‘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 sa
id 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.
Sometimes I was righteous. I tried to tell myself that I was just not entertained by this pantomime scripted to say that I was dead to him, when it was Alexander who was acting dead, impersonating a man without a heartbeat. He had always been a man without a scent of his own.
But I also told myself that he had been his best true self when he loved me, as I had been. And I believed, or tried to, that he would become bored with pretending not to love me.
And so I kept myself impaled on a fiery pitchfork of hopeless hope, my heart squirming without relief.
Chapter 42
Darcy exchanged her frizzled fringe hairpiece for a more voluminous one. More packages than usual arrived for her from Dublin, but I assumed them part of her continuing retail campaign.
But as the sun rose on the morning of the Assumption festival she had Pertilly rouse me and escort me to her room. It was clear from her pale face that she’d passed a sleepless night, a thing she’d always claimed previously to be the province of hysterics and drunkards and those troubled by a guilty conscience.
‘Manticory,’ she asked, ‘so is there something in your precious books that can explain this?’
She lifted her hairpiece. I took an unwilling step closer. At the top of her head, Darcy had grown two horns. They were not much more than half a finger long, a greyish yellow in colour. They curved to a tapering end, one in each direction, like a small antelope’s. Above her black eyes and sallow face, their symmetry had a diabolic perfection to it.
The Eileen O’Reilly’s voice came into my head after one of her beatings. You doan frecken me, Darcy Swiney, great divil that you are. One on them horned witches of Slievenamon.
‘An extreme case of chignon fungus?’ I whispered, racking my memory for conditions we claimed cured by Swiney Godiva Scalp Food in our extravagant advertising. ‘Plica polonica?’
‘No, you fool,’ she blustered. ‘There is no such thing. Tristan made that up, to frighten women into buying the essence. No. I am horned. They just grew. I didn’t put much consequence on it at first, but—’
When I recovered myself sufficiently, I asked, ‘May I touch?’
The horns were hard, solid, dry and somewhat brittle. The surface was rough, like an old toenail.
I asked, ‘Do they hurt?’
‘Only whenever I try to knock them off,’ she said wryly. ‘And believe me, I’ve not woken in the morning these last months but that I’ve used brutality against them before night.’ She pointed to a battery of bottles, knives and clippers on her dressing table. ‘So has O’Mealy, by long distance. He’s the only other person who knows, apart from Pertilly. He’s sent me everything from Dublin.’
Pertilly had tried to soften the horns with a tincture of hydrochloric acid but they simply grew harder.
‘So,’ demanded Darcy, ‘what are we going to do about it? As the so-called intellectual in the family, I’m assuming you’ll have a brilliant idea.’
I spent the next few days in the medical sections of bookshops and libraries trying to discover sources and cures. My Italian had improved to the extent that I understood very well from the texts that Darcy’s condition was a rarity and considered untreatable. But the tomes I found were aged and dusty. Darcy refused to consult a more modern, living resource – a doctor.
But one night she bent to inspect something floating in her consommé and her wig fell off in front of all of us. After the screaming was over, I insisted that she get a doctor in. This time I was reinforced by Oona, Pertilly and Berenice.
‘Not from Venice, mind! No talk. No talk.’
The first doctor, from Treviso, turned pale and suggested that we call in a priest. A young man arrived in a cassock. His skin was moist and his beard as black as Darcy’s hair. When he offered an exorcism, Darcy dismissed him in a most ungentle way.Then the Gazzetta delivered a useful snippet. I translated for Darcy. ‘There’s a dermatological doctor from Austria presently in Venice. He works with the lunatics on San Servolo, on their skin maladies.’
‘Well send for him, then.’
Doctor Morgolos was a dour old man, but his eyes lit up with a youthful flame when he saw Darcy’s bare forehead.
‘Quite the best specimen ever seen!’ he declared with enthusiasm and in flawless English. ‘May I touch?’
Darcy nodded. He ran his fingers along Darcy’s horns, with an expression that reminded me of Mr Rainfleury’s stare whenever his hands were amid Enda’s hair.
‘The best specimen of what?’ I asked.
‘Cornu cutaneum!’ he pronounced triumphantly. ‘A cutaneous horn! A pathology of aberrant female sensuality.’
‘Aberrant!’ shrilled Darcy. ‘There’s nothing aberrant about me. Or sensual! I am a respectable spinster. Away with your aberrant, man! I want hard fact, and plenty of it for your fee.’
He said, ‘Technically, such a horn is a circumscribed hypertrophy of the epidermis, projecting an outgrowth of horny consistence. Closely agglutinated epidermic cells form small columns or rods. In the base, we find hypertrophic papillae and some blood vessels. They have their starting-point in the rete mucosum, either from that lying above the papillae or that lining the follicles and glands.’
‘For the love of Jesus and Mary’ – Darcy resorted to Annora’s language – ‘close his evil mouth.’
But Doctor Morgolos was not to be silenced. ‘The lady is quite young – forty, is it?’
‘Thirty!’ screamed Darcy.
‘Er – for such a pronounced growth. Horns are usually met with very late in life, and are mostly seated upon the face and scalp. Also, the pudenda. Do you . . . ?’
‘Absolutely not, what a hideous and impertinent idea!’ shouted Darcy. So we knew she had horns in the folds of her groin too. I flinched for her, remembering how awkwardly she had been sitting recently.
‘Why does this happen?’ I asked. ‘I think how is too much for my sister.’
The doctor spoke cautiously. ‘We do not yet know. Though some speak of the contamination lurking in foreign hairpieces, I see this growth is entirely indigenous.’
‘Will they get bigger?’ asked Berenice.
‘I imagine these have taken quite a while to achieve this impressive size. Their growth is usually slow. But when they have finished growing, they will stop. They might even become loose and fall off.’
‘Oh please!’ breathed Pertilly.
‘But in that case they almost inevitably grow back.’
Darcy slumped against her dressing table. ‘Why?’ she asked heavily. ‘Simple words only.’
Simple words only? I thought. Ida would need to be here to say them. She would say, ‘You have grown horns because you are a devil.’ I would say, ‘You have grown horns because of the lies you told Alexander that have turned him away from me, because of what you did to Enda, for the harm you did everywhere and for whoever is buried under the crossed spoons in Harristown.’
The doctor bowed. ‘The cause is not known in the case of the head horns. Those that appear
about the lower parts of the body usually develop from acuminate warts. As I mentioned, there are some who speak of excessive but unrequited libido manifesting in this way.’ He added hastily, ‘Obviously, not in this case. I presume you have tried to detach the base? Or break them off ?’
Darcy’s lowered head confirmed such an attempt and such a failure.
‘An irresponsible physician would prescribe any of the well-known caustics, such as potash, chloride of zinc or even the galvano cautery. For your dear sister I would not advise such painful and unproven treatments. I literally beg you not to undertake them.’
Pertilly, laboriously writing it all down, crossed out the words.
‘Another method is to amputate the base from the root, as it were. This necessitates,’ he coughed, ‘however, considerable loss of tissue. And blood. Obviously, I would not recommend it here.’
‘So you are entirely useless to me,’ Darcy mourned.
When Doctor Morgolos had gone, Darcy remounted her latest frizzled fringe and her ferocity. ‘Stop staring at me like a calf in a field,’ she snapped at me. ‘Get out of my room.’
The trauma of her horns manifested perversely in her, as was to be expected. Darcy decided to rely on drama to distract the beholder. She began to trick herself out in the girlish ringlets of a bygone age – both hers and the decades’ past. She rouged her cheeks to appley roundness. For me, there was something intensely sad about this masquerade of juvenile femininity, for if Darcy must mask, then there was something underneath of a different essence – of uncertain gender, of decrepitude, of death. Her looks became theatrical, increasingly borrowed from the rouge pot and the charcoal stick. This, I should have warned her, only drew closer looks and closer looks might reveal what was wrong under the wig.
I guessed that Darcy needed to masquerade because she was driven to even greater fury by her inability to control what grew out of her body. Whatever had been hard in Darcy hardened now.