Alias Grace (23 page)

Agnes lifted the bedcovers and looked beneath. The nightdress and petticoat were soaked through with blood, and the sheet was all red with it, and brown where it had dried. She said, This is a bad business, and she told me to stay there, and she went at once to fetch Mrs. Honey. I heard her footsteps going away, and it seemed to me she was gone a long time.

I sat on the chair in our room and looked at Mary’s face; her eyes were open, and I could feel her looking back at me out of the corners of her eyes. I thought I saw her move, and I said, Mary, are you pretending? For she sometimes pretended she was dead, behind the sheets in the drying room, to frighten me. But she was not pretending.

Then I heard two sets of footsteps hurrying along the passage, and I was filled with dread. But I stood up. And Mrs. Honey came into the room; she did not look sad, she looked angry, and also disgusted, as if she could smell a bad smell. And there was indeed a smell in the room; it was the smell of wet straw, from the mattress, and also the salty smell of blood; you can smell something very similar in a butcher’s shop.

And Mrs. Honey said, This is an outrage and a disgrace, I must go and tell Mrs. Parkinson. And we waited, and Mrs. Alderman Parkinson came, and said, Under my own roof, what a deceitful girl. And she looked straight at me, although she was talking about Mary. Then she said, Why did you not inform me of this, Grace? And I said, Please Ma’am, Mary told me not to. She said she would be better in the morning. And I started to cry, and I said, I did not know she was going to die!

Agnes, who was very pious as I have told you, said The wages of sin is death.

Mrs. Alderman Parkinson said, That was wicked of you, Grace, and Agnes said, She is only a child, she is very obedient, she was just doing as she was told.

I thought Mrs. Alderman Parkinson would scold her for interfering, but she did not. She took hold of my arm gently, and looked into my eyes, and said, Who was the man? The scoundrel should be exposed, and made to pay for his crime. I suppose it was some sailor, down at the harbour, they have no more conscience than a flea. Do you know, Grace?

I said, Mary did not know any sailors. She was seeing a gentleman, and they were engaged. Only he broke his promise, and would not marry her.

And Mrs. Alderman Parkinson said sharply, What gentleman?

I said, Please Ma’am, I don’t know. Only she said you would not like it at all, if you found out who it was.

Mary had not said this, but I had my own suspicions.

At that Mrs. Alderman Parkinson looked thoughtful, and paced to and for the length of the room; and then she said, Agnes and Grace, we will not discuss this further, as it will only lead to unhappiness and added misery, and there is no sense in crying over spilt milk; and out of respect to the dead we will not say what Mary died of. We will say it was a low fever. That will be best for all.

And she looked at both of us very hard, and we curtsied. And all the time Mary was there on the bed, listening to us, and hearing about our plans to tell these lies about her; and I thought, She will not be easy in her mind about it.

I didn’t say anything about the doctor, and they did not ask. Perhaps they didn’t even consider such a thing. They must have thought it was only a lost baby, as women frequently have; and that Mary had died of it, as women frequently did. And you are the first person I have told about the doctor, Sir; but it is my true belief that it was the doctor that killed her with his knife; him and the gentleman between them. For it is not always the one that strikes the blow, that is the actual murderer; and Mary was done to death by that unknown gentleman, as surely as if he’d taken the knife and plunged it into her body himself.

Mrs. Alderman Parkinson left the room, and after a while Mrs. Honey came, and said we were to take the sheet from the bed, and her nightdress and petticoat, and wash the blood out of them; and wash the body, and take the mattress to be burnt, and see to it ourselves; and there was another mattress cover beside where the quilts were stored, and we could stuff that with straw; and we were to fetch a clean sheet. She asked if there was another nightdress for Mary to be dressed in, and I said there was, because Mary had two; but the other one was in the wash. Then I said I would give her one of mine. She said we were not to tell anyone of Mary’s death until we’d got her looking presentable, with the quilt pulled up over her and her eyes closed, and her hair combed down and tidy. Then she went out of the room, and Agnes and myself did as she said; and Mary was light to lift, but heavy to arrange.

Then Agnes said, There is more to this than meets the eye, and I wonder who the man was. And she looked at me. And I said, Whoever he is, he is still alive and well, and most likely enjoying his breakfast at this very moment, and not having any thoughts in his head about poor Mary, no more than if she was a carcass hung up at the butcher’s.

Agnes said, It is the curse of Eve which we must all bear, and I knew Mary would have laughed at that.

And then I heard her voice, as clear as anything, right in my ear, saying
Let me in.
I was quite startled, and looked hard at Mary, who by that time was lying on the floor, as we were making up the bed. But she gave no sign of having said anything; and her eyes were still open, and staring up at the ceiling.

Then I thought with a rush of fear, But I did not open the window. And I ran across the room and opened it, because I must have heard wrong and she was saying
Let me out.
Agnes said, What are you doing, it’s cold as an icicle out there, and I said The smell is making me sick. And she agreed that the room should be aired. I was hoping Mary’s soul would fly out the window now, and not stay inside, whispering things into my ear. But I wondered whether I was too late.

Finally we had all done, and I bundled the sheet and the nightdress together and took them down to the laundry, and pumped a tub full of cold water, because it’s the cold water you need to get out the blood, as the hot will set it. By good fortune the laundress was not in the laundry but in the main kitchen, heating the irons for the ironing, and gossiping with Cook. And I scrubbed, and much of the blood came out, making the water all red; and I ran that down the drain and pumped another tubful, and left the things to soak, with some vinegar poured in to help with the smell. Whether from the cold or the shock, my teeth by now were chattering; and as I ran back up the stairs I felt quite dizzy.

Agnes had been waiting in the room with Mary, all nicely laid out now with her eyes closed as if sleeping, and her hands crossed on her breast. I told Agnes what I’d done, and she sent me to tell Mrs. Alderman Parkinson that all was ready. And I did, and went back upstairs, and pretty soon here came the servants to see, crying some of them, and sad-faced, as was fitting; but still there is always a strange excitement around a death, and I could see that the blood was flowing more strongly through their veins than on ordinary days.

Agnes did the talking, and said it was a sudden fever, and for a woman as pious as she was, she lied very well; and I stood by Mary’s feet, keeping silent. And one said, Poor Grace, to wake up in the morning and find her cold and stark in the bed beside you, with no warning at all. And another said, It makes your flesh creep to think of it, my own nerves would never stand it.

Then it was as if that had really happened; I could picture it, the waking up with Mary in the bed right beside me, and touching her, and finding she would not speak to me, and the horror and distress I would feel; and at that moment I fell to the floor in a dead faint.

They said I lay like that for ten hours, and no one could wake me, although they tried pinching and slapping, and cold water, and burning feathers under my nose; and that when I did wake up I did not seem to know where I was, or what had happened; and I kept asking where Grace had gone. And when they told me that I myself was Grace, I would not believe them, but cried, and tried to run out of the house, because I said that Grace was lost, and had gone into the lake, and I needed to search for her.

They told me later they’d feared for my reason, which must have been unsettled by the shock of it all; and it was no wonder, considering.

Then I fell again into a deep sleep. When I woke, it was a day later, and I knew again that I was Grace, and that Mary was dead. And I remembered the night we’d thrown the apple peelings over our shoulders, and Mary’s had broken three times; and it had all come true, as she had not married anyone at all, and now never would.

But I had no memory of anything I said or did during the time I was awake, between the two long sleeps; and this worried me.

And so the happiest time of my life was over and gone.

Seven - Snake Fence

Chapter 21

Simon takes his hat and stick from the Governor’s wife’s maid, and staggers out into the sunlight. It’s too bright for him, too harsh, as if he’s been closed up in a dark room for a long time, although the sewing room is far from dark. It’s Grace’s story that is dark; he feels as if he’s just come from an abattoir. Why has this account of a death affected him so strongly? Of course he’s known that such things happen; such doctors do exist, and it isn’t as if he’s never seen a dead woman. He’s seen a great many of them; but they have been so thoroughly dead. They have been specimens. He has never caught them, as it were, in the act. This Mary Whitney, not yet — what? Seventeen? A young girl. Deplorable! He would like to wash his hands.

No doubt about it, the turn of events has caught him off guard. He’d been following her story with, he has to admit, a certain personal pleasure — he has his own happier days and the memories of them, and they too contain pictures of clean sheets and joyful holidays, and cheerful young maidservants — and then, at the centre of it, this dire surprise. She’d lost her memory, too; though only for some hours, and during a normal-enough fit of hysterics — but still, it may prove significant. It is the only memory she seems to have forgotten, so far; otherwise, every button and candle-end seems accounted for. But on second thought, he has no way of knowing that; and he has an uneasy sense that the very plenitude of her recollections may be a sort of distraction, a way of drawing the mind away from some hidden but essential fact, like the dainty flowers planted over a grave. Also, he reminds himself, the only witness who could corroborate her testimony — if this were a court of law — would be Mary Whitney herself, and she is not available.

Down the driveway to the left comes Grace herself, walking with her head lowered, flanked by two unsavoury-looking men he supposes to be prison guards. They’re leaning very close to her, as if she’s no murderess, but a precious treasure to be kept safe. He doesn’t like the way they press up against her; but of course their lives would be very difficult if she were to escape. Although he’s always known that she’s taken back every evening and locked into a narrow cell, today it strikes him as incongruous. They’ve been talking together all afternoon as if in a parlour; and now he is free as air and may do whatever he likes, while she must be bolted and barred. Caged in a dreary prison. Deliberately dreary, for if a prison were not dreary, where would be the punishment?

Even the word
punishment
grates on him today. He can’t get Mary Whitney out of his mind. Lying in her winding sheet of blood.

He has stayed longer than usual this afternoon. In half an hour he is due at the Reverend Verringer’s, for an early supper. He does not feel hungry in the least. He decides to walk along by the lakeshore; the breeze there will do him good, and possibly restore his appetite.

It’s just as well, he reflects, that he didn’t continue as a surgeon. The most fearsome of his instructors at Guy’s Hospital in London, the celebrated Dr. Bransby Cooper, used to say that for a good surgeon, as for a good sculptor, the ability to detach oneself from the business at hand was a prerequisite. A sculptor should not allow himself to be distracted by the transient charms of his model, but should regard her objectively, as merely the base material or clay from which his work of art was to be formed. Similarly, a surgeon was a sculptor of flesh; he should be able to slice into a human body as deliberately and delicately as if carving a cameo. A cold hand and a steady eye were what was required. Those who felt too deeply for the patient’s suffering were the ones in whose fingers the knife slipped. The afflicted did not need your compassion, but your skill.

All very well, thinks Simon; but men and women are not statues, not lifeless like marble, although they often become so in the hospital surgery, after a harrowing period of noisy and leaky distress. He’d quickly discovered at Guy’s that he was not fond of blood.

But he’d learned some worthwhile lessons nonetheless. How easily people die, for one; how frequently, for another. And how cunningly spirit and body are knit together. A slip of the knife and you create an idiot. If this is so, why not the reverse? Could you sew and snip, and patch together a genius? What mysteries remain to be revealed in the nervous system, that web of structures both material and ethereal, that network of threads that runs throughout the body, composed of a thousand Ariadne’s clues, all leading to the brain, that shadowy central den where the human bones lie scattered and the monsters lurk….

The angels also, he reminds himself. Also the angels.

In the distance he sees a woman walking. She’s dressed in black; her skirt is a soft rippling bell, her veil blows out behind her like dark smoke. She turns, looks back briefly: it’s Mrs. Humphrey, his sombre landlady. Fortunately she’s walking away from him; or she may be deliberately avoiding him. Just as well, as he is not in the mood for conversation, and especially not for gratitude. He wonders why she insists on dressing quite so much like a widow. Wishful thinking, perhaps. So far there’s been no news of the Major. Simon paces along the shore, picturing to himself what the Major must be doing — a racecourse, a bawdy-house, a tavern; one of the three.

Then he thinks, inconsequentially, about taking off his shoes and wading into the lake. He has a sudden memory of dabbling in the creek at the back of the property, as a young boy, in the company of his nursemaid — one of the young millhands turned servant, as were most of their maids then — and getting himself dirty, and being scolded by his mother, and the nursemaid too, for allowing it.