My Brother's Keeper, page 10
“It doesn’t hurt,” said Branwell.
Emily was sure now that the woman had no connection at all with any publishing company.
“And a relic to be deposited at our church,” Emily said, with a wave toward the leather bag on the table.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Flensing. “Yes. A small thing. Your brother needn’t have mentioned it.” From the corner of her eye Emily saw Branwell flinch and open his mouth; but Mrs. Flensing went on, “As you say, it’s a relic, and my family would like it deposited in a church.”
“May I see it?”
“No, my dear. It’s . . . a sacred object, and we prefer—”
“It’s the skull of a monster,” said Emily.
“Emily!” wailed Branwell. “I never—”
Emily felt Keeper tense under her hand. Mrs. Flensing stared at her blankly for a few seconds, then laughed softly. “Your brother chooses to see what he fears. There are no monsters.”
As she spoke she reached into the pocket of her coat on the table, and pulled out a flat case. Branwell stiffened, but when the woman opened it Emily saw that it contained a row of narrow green cigars. Mrs. Flensing lifted one out, sniffed it, and then tucked it between her lips.
She pulled one of the lamps closer. “What you have to consider,” she said as she lifted the glass chimney and leaned forward to puff the cigar alight from the lamp flame, “is”—and the syllable was a twist of smoke—“extension of perspective, and vitality. Ah, what can the woman mean, eh?” The glass chimney clinked back into place and she leaned back. “Something frightening? Well, yes, if you choose to be frightened by wider horizons.”
She exhaled a plume of smoke, and the aroma was not that of burning tobacco. The smell reminded Emily of heather and clay and wet stone; sharp in her nostrils, even astringent, but as invigorating as a cold spring breeze at dawn.
Mrs. Flensing went on, “But your path is not the path of the herd, narrow and short. Through no fault or virtue of your own, yours is no beaten path at all, for it stretches to the horizon in all directions—yourself everywhere inviolate, untouched—your name kept safe, never pared down to letters chiseled on a stone to erode away to nonentity.”
The sharp smoke was making Emily dizzy, and the woman’s talk of horizons brought up visions of endless windswept moors under gray skies . . . hills and unexplored valleys and cold becks, the landscape marked for eternity with the old standing stones . . .
Mrs. Flensing was speaking again: “Why would a knife need two points? Wouldn’t one do?” She exhaled a curling cloud. “No. Not for us. A double-pricking to confuse location, each of us apart.”
Branwell clenched his right hand into a fist and then opened it again.
“Encroaching order,” said Mrs. Flensing, “encroaching time, are pushed back.” She lowered her hand and reached out to touch the leather bag on the table. “New freedom always strikes us as wrong, monstrous, at first. But what I propose is simply restoring a relic to its proper, honorable place.” Her smile was welcoming. “You are already set apart, you know. Give me your hand, and never need to take anyone’s hand again.”
The woman reached again into the pocket of the coat, and this time set on the table a small glass jar that seemed to contain clear oil.
Emily thought of the ways in which she was indeed already set apart. The idea of marriage and children had never held any attraction for her, and conviviality of the sort going on in the bigger room beyond the door at her back was unfathomable: dissipation, in every sense. The people of the village, and of the remote busy world, were ciphers—their motives, if any, only to be guessed at. Her strength and firm identity thrived in solitude.
Emily’s right hand crept forward almost involuntarily—but, below the table, her left hand on Keeper’s collar was pulled downward as the dog lowered his heavy head. Keeper’s jaws closed firmly on her ankle, not puncturing her stocking but pressing hard enough to hurt; and she felt the vibration of his inaudible growl.
And the dog’s insistent presence called to her mind the real moors over which the two of them ranged nearly every day; a land that was expansive and wild, but in fact bounded by towns and roads and the cycles of, for her and Keeper, finite numbers of seasons.
Emily and her dog lived and thrived in the uncompromising natural world, snow and wool and springtime and potatoes to be peeled; and what this woman offered was a rejection of that—no doubt to gain something else, but it would be something else. Emily flexed her legs and shifted her feet on the stone floor.
From the corner of her eye she saw Branwell squinting anxiously at her. For all his weakness and delusion, he was inextricably a member of her solitude; as were Anne and Charlotte and their father, and Tabby, and Keeper himself. What good did Branwell imagine this diabolical woman offered him?
Emily smiled and withdrew her hand, and reached across to slide it into her handbag. She pushed her chair back from the table, and when she stood up and shook the handbag off to fall on the floor, she was holding her father’s pistol.
Mrs. Flensing was on her feet too, facing Emily with her hands at her sides. Her face was rigidly set, and she whispered, “Prove it if you must.”
But Emily swung the barrel to the side, toward the leather bag on the table, and pulled the trigger. The gun’s pan cover flipped up and powder sizzled in the pan, and even as Mrs. Flensing shouted and vaulted across the table the gun flared and the air in the room shook to the confined bang of the gunshot. Sparks flew in all directions.
Mrs. Flensing howled, and through the churning smoke Emily was able to see the woman slide off this side of the table; she landed crouching, furiously knuckling at her eyes with her free hand, and Emily scrambled back as the woman lunged blindly at her with the knife—
And then the woman was flung backward by the impact of Keeper and, somehow, another big mastiff, and both dogs were snarling loudly and leaping at her.
The knife in the woman’s hand flashed toward Keeper’s shoulder; but neither mastiff fell back, and the woman was now bent over the table while the dogs tore at her arms and clothing.
The woman howled again, in pain as much as frustrated rage this time, and a moment later she had grabbed the holed leather bag and used it to batter her way past the two lunging dogs. Covering her head with one bloody hand, she wrenched open the sliding door and plunged through the group beyond that had obviously leaped to their feet in alarm at the gunshot and screams.
Keeper moved back beside Emily, who quickly picked up her fallen handbag and shoved the still-smoking gun into it. Blood drops were spattered across the floor, but when she glanced at Keeper she saw only a small cut on his shoulder where the woman’s knife had caught him, and it wasn’t perceptibly bleeding.
She collapsed back into her chair just as half a dozen men came crowding into the room, blinking in the gunpowder smoke. The second dog was nowhere to be seen; could it have run out through the crowd? Emily had not been able to get a clear look at it in the violent confusion, but it had been darker than Keeper, and not quite as massive.
“What the hell happened?” yelled one big man in an apron, who Emily took to be Mr. Sugden, the landlord.
“The woman who just ran out of here,” she said, “fired a gun at my brother. My dog spoiled her aim.” Keeper was standing beside her, watchful but no longer tense.
Branwell’s face was in his hands, his fingers clutching his curly red hair. “Oh,” he almost sobbed, “true, yes, that’s what she did. Oh God.”
“Damn me!” exclaimed Sugden. He looked over his shoulder toward the front door. “Is she gone? Some of you catch her, or fetch the magistrate or something.” He turned back to look around the still-smoky room. “Is Keeper hurt? There’s blood there!”
“No,” said Emily. “She cut her hand when the gun went off.”
“Recoil,” muttered one man.
“Can’t have been holding it properly,” agreed another.
The men in the doorway shuffled back toward the bar, talking loudly among themselves.
“She was in yesterday,” Sugden said. “You spoke with her, Branwell. Who is she?”
Branwell lifted his face. “A . . . Catholic agitator.”
Emily thought this lie was unfair to Mr. Curzon, who apparently really was a Catholic, but this was no time to muddy the story.
“My brother refused her enticements,” she said.
Branwell groaned.
Two men blundered up behind Sugden and breathlessly announced that the woman had run out to the street and disappeared.
“Did you look for her?” Sugden demanded.
“We looked up and down the street from the doorway,” one of the men said, adding defensively, “Who’s to say she hadn’t another gun?”
“I’ll fetch a mop,” muttered Sugden, turning away.
Emily stood up and stepped to the table. Her pistol ball had dug a splintery groove in the polished wood, and scraps of leather and bone fragments were scattered on the table and the floor.
Branwell stood up at last. His voice was squeaky with shock. “You ruined it,” he said. “Emily. My chance—our chance.”
Keeper lowered his head and dropped a couple of pale, two-inch long objects at Emily’s feet. She caught her breath—but glanced toward the doorway, then quickly crouched, picked them up, and tucked them into her handbag. She was glad Branwell hadn’t seen—it would do him no good to know that Keeper had bitten off two of Mrs. Flensing’s fingers.
She wiped her hand on her skirt and reached across the table to take Branwell’s arm. “Home,” she said gently.
Branwell stepped around the table and stood unsteadily beside her. “I . . . need a drink. God, several drinks.”
“There’s whisky in the kitchen.”
He nodded several times, and let her escort him through the main room, moving from a haze of gunsmoke into one of tobacco smoke. People shifted out of their way, and a couple of men called offers to buy drinks for the two of them, but Branwell seemed not to hear, and Emily shook her head. Keeper walked ahead of them, sniffing the tangle of smells in the air.
Branwell’s hands were shaking so badly that Emily had to help him into his coat before putting on her own.
She looked around at the street as they stepped outside, but there was no sign of Mrs. Flensing. The men who had looked out the door for her had not mentioned horses or a coach—was the woman crouched in some recessed doorway, out of the moonlight?—still holding the knife? Keeper was pacing vigilantly beside her, and she reached down to touch his head as she tried to hurry Branwell along the pavement.
Branwell took off his spectacles as they approached the churchyard. He was panting deeply and rapidly; clouds of his breath whisked away on the night wind.
“Where in Hell,” he said, “did that other dog come from?”
“I can’t imagine,” said Emily. “Could it have been under the table all along?”
Branwell sniffed and shook his head. “There was blood on the floor! My God! How badly did they maul her?”
Emily thought of the two severed fingers in her handbag, but shrugged. “She ran out fleetly enough, even with smoke in her eyes. She poked your palm with that knife, didn’t she?”
“What? Oh—yes, years ago, when I was in London. It’s done me no harm! Why did you have to ruin . . . it would have been . . .”
“What did I ruin?”
“Besides . . . everything?”
The razory wind was much colder now than it had been when they had left the parsonage less than an hour ago, too cold even to carry smells, and it found every gap between Emily’s coat buttons. She rubbed Keeper’s bristly back.
Branwell faltered to a stop, eyeing the churchyard ahead of them.
“Mrs. Flensing,” he went on through clenched teeth, clearly trying hard to speak coherently, “gets a bit mystical, it’s true. All that talk of . . . paths and horizons and being set apart is just a lot of cant about spiritual awakening that she got from reading Swedenborg. But she’s a member of a . . . an old aristocratic family, and their position, their influence was crippled yesterday when some kind of one-eyed Catholic killed their, er, patriarch.”
They resumed walking, past the church belltower that their father shot at every morning, and Emily glanced ahead at the lighted windows of the parsonage. “And that skull?” she asked.
Branwell spread his hands and bared his teeth at the dark sky. “They need assistance in restoring their position—and placing that relic in our church would have gone a long way toward accomplishing that.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Socially, you understand! Politically! And she probably could have got your damned stories published! But you had to—” He shoved his hands into his pockets and hunched along more quickly, so that Emily and Keeper had to hurry to keep up. “Oh, what’s the use of anything anymore.”
“Did she let you look at it? The skull?”
“No,” said Branwell curtly, and Emily knew he was lying. Reviewing his pathetically adapted account—socially, politically!—she was disappointed to realize that Branwell had in fact known that he was aiding devils, and had tried to get her to do the same; but she was impressed to hear it confirmed that Alcuin Curzon had killed one of the things.
She heard faint noises from the darkness beyond the low churchyard wall—twigs snapping, and a swishing as if someone were sweeping up last year’s dead leaves in the dark. Branwell blinked in that direction and looked away, but Keeper kept looking back toward the church. Emily breathed in and out strongly, for the bad air in the churchyard sometimes made breathing difficult.
At last they reached the foot of the steps up to the parsonage front door, and Emily put her hand on her brother’s shoulder. “It was the skull of a monster, you know,” she told him quietly.
“How do you know?” He sniffed and wiped his nose on his coat sleeve. “You didn’t even see it, you just blew it up.”
“I know what the rest of its body is. It’s under that ledger stone in the church, the one with the grooves cut in it.”
He stepped away from her, shivering. “Wha—how do you know about this? Can’t we go inside? I caught a devilish chill last night, and this wind—”
“What that woman offered was a place in Hell.”
Branwell wailed and swept his hand in a wide gesture that took in the parsonage and all of Haworth. “Better to serve in Hell than rot in Purgatory.”
A flicker of light behind him, beyond the churchyard, caught Emily’s eye. Now it was gone, but she was sure it had been in one of the church windows.
She caught Branwell’s arm. “There’s someone in the church.”
Branwell turned to look in that direction, and after a moment of blinking uselessly he fitted his spectacles back onto his face—and flinched.
“Somebody praying,” he said shortly. “Let’s get inside.”
“It’s her. She’ll hide what’s left of the skull there somewhere—and even a stray tooth might accomplish some part of her purpose.” She took his arm again. “Come on.”
“I won’t. There’s things among the graves.”
“Nothing that will come near my dog.”
She hurried back the way they had come, clutching Keeper’s collar to keep him from running ahead, and in fact the dog did seem to sense something in the churchyard to their right. Certainly the trees were creaking. But Emily hurried past it, tugging him along the walk that slanted away from the street toward the church. Branwell’s footsteps scuffed close behind her.
She strode up to the church’s side entrance; one of the pair of tall ironbound doors was ajar, and she leaned to peer in. The long nave was in complete darkness, and only in her memory was she aware of the rows of pews, and the altar and raised pulpit at the far end to her right. She let Keeper sniff around in the doorway before she stepped through.
The still air inside the church was slightly warmer, but over the usual smells of old wood and candlewax she caught a taint of mimosa; and she heard a thump that seemed to shake the stone floor. After a few seconds she heard it again. She shivered, and felt the muscles of Keeper’s massive neck flex under her hand.
Then there was light—up by the altar to her right, a point of yellow light resolved itself into the bullseye lens of a dark lantern with the shutter now retracted, and by its glow Emily saw Mrs. Flensing bending over what appeared to be a bloody severed head on the altar. The woman hadn’t shed her coat, but the sleeves were pulled back to the elbows.
Emily hurried along the side aisle toward the altar, and she thrust her hand into her handbag and fumbled past the pistol to clutch the two severed fingers she had picked up from the floor at the Black Bull. Keeper trotted ahead of her, weaving from side to side to prevent her from passing him.
Mrs. Flensing had set the lantern on the altar and had both hands, one now missing two fingers, on the red-streaked object that sat on the flat surface. Her disordered hair hung in strings over her face, which gleamed with sweat. Emily could now see that the object on the altar was the deformed skull of a big animal, with the rim of one eye socket missing and a gap at the temple. Clearly Mrs. Flensing had reassembled many of the pieces of the skull Emily had shot, apparently using her own blood as glue.
Emily couldn’t imagine what species the skull came from. The top of it was a high dome, and its canine teeth extended down past the jawbone.
She caught up with Keeper and again took hold of his collar. In her handbag, the two cold fingers in her hand twitched, and she nearly let go of them.
She heard a grating sound from the central aisle, and then the massive thump sounded again, echoing among the high crossbeams of the church ceiling; and Emily’s chest went cold when she realized that they were the sounds of the ledger stone lifting slightly and dropping back into place.
The woman looked up, blinking and squinting at the sound of Emily’s footsteps on the stone floor, and she quickly extended her left arm, pointing along the central aisle; and she turned her bloody palm up and raised her maimed hand. There was nothing on her palm, but she grimaced as if her hand were meeting strong resistance.
