease between his frowning brows – or perhaps it is revulsion.
‘It was all worth it,’ I say, ‘to find you.’
Mr Pounds rubs his temples. ‘To think I insisted you stay on for the holidays,’ he groans. ‘Is this how you repay me? With this gross disrespect to authority, this – this, what is this? This cornering.’ He is spitting, reddening, his thin fingers (Mother always mentioned his thin fingers) trembling slightly as he loosens his collar.
‘Father,’ I exclaim, my smile feeling slightly lopsided now, a string of pink icing melting down a cake.
Mr Pounds jerks the cigar case into his jacket pocket and storms out of the room, leaving me standing barefoot in the middle of the library, alone with my smile.
Christmas carols played on the piano thunder from my left, so loud I would swear the instrument is upon me. I turn my head towards the music and indeed there is Miss Manners playing, for we are all now – suddenly, inexplicably – in the drawing-room, and an ode to joy tinkles from Miss Manners’ fingertips and ripples from her lips in peals of irritatingly correct German. That same symphony Beethoven tried to conduct himself at its premiere in Vienna, attempting to direct an orchestra he could not hear, flailing about and throwing himself back and forth like a madman while the musicians ignored him and followed the real conductor’s baton instead.
The guests are the picture of elegance as they look upon Miss Manners in their best, most constricting garments. Mrs Pounds smiles most of all; a beam so tight and long it’s pulling her eyes wider apart. Is there something bright red peeking between her lips? I stare at her, and as Mrs Pounds’ lips widen, a scarlet feather blooms from her mouth. It twists out of her like paint from a tube – a red fletch on a wooden hunting arrow. Beside her, Mrs Fancey begins to cough; shiny, bulbous pearls fall from her mouth to the carpet in a slow drip, her cheeks bulging with them, her lips sucking on them as they pop out of her. At the same time the old widow Mrs Manners gags, heaving a greasy string of hair from the back of her throat. Mr Fancey pulls a bootlace out of his throat in one impeccable, slavered coil. The guests retch and spit and choke on their deaths and it takes me a moment, a small shake of the head, to understand I am imagining things again.
I look down at whatever it is I’m holding in my hand, which happens to be a cleaver. I grip the handle – it is as real as I am. I must have retrieved it from downstairs at some point, and indeed I do remember spotting it on the deal-topped table, a thick, shiny cleaver, sharpened regularly to perfection with a bath brick and polished with leather rubbed in mutton suet. I applaud my past self for her forethought. My eyes (my father’s eyes), black as moorland peat, are reflected on the steel blade as I slowly get up from my chair. Nobody tuts in protest because I am on a lone row behind everyone else, so that it is clear I am to enjoy the music just a little bit less than the guests and family. My family.
I make my way toward Miss Manners, who nods at me, perhaps thinking I am offering to turn the page for her, then she frowns when she realizes she is not in fact using any music sheet.
I lift the cleaver and lop off Miss Manners’ hand in one heavy movement. The hand flops onto the keys, inciting a single chord. Miss Manners screams and falls clumsily over D minor.
The symphony is still playing – in my head now, I suspect, for how could it possibly be otherwise – the buoyant chorus tinged with hysteria. All creatures drink of joy at nature’s breasts. All the Good, all the Evil, follow her trail of roses.
All the good, all the evil.
Does not everyone deserve joy?
As the guests scatter, shrieking, and Miss Manners stares dumbly at her spurting stump, I pounce on Mrs Manners. She bellows in a surprisingly rich baritone, and I rip the mourning brooch off her silks and stab her in the chest with the pin, repeatedly, cracking one of the old woman’s ribs. The glass on the mourning brooch fractures and the lock of the dead husband’s hair uncoils onto his widow’s face and as she screams the hair slips down her cavernous gullet, so that she dies choking on a hair ball.
‘Do something!’ Mrs Fancey screeches at her husband.
Mr Fancey, swallowing, approaches me, his hands outstretched. I stare at him as he grabs a highly burnished brass poker by the hearth and waves it at me with one hand, the other behind his back, as if he were fencing. He strikes the air between us once, twice, and on the third I take the poker and smash it against the side of his skull, whereupon he falls to the floor.
The other guests run, abandoning Mr Fancey to his fate. He reaches for the poker, which has rolled toward him. I kneel beside him and strangle him with a bootlace I’ve pulled off one of his shoes, the voided velvet of his tartan waistcoat soft against my hand. His wig slides off, the few mildewy hairs on his crown as soft and white as the feathers clinging to the eggs that are picked from the coops each morning.
One by one by one they are killed, in a splendid ballet of twirling bodies and outstretched limbs and jerking heads. I pull silk scarves of blood out of them like the actors do onstage. Their insides spray into the air like handfuls of rose petals.
One by one by one they are killed, and it’s absolute madness – tea running down the walls, the delft tiles of the grand fireplace in the Great Hall no longer depicting the Scriptures but instead portraying all the guests, each extinguished in their own way.
I beat the Dowager’s soft forehead in with her cane, her brain revealing itself.
I spear Art Fishal with one of the mounted stag skulls in the minstrels’ gallery, wooden antlers piercing his flesh, bone clicking against bone like knitting-needles.
I push Marigold’s husband into a lit hearth.
Somehow, in the din, the coffin bells – Hopefernon’s coffin bells ringing, all the graves at once asking for assistance, bodies asking to be let out. I strain to listen, follow the bells downstairs, delicately hiking up my gut-stained skirts.
Oh, ’tis but the servant bells that are ringing, viciously, on the cracked wooden board in the servants’ hall. Black brass question marks jingling over their respective room names – Rich Ugly Cunt’s Room, Tiny Insufferable Virgin’s Room, the Drawing Room.
I force-feed fistfuls of salt of sorrel to the cook, then a kitchen maid. The substance can cause cardiac arrest and death, while also removing ink stains (practical).
There are many different knives available in the kitchen for slicing servants and guests’ servants, and steel-and-horn carving sets laid out in boxes inlaid with velvet and silk. There is also a heavy scrubbing stone, used to scour the stone floors and hearths, which I smash repeatedly against the head of a valet, and that of a lady’s maid, and that of a coachman.
I step into the butler’s pantry, which the eponymous subject has fled, abandoning his keys in his haste. Keys for the wine cellar, for the iron chest that holds the silver and for the fine glass closet, but also: the keys to the armoury.
I gasp in wonderment as I enter the small room, which is right off the entrance hall. Its walls a shocking red, lined with all manner of swords and shields and battle axes and maces and full suits of steel and brass armour. Among them, like a triumphant, outstretched arm, meticulously polished: the crossbow. I take it in my hands, the shifting weight almost alive.
I set the bow on the floor, step on it, and draw back the string with my hands, growling from the effort, my palms smarting on the hemp. There is an underwhelming click as it’s hooked onto the ivory nut. I take a steel-tipped, arrow-like bolt, surprisingly sharp, from the leather quiver I’ve hung across my body. I slide it into the groove and, thus armed, cross the Great Hall to the staircase.
I ascend, the wooden stock of the bow, inlaid with engraved staghorn, pressed against my right shoulder as I peer down it at the steps in front of me.
Upstairs, the Fanceys’ litter scatters when they see me approaching with the weapon, falling over each other like domino tiles. The window is so clean I think it is open when I attempt to throw one of the children out of it. The toddler slams against the glass and falls to the floor with a thud.
I chance upon Mrs Pounds and Andrew in the nursery, Mr Pounds cowering behind them. When our gazes meet, he pushes his wife and son at me and flees downstairs.
Andrew says with a kind of awed realization: ‘Mother, she’s the cuckoo!’ before I aim the crossbow at him and press the trigger. The bolt hits him right in the forehead, between his dull little boar eyes.
I crouch to draw back the crossbow string again, my fingers burning – take another bolt from the quiver –
‘How can you do that to your own ward?’ Mrs Pounds is howling at me – her indignation at my crass lack of tutoring etiquette stronger than her fear of death, apparently – ‘You really are the worst governess we’ve ever had!’
‘That’s not true!’ I scream back. ‘I taught them the French Revolution! It took me seventeen days! Your children are idiots!’ and I shoot her.
The two consecutive shots from the crossbow are enough for the nurse, who decides to give up her hiding spot behind the dollhouse where she is crouching.
She runs past me as she heads towards the staircase. ‘You are free!’ I yell after her. ‘Go back to France! Have a good life!’
The nurse glances back at me as she runs, confusion sprawling across her features. On the landing she trips over a dead child, stumbles violently, and, unable to right herself, falls over the banister. Her body thwacks the floor downstairs, her head bent between the first couple of steps.
I quickly use up the bolts in the quiver, so I resort to strangling Mrs Fancey with my bare hands when I find her hiding behind her bed-curtains. She fights harder than most – pushing her thumbs against my face as I kneel over her and tighten her neck in my fists, the pearls in her necklace digging into her throat.
On Mrs Fancey’s palm, currently crushing my nose and cheekbone, I detect a small, sad scent, of lanolin and sap. I wonder if it is Mrs Fancey’s Darkness, oozing from her skin as she dies, or if it is the smell of her six-year-old daughter – for this is the palm with which Mrs Fancey slapped said daughter repeatedly this morning for not adjusting her lace mittens. The same daughter who now lies inert between the branches of the alder tree outside the nursery.
Mrs Fancey, who had sprinted to her apartment in a last-minute effort to retrieve the mummy necklace she keeps stowed in one of the drawers, dies clutching the ornament to her chest.
I slide off the bed and turn on my heel to find Mrs Able, who appears to protest at the scene, her mouth seeming to form words, but the sound never released.
‘I – can’t – hear – you!’ I scream as I smash her face in with the bed warmer, embers rattling inside it. The housekeeper falls to the floor, trembling chimes raining from the keys on her chatelaine.
I press a few rogue hairs down onto my scalp, then walk to the staircase. Having pulled out the arrows from some of the corpses and replenished the quiver, I load the crossbow as I descend, treading over a few of the dead children scattered on the steps, picturing them rolling down the stairs with me, pirouetting and somersaulting under my skirts in a pretty dance.
I reach the downstairs landing. ‘FATHER,’ I call.
A squeal reaches me from the dining-room. Mr Pounds’ ankle has been caught in the leghold trap I dropped to the floor under my skirts this morning.
I cock the crossbow and point it at Mr Pounds as he crawls, wounded and soiled by other people’s vital fluids, on the floor of the dining-room.
‘Papa –’
‘Look, what do you want?’ He spits, leaning on his elbows to face me. ‘Do you want the house? I’ll give you the whole bloody estate if you just release me –’ He flinches at my approaching footsteps.
‘I do not wish for any material wealth,’ I say, lowering the crossbow. ‘All I ever wanted was a family.’
‘We’ll be a family! Of course we will. I’ve always wanted a daughter!’
‘You have a daughter.’
‘Drusilla?’ He scoffs, winces at the effort, reaches for his maimed foot. ‘She’s certainly not mine.’
A part of me can’t help but suspect he is telling me what he thinks I wish to hear.
‘Release me, Miss Notty,’ he demands, firmer now.
I look up at the painting of the flayed ox, at the heavy oak chairs, a few of them toppled, at the coffered ceiling. ‘Do you know . . .’ I say, pensive, ‘I think the dining-room is my favourite room in all the house.’
A shadow settles over Mr Pounds, his mouth pulled tightly downward like the hemp string of my crossbow. ‘That’s because you’re a fat bitch,’ he snarls.
I shoot an arrow through his heart, whereupon he collapses.
I lower the crossbow. Approach the body, which is turned slightly away from me, the head resting face-down on the carpet. When I am near enough to see that the wooden shaft is protruding from his shoulder and not his heart, I frown. At that moment Mr Pounds turns, brandishing a carving knife that must have slipped off the sideboard.
I observe the blade as it advances towards my stomach. At that moment Drusilla springs forth between us, wielding a rapier, like a fair-haired swashbuckler.
Emitting a cry fit for a launch into battle, Drusilla thrusts the slender blade into Mr Pounds’ chest, straight through the heart, both her hands cupped around the curved hilt as she pushes it in.
We look down at our father, who is leaking blood upon the carpet.
There is a silence.
A distant floorboard creaks. A plate crashes to the floor in the drawing-room – a servant, perhaps returning from an errand or the privy, must have come across the bodies. I turn and just spot her running across the halls, aprons flying, copper hair untangling from its pins.
‘Tally-ho!’ I cry, and run off in pursuit, crossbow in hand, pointing it at her zigzagging body, shooting a bolt which pierces her calf.
I set the bow on the floor, draw the hemp rope up again as the maid ducks towards the kitchens and I lose sight of her. Just when I think I’ll have to smoke her out of the larder, I find her heaving in the unlit fireplace in the Great Hall. She screams a scream as heart-wrenching and curly as a note played on the violin.
I take another bolt from the quiver, steady my aim. The red-haired servant is running across the Great Hall when I shoot her down after several tries. Her screaming hasn’t ceased, however, and it’s because it’s not her screaming at all, it’s Marigold, shrieking incessantly at the wall as she faces it like a chastised child. I turn her around towards me and slap her – ‘In the name of all that is sacred and manly, Marigold, shut up!’
Then something small and hard hits me on the head, bounces off it, and lands on the floor with a pop. I pick it up. It’s a round, brass livery button, embossed with the family crest.
The ceiling tinkles and I look up. The butler is perched on a crystal chandelier, which I find rather cowardly, for a butler. I ply him with the remaining bolts, and that is where his body will remain, swinging gently in the crystal fist.
Marigold is still screaming, back turned towards me again, her breasts pushed up against the wall, so Drusilla, who has tired of looking upon her father’s corpse, and has entered the Great Hall following the noise, stabs her in the neck just to shut her up.
From their new place on the floor, Marigold’s thickly lashed eyeballs mutely reflect a tiny version of Winifred and Drusilla as we cock our heads, turn towards the window, and run out into the gardens, little Winifred stopping to clumsily reload the crossbow before shooting down the gardener while, a small distance away, tiny Drusilla slashes the gamekeeper’s neck.
The servant who first drove me to Ensor House in the phaeton lies, limbs splayed, in the field of snowdrops facing the main entrance, the cleaver buried in his skull.
Not one of them tries to stop us. If three or four of them had the sense to join up, they could easily overpower us both. If most of them hadn’t been bred in captivity, force-fed a lifetime of politeness, kneading their spirits into compliance as callused fingers shape clay, they might have realized that.