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“If you’re here with me, give me a signal. Touch my hand.”
When Edith gave her hand to the darkness, there was silver gleaming at her eyes, and silver gleaming on her tongue. There was blood high in her throat again, and moonlight cool against the windowpane, wherever thickets of ivy had yielded to the wind. There was a song trembling through the timber of the walls, each note glistening like the hoarfrost she’d walked through in her dream.
They floated down through the canopy of thorns that hung above her head, distant and lonely as the bells that called up from the village below. They drew her hand towards them like the pale shimmers of an early snowfall, long before there came another’s hand to guide her.
Moths whirled frenzied in her wake as she climbed the stairs, their wings thrashing at the thin gold of her candle-flames. Whether anything else walked beside her, she could not say, but the song grew brighter with every step she took up to the attic. There was no candlelight left to her, by the time she reached the attic, and she was blind a while in the winding gloom, walking with her hands pressed to walls where moths slept in rookeries as dense as rotten damask, with only the song to light her way—and bring you—to—me—
But then she saw.
Like orphans lying caught between the bone-white jaws of winter: what Edith saw was something that had always been there for her to see. Out of its braids, Lucille’s hair was long enough to brush the floor. It tumbled over her brother’s arms in great moonshot waves, each ripple of it heavy as widow’s silk. And Thomas—Thomas—
His mouth was as fast against Lucille’s throat, his hands softly lost under the swells of her nightgown. His teeth shone wetly, redly, held by the light of a dozen candles, and into Lucille’s shoulder, Edith watched him keen out everything she’d ever tried to chase with her teeth, her tongue, her pen-strikes.
When he kissed his sister and stole away the last note of her lullaby, there was only a craze of wings colouring the air, moths gathering close around Edith as though they’d thought to take her back to bed.
Edith turned, at last, and fled alone down through the sinking dark.
-
All day, her notepaper lay in a sloping half-faint on her writing desk, satin-thick and stainless, as ready to drink in her tears as the shoulders of Ferguson’s overcoat.
I must have my estate back at once, she might have written. I have made a terrible mistake. I have seen such things—
She thought of Lucille’s hair falling over her shoulders, over her white, white arms. She thought of Thomas bent at her throat, his teeth as bare as any skull’s. She thought of her mother, too. Don’t look, her father had said, but she wouldn’t even close her eyes to sleep until the night her mother came to her.
With the thickening of the dusk, she let Thomas dress her for dinner, her father’s pen untouched.
Dinner. That slow, strange procession they made down the stairs every night, with Lucille lighting the way, her dress wrapped around her like a tower of spun blood. Following behind, she and Thomas would walk together, with Thomas’ arm held under hers, as though he were determined to make each passing evening of their marriage seem like another journey to another ball.
In the candlelight, before Lucille came for them, Thomas was always there to twist her hair into a gentle yellow cord, ready to be drawn up tight. Sometimes, as her eyelids grew heavy, she’d half-thought this warm gloom was what she had looked for all her life.
And now—
“Trouble writing, my darling?” Thomas asked her now. The fall of his mouth at the nape of her neck was no heavier than the chiffon he held in his hands, a bow blooming to black-winged fullness in the hollow of her shoulders.
Magician’s hands, made for prising open world on world, even when the worn dark weight of him seemed the only real thing to her in the gold confusion of the autumn sun. That candle could have crossed the ocean between their palms, and its flame would still be burning now.
“You know how it is,” said Edith. “What it’s like, when you’re looking for the shapes underneath.”
“Don’t I just,” he said. But something caught at the edge of his mouth, just then, a sudden glint beneath the thin stretch of his smile.
“When you started carving all those trinkets for Lucille,” she said, her pulse a whole measure faster, for all he could feel of it, “what was the first thing you made?”
“You’d never believe—it was a sheep, of all things. Lucille had the worst of it, whenever there was money to be lost, economies to be made. One day, after the year had turned, and no man would come up from the village, our father sent her out to the sheepcote halfway across the peak, told her to do what needed to be done. The first time we had cured mutton, all I could think of were her bloodied hands.”
With the slow darkening of his words, Edith thought of Lucille waiting under the dining room chandelier, remembered all the cunning twitches of her fingers whenever she slid her gloves back into place.
“It was bleak midwinter, by the time I’d finished it,” said Thomas, leaning his cheek into the crests of her hair. “My hands were always so cold, I could barely keep my penknife steady against the grain.”
She thought of Lucille chafing her brother’s hands until they were a warm scarlet, thought of Thomas kissing hers quite clean. Lifting her head to the window, Edith looked up to see Lucille caught in miniature beneath the drapes of doorway, red and glistering in the light that rose from her candelabrum.
“I think I know what my story needs,” she said, squaring her chin against the crush of half-night that spread out beyond the pane. “I think Cavendish should have a sister.”
In the depths of the glass, Lucille’s eyelids seemed to rustle, dry as the crackling of a leaf.
-
The key to the library drawer was longest of all the keys on Lucille’s chain. It fell deep into her skirt when she wore it at her waist; it hung over the edge of the kitchen table when she left it aside to tend to the kettle, the coronet braids in her hair turning warm like rosary beads by the light of the morning fire.
It cut a tender red latticework into Edith’s palm, when she slipped it from its ring.
When she opened the cabinet, Edith thought of secrets lying thick as silver in the knife-drawer. In one book, Five Caroline Tragedies pressed into a soft rust spine, she found an inky portrait drawn on the book's endpaper, kept with more reverence than any of the oils in the house. Beneath, a single letter, in Thomas’ hand, one of the dry scratches that seemed to graze against her heart: L.
“Giovanni and Annabella,” she read aloud from the first title page, séance-soft, and then her breath was held close as she read up to the end.
The first she knew of Lucille was a muted crash of metal against tapestry and wood, a circle of keys left in the middle of the table like a centrepiece of iron.
Between her hands, the book snapped shut; she pushed it between the wide carved legs of the nearest chair. From the chaos of gold leaf, a book carved with a crescent moon snagged at the corner of her eye, and she tucked it into the folds of her skirt, dust rising crazed beneath its hem as she flew down the stairs.
“Lucille! Lucille, I was just—“
Lucille’s eyes climbed up her like a slow ascending scale. Edith felt pinned and pierced, cork-skewered.
“Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world,” Lucille said by way of greeting. “To be finally butterflies when the summer comes.”
Gilt lettering seemed to burn against Edith’s fingers, deep in the spine of her book. She didn’t need to look down to know what she'd chosen. “I didn’t know you’d read Le Fanu.”
“Oh, yes,” murmured Lucille, a twitch pulling at the corner of her mouth. “I’ve read every book in here, you see. And parts of that one I find to be more true than most of these sad little histories.”
“I read it so often, when I was a girl,” said Edith, dust thickening in her throat. “After my mother died, and I wanted so many answers.”
Around those eyelids, there passed another rustling. The edge of her collar flashed blue in the light. “I do hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“Actually—I was wondering when I would hear you play again.”
The arc of Lucille’s brow turned high and peaked. “Then I shall use this for my sheet music,” she said, slipping the book from Edith’s hands.
A few paces from the piano, Edith watched the slow play of Lucille’s shoulders beneath the light of the great rose window. Dreamers, thought Edith, as the first strike of key carried to her ears like the silver of remembered light. Dreamers and defeat.
“If your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours,” Lucille said over a cool swell of notes.
But Giovanni and Arabella had almost seared her through her reading glasses. Brother, even by our mother’s dust, I charge you.
“I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine.”
Love me, or kill me, brother.
“As I draw near to you,” said Lucille, “you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love.”
A heaviness crept into her movements, then, a slow freezing from the fingertips upwards.
“Lucille?”
“And what answers did this story give to you, I wonder? Do you think you know what it is, to be drawn so?” Bell-leaden, her head began to bend towards the wood of her piano. “Do you know what it means, to draw away like that, faithless and free?”
Edith’s hand was a pale little crescent of a thing, floating out above the nocturne swells of Lucille’s gown. She nearly drew it back again, but she had already made it this far through the grey vaulted light of the hall, and Lucille’s head had, at last, sunk down to rest against the edge of the piano.
The final note of her song must have trembled in the rosewood at her temple, just as it still seemed to tremble in the air around them, its echo caught in the arches overheard. A latent image, Alan might have been saying, half the world away. Mineral in the stone.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, into the gloom. “I came here for—for both of you, you know.”
Love me, or kill me, sister.
A thick mothscoat of velvet lay spread out like the night beneath her fingertips, when she finally touched Lucille. And beneath that, there passed a tremor, like that of soft-stricken wire.
-
Winter fell over the peak with all the tender finality of a bride’s veil, frost heavy at every window, the house caught in a slow and brilliant slide towards blindness.
There was no turning back now.
Last year, Edith had been skating on the frozen creeks of Buffalo. With the black woods gathered close around her, she’d spun across the ice like a girl caught in the crystal of a carnival ball. And when Alan had sent her a surgeon’s thumbsketch drawn from the silvering bridge of the Thames, she’d burnt it without a second glance, her father’s ruby port like cinders on her tongue.
Now, on the other side of the world, under bleak and boundless pearl-grey skies, she walked slow circles in the snow, with Lucille’s arm fastened around her waist, and the red earth rising to claw at her skirts with each step she took.
“You must have fresh air, my dear,” Lucille insisted, with a strange cool light caught in her voice. “We wouldn’t want you to wither away from us so soon,” she said, with Edith’s chin balanced delicately as a lark on her forefinger, a fervid quickness brightening her eyes. “Would we?”
Following the sudden incline of Lucille’s head across the grounds, Edith looked out to where Thomas stood captive between the feet of the excavator and the feet of the house. She thought, then, of the nights when firethorn berries were new and burning on her lips. Nothing gentle ever grows in this land, he’d said. You need a measure of bitterness, simply not to be eaten. “Sometimes, when I see the clay coming up through the snow, I think the earth’s grown hungry for me,” she told Lucille.
She’d never thought of herself as gentle, before she came to Allerdale Hall.
“The Sharpe lands must be fed Sharpe bones, Edith,” said Lucille, her step growing heavy with something like stone-blank agreement. “And would you let it take you, if it came to that?”
Looking down to their feet—her own boots dyed a heavy crimson, and Lucille’s only a little darker than they’d been the day before—Edith saw how they’d left a long portrait oval of muddy scarlet pressed into the soil. It wanted only a body to hold, she thought, between its red, red arms.
If she were taken down to the dark of the peak, or if she were taken up to the attic bed. Either way, she would see it through to the end. She would know.
“I told you before. I’m not going anywhere.”
At her shoulders, Lucille’s hands came to draw her up, cold where her gloves had failed her. “Lady Sharpe,” she murmured, close like a secret. “We must get you back inside.”
Inside, at the waning of the light, she slept folded in the moth armature of her bedroom chair, pale as its skeleton, and let a silken handful of dog’s-ear slip through her fingers—let her eyes close, at last, onto the attic’s black, black heights.
-
“You must be gentle,” she heard Thomas say, from somewhere that must have been near to her, his voice only a shade darker than the moonlight that pressed faintly against her sleep-sealed eyes. “Gentle as a prince in a tower.”
She was no longer borne up by the wings of the chair. At her back, there was the thick slope of the bed’s pillows, the brocade of the bedcovers stiff beneath her nightgown. Thomas must have laid her out like this, she thought, feeling how her hands sat clasped at her breast.
They would not move for her, when she tried to lift them.
There came a rustling of skirts, the creaking wirework announcements of an old gown. Edith knew it well. The memory of it swept across the waxen, funeral heaviness of her eyelids with all the blistering grandeur of an organ fugue. Coming towards her now were the same winding scales of silk that she followed down the stairs each night when she was led to dinner. Her eyes would not open, her hands would not rise, but the beating of her heart was hard enough to disturb the muslin of her nightgown, to send out a dry fluttering into the dark.
“She is beautiful,” she heard Lucille murmur, in all her chilled abstraction. The back of her hand was no warmer, when Edith felt it come to rest against her cheek. “I could almost see flowers growing from her hair, like she and they were all that were alive in the whole world.”
Lucille’s voice seemed to be calling out to her from far away, but the tear that fell to Edith’s throat was warm, so warm, a bittersweet heat that trembled its way down her skin. Her own eyes stung in sudden, aching sympathy, though their lids were still leaden as those that shut away the dead.
“You are cold,” said Lucille, the folds of her dress sighing for her as she sank beside Edith. “Thomas,” she said, high and trembling, with Edith’s hand caught and lifted in her own, “she is so cold.”
But it was her voice that cracked, then, like the first great fissure in a frozen lake.
“You know how to warm her,” Thomas said, soft as a thief, his fingers so quick between his sister’s. “After all these years, with the wolves at our door and the east wind breathing down our necks. You know, Lucille. You know.”
Pressed to the veins of her wrist, through the thin mist of her nightgown sleeve, Edith felt the weight of Lucille’s kiss like she felt the weight of her wedding ring—cool and heavy, dark and glinting, a smooth small thing with depths that she would dash herself against, if she could only get inside.
“You see?” said Thomas, tender into the waves of her hair.
Edith wondered, then, what a black-breathed beware could ever have meant to her. She could have been the daughter who heard her mother’s warning, or the daughter who heeded it.
“Yes,” said Lucille.
When she sang, it spread through Edith like a vine of silver, binding, brilliant.
-
Edith opened her eyes.
To one side, she saw Thomas’ hair spread out across the pillow next to hairs, dark as an inkspill. To the other, she saw Lucille’s eyelashes falling heavy at her cheek under gleaming eyelids. All through her hair, her garnets flashed a brilliant warning; at her brow, one dark plait had begun to unravel, fraying over the thin line of a scar.
Edith didn’t know how long she turned over nothing but black air between her fingers, her hand hanging just above the rend.
“Here,” she heard at last, thick at the curve of her ear.
Thomas’ hand closed over hers.
Fine-veined eyelids opened onto the chill unblinking quick of Lucille Sharpe; trembled lily-cool; closed again only for a moment, only with the gentle press of Edith’s mouth against her own.
“Edith,” Thomas sighed to the hollow of her throat, through lips that would wetly darken the silk at his sister’s breast. “I knew you’d understand.”
And she did.
-
When the snow beyond the door was high enough to gather chill and white around her waist, Edith’s waltzing strength came back to her, blood climbing to her lip as surely as clay bloomed thick up through the earth.
In the hall where moonlight fell in petalled slants of grey, they wanted only a single candle to light the floor.
Its flame caught against the edge of Lucille’s jaw, when Edith bent to press a kiss just where her hair waved spaniel-soft against her brow. It caught in the pale sea-glass of Thomas’ eyes, and held them as steadily as he held her at the crux of her spine, his topmost fingers resting in a heavy garnet bead of heat between her shoulder blades.
If they were circled by another close-breathed audience, as they were the first time they’d danced as three, she could not say: the only sounds that carried to her now were those of a dark-throated lullaby cutting through the dead of night.