Sleep, Pale Sister

It was that name…Marta.

Her name was a sigh, a prayer, a supplication: on Fa

After midnight she walked the dim passageways of the Crook Street house. I felt her light, ironical touch against the nape of my neck as she passed. I caught the scent of her against the curtains, heard her sweetly hoarse, slightly accented voice from the open window, laughing from the damp London fog. I dreamed of her as I had first seen her through the chink in the wall-a burning rose of crimson flesh, a Fury with her hair in flames, laughing through the fire like a madwoman or a goddess…

And yet there was no Marta.

Sometimes I had to remind myself of the fact for fear I might go mad like all the rest of them. There was no Marta-I knew that: I had seen her reduced to a swirl of red ochre in the bathroom sink, a smear of cosmetics on the white of a linen towel. Like Cinderella, she was built from midnight’s deceitful magic; dawn left nothing of her but a few dyed hairs on a pillow. And yet, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes…

Damn her! Damn all their poisonous games.

There was no Marta.

Then there was the business with Henry Chester. Oh, don’t think I was having second thoughts. I had no cause to love the man, nor he to love me, but it seemed to me that the whole affair was getting a trifle too eleborate for my taste. I admit I laughed at first at the thought of Effie’s seduction of her own husband-there was something infinitely perverse in the idea which appealed to me-but if you had seen Chester, with his fixed and deathly smile…He looked like a doomed man at Hell’s own border.

What did they want of me? Damned if I knew! Fa

It wasn’t even as if I were seeing any money from it all: the grim masquerade seemed to lurch on indefinitely. Looking back, I suppose I could have broken free then-I would have lost my chance to blackmail Henry Chester, but that was not why I stayed. Call it arrogance if you like: I didn’t want to be bested by a woman. Either way, I fell into their trap neatly enough. I must have been mad.

I like to think I hesitated at first: the plan was so Gothic, so ludicrous, that it might well have been the libretto for some darkly burlesque operetta. Fa

‘Fa

‘Oh, but I am,’ she said serenely. ‘Very serious.’ She watched me from her cryptic agate eyes for a moment then gave me a secretive half-smile. ‘I’m counting on you, Mose, my dear. Really.’

I gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘Are you telling me that Effie persuaded Henry to agree to her own murder?’ My laugh was the sick, nervous laughter of hysteria. I cleared my throat, poured myself another glass of brandy and swallowed half of it at once.

The silence rang between us.

‘Don’t you believe it?’ said Fa

‘I…I don’t believe Effie…’

‘But it wasn’t Effie.’

Damn her! Her voice was smooth as cream and I knew what she was going to say.

‘Damn it, Fa

She smiled indulgently. ‘You should know that.’ A moment to allow her words to sink in. ‘She and I are both counting on you.’ Her smile became impish.

‘And Marta, of course.’

44

I could not go home to Cromwell Square. The thought of entering the house where she slept, passing her door, maybe brushing against her in the passageway or feeling her mad, accusing stare in the small of my back; watching her drink her chocolate at breakfast or unfold her needlework in the morning-room…and all the while knowing that at midnight she would be dead in some anonymous grave in Highgate, perhaps the very same which sheltered the whore’s child’s unquiet half-sleep…I could not bear it.

Instead, I made my way in the dark to my studio and tried to sleep. But the wind screamed outside in Effie’s voice, rattling the windows. Twenty grains of chloral was all I dared take. Even they brought no comfort, simply a lethargy of the spirit which quickly shifted to a shivering restlessness. I had a bottle of brandy in one of my cupboards: I tried to drink it but found that my throat had constricted to pinhole-size. Choking, I spat out the burning liquid in a wide arc around me. Suddenly I glimpsed a movement in the far corner of the studio; in the thickest shadow I thought I saw a shifting of drapery…the outline of a woman’s hand…

‘Who’s there?’

No answer but the wind. ‘I said, who’s there?’ I took a step forwards and she was standing in the furthest corner, her face a pale blur, hands outstretched to claim me. For an instant I sank into total delirium, an incoherent streamer of sound unfurling from my lips…then my groping hands met the frame and the smell of paint and varnish filled my nostrils.

‘Ahhh…’ I struggled to control my voice, dragging it back to its normal range. My mouth was slack; the captured moth beneath my left eyelid desperately fluttering.

‘Sch…Scheherazade.’

That was better. I said the name again, feeling my mouth take shape again beneath the difficult syllables. I forced myself to touch the painting and my laughter was forced and cracked, but at least it was laughter. There was nothing, nothing to be afraid of, I told myself fiercely. There was no dancing Columbine with empty eye-sockets and carnivorous teeth; no little ghostchild with arms outstretched and chocolate on her fingers; no Prissy Mahoney with her keyhole of blood; no Mother watching from her deathbed with her lovely ravaged face…

Enough! I forced myself to turn away from the painting (absurd that I should feel the hammering of Marta’s eyes like nails between my shoulder-blades, pitilessly bisecting the soft white cord of my spine) and walk towards the fire. I looked at my watch. Half past two. I found a book lying face down on a chair and glanced at it idly to pass the time. To my disgust I saw that it was a book of poetry; opening it at random I read:

my sister’s sleep

She fell asleep on Christmas Eve:

At length the long-ungranted shade

Of weary eyelids overweigh’d

The pain nought else might yet relieve.

A childish hand had underscored certain parts of the verse in red pencil and, with a shiver, I realized whose book this was; on the title page the legend euphemia madeleine shelbeck, written in a round, neat hand, made me hurl the book as far away from me as possible into the shadows. Damn her! Was she never to leave me in peace?