The Monster's Wife(28)

His forefinger soothed the rough lines of the charcoal Oona, blurring the plane of her cheek. “My mother died too young. She had been a wife, a mother, yes. She had known those blessings. But she barely knew life. It seems to me that’s why I’ve always had this passionate need to know what magic curtain divides life and death, to pull it aside and see.

“These last years have taken me deeper than anyone alive. I have seen the darkness, Oona. I have lived it.”

He paused. She could feel his skin’s heat and smell his cologne. He was too close, too real. The blush climbed her throat again.

He leaned close, whispering to her. “I have never truly beheld… that breath of life that animates our flesh. That force that turns your heart from mere meat to breathing beauty, to this.” He pressed his hand to her breastbone.

She held her breath. He pressed his cheek beside his hand, listening intently. Perhaps he could feel it, that wild fourth beat. His hand fell from her and he straightened, murmuring something.

She thought he said, “What a pity.”





24


Oona sat alone watching dusk purple the sky and bats replace birds outside the windows. She was bored and hungry, drained and at the same time clear-headed. The boredom reminded her of childhood - that familiar, irritable sensation of growing well again after an illness.

She rose, her legs shaking a little, and dressed, her fingers fumbling the ribbons of her dress. She was recovered from the laudanum’s effects. That much was certain. And the rest - her heart, her supposed imminent death - she pushed far down by splashing cold water from the ewer on her face and pulling her untidy hair into a punishing knot.

This time, the door opened easily. Outside it stretched the long gallery of imprisoned birds (no wonder she’d dreamt of them screeching). Candles guttering in brackets along the wall cast shadows. At one end lay the doctor’s sanctum, at the other freedom. She stood on the threshold, poised between the two.

To the right lay Granny, a beating and bed without supper. To the left lay another possibility - some way of being sure whether May was right in singing Victor’s praises, whether he had told her the truth. Perhaps some proof could be found in there, so that she would know, one way or the other, about the reality of the dead girl and the scarred man.

Before she walked to the music room, Oona made her limbs taut and her back straight. She pulled herself tall. Then she walked down the corridor of cages, eerily quiet now it was night. The birds perched with their heads tucked under their wings, sleeping with the subdued agitation of prisoners. At the end of the gallery she turned the tarnished handle, expecting it to resist her, but it opened easily.

Victor stood directly before her, his arm stretched out in front of him as if he’d been on the point of leaving. He took a step closer until he was nose to nose with her. She tried to manoeuvre past him. Instead of moving away as would have been conventional, he stood scratching beneath his arm and hardly seemed to see her.

She looked past him into the room’s chaos, grimacing at the sprawl of papers, half-eaten crusts and sausage rinds, wine-purpled glasses, beakers and stirring rods speckled with unknown substances, crystals of green and blue and brown, compasses and nails and screws and shavings of wood. On the billiard table behind him was a bloody cloth draped over a tall pointed object. Beside it sat a slice of mouldering cake and a parcel of linen. It was utter chaos. How had she thought she could ever find anything useful in here, even if he had been gone?

Victor’s eyes snapped clear, taking her in for the first time since she’d entered the room. “Hand me that.” He gestured vaguely. “Wrapped in the cloth...no, next to the scales. Ach Gott im Himmel, must I find everything myself?” His hand thumped the wall.

Oona frowned. “Hard to find anything in all this mess, Victor,” she said drily. He had asked her to call him by his Christian name, after all. It would be interesting to see how long that intimacy lasted.

“Ach, mess mess, what do I care of mess?” Victor pushed his fingers into his hair. “That. I mean that!” He pointed to the parcel.

“Open it yourself,” she said, not feeling the need to stand on ceremony any longer.

“I need some assistance with it. Truly. Jedenfalls, what I am doing, you will like it. It is almost some kind of a gifts for you.” He grinned broadly, his eyes narrowing, cat-like.

Moved now by curiosity, Oona crossed to the billiard table and opened the parcel leaf by leaf. She felt a small shock at the contents. The creature inside was curled in on itself, wings folded, yellow legs clenched under the tawny belly, throat blush red as if it had just been bitten. The dark eyes were milk-stained, dead, but the long, fine points of the tail looked as if they might at any moment thrum back to life. Orpheus. His head was no longer severed from his body. He was now a soft effigy of the creature he’d been in life.

Her eyes stung. “What kind of person wraps a dead rooster in a napkin and calls it a gift?”

He lifted Orpheus from the table. “The game’s not over for you, fine fellow.” He ruffled the rouged throat with his fingertip and moved the fine head up and down in a pale-eyed nod. With deft fingers, he fluffed the small neck feathers and stroked the eyes closed, until Orpheus seemed to sleep.

Watching him work, Oona’s head was light. She felt at the same time confused and horribly fascinated. “What do you intend to do with him?”