Page 5 of Blood on Her Tongue

Chapter 5

Lucy found Sarah fast asleep. Katje had placed a damp cloth on Sarah’s forehead, from which water had trickled, plastering the little wisps of hair that grew at her temple to her skin. The hollow of her throat was wet with sweat.

“How is she?” Lucy whispered.

“She’s been asleep, mostly. She woke some two hours ago. I gave her some water. She won’t hold anything else down.”

“I shall sit with her,” Lucy suggested.

Katje shook her head and said, “I’ve given her another sleeping draught. Doctor Hoefnagel said the most important thing right now is to try and get the fever to break, and for that, she needs to sleep as much as possible. She won’t wake for hours yet. Better you get some sleep, too. You must be exhausted.”

Lucy took Katje’s hands in hers and squeezed them. “What about you, though? You probably haven’t slept in days.”

“You mustn’t worry about me. I don’t need much sleep; I never have.”

“Then I envy you. All the same, starting tomorrow morning, I’ll nurse my sister.”

Lucy kissed Katje on the cheek and bade her good night. Yet despite Lucy’s fondness for sleep and the long day she’d had, her mind was restless, and she knew she would not be able to sleep if she went to bed now. Better to stay up and tire herself out a little more, try and ensure a dreamless sleep.

Because the servants hadn’t prepared the room properly, there was no paper at the writing desk. Rather than ring for a maid to fetch her some, Lucy went to Sarah’s room; her sister always had some sheets of paper at the ready.

The room was cold and smelled slightly of damp and dust. Funny how a mere week of disuse could do that. Sarah’s beloved things were all there: her crystal bottles of scent at the vanity, her boxes of jewels, the little writing desk with its carved legs. A ream of creamy paper with the Zwartwater letterhead lay on top, as Lucy had expected. Next to the stack of paper rested a lovely pen made of silver, which had Sarah’s name engraved on the cap. Lucy had its twin. They had been presents from Michael for their twenty-first birthday, though Sarah’s had been accompanied by an emerald ring; Lucy’s had come with a notebook bound in calf’s leather with beautiful marbled paper at the beginning and end instead.

Apart from the pen and paper, the surface of the writing desk was covered with pamphlets, torn envelopes, books, and journals. Sarah’s interests were broad, and her desk reflected that: Fashion plates were used as bookmarks in a medical handbook. A piece of paper, rather dirty, with a labeled drawing of a human tooth on it had been crammed into a torn envelope on which Sarah had begun and abandoned an equation. A newspaper clipping about the discovery of a new kind of bat in Mexico lay crumpled and smudged on top of a treatise on ticks. This last one must have been of particular interest to Sarah; the text was heavily underlined, the margins full of scribbles.

Lucy let her hands glide over it all with fondness, marveling at her sister’s mind. From a young age, it had been clear Sarah possessed a fierce intelligence. Sums held no difficulty for her, and she could memorize any text she had read and reproduce it after having read it through only a few times, often months later and with startling accuracy.

Her hunger for knowledge had been ferocious, especially regarding the natural world. Lucy had loved holding her sister’s hand and listening to her talk about moths, or orchids, or sticklebacks, or whatever creature or plant obsessed her that week. Sarah maintained to this day that the best gift she had ever received was an ant farm Aunt Adelheid had made for her for Saint Nicholas Day. Aunt Adelheid loved moths most of all insects, but she was also a knowledgeable amateur myrmecologist. When she’d discovered one of the maids had a talent for drawing, she’d let her assist her in her studies. One of the most vivid memories Lucy had of her aunt was of her sitting at the table with the maid, their heads so close together as to almost touch as they pored over a drawing of an Indian meal moth, smiling and whispering at each other.

They did say madness and genius were sides of the same coin. It was just a bitter, hurtful shame that some greater power kept tossing Sarah’s coin, as it had done with Aunt Adelheid’s. All Lucy could do now was hope it would be thrown again—and this time definitively land on the side of genius.

Lucy tore her eyes away from the cluttered desk to the silver-framed picture that kept watch over it all. She had expected to meet the level gazes of her parents but found instead the dead stare of her niece.

With her black curls and large blue eyes, Lucille had been rather pretty in a doll-like way. A funny little girl who loved to laugh. Once she had learned how to talk, she’d rarely stopped. Lucy remembered all the times she had held Lucille on her lap, rocking her a little, holding her hot little hands in her own, and listening to her emphatic babbling.

The picture had been taken after Lucille had passed away from scarlet fever. The photographer dressed her in white. Then he propped her up on the sofa and surrounded her with flowers before placing a rose in her hand. He painted eyes on her closed lids; her own eyes had gone cloudy already. Others exclaimed how beautiful she looked, like a little angel. Why, one could not tell she was dead at all! Sarah laughed and said it was the only picture they had that wasn’t blurred, because her darling little daughter had been such a lively thing and could never sit still, and wasn’t it funny that her sweet child looked most alive when she was dead?

Lucy often wondered if these comments about Lucille had triggered Sarah’s madness, the seeds of which she had always carried with her, as Lucy probably did, too. She had heard their father say as much during the only fight between her parents she had ever heard, just moments after Aunt Adelheid had been taken away to the asylum.

Perhaps Lucy was to blame for those seeds of sickness germinating in her sister. Every gardener knew plants would only grow in the right conditions. As others had gushed over Lucille’s picture, Lucy should have spoken out, told them that it didn’t please her, but she had not wanted to add to her sister’s pain. How could she insult the memory of Sarah’s daughter by saying the last photograph that had ever been taken of her was, to Lucy, deeply unsettling? Her niece, looking not quite alive, but not quite dead either.

Little Lucille in limbo.

Lucy turned away, wishing she hadn’t seen it. More than a year had passed since Lucille had died. Had the picture begun to comfort rather than hurt? She did not know, had not known the photograph was here either, and that unsettled her. She and her sister did not keep things from each other as a rule.

She pushed it all away and counted out sheets of writing paper. That done, she hesitated, then took the little book on ticks with her. Its spine had been broken rather roughly, and after having lain forcefully open for days, it closed with reluctance. It was not the sort of thing she usually read, but it would be better suited to lull her to sleep than the gothic tales she had brought with her.

Back in her room, she penned a quick letter to Mrs. van Dijk to let her employer know she had arrived safely. About Sarah she said very little, only that she was indeed seriously ill. The letter would go out with the morning post and reach Mrs. van Dijk before the day was out. Lucy then wrote in her diary. Like Sarah, she had kept one since the age of ten.

Finally, she crawled into bed with the book on ticks. It had a thin red ribbon sewn into it to use as a bookmark. Lucy took the end of it into her mouth and sucked on it as she read, which her mother had always told her was a disgusting habit fit only for a hussy, because the sucking leeched out the dye and painted her lips red. She did not suck on ribbons for their color, though; she simply liked the sensation of the thin wet silk on her tongue and against her lips.

The first thing Lucy noticed about the book were the margins. They were filled with Sarah’s beautiful handwriting: references to other pages and different texts, observations, questions she had. As Lucy got further into the book, the handwriting deteriorated. It became ever more slanted, the letters running into one another to the point of near illegibility. Lucy read what was scrawled on an empty page between two chapters:

Ticks are a benign sort of parasite becausetheyonly take a little blood butotherparasites take more fromtheir

host

likethis fungus this PARASITE auntadelheid told me about before they took her away

liketheymighttakeMEaway

it attacks ants and it takes over the the the whats the word

whycantithinkofthe right word

A sickness settled in Lucy’s stomach. “Don’t worry, Saartje. I won’t ever let them take you away,” she whispered. She curled her hands into fists, letting her nails dig into her palms. Her poor sister had been terrified these past few days, and Lucy had not been there to comfort her.

Lucy read on. The notes on the next few pages were badly smudged, as if Sarah had tried to scrub away the words. Halfway through, she had stopped annotating altogether. The final note, made next to a paragraph about the amount of time different species of ticks could go without blood, had been made with such vehemence, the thin paper had torn. Lucy had to squint at it, then bring it close to her face to make out what it said.

like the BOG WOMAN

Lucy flung the book away and sat with her heart drumming in her chest, her hands growing clammy. “She’s sick. A temporary madness caused by a fever of the brain. She wrote that when she was already ill. There’s nothing sinister about the bog woman,” she told herself out loud.

But Sarah thought that thing was thirsty , some part of her said, and then it made her cut her hand on its teeth and wet its mouth with blood.

This was such a morbid thought that she almost laughed. Instead, she did her best to push it all far out of her mind. The last thing this situation needed was hysteria and superstition. Those were probably the exact things that had led to a poor woman being staked down in black water with her mouth full of stone and broken teeth.

Or was there something else at play?

The manner of her death would have required planning. Stakes had to be sharpened, a tool to drive them in had to be brought along, and a place for the staking where they would not be disturbed and the body not be discovered had to be found. Her death also required at least two people: one to hold her down and one to do the staking and the cramming in of the stone.

Lucy shuddered. It was all so horrible, so vile, so downright evil . The perpetrators must have been half out of their mind with fear or else have had a thirst for violence. A pity it had all happened so long ago. There could be no solving it now, no justice for the poor woman, not even any dignity now that her body had been reduced to nothing but leathery strips floating in formaldehyde in some professor’s study.

They should have given what remained of her a decent burial , Lucy thought, then realized that, despite her best efforts, she was dwelling on dark and macabre things. She got up, picked the book up from where she had thrown it, and thrust it into one of the drawers in her nightstand so it was out of sight, then crept back into bed.

The rain had stopped, but the wind still blew. It came in great gusts that wormed themselves into every little nook and cranny, whistling and whining, sounding eerily like either a child or a young woman keening. Sleep would not come. She was still too frightened, too perturbed.

To hush and distract herself, she spun herself a little tale.

I’m walking in some dark woods, the branches overhead lacing together like clasped hands. I’m not alone. He’s walking behind me, his footfalls soft, for he’s the hunter, and I’m his prey. When I come to a clearing, he will be upon me, one arm around my waist. I’ll be his caught thing then, to do with as he pleases, and the shock of it will send a wave of color sweeping across my cheeks. Soon enough, the color will drain from my face, only dredges of it remaining in the bite marks he’ll leave. Those will damn him when I’m found, eventually, for no one else has two extra teeth in their lower jaw…

Lucy reached the point of orgasm quickly and quietly, for the fantasy pleased her. This was how she wanted and how she felt she deserved to be had: rather brutally, in the dark, in the dirt, by her sister’s husband.