Megan Arkenberg

Easter 1818

The rain hangs in the air, a chill white fog cut here and there with diagonal shafts of sunlight, on the morning after she kills the doctor. The sea is calm. A salt-wind, more hesitant that she has ever felt it, catches in her skirt like a child’s hand ushering her up the shore. She goes to church because the doctor would have laughed at her for it, would have scowled like an old woman offered bad fish and dismissed it as “foolishness.”

The doctor dismissed most of the village as “foolish.” Foolishness, she had learned, was a word he found infinitely more cutting than superstition—for the doctor was very nearly a superstitious man. He believed himself to be followed, pursued. He would not say by what. Their house on the little island is warded like a wizard’s, charms of broken glass and filed metal guarding every aperture. She did not mock him for it; she even helped to string the lattice of fine wire across the windows, her clever left hand wielding the hammer, her clumsy right holding the nail.

(The left hand was a gentlewoman’s, a lady who taught young women to play the harpsichord and piano-forte, turning wrists and raising palms with the gentle pressure of her fingertips. The right hand scrubbed potatoes day in and day out in a tub of cooling water, and knew little else.)

But foolish or not, superstitious or not—worthy of mockery or not—she has made up her mind to go. It isn’t easy. The island is half a mile from the shore, almost linked at low tide by a wide isthmus of gravel studded with eelgrass, as treacherous by boat as it is by foot. The church lies another mile inland. A road had been tramped between the two, many years before, but its traces remain only in the rusty patches where neither grass nor flower grows. Rust from the nails in a fisherman’s boots, she thinks, dragged day after day to prayer. Her own feet find the path unfamiliar.

(The left foot, a prostitute’s, remembers soft sheepskin cushions, a warm hand beneath the arch, kisses pressed to the inside of the ankle. The right, a grocer’s girl’s, remembers pinched shoes and long hours treading the same length of floor.)

Inland, away from the muck of the tides, the air takes on a cleaner smell. She had rowed the doctor’s little boat herself, quicker and smoother than the doctor ever did—both of her arms are thicker and stronger than his (used to carrying children and hot bread, used to pushing wheelbarrows of brick). Now she checks her gown for dampness, for splatters of salt or tidal mud. She owns two dresses: the one the doctor picked out for her, dark green, elegant; and this, a soft gray wool she stitched for herself, severe and clerical in its cut. (Her brain remembers Latin and deeply buried fantasies of convents: of clean white stone, gargoyles and stained glass; of herb gardens and rose gardens; of other women’s hands.) A high collar hides the joint between her head and neck, and the seam across the top of her breasts.

But even the scars that are visible get only a passing glance from the faces she passes on the road. A farmer blinks at her, curious but not unkind. Life is cruel and demanding, out here beneath the cold sun and the frozen rain. No one gets by unmarked.

(No man here looks like the doctor, smooth and pale, his linen white as a bride’s.)

Ahead of her now, the church’s square steeple floats above the ridge like some fairy castle of sand and seaweed. Easter has come too early for lilies this year, but the door is hung with garlands of evergreen and hazel catkins, with red berries and delicate clutches of snowdrop. And at the very last, she falters.

This is no place for you, a voice whispers in her head. It is the doctor’s voice, his cadence, his supple accent. You’re not one of them, not anymore. I have made you more—

A hand on her elbow interrupts the thought. A child of three or four—boy or girl, she cannot say, with its big black eyes and rosebud mouth—has come up behind her, stood on tiptoe to feel the smooth wool of her gown. “Hello,” she whispers, her mouth sore and stiff from disuse. The child giggles and darts back down the path to a waiting mother.

“Hello,” she says again, louder. The child’s mother tips her head in greeting.

After church, there is dinner at the young mother’s house, and after dinner, there are hymns by the fire. It is late by the time she returns to the island.

The air in the little house has become close and warm, and the flies have gathered thickly over the things she left in the pail by the stove. She should fling them away, she knows, out into the surf before the smell attracts creatures worse than flies. Already the sheets on the doctor’s bed are stained with blood and worse than blood, with the grease and fat of a body more accustomed to books and scalpels than to children, potatoes, grocer’s shops. She will need to replace them before she goes to sleep.

She is not tired yet.

Hanging her shawl over the back of his chair, she notices that his head is not where she left it, perched on his desk amidst his glass flasks and copper coils. It has rolled off, leaving a thin ribbon of blood in the dust, coming to rest against the clawed feet of his bookcase. She picks it up with handkerchief and sets him on a shelf beside his tattered copy of Milton.

“Happy Easter, Herr Doctor.” She greets the filmed white eyes with a smile.

The traps around the windows, the broken glass and wire, she begins to sweep away. She sings while she works, Easter hymns and scraps of Psalms, and where she can’t remember the words, she fills the gap with humming. The only devil she has ever known is laid to rest at last, and the sunlight fighting down through the gathering fog is like the first light of the world. I am Eve in the garden, then. She smiles to herself. I am afraid of no one.

 

L is for Laboratory