Page 8 of Blood on Her Tongue

Chapter 8

It was astonishing, really, how much work a death demanded.

Michael had to talk to the vicar to arrange the service and Sarah’s interment in the family crypt. The woodworker had to come and measure her so she would fit perfectly into her casket. Black-bordered cards needed to be sent out to notify people of her passing, and an obituary needed to be written and placed in the newspapers to that same end. Black clothes made of bombazine and crepe had to be ordered. Until those had been sewn, the mourners had to be able to wear black, so dresses and shirts and trousers had to be dyed. Ingredients needed to be ordered, menus planned, food cooked for those who attended the service. Mirrors and paintings were to be taken down, or turned to face the wall, or covered in swathes of fabric.

There was, of course, also the body to take care of. Lucy could have left this to someone else, as was usual—no one expected the direct family to arrange anything, grieving as they were—but she couldn’t stand the idea of someone else laying out her sister’s body. She was perfectly capable of doing it herself, anyway, seeing as it entailed little more than washing and dressing it; the only people who would even think about embalming a body were Catholics, and then only for their sainted dead, or Americans.

Together with Katje, she washed Sarah carefully, bound her jaw, then brushed what was left of her hair and put it up carefully. None of her clothes would fit her emaciated frame anymore, so Lucy and Katje set about altering a dress. She hung pearls in her sister’s ears. Her wedding ring was too large for her thin fingers, so Lucy secured it with a piece of string.

The veil they draped over Sarah’s face was white and trimmed with Brussels lace. The work was very fine; no doubt the nun who had labored over it had sharp eyes. Yet, in time, such small work ruins the eyes, and she would be blind before she reached middle age.

Fitting , Lucy thought as she looked at her sister’s face. Though the veil hid the worst of her injuries—the bruises, the half-moon marks her nails had left at her temples and hairline, the little bald patches where the hair had fallen or been torn out—it could not mask the damage done to her eye.

Through the weft, it was possible to see the meaty mess, which had glistened at first, then turned dull and brittle. She asked Arthur if he could try and stitch it up, but he shook his head and told her that both the upper and the lower eyelid had been torn beyond repair. Whatever skin was left was too thin; piercing it with a needle and then trying to drag some black thread through would only rip it further.

During the first night after Sarah’s death, the wound secreted a little fluid, which the veil absorbed. Lucy did not see it in the weak light of the candles, even though she sat up all night to watch over her sister and keep her company. They had laid her out in one of the lesser-used rooms downstairs; no one had much wanted her to stay in the room in which she’d died, which would now, Lucy supposed, be forever tainted, forever haunted.

She watched over her sister alone. Katje had wanted to stay, but she sobbed and even moaned to the point where Lucy couldn’t stand it anymore. She hadn’t expected this from Katje. Such an excess of grief was appropriate for a woman who had just been widowed, not a girl who had just lost a friend. Lucy told her to go and sit with Pasja instead. The dog had been slinking around the house with her tail between her legs, shivering and occasionally whimpering, getting in everyone’s way; she needed someone to be kind to her.

When Lucy tried to remove the veil to wash away that slightly putrid bloom of yellow, it had already crusted, so it would not come, stuck to what was left of Sarah’s right eye. Lucy put her head in her hands and took a deep shuddering breath.

“I’m sorry, Sarah,” she said. “I should have sewn you an eye patch of silk or perhaps black velvet. With your pearl earrings, you’d look half a rake, but I suspect you might have enjoyed that.” Sarah had always had a sympathy for the villains of each story, for the lost and the damned. No one but Sarah could have been so deeply attracted to the bog woman, and that attraction had no doubt been in part due to the way she’d been buried, shunned and condemned, after dying in agony unforgiven and unshriven.

The manner of their death may have been similar, but their graves would not be. It was the first thing Michael had arranged. “We shall say she tried to rise from her sickbed, but weakened as she was, she fell, and in falling, she hit the bedside table in such a manner that the pen was driven through her eye. A horrible way to go, very strange, but not a way to condemn,” he said. His face was tight, his voice forcefully flat.

“Suicide committed when temporarily insane is not an offense according to the law,” Arthur said softly.

“The fact that it is not punishable by law doesn’t mean it is in any way desirable. I can do without the stigmas of insanity and self-murder tainting my name and that of my wife,” Michael snapped.

And so they had told a bunch of half-truths to give Sarah a proper funeral. Lying did not bother Lucy. For her sister’s sake, she would do much worse—and do it gladly.

“Though it wasn’t exactly a lie, now, was it?” she murmured. She clasped her sister’s hand in hers. It was cold, the fingertips already discolored, the joints stiff. Soon, that stiffness would disappear, and if she held the hand long enough, it would not feel cold anymore either, and then she might fool herself that it wasn’t a dead woman’s hand she was holding.

“You thought there was something inside your head, and you wanted it gone. You destroyed yourself in attempting to remove it, but that destruction was not your goal, merely a side effect.” She crouched over her sister’s body, pressed her cheek against the back of that cool stiff hand. It was not a comfortable position, since she had to contort her spine and twist her head, but what did she care for comfort now? “Though if God disagrees and you are damned and restlessly must roam, please, Saartje, please come and haunt me,” she whispered.

If only I could cry , she thought, I think I might feel a little better. Her eyes burned like two blue coals, and the unshed tears seemed sharp as flint. It was not that she could not stomach pain; indeed, she welcomed it, for anything was better than the numbness that pervaded her entire being. It was not natural to feel so little. The moment of horror had come, the limb had been severed, but the pain had not yet registered. It would come, she knew; it could not be avoided.

Waiting, always waiting , she thought bitterly. She imagined Hell as an eternal waiting room whose doors would lead to planes of pain hitherto not experienced. In such a case, the absence of pain was not bliss but part of the torture, as indeed it was to Lucy now.

She rubbed her cheek harshly against her sister’s hand, wanting the feel of it to be ground into her very cells. “Why,” she hissed, “why did you have to die and leave me all alone? You were all I had. Selfish, selfish! Did you not know you left me but one wish in life, and it was that I might die before you did so I’d never need to know this pain?”

Her cheek burned with the friction, and the top layer of Sarah’s skin began to slough off, leaving her hand looking tender.

Lucy continued. “Perhaps it was selfish of me to want this. You may have been my leader, and gladly did I let you rule me, but I always did think I was the stronger one. I am still convinced that I can bear this pain of separation better than you could have. I didn’t want to, though. In this one thing, I wanted to be spared.”

A hand on her shoulder made her jump.

“I’m sorry. I did not mean to startle you,” Arthur said. He had his hands raised, as if she were a skittish horse he wished to calm.

She lay her hand against her throbbing cheek to shield it from his sight. She found a wisp of Sarah’s skin clinging to it, thin as cobweb, almost translucent. She held it between her fingers, unsure what to do with it. For a moment, she thought she really might cry after all, though not from grief but from shame. What kept her from it was the fact Arthur seemed even more embarrassed at having witnessed such a violent, intimate display of emotion. “Why are you here?” she said, and the words came out harsh, raw, accusatory.

“I came to see how you were doing. You’ve been sitting up with Sarah all night, I’ve heard.”

Always a gentleman, Arthur.

“During the wake, she must not be left alone.” She smoothed Sarah’s sleeve, which Lucy’s rubbing had rucked up and wrinkled. Her sister’s hand, as predicted, felt hot and alive, but the warmth was fleeting, and soon only the patch she had chafed at held no warmth.

When it became clear she would not say anything else, Arthur cleared his throat and said, “Forgive me, but you look exhausted.”

Now that , she thought, a gentleman wouldn’t say. A doctor before everything else, then. “These past few days have been trying,” she said.

“And the days to come will be trying, too, even more so if you don’t take good care of yourself. You may not feel like it, but it is vital that you do. Lucy,” he said, and he spoke with the voice of a friend, not a physician, “you must try to sleep.”

“On the contrary. I think sleep is the last thing I could possibly need,” she said, smiling a little. People described sleep as a respite from grief, only for the blow to land afresh upon waking. It had never been so for Lucy. When little Lucille had died, she had dreamed, some days after the funeral, that she held the little girl in her arms. She was quite cold, but when Lucy began to rub her little hands and blow on them, she warmed quickly. Soon, she was moving her arms and head, murmuring something unintelligible.

For all appearances, she was a living child.

But she is dead , Lucy thought as she rocked her niece, then again as she toyed with her little fingers, as she dropped kisses on her silken head. She is dead and buried. And because she knew this with unwavering certainty, it did not matter that she didn’t know she was asleep and dreaming: she was not able to rejoice at the weight of the child in her arms, at her scent and the words she slurred in her sleepy voice.

It had been similar when her parents had died; she had dreamed about them incessantly then, too. She knew with cold dread that it would be far worse with Sarah. The horror could be strangled during the day but not at night. Lucy had never been able to rouse herself from a nightmare, so she would have to endure until her mind could take no more and woke up, the sheets wet through with her sweat, fear seeming to choke her heart inside her breast.

“I can give you something to make your sleep dreamless,” Arthur said.

She hesitated. “But Sarah shouldn’t be left alone.”

“Magda could come sit with her.”

“Magda has too much to do to sit with her mistress’s corpse.”

“That may be why she’ll consent to it. Servants don’t usually get to simply sit. Katje would do it gladly, too, of course.”

“Katje is currently weeping her eyes out.”

“The girl has taken it hard,” Arthur conceded.

Why do we all insist on thinking of her as a girl? She’s almost twenty-two, isn’t she? That’s only three years younger than I am , she thought dispassionately. She rubbed her eyes, then hissed as her ministrations made the dry pain flare up. “I can’t think right now,” she said.

“That is why you must sleep. Come, no more arguing. As a doctor and your lifelong friend, I dare say I know what is good for you.”

He mixed a draught for her, which she drank obediently, then took her up to her room. Already she felt drugged and slow.

Once in bed, she realized she still held the fine web of Sarah’s skin between her fingers.

She rolled it into a ball. It was very small, no larger than the back of a pin. Afraid she’d drop it and lose it between the heavy sheets, she did the only thing she could think of to keep it safe: she popped it into her mouth and held it under her tongue.

One last thought crossed Lucy’s mind before sleep dragged her under: If this is what death tastes like and death is as it tastes, then it is a dull thing indeed.