Page 23 of Blood on Her Tongue

Chapter 23

The news wasn’t a shock, exactly, but it still landed heavily in her belly. From there, it sent out little creeping tendrils of dread, as if her veins had been injected with ice water. She swallowed against her gorge rising, somehow managing not to let her grip on Magda’s arm slacken. “Then my sister is at the madhouse now?” she asked.

“She might be, unless there’s no room for her at the local one. Then they must find a different one for her, won’t they? Until they find a place for her, he can keep her safe and asleep in the room where he usually performs his surgeries,” Magda explained.

Lucy had to do something, and she had to do it fast. If only she weren’t so abominable at performing under pressure! She preferred mulling a question over like a cow chewing cud. No time for that now. Every minute she dawdled, Arthur and Michael took her sister farther away from her and closer to the asylum. She might already be there. Who was to say there wasn’t a spot available straightaway for a case as dire as Not-Sarah’s, a case where the man who would pay for her stay had deep pockets and every incentive to get the matter over with as quickly as possible?

She forced herself to think fast. “Where’s Katje?”

Magda had long since stopped trying to pull free and now stood with an impression on her face Lucy had only ever seen on marble statues supposed to represent long-suffering martyrs. “Miss Katherina is locked in her room. The doctor gave her something to help her sleep, just like you. She was very distressed when they removed Mrs. Schatteleyn. Now please let go of my arm.”

“So you can fetch someone to administer another sedative to keep me nice and complacent and knocked out while my sister is taken from me? I don’t think so.”

Magda’s mask cracked. Underneath, Lucy found both annoyance and anger. “Miss Lucy,” she said, and she spoke as one would to a willful child, “I like to think I’ve been very patient with you and Mrs. Schatteleyn all this time, but my patience is running out now. If you don’t let go of my arm this instant, I’ll scream. Then they’ll come running and hold you down and give you another sedative, just as you said. If you let go and promise to sit quietly, I won’t call anyone. Miss.” The final word was added as an afterthought.

“You shouldn’t talk to me like that. It’s insulting and improper,” Lucy said.

Magda smiled. It was more a baring of her teeth than a genuine smile. “I don’t give a damn.”

A chill ran down Lucy’s spine like a wave of cold water, drenching her heart in her chest. It stuttered, strained through the next beat, then sped up. “Servants who are insolent never stay servants for very long,” she tried, but the smile stayed firmly on Magda’s face.

“You rich ladies with your fancy ways like to think you’re so high and mighty, but you’re no better than the rest of us just because you don’t have to wash your own bloody rags and unmentionables. Do you think Mr. Schatteleyn will keep on a lady’s maid when there’s no lady?”

“He won’t give you a good reference if he hears you talking like that.”

“I think he will. I could tell some tall tales about Mrs. Schatteleyn, couldn’t I?”

I should’ve paid closer attention to her , Lucy thought. Had the circumstances been different, she would have taken more of an interest in Magda.

Too late now.

Another opportunity missed. God, was she cursed to always run after the facts, never ahead of them, condemned to clean up messes but never able to prevent them?

No matter. Crying over spilled milk didn’t put it back in the bottle. All one could do was throw a rag in the puddle to soak it up, then give the surface a good wipe to prevent it from becoming sticky and smelling sour.

She loosened her grip on Magda’s arm.

The maid stepped away, rolled up her sleeve, and massaged the flesh that had reddened under the pressure of Lucy’s grip. “Look at what you’ve done,” she said, tutting.

“I’m sorry, Magda. I shouldn’t have done it. I…”

Magda smacked Lucy’s temple with her fist. Lucy’s head snapped to the side and struck the bedpost, which cut it.

The pain was sickening, sharp and continuous at first, then assailing her in steady waves. A trickle of blood ran down the side of her face, so soft and slow that it was almost a caress. She looked up at Magda in shocked confusion.

“That’ll teach you to grab me, you wicked thing,” Magda said. “Now, will you be good and quiet?”

Stunned, Lucy nodded.

“Good. That’s what we like to see,” Magda said. She smoothed her sleeve down over her arm, did up the button at the cuff, then sat in the chair beside the bed and took up her needlework. She was mending one of Sarah’s blouses, a delicate thing of crushed silk. Perhaps she meant to keep it for herself. Not-Sarah didn’t need many clothes where she was going.

Lucy fought the urge to cry. Her nose stung with it. She pinched the bridge hard to press the tears down. Crying was something children did—or women who were disturbed in their faculties.

I could cry if I wanted, then.

It wouldn’t make any difference. They already thought her hysterical, maybe even mad. But no, she wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t give Magda the satisfaction. The cut was small; the bleeding had already stopped. Hardly something to cry about. It would be from surprise more than anything else anyway, and that, too, was already waning.

Besides, Lucy had no time to feel sorry for herself. She had to get out and save her sister from Michael and Arthur. First, though, there was the small matter of Magda, who stood between her and the way out.

“Magda,” Lucy said in a little voice.

“Yes, Miss Lucy?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t feel well at all. I think I might be sick.”

Magda sighed and handed her the chamber pot. It was made of porcelain and painted green with silver stripes to match the wallpaper. Lucy gripped it, hunched over it, made soft gagging noises. Tendrils of hair had come loose and hung in front of her face.

“For Pete’s sake,” Magda muttered, then bent close to grab her hair and hold it back.

Lucy swung the pot against Magda’s head with as much force as she could. A crack ran through the porcelain. Magda cried out and fell to the ground, holding her face with her hands, and oh, wasn’t the sight and sound of it delicious?

No time to dwell on it, though. Lucy jumped over her and ran for the door. If it was locked, she was done for.

Please don’t let it be locked…

The knob turned without resistance. She yanked the door open and ran down the hallway, toward the stairs. Behind her, she heard Magda shout, heard the maid’s footsteps as she pursued.

Should’ve hit her harder. Should’ve cracked her skull till her brains ran out like yolk from a broken egg.

Lucy took the stairs as fast as she was able before leaping down the final dozen steps. Her ankles screamed as she hit the floor, the impact traveling up her shins, but she didn’t stop. Through the main hallway, out through the front door, down the lawn, and into the woods. She expected to be grabbed at any moment, but if anyone’s hands reached for her, they didn’t manage to catch her. She ran until she couldn’t anymore. When that moment came, she forced her way into the bracken and crouched there, waiting to see if anyone was still after her.

Her lungs burned. Both her breathing and her heartbeat came with a dizzying speed. She couldn’t hear anything over the sound they made. She waited for what she guessed was about ten minutes, then waded out, took hold of a tree, bent forward, and was sick after all. Mucus clotted in her throat. She coughed and coughed until red dots spangled her vision and her throat felt scraped bloody, then straightened herself and leaned against the tree.

“Oh, Lucy, you’ve been rash indeed,” she said to herself. There was no way back now. Better to press on, to persevere. She wiped the sweat off her brow with her sleeve, found a deer trail that would keep her off the main road—if the servants were to look for her, that was the first place they’d search—and began to walk.

In her mad dash, there had been no time to dress properly. She had no coat, no hat, no scarf nor gloves. The lack of a hat would make people think her indecent, and the lack of a coat, mad. All the more reason to get to Arthur’s house quickly.

It didn’t take long before the heat of the flight left her and she began to shiver. She stuck her hands into her pockets, then clenched and unclenched them to keep the blood flowing, but they turned red with cold.

Her bare hands were less of a problem than her feet. She hadn’t run out with nothing on them, but the thin slippers she was wearing were meant to be worn around the house. They didn’t even have proper soles. With every step, the twigs and stones sprinkled on the road bruised her feet. A branch ripped from a bush of brambles pierced straight through the embroidered fabric and bit into the soft pad underneath her right big toe. Soon she was limping. When she had to wade through a puddle that had swallowed part of the road, the water reaching her knees, she was almost grateful for the icy mud and water the slippers sucked up; they numbed her feet and thus the pain.

It took three hours to walk to the village. Once she made her way through the thin line of woods surrounding the estate, there was only heathland. Clusters of dead grass long as most women’s hair swayed in the wind. The rare lone tree stood naked and forlorn, its thin limbs stretched imploringly to the sky.

By now, the sun had thoroughly set, but she had the light of the stars and moon to guide her. It was a thin pale light, painting everything around her in hues of gray and blue. Thin tendrils of mist crept from the earth and nipped at her ankles. It was said that they heralded the arrival of the witte wieven , white women who came out at night from the burial mounds that were everywhere on the Dutch heath, hungry for gold, hungry for souls. They were the restless ghosts of witches, or fairies wishing to lure people off the straight and narrow, or perhaps something else altogether.

They could be the ghosts of those unfortunates who have drowned in the bog .

Once this thought had entered her mind, it would not leave her be. How many had lost their lives here, trapped by the mud that slowly pulled them in deeper until cold black water forced its way into their mouth and lungs? So few had ever been found, yet this land had been hungry since before the Romans had come to conquer. The ground beneath her must be stacked with corpses looking like Marianne.

Perhaps it was a trick of the moonlight as it glided over the wet landscape, or maybe her mind had finally broken under the strain of all the fear of the past few weeks, all that repressed desire and hunger and rage—whatever it was, Lucy could see them now, the veil separating her world from others finally blown away: the bog people as far as the eye could see, all tanned and dyed, lying snugly within the black earth like blankets folded in a drawer, dreaming, waiting.

Just ahead of her, buried beneath the road, lay what she thought might be a woman. She couldn’t be sure. To be taken by the bog meant to be altered, and whatever outward signs of a sex this body had once possessed had been erased. This woman—for Lucy could not help but think of her as such, just as Sarah had instinctively known Marianne was a woman—was dressed in rags and wore a rope around her neck, tightly knotted.

Lucy hesitated. Would this woman, unfed for so long, try to reach for her and drag her into her cool leathery embrace? As Lucy quickly stepped over her, she sighed and turned toward her as a child tucked tightly into bed might, slowly and with difficulty.

She’s looking at me , Lucy thought.

Not that this woman had any eyes to look with. The bog had eaten those, as well as the bones. All the same, she was watching Lucy.

All of them were.

As Lucy passed the bodies, they turned one by one so as to keep looking at her. Their muscles, cramped from having lain in the same position for centuries, made soft creaking noises of protest.

It was a curious thing to be watched so carefully by the dead.

She laughed softly. Had this happened to her sooner, she would have been terrified. Not anymore, though.

It was not the bog people who meant her harm.

When she reached Murmerwolde, she was almost sad to leave them behind. In a way, they had made her feel almost safe. She waved goodbye at them, then staggered into town. The paved streets were no easier on her bruised feet than the cold wet earth out on the moors had been. Just like at Zwartwater, the ground here was soft, leaving many of the houses crooked, their bricks cracked. Arthur lived in a little house of dusky pink that looked a muddied brown at night and a roof black shingles. Still wet from the recent rainfall, they glistened in the lantern lights. It made them look as if they were made of licorice.

It’s like I’m in the fairy tale with the gingerbread house, if only Hansel and Gretel had tried to eat the witch rather than the other way around , Lucy thought. Why did so many stories for children carry the threat of being eaten? Maybe they had come into existence at a time when Not-Sarah’s kind had existed in much greater numbers than they did now. It would make sense for those parasites to go after children. Though not as nourishing as an adult, they were much easier to kill.

She stopped in front of the door, swaying with cold and exhaustion. Her hands had turned red at first, then white. Now they were bluish. She raised the right one, trying to grab the string of the doorbell. The movement was clumsy, and she missed. Control over her fingers had fled at the same time their ability to feel had. She tried again, this time with her left hand, where the fingers remained unbruised and weren’t wrapped so tightly that they wouldn’t bend, but she missed anew.

She balled both hands into fists, then banged them against the door, not caring that her governess had told her never to knock on a door because it would roughen her hands and make them look servantly.

The door swung open so suddenly, she almost tumbled inside. A pair of beautiful hands with long white fingers steadied her. She looked up into Michael’s face, strange and bloodless as always, the brows almost touching in the middle. When he recognized her, his broad mouth opened in surprise, and she could see the little pearly pips of the extra two teeth growing behind the others.

“Lucy,” he said. He held her away from him, then noted the lack of a coat and hat and shoes, and now his brows did meet in the middle. He pulled her roughly inside and threw the door closed behind them. “What happened? You look like you were beset by highwaymen and then crawled your way through the woods. Has anyone seen you?”

“Where’s Arthur?” Her jaw was stiff with cold, mangling the words again.

“He got called away. A breech birth. He might be gone for hours. God, woman, are you utterly insane? Do you fashion yourself some sort of gothic heroine, wandering the moors at night without a coat?”

“Please don’t talk to me like that. I’m dog-tired, so thoroughly chilled that even my marrow feels cold, and my nerves are frayed. I can’t be held responsible for what I might do, should they snap,” she said. It was no easy thing, to keep her voice even remotely civil when all she wanted to do was watch him suffer.

“We can’t have that. There are only so many madwomen I can deal with,” he muttered. He wrapped her in his coat, lifted her from the ground, and carried her to the room Arthur had chosen as his surgery. It was an inferior room at the back of the house, rather small and dark because it faced north, but it had a door that led to the garden to recommend it. Patients who wanted their visits to be discreet made grateful use of it. No one could look into the windows either, not even from the surrounding houses. The angle was never right.

Michael helped her to a chair, then rifled through Arthur’s cabinets, looking for iodine and bandages and a pair of tweezers. She rested her cheek against the fabric of the chair, trying not to crack her teeth as they chattered. Soon her hands and feet began to burn as the blood forced its way through her capillaries. The pain was shocking. She stuffed the lapel of Michael’s coat into her mouth and bit it to keep from groaning. Tears streamed down her face.

“Fuck,” Michael muttered. He looked at her over his shoulder. “I’ll go to the kitchen to grab some things. Stay here.”

She sat slumped in the chair, shivering with such violence, she wondered if she might break her bones. How could she confront him when she was as wretched as this? Yet confront him she must, no matter how infirm she felt. She was Not-Sarah’s only hope, her sole defender.

By the time Michael came back with a bowl and pitcher and a towel slung over his arm, her shivering had passed its peak, and she felt a little stronger.

“Are you feeling a little warmer? You’ve got a bit of color back in your cheeks,” he said.

“A little,” she said.

“Good. You should drink something hot, broth or tea or coffee, but it’s the housekeeper’s day off. She’s visiting her sister in Apeldoorn and won’t be back till morning.” He washed her feet. When this was done, he began to pluck thorns and bits of pebble from the soles. She looked away, doing her best not to twitch as he rooted around the tender flesh looking for things. It was clear the housekeeper wasn’t here; the curtains weren’t drawn. A spider had woven its web at the window. The recent rain had studded each strand with drops that glittered coldly in the light of the moon.

Lucky little spider , Lucy thought. If it had spun its web at Zwartwater and one of the maids spotted it, they would have beat it to death, like the woman on the train had done all those weeks ago.

Not Arthur. Even as a boy, he’d had an instinct for tenderness and preservation of life, which had manifested in him using cups and bits of paper to export bees and ants and even wasps outside whenever they had found their way into his house. People found such kindness unseemly in a boy; they’d rather have seen him pull out the legs of a spider one by one than save it. Yet, despite the bullying of his father, brothers, peers, and schoolmasters, Arthur had remained kind.

It shows an enormous amount of character and willpower , Lucy thought, then wondered why she had never come to love him. Though she could never love him now, not after he had conspired to have Not-Sarah removed.

“Where’s my sister?” she asked.

“Don’t talk to me. I can’t listen and concentrate on your feet at the same time.”

Lucy pulled her foot back. “Where’s my sister? Magda said you brought her here. Is that true, or did you take her to an asylum already?’

Michael looked up at her, frowning with annoyance. “Don’t be a child,” he said. He gripped her ankle hard and yanked it back with such force, she would have fallen out of the chair had she not gripped the armrests. Her bruised fingers throbbed in protest.

She bit her tongue and waited. She couldn’t afford to antagonize him now.

He was methodical as he worked on first one foot, then the other, laying out all the things he had tugged from her skin on a white handkerchief he had spread out on the ground next to him: bits of twig, sharp little stones, and thorns, all of them blackened with her blood. Perhaps the smell of her blood was what had interested the bog people. Lonely they couldn’t be, not with there being so many of them.

“Stop moving. You’ll get iodine all over my trousers, and those stains won’t come out,” Michael snapped.

When he had bandaged her feet, he said, “There. All done. Not as neatly as Arthur would have done it, but beggars can’t be choosers.” He straightened, the joints in his shoulders and knees popping.

“Where’s my sister?” Lucy asked again.

Michael sighed. “You really want to know, don’t you? I presume that’s why you came running all the way from Zwartwater looking like a hussy?”

“Naturally. I would have preferred to have come along with you in the carriage, but you didn’t give me that choice, now, did you?”

Something tugged at the corners of his mouth. Not a smile—distaste, perhaps, or impatience. “We had no choice but to drug you. You were hysterical. You said you were going to hurt yourself. You acted like a madwoman. For a moment, you had me quite worried. I thought we might have to commit you alongside your sister.”

“There’s no need for that. There’s no need to commit her either.”

Again, he sighed. He picked up the handkerchief with things plucked from her feet, then idly sorted the twigs and thorns and bits of pebble on the palm of his hand. “She’s very sick, Lucy. You know that as well as I.”

“It’ll pass.”

“It won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Actually, I do.” He pulled a letter from his pocket and tossed it in her lap. “Read that, then tell me again why I shouldn’t commit my wife to the madhouse.”

Letter from Dr. Abraham Rosenthaler to Dr. Arthur Hoefnagel

Veendijk, 31 October 1887

My dear friend Arthur,

Let me begin my letter by thanking you for sending me a copy of that court document. It always gladdens my heart to see your spidery handwriting on an envelope when I come home from another grueling day of work (I am only joking; unlike yours, my patients never complain, though time may occasionally be of essence), so you can imagine my joy when I picked up your latest missive and found the envelope thick and heavy. I can’t thank you enough for allowing me to spend an evening with a cigar, a glass of brandy, and a ghoulish murder case.

For it is a dreadful case, to be sure, but I have to admit I chuckled in delight when I had finished reading it. In my line of work, it’s rare to know the identity of the body in front of you. Just imagine how much more interesting and complete this information shall make a potential paper written on the subject of the bog body! You must let me know when you can spare the time to sit down and actually write it—I refuse to do it without your help, dear boy, and I also think we simply MUST write one, for bog bodies are a rarity, and to know the identity of the bog body, well, that’s practically unheard of.

Also think of how interesting this case could be for the alienists. It’s clear that the unfortunate JW labored under the delusion that his wife had been replaced by a near-exact replica, a delusion that is not common but does occasionally occur.

On to a different, albeit related, matter: in your last letter, you mentioned a peculiar case you were currently working on and asked me to consult a number of alienists on your behalf. I agree with you that the case is extremely delicate, both due to the nature of the affliction and the patient’s reputation. It’s never easy when they are of high rank, is it? Well, I did as you asked. I need not tell you that living corpses do not exist outside penny dreadfuls and the superstitious minds of certain peasants usually found in the Eastern parts of Europe, though there have been some recent cases of New Englanders believing their dead loved ones to be revenants. I’ll copy out the newspaper article for you, if I ever find it again. I fear my housekeeper might have used it to light a fire.

I digress. What DOES happen according to those alienists is that a person may come to BELIEVE themselves to be a walking corpse in much the same way that someone may believe their loved one a changeling. Such cases are exceedingly rare and are often found in those with a propensity for insanity, specifically in schizophrenics. This particular kind of delusion is called le derilé des negations , named by Doctor Cotard. He has documented the case of a woman who believed herself to be thus afflicted.

Because it is so terribly uncommon, it’s hard to say what might cause it, though I think that, had I been almost buried alive, my mental faculties would be horribly shaken, perhaps even momentarily perverted, to the point where I may have wondered if the world I had woken up to was not perchance a kind of limbo or afterlife, and I myself dead. I suppose it wouldn’t help matters much if I had been very sick just before. You and I both know how alien our bodies can feel after a particularly violent illness. If the vigorous and healthy mind of a man can be disturbed to such a degree by such an awful thing happening, I can only imagine what havoc it must have wreaked on the frail mind of a woman with an affinity for madness (not to worry, dear friend: I didn’t divulge the details of your poor patient’s horrible ordeal, only that it was of such a horrid nature that it gave her delicate nerves a tremendous shock).

As for treatment, the alienists were quite unanimous in their verdict. A patient thus afflicted should be committed to a private institution with all haste. There’s no saying what she might do if she believes herself forsaken by both God and the natural laws governing the universe. To prevent her from harming herself and others, she must be entrusted to the care of specialists. Because cases of le derilé des negations are extremely rare (if this is indeed what she suffers from; an alienist should be able to tell you), it is hard to say how long it’ll take to subside, if ever. Taking into account the patient’s previous episodes of mental disturbance, I’m afraid her chances of recovery are exceedingly small.

Best wishes,

Dr. Abraham Rosenthaler

P.S. Let me know about that paper!

P.P.S. For a potential paper, Mrs. Schatteleyn’s drawings and notes would be invaluable. Is there any chance you might secure them? I would write to her husband if the circumstances were different. As it stands, the poor man must have too many worries clamoring for attention to give my small request any consideration. Do give him my sympathy and wishes for Mrs. Schatteleyn’s speedy recovery.