Page 9 of Blood on Her Tongue

Chapter 9

Grief made people do strange things, yes, but it also made strange things happen to people. During the days leading up to the funeral, Lucy found that time did not behave as it should. Hours would sometimes pass at the blink of an eye. At other times, the blink of an eye seemed to take hours.

She helped with the arrangements as well as she was able. When she wasn’t doing that, she sat with her sister’s corpse. She felt very protective of it. Whenever people came to say their goodbyes, she watched them anxiously, scanning their faces for signs of revulsion or alarm, her whole body tense, her breathing shallow and quick. Many of them she did not know and therefore could not trust.

Worst was when they wished to touch Sarah. She had awful, intrusive visions, waking nightmares, really, of someone gripping Sarah’s hand and accidentally twisting off a finger or someone bending over Sarah, placing their elbow on her belly and resting their weight on it, only for the skin to burst and the elbow to sink into her all the way to her spine. Bizarre thoughts, unrealistic and paranoid, but they had a hold on her and would not leave her no matter how hard she tried to reason them away, which she couldn’t, not always, and wasn’t that a sign Lucy herself was perhaps running mad?

A day before the funeral, Mrs. van Dijk arrived. She would spend the night with them, seeing as she was elderly and lived far away, and thus she could not be expected to make the trip to Zwartwater and back to her own home on the same day.

“Let me look at you” was the first thing she said to Lucy after she had kissed her cheeks thrice. She held Lucy at arm’s length and studied her. “God, you look awful. Black doesn’t suit you. It washes you out completely, and you’re already such a pale, colorless creature.”

“How kind of you to come,” Lucy murmured.

“Bring me to your sister, that I may say my goodbyes to her.”

Mrs. van Dijk held her by the arm, both leading Lucy and gripping her for support. Due to a childhood bout of polio, she had one withered leg that was much shorter than the other, the foot small as a child’s and twisted as a root. She had to have special shoes made with an extra-thick sole to even out the difference, but she walked with a pronounced limp nonetheless and had to use a cane. She had a collection of them at home: canes made of ivory and of polished wood, some tipped with silver, while others were simple and austere. She had brought a black one now, the top carved to look like a raven’s head.

When they reached the coffin, Mrs. van Dijk sucked her teeth. They stood there for a long time, until she said, “Well, that’s quite enough of that, I think. She doesn’t make a pretty corpse, I’m afraid. Poor thing. Her suffering must have been immense. I hate to say it, it sounds very callous of me, but now that I’ve seen her, I do think death must have come almost as a mercy.”

“She was recovering when it happened,” Lucy whispered.

“Was she? You wouldn’t say that from looking at her. It’s hard to imagine her looking worse than she does now. Of course, it doesn’t help matters that she has been dead for the past three days. Those open windows and buckets of ice can only do so much. You look about ready to faint. Come and sit down. There’s a dear. I’ve got some smelling salts on me that might revive you.”

She waved the foul-smelling things under Lucy’s nose, and Lucy began to cough. At the back of her throat, she tasted flowers, and underneath that was the sweet, meaty taste of rot. She coughed to the point of retching.

Mrs. van Dijk gave her firm slaps between the shoulder blades with a beringed hand, which did nothing apart from stamp Lucy’s back with the van Dijk’s family seal. By the time the coughing fit was over, she had a burning pain in her chest, was red in the face, and felt exhausted.

Mrs. van Dijk patted her shoulder. “There, there. All better. Nothing like a good coughing fit to get the circulation going. Now, do tell me: How are you holding up?”

“As well as I’m able.” Lucy choked. She picked up a lily—vases of fragrant flowers had been placed around the room to mask the scent of putrefaction—and stroked the fleshy petals in an effort to distract herself from the itch in her chest; if she wasn’t careful, she’d start coughing again. A little pollen, fine as dust, powdered the back of her hands. She wiped it away, but it had already stained her skin yellow.

Mrs. van Dijk tutted and handed her a handkerchief. “Come, no need to lie to me. That answer will do very well with others, but you are my companion. I know you better than that.”

Lucy scrubbed at the back of her hands until they looked bruised. “All right. I shall be honest with you. I feel maimed and…and mutilated, but also a little numb. The pain has yet to come, I think. I fear it will obliterate me when it does. I wish I were dead.”

“You poor dear. Death is a kind of mutilation, yes. A piece of you died as surely as your sister did. I remember that very well when my dear husband died. And to imagine it must be even worse for Michael…”

Anger rose in Lucy’s throat like bitter bile. Was this what others thought, too? That the blow was hardest to bear for Michael? He had loved her sister; of this she had no doubt. But he had known her for only a few years and could replace her when the time was right, whereas Lucy, who had known Sarah from before they were born, could never find another sister. He hadn’t been present at her death either, so he had been spared the horror.

She passed her hand over her face to compose herself. It was scented with the lily she had crushed. I shall associate this scent with Sarah’s death forever now , she thought, just as she would the smell of blood and meat. She stood, then brushed the thick scraps of lily petals off her skirt. “Forgive me. I don’t make a very good companion at the moment.”

“You do look pale as a sheet. Maybe you need to lie down for a bit?” Mrs. van Dijk’s voice was tainted with disapproval—apart from polio and other childhood illnesses, she had never been sick a day in her life, a fact in which she took great pride—but Lucy assented readily to the suggestion.

She did not go to her own room, though, but to Sarah’s. There she lay on the bed and buried her nose into the sheets, trying desperately to get a whiff of her sister’s scent. The sheets had been washed and smelled of nothing much at all, so she sat in front of the vanity instead. She pulled back the gauze that had been draped over it to keep Sarah’s wandering spirit from becoming entrapped, then looked at her reflection.

Mrs. van Dijk was right; black did not suit her. She looked wan, sickly, with bags of grayish skin underneath her eyes. The horror and sleeplessness had stamped her face with lines that hadn’t been there before, furrows between her brows and lines that ran from her nose down past her mouth. To conjure Sarah’s face, she smiled, but that only served to make her look slightly unhinged.

After Aunt Adelheid had been committed, their father had ordered to have all her possessions removed. Only the ant farm she had given to Sarah escaped his notice. In the weeks that followed, their mother would stare at it for hours, her pale face reflected by the glass. She and Adelheid hadn’t been twins, but now Lucy wondered: Had her reflection given her some sort of comfort because it had looked, at least a little, like her sister? Sympathy for her mother swelled inside her chest.

After all, once they close Sarah’s casket and inter her, the looking glass will be the only place I can find my sister , she thought. It was a gruesome thought, painful as a blow to the belly.

She sprang up and tried to throw the sheet back over the mirror, but haste made her clumsy, and she pulled the mirror down. The silver-backed glass cracked with a sound that was almost beautiful. Shards shivered to the floor.

Lucy cursed softly. She took hold of the frame and put it upright. Most of the glass remained inside, but a large piece in the bottom-right corner had cracked and broken and lay in fragments on the floor. She gathered the fragments carefully and bound them in her handkerchief. That done, she turned the mirror around so its reflective surface faced the wall. When she straightened and brushed down her skirts, she found a piece of wadded paper. It must have been hidden behind the mirror. As she unfolded it and smoothed it out with the flat of her hand, she found the ball actually contained three sheets filled with Sarah’s meticulous small handwriting. The first one was dated the twenty-second of September—almost two weeks ago.

I’ve been sleepwalking again , Lucy read. It used to happen pretty often to me when I was a girl. Lucy often had to fetch me from the schoolroom, or the dining room, or wherever it was I had wandered off to, and guide me back to bed without waking me. My wanderings became…

The door opened. Michael stood on the threshold. He had not expected her, and in that tiny moment before he realized he wasn’t alone, she saw rage in his eyes, then, when he saw her, a flash of fear. They stood staring at each other, both stricken and afraid. “Lucy,” he said at last, and the fear made way for relief, only to be replaced by anger once more. “Goddamn, woman. It’s a good thing I’ve got a strong heart; you scared me half to death just now. For a moment, I thought you were…”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

His gaze traveled past her and landed on the broken mirror. He closed the door behind him and strode toward the vanity. The corner of the mirror had chipped the wood. He rubbed at the flaw with his thumb, clicked his tongue in annoyance. As he let his hands wander over the frame to see if that, too, was damaged, Lucy slipped the balled-up pieces of paper with Sarah’s writing into her pocket.

“This was a wedding present. It’s ruined now,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to break it.”

“Fuck!” he shouted, then kicked the mirror with such force, it slammed against the wall, breaking the glass even more.

Lucy backed away from him until she felt the edge of the writing desk cut into the small of her back. She clutched the tabletop, bits of paper crinkling against her sweating palms. She could not stand shouting. When Michael raged like this, she was afraid of him. Her eyes burned.

Now, isn’t this silly , she thought clearly through the guilt and the misery and the fear. I can’t seem to cry for Sarah, but I feel as if I might cry for angering Michael.

She rubbed her eyes harshly with her fingertips, ruffling her lashes unpleasantly, but everything about them ached abominably: the balls felt hot and dry, the lids as if they had been cut.

He turned and came to her. For a moment, she thought he might strike her, but all he did was take her face between his hands and gently, gently blow on her eyelids to soothe their smarting. He had been chewing peppermint; she smelled it on his breath. It made her eyes prick painfully, but also made them feel cool and fresh.

“You must not mind me. I can be beastly. I’m not truly angry about the mirror,” he said.

“Then what has angered you?” she asked. His blowing made her eyes mist over, and as a result, his features were blurred to her.

“Mrs. van Dijk told me she intends to take you back with her tomorrow.”

She placed a finger against his mouth so he would stop breathing on her eyes. “But I’m not ready. I’ve got nothing packed. It’s too soon…”

“That’s what I told her, but she insists on having her little slave back.”

“You know it isn’t like that, Michael.”

“I know that the work is beneath you and that you know very well you needn’t put up with it. There’s a place for you here and always has been.”

“And you know very well I couldn’t stay.”

“I disagree.” He kissed one eyelid, then the other, then the first one again. His tongue darted between his lips, hot and wet, to lick up a tear that had tangled in her lashes.

“We mustn’t,” she murmured. She clasped his wrist. He was hirsute, and the hair grew thickly and darkly on his arms and knuckles, but the place where the bone protruded at his wrist was quite hairless, the skin very soft and smooth. Always sensitive to sensations, she ran her thumb over it and found it delightful.

He began to kiss her on the mouth.

She shuddered and turned her face away. “We mustn’t. We really mustn’t,” she said.

He took hold of her chin and made her look at him. “But we want to. Don’t deny this. You have craved the meat and the madness of it as much as I have.”

She smiled. “And therein lies the trouble, doesn’t it? We knew it wasn’t right, that it was unforgivable, but we did it anyway.” She tried to keep her voice light, but the tears lay hard like pips underneath the skin of her throat, softly strangling her.

He stroked her neck with his thumb, doing it rather harshly, leaving marks behind that were at first white, then flushed red as the blood came rushing back. “You may have thought it wrong, but you didn’t deny me before.”

“Things were different then. Lucille had just died, and Sarah wasn’t coping well, and you were lost and hurt. I didn’t mean to…to fornicate with you. I only ever meant to comfort you.” She winced at the word fornicate even as she said it. It sounded so grand, so severe and biblical. It hadn’t been like that at all.

“What a filthy word,” he said, as if he had read her mind. He kept stroking her throat. Her skin throbbed under his attentions. “You say things are different now. Perhaps they are. But answer me this, Lucy, and answer me honestly: Do you think I am not in need of comfort now as much as I was then?”

“Don’t ask me!” she cried. She dug her nails into his wrist to still the hand that chafed at her throat. “Why must you grasp after me so? You married Sarah; you made your choice! Stop straining after what you can’t and shouldn’t have.”

“Oh, darling,” he said, digging his thumb painfully into the soft tissue underneath her jawbone, “don’t you know that, of all the sins that taint me, greed is the strongest? I always want what I shouldn’t have. But I think you know what that feels like.”

When he kissed her again, she did not resist—did, in fact, lean into it.

He gathered the fabric of her skirt in one hand, pressing the heel of the other between her legs. Her hips rose of their own accord, and it felt so sweet that she gasped. He began to massage her, slowly at first, then, when she had caught up with the rhythm, a little faster.

When he parted her and slid his middle finger against the velvety flesh, he pressed his mouth against her hair and groaned. “Oh, Lucy, my darling, you’re dripping wet,” he said.

She tried to say something but could only sob. He had to let go of her skirt then and draw her to him to keep her standing; her knees were trembling something fierce and were close to buckling. She clutched his lapels to stop herself from falling. Her cheek lay against his chest, the silk of his cravat against her temple. Through the layers of fabric, she could feel the steady thud of his heart, which increased slowly the more she gasped, the more she bucked and strained against his hand.

Release struck her like lightning. For a moment, she was aware of nothing but the pure delight of her orgasm rippling through her. He held her fast as she rode it out. When it was done, he began to move her to the bed.

Shame stabbed at her. “Michael, not here!” she begged, trying to pull from his grip.

“I’m a gentleman, Lucy, but I’ll be damned if I don’t get what I am owed,” he growled.

“But not here!” She pinched the web of skin between his index finger and thumb brutally. He cursed and instinctively shoved her from him. The force of it made her cut the inside of her cheek on one of her teeth; a little blood pooled into her mouth, rich and hot and horrible. She swallowed it, gagged. The taste of it unleashed something in her, and she felt wild with want.

“My God, Lucy, are you hurt?” Michael asked, his eyes wide. “I didn’t mean to shove you so roughly, but you took me unawares. Let me look at you, my darling!” When he drew her close to check her for any injuries, she slotted her mouth over his and ran her tongue over his extra two teeth.

***

When they were done and he had given her his handkerchief to wipe away the sticky mess coating the inside of her thighs, the smell of it almost thick enough to get rid of the phantom smell of Sarah rotting and bleeding, she felt so revolted with herself, she wished she had a knife— or a pen— so she might cut herself and thus be punished.

Michael stood at the window, retying his cravat. His reflection in the glass was queer and blurred; she could not read it. But he could read the self-hatred and the guilt and the shame in her face, for he came to kiss her.

She twisted away.

“Suit yourself,” he said, not unkindly.

She came to her feet. Her legs were still weak with pleasure. She took care to walk into the corner of the writing table as she made her way through the room, relishing the sharp pain of a bruise blooming.

At the door, he took hold of her arm and said, “You may think I’m using you. I’m not. If this were just about sex, I would rather rut with one of the maids. It’s less complicated that way. But I care for you, Lucy, more than I suspect you know.”

She looked at his fingers, so long and white against the black of her sleeve. “Please let go. I need to sit with Sarah. These are the final hours that I may.” And I chose to spend some of that precious time coupling with her husband in her bed. I am vile .

Fornicating had been the right word after all.

As she took her place next to Sarah’s corpse again, the pages she had tucked into her pocket rustled. She took them out, smoothed them over her thigh. To distract herself from her self-loathing and guilt and grieving, she began to read.

When she was done, she sat very still for almost a quarter of an hour, her eyes large but unfocused, her face and lips blanched. The pages fell from her lap, startling her from her trance. She gathered them with shaking hands. “Don’t worry, Saartje. I’ll take care of this,” she murmured.

Without looking at her sister, she left the room. Upstairs, she collected Sarah’s final letters, the treatise on ticks, and a pair of sewing scissors, then took them to the library, where a fire was roaring in the grate. With the scissors, she cut the threads that had been used to sew the pages of the tick treatise together and ripped them from between the cover. She then set about cutting all the paper to pieces.

Halfway through, a sudden panic that someone might come in and read those infernal words took hold of her, so she dropped the scissors and tore the pages with her fingers before feeding the fire by the handful. The clothbound book cover did not burn so easily; it smoked and stank. She beat at it savagely with the poker until it submitted to the flames.

The only evidence of Sarah’s madness left now was Sarah’s maimed eye. Tomorrow she’d be interred, thus hiding it from sight. Within a few months—possibly sooner, if the winter cold did not come early this year—nothing would be left of her face but bone and stringy bits of tendon. Only Lucy would know the true extent of her lunacy then. She’d have to shoulder that burden alone, just as she would have to face everything alone from now on.

She folded her hands together, and though they were exactly like Sarah’s, they didn’t feel like her sister’s. They were just her own hands, one desperately gripping the other, seeking a sensation that would never come again.

Sarah Schatteleyn’s diary entry for 22 September 1887

22 September 1887

I’ve been sleepwalking again.

It used to happen pretty often to me when I was a girl. Lucy often had to fetch me from the schoolroom, or the dining room, or wherever it was I had wandered off to, and guide me back to bed without waking me. My wanderings became fewer the older I got. Since my marriage, I can count the times I’ve walked on a single hand, and whenever I did, Pasja wouldn’t let me get far: she’d paw at me and softly nip at my hand to wake me, and if that didn’t work, she’d scratch the door connecting my room to Michael’s until he woke and could help me instead.

When little Lucille died, I didn’t walk at all. Then again, her death turned me into an insomniac, and I had to take a tincture Arthur prescribed and Michael prepared for me himself every night to preserve my sanity, so perhaps that’s why I never wandered then.

But I did so last night, and I am frightened and horrified and revolted.

I blame myself. If I hadn’t insisted I attend that autopsy, the smell of that bog body wouldn’t have clung to my hair and clothes, driving Pasja into a frenzy. Who could blame her? That charnel-house stench was almost more than I could bear, and her nose is so much more sensitive than mine. She kept pacing and whining, occasionally sniffing my hands and growling softly, the hair on her neck and back raised. She has never shown me any aggression, but she showed me her little white teeth more than once. I couldn’t keep her with me, not like that. I asked Katje if she’d mind having the dog with her for a night, and so I was all alone.

I dreamed that I was in the cellar with the bog woman. I don’t remember getting there, but dreams usually begin in medias res, so it didn’t scare me. She was lying on the table where Arthur and Doctor Rosenthaler had cut her open and unsuccessfully tried to unravel her secrets. She didn’t look at all like her old self, dyed and cut and broken. She was whole, her joints not staked through, her chest firmly closed. Yet, with the uncanny knowledge of the dreamer, I knew it was her and knew this was what she had looked like in life.

When I touched her, she was cold, and she was cold because she was naked. I lay down next to her and gathered her in my arms to warm her, pressing her body against mine. Her skin was soft and supple under my hands and quite white, quite cool, yet under my attentions, it began to redden.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that she had done the same and was smiling at me. She clambered on top of me and kissed me. Soon, I was consumed with desire. I wriggled underneath her. Delighted, she writhed on top of me. She pressed her mouth to my neck, and I felt not the press of her teeth as I saw them, whole and a little yellow, but the raggedy bite of teeth chipped and broken. She pierced my skin and lapped at the drop of blood that welled. Her tongue was wet and hot, and though the small wound throbbed and stung, there was a pleasure in it, too.

When I was weak from her attentions, she kissed me again, more deeply than before. I caught a whiff of peat and stagnant water as something seemed to slither from her mouth into mine, something cool and soft. It tasted sweet and strong and rich, like blood, like rot.

I felt a deep sense of revulsion so strong that I gagged. She clamped her hand over my lips and nose. I tried to fight, but I was still weak, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she had seduced me for that exact purpose.

She stroked my throat until, convulsively, I swallowed what she had spat into my mouth. It went down slowly, painfully, for though it was smooth and soft, it was also large, about the size of a child’s fist. It clung to the meat of my esophagus. I coughed, retched, but down it went.

I woke up gasping for breath, my throat aflame and my limbs cramped with cold.

For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. Then I realized I was sitting in front of my bedroom door. I went inside and locked it to keep myself from wandering again. I crawled into bed and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t sleep, from fear and cold and the rawness in my throat. I coughed softly, but that only made it hurt more.

There is a logical explanation for this. My mind, so consumed with the bog woman ever since we found her, turned to her in my sleep, and my sleeping mind, unfettered by morality, gave me a dark and disturbing dream about her.

In writing all this down, I have purged myself of it. I must now try to forget that any of it ever happened. I shall rip out these pages and destroy them.

As for the body: I don’t much care what happens to it now, as long as it is removed from here.