After making sure the other girls were both taken care of, and before going to bed herself, Mary remembered to give Mrs. Poole half the money she had taken out of the bank that morning. Half a pound would keep them in groceries for a while.
But when she was lying in bed, she could not sleep. Diana was snoring in the nursery, and no doubt Beatrice was bedded down in her father’s office, on the other side of the courtyard. She stared into the darkness, feeling a sickness that had nothing to do with Beatrice’s poison. What was this secret society that seemed to have its members everywhere? What experiments were those members conducting? If she included the most recent murder, five girls had been killed and parts of their bodies removed. Why? She had a sense of something wrong in the order of things, some evil. She remembered having felt it once before—yes, when she was a child. That night, when she had seen the face of Edward Hyde.
When she finally fell asleep, she had dreams she did not wish to remember the next morning—of women with their heads or arms or legs missing, stumbling or dragging themselves through the streets of London, calling if they had mouths, gesturing if they had hands. But she could not hear what they were calling, or understand what, if anything, they were trying to tell her.
CHAPTER X
Beatrice’s Story
The next morning they gathered for breakfast in the morning room, which had a table just large enough to seat four. It was the room where Mary’s mother had done accounts, before she had become too ill to manage the household. Afterward, Mary had taken over. Each morning, she would sit at her mother’s desk, going over the books, making sure the bills were paid, her mother taken care of. It was strange to sit in that room now, across the table from Diana. Beatrice perched on a chair by the window, which was open at the bottom. Through the window, Mary could see the bleak courtyard.
Diana could not keep from yawning. She would have to be taught to put her hand in front of her mouth. Beatrice looked pale, but seemed composed. She said she had spent a perfectly comfortable night on the sofa in the office.
Breakfast was buttered toast, poached eggs, and good, strong tea—for Mary and Diana. “I went marketing this morning with the money you gave me,” Mrs. Poole had told Mary. “Fresh from the country, those eggs are! Look at the yolks. I paid Mr. Byles, so he can’t give me any more of his nasty looks. There will be cakes for tea if that devil of an oven cooperates. I was at a loss for what to give Miss Rappaccini, though I asked her last night what she would like for breakfast. ‘Water in which organic matter has been steeped, please,’ she tells me, as nice as you please. ‘And what might that be, miss?’ I asked her. Well, I’ve done my best, but it’s a queer diet, and no mistake.”
Beatrice warmed her hands around a steaming mug. It was all she would take for breakfast. “I have no need of food, you see. Only the nutrients themselves, and sunlight. It will take several days for the strong poisons to leave my system. The dandelion greens I picked in the courtyard will help with the detoxification process. Until then, we will need to be particularly careful. Do not touch me, and I will try to keep away from you as much as I can. Once the strong poisons are out, I will be toxic, but not to such a degree. My breath will be able to kill only the smallest living beings: insects, birds, mice, and voles. After spending some time in a closed room with me, you will begin to feel faint, but I will not be lethal unless we are in close contact. Still, my touch will burn, as though you had touched a strong alkaloid.”
“You seem to know a great deal about yourself,” said Mary.
“It is through sad experience,” said Beatrice. “If only I knew how to cure myself! Although my father taught me many things, he could not teach me that. He did not know himself. I asked him . . . at one time I even begged him to cure me. But he told me that as far as he knew, the condition was irreversible. He said I should be proud of my nature, which made me unique among womankind.”
“Why don’t you tell us about it?” asked Mary.
CATHERINE: Yes, you do need to write the section about yourself. You all promised that you would write your own stories.
BEATRICE: But my English is not so good. You know the whole story, Cat. Why can you not write it? You are the writer among us. You would make it, you know, lively. Truly, I cannot write it.
CATHERINE: Well, you have to. I have a deadline for Astarte and the Idol of Gold, and I won’t get the advance until I turn it in. At least write the first draft. Your English is perfectly fine, and anyway I’ll make everything sound right in revision. Come on, I’ll ask Mrs. Poole to make you some of that disgusting weed tea you like so much.
BEATRICE: It’s quite good, you know. Very refreshing.
DIANA: I’ve tried it. I had to spit it out. It tasted like warm piss.
CATHERINE: As though you would know! Come on, Beatrice. Here’s the pen. Sit down, like a good poisonous plant, and start writing. I’ll fix it all later.
“I never knew my mother,” said Beatrice. “She was the daughter of a poor man, a farmer in the hills around Padua, and much younger than my father. I believe he married her principally because of her youth and beauty—his goal was to have a daughter, to have me. A son would have been less useful to him. He would have raised a son as his apprentice, to continue his scientific studies. But a daughter could be both an apprentice and a subject for his experiments.
“My father was a physician, the greatest in Padua, perhaps in Italy. Patients would come from all over the country to be healed by the famous Dr. Rappaccini.
“On her father’s farm, my mother had been used to tending a garden. She tended my father’s garden, and I have often wondered if she was weakened by constant contact with his pharmacopeia, the poisonous plants he grew and from which he made his medicines. For as he often told me, poison is in the dose, and a poison in the human body can be cured only by a poison from the external world. Digitalis, the active ingredient of the common foxglove, kills a healthy man, but cures one who is sick in his heart. As she tended his poisonous plants, I grew in her belly, absorbing their poisons. I believe they affected me even in the womb. While they weakened her, I was so imbued by their essence that they made me strong and healthy. On the day I was born, she died—giving birth to me. Already weakened, she could not bear the rigors of childbirth. She was a farmer’s daughter, and I—was a monster. I hold myself responsible for her death.”
“You must not think that way,” said Mary.