Authors: Martha Lea
“You might have written to me.” His voice was thick with emotion and a sudden thirst. “I found your letters, to her.”
“I did write to you, Edward,” Gwen spoke very carefully. “I wrote every week for a whole year until I was certain that they were being intercepted.”
“You could have,” Edward grasped at the air as though it would offer him some comfort, “you could have sent him sooner.”
Gwen watched Edward begin to pace the room. How dare you, she thought. How dare you blame me like this, as though it was all down to me. You should have done more, she thought, when Vincent told
you I was dead. You should have noticed how mad he was, how crazed, how false he was. You should have done more to find out the truth of it, of what happened that day. You should have been able to
find us, she wanted to scream, you should have been able to deduce what had happened in an instant. But, you were as useless as I had always suspected you were, and now you lay all the blame of
your own hurt and misery on my shoulders.
Gwen said quietly, “You’ll know her ways now, Edward. And you have those two boys. I think you know, really, that I could never have acted on impulse.”
Edward stopped and turned, then he let himself slide into a leather reading chair, giving gravity the final decision on how he should land. “Her ways. Gwen, I am lost. The boys, yes; I
think they are everything to her. Yet other times, when I see her, some days, it seems she hardly knows that they exist.”
“Mr Pemberton told me that they looked like they were very happy, healthy children. Edward, I could never have acted selfishly.”
“Why not? She has.”
“That’s always been her way, Edward. My sister has never done anything which did not benefit her. The rest of us, we have to negotiate through whatever she lays down in our path.
Let’s not talk about it until later. Why not show me the rest of your house? I’ll help you draw up a list. I can help you find staff.”
And yet all the time she was thinking, I must leave, I’ve made a mistake. I must go from here.
He brushed her words aside with jerking flicks of his hands as he advanced towards her. “Pemberton, Pemberton. Why was it him? What else, what did he tell you? To your face? In a letter?
What kind of cosy discussion did you have, the two of you?”
“It’s irrelevant.”
“Look at me. No, somehow I don’t think that it is at all irrelevant. It appears to me now, very odd, indeed, that a man you met
but once
, should be the one to come and
deliver such devastating news.”
“You’re devastated that I am alive?”
“No.”
“There was no one else; no one who had known us both. Honestly, I have tried to do the right thing.”
“But where did you pluck him from? You don’t know him!”
Gwen looked away. “He is Hettie Grindlock’s brother. I thought you knew.”
Richmond. Monday, August 6, 1866.
Gwen’s hand hovered over the blank page for so long that the ink dried on the nib. She loaded her pen afresh and closed her eyes as she wrote:
I killed him
.
Opening her eyes, she looked down at her words. They were skewed and slanting, black and shining. She pressed the blotting paper to them; they had authority now. She added something to the
sentence, gave the full stop a tail:
I killed him, the man called Vincent Coyne.
So the letter became:
I killed him, the man called Vincent Coyne. One of us should have done it sooner or later, and since you were not there, the onerous task was left to me.
I can’t say I undertook such a ghastly task lightly. It only sounds so, when you write it down.
He came back, to where he had left us. He came alone, and, of course, I never thought he intended to rescue us, or remove us to a place of safety after that first night. After those two
days without shelter or food, perhaps he imagined a greeting different to the one he received.
Faced with such an intimidating prospect—left alone to perish through starvation or thirst, I never let myself believe that this was a certainty. I had Augusta to protect. I had
the flint and the pocket knife, which Mr Coyne did not know about. He took everything else from us, as you know. But we were not weak with hunger. The place we had been abandoned to was
favoured by the river turtle. We ate hatchlings roasted in their own shells for those two days. A happy coincidence while God had been averting his gaze.
Augusta slipped out of my hands, came out from our hiding place, running. He picked her up too roughly. He shouted that I should come out.
“Where is Edward?”
“My conscience is saved. However, you’re still alive.” His face for a second looked stupid with incomprehension. But he recovered himself.
“Mr Coyne. Two days ago, you told me that you would be gone for one hour, and that you would bring Edward here. Where is he?”
“You think he respects you. Do you really suppose that a man like Scales could ever respect a woman like you the way he respected Frome? And do you think by not being his lawful
wife, you have elevated yourself to some higher position? Think.”
“What? Put my daughter down, and tell me where Edward is.”
“Go on, think. What promise did Scales ever make to you? No one is ever quite what they seem to be, are they, Miss Carrick? You should know that more than most.”
“Augusta is innocent. You can talk to me, but put her down.”
“Think, Miss Carrick. Thinking, working things out. That is your gift, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is, Mr Coyne. Please put Augusta down; you are frightening her.”
“Miss Carrick. Which one of you did he really fall in love with? Do you think he really fell in love with you? Or was it the woman who would never question his authority, who would
never be able to put his own intelligence in the dock? Which woman, Miss Carrick, do you think Scales really fell in love with—you? Or was it Euphemia?”
“Your mother was one of her clients. If you suppose that you surprise me, Mr Coyne, with your little revelation, you do not. Augusta, please, give her to me now.”
“No. Euphemia hated you enough to employ my assistance. But I don’t believe she would bear a grudge against the innocent party. Scales’ bastard child is coming with
me.” Augusta, my child, the only light I possessed. To hear that ugly word used to describe my beautiful daughter. He turned his back on me and went to put Augusta in the canoe.
These things are done without thought.
His guard was down for a second. Just a second.
I had been walking slowly towards him over the sand but now I ran. I fixed my loose plait round his neck in a quick tourniquet. He dropped Augusta. He tried to shake me off, and in his
confusion, and in the struggle, he and I fell.
He, face down in the sand; myself, landing on top of him. All of my strength was taken by the determination not to let him free of my throttling.
Augusta stood at the water’s edge and screamed for her father. Over and over. Bright macaws took off from the trees and called over our heads.
After a while, he became still; I don’t know if he meant to fool me or not. I wrapped both ends of the tourniquet around my left hand and brought out my pocket knife. And then a
new vigour, I didn’t know whether he was trying to throw me off or if these were his death throes. My knee in his back. All of my strength.
Being a mother, protecting Augusta. These were the things on my mind as I pressed the point of the knife into his neck, just below his jaw, turning the blade handle, driving it deeper.
And I thought of the stillness of oppressive afternoons as I dragged the knife across his neck, messily, inexpertly, towards the other side of his jaw. I thought of never having to wonder what
he would do next. What the next insane plan he might concoct in his addled head or conduct on behalf of my sister would be. I shushed Augusta. I waited.
When I rolled him over, I saw that his bladder had emptied. I am ashamed now to say that I scraped a handful of sand and let it drop into his open eyes; to verify his death, only to
know, not out of malice for the corpse. I washed my hair, face, hands in the river.
Her hands shook, her body convulsed, she poured with a sweat that went cold on her skin. Her vision was blurred, the image of his spectacles slipping down into the river,
released from her fingers. The silver frames and the blue glass catching the sunlight so briefly before being covered completely by the black, tannin-stained water. She wanted to run; her legs felt
twitchy, and yet they barely supported the weight of her. It was impossible to think that it could have happened. Should a letter like this contain every detail, she thought, it loses its
purpose.
We drank some of his water, we ate some of his food. I covered him with sand. We got into his boat. I paddled.
We came that night to the place where we had stayed. We were ghosts. But ghosts who were clothed and fled and looked after.
You know the rest of it already. And now—
Gwen read it through. She was tired. Behind her on the bed, Augusta shifted in her sleep—her legs and the sheets tangled, her arms thrown wide. Gwen wanted him to know
the depth of it. Had to get rid of him herself; no one else was there to do it for her. Gwen put the letter onto the table. She folded it up. She unfolded it. She read it again. She cut it into
flaccid spills and fled them into the flame of her candle, letting them drop, brittle, grey flakes of her confession, onto the rim of the candle-holder. The top half of the window was open behind
the thick, heavy curtains. Gwen listened to the stillness. She looked over at Augusta. She’d agreed to take her to the Zoo the next day. It would be a day to make up for her long absence
today, just the two of them. She crawled gingerly onto the wide bed, as though it were a trough of sinking sand, not wanting to disturb her daughter, spreading out her limbs, waiting for the
tincture of morphine to work.
The afternoon she’d spent with Edward at his house drifted in and out of her mind as she tried to push it firmly out of reach so that she might be able to sleep.
Time and again, Edward had tried to pull her into an embrace, and each time she had evaded him he had become more determined. Eventually, stepping back, putting a physical distance between them,
she said, “Because I don’t love you, you see. And because I can’t begin to love you. I know too much. Yes, once I was gullible, Edward. From before the moment you met me you were
already hiding things, but I am not that girl. I have a different life now. The person you knew no longer exists. I’m sorry. I’ll go.”
Edward had made a show of intending to see her out, but at the door he was more insistent than ever. “A different life? What different life?” He grabbed her hands, pulled off the
fine gloves, painfully tugging at her fingers, forcing them into his mouth where he sucked drily on them. She felt his teeth closing on her bones.
“You have no different life now,” he said. “You are the same, just the same and more; you still wear that cheap ring I gave you. You can’t bear to take it off when you
put on your gloves. It looks better than I remember. It grows well on you. It used to slide between your knuckles, but now—”
Gwen tried to close her fist, get her fingers away from his mouth, pull free.
He pressed his cracked lips to her mouth and drew breath from her lungs. “Say the words,” he said. “Tell me what you used to say.”
In her corset, bound and stiff, she was unable to gather the wit of her strength to block him. She pushed her face aside, nauseated, gasping. “I can’t remember any words, Edward. Let
me go now.” She reached out for the door handle, but he grabbed her wrist, holding her painfully, pressing skin to bone.
“Tell me about the weather. Make it the way it was.”
“What?” She twisted her arm in his grip. His determination was manic; rub turning to burn.
“The rain, that we’ve been having this week. Say, ‘This rain, this rain’, say it to me.”
“Edward, you must let go of me, you must stop this. I am married. Gus Pemberton is my husband.”
“Whore.” Edward shoved her against the wall and spat into her face. Her anger dug at her as his hands scrabbled at her clothes tearing a seam in the silk. He pushed her back along
the dingy hall into the room across the floor and down. She lost her footing in her heels on the rucked carpet, and knocked her head against some part of the daybed as he thrust a hand up under the
heaps of expensive silk, his fingernails scraping her, his grotesque heaving panting, shoving her into a corner of the bed, her legs parted now with the full weight of his hips bearing down on her.
She took hold of his neck and squeezed. He slapped her across the face. A raw, flesh-stinging swipe, catching her lip against her teeth. She felt the swell of it, the butcher-block taste of it.
“Tell me about the foul weather, Mrs
Pemberton
, you obstinate bitch.”
“I don’t care to.”
There came an enormous crack from somewhere. Gwen realised that her hearing had failed, and just as the black edges began to close in around her she knew that the crack must have come from her
own head.
She woke face down. Her head throbbing, hanging over the edge of the daybed. He wasn’t finished. She made no sound, her eyes fixed on a plate of half-eaten food, a glass half full of
claret gone to vinegar. For a long while, it seemed, she simply couldn’t believe that it could have happened so suddenly, and without warning.
She remained immobile as he gripped the flesh on her thighs and pulled himself away from her. Thumbs pressed in, he ground the meat of her as he followed the contours of her
lower back to her buttocks and hovered there.
“Do you realise,” he murmured, “that I have not fucked you since that horrible day when I had to unpick your sister’s needlework?” He seemed not to mind that she
made no answer or that she might be unconscious. Perhaps he wished it that way. Gwen felt the wet and cooling weight of him resting now between her buttocks. He pulled himself closer again.