Page 6 of Blood on Her Tongue
Chapter 6
At some point during the night, Lucy woke with a start. There was no disorientation, no fear, just guilt and shame. Here she was, comfortably in bed—quim still slick from indulging in what should never be thought about, for onanism is a sign of madness, and what woman desires her sister’s husband?—while Sarah lay wasting away in a stuffy room. Though wasting away sounded gentle, like something a plant might do. Lucy could find nothing gentle in a sickness that sucked the flesh off your bones, blinded you with the pain in your head, and made you raving mad to the point where you bit your childhood friend, and all that in just a few days.
She got up, put on her dressing gown and slippers, and picked up a lamp to light her way. As a child, she had been afraid of the dark. Her nurse didn’t allow her to have a candle next to the bed for fear of fire, but Aunt Adelheid sometimes snuck in and sat with her until she fell asleep, a flickering candle held between her hands, the hot wax running down her fingers. When Lucy asked her if it hurt, Aunt Adelheid told her she loved the sensation of wax cooling on her skin.
“Dipping my fingertips in the hot wax of a just-extinguished candle is one of my many vices, I’m afraid,” she’d said, then laughed.
The house was dark but not quiet. It groaned and clicked, as if it felt Lucy scrabbling about inside, her hand to the dark wooden paneling of the hallway so as not to lose her balance, and wondered what she was doing up so late, when all should be abed.
Katje shot up from the divan on which she had been sleeping as soon as Lucy opened the door. Lucy pressed a finger against her lips. It’s only me , she mouthed.
Katje giggled softly. “Oh, but you gave me a fright!” She would not look at Lucy. Instead, she lay back down. She rolled herself into the sheets as if they were a shroud, then curled up tightly.
She really is strange , Lucy thought as she killed the light, removed her dressing gown and slippers, and crawled into the bed. She took her sister into her arms. The feel and weight of her were alien, as her handclasp had been. She pressed her nose against Sarah’s neck and inhaled her scent. It was tainted by sweat and sickness, but underneath all that, she still smelled like Sarah. The familiarity of it made her throat and chest ache. They had often slept like this before Sarah had gotten married, for warmth and comfort and safety.
On the nights when the governess extinguished all the lights and Aunt Adelheid wasn’t there with a dripping candle to keep the darkness at bay, Sarah would hold Lucy close and whisper facts in her ear. It had been hard to be scared when her twin explained the best way to bathe an orchid or debated whether a mouse or a frog was the best test subject for galvanism.
As if remembering these nights, Sarah began to mutter. The words were unintelligible, but they came in a steady patter, with the occasional pause, as if she were listening to another and answering him.
“Hush. You’re talking in your sleep again,” Lucy whispered.
“I’m not asleep,” Sarah said, the words still slightly slurred but understandable now. She sounded offended.
Lucy smiled. “Aren’t you? My apologies, Sarah.”
“That’s quite all right, but I’m barely Sarah.”
“You’re talking nonsense, darling. You must be quiet now and sleep.”
“But there’s so much to do.”
“No, there isn’t. Katje and I and the servants will take care of it all, you silly sweet. You’ve got nothing to do at all but to get well, and for that, you must sleep. Hush and shush,” Lucy said, then clapped her hand over Sarah’s mouth. The lips parted. Lucy felt the tip of her tongue against the base of her fingers, and then, very gently, Sarah’s teeth closed around a bit of skin. Lucy pulled her hand back. “Don’t be disgusting,” she said.
“I’m not. I’ve got such a hunger and thirst in me, is all. The water was so deep and dark…” Sarah whined.
A little chill swam up Lucy’s spine. “You’re safe now, I promise,” she said. No use denying her sister’s delusions; that would just distress her. Best to soothe her. “Shall I fetch something for you? Some laudanum for your head?”
“No, no! I don’t want to be drugged. I must eat. I’m starving.” She murmured something Lucy didn’t quite catch, something about the black water outside.
Lucy ignored this. “What would you like?”
She sensed her sister smile. “Meat. I want it pink on the inside. I want it tender and juicy. I want the blood to run down my chin as I eat.”
“You’re being silly again. You haven’t been able to hold anything down for a whole week. Meat is the last thing you should be thinking of right now. You’d be spewing up your guts before you could swallow. Why don’t you try and drink something first?” Lucy asked, trying to keep her voice light.
Sarah grunted and shook her head. “No more water! Please, no more, not ever! The bog, the bog…”
“No water, I promise,” Lucy said quickly; Sarah had grown loud, and Katje stirred uneasily in her sleep. Lucy did not want to wake her. “How about something to eat? I can ask the servants to make some pap for you, or some bread soaked in milk, or some beef broth.”
“Food not even fit for an invalid,” Sarah grumbled; at least she did not shout.
“On the contrary. It’s very fit for an invalid. Anything else would be too stimulating.”
“Do you mean to starve me out? I’ll have to eat and drink you up if I don’t get something good soon, and I don’t want that because I love you more than anyone.”
“That’s good to know. I love you, too, very much so. Now be quiet.”
She murmured something Lucy couldn’t make out, twisted around for a bit until her arms could snake around Lucy, then hushed and grew still.
The next morning, Lucy rang for Magda to help her get dressed. Magda was a large young woman with sloping shoulders, a round face, and an air of discontent. Lucy chattered a little about the weather (rain, again) while Magda did her hair, then said, “These past few days must have been strange for you with your mistress so unwell.”
Magda merely shrugged; Lucy could see her do so in the mirror.
“I believe,” she went on, “that you may have been one of the first to realize my sister was unwell. You went to Michael about a week ago to tell him you were worried about her, isn’t that so?”
“And what if I did?” she asked brusquely, pausing with her hand full of Lucy’s hair to look at Lucy in the mirror with narrowed eyes.
“I’m not accusing you of having done anything wrong, Magda.” Lucy tried to soothe her. “I’m just trying to understand what has happened to my sister in the days leading up to her illness. She’s…well, she’s very sick, as you well know, and I’ve never seen anything like it before. As her lady’s maid, you could observe her better than anyone. What about my sister’s behavior worried you?”
Magda returned to the work of pinning locks of Lucy’s hair to her scalp. “I don’t know. It was just a feeling at first. She didn’t eat well, and she had headaches, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary, especially when she was working on one of her projects. I told her before she shouldn’t be looking at all those books when it was dark out, that she’d just ruin her eyesight, and then where would we be? But she never listens to me. When she asked me for laudanum, I told her she should try spectacles instead. I shouldn’t have said that. She flew into a rage and locked her door against me.”
Lucy winced. At her worst, Sarah could grow unreasonably angry at little things, especially when a project consumed her. It was one of her least favorable qualities. “Did that upset you?” she asked.
Magda shrugged, but there was something hard and defiant in the set of her mouth, the gleam of her eye. “I shouldn’t have tried to be smart, now, should I? My mother always did say I have a lip on me and it’ll make me come to grief one day, because talking back is fun and witty when you’re a fancy lady but just plain disrespectful when you’re a maid, but I can’t help being anything else than the creature the good Lord made me. And you know your sister better than I do, Miss Goedhart; she’s quick to anger but also quick to grow calm again. Why, within an hour, she had me running around fetching all manner of things for her as if she’d never been mad with me at all!”
“What sort of things?”
“Books, mostly.”
“What sort of books?”
“All sorts.” She finished pinning the last lock of Lucy’s hair in place, then set about brushing down the dress Lucy had laid out the previous evening.
“Anything about bog bodies?” Lucy asked lightly, tracking Magda’s movements in the mirror.
Magda shrugged again. “There might’ve been. Some of the titles were in other languages.”
Lucy remembered the heap of books and tracts on her sister’s desk and the little book about ticks with its broken spine, her sister’s increasingly incoherent notes scribbled in the margins.
Like the BOG WOMAN .
She felt cold all of a sudden and wished she had not asked Magda to put up her hair; it would have been nice to draw it around her now like a cloak and be enveloped in its warmth. “Do you know what Sarah was writing about? Could it have been about the bog body that was found here?”
“Stand up please, miss. I can’t fasten your corset with you sitting down. You know, I saw that body when they brought it inside, and I found it a sorry sight. Most of the other maids didn’t want to go anywhere near it because they spook easily. Not me. I’ve seen dead bodies before, haven’t I, what with my fifteen siblings, nine still living? And this was nothing to be scared of. It looked more like a leather sack than a proper body.”
“Was my sister writing about it?” Lucy insisted.
Magda shrugged. “Mrs. Schatteleyn wasn’t in the habit of telling me what she was working on. A lady’s maid is not expected to assist her mistress with anything that requires a brain.” There was something hard, almost angry, in the way she said this.
“But what do you think she was working on?”
Magda had picked up Lucy’s dress and guided it over her head, careful not to disturb the hair she had so carefully pinned up. “Something about insects. At least that’s what the books she wanted me to fetch for her were all about, the ones whose titles I could read.” She frowned. “Although, now that you mention it, she did want a specific book about fungus, but I couldn’t find it. I thought maybe one of the footmen had borrowed it, and I thought to myself I’d go and look for it later, only Mrs. Schatteleyn flew into another rage when I told her I didn’t have it, and she slapped me, and then she bit me. That’s when I knew there was something wrong with her again.”
She rolled up her sleeve and showed Lucy a half circle of marks on her lower arm. The skin had broken in places and was scabbed over; in other places, Sarah’s teeth had only left behind bruises, now colored a sickly yellow.
Gooseflesh rippled up Lucy’s neck and throat. “You didn’t tell Michael that she’d bitten you. Why didn’t you? My sister shouldn’t have done this to you.” Her voice came out high, distraught. Normally, she would have thought twice about showing emotion in front of a servant, let alone acknowledging to a servant that her sister had wronged them—her mother had warned her that such behavior would ultimately lead to insubordination from the servants, and a woman who would let her servants bully her wasn’t worthy of respect—but the bite marks had shocked her. Sarah could be quick to anger, especially when someone distracted her when her mind was consumed with work, but that anger usually expressed itself verbally. If she had ever before physically hurt a servant, Lucy was not aware of it.
Magda shrugged again. “I tried. I began to tell him of all the things that were wrong with Mrs. Schatteleyn, but he didn’t let me finish. He doesn’t like us maids. Most of us, that is.”
“Did you tell anyone else about this? The housekeeper, maybe?” Lucy asked.
“Why would I? If a maid goes running to the housekeeper every time her mistress slaps or pinches her, why, no work will ever get done. Mrs. Schatteleyn can’t help that she’s not a docile lunatic. I do think a good wallop every now and again would make her a lot more manageable, but I know better than to lay a hand on my superiors.”
If she talks about Sarah like that to a social superior like me, then what sort of things does she tell the other servants and all those siblings of hers? To protect Sarah, it was vital that as few people as possible knew about her current mental state. The very fact that only a handful of people knew about Sarah’s previous bout of insanity was the only thing that had kept her from the madhouse.
“Mind you,” Magda went on as she did up the last hooks of Lucy’s dress, “I do hope this won’t go on for much longer. An invalid for a mistress is hard enough, what with all those soiled sheets and nightgowns, but to have a mistress who is both an invalid and a madwoman, well, that’s more than I get paid for. I…”
Lucy interrupted her sharply. “Magda, that’s no way to speak of my sister! Have you no compassion?”
Magda’s eyes hardened. It was as if a brick wall came crashing down between them.
Now she’ll never trust me with any information about my sister again , Lucy thought. She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she said, “I did not mean to bark at you just now, Magda, but you must understand…”
“Oh no, don’t apologize, please, Miss Lucy,” she said coldly. “The fault’s all mine. I forgot for a moment who I was talking to. It won’t happen again. Now, is there anything else you need me to do for you?”
Lucy shook her head.
“Then I shall go and see if Mrs. Schatteleyn needs my help, won’t I?”
When she had gone, Lucy rested her head in her hands. “Oh, Sarah,” she said softly, “what on earth is wrong with you?”
Over the next two days, Sarah deteriorated further. She did not speak anymore in her sleep, did not toss and turn. She just lay in bed, her eyes closed, breathing shallowly and quickly, looking simultaneously ancient and incredibly young, the child she had been and the old woman she might not grow into mingling on her face. When she woke, she was delirious. She was often frightened, cried occasionally. Once, she asked after Lucille and tried to get out of bed because she believed the child was calling for her. She was so weak, she could not stand. Had Katje not slung her arms around Sarah, she would have fallen. She refused food, complaining that she wasn’t well and shouldn’t eat. When they tried to spoon some broth into her mouth when she was sleeping, she was sick with such violence, Lucy feared she’d die on the spot. From that moment on, she wouldn’t drink anymore either, causing her lips to split and her tongue to swell grotesquely.
Lucy witnessed this one-woman horror show of the body, and because it was her beloved twin sister who performed it, it hurt almost more than she could bear. To say it broke her heart was an understatement: it maimed a tender, vital part of her. Worst was that there was nothing to do but the small tasks of the nurse: stoking the fire, preparing wet cloths, keeping the room clean.
Michael visited every few hours, but he was ill at ease. “Sickrooms are no place for a man, unless he’s the patient. I’m useless here,” he muttered once, violently stabbing the poker into the fire, causing a rain of sparks. One hit him on the back of the hand. He cursed and sucked the skin, a fierce scowl on his face.
How like a demon he looks , Lucy thought.
“You mustn’t think your visits are useless. Sarah knows you’re here, and that will give her strength and courage,” Katje said.
“I don’t think she knows anything at all. Look at her! If you’d told me I was looking at a corpse, I’d believe you. How can anyone look like that and still live?”
“Don’t speak so!” Katje begged him. “What if she can hear you?”
“Then I’d like her to know that it is all right if she stops fighting. She needn’t live on my account. I would not ask that much of anyone.”
In that moment, Lucy hated him. The intensity of the feeling shocked her. She tamped it down quickly and harshly, yet when she spoke, she couldn’t stop emotion from bleeding into her voice. “You are upset,” she told him. “I understand. But for my sister’s sake, you must not speak like that. If she can hear you, it will only hurt her. If she can’t, there are still Katje’s feelings to consider—and my own. I must believe Sarah will get well. I simply must. If there is no hope, well…” Tears blurred her vision, burning her eyes like salt. She could not finish her sentence and crouched over her sister’s hand instead, pressing it against her cheek to warm it. Sarah did not merely look like one already dead; with her cold hands, she felt like one, too.
Michael was quiet for a moment, then cleared his throat and said, “You are right. I apologize. I have no wish to dash anyone’s hope, and as long as she still breathes, there’s hope yet. Forgive me, both of you. All I can say in my defense is that it doesn’t come easy to me to be helpless. It isn’t natural for a man.”
The other times he visited, he was quiet and did not stay long, but he came, and he tried, and for that, Lucy was grateful.
It was easiest when she was alone. She did not have to pretend she was anything but half out of her mind with fear. She tried to write in her diary to soothe herself, but all she could think about was how desperately unwell her sister was.
That, and the bog woman.
The whole case frightened and sickened her, but she could not deny it drew her, too. She could see how Sarah, who always had been driven by a hunger for knowledge, had grown obsessed with it.
Soon, though, the bog woman merely depressed Lucy. Without any clues as to the woman’s identity or when she had even lived, the reason for her murder and burial remained a mystery, and unlike Sarah, Lucy did not have an appetite for those.
She mainly sat and held Sarah’s hand in the hope the sensation would penetrate into some primal part of her psyche and let her know Lucy was there with her, prompting her to talk to Lucy.
Such waiting was its own kind of torture.
“This won’t do,” Arthur said on the third day. “To get better, she must eat and drink. The body cannot heal itself without fuel. If we can’t get any fluids into her, she’ll die.”
“But she can’t hold anything down. A sip of water is about all she can manage, and lately, not even that,” Katje said. She twisted the stuff of her dress between her long fingers. She had such dark rings under her eyes, they looked bruised.
Arthur thought for a moment, his fingers steepled, the tips touching his mustache. In the firelight, the hairs gleamed like gold thread. He sighed, dropped his hands, and said, “If she can’t stomach anything, we must give her a blood transfusion. I see no other option to nourish her.” He touched his injured arm for a moment, then said, “Perhaps, on some unconscious level, she realized that, too.”
It was such a kind thing to say, implying Sarah had not bitten him in some feral frenzy but out of a desperate need to secure her own survival, that Lucy felt all tender toward him. She began to work at the buttons on her cuff. Arthur saw, smiled, and stilled her hand. “Men are stronger, as is their blood.”
“But she and I are the same.”
“If she needs another transfusion, I shall keep that in mind. For now, I will do this by the book, and the book recommends using the blood of a healthy man.” He turned to Michael, who nodded, took off his jacket, and rolled up his sleeve. Katje bound a handkerchief around his arm until the veins stood out clearly, all swollen with blood. “An excellent nurse,” Arthur said, then made a little bow. Instantly her cheeks flooded with red, and her mouth twitched something fierce.
Michael winced when the needle went in, then looked away to his wife. “Funny, isn’t it? Not so long ago, doctors believed an abundance of blood could make people sick, and they bled them to restore the balance of the humors. I still have tenants who demand to be bled when they feel unwell. Yet here we are, pouring more blood into the patient to make her better. One can almost understand why some prefer religion to science. At times like these, I, too, find myself hankering after the safety that constancy brings.” A light sheen of sweat had sprung up on Michael’s forehead, and his face had taken on the color of whey.
“Transfusions are not as novel as you may think,” Arthur replied. “Doctors have been performing them for decades. It isn’t normally done anymore, mind; we are supposed to give transfusions only in case of acute blood loss, and saline solution is preferred rather than blood. For reason we don’t yet understand, a blood transfusion sometimes kills the patient.”
“Then why do you use blood?” Lucy asked. Her mouth had gone dry with fear, her hands cold.
“Have no fear, Lucy. I know what I’m doing.” Arthur tried to soothe her. “Doctor Blundell writes of a patient who suffered from a canker of the stomach that left him unable to eat or drink. He injected him with blood from several healthy men, and the patient felt less faint and was able to take food once more. That is the effect I’m hoping to achieve. Besides, whatever is causing Sarah to fail so rapidly seems to have diminished the amount of blood in her body; that would explain her paleness and why she is so short of breath. I wonder if a transfusion might not strengthen her a little.”
Once he had extracted a pint of blood from Michael, he injected it into Sarah’s arm. She did not respond to the needle slipping into her vein.
Lucy held her sister’s hand and squeezed it so hard that the fine little bones in her own hand hurt. Please , she thought, you must get well again, if not for your own sake, then for mine. I can’t do without you. You can have my blood, if you need it. You can have my flesh and bones, too. You can have it all, as long as it keeps you here . She kissed her sister’s knuckles one by one.
“I must take my leave of you all now, but I shall come again this evening. Please send for me earlier if there’s any change. Michael, you must rest now, and eat and drink plenty,” Arthur said as he packed up his bag.
“When shall we know if it worked?” Katje asked.
“Difficult to say. I’ve got no experience with this procedure and am afraid I don’t know. The most important thing now is to keep her comfortable.”
He thinks she’s dying , Lucy thought, and whatever tenderness she had felt for him drained away.