The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (46 page)

A gentleman collector of female pain, that’s what he is
, I thought.
Alexander would
– but I stopped myself. I no longer knew what Alexander would think.

Blank with shock, Berenice swayed in front of Mr Rainfleury for a moment before Pertilly hurried her away. Pertilly and I sat with Berenice in her room for an hour, in which she did not move and the imprint of Mr Rainfleury’s hand slowly faded from her face.

The undertakers had arrived by then. Messrs Gerty and Rorke of Baggot Street were making Enda’s as decent as a scorched body can be. A few hours later she was lying in a coffin on the dining table, her burned face covered with a lacy napkin and the remains of her hair fanned out around her. We sat vigil around her, in silence.

Much of Enda’s hair had burned, but much remained – more than an ordinary woman would ever have. We were watching Pertilly perfecting the curls – one half was neatly ringleted, and the other still wild.

Mr Rainfleury burst into the room, sank to his knees and drew the ringlets over his own bare head. His incorrigible ears poked out through the rich brown hair, clammy and trembling.

‘Dead!’ he keened. ‘Dead at twenty-eight. And me a widower at my age!’

He looks like a hog in a wig
, I thought.

‘Have a care!’ Darcy ordered him. ‘Do not rake at the hair. It comes off so easily now.’

Mr Rainfleury vowed thickly, ‘I will make it live for ever.’

In sobs, he explained that he had already summoned Professor Sukolov of Moscow University, who had mummified the famous Mexican Baboon Lady, Julia Pastrana, along with her furry newborn baby, using a secret technique of injections over six months.

He enthused, ‘Julia Pastrana still looks so alive you think she’s about to break into one of her Highland Flings, and they say the embalming will keep her that way for ever. I’ve seen her myself at one of the travelling shows . . . “The Embalmed Female Nondescript”, they call her.’

‘A dead woman performs in a circus?’ I asked.

‘Her keeper, I mean her widower, rents her body out to portable museums and the like,’ explained Mr Rainfleury. ‘Professor Sukolov is halfway to Dublin. Unfortunately our old friend Millwillis is hotfoot behind him, for the news of my darling’s death has somehow got out.’

‘Is it witless you are?’ said Darcy. ‘Gerty and Rorke will do a perfectly adequate job of embalming her. We don’t need Enda to last for ever. It took six months to do Julia Pastrana? We have not got such time at our disposal, not with Millwillis on our trail.’

‘And nor,’ I said bitterly, ‘would we let you display Enda as another “Embalmed Female Nondescript”. You have
finished
making money out of Enda and making a sad spectacle of her as a betrayed wife.’

For once, Darcy looked at me with something like respect. She jabbed at Mr Rainfleury’s ear with her finger. ‘Put him off at once, that Russian ghoul.’

Professor Sukolov was ordered home to his Anatomical Institute before he even arrived in Paris. Darcy urged Gerty and Rorke to make the funeral hasty and private so the depleted Swineys could scurry back to Venice.

But it appeared that our brother-in-law had no intention of promptly relinquishing the wife he had so thoroughly betrayed. Even when the undertaker’s men departed, even when the smell of chemicals subsided to a dull ache in the nostril, Mr Rainfleury kept Enda’s body by his side, now in a glass case designed to fit inside the oak coffin with its gilt mountings and carved shield. The glass case sat on a table beside the matrimonial bed. Meanwhile, the coffin itself stood upright like an Egyptian mummy down in the hall of Number 2 Pembroke Street.

It seemed that Mr Rainfleury found Enda’s embalmed body a useful way of repelling Berenice, who would not enter the bedroom that contained it, though she continued to solicit uselessly for Mr Rainfleury’s tender attention every time he appeared.

Oona was no more effective in squeezing affection out of Tristan. She confessed to me that she hoped that the pathos of her loss might arouse his compassion.

‘He might write a poem for poor Enda,’ she said. ‘He might mention her loving sisters. He might show his great heart and comfort me with it.’

‘Do not hurt yourself with wishing for that,’ I told her.

Mr Millwillis, we were relieved to read, had been detained in Paris by new developments in the story of child slavery unfolding every day more luridly.

Darcy would not be frustrated in access to Enda’s hair. Eventually she went to Mr Rainfleury’s room while he was bathing, and secretly extracted some strands of it from the glass case.

Ida was released from her asylum and appeared with a nurse escort for the funeral. She was more composed than I had ever seen her. Her hair had already regrown to reach her shoulders and was twice as thick as it had been before.

‘They gave up trying to cut it,’ she explained. ‘It
would
have its way.’

Our mourning outfits were ready. The next morning we pulled on the black-bordered drawers and the heavy crape mantles. An angry wind raged around the cemetery, fraying the discreet veil of rain, tugging at the black-dipped feathers in our hats. Darcy’s was as horrible a creation as I had seen in any of my nightmares.

Mrs Hartigan and Enda’s sisters were her only mourners. I did not count Mr Rainfleury and Tristan, who looked over the tops of our heads while struggling to keep their hats on.

Tristan chose to walk as far from Oona as he could while still being of our doleful party stumbling through the grass to the place where the men were digging. He did not look at her, and he did not rush to help her up when a ferocious gust unbalanced her. It was my own arm she caught. I kept hers tucked under mine after that.

At the grave, Darcy was dry-eyed, angry as the wind, lost in her recalculations, I guessed. Berenice stood with Ida, her face contorted. Ida herself was composed, crying only a decent amount in the shelter of Mrs Hartigan’s arm. I stood between Oona and Tristan, trying to shield her from the absence of his gaze, trying not to picture Enda sisterless in her coffin, going alone into that dark hole in the ground.

I thought of the crossed spoons over the wild grave in Harristown. Someone lay alone beneath them too.

From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a man hiding behind a tree. At first I feared it was Millwillis, come to gloat at our pain. I reminded myself that he could not yet have reached Dublin. Had he sent a minion to cover the story? A second glimpse of the man, peering around the tree, showed he was no journalist. He was elegantly dressed, with a long beard and luxuriant curls and sideburns. I could see dark shadows at his wrists and a fullness under his immaculate shirt front that argued for a thick pelting on his chest. Such a man was no Brother of the Hair: he had enough of his own not to covet any woman’s. Anyway, the man who had assaulted Pertilly was in prison. It was Darcy’s conviction, alone, that he was also the author of the letters to us.

The man appeared to be weeping. I saw his shoulders shake. For all that, he was a brave figure of a man in late middle age, with a grace to his bearing. My years of enforced sentimental banality, of the most vulgar operetta scripting, reduced me to a romantic theory.

Enda!
I thought.
Did you keep a secret mature lover in revenge? If you did, you chose well, for that hair on his head and face utterly trounces Mr Rainfleury. My compliments!

Suddenly my loss engulfed me, and I knew in a dizzy sweep of grief what I had lost in Enda, the queen of my tribe. And I allowed myself to be squeezed by dirty coils of guilt: if I had not intensified Berenice’s hatred by my scripts, would Enda be dead? She had intervened on my behalf with Mr Rainfleury about the contract, raising Darcy’s ire against her. She had sacrificed herself to Mr Rainfleury, and even at Berenice’s worst betrayals she had protected all of us from the pain by refusing to share it. Then I remembered the lost babies. I forgot about the hirsute man behind the tree.

By the time the service was over, and Enda was below the ground, he was nowhere to be seen. One final gust of wind lifted Darcy’s hat into the air like a slow crow and flew it away above the treetops. Darcy lost her composure then, keening like an animal and clutching her frizzled fringe.

I had not known she had such pain in her.

Darcy wanted the hair she had stolen from Enda’s coffin twisted into bracelets and braided into necklaces. Ida was set to making flowers and silhouettes and even small picture frames with Enda’s likeness inside.

What Mr Rainfleury had done with the bulk of Enda’s curls remained a mystery until Mrs Hartigan bustled in with his tea tray the morning after the funeral. She swooned at the fumes of opium and the sight of our brother-in-law deeply asleep inside a wig made from Enda’s hair, topped by his usual jellybag tasselled night cap.

‘From behind,’ Mrs Hartigan gasped to me and Darcy, ‘it looked as if Miss Enda was lying in the bed, still breathing, snoring, even. Then she turned and I saw Mr Rainfleury’s ears sticking out of the hair. As you know, the ears on him are considerable, and they do
poke
. Oh ma’am, it was a horrible thing to see. It was as if he had eaten Miss Enda and was living in her skin, not just her hair.’

‘I’ll see to him,’ muttered Darcy, and she was next door in a moment doing so. We could hear the roaring through the walls. She did not succeed, however, in wresting more than a few strands of Enda’s hair from Mr Rainfleury.

Mr Rainfleury refused to accept the finality of Enda’s death.

‘Every night,’ he declared, with his hand over his heart, ‘love prises open the lid of my poppet’s coffin, and I love her still and again.’

Darcy wrinkled her nose. ‘You only ever loved Enda’s hair; it was only public decency that made you marry the whole woman of her. And then you betrayed her day in and day out and every stolen afternoon you could.’

Yet Mr Rainfleury chivvied and whined until we agreed to attend a spiritualist meeting. We were ushered into a darkened room in a tumbledown house in Rathgar. Mr Rainfleury reverently laid a tress of Enda’s hair on the table. A white hand reached out of the shadows and made a circle of the hair.

My eyes stung to see it there, soft and pliable as it had been when it still grew from Enda’s head.

‘This hair,’ announced our guide into the spirit world, a cadaverous creature unconvincingly got up as a priest, ‘was once a dead front on the living. Presently it shall reanimate the dead. This hair lives between two worlds, the living and the dead. Let it join us to our sister.’

‘It is hair. It is not magic,’ snapped Darcy, rising abruptly from the table and then groaning with some apparent pain in her hindquarters. I’d noticed she was very sensitive there lately.

‘Be done with this witch-doctoring!’ Berenice pleaded with Mr Rainfleury. ‘Use your rationality. Enda has not taken up abode in this hair. She’s gone for ever!’

Mr Rainfleury put a lace handkerchief to his eyes. ‘There is an evil spirit abroad in this room,’ he whispered. ‘It frightens my poppet away.’

We left him there, with his money on the table. He barely noticed when we returned to Venice, two days before Millwillis was back in Dublin, on our trail.

Darcy arrived at Santa Lucia Station a few days later than the rest of us. She had insisted on escorting Ida to the asylum without our assistance.

Oona and I tried to raise the matter of Ida’s illness that seemed not to exist at all any longer.

‘Why do you need to take her back there, to that place?’ I asked. ‘The mind on her is ticking peacefully as a clock now.’

‘I’ve paid the year in advance, for a favourable rate,’ said Darcy. ‘Food included, which it would not be in Venice.’

‘Darcy honey,’ said Oona. ‘We have money for all the food in the world. Ida’s not a greedy girl. Let her come with us.’

Darcy was not listening. She had a tattered air of worry about her and a slight tremble in her hands, which flew to her head very often to touch her frizzled fringe. She wore one of her monstrous black hats whenever possible, even in the house.

I hugged Ida farewell, whispering, ‘We’ll get you back to Venice.’

She said, ‘I would like that greatly. How is Signor—?’

‘Alexander does not visit us any longer,’ I said quickly.

‘No, I meant Signor Bon,’ she said.

In all the time in Dublin I’d not heard from Alexander, who had failed to meet us at the station, failed to arrive in my bedroom via the secret steps, failed to send even the shortest note of condolence.

In his mind, it seemed, I had been neatly amputated by Darcy’s slander and the news that my fortune might not be extracted. Without the appendage of me, he fitted into the life he’d been secretly leading and now planned to live in public, as the husband of Elisabetta and the father of their child.

But it was not like that for me, and returning to Venice brought back all the pain, renewed, violent, inconvenient. Despite our continual separations over the past four years, I had become used to sharing my thoughts with Alexander. It took effort and pain to cut a path for my lone brain. It felt as if I was dipping in my own flesh with a scalpel, trying to extract every second artery, the ones that flowed only for him. The hurt was so evil that I grew exhausted and silent with it.