The house descended into a sepulchre. Curtains shut out the light, clocks were stopped at the minute of Naomi’s last wheezing breath. I couldn’t cry. I was too numb for that. My heart didn’t seem to beat at all.
Now, at night, the flashes came with greater intensity. Not just the blood of Naomi’s birth but the awful struggle of her death. I saw her choked face. Sometimes it was mine. Sometimes my fingers were around her neck and I was sobbing, begging for someone to stop me. But if I cried out in my sleep, my parents didn’t come with reassurance. Their own sorrow absorbed them as they sat up to keep watch with the corpse, and I was left alone to stare at the empty crib. Only the corset embraced me. Refused to let me go.
There was no money saved against a funeral. We feared Naomi would end up in the common pit until Mrs Simmons set up a subscription to bury her in the churchyard. ‘I’m so ashamed,’ Pa kept saying, ‘I can’t even bury my own daughter,’ as if that were the hallmark of every good parent.
On the day of Naomi’s funeral, the callous sun shone with all its might. Ma tottered out of the house on Pa’s arm, wearing a weeping veil that brushed her hips as she walked. Every step cost her effort. For me it was different. I stood beside my parents, ready to walk to the church, and my mind was cold.
The little handcart trundled out, bearing poor Naomi bound up in her shroud, the wheels maliciously cheerful on the cobbles.
We followed behind. Summer was upon us, bringing with it the river stink and another smell from Naomi’s cart: ripe and low, like rotting meat.
I roasted in my one good gown, which I’d dyed black for mourning. Beneath it, my corset squeezed, trapping its own layer of heat. I deserved to swelter. But poor Naomi didn’t deserve that pauper’s burial, her corpse bumping over cobbles as dust curled up from the wheels of the cart. If only the charitable subscription had stretched as far as a coffin! But death is an expensive business, miss, as I’m sure you know.
Under a sky of hard, glazed blue, we entered the churchyard. Posturing angels and death’s heads loomed over us, half-devoured by lichen. The place was a mess of bracken, moss and nettles. We approached a rectangular grave, fresh cut and pitifully small, like a privy pit.
It wasn’t that long ago we’d gathered in the chapel for her christening. Now the minister looked pained, his voice husky as he said, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.’
Ma remained frozen until she heard the hollow pat of Naomi’s body meeting the soil. Then she folded in half. Pa held her, his sobs drowning her own, and I wanted to be anywhere, with anyone, rather than there in that horrendous tableau.
The vicar intoned his ancient words. He spoke of God’s kindness to children. Now, I thought. Now someone will look at me and realise what I’ve done. They’ll hear my heart pounding.
But no one did. God didn’t strike me down. Soil tumbled upon Naomi, even a clump from my own hand, and still nothing happened. The vicar blessed me, just like the rest, and sent me home to love and serve the Lord.
Our house looked tired and grey when we came in from outside: a place buried in silt. Shadows crept out from under the chairs, spreading across the floor towards the kitchen. There, flies droned over my abandoned tubs of lye and dirty clouts.
There would be plates to clean, as well as the laundry. I hadn’t been able to keep up with it all. After Naomi’s death, my first menses had arrived – the mark of Cain, I thought – leaving me with even more to wash. Odours of sweet blood, dirt and grease mingled together; our home was marinating in the scent of death.
Ma was no help – her eyes were worse than ever. I watched her grope her way across the room to collapse in the comfortable chair.
Pa went straight to the box where I’d packed up Naomi’s things. He looked smaller, somehow, hunched over her binder, barracoats and shirts. Every item he turned over in his hands drained him, took something else from his face. Soon I would be able to fold him up and pack him away too, there was so little substance to him.
At last he settled on the plain cap I’d made, still waxy from her scalp. He tucked it under his waistcoat, next to his heart, and shut the box.
How quiet the house was. No baby crying, no clocks ticking; only the buzz of flies, on and on, the lullaby of decay.
Pa lifted his morose eyes to me, but I had nothing to offer. He wet his lips. ‘I … I don’t know how to occupy myself, now.’
‘You could paint, couldn’t you? Or do you not do that, any longer?’ We both flinched from the venom in Ma’s voice. I’d never heard her speak like that – but then I’d never seen her look like that either: ugly, her pretty features contorted by grief.
‘Jemima, how can I possibly set my mind to work? Our little girl—’
‘We still have a daughter,’ she snapped. ‘One I would very much like to keep alive, if it’s not inconvenient to you.’
The atmosphere had shifted, quick as a blink, from despair to rage. Pa glared at her, his chest rising and falling beneath his black waistcoat.
‘So that’s your conclusion, is it? You’ve decided Naomi’s death was my fault?’
‘Don’t say her name!’ Ma screeched. ‘Don’t you dare say her name.’
Silent accusations ate their rapacious way through the air. I longed to tell Ma and Pa the truth, to stop them hurting each other, but my lips refused to part.
‘There’s no guarantee that a physician would have been able to save her,’ Pa said at last. ‘You heard Mrs Simmons talk about her husband. He saw many children who—’
‘She would have had a chance,’ Ma cut him off. ‘Naomi wouldn’t have been so weak and sickly if we could afford to feed her properly, to keep the place warm. God above! When I think of her skinny little arms! It would have been kinder to put her in the workhouse!’
‘Well, perhaps I would have been able to paint superior pictures if my studio wasn’t full of women’s frippery.’
‘I had to sew up there.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘I did, I had no choice.’
‘What utter rot. Why on earth would you need to invade the only place I can create with all your—’
‘Because I can’t see!’ she roared. ‘I can’t see to work, even in your precious studio. You’ve made me rough it out down here in the dark for too long and now my eyes have gone. They’re gone, James.’
An awful pause.
‘What do you mean?’ His voice was blank, disbelieving.
‘I can’t work. Not any more.’ Tears leaked from her dead eyes. ‘I’m done. You will have to support the family alone.’
Something sank in my stomach, a leaf settling on the bottom of a pond. Deep down, I’d known. I’d known it for weeks.
Pa stormed to the kitchen and threw open the cupboards. Glass knocked against wood and a cork popped.
‘Oh, that’s right!’ Ma called bitterly. ‘Have something to drink. That will help, won’t it? No money for Naomi, but always enough for gin.’
He slammed back into the room with a bottle. Ma lunged towards him. Flailing, she caught hold of the gin and grappled with him. For a moment they wrestled, veins standing out in their necks, but then the bottle slipped and shot from Pa’s hands to shatter against the wall. The scent of gin bloomed, judgemental.
‘Damn you, woman! I wish I’d left you where I found you, rotting in the countryside.’
‘So do I!’
He flung himself away from her and thudded up the stairs. I heard him banging in his studio, throwing objects around.
Ma burst into sobs.
A good daughter would have comforted her. Or she might have gone to her father and calmed him down. But I slunk into the kitchen with the flies, where I belonged, and closed the door behind me.
Mechanically, I began to wring out the linen with my hands. The cold water I’d used to soak it was now green-brown, the colour of gangrene. Two or three flies had drowned and floated on the surface.
It was good to have a task, even a disagreeable one. Good to see that my body could move while my mind veered out of control. I poured the used water out in the soakaway at the back of the house, and as I watched it slop I thought how strange it was, that Naomi was dead and I was still cleaning up her mess. The spirit went but the filth lingered; the waste of things remained.
I set pans of water heating on the range and searched the cupboards for our washing jelly. Nothing but mice and their droppings. Pa had swung one of the cupboard doors off its top hinge.
He’d seen the angel on the blanket. Why didn’t he mention it to me? Blame me? Perhaps he didn’t believe that small piece of embroidery could summon the strangling angel. I could scarcely credit it myself.
Wisps of steam began to curl from the pans.
But it must be true. For there was that lady, wasn’t there, the one I embroidered the gloves for? Somehow I’d passed my sadness on to her. And then I’d made a corset so strong, I couldn’t take it off.
My thoughts, my stitches. An unbreakable link between the two.
Gently, the water started to bubble.
I’d have to take great care in future, for with Ma’s eyesight failing, all the Metyard work would fall to me …
I dropped the wooden beater. Ma. I’d sewn her too, hadn’t I? They were my stitches in her flesh, but when I sewed them I wasn’t thinking of strength. I was thinking …
Do not see. Be blind.
And now she was.
The kettle whistled. I was only dimly aware of it. I stared, transfixed, at the empty cupboard, as the enormity of what I’d done began to dawn.
It couldn’t be a coincidence. Not with Naomi as well. Somehow, a part of me had bled into those stitches. The darkest, bitterest part.
Steam filled the kitchen. I wiped my brow as my insides churned. What else had I sewn? Hundreds of things, countless items, each with its own poison. I couldn’t separate them in my mind. I didn’t remember making them.
Only one garment flashed before my eyes: Naomi’s cap, set against a backdrop of red. I recalled the horror as I laboured over it, the waves of blood. Hideous images I could only stop by remembering the gun—
The gun.
I hurtled to the door and threw it open. Steam swept across the threshold with me. Ma gasped.
‘Ruth, what in the name of—’
Even as she spoke, the pistol cracked. It rang through the house, rang through my soul.
‘Pa!’
I ran up the stairs, hoping against hope, knowing I was too late. Smoke snaked out of the studio door, filling my mouth with an astringent taste. Gunpowder.
God knew I’d seen enough horror. I should have turned back. But instead I trembled forwards, on to the threshold, and sank to my knees before Pa’s last masterpiece.
He hadn’t put the gun to his temple, as I’d thought. It went through his mouth. Where his head hung forward, I could make out the shattered remains of his skull and his hair, my hair, matted with blood.
Red washed up the wall, over his easel, over the portrait of Ma, painted all those years ago when they first met. It dripped, with gobbets of something awful, on to the pile of Mrs Metyard’s work.
And there at the centre of it all, falling from his waistcoat: a flash of material, clean amidst the carnage. A plain cap, worked with innocent white stitches.
My stitches.