Page 20 of Blood on Her Tongue

Chapter 20

How dare she? Lucy thought as she marched down the lawn and into the woods. The grass, stiff with hoarfrost, crunched under her buttoned boots. How dare she talk to me like that? How dare she think those things of me? After all I’ve done for her!

When she had been little and still beset by tantrums, she would throw things and scream till she threw up. She hadn’t done so in a long while, but her fury needed some sort of outlet, or something inside her would snap and kill her. She broke a branch off a tree and used it to slash at the bracken as she walked, making drops fly around. Already, it had begun to thaw.

To say Lucy was unwilling to help her twin whenever it inconvenienced her was a gross and utter lie. If Not-Sarah believed it, she was completely delusional. Lucy had come to be with her whenever she was needed, hadn’t she? And she had done so much besides. She was there to help Sarah pick out her trousseau when she got married, even though her heart felt as if it were being ripped to shreds; she held Sarah’s hair when her pregnancy made her vomit several times a day, and she wiped up the sick; she sewed and embroidered little Lucille’s baby clothes because Sarah had never had any patience or talent for needlework but wanted beautiful things for her little girl.

A thousand things Lucy had done for Sarah, painful things and disgusting things and boring things, never asking for anything in return.

Besides, even if she discounted all that, it was still absolutely irrational of Not-Sarah to be angry with Lucy for not rejoicing at the thought of murder. Lucy had always believed herself capable of killing someone for Sarah, but whenever she had thought of it, she imagined someone who had wronged her sister terribly, thus justifying the act of murder. She knew instinctively and hotly that she would destroy anyone who dared to hurt her sister. She would rip out their throat and desecrate their body, then dance on their grave and gladly burn in hell for it.

But to kill someone who had not harmed her sister, that was different.

If I can even consider that parasite my sister.

She looked like Sarah, talked like Sarah, acted like Sarah, but that did that make her Sarah?

This philosophical conundrum aside, Lucy was ill-equipped for murder. She had never managed to conceive of the act beyond abstract terms. To balk at the reality of it was only natural. Truly, Not-Sarah should have been far more concerned if she had found Lucy willing and eager, but then her sister could be unbelievably delusional and selfish.

Lucy gave an oak tree a sound thrashing with her stick until the heat beat off her face and hands and her breath steamed from her mouth in great quick plumes.

Delusional and selfish, yes. How dare Not-Sarah say Lucy was responsible for her own unhappiness? How dare she even think it! She had taken the one man Lucy had ever loved and wanted for herself, hadn’t she? And after their parents had died and left her penniless, all her prospects had been dashed.

Well, not quite. Michael could have given her a dowry and put her back on the marriage market, had she asked. She hadn’t because she was too proud to take his money. But even if it weren’t for him, Arthur had still proposed to her. The only reason she hadn’t taken him up on his offer was out of respect, both for herself and for him. She didn’t love him. She’d rather be a spinster than wedded just for the sake of it. To think, though, that her sister felt she wasn’t responsible for Lucy’s current situation, as if it hadn’t been absolutely cruel of her to snatch up and marry the one man Lucy had ever loved…

Though perhaps she didn’t know that at the time , a little voice piped up. Not-Sarah hadn’t told her when, exactly, she’d realized Lucy loved him.

No! She must have known from the start. Lucy hadn’t told her, but that didn’t mean Sarah couldn’t have known. They never kept secrets from each other.

Except for the fact you were Michael’s mistress for a while . That Sarah still didn’t know and did not suspect.

Naturally.

Lucy wouldn’t expect something as vile and underhanded as that of her twin either.

And it was vile and underhanded. She knew that. She had known it from the very beginning but had shoved the knowledge aside because she had wanted him. Oh, she could pretend she had merely wanted to comfort him and one thing had led to another, but lifting your skirts and bending over for a man again and again was a choice, not a natural law. Yes, she had done it partly so she would know what it was like and she and Sarah could be alike again, but the truth of the matter was that she had wanted Michael to love her, to desire her, to prefer her over Sarah, as if love and life were competitions.

She was spineless after all, then—and rotten and selfish, too.

Lucy twisted the stick in her hands, scraping her palms raw. The wet bark peeled away in strips, revealing the smooth wood underneath, pale as bone.

Why did it always keep coming back to Michael? Her life did not revolve around him. God knew Sarah’s never had; she had her insects to study and her books to read and her papers to write and her Katje to kiss. As children, Lucy and Sarah had rarely ever fought. There had been little frustrations, of course, small squabbles. Naturally; they were only human. These feelings of resentment and envy, though? They hadn’t come about until Michael stepped into their lives.

It would’ve been better if he never had.

No man was worth hating and despising your sister for, nor yourself, for that matter. That was why she had broken things off between them after Sarah had gotten well again, then taken the position as Mrs. van Dijk’s companion that Arthur had found for her when she had let him know she no longer wished to live at Zwartwater.

All the same, Not-Sarah shouldn’t have raged at Lucy like she had, shouldn’t have said such awful things. Lucy allowed herself to be inconvenienced by her sister all the time, for instance…

And so her thoughts went around and around in circles. She was too hurt to admit to herself what she knew deep down: that, in some things, her sister had been right.

***

That night, it stormed. The wind stripped trees of their bark and branches. It howled, threw things, like a child having a tantrum. Raindrops cold and hard as bullets smashed against walls and windows and wormed their way into every nook and cranny. Soon, rain trickled down the walls and ruined the wallpaper or dripped from the roof. The maids had to bring buckets and bowls to catch the drops.

By morning, the storm had spent itself. The only movement among the trees came from the occasional raindrop falling to the ground and rippling the pools. The ground, already sodden and waterlogged, had been unable to drink up the rain. A sheet of water lay across the land, reflecting the bruised sky and flagellated trees overhead. Young trees had been ripped from the soil and lay helplessly draped across the roads, their roots washed clean of clods of earth and raised to the clouds as if in supplication. The air smelled of water, of churned-up mud and broken wood.

There was no question of Mrs. van Dijk leaving now. Even if the roads had been passable, which they were not and would not be until at least some of those trees could be cut and removed, no sane man would send out a horse in these conditions. The risk of it stumbling and breaking a leg was simply too great.

Lucy spent the day in her room, the door locked against her sister. The next day, too, she refused to talk to her. Not even Michael could persuade her to do otherwise. In the end, he threw up his hands and exclaimed, “I don’t much care what has caused this rift between you, only that you make amends. Nothing fouls up a house’s atmosphere the way women fighting does.”

“Then tell your wife to apologize to me and mean it this time, and I shall do the same!” she snapped, then went back to her diary. She had filled page upon page with her thoughts on her sister, on Not-Sarah, on Michael. Her fingers were smeared with ink, the tips of her thumb and index finger dented from where she held the pen. It wasn’t the one Michael had given her for her birthday—God knew where that one had gone once it had been plucked from her sister’s socket—but one Sarah had bought for her when she was about fifteen, just because she could. They had given each other little gifts often: a pretty ribbon, a dried flower, a drawing the size of a stamp dabbed with scent. Over time, the pen’s nib had split too far, doubling every stroke, twinning each word.

By the third day, the water had gone down in many places, and most of the fallen trees had been cut and dragged to the side of the road, making them passable again. That morning, Katje knocked on Lucy’s door and begged to talk to her. Lucy ignored her and would have gone on ignoring her, had there not been a heavy thump. When she opened the door, she found the girl had fainted.

Lucy cursed softly, then dragged her inside and placed her feet on the chair to let the blood flow to her brain. Soon, Katje moaned and tried to move her head away, rubbing her cheek against the carpet until it looked raw. The other, by contrast, was smooth and white as the inside of a shell. It took about five more minutes before she regained full consciousness. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I think I fainted.”

Lucy looked down on her, her arms folded across her chest. Her mouth, she knew, must have been an angry line, pale from tautness, but she couldn’t help it. “You’ve been letting her feed from you, haven’t you?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie. I can see the marks on your wrist. Those are fresh. You look pale as well, and your pulse is much too fast. You let her feed from you even before I knew what she was.”

“Maybe I have,” Katje admitted.

Lucy began to tap her foot in annoyance. “You want her to drain you? You want her to kill you, then eat you up? Don’t be stupid. She’d never be able to eat you without others noticing. Besides, where would she be without you? Do you think others would let her live if they knew the truth of what she is, let alone help her? Dying for someone is easy. If you really want to help her, stay alive.”

“Then help me. I can’t do it alone,” Katje begged. Tears rolled from her eyes over her temples, beading in her hair. One fell into the whorl of her ear. She rubbed it away with her little finger.

“I am trying to help! Why can’t you see that?” Lucy realized she had raised her voice. She swallowed, then forced herself to speak calmly. Katje tended to cringe whenever she was shouted at, which she didn’t deserve.

“I am trying to help,” Lucy said, quieter now. “I’ve been thinking the matter through these past few days,”—she had, during those moments when she wasn’t stewing in anger or pity or self-hatred, whichever one had her gripped—“and I don’t see an easy solution. A good murder is complicated. Even if we disregard the ethics of it, there’s still the logistics to consider. If we are caught, we will be sent to jail, or worse: the madhouse. Why must my carefulness be seen as cowardice?”

Katje said, “If she eats the body, there’s no body, and without a body, there’s no crime.”

“We don’t know how long she needs to consume an entire body, and even if she could do that swiftly, we still need to get the body, then get the body to her or her to the body.”

Katje took hold of her hand. Her fingers were cool and clammy. “Whatever we do, we must hurry. She’s getting frantic. She’s famished , Lucy.”

“I know that. I…”

Down the hallway, where Not-Sarah’s room was, Pasja began to bark hysterically. Lucy’s heart thumped against her ribs like a bird throwing itself against the bars of its cage. She swallowed, feeling the veins in her throat throb as the blood was forced through it at great speed. She locked eyes with Katje. “Did you leave my sister in the care of a servant?”

Please , she thought, please tell me you didn’t. Please tell me she is by herself right now.

Because if Katje hadn’t, and Not-Sarah—starving, desperate—had been left in the same room as a highly edible member of the staff she had no emotional attachment to…

“No,” Katje said.

Lucy relaxed. Of course, Katje wouldn’t let Not-Sarah close to a servant, for all their sakes. “Thank God for that,” she said.

Katje smiled weakly. Her eyes were soft, dreamlike. Perhaps she had taken a drop of laudanum to help numb the pain of Not-Sarah biting her. “I left her with Mrs. van Dijk.”

Whatever relief Lucy had felt evaporated. “You left her alone with Mrs. van Dijk? Old, frail, defenseless Mrs. van Dijk?”

Her eyes lost some of that blurredness. “Mrs. van Dijk asked me to. She said she was leaving, and there was something she had to say to Sarah, something private.”

“Oh, Katje, how could you!”

She trembled. “I didn’t think… But she wouldn’t, surely she wouldn’t, not when I promised her I’d go talk to you, and we’d help her…”

But she would, and if Pasja’s manic barking was anything to go by, she already had.

Fuck.

“Stay here,” Lucy ordered. “If you get up now, you’ll just faint again.”

“But I…”

“Stay!” Lucy yelled. She was already halfway through the door, her hands holding up the slippery stuff of her skirts so she could run without tripping over the hem. Pasja stood in front of the door to her sister’s room, her hackles raised, her lips pulled up so far that her snout looked like a crumpled piece of paper. She barked incessantly, the sound echoing between the thick walls, so loud as to be painful.

“Easy, girl!” Lucy said. When she reached for the door handle, the dog whined and butted her head against the wood in her eagerness to get in. Lucy gripped her collar to hold her back, but she thrashed and screamed.

Lucy had never heard a dog scream before.

It was a nerve-shattering sound, high and panicked, the sound a terrified child might have made.

“Hush, Pasja!” Lucy pleaded, trying to soothe the dog by laying a hand on her trembling haunches, but Pasja wouldn’t be consoled. She struggled against Lucy, her nails scrabbling against the floorboards, scoring the wood. The collar bit deep into her slender throat, cutting off another scream.

They struggled until Pasja went limp. Lucy threw an arm around the dog’s heaving chest to hold her back and eased the pressure on her throat. Pasja let out a horrendous honking cough, her tongue lolling from her mouth. It was flecked with foam and blood.

“Hush, girl. It’ll be all right. You mustn’t get so worked up,” Lucy said, then rubbed her under her chin with a trembling hand, taking care not to touch the bruised part of her throat. The fur there, usually so soft that it was almost impossible to tear herself away from fondling it, was stiffening from all the drool.

Lucy righted herself. With one hand still clasping the leather collar, she opened the door at a crack. Pasja stiffened, her nose trembling. A smell wafted through the crack, cloying, so thick that Lucy tasted it at the back of her throat with every breath.

It was the smell of the abattoir.

Without warning, Pasja bolted forward, ramming the door with her slender head, opening it. Lucy tried to hold her back, but she hadn’t been prepared and wasn’t strong enough. She fell to her knees, her arm feeling like it was being ripped from its socket. She tried to pull back, but her fingers were still hooked around the collar. Pasja kept going, choking and whining and growling. Some of her nails had cracked or come away altogether; her paws left bloody lines on the floorboards.

Mercifully, the collar snapped.

Lucy lay where she had been dropped. Her shoulder was on fire, flames of pain licking down her back and arm. Her fingers burned, too, the blood pounding at the tips as if pooling there.

No matter. They were still attached, weren’t they? Although wiggling them made it feel as if hot rods were being driven through the bone, she had more pressing concerns. With her good arm, she forced herself up, then looked around the room.

It was in utter disarray.

The little writing desk had been toppled. The inkwell had shattered, leaving a pool of gleaming midnight. Some of it had been sucked up by the stack of diaries that had fallen. They lay bent, their pages creased. The binding had broken in one of them, and pages full of Sarah’s meticulous handwriting lay scattered on the floor like leaves in a forest. Some of them had the print of a bare foot on them done in ink.

Lucy followed the trail of footsteps. It led past the writing desk and onto the bed, ruining the sheets. Though if the ink hadn’t ruined them, Pasja’s bloody paws would have. She had jumped on the bed and half crouched at the end, a snarl rumbling through her thin frame.

Not-Sarah had clambered on top of the bed’s headboard to get away from the dog and now stood pressed hard against the wall, the tendons in her feet taut as they gripped the wood. Her mouth was smeared with blood. She bared her teeth at Pasja. The porcelain one had cracked. One of her hands was mangled. Blood dripped slowly from her balled fist and ran down the wallpaper. Some of the fingers stood at an impossible angle. It was a wonder they were still attached, Lucy thought. By all rights, they should have fallen off. At the very least, jagged ends of bone should protrude from her knuckles. They…

They weren’t her own fingers.