Tell Me I'm Worthless(37)

He had been in London on “business,” leaving Emily to wander the empty halls of Albion on her own, lonely and bored. They had started to fill them out with furnishings and paintings but neither of them had much of a taste for the arts, and she often found that, once something was installed, it didn’t match anything else. This aggravated her. It made her eyes sore. She was in a mood when he returned from his business trip. Happy to finally have him back, she ran from the room and to the first-floor landing, looking down the stairs to see him. Only then she found that he had not returned home alone. He had a black woman with him. She stood next to him at the foot of the stairs, gazing around in wonder at the interior of the House. The woman’s name was Agatha, although neither Edmund nor Emily ever asked for her name. He had approached her on the streets of London, and she had expected that he wished to pay her for sex, when suddenly he offered an extortionate amount to accompany him back to his home. She was in no position to refuse payment of that level, no matter if the request made her suspicious. And it made her very, very suspicious. The moment she had gotten into the carriage with him, she had regretted this – no amount of money was worth dying for, she thought, and she kept thinking it all the way down the long road to Albion. At any moment she expected the carriage to stop, and when it did, he would take her out into the fields of the woods and have her and leave her there, dead or dying. It happens. It had happened to girls she’d known. But he had taken her all the way, and here she was, in the mouth of Albion, with Emily standing at the top of the stairs glaring at her with horror. Who was this, who her husband had brought here? She was possessed of a violent jealousy as she watched her husband lead her up the stairs towards her.

As they passed, Edmund looked at Emily very seriously.

“Now, my beloved wife, I am going to take this individual here into my study. Don’t disturb me, even if it is time to eat. I will eat when I please. Take your dinner without me if you must. Whatever you do, do not disturb my work.”

Edmund’s study was on the first floor. It was at the end of a long corridor. Just when you thought the corridor was far too long, unnaturally so, that was where the study was. At the very end. It was the one room in the house that Emily was forbidden to enter. A man must have his own, private, space, said Edmund. In fact, he told her that if she ever entered the room without his express permission that he would beat her, and beat her hard. So, she didn’t disturb him. She knew she mustn’t. But, God, the jealousy she felt, watching that woman, that woman whom she considered clearly lesser than herself in every manner, being taken into Edmund’s study when she, herself, his very own wife, was not permitted to see it. That jealousy was very nearly overwhelming. She spent the entire evening waiting around the downstairs of the house, listening carefully for some noise from upstairs. When Edmund came out, the staff served dinner for them both, and the married couple sat and ate. Agatha, the woman Edmund had taken into the room with him, had not come back out at the same time. Emily wondered if she should ask what had happened to her, where she had gone, but found she was too frightened. The woman must simply have slipped away, she thought. Somehow.

This was not the last time Edmund brought back a ‘guest’. Every few months, he would go away for a few days and return with one in tow. They were usually women, and usually not white. Emily learned to let him have this quirk, however much it ate at her.

One time, he brought a white woman with him. Emily was stunned by this – this was something different. She was very beautiful, very tall and slender, with bright blue eyes. The jealousy was there again, filling her entire body. She clenched her fists as she listened to the two of them ascending the stairs. Again, though, Edmund came back out of his study, but the lady did not.

This time, Emily felt brave enough to ask him. She steeled herself and said, “That woman... who was she? Where did she go?”

He was silent, and she was sure she had crossed a line. But then he spoke: “That, my dear,” he said, “was not a woman.”

“But Edmund, I saw her!”

“I found… it… in Bristol. Pretending to everybody around him that he was a woman. And he put on quite the performance, you know. Nearly had me fooled, too. But I found him fascinating, you know, he had received some sort of rudimentary surgery? He had lost his manhood, as it were.”

Emily blushed. “And what happened to him? I did not see him leave.”

Edmund shrugged. “Oh, don’t you worry, my pretty dear. Don’t you worry at all.”

The door to Edmund’s study was painted black, and had a small, gold keyhole. Emily had, of course, tried to look through that keyhole, but found that nothing was visible through it at all. All that she could see was an intense liquid red colour. It must be from the wallpaper, she thought. Emily did have access to the key. He had even told her which key would open the study – it was a small, gold one. But she was a good wife, and she wished to do what he asked. But this became increasingly difficult, as he brought more and more of these unsavoury guests back from his trips. With each thing he brought into her house, her curiosity grew, and her violent jealousy. She did not only wonder too hard and too long about why these guests never seemed to reappear, but about what Edmund did to them in that red room. She would lie awake in bed next to him, vividly fantasising about her husband treating her like some kind of scientific object, to be studied, to be used and discarded.