The Monster's Wife(45)

She was in the east wing, her arms aching with a burden of sheets and her fingers stiff from jiggling at the lock when she found that she was a key short. Some had been lost over the years and May used a knife in place of them. Oona laid the bedding on the floor and knelt to peer through the bothersome hole. It was dark inside. Something sat on a table and bubbled like a pot of soup. A copper barrel gleamed in firelight. She couldn’t see a bed and lacked May’s skill with a knife.

With a sigh, she picked up the sheets. The keyring slipped down to her elbow, clinking and clanking, making her sound like some old ghost wound in chains as she trudged down the hallway, down the stairs, to make the doctor’s breakfast and try not to think of how May had done it, or the song she’d be singing under her breath if she were there.

She trudged from the burn with pails of water slung on a pole across her shoulders. On the long trip up the brae, she remembered May’s arms around her that last time they hugged. Surely nobody here was wicked enough to harm such a fragile creature. She remembered Stuart’s hard words and Cormick’s knife stuck in her belly. They were a rotten pair and had malice enough, but the thought of them hurting May and working together to cover their crime made no sense. Why would they?

And now Stuart was blaming her and Victor. She must warn the doctor as soon as she could.

In the dining hall, the air was ice and the windows were fogged with dripping mist, because she hadn’t remembered to light the big fire yet, only the one in the kitchen. She set her pails down, spilling water onto the rug.

“Lovely.”

Despite the cold, an angry heat flashed through her, at having all this to do alone, at Stuart’s horrible words, at her own foolish weakness. At May, damn her eyes! Damn her secrets!

She pulled out the brush and threw it hard. It collided with the table leg, knocking a chip from it. Half-sobbing, her hands as raw with chilblains as her head was hot, she sank onto her stiff knees and scrubbed the floorboards with all she had left. May had always left them spotless. She must do as well. She must. She looked up and surveyed the one patch she’d left slick and gleaming, then saw the rest stretching out endlessly. There was so much more to do. She scrubbed and scrubbed, pressing her anger, her sadness into the brush, letting the noise lull her, suck the feelings from her, until she was numb.

She had just lit the upstairs fires and was on her hands and knees sweeping ash from the kitchen hearth when she thought she heard Victor calling her. She stopped, head tilted, watching water ripple in one of the pails. The chandelier shook. He was moving something heavy upstairs and, she felt certain, calling her. The noise seemed to come from the Master bedroom. There it was again – a blurred word she couldn’t make out. She set down the brush and got up, dusting her hands on her apron.

She ran up the narrow staircase, her knees cracking like an old woman’s. On the landing, she turned into the hallway that ran in the opposite direction to the gallery of caged birds. In this (less peculiar) corridor, a dusty tapestry showing men and dogs cornering a wounded stag ran the length of the wall. At the end of it, a door stood ajar. Victor’s silver breakfast tray lay just outside, the napkin genteely folded over a plate, a kipper’s glazed eye peering out from underneath.

A board creaked. She slowed her step, her fingers ghosting the balcony rail ornately carved in oak. She felt the intricate shapes of cool, wooden petals brush past her thumb. When she reached the door, she listened again but heard nothing. She had never been into Victor’s private chambers when he was within them. In the mornings, at his request, she always left his breakfast outside. She was about to turn back when she heard the sound again, although this time she couldn’t make out a particular word or name or whether it came from this room or the one beside it.

There was only one way to know. She put her hand to the door and pushed gently, fearing the squeal of hinges. But the door was well-oiled and moved silently open, revealing a big bed with tapering wooden pillars rising from each corner. The red comforter was rumpled and flung back as if someone had just risen from it. Papers spilled from the carved chest at the bed’s foot and were dotted across the rug like fallen blossom. Force of habit made her stoop to pick up the first. She tidied her way towards the bed, feeling a bit foolish at the thought that the doctor had probably been calling her to make his bed and take his tray. As she worked she followed the blooms and swirls of the rug. Some of the pale curls in the pattern looked like faces.

By the time she reached the chest, her arms were full of papers covered in inky scrawl she couldn’t make out. The last piece of paper was half in, half out of the chest. It was larger and whiter than the others and when she picked it up, she felt the heaviness of the paper, its rough grain.

Turning it over, she saw that this time the dark lines were arranged in sweeping curves instead of letters. She carefully slid the other papers into the chest and held the sketch out in front of her to get a better look. It showed a woman lying on a table. She was naked except for a sheet thrown over her mid-section. Her arms stretched above her head, the wrists pressed into each other. There was something wrong with them, as if they were cut or bound in some fashion. She peered closer.

“Do you like it?”

Oona dropped the paper. She saw a bare-chested Victor wearing the black silk breeks she’d ironed yesterday and the beautiful shoes she’d polished into mirrors. “I was not spying, only squaring your papers away.” She stared at the floor.