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CHAPTER XXVII.

IN WHICH A SUMPTUOUS CHRISTMAS EVE FEAST IS ENJOYED AND FESTIVITIES ARE HELD.

I n our respective bed-chambers, the guests and I dress up with caution and purpose for the war of merriment. Lady’s maids’ fingers – scrubbed raw in preparation of handling silk – button up dresses. Valets advise on gold and sapphire and topaz cufflinks that cost more than their fathers’ farms. The nurse smoothly parts Drusilla’s hair and arranges several combs of long, false ringlets – purchased for the occasion – so that they stream down her neck in shiny spirals.

Alone, I dress in death, green falling from my shoulders to the floor. Mrs Pounds has not thought to lend me shoes, perhaps on purpose after noticing I possesses none but a pair of worn boots the colour and texture of lentils. The dress has not been fitted, so the hems are too long, the heavy material rasping audibly against the floorboards when I turn, and my flesh bulges out in all its splendour, seams pinching my waist and armpits. Between my breasts I slide a scrimshaw whalebone busk hewn by a sailor for another woman.

Inside myself, my Darkness rests within my rib-cage, a jailed animal grown listless with domestication. I have not felt my soul for a very long time. It may have slipped out, unbeknownst to me. I’ve seen others lose their shame or dignity in this way.

Above my heart I pin the pearl brooch my mother was buried in. My black eyes shimmer at me from the wash-stand glass. I think, I deserve this . I think, They deserve me .

THE STAIRCASE SMELLS like meat and wood damp with the iron tang of blood. There is silence but for my weight on the oak steps and the rustle of my fingers on the wreaths lining the banister.

I nod at the liveried footmen standing rigidly on either side of the drawing-room door. Their faces are so solemn, so unbearably austere, I unpin my pearl brooch and swallow it.

In the drawing-room, the guests each shine in a different, specifically worn-out way, like stray pennies. Mrs Pounds sneers when she sees me wearing her old dress. She seems to regret gifting me with it, likely self-conscious in her own ridiculous gown, the silk of which is coated in a changeable sheen – purplish and iridescent, bruise-like – that varies in the different lights.

Drusilla stands in a corner, straight-backed in pink silk taffeta that is slightly too large on her frame, giving her the air of a rumpled prepuce. Andrew writhes on the floor, gurgling as he looks up women’s skirts.

WE WADDLE INTO the dining-room stuffed into our loud, uncomfortable clothing, the thick, stiff fabrics crunching like boots wading through snow.

Shadows are cast on the walls by large bouquets in the candlelight. We sit at the dizzyingly resplendent table and admire the feast the servants were up since five preparing. There is turkey and brawn and a sucking-pig and garlands of sausages and steaming bowls of wassail. There is a boar’s head, lemon in its mouth, on a silver platter. There is roast swan – carried in proudly by the butler – re-clothed in its skin and feathers for presentation at the table. It totters on the plate as it is set down, reflected on the greedy eyes of the diners, the boar emblem from the Pounds family crest carved onto its beak.

It’s a controversial choice – swan has fallen somewhat out of fashion, it being difficult to domesticate and some hunters feeling unwilling to shoot it (Mr Pounds will laugh at them momentarily as feathers spill from his mouth) – but it’s an appropriate medieval Christmas dish for a medieval house, and there is a rumour circulating that Queen Victoria herself serves roast swan for Christmas. Hatched in June and separated from its parents in September, then fattened on grass and barley, the obese cygnet was slaughtered as soon as it grew its white plumage, just in time for Christmas. My torso trembles with a frisson of pleasure when I picture the scullery maids washing the blood off the feathers, perhaps one of them licking it off her fingers.

The swan is tough and acrid and hard to chew – even harder to swallow – and eating it feels like pulling at the skin of a dead old man. My jaw grows sore with the effort, chewing on it and chewing on it but it’s still the same size when it drops down my gullet like it’s being lowered on a rope. I have never tasted swan before and so do not know if it is always like this or if it has been overcooked, which tends to occur nowadays because undercooking is thought to exacerbate women’s weak nervous conditions. The guests attempt to hack at the animal audibly until, frustrated, they all throw themselves at the much juicier, tender baron of beef.

Miss Manners chews as elegantly as one can on a stew of tripe, while her mother sucks chitterlings off a silver spoon, elbowing Mr Fancey, who is sitting beside her gnawing on potted ox tongue. Mrs Fancey sits opposite him, her mouth bulging with kidneys, her chin varnished with fat. Wassail drips from Marigold’s wet lips to her chest, where it rolls between her breasts, eliciting a small, excited groan from Mr Art Fishal, whose belly swells under his fine embroidered napkin as he crunches on the bones of an ortolan (force-fed to the size of a handful, then drowned in a glass of brandy, then broiled). Belches travel up throats, spit-threaded maws gnash, juices momentarily dry, then are replaced by others. Oysters are slurped, alive, along with their hearts and anuses and whatever watery algae they have excreted. Shrimps are munched on, along with the black, slimy string of their faeces. Mr Pounds holds a turkey croquette in one hand, reaches for a headless liver-stuffed lark with another. The children nibble daintily on sheep’s brains with matelote sauce. There is much merriment and squealing and ‘Je plis par pleu la manière du fale manne,’ says Drusilla, because I have not, in fact, been teaching anybody any French.

The ghosts of the servants are reflected on the silver. They wait at the sideboard to serve the food and drinks, looking upon the scene through a veil of their superiors’ indifference. I watch the footmen turning their backs on the table and spitting into the food before serving it. I lock eyes with them as I bite into my moist fillet of blackcock, their titters dissipating when my gaze refuses to let theirs go and it dawns on them that maybe the joke is somehow on them.

Desserts are brought in, chestnuts and oranges and pears and mince-pies ignited in brandy. Mince-pies which traditionally used to be stuffed with shredded mutton and veal but which are now sweet thanks to all the enslaved men and women and children who harvested sugarcane in the colonies. Mr Pounds scratches his fingers on the sprig of holly atop the Christmas pudding, though he pretends otherwise, brushing his grazed fingertip against the food as he reaches for dessert. Drusilla bites into the sixpence hidden inside the pudding – a sound like a cracked knuckle. She holds up the silver coin and smiles at us, teeth bloodied.

WHEN THE DOORS to the Great Hall open, everyone whoops with delight – a large, impossibly fresh tree presides over the room, lit with tapers, hung with gilded walnuts and apples and pears and flowers and little cherubs carved out of sugar swaying from colourful ribbons. It drowns the hall in the scent of an entire forest, a redolence that presses down on our chests as we breathe it in.

One cherub sways dangerously close to a taper. Fleetingly I picture the flames burning its face off, burning the entire tree, and all the cherubs’ faces (there are cherubs and babies in mangers and in trees and on the Dowager’s cane and babies everywhere).

A band of fifteen begins to play from the minstrels’ gallery. A set of stalwart, rustic characters sweating into their instruments.

The guests take to their dancing while I serve myself some wassail from a large silver bowl on a corner table, disturbing the bronzed apples and lemon slices that bob like drowned corpses on the surface. I drink and set my cup down to scratch at my neck. It itches – from the noose, perhaps, although that hasn’t happened yet.

Mr Pounds grabs my wrist and I am swept into the ridiculous choreography. He and Marigold and Art Fishal swivel around in a dizzying circle of faces, and their features merge so that Marigold’s eyes appear to be looking in opposite directions. I take Mr Fishal’s hand and he turns me around and we trot closer and we trot farther away, my blurry reflection shrinking and enlarging on the silver buttons of his jacket. When the musicians take breaths there are pauses in the music, and then only the absurd pitter-patter of feet, like fingers tapping on a tabletop, is heard.

In a far-off corner I see Mr Fancey forcing one of his very young children to kiss Drusilla, shoving them both under a twig of mistletoe, insisting that this was how he first kissed his cousin, who then became his wife.

The music quickens, allegretto. I take Mr Pounds’ hand. His lips and teeth are purple from the wine and orange concoction (aptly named the smoking bishop). I sway away from him, then back towards him, and I murmur, ‘When we’re dancing and you’re dangerously near me I get ideas,’ but he doesn’t hear me and it’s time to trot away from him again and circle around the other couple. As I do so I take Marigold’s silver flask pendant of smelling salts because there’s no way I’ll be able to bear this evening without the aid of stimulants. It comes undone with a gentle tug and spools into my palm.

Drunk on wassail and smelling salts and dance, I stumble out of the Great Hall into the quiet of the staircase.

There is pause, here. A welcome intermission. I breathe into the space, feel my Darkness coming out in spools of spiced exhalations, dissolving in the air and between the cracks of the woodgrain on the banister.

I realise the house is, for once, completely unoccupied upstairs, waiting to be haunted – and so I comply. I step into the bed-rooms, caress goat-haired shawls and challis dresses, sniff out ear wax on pillows, sneeze on Mrs Fancey’s gold-leaf hair powder so that it sprays across the looking glass, a fairy’s tuberculosis.

I walk the hallways, stalking the dreams that stalk the chambers. The wind outside blows, high-pitched, sounding like a group of women humming in unison. The music from the band downstairs blows upward momentarily, as if on a gust of that same wuthering wind that is rattling the windowpanes, and the disjointed notes dampen the spaces and furniture with melancholia.

I walk past one chamber, its door wide open, which appears to be occupied by a small group of masked gentlemen. They came to disinfect the house of plague, many years ago. Together, they turn their black beaks in my direction. They smell of dried roses and camphor. One of them steps towards me and closes the door.

In a fit of joyful liberation, the cheer of wassail coursing through bone and vein, I crawl across the deserted gallery floor. I reach the tapestry depicting the medieval hunting scene. Still kneeling, I fling it to one side and feel along the panelling behind it with my fingernails to open the tiny hidden door.

I wriggle into the secret garret space in the attic where the bodies smile at me except one who’s still alive but whose vocal cords have been ripped out, in the same way I ripped off the blind fiddlers’ catgut violin strings at Hopefernon. I replaced them with fresh, twisted guts from a slaughtered sheep. And their music tasted sadder, got caught in your throat like suet.

I roll down the stairs, green dress rumpling in waves around my colourless thighs as I lift my legs, place them on the walls, kick my way down – landing on each step with a thud (noises the servants have complained of hearing in the night). Lying at the foot of the staircase, face-down (potent stuff, that wassail), I breathe into the mildewy carpet, dimly aware my dress is crumpled above my bare buttocks, and that if anyone were to come across me now, they would surely assume me dead. I wonder if I could pretend death long enough to be buried alive. I’d truly love to ring those coffin bells. Ring them for all to hear.

I lift my head. The two liveried footmen are not observing me nervously from either side of the drawing-room entrance, because they aren’t here. Grandfather Pounds and the portraits sing, jolly, from the gallery upstairs – but no, the voices are coming from elsewhere. I crane my neck to follow the sound. They’re coming from the servants’ hall.

THE SERVANTS are telling ghost tales around the fireplace – not only Ensor House staff but the guests’ lady’s maids and valets and a couple of coachmen, too. The servants’ hall is dense with breaths that are hot with mead and victuals. The leather fire buckets hanging from the beams appear to swivel ever so slightly over the heads of all those gathered.

The butler is mid-story, recounting an incident which allegedly took place in the neighbouring market town of Woe-on-the-Wold.

‘And so it happened, one night, that as that very servant – my cousin – was extinguishing the candles in the Long Gallery on the first floor, a strange flicker on the other side of the window glass caught her eye. Upon further inspection she saw, across the courtyard, in the opposite wing of the house, her mistress – walking through the halls, calmly and in her flannelette nightdress, just as she may have been glimpsed on any other night except that she had on no shawl and she was on fire, illuminating each of the windows she passed by. The servant wondered fleetingly, if she were equipped with a bigger snuffer whether it would be moral to extinguish the lady of the house.’

There are murmurs of approval among the servants.

‘She disappeared into the servants’ staircase and was never seen again. Nobody knows what happened to her – there was no body to bury. There are still whispers in Woe-on-the-Wold, to this day, about the woman who set herself on fire and walked, calmly, through the old house; a blazing spectre. It is rumoured bad luck will befall any who sees her and locks eyes with her through the flames.’

There is some scattered clapping as he finishes the story. I scoff loudly from the doorway. The congregation turns towards me, chair legs clearing their throats on the stone slab floors.

‘There once was a man,’ I begin at the top of my voice – there is some groaning, but I persist – ‘a man named William Batt. He owned Oakwell Hall, a fine manor house not very far from here. Everyone thought him in London on business, but one winter evening, as dusk was falling, his widowed mother watched him approach the house, on foot, along the lane. He went in through the hall and ascended the stairs to his room, where he vanished.’ I survey the servants, all alike in hues of black and grey, except one of the kitchen maids, herself deathly white with flour. ‘He had been shot in a duel in London that very afternoon,’ I say, with worthy performative conviction.

One of the valets, a gangling youth, shakes his head impatiently. ‘We’ve heard the William Batt story before –’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘Yes. But what I must confess to you all tonight, is that I fear I myself am treading in William’s footsteps. I came to this house thinking myself very much alive, and yet during the past months it has been proven to me, time and time again, that I must have died at some point without realizing. And here I am, walking the halls of Ensor House, cursed to walk them evermore.’

There is a pregnant pause.

‘We don’t like you very much,’ the butler says.

UPSTAIRS, I FOLLOW the wild and elevating music back into the Great Hall, the whiff of sweat and exhaled food in the air growing ever more pungent.

Upon my arrival, Mr Pounds tiptoes towards me, a finger to his lips, conspiratorially indicating silence from his guests, as if I couldn’t see him perfectly, coming at me with a piece of cloth in his hands. He raises it over my head. I am blindfolded.

Darkness settles over, and although my eyes are open, I cannot see (the same could be said of most of the guests present). ‘Blind man’s buff! Blind man’s buff!’ they all chant, Mr Fancey’s chortles escaping his mouth with the same surprised squawking of birds fleeing from a tree after a gunshot.

I turn my head, the darkness of the blindfold moving along with me so faithfully, I wonder if this blackness isn’t in fact the real world, and the true blindfold is that other world of colour we are accustomed to. I reach out, my fingertips just barely grazing the wool of a tailcoat.

There is the clumsy rap of a heel upon the stone floor, an angsty gasp. The fragrance of their different hides – sweet as apples or dry as whiskey or musty as a closed oak drawer. I picture them fleeing, falling over themselves, toppling over chairs and crawling on the floors and jumping onto window seats, screaming as they climb up to the minstrels’ gallery, gripping onto a French horn, a bassoon, the alarmed musicians trying to shake them off. The men hugging the women’s waists to push them forward, to save themselves. The women diving into the massive fireplace to escape me, singeing locks hissing like Medusa’s snakes.

The Grim Wolds church bell tolls midnight, which is odd because I remember hearing it strike one. Blindfolded, I wave my hands about, stroking silk and skin, my fingernail tapping, hard, against another fingernail.

The church bell tolls midnight, and Mother walks down the parsonage steps, past the carollers and into the snowed churchyard where she digs her own grave with her hands, her fingernails black with the deathbeds of strangers. The townspeople trickle into the church square as they exit midnight Mass. The two blind street musicians play their one shared fiddle against the tolling church bells, and shake their one shared top hat at passers-by, their knees shining through the holes in their trousers. The Reverend hurries up the walk to the parsonage, having missed Mother in church and fearing the worst. Meanwhile, Mother digs, her fingers frostbit, the longcase clock in the parsonage entrance ticking, ticking but the hour never changing, always midnight.

The church bell tolls midnight. My hands clutch at something crisp that tries to slip between my fingers, so I clench harder, feeling muscles ripple in my fists, the linen blindfold scraping my cheekbones. I pull off the blindfold and it’s Drusilla, a human blush in pink, the taffeta of her dress dampened, her sweat reeking of rotting rose stems in old vase water. Drusilla raises her arms in mock surrender, and a shining steel blade near her wrist winks in the light. I pull out what happens to be a painting knife that Drusilla has stashed in the pink cuff of her sleeve. I feel the blade, caked with decades of pigments, that has accidentally crisscrossed Drusilla’s wrist with scratches –

The church bell tolls midnight, and it is the following Christmas Eve, and Ensor House, an empty shell of its former self, its walls supple with the fingerprints of past misery, is set on fire by superstitious villagers, like a plague-ridden ship.

The church bell tolls midnight, and I am but four, and Mother is pounding on the front door of the Harley Street terrace, demanding that my father see his daughter, see the monster he has created with his evil, her voice growing hoarse as the servants who used to work by her side throw buttons and an old shoe and then curses at us from the windows. The boar-head door knocker sneers at me as it chews on a brass deer leg.

The church bell tolls midnight. I stab Drusilla in the chest, over and over and in and out and in again, feeling for openings between her ribs with the point of the painting knife, the way men poke at unyielding hymens with their penises.

The church bell tolls eight and I walk into the dining-room. It is Christmas morning, the light of a fine winter’s day shining through the stained-glass windows. Drusilla is fine, if a little pale, seated at the breakfast table. Of course she is. Painting knives, no matter how sharp, are too blunt to penetrate chests. Don’t be so gullible.