"Sleep, Pale Sister" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harris Joanne)

23

I suppose a century ago they would have called me a witch. Well, I’ve been called worse things, some of them true, and what people think has never been a worry to me. I can make up a broth that will calm a fever or brew a posset for dreams of flying, and sometimes, in my mirror, I can see things which aren’t reflections. I know what Henry Chester would call that: but then again I have my own terms for the likes of Henry Chester, and not ones you’d find in the Authorized Version, either.

If it hadn’t been for Henry Chester, Marta would have been twenty years old this July. I’m rich enough to have left her a tidy fortune: there’d have been no danger of her walking the streets. I’d have found her a house, a husband if she wanted one; anything she asked for I’d have given her. But when she was ten years old Henry Chester took her from me, and I waited ten years to take his Effie from him. I’ve not had much time in my life for poetry, but there’s fearful symmetry in that pattern, and that’s justice enough for me. Cold, to be sure, but none the less bitter for that.

I was young when I gave birth to Marta, in as much as I was ever young. She might have had thirty fathers but I didn’t care. She was all mine…and, as she grew, I took pains to shelter her from the kind of life I was living. I sent her to a good school and gave her the education I never had; I bought her clothes and toys and gave her a respectable home with a schoolteacher, a distant relative of my mother. Marta came to see me as often as I dared invite her-I did not want her to be exposed to the kinds of people who came to my house, and I never allowed any of my clients up to the little attic I made into a bedroom for her. I invited her to my house for her birthday and, although that evening I was expecting guests, I had promised I would make up for neglecting her. I kissed her goodnight…and I never saw her alive again.

At ten o’clock I heard her calling me and I ran up to her room…but she was already dead, lying sprawled across the bed with her nightdress around her face.

I knew the murderer had to be one of my clients, but the police simply laughed at me when I demanded they investigate. I was a prostitute, my daughter a prostitute’s daughter. And the clients were wealthy, respectable men. I was lucky not to be arrested myself. As a result my daughter was buried under white marble in Highgate cemetery and her murderer was allowed to forget her for ten years.

Oh, I tried to find him out. I knew he was there: I smelled his guilt behind his respectable façade. Do you know what hate is? Hate was what I ate and drank. In my dreams hate walked alongside me as I stalked my daughter’s murderer and painted the streets of London with his blood.

I kept Marta’s room just as she had left it, with fresh flowers on the bedstand and all her toys in a basket in the corner. Every night I crept up there and I called her-I knew she was there-begging her to give me a name: just a name. If she had given me a name in those early days I would have killed him without the slightest remorse. I would have gone to the gallows in Biblical glory. But in ten years my hate grew hungry and lean, like a starving wolf. It grew clever and slinking, watching everyone with the same suspicious amber eye: everyone, and one man in particular.

Remember, I knew him: I knew his eager, shameful appetites, his abrupt self-loathings, his guilt. The girls he asked for were always the youngest, the unformed ones, the virgins. Not that there were many of them, but I’d seen him watching the beggar-children in the street, and I’d seen his paintings, the old hypocrite: sick longings fit to make an honest woman choke. But he wasn’t the only one I suspected and I couldn’t be sure. I tried to reach my little Marta; at first with candles and the mirror, then with the cards. Always the same cards: the Hermit, the Star, the High Priestess, the Knave of Coins, Change and Death. Always the same cards in differing order: always the Hermit flanked by the Nine of Swords and the Death card. But was Henry Chester the Hermit?

He was clever, you understand. If he’d run I would have known for sure; but he was a cold one. He kept coming, not often, maybe once a month; always polite, always generous. I followed other quarry: men who, too abruptly, had stopped visiting after Marta’s death. A doctor, one of my long-standing clients, suggesting that my little girl had died of some kind of a fit; epilepsy, he said. I didn’t believe it for a minute. But pain and time eroded my conviction; I began to doubt the purity of my hate. Maybe it had been a fit, or an intruder, lured by the prospect of easy pickings. Inconceivable that one of my clients could have committed such an act and remained hidden for so long.

My vengeance slept. Then I learned that Henry had married. A child scarcely out of the schoolroom, they said. A girl of seventeen. Suspicion woke again in me-I’d never been sure of him, never-and my hate went out to them both like a swarm of wasps. What right had they to happiness when Marta was rotting in Highgate? What right had anyone?

I followed them to church one day, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bride, but she was all swathed in black, like a mourner, and I could only see her thin little face under her bonnet. She looked ill and I could not help but feel a drawing-towards her, something which was almost pity. She looked so like my poor lost Marta.

I’ve no liking for preachers: I’d come to see Chester and his wife, not to listen to the sermon, and so I was the first one to see her go. One minute she was listening, the next she was gone, her head tilting forwards like a child saying her prayers. Now, I’ve long had the knack of seeing things that most of you don’t, or won’t see, and as soon as Mrs Chester fell I could see that it was no ordinary faint. I saw her pop out of the body, naked as the day she was born, bless her, and, judging by the look of surprise on her face, I’d guess it was the first time it had happened to her.

A pretty thing she was too, not a bit like Henry Chester’s ethereal paintings, with a beauty natural to herself, like a tree or a cloud. No-one else could see her-and I don’t wonder, in all that army of churchgoers. No-one had taught her that trick: she must have learned it all by herself, and I guessed she had other talents she didn’t know about. Right there and then I wondered whether she might not know something that could help me…I called her, in my mind, and she looked at me sharp as a needle: I knew then that she was the answer to all my questions. All I had to do was bring her to me.

Her name was Effie and I watched her many times without her knowledge, calling her to me from Marta’s little room at the top of my house. I saw she was unhappy, first with Henry, then with Mose. Poor, lonely little girl: I knew it would only be a question of time before I brought her to me and I began to care for her like a daughter. I knew her mind, her haunts…and when I saw her at the fair I knew that this was my chance to talk to her alone.

The crystal-gazer was happy enough to give me her place for the price of a guinea: I sat in the shadows with a veil across my face and Effie didn’t suspect a thing. She was so sensitive to my thoughts that I didn’t even have to put her to sleep: she did it herself…but even so, it was not until she began to speak to me in my daughter’s voice that I truly realized how unique, how precious she could be to me. If she could bring back the voice so clearly, what else might she be capable of? My head was spinning with the possibilities: to see my little girl again, to touch her…why not? Believe me, I wished Effie no harm, but her reaction on being jolted out of her trance astonished even me. The girl was too precious to lose; I couldn’t let her go.

Sure enough, before I had to delve too far, she gave me the name I wanted. Henry Chester, the Hermit, the murderer of my daughter…

I was past the age now of wanting to scream my rebellion on the scaffold. If there was to be a sacrifice, this time it would not be me.