Evan Hunter - Lizzie

“And you, my love? Have you forgotten the nectar and the spice? Do you long for me as I long for you, my precious, fragile orchid? We will be returning to London shortly before Christmas, and I promise I shall try my utmost to make the journey to America as soon as possible in the New Year. Until then, my darling Miss, be mine forever, as I am surely thine.”

There was a card from her at Christmas.

Nothing else.

And then... silence.

All through January Lizzie wrote to her daily at the Kensington address, suspecting at first that the Newburys had extended their stay in India (but would they not have come home for Christmas, as she’d said they would?), fearing next that Alison had contracted some dread disease in Delhi or Calcutta or wherever they had gone (she had mentioned lepers, hadn’t she?), believing then that Albert was intercepting her letters, and then that they had moved and were not receiving forwarded mail, and then that they had gone to Cannes during the winter season Alison so despised (but a letter to the villa was never answered), refusing to accept what was becoming more and more apparent, the unbearably painful realization that Alison no longer cared to answer her desperate pleadings.

In the silence of her bedroom, she reread by lamplight the last paragraph of the letter Alison had written before leaving for India:

And you, my love? Have you forgotten the nectar and the spice? Do you long for me as I long for you, my precious, fragile orchid? We will be returning to London shortly before Christmas, and I promise I shall try my utmost to make the journey to America as soon as possible in the New Year. Until then, my darling Miss, be mine forever, as I am surely thine.

Then what had happened? What was causing the silence now? Should she write to Albert? Had something truly dire befallen Alison?

She remembered a rainy afternoon in Cannes, the conversation with Alison that day, the distant sea surging.

“I should never want another woman but you. I should never dream of allowing anyone else to do to me...”

“Never say never.”

“Though I’m certain that the moment I’m gone, you shall tumble into bed with the nearest ...”

“More than likely .”

She refused to believe this. She read and reread the last paragraph of Alison’s letter. What was it promising, then, if not a love as eternal as her own? In a blinding snowstorm at the beginning of February, Lizzie walked to the telegraph office in town and sent a cable she hoped would be clear to Alison while remaining cryptic to the clerk who took her hand-lettered message. It read:

Mistress,

Have you changed your mind then?

Miss

“Miss what?” the clerk asked.

“Send it that way,” Lizzie said, and the clerk shrugged.

Alison’s answer did not arrive until St. Valentine’s Day. The same familiar hand on the same familiar stationery. The same Kensington address. And inside the envelope, appropriate enough on this day for lovers, a poem. No date, no salutation, no closing sentiment, no signature, only the poem in blue ink on the paler blue stationery:

The meaning was immediately clear to her. She read the letter, if such it was, yet another time, and then burned it in the stove together with the letter she’d received in October. The snow lashed fiercely at the windows as the flames licked at the blue sheets of paper. She replaced the lid on the stove and went upstairs to her room, and only then did she begin sobbing with the knowledge that what had happened almost two summers ago had been — for Alison, at least — a passing fancy, something best and soon forgotten, pressed into a memory book like the faded, dry and crumbling orchid she’d received as a farewell gift in London. Thine Forever, she thought, and sobbed uncontrollably. Days later, when her father asked if she had stopped writing to her friend in London, she replied simply, “Yes.”

Spiritlessly, listlessly, she got out of bed.

There was fresh water in the pitcher on the dresser; she had filled it last night from the tap over the pantry sink before going up to bed — voices in the sitting room, muted, the sitting room dark, she’d had no desire to talk to anyone then, she’d talked long enough to Alice Russell. The fears she’d relayed to her, still with her this morning, vague and nameless, filling her with uncertain dread. The house burning down around them. Perishing in flames. The fires of Hell. Damnation forever.

She poured water from the pitcher into the washbowl.

She dipped her hands into the water.

There’s no one! Come in, come in, we’re quite alone!

No one then to spy on them from the clifftops as they splashed naked in the gelid sea, no one here in Fall River either to offer her comfort or solace while she waited in vain for a further letter from Alison at home in her own country, her father returning from the post office empty-handed each day, we’re quite alone, Ah, yes, she thought, I was quite alone, and splashed water onto her face, and reached for the bar of soap in the scalloped white dish. Washing her face and her hands, she felt again the steady seep of her own blood, and thought, Alison was right, of course, so right about so many things. This was not the time for making decisions, she would be less confused when her monthly sickness had passed.

And yet, yesterday morning, the decision had not seemed at all preposterous to her, lost in hopelessness as she’d been, anonymous terrors consuming her — lost in guilt, lost in shame, lost in anxiety, lost in knowledge, lost in all save love — her menses full upon her and adding to her depression and her contrary passion. Alone in the privacy of the water closet down-cellar, she had syringed into herself a mixture of tepid water and carbolic acid, as she did each month to remove particles of dried blood and mucus and to dispel any disagreeable odor. Drying herself, fastening a fresh towel into place between her legs, pinning it before and behind to the band about her waist, her eye had lingered on the word acid handwritten on the brown bottle’s label in the druggist’s careless scrawl, and she had remembered all the talk the day before of poison, her stepmother certain that someone had poisoned the milk, the sounds later of her vomiting behind the closed and barricaded door between their rooms in this prison of a house.

And she had thought, Yes, poison, why not? An appropriate end to Eve’s sin, the apple poisoned with knowledge, the wrath of God satisfied at last in the completion of the cycle, poison unto poison, carnality purged. “To disbelieve truth is to invite deception,” Alison had said, and the truth in this house, beneath this secretive, deceitful roof, was that whatever transpired here was carnal and lustful, a sinful satisfaction of the tyrannous blood, loveless and doomed. Yes, poison, she had thought, and had adjusted her clothing and gone upstairs to tell her stepmother she was going out to do some shopping.

The thought frustrated, the purpose thwarted, the action aborted.

“Well, my good lady, it’s something we don’t sell unless by prescription from the doctor, as it’s a very dangerous thing to handle.”

“But I’ve used it before, you see. Prussic acid, that is. To clean furs. I want it to put on the edge of a sealskin cape. A soiled cape.”