Pinkerton's Sister (39 page)

1. Lift the lid of Mrs. Albert Comstock’s coffin.

Tick
.

2. Place the point of the stake over Mrs. Albert Comstock’s heart.

Tick
. Charlotte takes the stake in her left hand, and places the point over the heart, holding it ready in position for Alice.

3. Hammer the stake into Mrs. Albert Comstock’s heart.

Tick
. Alice takes the hammer in her right hand – no, no, forget the text,
both
hands – and strikes with all her might. One
Tick
would not be enough.

Tick
.
Tick. Tick.

There would be enough ticks for a shop full of clocks.

Alice would insist on being the one to wield the hammer. It was, after all, from
her
house. She would bring the hammer down as if destroying a Test Your Strength machine, the bell exploding and whistling across the fairground to cut a swathe through the freak show. (It would spell the end of the Goodchilds and the Griswolds, the depopulation of vast areas of Longfellow Park.) Her capital-lettered Strength would pass the Test with all flags flying.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

She would bring the hammer down as if she were driving home the last bolt into a tie securing a coast-to-coast railroad track. Her arms would rise and fall, driving the stake deeper and deeper, while the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. She would wear an apron – her long, cream, floor-length apron – to protect her dress. She would wear her winter gloves to prevent blisters on her hands. She’d be thwunking so hard that there’d be a definite danger of blisters. There would be no hint of a
Teuch!
There would be no
Faugh!
and no
Fah!
There would not even be a
Phew!
The only sound, over and over – apart from the loud cheers – would be a satisfyingly resonant
Thwunk!
as the blood from the pierced heart – she liked to think of it yet again – welled and spurted up around it. That’s what it said in the book, and instructions needed to be followed precisely to be certain of success. (Just as
Equipment
had merged into
Materials
, so
Method
had blended with
Observations
. She clearly lacked the necessary scientific detachment to become a Madame Curie of Murder.)

(
STAB ENORMOUS SIBYL!
)

She would sing the “Anvil Chorus” from
Il trovatore
as she thwunked away. She’d learned the words especially.

4. Sing the “Anvil Chorus.”

Thwunk!

Thwunk!

Thwunk!

Thwunk! Thwunk! Thwunk!

Thwunk!

Thwunk!

Charlotte would be permitted to join in.

5(a). Listen awhile to hideous blood-curdling screech from the opened red lips.

Tick
.

(b). Listen a little while longer, as it was so much fun the first time.

Tick
.

6. Saw the top off the stake, leaving the point of it in the body.

Tick
.

7. Cut off Mrs. Albert Comstock’s head.

Tick
. Alice would insist on being the one to cut off the head. The knives were, after all, from
her
house.

8. Fill the mouth with garlic.

Tick
. Charlotte would be permitted to do this, if she asked nicely. They’d need an enormous amount of garlic to fill that cavernous aperture. Charlotte would be shoveling it in with both hands.

9. Light the oil lamp.

Tick
.

10. Melt some plumbing solder.

Tick
.

11. Solder up the lead coffin.

Tick
.

12. Screw on the coffin lid.

Tick
.

13. Gather up belongings.

Tick.

14. Come away.

Tick
.

They’d sing an extra chorus from
Il trovatore
as they came away, as a form of celebration.

“
La zingarella!
” they’d bawl triumphantly as they emerged, blinking, into daylight from the cellars of 5 Hampshire Square.

“
La zingarella!
”

You could keep Apple Charlotte. You could keep Brain and Tongue Pudding.
This
was the recipe to make everyone roar for more.
This
was the recipe for second and third helpings.
This
was the recipe to get the spoons banging on the dining-room table in an insistent, irresistible rhythm, bouncing from wall to wall like deafening multi-layered echoes of the heart-piercing thwunks.

“Please, sir, I want some more.”

The master grinned hugely, and plunged his ladle deep into the copper.

“And you shall have some more, Oliver. As much as you want! All of you!”

In the George Cruikshank illustration, Oliver’s spoon was huge, as large as his bowl. It was too large to insert into his mouth. He would have to sip his gruel from the side. Here was an artist who read the text carefully.

“As much as you want! All of you!”

With a ringing cheer, the workhouse boys began to bang on their bowls with their enormous spoons, singing the “Anvil Chorus” as they jostled into a line behind Oliver Twist.

Clink!

Clink!

Clink!

The spoons, like the bowls, were very bright and shiny, where the workhouse boys had licked them in their hunger. They held the spoons before their faces, as if they were hand mirrors – they were the right size and shape for this – in which they were studying their faces, like mermaids, like girls combing their hair late at night, noticing the results of slow starvation, the withholding of love, being unwanted: the sunken eyes, the pale, drawn cheeks, the emaciated bodies. They were – shrunken and bowed down – like a procession of young Dorian Grays or ragged Mr. Hydes lining up for nourishment.

Clink!

Clink!

She stared at herself in the coal scuttle’s curving surface, her face lugubrious and elongated, like a face on the back of a spoon, as she pondered the problem of a goatskin. The goatskin was proving elusive. Charlotte’s reflection appeared beside hers, equally drawn-out and doleful.

“Do you think Mr. Gauntlett would let us borrow his leopardskin?” Charlotte mused. They had remembered seeing one in the photographer’s studio, draped informally over the shoulders of the Vestal virgin, massive in marble, with the breasts – “Boo!” – thrusting officiously through. Henry Walden Gauntlett was about the only man in Longfellow Park who employed a naked woman as a rack for clothes, if – that is – you ignored the scurrilous rumors about Dr. Vaniah Odom. “If we explain what it’s for?”

“If we explain what it’s for he’ll insist on doing it himself,” Alice objected, “and
I
want to chop her head off. I’ve been practicing.”

The pillars in the schoolroom had been quivering for days. The rooms beneath must be deep in shaken-down dust. They ought to send out a search party for Annie. She was – like Jane Eyre’s Alice Wood – such a small servant that she might be lying somewhere under a drift, completely vanished from view, praying for rescue.

They caused considerable concern to their mothers – Charlotte’s mother had still been alive then – by, for several weeks, inexplicably speaking to Mrs. Albert Comstock’s reflection in the mirror on the rare occasions on which she addressed them, rather than facing her directly.

“Little girl …”

“Little girl …”

Charlotte had spent one afternoon speaking to a large polished brooch on the left of Mrs. Goodchild’s bosom because it reflected – even more grotesquely misshapen than the real thing (and divided into three parts, like Gaul) – the Hunchfront of Hampshire Square.

(Alice had been listening to the older brothers of some of her friends: smart young men with parted hair and vulgar imaginations, smoking cigarettes and laughing together as they exorcised their demons, their remembered afternoons of agony as small boys, desperately fighting their irresistible urge to give way to hilarity as Chinky-Winky’s foundations-threatening farts shook the music –
music! –
room around them. She tried not to giggle when she listened to them, because they’d make her go away.)

“Little girl” had developed a positively icy resonance.

Thoughts of the Medusa of Longfellow Park awakened thoughts of the Minotaur, the monster for which she had searched with Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, so many years later.

“
You shall not go, to die horribly, as those youths and maidens die; for Minos thrusts them into a labyrinth, which Daidalos made for him among the rocks, – Daidalos, the renegade, the accursed, the pest of this his native land
…”

This was what Aegeus had said to his son Theseus.

On the ledge outside the window of Grandpapa’s office, she imagined the statue of Aegeus staring out to sea, the one man amongst all the women, like a man turned to stone by years of waiting, his blind eyes straining to make the color of the shadowed sails discernible, the first glimpse of whiteness that meant his son was alive. Daidalos had also made statues for Minos, statues that could speak and move. He was like Prometheus in what he could do. He had also invented the plumb line, the auger, glue, woodworking tools, and masts for ships.

When Alice was a little girl the highest things on the skyline of New York had been the masts of ships and the steeples of churches.

It was so long ago, last century.

Daidalos and Icaros – “Daidalos” and “Icaros” were further examples of Charles Kingsley’s creative, almost Mrs. Goodchildian, approach to spelling – fled from the anger of Minos, having made themselves wings of feathers, and fixed the feathers with wax. So they flew over the sea toward Sicily; but Icaros flew too near the sun; and the wax on his wings melted, and he fell into the Icarian Sea, the feathers falling like snow in summer.

She stared at the clouds, striving to see a tiny figure falling to earth, striving to see the first flakes of a fresh snowfall.

Clouds …

There was something she had to remember …

She reached for the ring on her finger, and realized that it was not there. She ran the first two fingers of her right hand up and down in the place where the ring ought to have been, and then looked down.

She had taken it off before she washed.

The ring, however, had already been moved to her wedding finger. There
was
something else she had to remember …

She had been standing where she was now, at the window, hearing a voice in her head –
Tell me what you can see in those clouds, Miss Pinkerton
– and looking at the sky …

She found herself opening her right hand loosely and circling it round and round, rotating her wrist as far as it would go, in an attempt to grasp something that was just out of her reach, the memory something tangible, pushing it away with the tips of her fingers as she drew close …

Clouds
…

It was something to do with clouds …

She placed Annie’s ring back on her wedding finger, as if this would prompt her into remembering.

She looked up at the clouds, attempting to read a meaning in them.

Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had made her believe that everything would change if meanings were found within those clouds, and in dreams. If the clouds were correctly interpreted, they would lift away to reveal limitless sun-filled landscapes. If the dreams were accurately read, there would be nothing to fear anymore; nothing but endless nights of soothing, dreamless sleep would lie before her.

Every movement of the body, every emotion of the mind, is at certain times an omen
…

She would repeat the words from
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
to herself – what better place for this title than in the lair of the mad-doctor? – to shut out his voice, as she read the titles of the books beneath the glass, as she stared at the walls or from the window.

Every form and object in nature, even the shape of the clouds
…

Even the shape of the clouds
…

Clouds
…

She touched the ring. The memory was there, something that could be touched.

The Shape of the Clouds.

That was it.

The title for a novel.

She should write it down, add it to her list.

“Listen to my voice …”

“Be still …”

“Empty your mind of all thought …”

“Sleep …”

She listened to Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster's voice.

She was still.

She emptied her mind of all thought.

She slept.

(She spent the years in sleeping and dreaming, the fairy tale seven years, with no sign of a happy ever after.)