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“Je suis la plaie et le couteau!
Je suis le soufflet et la joue!
Je suis les membres et la roue,
Et la victime et le bourreau!”
– Charles Baudelaire, “L'Héautontimorouménos”
He passed from pain, with the sound of Lucille’s soft, brittle lullaby in his ears, and into darkness. There was warmth there, and he slid deeper and deeper, wondering when the odd feeling of sinking into a soft black feather bed would end and he would feel himself on solid ground and be able to hear again.
A frantic voice hit his ears like a hammer on a brass gong.
“He’s not breathing!”
Suddenly the pleasant feeling of sinking transformed into a terrifying sensation of being caught and dragged by something massive and inexorable, like a giant unforgiving wave, and Thomas remembered that he had never learned to swim. His arms were pinioned by something, and he couldn’t breath and he couldn't see and everything hurt and tasted of iron and copper and and and—
Light flooded his eyes, and he screamed.
The darkness claimed him again, but this time it was cold. He was maddened by whispers of words that were just beyond his ability to understand, and over and over he felt the pain of his wounds in miniature, as though he was being stabbed by a thousand small daggers instead of one large one.
And through it all, he heard one soft, firm command, spoken in an American accent: “Hold on, my love. Hold on.”
So he hung on, though he knew that somewhere in the cold blackness was that lovely warm soft feather bed, where he could sink down into peaceful oblivion, and he so badly wanted to rest...
He moaned, and he felt the moan in his throat, and that surprised him so much that he opened his eyes... he could only see out of one. But his uncovered eye saw a vision of white and gold. “E... Edith?”
His wife’s smile was bright and brittle with relief. “Welcome back.”
“You’re...” He tried to move, and something else moved instead. Thomas’s teeth clenched instinctively, biting back a high, agonized moan. “Oh... hurts. It hurts.”
“I know, my love,” Edith said, stroking his hair. “I know.”
His vision swam, and for a moment he thought he saw Lucille standing behind her. Then she was gone.
His recovery, the doctors told him, both the village doctor and the American doctor, would be long and arduous. His lung was punctured in multiple places and his heart had been nicked by Lucille’s anguished stabbing, and his cheekbone and several blood vessels had been broken by the same. For the rest of his life, he would bear the mark of her rage upon his face, and possibly even be blind in one eye.
“You shouldn’t be alive,” was Dr. McMichael’s blunt assessment. As it was, for the rest of his life, Thomas would suffer from breathing problems and a dangerously weak chest. For the sake of his health, when he was well enough to travel, he would have to leave Allerdale... forever.
Before the local physician, he expressed the appropriate level of dismay. In private, overwhelmed by his sudden freedom and the terrible price they had all paid to claim it, he cried in Edith's arms.
For a time, he was confined to his back in his sickbed in the local village doctor’s house, to keep the blood out of his lungs. To his surprise, Edith spoke calmly about finding a house of their own to rent in Allerdale Village, and settle there so that she and McMichael could nurse Thomas properly.
“Nurse me?” he said, with confusion. “You ought to be turning me over to the authorities.”
Edith turned her odd, solemn, searchlight-blue eyes on him. “I suppose we should,” she said, after a moment. She moved to his bedside and gently took his hand. “Tell me why.”
He told her everything. The abuse he had endured as a child at the hands of his mother and father, the terrible isolated years while his sister was locked up, the incestuous affair with Lucille, the coldly calculated murders of the women he had been compelled to marry. And with each revelation, Thomas waited for Edith to draw back, to recoil in disgust and send Dr. McMichael for the police.
She did not. And, when he finally fell silent, exhausted in body and soul, she simply leaned forward and delicately kissed his lips. “Rest now, Thomas. I’m here.”
“I...” Weakly, he curled his fingers around hers. “I’m here, too.”
Within a week or so, Scotland Yard had sent a man down at the request of the local police. He knew something of the previous ‘Allerdale Horror’ and was inclined to be deeply suspicious of the whole affair, especially when the doctors initially would not let him speak to the baronet.
Sir Thomas Sharpe, lying flat on his back in the bed in the local doctor's house, his chest stitched and his face half-disfigured by bandages, insisted on being interviewed, but (as previously agreed) there was little he could tell. “It is a house of many strange noises,” he told the inspector, who had the sort of face that would be forgotten as soon as he left the room. Edith and McMichael hovered nearby. They were not in the line of sight of Thomas’s one good eye – it would take some time to adjust to that new reality – but he knew they were there. “One becomes accustomed to them all. So, when there is an even stranger noise, one goes to look. I heard something in the old nursery. It is at the top of the house. I thought a roofing slate had torn away and the wind had ripped a hole in the roof, so I went to check.”
“And that is when you were attacked?” the inspector asked. He cultivated an air of professional disinterest, but no one was fooled. He was listening to every word.
“Yes.”
“According to the doctors, Sir Thomas, you were attacked from the front. Yet you can give no description of this person, whom you must have been face to face with?”
“I’m afraid I cannot. My medical men tell me I had a stroke of some sort, which has apparently addled my brain. I am deeply sorry,” Thomas added, sincerely, “that I cannot tell you anything more that will assist you.”
McMichael looked at him oddly, when the inspector had gone.
He was too weak to attend the inquest a few days later, but it was much the same, as Edith told him when she returned. She had explained to the assembled officials and villagers that she was awoken by her sister-in-law's screams, and being unable to find her husband, went outside to find Lucille, and was attacked by the mysterious assailant. Likewise, Dr. McMichael had claimed that he had intended to visit the house as a surprise for his old friend, and was attacked from behind, stabbed, and left for dead. The police found no fingerprints on the weapon that had killed Lucille Sharpe and nearly killed her brother and sister-in-law and the American doctor. The coroner had examined the body, but Lucille's remains told him nothing except that she had been stabbed.
There was little else the police could do.
“They returned a verdict of ‘Willful Murder by Person or Persons Unknown,’” Edith told him, as she carefully changed the dressings on his chest and face. “The police have no other leads.”
“Hopefully this will be the end of it,” Thomas murmured, unable to speak very loudly, and wincing where the dressings clung to the mending flesh. “The old residents likely remember when Mother was killed... no doubt they suspect the truth. But they won’t say a word. Loyalty is a very powerful thing. And a very curious one.”
“Yes, it’s for the best.”
Thomas looked at her worriedly. “Best for who?”
She smiled slightly, careful to tie the linen bandages where the knots would not bother him. “For you.”
Then she smoothed her hands over the bandages on his chest and his face, and Thomas shivered. “You feel so different from her... sorry, I shouldn’t—” He looked at her forlornly. “Why, Edith? You could be free of all of this, free of my family and this curse... After all the lies I told you, I don’t deserve this kindness.”
She touched his cheek lightly with her fingertips and he drew in a soft, silent gasp.
“You did try to warn me, in a strange way,” she said, her expression somehow far away and all-too-present. “‘Perfection has no place in love,’ you said. And you warned me not to look for a pure soul to redeem, and to return to my ghosts and my fancies.”
Thomas tried to smile. “You should have listened to me. I should have listened to me.”
“I did listen to you. That’s why I’m still here.”
His vision wavered and feathered at the edges, like a crumpled photograph, and the light from the coal fire shone through her hair and made her like something out of one of the bright dreams of his childhood, long ago lost, that he had spent so many futile years chasing and trying to recapture. Tears welled in his unbandaged eye, and spilled down his cheek.
“Later.” Edith gathered up the salve and dressings and bandages, and stooped to kiss him. He tasted his tears between their lips. “We’ll talk later, when you’re stronger.”
Unable to do anything else, Thomas lay in his bed and, from his one uncovered eye, looked out the window and watched the snow slowly fall. And it crossed his mind how novel it was to be in Allerdale yet not at Allerdale, to be lying in a bedroom where he need never worry if he was going to wake up in the morning and find himself covered in snow...
To never see Lucille again.
He wanted to mourn her. He wanted to cry. She had been his entire world for so long... but he was so very, very tired.
Without meaning to, Thomas slept. When he opened his eyes again, forced awake by the hot, throbbing pain in his face and chest, it was dark outside his window, and Dr. McMichael was sitting beside his bed.
“Hurt,” Thomas said hoarsely.
The doctor nodded and poured something from a brown glass bottle into a spoon. “It’s past time for your dose, anyway.” He leaned forward and slipped a broad, sturdy hand behind Thomas's head.
It was a milky white fluid – opium, Thomas knew. He was normally wary of the stuff, as he was of alcohol or anything else that could warp the senses – it was how Father had eventually died – but now he swallowed it gratefully. “Thank you,” he gasped.
McMichael nodded and laid Thomas back down gently. He took his patient’s pulse and temperature, asked if he needed anything in the way of help with personal matters, and then rose to say good night and go... and then sat back down.
“...Something else, Doctor?”
“Edith loves you,” said McMichael, very quietly, his normally kind eyes sharpened to a point of unwavering keenness that made Thomas want to run and hide. “In spite of... everything. And you love her. I’m convinced of that.”
“Thank you,” Thomas replied, looking away, as a wave of shame crashed over him. “She is... more than I deserve, as we are both aware.”
“Oh, very aware, yes. And for reasons she claims I wouldn’t understand, she’s decided to stay here with you, to keeps all of your secrets and to move forward with her husband. Her legal husband,” the doctor added, with a touch of disgust, “since you’re a serial widower rather than a serial bigamist.”
Thomas’s long, nervous hands clenched and unclenched in the bedclothes. “Yes.”
“Since that’s what she wants, I won’t object. Edith has always known her own mind. Even if I raised my concerns, she wouldn’t appreciate it.”
A tiny smile touched Thomas’s lips. “No, I suppose not. I’m... grateful, Doctor, for everything you've done. I realize it’s all been for her.”
“It has,” McMichael nodded, his eyes still very solemn and dark. “Which is why if, in the future, she ever so much as breathes a word of unease to me about you, I will send your confession not only to the Cumberland authorities, but to the London and New York City newspapers. I will make sure all of America, all of England, all of Europe knows what you and your sister did.”
“Collateral against my good behavior?” Thomas tried to laugh, but only managed a painful wheeze. “I can’t hold that against you. But for what little my word is worth, you have it. I don’t want her to be hurt anymore. I never did.”
“Good.” The doctor leaned over and held Thomas’s head up again, this time to help him to water. “Get some sleep, Sir Thomas.”
“Just Thomas will do. Thank you, Dr. McMichael.”
The doctor did not extend the courtesy of his own Christian name in return, only nodded and turned the wick of the oil lamp down, and on his way out, drew the blinds over the window.
Alone in the dark, Thomas held himself tense, afraid to sleep lest he sink once more into that tempting soft feather bed so plentifully strewn with daggers. He was morbidly convinced that he would find his sister there, waiting to reclaim her lover.