The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (40 page)

READ MORE ABOUT THOSE FAKING BIGWIGS THE SWINEY GODIVAS AND THEIR PENCHANT FOR MENDACITY IN THE NEXT ISSUE!

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Promised a banner in red.]

IT’S NOT EVEN THEIR OWN HAIR!

And learn more about their lust for power and money, their scandalous birth! Seven sisters with seven different fathers, den of vice in the depths of the Irish countryside. And a fake sister in their midst!

The red-haired temptress Manticory Swiney says, ‘Men are just our accessories.’

Chapter 36

‘I’m going to mutilate him into a female,’ sputtered Darcy.

‘Nobody will want us now,’ mourned Berenice. ‘And when Augustus and Tristan read what Millwillis wrote, we’ll have no one to manage us or make our bookings, or prepare our accommodation or sell the tickets. They’ll find other sisters, other hair.’

Oona said, ‘They would never abandon us. They are brothers to us.’

But her voice broke on the word ‘brothers’.

Darcy snapped, ‘Your tiny brains are running away with themselves. We must simply keep out of sight until we can make this go away. If we go on the stage again, there will be advertising and newspaper stories and Millwillis will find us in a goat’s leap.’

Ida said, ‘
Everyone
will want to come see the evil Swineys. I am surprised that Tristan and Mr Rainfleury did not think of that. So if we earn a great heap of money, we could give some to Millwillis, to make him go away and stop writing any more.’

‘You mean
offer
to be blackmailed?’ Darcy scowled. ‘We can’t afford him. He’ll never stop coming after us if he sees that blackmail works. No, he has stolen our earnings for a while. We must hide. We shall retrench somewhat, cut our firewood expenses, that kind of thing. One less maid. You girls can manage without your pocket money for a while. Pudel can cover for the second maid.’

Berenice said, ‘But at least we can have Pertilly back now – she doesn’t need to hide any more. Everyone knows what happened to her.’

‘No, no,’ said Pudel. ‘I am happy as I am.’

I thought,
Yes, she is. And there is dignity in her labour, compared with the degradation of public Swineyness
.

Darcy allowed, ‘We can call her Pertilly again, so long as she continues with her chores.’

I cleared my throat. ‘Why don’t I just write that book then?’

‘You mean the story of us?’ asked Oona. ‘The real story?’

I nodded.

‘I told you why not,’ fumed Darcy. ‘Is it that you are all a bit more stupid than you were last week?’

‘If we cannot perform and I may not write the book,’ I said stubbornly, ‘then why don’t we go to Venice?’

‘Not Venice again,’ drawled Darcy disparagingly. ‘Always on about Venice, Manticory. You’re like a stray cat when it comes to that place. As if you once had a good dinner there.’

I suspected that she alluded to Alexander – I could never be sure that Darcy had not detected or sensed what was between us, as Ida had. Still I managed to bring off a great feat of pretended incomprehension, answering, ‘I don’t know about dinners. But we do have a home in Venice, all paid for, that will not need a lump of coal burned till October. Thanks to Mr Rainfleury’s sharp advice, no one knows about it, not even Mr Millwillis, it seems. The article hasn’t mentioned it. We might as well go hide in the Catacombs, it is so secret. And Signor Bon’s postcards are still selling so we have funds there too, waiting to be spent.’

‘We could remove ourselves very quietly there,’ said Oona thoughtfully. ‘And maybe Tristan would want to come too, to keep out of the limelight a while.’

‘Better still, let’s print handbills for a tour of Russia!’ said I. ‘And say that we are going there. And then travel secretly to Venice.’

Everyone looked to Darcy.

‘I suppose Manticory makes a point.’ She held up another smudged letter. ‘And it would remove us from the charlatan mariner who seems very much inspired by Mr Millwillis’s outpourings. Three more of these today.’

She tossed a bundle of letters in the fire, unopened. ‘I expect
he
wants to blackmail us too, the species of thing that he is.’

Ida, sucking on her hair, suddenly convulsed and rushed out of the room.

‘We must deal with Ida first. She’s not fit to travel,’ said Pertilly tenderly. ‘And the cold is drawing in, ever so fast now.’

‘There are doctors in Venice,’ answered Darcy. ‘Less costly than Dublin ones too.’

Millwillis published another article the next morning: this time he had Mr Rainfleury in his sights. It did not name Mr Rainfleury: but what other Dublin manufacturer had married into a large family and had made himself a fortune that could not quite be fully accounted for in doll receipts? The real source of ‘Mr R’s’ wealth, it emerged in the press, was not the dolls, who were but his pretty pastime.

No, the article revealed, ‘Mr R’ was deeply and profitably involved with the ill-esteemed hair trade – the obtaining, cutting, selling, bagging, transporting, refashioning and selling of real human hair, a commodity worth five times as much per ounce as real silver.

Until this day
, thundered Millwillis,
only the do-gooders and the anti-vivisectionists have gone deeply into where the coveted hairpieces are sourced. Now the free press shall have its say.

In sweatshops in Dublin, ‘Mr R’s’ workers toil with sacks of hair, each containing the glories of six hundred poor women who have sacrificed it out of hunger, sickness or for vice.

What a Bluebeard ‘Mr R’ was painted by the article! And what a purveyor of sordidness, employing small boys with fine-toothed rakes to hook clots and tangles of pauper hair from gutters and sewers.

To swell ‘Mr R’s’ coffers, rich women now wear poor women, incorporating them, swelling their natural attractions just as cannibals eat up the substance of weaker beings and fatten on them.

And this is not to mention the switches, plaits, curls and severed chignons ‘Mr R’ has – knowingly – provided to all the male hair fetishists of Europe; those men, who by a complex conjuring, project their sickening lusts onto dead hair, animate it with their desire and worship it.

Mr Rainfleury disappeared on an urgent trip to Ulster. But we acquired a new protector. A man signing himself
PS
threatened the hack with retribution for his slandering of those blameless Irish roses, the Swiney Godivas.
PS
’s letter, published in full beneath the next article, asserted in picturesque terms that Millwillis deserved a dark destiny for murdering seven reputations, and that
PS
himself was more than ready to serve justice personally.

Every drop of poison ink that he spills is one more danger in his path. He can watch out for himself!

‘I like the style of the fellow,’ said Darcy.

PS
. My thoughts were inevitably pulled to the grave with the crossed spoons in Harristown. Of course our father would have wanted to defend us, were he alive. And the same conundrum defeated my speculations: if it was not our father lying in that clover-scented grave, who lay there?

‘Did you notice,’ I asked Darcy, ‘that his initials are the same as Phelan Swiney’s?’

‘Did you notice,’ she replied, ‘that there are a thousand other names you can get out of those letters? If you wanted to waste your time that way.’

Millwillis deployed the letter for his own glory. The newsboys ran along our street shouting, ‘Anonymous death threat to journalist!’

‘How frightened is Millwillis by this
PS
? What do you think?’ Enda asked Tristan.

For once, the master of publicity was silent, and would not meet our eyes.

To no one’s surprise but Oona’s, Tristan regretfully declined our invitation to join us in Venice.

‘I shall just have to bear it here,’ he sighed. ‘Without you.’

By letter, Mr Rainfleury pronounced his presence indispensable in Ulster ‘during this crucial period’.

He said, ‘Mr Sardou has agreed to see to you.’

Alexander met us at the
é
lysée Palace in Paris – though he did not room there – and escorted us all the way back to Venice. Over coffee in the train’s dining car, he told me, ‘I am sorry to get you this way, but it is better than not at all. Is it a frightful thing to say? Is that what makes your lips set themselves so?’ He touched my mouth. ‘This smile of yours would be hard to paint.’

‘It’s not a smile. I am distressed that it has come to this, hunted across the Continent. And I am sad that you should find it amusing.’

‘You should be angry. You should be furious. I am only sorry that you make me the object of your scorn. We both know it should be Darcy. And perhaps you should look to yourself as well, for allowing her to sell you, to run you and your sisters like dogs at a race, and for keeping all the money to herself. It should be Darcy who sees this outraged dignity, who hears your anger.’

‘Money! You too! So if I had my money, could we be together? Is this what you mean?’

The air seemed to bristle around my tight eyes.

Alexander said, ‘Don’t waste your hate on me! Or is it that you can show anger to me because I am less frightening than Darcy? It is not
my
venality that is in question. Manticory, can you not see the clear path for yourself ? You must free yourself. Whether you come to me—’

Clear path
, I thought. Well, the contract Darcy had signed could not be unsigned. But was that really any obstruction in my path to Alexander’s love?

In fact
, I decided,
I shall be with him. He need not know about the contract. It is not relevant. There is no mention of love in that contract. Darcy sold the use of my body. My love is still mine to bestow as I wish
.

‘So,’ I said boldly, ‘come and tell me that again after midnight. In my sleeping car. Oona is taking care of Ida tonight.’

‘And you shall be alone?’

‘I hope not,’ I smiled, one corner of my mouth flittering.

Part Four

Venice

Chapter 37

It was as if the train did it.

It was the train, shuddering and screaming through the night, that jolted my naked body against his.

The anger that had driven me to the act still fuelled it until the moment I lifted my coverlet to welcome Alexander in and he lay down in my arms, having shed his clothes in the dark.

‘Did you lock the door?’ I whispered.

‘Yes,’ he told me. ‘We are safe.’

Then I was afraid. I could not see his face. He had no scent. His mouth on mine had no taste of its own. As he deftly unlaced my nightdress and pulled it over my head, his voice quietly reassured me that I was doing this strange and sticky thing with the person I also loved in letters and looks and by my side in libraries. His hands and mouth were gentle as a hot flannel; he kissed my forehead and told me I was adorable before he turned me over, raised my haunches and pushed my head down into the pillow.

When he roughly unseamed the fabric of my body, put himself inside the tear he’d made, and commenced to move there, I knew he was doing with me what the paying-for men wanted to do to every Swiney Godiva; it was as blunt as the lechery of the beasts in the Harristown fields. I felt as if I was bedded on hot wet earth, rolled in the curses of the world like a newborn snake. Alexander’s hands cupping my breasts were cold and brittle as scallop shells. While we grappled, my hair slipped from the confines of its braid and uncoiled around us, the tendrils weaving us together till we kneeled exhausted inside a cocoon of dark-washed red.

‘You are thinking too much,’ he whispered into the back of my neck. ‘Stop thinking, that is half the pleasure of the thing – it defies thinking.’

And he started again, too hard where I was too tender now.

I should not have been thinking. Alexander was right. It was lovely to feel Alexander’s body aligned with every inch of mine, to feel his skin, that was not pale and delicate in the dark. Without the light, it felt strong and full of the jungle’s breed of darkness.

But it was not quite lovely. For whole seconds at a time it was delicious, and then my thoughts fell out of their clouds. But the constant quickening too quickly died away. The sensations were ticklish to the point of being sickening; Alexander’s pitiless rhythm found no answer in them. So the pain of the impalement would not let itself be forgotten.

I wanted to see Alexander’s face instead of the pillow into which I was being pounded. And that longing spoiled even my bits and pieces of pleasure, rendering them wistful, though we were doing the very thing that was supposed to bind men and women the very closest they could be.

How could I stop thinking? I thought of Eve eating her portion of God in the apple, and my biting down the Body of Christ in the chapel of Harristown after I lost my faith. Alexander had broken faith with his wife to do this with me. And I – who had condemned Tristan and Rainfleury for their lubricious marketing of our bodies – I had just broken faith with the moral creature I’d been in judging them. These fragmented faiths drove my thoughts to Annora. I wondered if she’d known any pleasure in the couplings that created her daughters. Even the first coupling? Was it as awkward as this one? Had Annora learned to stop thinking of God while our father or fathers seeded her with daughters? I then commenced to worry that I might have inherited my mother’s fecundity.