Page 2 of Blood on Her Tongue

Chapter 2

Lucy arrived around six in the evening. She had rarely been so relieved to see the stone letters, now much faded, above the front door, spelling out the house’s name: ZWARTWATER.

She had thought it an odd name for an estate until she had seen it for the first time, now almost five years ago, when her parents had still been alive. Michael had invited both sisters to stay with him, Sarah because he was courting her and Lucy for the sake of propriety. The house had been built on soft ground unsuited for stone so heavy, which made the whole structure sag to one side. This, in combination with the west wing, which had been built much more recently in a different style, gave the house the appearance of having suffered a stroke. There was beauty in it still, the way imperfect things can be beautiful, but it was a beauty of a dark and fading kind.

The ground was so soft because the land had used to be bog, now largely drained. Yet the draining had lowered the land considerably and brought it much closer to the groundwater, which meant the soil could only take in a little liquid until it became swollen and sodden. Thus, every fall of rain turned the earth to mud and created large puddles. In summer, these functioned as nurseries for insects; until the discovery of Peruvian bark, the locals had been riddled with malaria. In autumn and winter, when the sun was weak and often hidden, the grounds of the estate were pockmarked with large expanses of water that didn’t shrink for days, often even weeks. The dark soil colored the water black.

Black water. Zwart water .

A fitting name, yes, but an ominous one, too , Lucy had thought that day five years ago. The thought came back to her as soon as the house appeared through the sheets of ceaseless rain, and it lingered as a servant led her upstairs to see her sister. Normally, Sarah would have fetched her from the station with the horse trap, or she’d be waiting for her in the hallway, pacing impatiently, then running for the door as soon as she heard the creak of the carriage outside, laughing with the joy of being reunited with her twin.

No laughter now. The only sound came from Lucy’s broken heel and her kid gloves. The leather creaked and strained at the seams every time she opened her hand, then closed it around the banister. The rain had ruined them, as it had ruined the silk of her dress. Despite Michael’s assurances, no one had been waiting for her at the station. Rather than wait for the stationmaster to send someone up to the house, she began walking herself, her broken shoe and the rain be damned. Anything was better than waiting. The servant driving the horse trap found her after only fifteen minutes, but by then, her clothes had already been ruined. It was a waste, but she could not find it within herself to care. There would be other gloves, other dresses. She had only one sister.

Arthur was waiting for Lucy outside the sickroom. He was a tall thin man with blond hair the color of honey, though his mustache was much darker. He grew it in the hope it lent him a sense of authority; his face was a boyish one, the cheeks round and red. A kind face, Lucy had often thought, the sort of face you’d be happy to see at your bedside when you felt weak and unwell. It suited him.

They had grown up together, she, Sarah, and Arthur. Their parents had been friends and moved in the same circles. Arthur was almost five years older than Sarah and Lucy but made a good playmate, patient and kind. Because he had three older brothers, he had to make his own way in the world, and he did so by going to university and studying to be a doctor. He joined student societies, and there he met Michael, the only son of a noble family who stood to inherit the large family estate once his father passed. For men like Michael, university was often not a time to learn but a time to drink and whore and gamble before they married and took up their responsibilities as heirs.

Yet Michael was serious in his studies and pursued knowledge doggedly even when his father died and left Zwartwater to him. Though he had never been able to settle on a single subject and therefore became a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, university had drawn him and Arthur together. That, in turn, led Michael to the Goedhart twins. He and Sarah were engaged within three months of their first meeting, then married as soon as Michael finished his studies. He had secured a position as a country doctor for Arthur, which was unglamorous, the pay poor and the work hard, but it had the advantage of keeping them close together.

It all seems so long ago now and yet no time at all, Lucy thought tiredly. Arthur smiled at her, took hold of her left hand. He did not flinch at the feel of the sodden leather, but he did say, in a soft, concerned voice, not quite the same he used with patients but not very much different either, “You are very wet.”

“I shall change once I’ve seen my sister,” she said.

“You might catch a cold. Your lungs…” Again, he did not continue.

Briefly, she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she gave his fingers, which she still held in her gloved hand, a little squeeze. “I shall change once I’ve seen my sister,” she repeated, not unkindly. “Now tell me: What exactly ails her?”

“A fever of the brain; she has a blinding pain in her head. As a result, she can’t keep anything down. You must try not to be frightened when you see her; she’s much changed. Ever since last night, she is often unconscious, and when she isn’t, she raves, so you mustn’t be startled if she says strange things either.”

“Is it like last time?” Lucy asked.

Arthur hesitated, then said, “In a way. It shall pass much faster, since her fever is the culprit this time, not her mind fracturing. When the fever breaks, she’ll be her old self again.”

“What sort of strange things does she say?”

He was quiet for a moment, rubbed his face in that harsh way men can often be seen to do but women never, and said, “She seems convinced there is someone, a woman, who means her harm.”

A hot little coal of worry and dread burned in Lucy’s breast. The sensation traveled all the way up to her throat, causing her to swallow thickly. The thought of her sister in pain had been agony; knowing she was confused and frightened as well was, quite frankly, unbearable. “What woman?”

Arthur shrugged. “I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. It’s not real.”

“It’s real to her. Please,” she said, “let me see my sister.”

Together they went into the room, which was not Sarah’s own but a guest room rarely in use. The curtains were closed, plunging the room into darkness; the only light came from the fire roaring in the hearth, which made the room hot and stuffy. Immediately, Lucy’s clothes began to steam. She could see very little in the dark. But she could smell: her own wet clothes, plus soap and syrupy medicine administered with silver spoons. Underneath those scents was the stench of an unwashed body sweating, and underneath that, the sweet whiff of rot.

As her eyes adjusted, she could make out the solid shapes of the furniture: a silk dressing screen with its painted flowers; a chest of drawers; a little writing desk with dainty legs. Its chair had been moved next to the bed and was currently occupied by a young woman with close-cropped dark curls. She wore a simple dress, as befitted her station as a poor relation to Michael subsisting on his charity. Its color was impossible to guess in the queer half-light. She got up when she saw them and went to Lucy to embrace her. She felt hot to the touch.

“Katje,” Lucy murmured.

“It’s good you are here,” Katje whispered, then smiled. She was a nervous creature, with a twitch around her mouth and a tendency to look one in the eye only in little bursts. Lucy did not care for eye contact either, and so she did not mind.

“How has she been?” Arthur asked.

“A little restless,” Katje confessed. “She kept tossing and turning.”

“Did she speak?”

“Sometimes, but her words were slurred, and I couldn’t make them out. I think she talked in her sleep.” As a child, Sarah had often walked in her sleep, and many things besides. The habit came back to her occasionally, often in times of stress.

“Nothing more?” Arthur asked.

Katje shook her head.

They all spoke in hushed voices. As if we are in the room of one already dead , Lucy thought, then shuddered violently, painfully. She moved past Katje, to the bed in which her sister lay, and bent over to look at Sarah.

The disease had ravaged her. Before, they had been so alike that no one could tell them apart, and looking into a mirror had made Lucy uneasy because the face staring back at her should have belonged to Sarah but did not. Now there could be no confusion. Whereas Lucy looked reasonably healthy, Sarah was gaunt and sick. She had lost weight so rapidly, her skin hung loosely around her bones, like a piece of cloth inexpertly draped over a frame.

Lying on top of the covers, Sarah’s hand was a strange thing, almost translucent yet not threaded through with veins as one might expect when the skin grows thin as onion paper. Waxen was the word that popped into Lucy’s mind. Sarah’s lips, too, were almost white, save for a sore that bloomed red and brown in the right corner of her mouth. Apart from that little wound, only her cheeks retained any color: they were a shocking pink—not the shade of a healthy blush but that of a patch of badly scalded skin.

“Sarah, I’m here,” Lucy said, gently taking hold of her hand. Up until Sarah’s marriage, which had taken her to Zwartwater and thus far away from Lucy, they’d used to hold hands all the time. With clasped hands they had slithered out of their mother; perhaps that was why nothing had more power to soothe Lucy than Sarah’s slim fingers twining with hers. Sarah, always restless, always eager and quick and laughing, had a habit of toying with Lucy’s fingers, of moving them this way and that, and stroking her knuckles and the dips in between. When Sarah had married and Lucy had slipped her hand into her sister’s, the golden wedding band had felt wrong at first. It was not quite cold but hard and unyielding, biting into the flesh when firmly pressed against.

This hand, so slight and limp, didn’t feel like it belonged to her sister at all.

The shock of it was enormous. It drove the breath from Lucy’s body, made her throat smart. Stinging tears welled in her eyes. As she bent closer to her sister to press a kiss on her burning forehead, gravity coaxed them from her eyes, and they fell: one to land in Sarah’s hair and lie there unbroken, and the other to drip on the bridge of Sarah’s nose, where it balanced precariously, then slid down the left side, following the curve of her nostril.

Sarah’s eyelids twitched. Slowly, she opened her eyes. They were very large and wet in that dry sunken face.

Like the face of the bog woman in her drawing , Lucy thought, and instantly felt thoroughly chilled.

“Lucy,” Sarah murmured, “are you really here?” Her breath was foul, stinking of sickness and hunger and thirst.

“I am,” Lucy said, then gave her sister’s hand a firm squeeze.

Her sister’s mouth stretched to the sides, drawing her lips taut, causing the sore to crack and weep, and revealing her teeth. In childhood, she had lost the one next to her upper-right incisor. It had been replaced by a fake made of porcelain, its shiny white surface incongruous with the other teeth; Sarah’s love for tea had slightly discolored her natural ones. In that cadaverous face, her teeth were huge, as were her eyes, now opened very wide in terror. “Leave, at once,” she begged, clutching at Lucy’s hand with such strength that the little bones ground together.

“But I’ve only just arrived. I’ve come to nurse you.” Lucy said.

“You can’t stay. She’s killed before and will kill again if I let her. I’ve seen it, Lucy. I’ve lived it. She’s hungry. Oh, I’ve never known a hunger like hers!” she said. Her eyes, fever bright, gleamed wetly.

Fear, primal and deep, froze Lucy to her very marrow. Had Arthur not gently disentangled her hand from her sister’s grip and moved her to the side so he could tend to his patient, she might have stood like that forever, still and stiff, her heart lurching sickeningly.

“Like I said, she doesn’t know what she’s saying,” he said softly. Then, with a brighter voice, he coaxed, “Sarah, you aren’t well. You must drink this.” He brought a glass to her lips.

“No! You’re lying to me. You’re trying to feed me that disgusting mush again, bread softened in milk. You want me to eat. You know I mustn’t,” she moaned, twisting her face away.

“It’s only water. Feel how cool it is.” He held the glass gently against her forehead.

She pressed hard against it and moaned, and the sound was suffused with such deep pleasure, it embarrassed Lucy.

Arthur said, “I know. Now drink up; it’ll soothe the fire in your brain.”

Eagerly, Sarah clasped his arm to guide the glass to her mouth.

And then she bit him.