Toad Words (5 page)

She sighed. It was important to him, apparently, and she was determined to be a good wife, since it had already become obvious that there would be no children between them. “If you insist. But I will not have them here, you understand? I will go to the townhouse and receive them there.”
 

There had been an enormous party at the townhouse. In the middle of it, she had gone to her bedroom to change her shoes—the white ones had always pinched her feet, but they looked so elegant—and found her oldest sister rifling through her jewelry box and her middle sister going through the drawers of her vanity.

“Sister, dear,” said the oldest, leering, expecting her to ignore the intrusion, as she always had.

But she did not ignore it. She was no longer a little girl in a patched frock, but a married woman with a home and husband of her own. She bared her teeth and said “Get out. Go downstairs and leave gracefully, or I’ll have the footmen throw you out. You’re not welcome here any longer.”

“Althea, dear,” said her middle sister, trying to tuck her hand under Althea’s arm. “We’re your sisters. We just want to make sure you’re
all right.”
 

“Then ask me,” she snapped. “You won’t find the answer at the bottom of the jewelry box. No, get out! I am sick to death of both of you.”

They left. Althea left the party in the hands of her aunt and went upstairs, pleading headache.
 

Thank god for Bluebeard. Otherwise she’d still be at home, dealing with those…those prying
harpies.
Not a shred of privacy to her name.

Her husband understood. When she said that she was sick of both of them, that they were appalling, that she would have nothing more to do with either of them, he did not argue. When she burst into furious tears at the end of it, he said “Oh, my dear—” and opened his arms, and she cried into the blue curls of his beard until her nose was red and she looked a fright.
 

He had apparently been a very evil man, but not actually a bad one. Althea had spent the last few months trying to get her mind around how such a thing was possible.

At the end, he’d tried to spare her. She remembered that, when everyone turned on him, when they’d dug up the bones and thrown them into the river.
 

Years had passed. Any blue in his beard had long since been replaced by gray. He no longer travelled for business or rode to hounds. Althea herself moved more slowly, and felt the weather in her bones.

They had not shared a bed for many years, but they were friends. Probably there had been other women, but he was always discreet, and Althea never faulted him. There had certainly not been other women for a number of years, nor other men either.
 

They spent evenings in the library. She would read funny passages aloud to him and he would laugh. They played chess. He usually won, but he was a patient teacher and occasionally she surprised him.
 

On that last night, he moved restlessly away from the chessboard, rubbing his left arm and gazing out the window.
 

“What’s wrong?” she asked.
 

He turned toward her and grasped her hands, his eyes fierce. “Althea—my love—promise me something.”

“Anything,” she said. She did not like the pallor of his face, or the way he kept rubbing his arm. “What can I do?”

“When I die—when I am dead—”

“Don’t talk like that!”

“It will happen soon. I was already well-aged when we were wed. I have lasted much longer than I expected, probably because of you, my dear. But it will happen. I can hear Death tapping at the walls. I know him—very well. I owe him this.”

Althea put a hand to her mouth.
 

“Promise me,” he said, “that when I am dead, you will burn the house down.”

“What?”

“The manor,” he said impatiently. He clasped his wrist to his chest, looking really angry, angrier than she had ever seen him look. “Take the furniture out if you must, take your clothes, whatever you want to keep—but burn it to the ground. Leave the doors opened. It must burn.”

“You’re mad,” she said unsteadily. “This is my home! I live here too! I can’t just—why?”

“I can’t tell you,” he said. He sank to his knees in front of her. “Please. If you have ever loved me—if we have been friends these last few years—”

“You aren’t well,” she said, standing up. “You’re delirious, that’s all. I’m going to send for the doctor. It will be all right, my love, it’s probably just a touch of the influenza—”

She put a hand on his forehead, and he groaned. He was ice cold, not hot.
 

“Please,” he said. He fell over on his side, curled in a ball, and she stood helplessly in front of him, not knowing what to do. “
Please.”
 

When the servants found them the next morning, she was staring dry-eyed out the window, and Bluebeard’s body was already cold.
 

She wished now that she had listened to him.

If the house had been burned—oh, if only! Then she might be a respectable widow. They might whisper that she had gone mad, to burn such a marvelous house as a funeral pyre, but they would not stare at her with such mingled pity and disgust.

But she had not burned it. Instead she had been swept into the usual business of widowhood—papers to sort through and allotments to settle. He had left most of his affairs in good order, but there were a few things missing, and she had to turn the house over looking for them, while the lawyers tapped their feet and sent politely worded notes about how vital it all was that they receive this by such-and-such a time to avoid some unspecified unpleasantness.
 

At last, with one of the lawyers actually in the house, she had remembered the room at the top of the tower.
 

“There’s one other place I suppose it could be,” she said dubiously. “My husband’s study—I never went in there. But I suppose it’s possible.”

“Were there papers in there?” asked the lawyer.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Althea. “I still haven’t gone in there. Let me find the key.”

She had to get a chair into the library, and then check three or four bookends—was it the elephant with the saddle, or the woman with the urn, or the dragon clutching the treasure chest?—until she found the key. There were cobwebs in the urn, but nothing more. The key was as brilliantly gold as it had been the day that Bluebeard had handed it to her.
 

They went up the stairs to the top of the tower—stupid having a tower in a manor house, but the previous earl had been fond of eccentric architecture—and Althea fitted the key to the door.

“The dust is probably appalling,” she said. “Nobody’s been in here in six months, and I doubt my husband kept it up very well. He was a dear thing, but not much of a housekeep—”

She pushed the door open, with the lawyer at her back.
 

No overstuffed chairs. No etchings. Bare floors, bare walls—and them. The previous wives of Bluebeard.
 

The irony was that there was bad taxidermy after all. He hadn’t been good at it. Those poor women. Bad enough that he had killed them at all, but their bodies were preserved so badly that they barely looked human. At first she had thought they were festival costumes with poorly-constructed masks, draped over dress-maker’s dummies. Something. Not people.
 

Cobwebs draped each of the figures. There were seven in all.
 

“What on earth…” she said, peering more closely. “What are—oh god—”

When Althea realized what they were, she sat down in the middle of the floor and put her hands over her face. The lawyer caught her shoulder. “Miss—miss—” and then, bless him, he picked her up bodily and carried her out of that terrible room.

She didn’t go back. They had men out—constables and investigators and who knew what. They went into the room and took the pitiful contents out. Althea lay in bed for three days, her mind a great roaring silence, and then her sisters arrived and she rose off her bed long enough to throw them out again.

Once she was up, she figured that she might as well stay up. She packed the entire household up in a week, left most of the furniture to the lawyers to auction off, and went to the hunting lodge in the country. Before the horses were even unloaded, she went into every room, throwing the doors and windows open, letting light shine into every crack of the house.
 

There were no dead women there. She moved in at once.
 

It was not a bad place. It was rougher than the manor house, and the cook complained endlessly about the stove, but be damned if she was moving to the townhouse to be the butt of pity and accusation. She walked through the woods every day, wearing mourning black, not entirely sure who she was mourning for.
 

She still missed her husband sometimes. Every time it felt like a betrayal of those women—those other wives—and yet it was what she felt. Twenty-seven years of living with someone, sharing their bed and crying on their shoulder, were not so easily erased. There was a great deal of guilt and fury as well—enough to fill an ocean, enough to make her pound her fists on the walls and howl—but there was no one she could talk to. No one else had ever been in this situation. The one person she could always talk to, the one who would have listened, was dead. And a murderer. But mostly dead.
 

When the lawyers found her at last, and made their report, she learned that she had a great deal of money. A murderer’s estate was automatically forfeit to the Crown, but apparently her husband had, in the last few months of his life, put everything into a trust in her name—except for the manor house.
 

Very well. Let it be someone else’s problem now.

She also learned that around the neck of each of his dead wives had been a necklace, and on each necklace hung a brilliant golden key.
 

“How frustrating that must have been for him,” she said, and laughed a little to herself. Her laughter sounded rusty and disused, but it was a laugh all the same.
 

She really hadn’t known.
 

She’d just thought that the world was a complicated place, and everyone in it deserved a little bit of privacy, and perhaps a room of one’s own.
 

Author’s Note: This is a Loathly Lady story, which were more common in medieval literature than they are now. The only popular version that I know from recent times is Steeleye Span’s “King Henry” on the album Below the Salt.
 

It is a hard, sometimes ugly story, and hard, ugly things happen in it, including sexual assault. The reader is advised to proceed at their own risk.
 

My husband never forgave me for the hounds.
 

Everyone knows the song by now, I suppose—how the king was hunting, and stayed the night in a haunted hall, and a monster came in the night and trapped him inside. He killed his animals—“his hawk and his horse and good greyhounds”—to feed her, and then she demanded that he lie down beside her as man and wife.

When he woke in the morning, the monster was gone, and he held a beautiful woman in his arms, with the whiff of elder days about her.

The song is true, more or less. He wasn’t the king, but a younger prince, and no one ever comes up with a suitable rhyme for “goshawks.” And I would deny categorically that I was “the fairest lady that ever was seen,” then or ever. But most of the other details are right.
 

I did not want him to kill the hounds or the horse or even the mad-eyed goshawks, which made such pitifully small mouthfuls of feathers.
 
But I was given no choice in the matter. These things were, you might say, the conditions of my parole.
 

I was enchanted two or three hundred years ago, as near as I can determine. The reasons don’t matter now. Everyone involved is dead, except for me. I have not been able to find records of my father’s house, or of the sorcerer that enchanted him, and my sense of time passing was blunted by the years. Acorns turned into worm-ridden oaks and came crashing down, tearing holes in the forest canopy around my hall, and I endured.

I should have started marking the seasons, I suppose, but I was not thinking clearly. Being turned into a monster will do that to you. I was sunk into despair, curled up in the back of the ruined hall. Hunger was the only thing that drove me outside. It may have been several seasons before I travelled more than a hundred yards from the hall, and ate more than lichen clawed from the stones.
 

I was—well, I suppose I was a sort of bear-like creature, but a bear crossed with something else, and larger than any mortal bear had ever been. I had shaggy fur and horns like a cow, and enormous claws.
 
My eyes were very large, and the edges of my tongue turned up against my fangs.
 

It was a long time before I could look at myself in a still bit of water without screaming. Screaming only made it worse, because they weren’t proper screams at all, but the bellows of a monster. It was too exhausting. I stopped looking.
 

My claws bothered me the most, because they were always in front of me, and I couldn’t ignore them. But they were useful for tearing into rotten logs to turn up grubs, sometimes even honey, and I learned to flip fish up onto the banks with them. The magic would not have let me die of starvation, but it did not much care if I felt hungry, so I learned to fish and eat grubs and mushrooms and anything else I could find.
 

The first knight came to the hole a year or two after the enchantment took hold. I tried to hide from him.
 
I was ashamed. I had been beautiful, and now I was a great shaggy monster reduced to eating insects and gnawing strips of lichen off the stones with my teeth.
 
I did not want to see him. I was afraid that he would try to kill me, or worse, that he would recognize me.