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CHAPTER XXVI.

THE DRESS, THE DRESS.

A s if on cue, snow starts falling the day before Christmas Eve. The guests huddle in front of windows and laugh excitedly at the possibility of the storm continuing well into the New Year – delighted at the prospect of having to overstay their welcome at Ensor House. The ladies who were contemplating walking the moors in light rainfall and catching a semi-serious but not fatal cold for dramatic effect cancel their plans.

Even the obituaries carry a festive cheer – a woman is murdered on her doorstep by two men posing as carollers. A man’s head is speared by an icicle falling from a roof. A whole family is poisoned with arsenic poured into the wassail bowl.

Drusilla is so agitated upon her return from the Grim Wolds dress-monger, describing her new gown in such detail to the guests and the servants and anyone who’ll listen that I feel obligated to give her the afternoon off in case she develops a debilitating brain fever.

‘Miss Notty, what shall you wear to Christmas Eve dinner?’ she asks me over lunch.

‘I have but one formal dress, as you know.’

‘The black one? Oh, but it is so plain.’

‘I am not the one on display here, Miss Pounds. Now, eat slowly, or you might choke. You are quite excitable.’

The shimmer of an idea must have settled within Mrs Pounds upon hearing this exchange, for that evening she sends for me in her chambers, where she awaits, regal, upon her toilet-table, her back to me as she prepares for dinner.

Seeing it for the first time in the light of day, I note this might be the only room in the house that isn’t heavily oak-panelled or wallpapered in a fierce colour – the walls and drapes are light peach, hues of watercolour dawn; the colour of fingernails.

‘Miss Notty, I could not help overhearing you say to Drusilla you shall be wearing your black frock to Christmas dinner. It would be my great pleasure to offer you a dress.’

Mrs Pounds turns to her lady’s maid, who is brandishing a silver hairbrush in the corner. ‘Amelia, bring me the green dress.’

‘The – green dress, ma’am?’

‘That is what I said,’ says Mrs Pounds, fussing with her jewellery.

Amelia looks up to the ceiling as if asking for help from the heavens, curtseys, and leaves the room. I stand, hands clasped before me, as we wait. The silence is interrupted by pearls tapping together as Mrs Pounds adjusts a necklace around her throat.

I glance to one side and observe, on the chest of drawers beside me, arranged in neat rows, the framed daguerreotypes of Mrs Pounds’ dead children.

‘I see you looking at my babies,’ Mrs Pounds says, although she has locked eyes with herself in the glass.

‘How did they come to pass?’ I ask, noticing a pair of irises have been painted onto one of the children’s closed eyelids.

Mrs Pounds shrugs her shoulders. ‘Convulsions, stillbirth, atrophy, atrophy, atrophy . . .’ She takes a deep breath, holding an ornate, azure brooch above her breast to see the effect. ‘All gone to heaven, so precious were they that God wanted them for Himself.’

‘Did Mr Pounds love them very much?’ I ask, dismayed to think he did.

Mrs Pounds purses her lips as she sets down the azure brooch and picks up a diamond one. ‘You care very much for John, don’t you,’ she says, rather than asks, so that I do not understand if it is a question. ‘John doesn’t like that I have them here. He claims they look at him. He says he never had to endure this with the others.’

‘The others?’

‘Yes. With the first Mrs Pounds.’

I am quiet.

‘None of those children survived. Neither did the first Mrs Pounds. She was not quite right. Irresponsible of her to have children in her state.’

‘Not quite right how?’

‘Oh, you could tell just by looking at her. She was a high society lady, but’ – she chuckles scornfully – ‘I suppose marriage overwhelmed her. She started going funny, after John married her. And her beauty diminished terribly,’ she adds with relish. ‘Her complexion was downright pasty, and dark bruises began to show on her neck, big and dark as leeches. She tried to hide them, of course, but there’s only so much frills can do.’

‘Maybe they were leeches,’ I say, looking at the carpet, ‘and she kept them as pets.’

‘What?’ Mrs Pounds snaps, her eyes finally meeting mine in the glass. ‘Are you laughing at me, Miss Notty? Who would do such a thing?’

I shake my head, look down again. On one of the Reverend’s early attempts to understand me – to understand how my body could be ‘devoid of any trace of goodness’, as he put it – he sent for the Hopefernon physician, under pretence of illness. The physician’s fingers were rougher than cardboard as he set thirty-five leeches on my body, one of which I stole and convinced the physician’s eight-year-old daughter to swallow. It fed on her pharynx for seven days before she choked to death.

The door opens quietly and the lady’s maid reappears, holding between her now-gloved fingers a dress of such a vibrant apple-green it strains my eyes.

‘It is yours, Miss Notty,’ Mrs Pounds says. ‘You may have it. For the Christmas ball.’

‘I’m afraid I cannot accept, Mrs Pounds. I wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing a dress so . . .’ green ‘grand.’

‘Nonsense. You shall have it,’ Mrs Pounds says, and it sounds like a threat. ‘Let us at least depart on good terms.’

I abandon the apartment with the violently green dress. When the door closes behind me, I hear Amelia the lady’s maid ask: ‘Is that the colour that killed Charlotte Plummer down at Grim Wolds, ma’am?’

There are rumours the colour will kill you. Dressmakers inhale and swallow enough arsenic from the yards of dyed fabric to perish while foaming green at the mouth, the whites of their eyes green, their fingernails green, green mould creeping over their skin.

‘Well, nobody can know that for sure,’ responds Mrs Pounds.

I return with the loud, rumpled dress in my arms to my bed-room, where I feed it to the wardrobe. In the low light of the fire, because of the particular way the sleeves are creased, it looks like a woman attempting to claw her way out. I shut the door on her.

THE NIGHT BEFORE Christmas Eve, in the late hours when all the fires have died out, Ensor House is still, as if bracing itself for what is to come.

In her bed-chamber, Marigold’s eyes open to darkness. She blinks at the night, sits up in bed. Beside her, her husband stirs.

‘Wake up,’ whispers Marigold. ‘There’s someone in the room with us.’

‘What are you on about,’ he says, but does not reach for the candle on his bed-side table, instead pulling the bed-clothes firmly to his chin.

‘I can feel someone here.’

They look around the chamber blindly, past the stately mahogany bed pillars. The two large windows are shrouded in festoons of thick drapery, the soft patter of rain on the panes the only hint of a world outside.

‘Go back to sleep, Marigold. Tomorrow will be a tiring day.’

‘All right.’

They cast one last look about the room – their gaze falling, with suspicion, on the shape of the wardrobe, of the large easy-chair beside it – before slumping back into bed.

They never quite manage to meet my eyes.