Page 15 of Blood on Her Tongue

Chapter 15

After Lucy finished reading, she sat feeling sick and chilled. Her mind, usually so active, flitting from thought to thought, was painfully focused on one thing and one thing only.

MW.

The initials of the murdered wife.

M could stand for Marianne .

Sarah had claimed Marianne was the bog woman’s name.

According to the husband’s testimony, Marianne knew things she shouldn’t or couldn’t. It had been one of many symptoms— symptoms that afflict Sarah, too, like the fear she inspires in animals and her lack of appetite, and like Marianne she suddenly cusses like a sailor— that had made him believe she was a changeling and had led to him murdering her.

Did this mean Sarah was some sort of changeling, too? It would explain everything, wouldn’t it?

There was only one small problem: changelings didn’t exist, and those who believed in them were either very young, very superstitious, or very mad. Besides, the idea that something had taken her sister’s place and was mimicking her in such a convincing manner that she had almost everyone fooled, well, that was too horrible, too dreadful, to even contemplate.

Lucy found her mind rejecting it even before she had properly entertained it. Much better to put her faith in logic and reason. Her sister was behaving strangely because she was recovering from a fever of the brain and the terrifying ordeal of almost being buried alive. The fact the bog woman’s name began with an m and Sarah had claimed she was named Marianne was a coincidence. A disquieting coincidence, yes, but a coincidence nonetheless.

Lucy desired to slam the book shut and ask the attendant to take it back to whatever dusty shelf it had come from so she could forget all about it. Instead, she smiled at Mrs. van Dijk and forced herself to say, “I think you’re right, Mrs. van Dijk. The bog woman must be the wife of this man. It would be very strange indeed if there were another woman buried on Michael’s land with a stone in her mouth.”

Under her employer’s watchful gaze, Lucy copied the entry four times: once for Arthur so he could use it if he ever wanted to write a paper about the case, once for the university currently in possession of the sad few remains of the bog woman, once for Michael in case he ever needed it to treat Sarah, and one final copy for herself. This one she folded and tucked into the pocket of her dress.

When she went to fetch Michael and tell him they had very likely solved the mystery of the identity of the bog woman, he stood and stretched, the joints in his shoulders and elbows popping.

“Pity,” he said, looking genuinely disappointed, “I was just gaining steam. I found some very interesting pamphlets. One had some truly filthy limericks. I’ll tell the attendant to keep that one from visitors of the fairer sex; we don’t want to offend your delicate sensibilities.” And he bent close to her and whispered in her ear, a grin on his face.

“There was a girl who made a poor wife,

“Her lovers and dalliances were rife,

“She was always wet as a duck,

“Truly a sweet little fuck,

“Much better suited to the prostitute’s life.”

She flushed spectacularly. “You’re lying about those limericks,” she said. Had she not been so perturbed by the document currently burning a hole in her pocket, she might have laughed.

“Of course. I made it up just now. Still, I did find myself thoroughly immersed in this project. I’d almost forgotten how much I enjoy it.”

“The writing of limericks or the reading of documents?”

“Both, though I was aiming for the latter.”

At the start of their marriage, he and Sarah had been almost inseparable and had created projects to do together. Lucy had boxes of her sister’s letters in which she talked in great detail about the butterfly nursery they’d built together, the plants they grew in the hothouse that had come all the way from the Dutch Indies on creaking ships, the hare Michael had shot and they had dissected with Arthur’s help. The number of projects and expeditions they had undertaken together had decreased sharply when Sarah found herself pregnant. By the time Lucille had died of scarlet fever, they had become almost nonexistent. Sarah had explained this away by saying she had some projects she’d rather do alone, but Lucy suspected it was Michael who no longer wished to work with her, perhaps because he had discovered Sarah’s intelligence far exceeded his own. He did so very much hate being corrected. Lucy had once done so unthinkingly, and he had been sullen and resentful even after she had apologized. Only after they’d had sex had he been nice again.

He would never do anything like that to Sarah, probably because he knew, instinctively, she would not simply stand there and take it like Lucy would.

Sudden tears fell from her eyes.

Startled, Michael lay a hand on her arm, searching for his handkerchief with the other. “Are you all right?” he asked in a low voice.

“Don’t mind me. I don’t even know why I’m crying,” she said, stepping away from him. But she did know.

She wanted her sister. It didn’t matter that she was now a sick, sullen creature with only one eye. Lucy felt overcome with love for her twin in all her demanding, obsessive, insufferable imperfection.

***

This desire to be with Sarah grew steadily on the drive back to Zwartwater. By the time the carriage drew up in front of the house, Lucy had been clutching her own hand with enough force to discolor the skin, first to white, then to pink, now to almost purple. She made herself thank Michael and Mrs. van Dijk for accompanying and helping her, then excused herself, saying she was anxious about her sister and wished to check on her.

She half walked, half ran up the stairs. The paper in her pocket rustled softly as the lifting of her legs creased it. At last: the thick oaken door leading to her sister’s bedroom. She opened it without knocking. Until Sarah had gotten married, there had been no need, and old habits die hard. She had taken two steps inside before her brain registered that something was wrong.

Sarah was not alone.

In her bed lay Katje, her nightshirt rucked up around her hips, her head thrown back, her eyes closed but her mouth open. Sarah lay on the bed with her, her hands gripping Katje’s thighs with such force, the skin was white and dimpled underneath her fingers, her face between the other girl’s legs, held there by Katje’s hand.

The room smelled of sweat and sex and blood and something rotten.

Shock nailed Lucy to the ground. The blood drained from her face and limbs, whooshing as it went. Black spots danced in her vision. Dear Lord, I’ve never been much of a fainter. Please don’t let me start now , she thought. Her hand—cold, weak—clutched the back of a chair. She stumbled heavily against it as her knees gave out, clung to it, and somehow managed not to let go and fall to the ground.

Though she couldn’t hear a thing over the hollow thumping of her heart, her feet dragging over the floorboards and the screech of the chair as she clasped it were loud enough to disturb the pair on the bed. Katje opened her eyes. They were glassy, the pupils overly large from the drugs Arthur had given her to make the stabbing pain in her womb bearable. They fixed upon Lucy. She frowned as she struggled to focus, seemingly on the cusp of saying something. Then her eyes simply slid off Lucy. Her back arched, and she whined and twisted her face against the pillow, her damp hair rasping against the fabric.

Sarah had looked up, too. Her eye patch had ridden up, revealing the tender hole underneath that Lucy still cleaned for her every day, the cotton wool damp and yellowed from where it had absorbed the fluids that leaked intermittently from the skin. Her remaining eye was empty, the way it used to be when she was sleepwalking. The lower half of her face was smeared with blood. It coated her mouth and cheeks; it had dripped down and stained the collar of her nightdress, plastering it to the white skin of her throat. She swallowed. Then she, too, looked away. She bent over Katje and resumed her drinking.

Lucy’s heart contracted fiercely, painfully, and the blood returned to her hands and feet, suffusing them with heat, extinguishing the motes of black that had speckled her vision. She blushed so furiously, her face and throat felt scalded. To witness something so private and intimate and then to be ignored, as if she were so insignificant, it didn’t matter that she had seen, was seeing it still…

Lucy got to her feet. Once in the hallway, she closed the door softly. Her face still burned. She lay the back of her hand against her cheek to cool it, but her fingers throbbed with warmth, too. Sweat prickled under her armpits, in the hollows of her knees. She went to her room in a kind of daze, seeing nothing, feeling nothing.

She sank into a chair and sat motionless. Yet, underneath the surface, her mind was in turmoil. It only had so much room for unwanted things. If she kept cramming in more, it would flood like a cesspool. Some things had to be dealt with straightaway, like finding her sister committing adultery with her husband’s poor female relation.

But her motives aren’t sexual, at least not completely , something within Lucy whispered. She thirsts for blood and found a way to slake it. And Katje would let her because she was an invert and thus enjoyed it. Hadn’t she told Lucy often how she loved Sarah more than anyone else?

Back to Sarah. This wasn’t normal. So little had been, these past few weeks, and now, thanks to her work in the archive, Lucy might finally have an explanation for it all, no matter how strange and inexplicable, no matter how much she wished it weren’t true.

She took the copy she had made of the court document out of her pocket, smoothed the folded paper, and feverishly read through it again. Her eyes snagged on certain words and phrases that she had rejected before as too strange and horrible to be true.

When pressed to explain what that meant, the Husband said she spooked the animals, knew things she should not, and had unnatural appetites… The Doctor was much perturbed by her for she seemed impervious to pain and stank like one several days dead and indeed had begun to show many signs of the Corpse… The Husband was at this time convinced his Wife was not truly his Wife but a changeling…

She lowered the sheet and pinched the bridge of her nose until her eyes watered with the pain of it, but still the words reverberated inside her head. Now that she had forced herself to contemplate them rather than reject them outright, she could no more deny them than she could fly, and the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became.

Her sister wasn’t her sister.

Oh, it looked like her sister, talked like her, and moved like her, but though the imitation was convincing at first glance, perhaps even at the second or third, as soon as one kept looking, one saw through it.

And whatever had taken up residence inside Sarah, it had lived inside the bog woman first.

Lucy let go of her nose. The blood flowed back into the bit of skin she had pinched, causing a sense of heat that brought even more tears to her eyes. She rubbed them away with her sleeve.

What she needed now was a plan. If only she hadn’t been so rash as to burn Sarah’s letters, her diary entry, the treatise on ticks! Evidence, all of it, that Sarah was possessed by something. Without it, who would believe her? Until an hour ago, she wouldn’t have believed it herself.

“And I know Sarah better than anyone,” she muttered. She stood and began to pace in an effort to get rid of the desperate, manic energy that had taken possession of her.

No matter if it was sickness or a parasite that currently played puppeteer with her sister, it was convincing, and for the areas where it wasn’t, people would find reasons to explain away its strange behaviors. Already Arthur had found explanations for Sarah’s— Not-Sarah’s —lack of appetite and the changes in her personality. As for everything else, well, there was always the excuse of madness. Once one had been deemed mad, anything and everything could be interpreted as a symptom, especially if one was a woman. A desire for sex, sullenness, cursing…

“Hell, if we go by those criteria, I am as mad as my sister. Even madder, because I talk out loud to myself,” Lucy said, then laughed, or perhaps sobbed; even she couldn’t be sure.

She didn’t want to be thought mad, but neither could she stand idly by and do nothing. The real Sarah might still be alive and trapped somewhere inside her body, waiting desperately for someone to notice what was going on, for someone to save her. The thought of her sister frightened and helpless, perhaps in pain, was maddening, sickening, and, above all, more than Lucy could bear.

This could not wait.

She’d go and confront Not-Sarah right now. Didn’t the best attacks have an element of surprise to them? “Of course, Not-Sarah will probably deny being Not-Sarah,” Lucy muttered to herself as she nervously smoothed some stray hairs against her scalp.

Demons were famous for lying.

Not-Sarah might not be a demon, but she was probably just as tricksy. Any creature with a certain level of intelligence would be, if only out of self-preservation. What Lucy needed was irrefutable proof even that thing couldn’t deny when confronted with it. She kept pacing as she forced herself to think.

When inspiration struck, it sent an electric shock down Lucy’s spine and raised all the hairs on her body. She opened her sewing kit and drew a pin from the cushion inside, which was shaped like a hedgehog, the pins and needles his spikes. Sarah had made it for her when they were children. The pin Lucy selected was almost as long as her little finger. She touched the tip to her thumb, then withdrew it. A drop of blood beaded from the puncture. She sucked her thumb, doing her best to ignore the taste of salt and metal, and stuck the pin just below the waistband of her skirt, where she could withdraw it easily but the folds hid it from view.

Before she could lose her nerve, she went into the hallway and almost ran to her sister’s room. Yet, once there, she faltered. She rested her forehead against one of the windows. It had begun to rain. Drops ran down the glass. The rain came so thick and fast, it formed a layer of distortion; when Lucy looked outside, the world warbled. She closed her eyes, trying not to feel sick. Nerves writhed in her belly like snakes.

Don’t be a coward , she admonished, then forced herself to close the short distance between the window and the door to her sister’s room. This time, she did knock.

“Enter,” Sarah called.