Chapter 21
The temperature in the small, second-floor room on Skipper’s Lane was pleasant and comforting for the three women who were there tonight. Kate, Mary, and Sarah had their hay bags, which served as mattresses, arranged close to the fire, on the far side of the room from the window. It was a bitter night, and they were wrapped in sheets and blankets and had clothes on top of these to aid the warmth of their bodies. They were warmed inside by a vegetable stew Sarah had made earlier with the carcass of a chicken for stock and some of the weak tea Kate sometimes got from the brothel.
Though she had only taken these two women into her home to get help with paying for it, and she intended to have as little as possible to do with them, Kate found that she couldn’t help but like them. She was especially fond of Mary, who was making great progress with her injuries. She was going to be scarred for life, and sometimes Kate would cry for her when she caught sight of the marks on her body and thought about what she had gone through, but Mary was moving around much better than before and getting stronger by the day.
Mary helped at the stalls for small pieces of vegetables, which she brought home and shared with the others, and she was able to cover some of the potato selling once more. She wasn’t able to bring in as much as the other two, but Sarah made up for the shortfall, so it suited Kate fine.
Sarah was honest and hardworking. She worked at the stalls in the market, and she would go about the gangplanks of the ships with armfuls of produce to sell to the sailors who docked each day. They had also come to an arrangement with Kate whereby Sarah would talk about Kate in glowing terms and then would point her out to the sailors as she ‘happened by.’ This resulted in quite a few on-board trysts that might not have happened otherwise, and as a result, even with Mary’s diminished (but growing) earning potential, they were living as comfortably with three as most others lived with five or more.
The fire flickered and reflected in their eyes, and Kate wondered what was going on in the brothel tonight. It was bitterly cold out, and anyone who had to walk the streets this evening was to be pitied. Had it not been for five sailors on a Portuguese vessel at the docks today, Kate herself would be out in it. She had to work hard to convince herself that she should not be out anyway, bringing a little more in—even if she went out for just an hour—but she managed it, and now she was happy and warm and well wrapped up, and the dark world outside seemed a long way away.
“I bet you’re glad you’re indoors now?” Sarah said when a howling wind whistled through the frames and rattled the glass panes.
“I am.” Kate smiled at her. Mary snuggled up a little more in her bed.
“That was a lovely stew, Sarah,” Mary said.
“Certainly warmed my belly, anyway,” Sarah replied.
“Well, I think it’s time we warmed our throats.” Kate laughed and pulled a bottle of greenish liquid from under her coat and waved it for the others to see.
“What’s this?” Sarah said, taking it from her hands and peering into the glass bottle.
“Some kind of grog those sailors had today,” Kate replied.
Sarah handed it to Mary to look at, but she seemed reluctant to take it.
“It’s ok, Mary, it’s only a drink,” Kate said. “Just have a sip, and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to have any more.”
Mary opened the bottle, the stopper making a funny noise as it came free, and she smelled it and recoiled from it.
“Never smell anything you’re going to put in your mouth,” Sarah laughed.
“That’s my motto!” Kate said, and they all shrieked with laughter as though they were already drunk. Mary lifted the bottle and took a small sip with a look of disgust on her face, which all of a sudden brightened into a sunnier disposition.
“It actually tastes alright,” she said with a smile. She handed the bottle to Kate, who took a longer pull on it.
“I’ve never had that before, whatever it is, but it’s nice,” she agreed.
Sarah drank next. “That feels different to any drink I’ve ever had, too.”
They passed the bottle from one to the other, and soon they truly were all drunk. They spoke about their pasts and where they had lived before. During the early phase of intoxication, they avoided asking Mary anything that might involve her talking about her aunt or, worse still, of what had happened to her, but the conversation naturally drifted to darker things as the bravery of alcohol came over them, and they felt they were ready to hear and tell of everything.
“How did your aunt know Olocher?” Kate asked. Sarah looked at her reproachfully, but she didn’t say anything and Kate knew Sarah was as curious as she to find out.
Mary looked into the fire as though she were concentrating on it with great intensity; it felt to Kate that the young girl might be trying to use the dancing flames and red hot embers to distract her eyes from what her memory was trying to show her.
“I never knew that,” she replied. “One evening, he was just coming up the stairs, and my aunt had this look of fear on her face that I will never forget.” Kate and Sarah looked at one another. “She made me get into the cupboard and told me not to make a sound. She shut the door, but it didn’t close properly, and I could see out through a small gap.”
Kate handed the bottle to her, but still Mary didn’t look away from the fire. She just clasped the bottle and took the longest pull she’d had tonight before going on.
“He came in, and he was angry. He was saying something about her snitching on him, and my aunt was saying she had never said anything to anyone. He seemed to calm a little then, and he put his hands on the table with his back to her. This was when I got a full, clear glimpse of him head on. I was sure that he was able to see me, but he didn’t indicate that he did.” Again she paused, and the others could see her struggling to go on, but they waited it out, both so engaged in her story now that they had to hear it to its grisly end. “Then he spun and smashed her across the face and sent her flying. I know I made a noise then as it frightened me so much, but my aunt falling made enough of a noise to cover mine. He jumped on top of her then and started hitting her. She was not making any noise, but she was trying to defend herself with her hands and arms, and then he had blades in his hands, and now she was screaming, and he was slashing about on top of her like someone having a fit or something like that.” There were tears in Mary’s eyes now, but she looked mesmerised, and she seemed unable to stop talking. “I was frozen; I couldn’t do anything. Then he stopped, and I heard my aunt crying and him trying to get his breath back. She was trying to crawl away from him; I think her senses were probably gone by now, and he let her get a good distance from him. He stood there and didn’t make a sound for a while, and then he crept up and kneeled down on top of her and whispered something into her ear, and that’s when he cut her throat.”
“Could you hear what he said?” Kate asked.
Mary shook her head; Kate got the sense that she had heard but was never going to repeat it to anyone. At that moment, Kate understood how young this girl actually was; she was fifteen now, fourteen when that terrible thing had happened. She was still a child! And with this thought, Kate began to cry. Sarah was crying too; Kate hadn’t noticed when she had started, but she had been a friend of the woman so horribly slain that any point in the story would have been an apposite time for her to cry.
When they had stopped and were silent for a while, Sarah said to Mary, “Do you mind if I ask you something about what happened to you?” Mary shook her head, looking at her this time. Sarah looked at Kate as though she didn’t know quite how to ask. She looked for support from her, but Kate had no idea what she wanted to know and thus couldn’t help.
“Do you think it was him?” Sarah asked finally, and Kate looked intently at Mary to see what she would say.
“I don’t know if that’s how I felt at the time, but that’s how it feels now,” Mary said, and Kate noticed that the young girl was rubbing her arms and then her
back, where she had been savaged.
“They’ll catch him soon,” Kate said, putting her hand on the child’s shoulder. Sarah looked her in the eyes, as though she were trying to see if there was any truth in this.
“Any day now, love,” Sarah said.
The fire was down to dying embers now, and they had huddled their three beds in front of it, their heads feeling the heat and their feet towards the window. The bottle was empty, and they were dozing now. None was fully asleep; their bodies for whatever reason fighting the sleep they so needed, their chemical brains looking to keep on going.
When Sarah and Mary fell asleep, they seemed to sleep like the dead. Kate listened to the wind outside as it rattled about and sang through every orifice of the buildings nearby. The door rattled from time to time, as though someone were trying to get in; each time, it startled Kate into sitting up, and still neither of the other two would budge at all. Each time, she would lie back down and wonder why she was not falling asleep; she felt tired, but sleep would just not come.
As she lay there, for something to focus on she listened to the breathing of the two women. They were almost in unison, but Sarah took slightly shorter breaths than Mary. It was a soothing noise, and Kate tried to get her own breaths in rhythm with the others. She got close, but it turned out that she took much longer breaths than them both—while she was awake, anyway.
As she listened, she slowly became aware of another noise. It was like another low breathing noise, and she wondered if one of the neighbours were breathing heavily in the next room. She began to get nervous when it seemed to be getting louder. She looked around the room and told herself that it was the wind and that her mind was playing tricks on her.
There was a movement in Mary’s bed, and Kate turned to look at her. She was still lying in the same position as before. There was another movement, and Kate saw it beneath her blankets; she thought it was just Mary’s arm or leg, but it seemed too big to be part of this small slip of a girl. Kate sat back in fear, still trying to convince herself that she was being silly, that what she saw was a shadow trick.
When the growling started, Kate began to scream, and she jumped out of the bed and pinned her back to the wall. She had heard these same growls that night in the Nunnery, and they were unmistakable. She was so afraid that she wasn’t even trying to get to the door to escape; she was pushing back into the wall in the hope that it would somehow swallow her and take her somewhere safe.
The thing under the blankets grew larger and larger, and she could see the outline of something monstrous inside there. Mary and Sarah had not even stirred a little, and Kate screamed at them to get up, that the monster was in their room, but there was no response. She could see the blankets lifting from Mary now, as though this creature was wearing them as a cloak as it reared up, huge, in front of her. Mary’s exposed scars were swirling and changing shape; they seemed to grow teeth, and they smiled and snapped at her in malevolence. Still she screamed, and still no one came to her aid, nor did she rouse her housemates. The cloaked creature began to come before her, much more slowly than she would have imagined it would ever move.
Kate turned and pounded on the wall, calling out for help. No reply came, not even someone telling her to shut up, that people were trying to sleep. She turned to face the Dolocher again and saw that her way to the door was blocked now that she had thought to try to use it. She looked around frantically, half thinking of escape and half looking for a weapon to defend herself.
Finally, she saw what she had to do. She called out once more to try to rouse her fellow women, and then, just as the creature was upon her, she bounded in the small space to the window, pushed herself shoulder first through it, and plunged to the cobbled street below.