The Accursed (59 page)
But Josiah recognized the blandishments of his old enemy, and did not succumb.
THE GRAY-SPECKLED PONY’S
eyes rolled in terror as she floundered chest-high in snow, and stumbled, and snorted; and in panic released a steaming spray of urine, that stained the snow yellow; and in a terrible instant the dogs were upon her, tearing at her living flesh.
No! Stop!
Josiah was shouting. But the ravenous huskies would eat, for they were starving. But the men would eat, for they too were starving, and knew themselves doomed.
I shall not eat
Josiah vowed.
Not I.
Captain Oates had, by this time, so overcome his gentlemanly scruples and the good manners of his class, he ate with relish the steaming flesh, and stooped to suck the hot blood; and, leaning back, his mouth stained red, offered his young comrade Josiah Slade the “most succulent of the inner organs, the kidneys” for his delectation.
I will not. Not I.
In a paroxysm of shivering Josiah woke from this nightmare, which he knew to be not a mere dream-phantasm, but a vision: for Josiah knew it would all come to pass, within a few months’ time. Once the
Balmoral
reached its destination, and the men disembarked to “explore” the vast white void before them, it was inescapable. Ponies, and howling huskies, and Captain Eric Campbell Oates’s bloodstained muzzle, and the triumph of his mad eyes.
Come, my sweet Josiah, my dear boy—the most succulent of the inner morsels is for
you.
After this, on the lurching deck of the
Balmoral,
all the huskies that were chained topside—(and very much weakened, poor brutes, by the driving rain and sleet)—growled deep in their throats when Josiah passed by. Their muzzles were flecked with foam and their wet eyes jerked in their sockets. These sledge dogs were killers, trained from puppyhood to attack any stranger approaching their master’s sledge.
PLAYFULLY JOSIAH WONDERED:
was he, in fact, by the strait-laced standards of Princeton, New Jersey, now
standing on his head
? That is,
upside-down
? For he was in the Southern Hemisphere now, far from the temperate regions of the northeastern United States.
Yet his gallantry remained. Like instinct bred in the bones of his Slade ancestors, it remained.
For one evening at dusk, unless it was a luminous dawn, an incautious woman, dressed splendidly in ermine, with a matching hat, and fur-trimmed boots, ventured too near the dogs, that she might pet their handsome heads; with the immediate result that the nearest of them attacked, and within an instant her ermine-clad arm had been terribly torn and mangled, and streams of blood flew into the air; and Josiah rushed forward, for he had gloomily prophesied such an incident, observing the woman making her way along the deck, with an outstretched hand; seeing that the injured woman, in shock too severe to allow her to scream, was Mrs. Adelaide Burr, whom he had not glimpsed in years. As the dogs barked and howled, and lunged at the fallen woman, prevented only by their chained collars, Josiah pulled her to safety; or, to a spot on the bloodied deck that would spare her further harm; seeing that she lay mangled and bleeding from myriad wounds, her face scarcely recognizable, and her small pale bosom exposed, cruelly exposed and bleeding from a dozen wounds. Josiah cried for help, and tried to stanch the flow of blood with his coat-sleeves, and his gloves; and the ermine coat; but blood had already frozen underfoot, the deck was covered in ice-blood, and he slipped, and fell, and struck his head, as hard as he had caused Pearce van Dyck to strike his head on a hardwood floor, and Jack London on the plank floor at MacDougal’s.
Will no one save us? Is there no one? No God? No—Savior?
So the dying woman whispered as Josiah lay unable to respond.
On the open deck in a howling wind laced with sleet he was discovered sobbing and despondent as a boy who has lost his mother. His tears had frozen in his eyelashes and in his short scruffy beard and the flesh of his face had lost all sensation.
“Shall we tie him in baling wire this time, sir? What is the captain’s wish?”
THE CAPTAIN’S BELOVED CAT
Mungo Park was a double-toed black Manx who slept with him each night at the foot of the captain’s bed, and purred deep in his throat when he was stroked, and showed particular affection—(so Captain Oates explained to Josiah who lay fevered and convalescent in the captain’s own bed)—by making kneading motions with his claws, and seeming to “nurse” against human flesh.
The glory of Mungo Park was that he had nine lives, of which only four or five had been used up.
Though Captain Oates dearly loved his big black tailless Mungo Park there were men aboard ship who did not; for one morning when Josiah was recovered enough to return to the deck, he observed the burly creature climbing to his customary perch atop some rigging, and saw not long afterward a sly ruffian reach up to him with a rod, and startle him into hissing, and losing his balance to fall howling into the sea.
A chorus of cheers arose. Captain Oates was nowhere near. Josiah leaned over the railing to seek out the abandoned cat—an inconsequential bundle of what appeared to be matted black fur, rocking in the waves behind the ship—with no idea of what to do. A Negro crew member said with a grim chuckle, “Mungo Park is the Devil’s own. He will never drown. He will never die. Don’t shed a tear for Mungo Park.”
(AND SO IT TURNED OUT:
for early the next morning Josiah was wakened by the creature’s guttural purring close beside his head, and the rhythmic kneading motions of his partly sheathed claws against Josiah’s chest. And, ah!—the beauty of those coolly-glowing topaz eyes!)
BY DEGREES JOSIAH
succumbed to the Ice Kingdom. Wondering why he had eked out his existence until now in the greenery of—(what was its name?)—the village of his birth, and the hoary old estate-house called Crosswicks? Somewhere in the State of New Jersey, of no more size and consequence than a gigantic iceberg.
No matter: the Ice Kingdom was eternal. By day and by night he was entering it.
Parallel lines there were beyond counting in the (newer, revised and updated) Scheme of Clues; yet, as Josiah studied the chart, the lines extended, and distended, and whipped about to form clumsy circles—touching
mouth to tail,
it seemed.
The Antarctic moon swung around to hang motionless in the sky, so gigantic it threatened to bump into Josiah’s head, had he not laughingly ducked, and crawled on hands and knees into the darkness of the hold; crouching behind a barrel of flour; until there came a cry—
Josiah? Josiah? Where are you hiding?
—and the sweet laughter of his baby sister Annabel who searched for him in the old slaves’ quarters behind Crosswicks, that had been converted into storage buildings.
Shortly it seemed that the sea was composed of shallow puddles, that sparked and winked with secret marine life; and, though no vegetation seemed to be at hand, tendrils blossomed everywhere—unless they were serpents that wriggled out of the black water, to stretch over every surface; and, when a man’s head was turned, to flash across the deck and into the hold? Josiah shouted, and kicked, and stamped, and tried wildly to thrust the serpents away, for they were underfoot as well; the more insidious, that they could not be seen with the naked eye.
In the distance, beyond a shattered ice floe, the upheld head of a great serpent, moving, like the
Balmoral,
in an unflagging southerly direction to McMurdo Sound.
“That? A ‘sea serpent’ they are called,” one of the crew explained to Josiah, as if he’d asked a very stupid question. “There are many of them in these waters but as we pay them no mind, they pay us no mind.”
In the wake of the great serpent, however, came a curious balmy breeze fragrant with Grecian windflowers, and daffodils, and narcissus. Josiah breathed deeply and swallowed the air. For he knew himself saved.
I shall not develop scurvy like others of the crew. I shall not suffer weakened blood vessels in the brain that, popping one by one, produce foolish hallucinations, and nightmares at noon.
PROFESSOR PEARCE VAN DYCK
protested that the blood vessels in his brain had not weakened; he had been in “full possession” of his faculties until the very end—when Josiah had killed him.
Josiah begged for forgiveness but Pearce van Dyck persisted, now accusing his wife Johanna of “base adultery” and the baby sired by the Fiend “no child of mine but a demon.”
Josiah blushed to hear his old professor speak so coarsely of his own wife and protested that he found it very difficult to believe that Johanna, of all women, had been unfaithful to her husband; the more so, in that the baby appeared, to Josiah, to be an entirely normal baby, of no particular distinction—neither exceedingly beautiful, nor ugly; rather, of the very essence of
human baby
.
Pearce van Dyck interrupted with a bitter chuckle, to declare that the “marital paradox” first reasoned out by the Church Father St. Gregory the Great in the sixth century explained his position: the “carnal act” within Christian marriage is
innocent
even as the desire for such an act is
morally evil
.
Josiah clasped his mittened hands against his ears and tried to argue that Christian marriage, like all marriage, could not be
morally evil;
but Pearce van Dyck refused to listen. Josiah relented, saying that brothers and sisters had no need, and no urge, to marry; therefore, no requirement to wed; in this way, the “paradox” is transcended.
Pearce persisted in his argument, drawing close to Josiah until to Josiah’s surprise his features shaded into those of Captain Oates, who comforted Josiah by stroking his fevered brow, and pressing his cold cheek against Josiah’s fevered cheek, and embracing him tight as any brother, or lover. Yet at the same time, Professor van Dyck seemed still present, if not visible, and at a little distance of about ten feet, grimly intoning:
Who will take little Baby?
I, said the water deep.
Baby will float in his cradle boat,
And I shall rock him to sleep.
THOUGH THE DELICATE
little flowers were but satin lilies of the valley, prettily sewn to the bridal gown, yet they gave off a sweet fragrance of actual lilies, causing Josiah to inhale so deeply he began to stagger about like a drunken man.
He
would not have abandoned the mill-girl Pearl to her coarse companions.
He
could not find it in his heart to quite forgive his grandfather, for such cowardice.
O help. Josiah. My dear brother. Do not abandon me on the ice, Josiah!
Her frightened voice lifted with the sea breeze and sent him reeling across the deck. Was it—Annabel? But where? So far from home? Ah!—starboard she drifted, crouched barefoot and trembling on the ice, her hair whipping in the wind, not very prettily; and her strained face, pale as alabaster, turned to Josiah in desperate appeal.
O Josiah help me. Do not abandon me as you have done. Come to me and warm me!
And this time, no crew members being near, Josiah climbed over the rail and unhesitatingly dived into the pitching sea.
P
OSTSCRIPT
The carelessly annotated log for the
Balmoral
entered in Captain Oates’s flowing hand, contains the (undated) notation that Josiah Slade’s lifeless body, solid-frozen and encased in ice, was hauled from the McMurde Sound, and carried into the hold of the ship.
“
Requiescat in pace
,” the vexed captain scribbled into the log, “—and there’s an end to it!”
O
n the morning that Copplestone Slade at last “made his move” his frightened wife Lenora had dared to lock her door against him, having had a premonition that her husband’s unreasonable fury at her could not much longer be suppressed. As it was Lenora’s habit, following the deaths of her children, to sequester herself away in her private rooms, after her morning bath, to write letters, and read in her Bible, and enjoy her modest breakfast, so Copplestone knew where to find her; she had been hearing his uplifted voice downstairs, as if he were reprimanding the household staff, which lately he did often, and trying to gauge if he were on his way outside, or whether he was on his way to
her.
For months, Lenora had queried herself mercilessly, as to how she had failed her husband; she had sought advice and solace from Henrietta Slade, and from the elder Slades at Crosswicks; she had not wanted to seek out her own family, the Biddles of Philadelphia, for fear of revealing too much that was intimate, and risking a scandal. At the time of her marriage to Copplestone Slade, all of her relatives had thought the match a very good one, for Copplestone was a genial, good-hearted, prank-loving young man, far from the shrewd businessman who was his elder brother Augustus, and farther still from their father Winslow Slade; he had evinced a good deal of pride in the fact that his young wife resembled a “Renoir woman” and was a descendant of the Pennsylvania patriot Lord Stirling, who’d met a martyred death while commanding the Northern Department of the Continental army; and destined to inherit a small, tidy fortune from her parents, as she was their sole surviving heir.
For many years, their marriage was unremarkable; as a West End couple, they entertained frequently, and dined out frequently. As an historian I am inclined to somewhat overzealously research even my minor subjects, and so I have looked into Copplestone’s background; but there is really not much to report, for the man acquitted himself in a more or less adequate way as a son of Winslow Slade, and a partner in the Slade family businesses, that were managed by professionals, and had always prospered. It is true, Copplestone had a penchant for the theater, as a younger man; he had even participated in amateur theatrics, in the Princeton Players, taking on such ambitious roles as Theseus in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Bertram in
All’s Well That Ends Well,
and Frederic in
The Pirates of Penzance;
less profitably, Copplestone had a penchant for gambling on racing horses, at which he lost a fair amount of money over the years; but very likely Lenora never knew anything about it, for the couple lived quite separate lives, within the granite walls of Wheatsheaf.
Since the abduction of Annabel Slade in June 1905, relations between Copplestone and Lenora had deteriorated; the more exacerbated by the children’s deaths, for which Copplestone blamed Lenora. And there was Copplestone’s yet more irrational jealousy of Lenora, for he seemed to have convinced himself, with no evidence, that his wife was “involved” with one or another Princeton man including the dashing Count von Gneist—though so far as I have been able to determine, Lenora and the Count could have met only once or twice, at large gatherings.
Yet, Copplestone had so degenerated in his denunciations of his wife, he was overheard to mutter in her hearing such words as
Slut! Whore! Doxy! Bitch!
and
Sloven!
not caring whether others overheard, including even the abashed household staff.
“Yet, I know myself innocent in the eyes of God,” Lenora bravely reasoned. “Shall I feel ashamed, in
his
eyes?”
ON THIS MORNING
in late May, Lenora was sitting at her writing desk, beginning a letter as an officer of the New Jersey chapter of the Colonial Dames of America, when Copplestone struck loudly on her door with his fist, and demanded that she open it.
So terrified was Lenora, and so oppressed by her husband, she hesitated only a moment before rising to open the door; it was with housewifely concern that she removed the breakfast tray from a nearby table, with a platter of blueberry muffins, butter, and jam, and tea things, that had scarcely been touched, to set it out of harm’s way. Then, with a silent prayer, Lenora went to unlock the door, and her infuriated husband pushed it open, and stepped inside.
“So! What are you writing? I demand to see.”
Mutely Lenora stood aside as Copplestone bent over the writing table, to see the innocuous-seeming letter on the issue of the Dolly Lambert house in Washington’s Crossing, Pennsylvania; yet seeing this, the jealous man snorted in derision, as if this were the most transparent of ploys, and
he
was not to be deceived.
Trying to disguise her alarm, Lenora suggested to Copplestone that he sit down, and breathe deeply; for he was breathing loudly, and he was flush-faced, and “should take care not to strain his over-taxed heart.”
Copplestone relented, to a degree; for Lenora’s wifely solicitude was always touching to him, even in such circumstances. Yet angrily he waved a sheaf of handwritten letters in her face, claiming that he had evidence here for civil divorce, on grounds of infidelity: “These shameless letters from
Yr. adoring Tommy
.”
Lenora had no idea what Copplestone meant, but knew not to inflame him further. She suggested that he be seated, and be “calm”; perhaps join her in a cup of Earl Grey tea, which was his favorite, and a blueberry muffin from a batch baked by Lenora herself just that morning, in the hope of tempting him . . .
“ ‘
Yr. adoring Tommy’
it is—and again, on these five or six letters—
Yr. adoring Tommy.
As if the horse-face parson hadn’t enough womenfolk of his own to pet and pamper him on the university campus, he dares to plot clandestine meetings with my wife!” Copplestone waved the letters another time at Lenora, who saw that they were somewhat yellowed, and covered in a dense, dark hand that looked familiar to her but which she could not immediately identify.
“My dear husband, I can’t understand any of this except to say that I am innocent. I have never received a letter from—are you referring to Woodrow Wilson?—ah, never! I scarcely know him, or his wife Elaine—is that her name? Ellen? I swear that I—”
Copplestone grunted in disgust, and slapped Lenora on the side of the head, causing her to cry out in surprise and pain. In addition, her graying hair was loosed from its pins, and fell unevenly about her face, the sight of which so repelled Copplestone, he feinted a second blow, and the poor woman dissolved in shamefaced tears.
“Copplestone, I swear to you—
I am innocent
. The letters might be from my great-uncle Timothy Jefferson Biddle, which he used to sign
Yr. adoring Uncle Timmy
—I think that must be it. Poor ‘Uncle Timmy’ has been dead for fifteen years, Copplestone! In the last, lonely years of his life he’d taken to writing long rambling letters to several of his nieces. I’m sure you’d met him, Copplestone. If you let me look at the letters, I’m sure I can explain.”
“Yes. I’m sure you can
explain
. I’m sure you had a
ready explanation.
”
Copplestone raised his hand as if to strike her again, and the poor woman shrank guiltily away.
“Lies! ’Tis all ‘weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable’—this domestic life of ours, hewn out of chaos. Only the fifth act of the tragedy redeems.”
Panting quickly, Copplestone was yet distracted enough by the aroma of Lenora’s blueberry muffins to stab his finger into one of the muffins, and taste the crumbs, even as he continued to persecute Lenora, ranting that “Thomas Woodrow Wilson” could not have been the first, or the last, to have been involved with Lenora—“It isn’t beyond imagining that my own damned brother ’Gustus has set his cloven hoof in my bed, for the sport and spite of it!” In his rage, Copplestone’s vocabulary had sharpened; his pronunciation of certain common words had acquired a British flair.
“Your own brother, Augustus? You can’t be serious . . .”
“Can’t I! Can’t I ‘be serious’! You will be quiet, whore, or I will murder you! It’s as the playwright knew, ‘Lie with her? Lie on her? We say lie on her, when they belie her. Lie with her, that’s fulsome!’ All who marry take out license to become cuckolds, in time.” Copplestone made the cuckold’s sign of horns on his forehead, as his greeny eyes shone. “Yet—should I take my revenge now, or leave her to Heaven? Let me see that damned letter you’re scribbling—in code, I suppose. It’s said that Adelaide Burr kept a journal in code, that the authorities are trying to ‘crack’ without success. Pah! A regiment of faithless women.”
Copplestone snatched up the letter on behalf of the Colonial Dames, but could make no sense of it, and hadn’t the patience to read it carefully. Lenora dared to speak to him, saying that she feared he was “unwell”; since Oriana’s death, he had not been sleeping through the night, and his appetite had diminished so that he only picked at his favorite foods—roast suckling pig, blood pudding, sweetbreads, and the baked goods Lenora made with her own hand, solely to please him.
“Dear husband, I wish you would sit down for just a minute, and compose yourself; then if you like, you can resume your interrogation of me.” Lenora spoke so pleadingly, fixing her husband with tearful yet loving eyes, it was very difficult for Copplestone to resist. “Here is a cup of Earl Grey. And here, some brown sugar, and cream. Shall I? You are very fatigued, you know; you have taken the deaths of our children very hard, which is a mark of your love for them . . . Copplestone, darling, these blueberry muffins are favorites of yours, prepared from the recipe of Prudence Burr which I’ve often followed. You know you are very hungry, dear. It isn’t good for a man of your age and responsibilities to fast; I am sure that it is very bad. Shall I butter the muffin for you . . .”
Despite his resolve, Copplestone was swayed by his wife’s soothing words; for perhaps he did love her, or some dim memory of Miss Lenora Biddle, forged in the long-ago of a Philadelphia Christmas cotillion ball at which Copplestone Slade and Miss Biddle were perceived to shine. Roughly he wiped at his eyes and mustache and, overcome by a rush of ravenous if reluctant hunger, he took the blueberry muffin from Lenora and devoured it in two or three bites—“Well. Yes. It
is
good—God damn!” Copplestone laughed, and took up the platter of muffins, which Lenora had pushed in his direction; greedily he devoured these, with swabs of butter, eating rapidly and with an obvious sensual pleasure. Lenora poured him another cup of tea, and sweetened it as before with brown sugar and cream; and this too the panting man accepted, with a shaky hand. He drank heartily, finishing the cup within a minute; rudely he belched, and wiped his mouth on the edge of an embroidered doily, on Lenora’s table. After a pause he said, with a sly, cruel smile: “Yet it will not save you, whore.
It will not save you.
”
FOR COPPLESTONE SLADE
had prepared a document during the night, dictated to him, as he thought it, by a Higher Power; which document, embossed with the monogram of Wheatsheaf Manor and the coat of arms of the Slades, he intended for his adulterous wife to sign. Then, he would bribe a notary public employed by the family firm, to swear that he had witnessed the signature.
While Lenora listened, very stiffly, and still, Copplestone read to her in a swift, stern voice: “ ‘I, Lenora Biddle Slade, the wife of Copplestone Slade and the mistress of Wheatsheaf Manor, being of sound mind and body, do hereby confess to the loathsome sin of Adultery, with these persons—____, _____, and _____.’ ” He would fill in the blanks, Copplestone said, when he’d determined the full extent of her crimes. “ ‘By affixing my signature to this document, free and uncoerced, with my husband as my primary witness, I hereby relinquish all my claims as mistress of his household and surrender all my expectations as his lawful wedded wife; and sign over to him the power of attorney of my hand, and the rights and privileges thereby entailed; and, as God is my witness, I consign to him and to him alone the discretion of
taking my life, or no:
this act to be performed at a time and a place appropriate to it, the decision resting with Copplestone Slade.’ So, a Higher Power has instructed me, Lenora; it is out of my hands. You are to sign on the line here, do you see? Yes?”
Copplestone then tried to close his wife’s trembling fingers about her fountain pen, and to dip it into ink, but their struggle was such that an anguine blot appeared on the document, which quite dismayed Copplestone, as he had prepared the writ with great care on a stiff sheet of parchment, and had neither the time nor the spirit to transcribe it a second time. “Sign your name, whore, and have done with it!”
Understanding that her cause was hopeless, and that this man was not her husband but a maddened creature bent on her destruction, Lenora sprang past him suddenly to seize a silk bell pull that hung on the wall, in order to summon a servant; she had to hope, in desperation, that the household staff downstairs would not shrink from the responsibility of coming to her rescue, or at least summoning help from neighbors; but, unfortunately, Copplestone was too quick for her, clumsily wrenching her back by the hips and throwing her down onto a velvet
chaise longue
. The spark of resistance in the woman—the mere touch of her flesh—seemed to inflame him; he felt a perverse rush of animal desire, yet a stronger rush of revulsion. His fingers closed about her throat as he muttered: “Oh no you don’t, whore—you shall
not
. For a Higher Power has instructed me, we are but pawns in His hand. Stop struggling, slut—don’t madden me the more!”
Thrown into a frenzy, like a wild creature fighting for its life, Lenora too cast off all restraint; so raking Copplestone’s hands and face with her nails as to force him from her, at least temporarily, that she might scream for help. In a fury the madman seized a pillow and pressed it over her face; and pressed, and pressed, until her cries were muffled; and the wild thrashing of her body gradually ceased. Such was Copplestone’s effort, his eyes fairly bulged from his head, and a great artery throbbed between his eyes. Half-sobbing he fell upon the woman, and pummeled her with his fists as a child might have done, whispering: “Whore! Strumpet! Have you learned, too late? Do you repent—too late?”