“Look at your lovely ladies,” Cyril said, his eyes glinting. “You’d think they were dolls they are so lovely. Or puppets, perhaps. Dance for us, lovely puppets.”
“Go on,” Mihai said, “Do as he says.”
So the girls drew out their scarves and danced. They brought the only color to the place; there was scant art, much of it dull, and the food served on plain plates. Only the wine goblets shone golden, and the enormous candles brought a warmth and a glow.
“Have them dance on my grave when I’m dead,” Cyril said, and the two men laughed until they fell off their chairs.
Looking back, the girls would see that as the best night of their captivity. The last color they saw. As the sun rose, Mihai said, “And now.”
As he imprisoned down below, in solid dark rooms, his eyelids lifted so his eyes stared dark and hard and Julia understood that he would not listen to reason.
Each girl had a cell to herself. The cells were bare; no bed, no chair, no window, no light. It took them a while to understand they were there to die. They wondered; did their father build these rooms? Didn’t he wonder what they were for? Or did he imagine coal, or wood, or wheat?
Day by day Mihai told them how long they had to live.
“How good I am to you,” he said. “What a gift I give to you. To know the truth.” He said this every day.
He allowed them water. He passed tall thin jars to them through small cracks and while they saw nothing in the pitch dark, they knew this water was blue. He told them so, he said, “Your insides will be such a lovely color.”
Julia thought, this is because of the whores. He wants us blue like them. He couldn’t see them in the dark; it was their corpses he wanted to see.
They couldn’t hear each other. They could barely hear themselves; the walls were dense, almost absorbent, drawing in all sound and most of the air.
So hungry. So very, very hungry. No moss or mold on the walls, no rodents, so day by day they weakened. Amara was the bitterest; she alone had believed he would marry her and she would live a life of adventure. She felt such fury at what he stole from her. Not just her own moments of joy, love, success, but those of all her future generations. He stole her name, her family’s future, he ended her line, and this made her exceeding bitter.
Mihai fattened. Larger and larger so quickly his servants thought he was a devil and ran for their lives. He grew so large he could no longer walk down the stairs, and so he did not know that those three girls died together, within an hour of each other.
They oozed through the gray brick walls, waiting till they are all three dead and spirit.
They found him, fat, repulsive, sunk deep into his bed. He wept. “Oh, glory. O great glory of god, they are beautiful. Ah, great day.”
Julia said, “Is this how your wife died? And your sister?”
“Great glory of god they were beautiful too,” he said. And they watched, feeling victorious, as he rose and stumbled to the stairs, as he tripped and fell down, as he bled out, alone and foul.
Many years hence, Eliza was old and dead in the tongue from keeping silent. She had not hated living amongst the women and had enjoyed her work as nurse during the war, but she despised the filth, the jailors, the cruelty. She was not expected to see freedom, but during a transfer to a new gaol, where a woman of her years could see out her time, there was an accident.
The horses reared up. The driver called out “Get off the road you stupid girls,” but nothing was there. The horses reared sharper, the wagon tipped over into the river, and only Eliza, of the five being transported, the guards, and the driver, survived.
Free at last, wearing prison-made clothing, carrying one small bag of belongings, she had nowhere to go but to her daughters in captivity. Her husband was long since dead of the drink; she’d always known that’s where he was headed.
She found herself walking in the shadows of the shallows of the river, her feet so cold she thought perhaps they’d been severed, like the poor soldiers at the hospital who woke to find their feet removed by a surgeon’s blade.
But no, her feet were there, she didn’t walk on stumps at all.
No one had aided her find her daughters. No one listened.
She saw a gray washerwoman holding up what looked like cloth but, Eliza thought, was the tattered souls of the girls. It filled her mortal despair. It was too late; they were lost. Still she walked on, to pray over their graves at least.
There were times she imagined she was elsewhere, to help the forward steps. At school, when they did walk long miles for punishment (maybe not) or she’d imagine herself doing laps of a beautiful boat, the girls at play, her husband still alive and in love with her
At last she found the mansion. Long abandoned, uglier than ever. No name over the door, so Mihai had not even kept that promise.
She walked around and around, not sure how to get in. There were no windows and the door seemed locked tight.
She thought she heard moans and cries. Her daughters crying. She was suddenly sure they were alive and waiting for her, and she pressed her fingers against the gray brick, seeking entrance. One small door where the servants had entered was ajar, and there she entered, and then she found her girls.
They were bone.
They were long dead and she was old in the bone but she loved them.
She was cold, though, so cold, and she had been since the river, chilled to the bone and when she found an old rug by the hearth, and at the top of the house one small window where the sun crept in, there she lay down and allowed herself to sleep.
As sad as she was, and drained gray by grief, she achieved death at last and her soul passed on to another place. Her daughters, the gray ladies, would never find that peace.
They did feel something. From where they were, a world away, the three stopped as one. For a moment, a wash of red passed through them, the color of love, perhaps, and for a moment they clustered, almost remembering, but then they were drawn away, drawn towards, and they found the next door and they knocked on it, bringing their gift of knowledge to the person within.
(Author Note: The title “Exceeding Bitter” is inspired by Requiem, Op. 48, by Gabriel Faure: “…ah, that great day, and exceeding bitter, when thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.”)
Witch-Hazel
Jeffrey Ford
Back in the day, in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey, from October 31 to November 2, All Souls’ Day, people who lived in the woods or close to them would pin to their coats, their blouses, the lapels of their jackets, a flowering sprig of witch hazel. It’s a shrub that grows naturally in the barrens and blossoms right around Halloween. The flower looks like a creature from a deep-sea trench, yellow tentacles instead of petals radiating from a dark brown center that holds a single seed.
The name of the plant could have something to do with real witches and witching but not necessarily. The word “witch” is derived from Middle English wicche, and all it means is “pliable” or “bendable.” It’s a reference to the use of the branches of the witch hazel shrub in the art of dowsing by early homesteaders to the barrens. Dowsing is the practice of locating things underground with and through the vibrations of a Y-shaped tree branch. One thing’s for sure, the “hazel” part of the word comes from the fact that in England the branches from the hazel tree supposedly made the best dowsing rods. That tree didn’t grow in the barrens, though, and so the settlers found a substitute that was equally pliant—a shrub with crazy flowers that blossoms in the season of Jack-o’-lanterns.