The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (54 page)

Those girls have never drawn a breath
, he wrote in the
Pall Mall Gazette
,
but that they’ve used it to poison someone
.

Ida and Darcy had been home only two days when I caught my youngest sister waving out of the back window.

‘There’s Cousin Matthew!’ she told me. ‘Come all the way to see us. Shall we wet a pot of tea for him?’

Chapter 49

‘I’d like to see him at the bottom of a lime pit,’ growled Darcy. ‘I’d pour the lime myself.’

Berenice envisioned his skeleton prodding the mud at the bottom of the Grand Canal. Pertilly wanted him staked on a bonfire. Oona opined that Millwillis should be struck down by a highwayman. I kept my imagination away from him. My imagination had already done too much damage.

‘You’re very quiet, Manticory,’ hissed Darcy. ‘Got a scruple, have you? For a change?’

‘She is sad,’ said Ida. ‘Not in a killing mood, but a dying one.’

When I embraced her at the station, Ida had given me a long look. She’d whispered, ‘I heard about Alexander.’ And she had offered the only consolation that seemed to stick for a moment because of the hideous sense it made: ‘You have been took bad by bad love and you’ll be a dirty long time dying of it. He was more lucky than you.
Minutes
, he had of pain, and then a clean ending. But Manticory, you should be happy. You have been dancing with a broom like the last spinster left at the ball, like the last spinster left on earth. Alexander, he was a broom; he had no more life than that, even when he was alive.’

‘The hack’s still here.’ Darcy was at the back window taking another look at Millwillis. ‘I hope your knives are good and sharp, Ida.’

‘Don’t be talking of knives, Darcy honey,’ pleaded Oona. ‘Or thinking of them.’

The journalist passed unhurried hours in the
calle
outside our house waiting. His self-possession was admirable, especially in the heat. Besieged, when necessary we used a different exit, through a neighbouring deserted garden, past the lime pit that housed the bodies of the neighbourhood’s dead animals. It was necessary at least to get to the post office for our correspondence with Tristan.

In defiance of Millwillis’s articles, or perhaps inspired by our new notoriety, Tristan was engaged in ‘one final bid to save your fortunes, ladies’. Given that Growant had entirely killed the market for Swiney Godiva Scalp Food and Hair Essence, he wanted to market a Swiney Godiva depilatory cream: something to remove those hairs where hairs should not be. He’d not so much asked our approval as informed us that the Swiney Godiva name was now doing the opposite of its normal work.

AWAY! FROM ARABIA
, Tristan called it.
The Latest Swiney Miracle
.

And it was advertised as containing sandalwood, cloves, musk, red Cyprus and roses. When he threatened to use an image of the Baboon Lady, Julia Pastrana, to advertise it, we agreed to let him Swiney
AWAY!
instead. Saverio was invited to the
palazzo
to take some photographs of Oona and Berenice to illustrate Tristan’s caption:
Will you run the risk of alienating the affection of a husband by not attending to the few unsightly hairs that have sprouted above those lips he once loved to kiss?

Saverio Bon pursed his lips, asking me, ‘Is this really necessary?’

But neither Tristan’s sudden slight rekindling of interest nor his enclosures of handbills could distract us from the unwelcome visitor who haunted our gates.

‘That wants solving,’ muttered Darcy, staring out of the window in a speculative way. Then she suddenly hunched her shoulders and cried, ‘No!’

‘What is it?’ I asked, for her face was contorted with fury.

But all my response was the winnowing noise of her skirts as she rushed to the kitchen. Following her, I saw her grasp Ida’s carving knife, which she tucked into her pocket alongside the hammer she used for nailing up the letters from Tristan and Mr Rainfleury.

‘Go,’ she hissed. ‘Look outside, and you’ll want to be fitted up with weapons too.’

Hastening to the hall window, I saw what Darcy had seen.

Mr Millwillis had a companion walking arm in arm with him, back and forth in front of our home. And that companion was the Eileen O’Reilly, every inch of her, no longer runtlike but quite the shiniest and most prosperous little piglet of a girl you ever saw. She would never make a fat corpse, and yet above her slender waist she had grown a prosperous pair of breasts, which displayed themselves at a jaunty angle inside a plaid waistcoat. Millwillis and the Eileen O’Reilly paused together in front of our garden gate, a few yards away from me.

And the most amazing thing of all was to hear the very Eileen O’Reilly herself chattering loudly in Italian to a passer-by. Hers was much more fluent than my own. Of course it was! She was a lady of business now. Her uncle must have invested in her acquiring the tongue so that she could deal with the Italians from whom he bought his delicacies.

We already knew that Millwillis had encountered the Eileen O’Reilly on one of his sleuthing visits to Harristown, where she still spent her Sundays, as Mrs Godlin regularly reported. Of course, the butcher’s runt would have thrust herself forward, being only too happy to share her many colourful old stories about Darcy. She’d probably embroidered on them. And now he’d rewarded her long tongue with a trip to Venice!

No doubt she was the one who’d translated Lombroso on hair as a diagnostic of feminine depravity, feeding him information that served to fatten his mock-scientific theories. The Swineys, he had just written,
show just that absence of self-control and civilisation that we regret in the savage beasts
. Yes, he could see it that way and he would keep writing it that way, and there would be nothing we could do to stop it being printed in a book, a thousand times over. A book raised the stakes. A book was like a tombstone, for ever. Millwillis would be washing our hair in public for years to come; the filth of his insinuations would be indelible. People might dismiss newspapers as entertainment but everyone believed what was in a book.

Darcy put her hand on mine. The veins on it were raised and livid. She said, ‘There
is
something we can do about it. Call everyone to the dining room.’

Darcy treated us to an hour of the inside of her mind, as dark a place as you might imagine. There was a fairy-tale quality to the way she spoke of murder. It had a lulling effect on the rest of us. My sisters listened to her as they had so many times before, believing the worst of her violence to inhabit her tongue and just occasionally, these days, her hard hands. Only I thought again of
PS
buried in the clover field at Harristown. Had Darcy killed a man, in real life, not just in threats? I believed she had. Even as a very young girl, she had somehow contrived it. And then there was Enda, who had tried to use her influence with Mr Rainfleury against Darcy, and had not survived it.

The lime pit was in the end dismissed by Darcy as impractical. How would we push Millwillis down it?

‘We?’ said Oona. ‘Darcy honey—’

‘It’s too shallow. Would he be buried
enough
down there?’ Darcy asked herself. She specifically wanted him wrapped in a winding sheet, coffined, lead-encased, with earth packed down around him. An open grave, even if a relatively deep one, would not be sufficient. And the other problem was, as ever, the Eileen O’Reilly.

‘Even if we manage to separate them, and to dispatch him,’ Darcy insisted, ‘the butcher’s runt will never leave off looking for her fancy man. She’ll be battering at our door in a hog’s grunt.’

‘Oh no!’ said Oona. ‘That just shows—’

‘She would follow us to Hell but she’ll have something out of us,’ muttered Darcy. ‘The corpse must not be found in our proximity.’

‘Better if not even in Venice, really,’ observed Berenice. ‘You’re still quiet, Manticory.’

‘Wait,’ said Darcy. ‘I’ve thought of that too.’ Her eyes were glittering with that dark light that they emitted only when she was in possession of an idea.

‘Do you remember your stupid ballad, Manticory?’ she asked.

‘Which stupid ballad?’ I asked bitterly. ‘They were all condemned by you at one time or another, even the songs in
The Cruel Sister
.’

‘The one about the evil hack suffocated by the bales of Venetian laundry dropped on top of him,’ she said. ‘In a boat. After being hit on the head and pushed in.’

‘Leave it be, Darcy,’ I said.

I had not remembered it until this moment, but now I did, in every detail. How could Darcy have kept it in her mind all this time?

‘A crueller death than slow suffocation is hard to imagine,’ Darcy said happily. ‘Your Mr Sardou preferred a quicker end. And
this
death will come with a mighty headache on top, and no laudanum or brandy or a gun to speed and ease the end! The beauty of it is that we don’t even have to kill him,’ gloated Darcy.

‘Fetch it from your desk,’ she ordered me. ‘That ballad of the laundry, I know you keep all your little productions. No, I don’t trust you not to tear it up. I’ll get it.’

She returned a moment later with the paper folder I had marked
Unperformed Drafts
. How easily she’d located it! How often had she spied on my writing?

Reading it aloud, she stopped frequently to embroider my ballad. Instead of ‘the hack’, she substituted Millwillis’s name, lending a dreadful reality to the fiction I’d composed that long-ago evening in Venice when I had thought existence was properly perfect, our first night in this
palazzo
.

Darcy’s commentary ran on and on, substituting reality for fantasy. She was anxious to ensure that Millwillis was briefly stunned long enough to be covered with bales between the men’s departing with the clean sheets and arriving with the dirty ones. ‘We can let the bales’ weight do the rest.’

Oona said, ‘Well, Darcy, I am sure it was a great relief to you to picture all that murdering in detail, but what are we really going to do about that dreadful man so?’

‘It will be a great relief,’ repeated Darcy. ‘A very great relief.’

It was an August dawn already pulsing quietly with heat and the heat’s whining handmaidens, the mosquitoes, the morning that the deed was to be done. I sat on our slender terrace, with my hands around a cup of coffee I had made for myself. This was a skill I’d had a care to hide from Darcy lest she delegate me to serve it to her hourly and somehow produce the funds for the precious beans too. Below me men were already in their boats bringing
‘il latte, il burro e il formaggio’
to the shopkeepers of Venice. I loved those proper namings – not just any milk, butter and cheese but
the
milk,
the
butter and
the
cheese. None other would do.

Shirtless men rubbed their torsos with rags to blot the sweat. As the sky lightened, a suggestion of a breeze teased the hairs on my arms, but soon disappeared. Even the water did not pretend to be cool. Its feverish surface borrowed hot terracottas and molten ochres from the
palazzi
hovering above.

Our assignation was for six. Darcy had dictated the letter I had written to Millwillis at his hotel to say that I was ready to talk, but that this meeting must be out of doors and secret:
My sisters are against this. So I must do this discreetly. I know everything, and anyway – better one visible, speaking, cooperative sister than seven invisible, silent ones
.

He had agreed. I had not counted on that. I had been sure that Darcy’s mad plan would stop there, with the newsman too canny to fall for the bait.

After all, he knew what we Swineys were like. Or at least he’d written the words that defined us: savage, primitive, violent, backward.

You must come alone, but bring the manuscript
, I had written.
So I can help you with the material points
.

He had agreed, so sure was he of himself. None of the Eileen O’Reilly with him, he assured me in his note.
Of course I’ll bring the manuscript, and an open mind
.

Not a steel-tipped knife or loaded gun, or a lifebelt, or a stout pole: just the manuscript and an open mind.

I could not believe it. I did not want to do so. I told myself he’d bring a guard with him.

One by one, Darcy, Oona, Pertilly and Berenice joined me silently on the terrace. The others were still in their wrappers, but Darcy was dressed and ready.

She raised an eyebrow at the empty cup of coffee.

Perhaps
, I thought,
there will come a day when I’ll feel strong enough to say no to her, to her face, instead of subverting her will only in secret, only in subplots, only for my own satisfaction and not for the good of the world
.

It was our old routine – and it had never yet failed to stun.

I tried to tell myself that Millwillis was scarcely human. I had stood inches from him in Dublin; I had breathed the corruption of his breath, seen the misery he spread, not just to us but to the living and the dead, to living women in Paris to St Petersburg, to the corpse of poor Julia Pastrana.