Page 25 of Blood on Her Tongue

Chapter 25

Exhaustion made Arthur’s mustache droop and had sucked the ruddy color from his cheeks. He smelled of amniotic fluid, perhaps of blood, too, only so much had already been spilled that the scent had gotten stuck in her nose, so she couldn’t be sure.

He stared at the wreckage of his surgery, his eyes wide, his hand tightening around the strap of his doctor’s bag. He knelt next to Michael to feel for a pulse, then held his fingers underneath his nose to see if he still breathed, doing so without any hurry. When he saw Lucy, he visibly started, then went to her, his scrubbed hands reaching to assess the damage.

“Did he hurt you? Have you any pain?” he asked as he checked for cuts.

She did her best to keep her hands away from him so as not to ruin his clothes. Blood and eye jelly and other fluids had run down her wrists and into her sleeves, where they had begun to crust, caking her cuffs to her skin. This only made him think something was wrong with them, and he bent her fingers one by one, then pulled on them till the joints popped softly, sparing only the two she had bruised when hooking them into Pasja’s collar. That done, he placed two of his fingers underneath the joint of her jaw to feel the blood thunder through her veins. Gooseflesh erupted at the spot, rippling down her throat.

He smiled. “Sorry. Cold hands, I’m afraid. Does anything hurt?”

Her limbs from weariness, her feet from being abused by the road, her fingers where she had bruised them, her wrist where Michael had clasped it, and her face where Magda had struck her. Put like that, there was very little that didn’t hurt. “My eye,” she said. Her voice was dry to the point of hoarseness. She cleared her throat, then repeated herself.

Arthur helped her to her feet and brought her close to the lamp. He brushed some hair from her forehead. It was sticky with blood. He tilted her head this way and that, then gently pulled her lids open, his fingertips ruffling her lashes in a manner she found deeply unpleasant. “Bloodshot and bruised, but nothing that won’t heal. That cut doesn’t need stitches either, but I’ll clean it to stave off infection,” he decided. He grabbed his doctor’s bag, opened it, and disinfected the cut on her temple. When he was done, he rested the back of his hand against her swollen eye, and the cold was lovely against the burning flesh. She leaned into it, sighing with the simple pleasure.

Certain now that she was relatively well, he began to interrogate her. “Lucy, I must know. What are you doing here? How did you even get here?”

“I walked.”

He stared at her in disbelief. “All the way from Zwartwater?”

“All the way from Zwartwater. It’s only a few hours. I suppose I would’ve been faster if I hadn’t been drugged.”

He had the decency to blush. “You were in extreme distress when you realized we had to take Sarah away. I feared for your health.”

“Of course you did,” she said bitterly. Since she had only one eye to see him with, Arthur’s face looked strange to her, curiously flattened and unreal, as if she were talking to a poorly made waxen cast of him. If she pushed her fingers hard against his cheeks, she was half convinced they’d be forever marked with her fingerprints.

“The best treatment for a patient may not be the most pleasant one, but you know what they say: gentle surgeons make stinking wounds.”

This reignited her anger. It rose in her like bile, tearing the gentle fugue of her fatigue to shreds. Her face heated with it, making the feel of his hand against her socket disagreeable. “Will you tell yourself that when you go to sleep at night, knowing my sister lies in some impersonal little room surrounded by lunatics, sobbing her eyes out, terrified and unhappy?”

The color in his cheeks leaked into his forehead and nose until his whole face was pink. “You’re too close to her to understand what’s good for her.”

She blinked hard with rage. Again her lashes brushed unpleasantly against his skin. She pulled away and rubbed her eye on her sleeve, but her eyelid felt cut in places, as if the lashes had been ripped out at the roots. “On the contrary. At the moment, I’m the only one who really understands what she needs.”

He sighed. That little sigh made her want to hurt him. He smoothed his mustache with thumb and index finger, then asked, “Where’s your sister now?”

“How should I know? I haven’t seen her since you forced whatever vile medicine you gave me down my throat.”

“I didn’t force anything down your throat. With chloroform, you don’t have to. The patient only needs to breathe it in. Now, stop lying to me and tell me where Sarah is.”

“I. Don’t. Know,” she said through gritted teeth.

His face in the grips of utter bewilderment looked more than ever like that of a boy with a mustache plastered on. “What do you mean, you don’t know? She murdered Michael, didn’t she? And by the looks of you, you were right here when it happened. You’re soiled with blood.”

She chuckled with incredulity; she couldn’t help it. “You think Sarah did this?”

“Didn’t she?”

She shook her head so fast, the remaining bits of hair plastered to her face with blood and gore tore free. “No! I did, Arthur. I killed him.”

“Lying for your sister is admirable, but…”

It was like the funeral all over again, when he wouldn’t be convinced she had heard her sister scratch at her coffin. “You’re not listening to me!” She thumped her solar plexus with her palms. “I killed him, Arthur. Not Sarah, Lucy . I put my thumbs through his eyes the way you told me to, should I ever be assaulted, and then I stabbed him in the throat with a pen. The blood spouted out of his neck with such force, it was like a fountain. That’s why I’m covered with it, like the wall, and the window, and the ceiling.”

His eyes were large and wet with hurt. Then he blinked, straightened his shoulders, and embraced her. She struggled, but he held her tightly, her arms pinned painfully against their chests, useless. “It’s all right,” he whispered in her ear. He began to stroke her hair with one hand, as if consoling a sobbing child. “I know why you did it. I know how he abused you.”

This close, with her nose pressed against the tweed of his vest, the scent of amniotic fluid was incredibly potent, overpowering the smoke of his cigars, the starch his housekeeper used to stiffen his shirts, and the sweat he must have worked up as he yanked on a small slick shape stuck inside a woman. Again she tried to push away, using her elbows, but there was no space, no leverage.

“Abused me?” she asked. She had to murmur; her mouth, too, was pressed against his vest, a button compressing the soft meat of her lip hard against her teeth.

“Did you think I didn’t know? Michael is proud, and selfish, and an insufferable braggart when in his cups. He loved to boast of…of all the times he’d had you. I shan’t repeat the exact words he used, but I…I knew.”

She felt as if she had been dropped from a great height, the ground slamming all the air out of her lungs. Had Michael not been dead, she would have liked to stab him again and again and again, until nothing remained of his face but a mass of meat and broken bone. Tears burned in her eyes. “You think he abused me, yet you did nothing?”

Finally, he loosened his grip a little in order to look her in the face. He touched her lip, rubbing at the shape of the button the pressure of his embrace had stamped there. “But I did! I secured you a position with Mrs. van Dijk on the other side of the country to keep you as far away from him as possible, didn’t I? And when we thought your sister had died, I offered to marry you to keep you out of his clutches. You can’t know how relieved I was when your sister proved to be alive after all. I lived in such dreadful fear that Michael would manipulate you into becoming his wife, using your couplings as a reason to wed.”

“I thought you asked me to marry you because you loved me.”

“I did! I do! Most ardently, Lucy.” He tried to kiss her.

She twisted her face away. That weak fleshy mouth he tried to hide with a mustache revolted her. “No! You betrayed me. I told you things about my sister in confidence, trusting you never to relay that information to another. I’d never have told you had I known you’d use it to remove her from my life forever. The worst of it is that you shared it with all your schoolfellows first. You have treated Sarah like she’s nothing more than fascinating material for a paper rather than one of your oldest and dearest friends. You’ve been a bad friend and a bad doctor!”

He clasped her shoulders, then shook her until she had no choice but to look at his imploring face. “If I hurt you, you must understand that was never my intention. Allow me to make amends. I’ll take care of all this.” He made a sweeping motion with his arm.

“How? I brutally murdered a man, Arthur.”

He smiled. “No, you didn’t. Your sister did.”

“What are you talking about? I just confessed to you that it was me who killed him. Look at my hands! They are coated with bits of him. Sarah doesn’t even know he’s dead.”

He squeezed her shoulders, still grinning at his own cleverness. “But outside of you and me, no one knows that, now, do they? And what story do you think the police are more likely to believe: That you, who have up till now always proven to be a quiet, dependable little creature, killed him, or his insane wife who earlier today ripped off the fingers of a crippled and elderly widow without provocation?”

“No! If you told anyone that, she’d be locked away for the rest of her life.”

“And would that be so bad? She may not have murdered Michael, but she very well could have killed Mrs. van Dijk, might in fact still accomplish that if putrefaction sets in.”

“I’m not justifying what she did. It was wrong and horrible, but if you send her to an asylum, she’ll die. I know you think me dramatic and irrational when I say this, but you must believe me. I know she’s unwell. Of course I do. I’m her twin, aren’t I? But sending her to the madhouse won’t solve this problem.”

“God!” he cried out, his face twisting with rage, as if a child had smashed their fist into putty with two pale blue chips of glass for the eyes. She had never seen him angry before. It scared her.

“Sarah, Sarah, Sarah!” he shouted, and his voice was like that of a stranger, too, rough and a little hysterical. “Always Sarah ! Your whole life, you’ve stood in her shadow. Don’t you see that she’s unworthy of your affection? She’s nothing but a dissatisfied, spoiled, selfish little girl. She makes you act like a madwoman, has you carry out atrocities. She uses you, Lucy, and will continue to use you unless I put a stop to it. And I will! It stops tonight!” He shook her roughly as he shouted at her. Her head snapped back. Pain radiated down her neck.

She whimpered, and he stopped. She tore herself out of his grip and backed away from him. She stumbled over Michael’s sprawled legs but caught herself against the desk with Arthur’s leather doctor’s bag on top. Inside were spools of bandages, a suturing kit, a pair of dirty forceps, and a used scalpel poorly wrapped in a bit of soiled cloth.

Arthur was breathing hard. He pulled on his vest to straighten it, then wiped a drop of sweat from his temple. His face was still this waxen thing, quite horrible, but when he spoke, he did so with the calm, authoritative voice he used with his patients when he needed them to understand that he was in charge. “It stops tonight,” he repeated. “Sarah is like a strangler plant. As long as she has her tentacles inside you, you can never grow. You are too weak to remove her, so I shall do it for you. Then we shall get married, and you need never worry about a thing again.”

There’s no swaying him , Lucy thought, and she almost sobbed.

He smiled, and it was ghastly. “You’ll make a good doctor’s wife, Lucy. Not everyone would have found a man’s jugular artery on the first try.”

He reached for her. She shied away, upsetting his bag with her elbow, tipping it over. Its contents spilled over the tabletop. His face crumpled with pain and disappointment, and suddenly, it was the face she knew again, that of her childhood friend. “Don’t be scared of me, Lucy. Come, did I hurt you? I didn’t mean to. I’m afraid I got a bit carried away. I’m rarely ever ruled by my passions, though; this you know. Now let me look at you.”

He placed his hand on her neck. She gripped the scalpel that had fallen from his bag.

“If you ever think I’d let you hurt my sister, then you don’t know me at all,” she hissed as she cut across his throat.

The blood sprayed into her eyes, blinding her. It went up her nose and into her mouth, hot and thick. She twisted to the side, wiping her face against the inside of her sleeve to restore her sight. When she looked up, Arthur was staring at her with an expression of complete bafflement, the blood gushing down his throat like a sheet of unbroken dark silk that looked sometimes crimson, sometimes brown. When his legs gave way, he fell heavily. He made a soft choking sound. She had cut so deep that his windpipe had been ruptured. Air came through the rip in his throat, briefly turning the blood into a thin mist that flew everywhere.

She thought of holding his head in her lap and stroking his hair as he died, but she was too angry, too agitated, too filled with the glory and the horror of murder, and by the time she could reconcile herself with the idea, he had already grown slack, his eyes open but unseeing. A tinge of regret made her soften. She hadn’t loved him, but she had been fond of him, had admired him, even, for his steadfastness, his kindness, his selflessness. His desire to marry her had been his one selfish act, and it had cost him his life.

She stepped over his corpse, then over Michael’s, trying not to tread into their comingled puddles of blood. This brought her close to the window. In its surface splattered with blood, she saw her face reflected. Her eye was already swelling shut where Michael had hit her, the flesh red and puffy. Almost all the white of her eye had turned pink. She supposed it was only fair. An eye for an eye, and all that…

That hysterical laughter took possession of her again. She bent double with it. It tore through her till she felt she was convulsing. Her knees buckled, dipping her hem into the blood after all. She pulled herself along the windowsill, sank down, and laughed till she felt she might hurl again. She only ceased when she heard a heavy thump upstairs, then a sound like something was being dragged.

Someone else was in the house with her.