Tell Me I'm Worthless(38)

Edmund grew increasingly frustrated with her. Their marriage was not the haven he had hoped. No matter how much he fucked her, she seemed incapable of producing a baby. She tried every method she could think of, and nothing worked.

“I need a son!” he screamed at her. “I should have forced your sister to marry me! She would have given me five sons by now, at least!”

Emily cried at his words. He looked at her. She was a pathetic specimen. He threw his glass at her head, and she only just managed to duck. It shattered against the wall, the dark brown alcohol staining the paper. And however much he shouted, however much he began to threaten physical harm, no baby came. She wondered if losing her virginity outside of marriage had cursed her. He took to calling her slutwife. When he arrived home, with one of his guests, he would greet her: hello, dear slutwife. Do not disturb me, lovely slutwife.

He spent increasing amounts of time in his study, alone. The frequency of his guests grew, too, as did his trips elsewhere, to London, to Bristol, and abroad, to Paris, to Berlin. It was whilst he was on one such trip that Emily broke. She couldn’t bear it anymore. The marriage was coming apart all around her, at its very centre, its very foundations, perhaps. This room, from which she was forbidden. These activities, which were reserved for others and never for her. Why did he like all these others so much more than her? Did he fuck them, and, if he did, did they ever become pregnant with his illegitimate children? She strode up the stairs and down that endless corridor, walking with purpose towards Edmund’s room. The key, small and bright, was between her thumb and forefinger. It slipped with ease into the lock and turned. Her heart was thumping about inside her, like a drum beating her head, screaming what are you doing, oh, Emily, what are you doing, what have you done?

Yet there was another voice, a voice without and within. Emily look inside it said.

The door opened. She was ready, craving answers. I know you are, too. You want to know what was inside. Women hung from hooks like slaughtered pigs. Corpses preserved in glass. But no. She saw none of that at all. What she saw was, in a way, even stranger. It was, quite simply, Edmund’s study. The walls were papered with a vivid red, devoid of any pattern. The only piece of furniture was a desk, pushed against the far wall. The floor was wooden and bare. There was a single light in the ceiling. It was a bare, disappointing room, but one she felt compelled to enter. Her footsteps click-clacked across the floorboards as she walked over to the desk, in the far corner. On top of it were a series of tools – a pair of calipers, a scalpel, a bone saw and some rope. She opened the drawers of the desk, but the only items in them were financial papers, letters from Edmund’s bank and so on. She backed away. There was one more thing of note in the room: opposite where the desk was pushed, there was a second door. She went to it, but it was locked tightly. It did not even have a keyhole. However Edmund had locked it, there was no way of bypassing it, not without kicking the door down, and Emily was certainly not about to start doing that. Emily’s heart sank with disappointment. Her husband’s bloody chamber was empty. It was a room with nothing in it. No fresh gore. She wasn’t sure what she had wanted to see, but it hadn’t been this.

She left the room, and locked the door behind her, but to her horror found that the key had been stained red by the lock – what she had seen through the keyhole hadn’t been the red wallpaper at all, it had been ink. Edmund had contrived to put red ink in the keyhole, so that her copy of the key would show that she had broken her promise not to enter the room. She ran to the bathroom, but no amount of soap and warm water would remove the ink from the little gold key. While she was still trying her best to fruitlessly wash away the blood-red ink, she heard the front door open, and Edmund called out that he was home.

“My dear,” he said as she walked down the stairs. He had a guest – an Indian girl. She looked no more than twelve. The girl’s eyes were fixed on the carpet and her head was bowed. She knew her place, thought Emily. Edmund, of course, had his own key to the room. She didn’t need to worry about him seeing what she had done to her copy. He took his guest upstairs, and she waited a few minutes before she followed them. While he worked, she sat down on the floor outside of the room, listening as best she could to what went on in there, although the noises were indistinct. She pressed her ear up close to the door and strained hard, but all she could hear was her husband’s feet, click-clacking on the floor.

The next day, Edmund came to her. “My dear,” he asked, “I seem to have misplaced the key to the basement. Might I use yours?”

“Of course,” she said. Emily ran to her room, sweating heavily, and removed the basement key from the ring. Whatever happened, she couldn’t let him know that she had been in his study. However, when she brought the basement key to him, he asked the question she dreaded to hear.

“Dear, might I see your copy of the key to my study?”

She gulped. “Why would you need to do that?”

It was obvious, of course, that he somehow knew she had been in his room. Or at least, that he suspected, and now sought to confirm his suspicion.

He simply smiled in response.

“You know, Edmund,” she said, tiptoeing with her words. “I fear I must have misplaced it.”

He stared at her strangely. “Well,” he said, after a few seconds of silence. “We can’t have that, can we. Come, we shall look in the bedroom for it. I’m sure it simply slipped off the ring.”