Page 12 of Blood on Her Tongue
Chapter 12
The next morning, Lucy asked Katje to join her for a walk.
Her reasons were simple: Firstly, she wanted to discuss her sister, which she couldn’t do with Michael, since that would be a kind of betrayal. It would also be somewhat useless because Michael had barely spent any time with his wife ever since she had risen from the dead. He claimed he was simply swamped with work, and though Lucy did not think that was a lie per se, she did think the real reason for his lack of visits had more to do with Sarah’s unattractive current state and his powerlessness to change it. Lucy couldn’t talk about Sarah with Arthur either because he would inevitably slip into his role of doctor. Besides, she was still avoiding him in the hope that his proposal would disappear, a hope she knew was utterly delusional but couldn’t quite shake.
That had left either Katje or Mrs. van Dijk. Because Mrs. van Dijk was unsuited to her second reason (Lucy wanted to walk fast and far to tire herself out in an effort to quiet her thoughts), she asked Katje, who had been delighted to be invited for something.
It was a fine morning for a walk: cool but dry. The sun bathed everything in that beautiful warm light so particular to autumn. The trees looked like royalty in their mantles of scarlet and their crowns of gold. The recent rain had left behind the famous pools of dark water for which the estate was named. This day, uncharacteristically windless, they were utterly still. Lucy had the strangest feeling that, if she were to try and dip her hand into them, the surface would not break, and it would be like trying to submerge her hand into black glass.
She told Katje, smiling disparagingly at herself.
To her surprise, Katje said, “I know what you mean. Ever since I’ve come to live here, I’ve thought things like that. I never used to. I think there’s something strange about this place. It feels realer than other places I know.”
Lucy picked up a pebble. It was flat on one side and veined all over. She rubbed it for good luck, then tried to skip it on one of the puddles. It bounced once, then sank, revealing the puddle to be no more than water after all. “Funny. I myself am never sure if Zwartwater is realer than other places or less so.”
“Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Either one would suffice to cause ripples in the mind.” Katje shivered and huddled deeper into her coat. It was one of Sarah’s old ones, beautifully woven of fine wool.
“‘Ripples in the mind.’ I like that. Very poetic. It is of such ripples I wanted to talk to you today.”
“Sarah.”
“Sarah,” Lucy agreed. “Does she not seem changed to you?”
“In what way?” Katje asked cautiously. She looked pinched and pale today, Lucy noted, but they had all had a tough few weeks of it.
“Well, for one thing, she doesn’t want to eat.” Not the things she should be eating, anyway.
“Perhaps there is a reason for it,” Katje said. “Some months ago, Sarah told me of a soldier who had some rotten human flesh flung into his mouth during a battle, which he swallowed accidentally. It made him horribly sick. The whole episode made him afraid to eat afterward.”
Something seemed to slither from her mouth into mine, something cool and soft. It tasted sweet and strong and rich, like blood, like rot. I felt a deep sense of revulsion so strong that I gagged. She clamped her hand over my lips and nose. She stroked my throat until, convulsively, I swallowed what she had spat into my mouth.
Could that explain it? Sarah suffered from a horrible nightmare at the onset of her brain fever, which had amplified and anchored it to the point that it made it impossible for her to eat. Why hadn’t she told Lucy of it, though?
For the same reason she tried to destroy that diary entry: it made her feel distressed and ashamed. That, or she didn’t remember it and now didn’t understand herself why she couldn’t eat. But why, then, did she crave blood? The thing she had swallowed had tasted of it; would that not make her particularly averse to it?
Lucy pinched the bridge of her nose. “I know that story of the soldier. She read it in a medical journal Arthur gave to her. I didn’t know she had shared it with you, too.”
Katje flushed. “I was closer to her than you may suppose. And her loss of appetite doesn’t have to be caused by something so acute and horrible as what happened to that soldier. I talked to Doctor Hoefnagel about it. Apparently, some girls and women starve themselves on purpose. It’s a documented disease of the mind.”
“Sarah has never had much trouble with eating. Even when she lost her tooth, she still ate her buttered bread just fine.” Sarah and Arthur had pretended to be knights, with Lucy the fair maiden to be fought over, preferably to the death. They battled each other with wooden swords. Arthur had a distaste for violence, but Sarah fought with a viciousness and anger particular to little girls. That he hit her in the face with such force that her lip split and one of her teeth broke clean at the root was partly her own fault; he had only meant to deflect her blow.
“You forget that time after Lucille died, when Sarah brought her home for a little bit,” Katje said. The words came carefully, each pronounced slowly, like a child still learning how to read feeling their way through a text or a foreigner who hadn’t yet realized that words in a running sentence were pronounced differently than when taken in isolation.
Oh, but that’s a very gentle way to describe a very disturbing thing , Lucy thought.
A few days after they had entombed Lucille, Sarah had become convinced her little girl was still alive. Because no one else could be convinced of this, she broke into the family crypt and took the body home.
A memory rose: Sarah clutching her daughter still wrapped in her shroud, now stained. She had removed the fabric from the little face, which was gray and pulpy. Mold in shades of fantastical orange and yellow had grown in the corner of her mouth. Unlike the flesh of her cheeks, it didn’t jiggle as Sarah rocked the small corpse.
“I told you,” she said, smiling, her eyes glittering in triumph. “I told you I could hear her call for me.”
Lucy locked the door against the servants and against Michael. No one could see this; no one could know.
“Oh God!” Sarah wailed, not a quarter of an hour after, when the delusion had broken. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, what have I done?”
It took the better part of an hour to calm her down. Then Sarah became terrified that Michael would have her committed for this, which Lucy had to admit was one of the more lucid thoughts her sister had had in days, and that set Sarah off again. Lucy had to push her to the ground and lie on top of her to keep her from hurting herself. All the while, little Lucille had lain in the room with them, her fluids seeping into the carpet, the smell of her causing Lucy’s eyes to water and her stomach to spasm.
“We all struggled with our appetites that day,” she said. Zwartwater had a way of blowing the rooms of her mind wide open. She never remembered things so variedly and vividly when she slept in her little room in Mrs. van Dijk’s house, which was a sensible place devoid of sentimentality.
To steer the conversation back to where she wanted it, she asked, “But you don’t think Sarah has been behaving oddly?”
Katje toyed with one of the buttons on her coat. “Doctor Hoefnagel says there’s a logical explanation for everything, even if we can’t see it.”
How exhausting this conversation was! Did Katje always hedge so? Perhaps it would have been a better idea to ask Mrs. van Dijk after all. The woman was many things, but known for beating around the bush, she was not. “But what do you think?” Lucy asked.
“My uncle told me it isn’t my place to think,” she said, then laughed. Her laughter ended abruptly. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking appalled. “I don’t know why I mentioned him. I’m not in the habit of talking about him.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said as she laid a hand on Katje’s shoulder.
Katje looked at that hand with a frown. “Please don’t do that,” she said softly.
Lucy removed her hand instantly. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you didn’t care for that sort of touch.”
“I don’t mean that,” Katje said. Color bled into her cheeks. “I mean how you are treating me, as if I’m fragile. I’m not!” She stomped her foot in frustration and roughly knuckled at her wet eyes. Her hands, Lucy saw, were balled into fists, and they trembled. “People look at me, and all they see is this abused girl they must pity. It’s a hard thing, to be reduced to the abuse you’ve suffered. People don’t understand that I am so much more than what my father and uncle did to me. Even worse is that I can never say that out loud, because what my father and uncle did to me, well, that’s not the sort of thing you can hint at, let alone discuss in polite society.”
Katje dropped her fists. “Only Sarah has ever seen beyond all of that. That’s why I love her terribly.”
Shame burned inside Lucy’s chest, creating patches of pink on her throat and cheeks. “Katje, if I ever treated you like that, I’m sorry. I’ll do my utmost best to ensure it won’t happen again.”
Katje gave her a weak smile. The color had drained from her face, leaving it extraordinarily pale. “I appreciate that, truly I do. Now, can we please go back? I don’t feel well. It’s almost that time of the month again. It afflicts me more than most.”
“Of course,” Lucy said, chastised.
They had walked for about five minutes when they ran into Mr. Hooiman. Lucy recognized him immediately from Sarah’s description: a brown giant with crooked legs. He stared at her, then blinked and took off his cap. “I’m sorry, miss. You gave me a fright. For a moment there, I thought you were Mrs. Schatteleyn. You two are as alike as two drops of water, but you’ve probably been told that all your lives.”
“It’s never unpleasant to be told again,” Lucy said. “You are the new groundskeeper, Mr. Hooiman?”
“I am.”
“I don’t envy you your job. So much rain here, and so much mud.”
“You get used to it. After a while, you barely feel it. As a matter of fact, I’ve just come from the fields. I was on my way to see Mr. Schatteleyn. The boys have found something else, and I thought he might want to have a look at it, seeing as he and his wife were so interested last time we found something.”
Her mouth turned dry. She swallowed. Something in her throat clicked, as if she were a clockwork toy rather than a young woman. “Do you mean the bog woman?”
“It was a woman? We couldn’t tell.”
“What did you find?”
He thrust his hand in his pocket, withdrew it, and held it open with the palm up. The inside of his hand was much paler than the rest of him, though the creases were black with dirt. Cupped in his hand lay a golden ring. “There’s something written on the inside, but I can’t make it out, and most of the boys can’t read. We think it’s a wedding ring. It might have belonged to the body. We found it in the same field.”