Cupids, page 7
I stoop and throw a fresh log upon the sunken mountain range whose peaks are the last ridges of sawn wood and whose river valleys are slow-cooling dust.
I had to try. I had to push the boundaries of success as far as they would go, and a small part of me is still disappointed; it would have been so simple and clean with Helen as an ally. But mostly there is relief beyond any I have felt since November last, when the homeward sail bulged and the masts creaked and the course was set for home. Helen will not be my murderer. I must find another course, slower and more tortuous. It is the curse of my ambition that I must seek for that which I would rather have refused to me.
Beyond my horizon lives a man of riches and endless pleasure. He is impatient for me to reach him, and his is the voice I must listen to first. My future self knows not only wealth, but security. He commands judges, and armies obey his will. He nags and harries me. He allows me no peace until his destination is achieved.
A swift assassination and a share in the Company’s fortunes would set me on the road. But the gorge of Helen’s non-co-operation has been met. I have no choice but to skirt by its perimeter. Months, perhaps years, have been added to my journey, as well as dangers and hazards as yet unknown. But it is a wholesome feeling still, the sting of her refusal.
“Do you like Mr. Egret?” I asked her, the flames dancing to my words.
“He is my master,” she shrugged. “I never think of like or dislike.”
“Is the world a sweeter place for his presence?”
She laughed in reply — a mirthless, nervous laugh — and when her features settled again, I thought I saw signs of lingering bitterness.
“It’s a simple choice we have been given, Helen. You, more than any of us, are in a position to deliver results.”
Her face, dark eyes alive in firelight, returned to a vision of confused innocence.
“What choice? What results?” she said. “He is alive. You cannot profit unless misfortune falls upon him.”
The trick now was to remain completely still and let her words hang. A frown slowly creased her pale forehead. Her eyes narrowed into a kind of questioning, then a plea, and her head tilted like that of a dog which tries to comprehend an alien sound.
“The choice, Helen,” I said softly, “is to languish in slavery or to act and take fortune in our hands.”
“You can’t mean it!” she whispered, hands now rising in a girlish steeple to her mouth.
“This is how the world is,” I said, reaching my hand to her, palm resting just above her knee.
“Murder,” she said, eyes now rimmed with red. She hardly noticed my touch, so my hand remained, gathering heat.
“Far more common than you think, Helen.”
Her knee shifted, perhaps without my knowledge, so I let my hand remain.
“It’s the language of politics, Helen, a well-trodden route to advancement.” I shook my head and fell upon my knees like a man out of his mind. “I am as terrified of this as you, believe me!”
She gaped at me, hands slowly slipping from her mouth, an expression I couldn’t name — could it be sadness, even pity? — upon her face. I had aimed my arrow with care; when all else failed, I reasoned, vulnerability was surely the one quality no woman could resist. I had a hand upon each knee now and my fingers were pulling folds of her nightdress into my palms.
“It is fate that has brought us here, Helen, not careless ambition or cruelty. Are we such fools that we imagine we can live happily without stealing another’s air? Do we not tread upon many ants and spiders when we make our way through the market? Do we not drown a dozen ticks when we plunge into the river? All effort has a cost, my Helen. We cannot make our bed without cutting straw.”
Then it all happened. Her fingers burrowed under both of my wrists, shifting my hands from her legs then letting go. She stood slowly and, when she spoke, her voice was somewhere between a whisper and a hiss. “Villain, I am not your Helen!” The expression that had confused me, I now realized, was neither sadness nor pity. The water in her eyes would surely have scalded had I touched it. “You have already turned me into a thief and informer. Now you would have me commit murder.” She gained the door before I could stop her, but turned a final time. “Oh, Bartholomew,” she said with a shake of her head. The tear running down one cheek now, together with the unexpected use of my name, suddenly touched me quite deeply, and I was rendered mute. “You are a worthless young man!”
And with those words she was gone from the room, footsteps descending the staircase, the side door shrugging open then banging closed.
IT’S CURIOUS WHAT MORSELS may encourage a man. While individually the words — villain, worthless — seem to damn me in her eyes, there is something in their context and organization that gives me hope. Tears are not shed for a villain. Women do not brave the night for the worthless. Nor do they allow the touch of his hands to linger. I think not of her refusal to submit to the task, but of how very close she came. And now, as the room begins to warm and tiredness creeps upon me again, I thank whatever stars reign over Helen’s thoughts and movements tonight that she did remain firm. There is no end to ambition’s duty but that which virtue imposes. I cannot find virtue in myself, so my ambition would have remained quite unchecked but for Helen. Helen’s virtue, then, has allowed me a moment of rest.
Closing my eyes I allow the hiss and crackle of the now-growing fire to wash over me like a reddening stream. The Crossroads does not close and it seems as well to drowse here as to return to Guy’s house and endure his pitiful cries and tortured dreams.
A noise comes from far beneath me — two short coughs perhaps — and I think of Cupers Cove, with its storms, its hail, its bone-gnawing cold, its half-finished buildings, with unfastened doors of slippery pine banging through the endless nights. I see myself as I was there, a figure unrooted, drenched in foreign rain, soaked in the stealthy secret vices of my displaced countrymen. Unresolved questions thump to the memory of the wind: how to eliminate Egret; how to keep Guy’s favour; how to profit from the Newfoundland Company; how to profit but avoid returning; how to return but avoid attack. Footsteps — approaching footsteps — have merged into the rhythm and I realize the initial double cough was not a cough at all but the opening and the shutting of the Tavern’s side door, an unwelcome realization now as the door and staircase lead to this room and I really don’t want to carouse. Reluctantly, I stir myself to take leave as the newcomer reaches the top of the staircase and the door opens.
The hooded figure before me neither speaks nor shows his face, but his shoulders, slim and youthful, make the stranger very close to my own size. Steam swirls upward from the fabric of his coat, and rain drips from its hem. The coat’s colour — purple grey — and the stitch, fine and flawless but for a single frayed thread hanging in a loop from the arm, announce the garment undoubtedly as my own.
I stand suddenly, chair scuffing backward along the floor. This can’t be a dream. The senses are too precisely etched and coloured for such a hope. But I find myself scurrying after the impossible, as mice must scurry from a house on fire.
“Your coat,” comes a voice from within — a voice without expression. Its tones, unmistakably feminine, nevertheless ease my terror in a stroke.
“My coat,” I gasp, my heart still pounding, my ears hissing as though with a chorus of snakes.
“I had to give it back.”
“Of course,” I say hoarsely. “I had forgotten.”
She lets the hood drop at last. With her dark hair wet and in some disarray, Helen looks like the handsomest of crows. Illogically, given her words, she moves toward the chair she had vacated earlier and, far from handing me the garment, only draws it closer around her shoulders as she sits.
I sit also, pulling my chair forward. My knees still quiver from the shock and my heart skips wildly. Though abating, my first wave of fear has given way to another anxiety, less urgent but no less serious.
“It could have waited,” I say. “How long have you been outside? You left more than an hour ago.” My voice is high-pitched and words fire rapidly.
“Does it matter?” she answers, looking not at me, or even at the wall behind my head but at some unseeable distance.
“To me, Helen, yes it does. I want you safe from the elements.”
Her eyes turn upon mine.
“Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“Is it?”
There remains something trance-like about her, though her attention is locked upon me now.
“Yes,” I repeat. “Why are you here, Helen?”
The hissing subsides and my ears go rather numb as though suddenly afraid of what they might hear.
It is through movement of her lips rather than through sound that I catch her answer: “I’ve changed my mind,” she says. “I’ll do it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Helen
I’VE SAID IT, AND now my words are his. I can’t reclaim them. But he doesn’t seem delighted at all. Instead there is a mask-like fixedness to his expression. He looks rather pale and his eyes will not settle on me for more than an instant. Is it my imagination or do his lips even tremble as he speaks?
“You’ll do it?” he asks like a frightened boy.
A vow, even if spoken in haste, is safe enough if the recipient doesn’t mean to exploit it. This is how I feel now. My willingness to act has landed not upon the stone where commandments are etched. It has landed in a nest of feathers. Reluctance, not gratitude, has greeted my promise to spill blood. Suddenly I’m the one who feels stained by murderous thoughts.
“That’s what you wanted,” I tell him, impatience, and perhaps a little panic, creeping like an army of spiders over the skin of my shoulders. I couldn’t have mistaken it all, could I? He couldn’t have meant something else? The word “murder” never actually left his lips. It was myself only who gave it utterance just before I left him and ran in a state of fury and indignation into the night. And now with the words “I’ll do it” I have completed the noose of guilt, eased it carefully over my head, and handed him the end of the rope.
MY CHANGE OF MIND came with the crushing of a snail shell.
I had run from the tavern, bare feet scattering wet pebbles from the Broad Quay into the water, mast bell mocking me through the dark. Arriving at my master’s house — the place of my mother’s life, the place of my own birth — I had begun circling the building over and over. Why could I not enter, climb into my customary bunk, and forget about the hand at the window, Bartholomew’s fall, and my own so easily won night journey to the Crossroads Tavern? Why could I not shed the young man’s horrible plan along with his dripping coat and get the sleep that would enable me to resume my duties refreshed?
I felt the sharp stab once more as Mr. Egret’s cane whooshed through the air. This time, the imaginary blow seemed to dig deeper, right into the bone. In this reliving, the girl on the stair was aware of something vicious and unjust, aware also of anger already burning in her belly even as she listened for the oncoming shriek, the sob and the collapse of knee upon floorboard.
Yet he was kind enough most of the time, wasn’t he? He let my mother stay in his employ when she was with child, let me scurry under the feet of the household. In the early years he allowed me to learn my lessons alongside Eliza with hardly a division of rank. Later, after Mother died, he would come upon Bertha nurturing me into the ways of service, and would nod calmly, give me a thin smile and even a pat on the head.
But why was he so charitable to us? The question hung as I watched the rain fall. Each droplet carried a fragment of the moon and slowed to half its speed when I caught and followed its movement. Mr. Egret was not renowned for his generosity of spirit, and my mother’s life was a catalogue of regulation — not established in rueful guilt but through long and tireless observance. A tavern, she told me, is not a place for a decent girl no matter the hour. The warning in her eye held neither suspicion of me, nor remorse for herself. It was merely a fact, known and adhered to. My mother did not go to taverns, ever. Her name — Isabelle — rang through the tiny community of shopkeepers, widows, and barrow boys like a chime spelling good sense and restraint. A glance from her was enough to silence horseplay and have the roughest of boys touch his hand to his cap. How did this strict and disciplined woman with no suitor come to be with child?
The answer was like a pattern in the wood, obvious but unimportant. The knots and swirls had always spelled a face — two narrow eyes, a bent nose, and thin mouth — but the rag that cleaned had barely time to care. What passion would cause a cautious man like Mr. Egret to strike a servant after so many years? Why would the servant care enough to wither and die?
I watched a raindrop disappear into the earth, walked a little farther and felt the crack of the shell as it splintered beneath my bare heel. Bartholomew’s words returned — do we not tread upon ants and spiders when we make our way through the market? Here I was already a murderer and all I had done was tread upon the ground. Raising my foot, I heard a multiple crack as the shell fragments fell upon themselves. Inevitable, was the word that sounded in my ears, a term of fragile constancy. Everything crumbles. Mr. Egret would certainly die one way. Ten years, or five, or three would be too late for some.
But what had it to do with me? I continued circling the house, my feet scratching against the pebbles, the rain seeping at last through Bartholomew’s coat. I thought of my mother, betrayed by his secrecy; I thought of myself obscured by his shadow; I thought of Mrs. Egret, her late husband, Mr. Guy, and Bartholomew, each of them journeying to unknown shores, risking themselves for every gain. Mr. Egret seemed like some giant carrion bird which preys not upon the dead but upon the living.
I reached the spot where I had crushed the snail. The ridges of its shell fragments caught the moon. Inevitable, the jagged edges seemed to spell. The reins of all knowledge — Bartholomew’s plan, Mr. Guy’s hope, my mother’s death, and my likely paternity — had all been drawn together and placed neatly in my hand, and as fate, or providence, would have it, I also had easiest access to the target. Why should he live to thwart so many?
“YES, YES,” HE SAYS, rising, shuffling around the table, shoulders oddly stooped. “It’s the course we must take.” He picks up a log from the pile, though the fire is burning warmly enough, and hurls it over the grate. The new log dislodges one already burning, sending a swirl of sparks into the room. The glowing underbelly of the upturned log fades into grey. Slowly, as I watch in silence, the first timorous tongues of new flame tease their way around the base of the fresh wood.
“How?” I ask his back.
His feet and shoulders do not move, but his head flicks in my direction. I can see his high cheekbone, the tip of his nose.
“Atropa belladonna,” he mumbles, and then turns. I’ve heard the phrase before. It tumbles from the mouth like a snatch from a love sonnet, caressing and smooth. He stares at me now, his face a mask, drawn and unmoving.
“What?” My question comes out like a cough.
“Deadly nightshade.”
The voluptuous phrase dissolves, falling in soft leaves to reveal a blade.
“A poison?”
He nods and then comes to the table. He sits close to me again, body hunched, elbows on knees, hands over his mouth as though preparing to catch whatever words might be spoken. “We must plan carefully,” he says. I’m surprised at the whiteness of his face and at a slight tremor of his fingertips as they stroke his light, boyish beard. “I will collect it, of course. You must make sure it finds its way into his food.”
The chain of guilt is oddly comforting. I imagined the plunge of a knife, the drop of an ax blade. This way the murder is shared. Who is more responsible: the supplier or the one who applies the poison? I was readying myself for the title. Murderess! — the word hurtled through my brain as I saw the sea of shaking fists, and the stones hailing down upon my head. Now I can apply a prefix: semi-murderess! Which mob could squeeze vengeance into such a cumbersome chant? Only half of my soul will be damned. Hellfire will last only half an eternity.
His right hand falls from his young beard and comes to rest upon my knee. Is the brain behind those distracted blue eyes aware of it? Does he know his fingers are working at my nightdress for the second time tonight, gathering fabric as before, then dropping those same folds, then beginning afresh? It’s curious, this compulsive, repetitive action. I can feel his breath on my face, but it seems to contain the heat of agitation, not of lust. I sense that for the moment I am an extension of him. My leg, my nightdress is of no more consequence than the beard that he smoothed with those fingers.
“When?” My voice is sharp, urgent to rouse him. I shift my knee. His hand drops without protest.
“When,” he repeats like a distant echo.
“I don’t want to wait. The crime will grow larger and larger until the moment it’s committed.”
“Yes,” he whispers like a man emerging from a dream. “We must overtake remorse before it swells and forbids action.” His eyes, rather bloodshot and tired, meet mine now, and I see the tensing of his jaw as he raises himself in his chair. “We must act,” he says.
My stomach suddenly churns and certain knowledge descends. The wheel is already turning; the operation to which he refers will not be commenced next week or even tomorrow, but now.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Guy
HOW DID ELIZA COME to be in my bed? The question surfaces again, but I push it down until it sinks under and Eliza’s soft, white arm emerges from the folds of linen. Her skin, unaccountably wet, hisses as it slides against the sheets. Ridges of foam appear and disappear with every movement, and the taste of salt comes and goes in my mouth.
The sweetness of it all is almost beyond bearing. Any more pleasure would surely tilt into pain. Still, I am worried. What about her reputation? Bartholomew, the young rogue, comes freely into my chamber whenever he pleases. The thought of Eliza sullied by smirks and whispers distracts me. The ebb and flow of her movements, though delightful to me now, would be branded in scarlet shame if revealed to the light of day.
