Page 4 of Blood on Her Tongue

Chapter 4

From where Lucy stood in the upstairs hallway, she couldn’t see Michael’s face, though she could see his boots were caked with dull mud. Water streamed from his coat, leaving cloudy puddles. He had his hat and a silver-topped walking stick in one hand. With the other, he held a piece of dirty rope whose end was looped around the neck of a shivering Italian greyhound: Pasja. The skin covering her haunches rippled as if trying to dislodge a fly. Her fur, normally a soft gray, was smeared with mud and stained green in places from grass.

“She caught the scent of a hare. I had a devil of a job to catch her after that, and when I finally did, the leash snapped, and I had to do it all over again. In the end, I hauled her halfway home by the scruff of her neck, until I met Mr. van Eyck, who was so kind as to fetch me some rope,” he explained to the servant who took the hat and cane from him.

A different servant began to wipe Pasja down with great sheets of newspaper. The dog whined softly.

“Tough luck, girl,” Michael told her coldly as he unbuttoned his coat. “That should teach you not to run off and make me look like a fool.” But once he had struggled out of his sopping coat, he stooped next to her and scratched her between the ears. His hands were similar to Katje’s: long, beautiful. When he made to stand, he looked up and caught Lucy’s eye.

“Lucy,” he said softly.

His face was a curious one, not at all handsome, yet interesting. With the skin so white as to almost seem bloodless and the wide-spaced black eyes, it had something of the shark about it. The effect was heightened whenever Michael opened his mouth; he had two extra teeth in his bottom jaw that had grown behind the row of regular teeth. When they’d been newly married, Sarah had once mentioned offhandedly in a letter that she had asked Michael to have them extracted, for they were pointed and sharp and he often cut his tongue on them, but he wouldn’t hear of having two good teeth pulled, so Sarah had carefully filed them for him. The implications—that Sarah may have cut her own tongue on them as she and her husband kissed, and that his kisses must often have had a tang of blood to them—had not been lost on Lucy. She had closed her eyes and run her tongue over her own teeth, and in doing so, she had thought that, if she had been married to Michael, she wouldn’t have minded.

She might, in fact, have enjoyed it.

Lucy came down the stairs and let him kiss the back of her hand. His lips, rain chilled, did not merely look bloodless but felt bloodless, too. His lips parted, and she felt the press of his teeth. Gooseflesh rippled all over her body. She withdrew her hand hastily, then cupped it with the other one. The skin he had kissed tingled. She dug a nail into it, but that only drew more attention to the spot. You damned little traitor , she told herself silently.

“Had I known you’d be here already, I would have come home sooner,” he said.

“But you couldn’t because Pasja was hunting,” she said. At the mentioning of her name, the dog came over to Lucy and sniffed the hem of her dress and her proffered hand.

“She’s been quite out of sorts lately,” Michael said.

Haven’t we all? Lucy thought but did not say, for there were servants still with them, so she could not speak freely. It was the same during dinner. She wished she had simply asked to have a tray in her room instead, as Katje had done; small talk did not come easily to her, especially not now, especially not with him. It would have been easier if Arthur had been there, but he had other patients to attend to.

It was not until they had tea in the library that they were alone at last. By then, she felt both high-strung and exhausted.

“How’s Mrs. van Dijk?” Michael asked. “Very peeved to find herself without her companion, I’m sure? I heard she can be rather possessive.”

“She doesn’t like it when people speak ill of her.”

Pasja lay in front of the roaring hearth, basking in the heat. When Lucy spoke, she thumped her tail against the carpet in lazy arcs.

“She’d be mighty strange if she did, though I meant nothing with my remark,” Michael responded.

She poured some milk into her cup. It spread through the dark tea like a cloud. The porcelain seared her skin. The sensation was not quite pleasant, but it soothed her. “You really mustn’t. She has been good to me.”

After her parents had died, both of them without warning and within two weeks of each other, it had become apparent that there was very little left of the family wealth. This did not matter much for Sarah, who was already safely married, but it had meant the end of life as Lucy had known it. Becoming an old woman’s companion was far from the future Lucy had imagined when growing up, but it was respectable and meant she didn’t have to rely on her sister and brother-in-law for money.

Michael slung one long leg over the other. “Let’s not talk about old Mrs. van Dijk. I know you well, and you’ve been burning to ask me some questions.”

Lucy wasted no time. “Why was I not called for sooner?” she asked.

Michael spooned some sugar into his tea and stirred it vigorously, the spoon grating against the delicate rim. “Because none of us realized how ill she was. After the autopsy, she locked herself away in her room with her books and her papers, took her meals there. You know what your sister is like when something piques her interest.”

“And there were no signs?”

“No.” He frowned. “Well, Magda did tell me she wasn’t eating well and had asked for laudanum because she had a headache, but you know what maids are like: prone to hysterics and exaggeration.”

Magda had never struck Lucy as prone to hysterics and exaggeration. She did not tell Michael this but resolved to talk to Sarah’s lady’s maid soon.

“Besides,” Michael went on, “you know as well as I do that Sarah often forgets to eat when she’s working on a project. As for the headaches, she had suffered from those before, especially when reading a great deal. Arthur suggested she try wearing spectacles.” He chuckled darkly. “Spectacles! For an inflammation of the brain! So you see, dear Lucy, that none of us understood the true extent of her illness.”

I should have known from her letters , Lucy thought. Guilt churned in her stomach. “When did you know something was wrong with her?”

“Some three days ago, when she began to talk incoherently.” He leaned closer to her, his voice pleading. “I assure you, Lucy, that I did everything I could, but when she began to deteriorate, she did so very quickly. I wrote to you as soon as I realized how serious the situation was.”

She resisted the urge to rub her eyes; she felt dog-tired all of a sudden. “I know you did. I’m just trying to understand how all this could have happened. For her to become so desperately unwell in so short a time…it has rattled me.”

“Of course it has.”

“Have you engaged a nurse?”

“No.”

“Katje can’t take care of Sarah all alone.”

He took a sip of hot tea. His Adam’s apple moved beautifully up and down his throat. “That’s why I wrote to you.”

“I’m not trained.”

“Yet you did very well last time she suffered from a temporary bout of insanity.”

A memory clawed its way up from the hurtful place: Sarah dressed in a dirty shift, her nails split and weeping, murmuring things that weren’t quite words, crooning over a stinking bundle in her arms…

Lucy’s throat contracted almost convulsively. For a moment, she could not speak. When she did, her voice was queer, slightly strangled. “Grief can make us do the most peculiar things.”

He laughed without mirth. “You know very well it wasn’t just grief. Plenty of women lose children, but they don’t do what Sarah did.”

But I wasn’t talking about her , she thought.

“It was sick, and unnatural, and perverse. I had to go to great lengths to hush it all up. If it had come out, I would have had no choice but to have her committed, your irrational fear of the asylum be damned.”

She wanted to say that no, it wasn’t irrational, he knew what had happened to her aunt Adelheid, but she knew better than to interrupt him. It was one of the things he absolutely could not stand.

“If you hadn’t been there,” he continued, “I think I might have lost my mind.”

“Don’t,” she whispered.

He frowned, gulped down the rest of his tea, poured another cup. “Well, you can understand why I’m loath to hire a nurse. One can never know if they are truly discreet. With you, I need not fret.”

No. I’ve proven I can keep a secret, haven’t I? She put her cup down and bent over the dog to fondle her so she need not look at him. “Poor Pasja. You must miss your mistress.”

“She’s been quite out of sorts lately,” Michael said, “slavering and shivering and barking at nothing.”

Lucy squeezed a silky ear softly between her fingers. The dog closed her eyes in ecstasy. “She seems fine now.”

“It’s because you’re giving her attention. Everything is heaps better if you’re being stroked. You’re a bit of a slut, aren’t you, Pasja?” he said, then gave the dog a playful shove with his foot. She looked at him with mournful wet eyes.

“Maybe she’d feel better if she were allowed to stay with Sarah.”

“Oh, not at all,” he said, and she looked up at him, at his strange, dear face, which looked stranger still with the light of the fire dancing upon it, carving black shadows on his cheeks.

“What do you mean?”

“She currently can’t stand being anywhere near Sarah. She barks her head off, shows the whites of her eyes, pulls up her lip. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the madness was catching.”

Pasja placed her head on Lucy’s knee, whined softly. Lucy hadn’t realized she’d stopped stroking her. “But you know better?” she asked.

“It’s the smell of the bog body. For some reason, it makes the dog fly into a frenzy. You should’ve seen her after the autopsy: she was so frightened, she could’ve just about torn Arthur’s throat out when he bent over to try and pet her. To be fair, he did smell awful. They all did. Such a charnel-house stench. I wouldn’t be surprised if it still clings to Sarah in some way. You know she attended the autopsy, don’t you?”

Lucy nodded. “She wrote to me about it and about how the body was found.” She hesitated, then said, “In truth, I found her letters somewhat troubling. She found the body so very…interesting.”

“Interesting? She has been obsessed with it from the moment we found it. She was adamant she assist in the autopsy Arthur performed.” Michael took a sip of his tea, made a face, put the cup down roughly. Tea slopped into the saucer. He didn’t see, or didn’t care, because he leaned back in his chair and went on. “I shouldn’t have allowed it. I can see that now. It’s not natural, this fascination with something so broken and ugly. Aren’t women supposed to have a natural inclination toward the beautiful and the healthy, like plump babies and silky dogs and men with good teeth?”

Lucy smiled. Michael’s ideas about what was womanly and what was manly were always so rigid, some of them so oddly specific, it was hard not to be amused by them. Had he been in a kinder mood, she might have teased him. Instead, she said gently, “Aren’t men supposed to have that inclination, too?”

Michael scowled and made a jerky sweeping motion with his hand, as if to brush her words away. “A hankering for the macabre certainly is unnatural in either sex, I give you that, but more so in a woman than a man. That’s why I wouldn’t be surprised if that damned leathery corpse is at the root of Sarah’s current madness. An unnatural act may very well lead to unnatural thoughts.”

“Katje thinks the woman Sarah is so terrified of might be the bog woman.”

Michael steepled his fingers under his chin as he considered this. The flames of the fire were reflected in his eyes, little writhing flickers of yellow. “She might be right. The body certainly obsessed her in the days before she fell ill and thus would make a logical subject for her mind to fix upon now that it is diseased. Then again, trying to find logic in the ramblings of a lunatic is, in itself, a kind of madness.”

“Sarah is no lunatic,” Lucy said sharply.

“Forgive me. I meant only someone whose mind is disordered.”

“ Temporarily disordered.”

Michael sighed heavily. “That’s what we hope, isn’t it?”

Lucy let Pasja’s ear run between her fingers to calm herself. There was something almost sinfully pleasurable in caressing the dog’s ears, which were soft and furred on the one side, hot and naked and beautifully veined on the other. “Where is the body now?”

“Gone.”

“Gone how?”

“It did not keep.”

“I thought Arthur would smoke it like a ham after the autopsy?”

“Decomposition got to it first.”

“But surely something remained?”

“Only some dried strips of skin I wouldn’t even give to my dogs. Arthur sent them to his old university. I doubt they will have any use for them, but one never knows. Why, you look rather disappointed. Had you hoped to see the body for yourself?”

She remembered Sarah’s drawing: the twisted face with its mouth opened farther than a human mouth should be able to open, the tendons of the cheeks and jaw stretched taut. It had no eyes, just two holes Sarah had colored in with ink, making them appear endlessly deep. It was the face of a dead thing, but in that drawing, it had not looked dead. Instead, it had seemed possessed of a sinister sort of intelligence.

What could she have done in life to deserve such a death?

Lucy suppressed a shudder. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think I would.” She finished her tea in silence, then excused herself and went upstairs to the sickroom.