Arsenical Soap

The house smelled of camphor and calcium oxide, of turpentine and the particular mineral sweetness of powdered arsenic, and beneath all of it — beneath the professional odors of Uncle Rorke’s trade — the vegetal rot of the moor pressing in through every window seal, every crack in the plaster, the patient damp of a landscape that had been dissolving sandstone for ten thousand years and would dissolve this house too, given time.

Nell Rorke knew the smell the way she knew her own skin. She had grown up in it. The first thing she’d learned to name wasn’t mother or father but specimen — pointing at the peregrine falcon on the landing, its wings wired into a permanent stoop, its glass eyes aimed at a prey it would never reach. She was nineteen now and could skin a hare in four minutes, a feat she’d timed against the bracket clock in the front hall. She could wire a wing joint so the pinion feathers splayed at precisely the angle of banking flight. She could mix arsenical soap — white soap shaved into a basin, the arsenic stirred in with a bone-handled spatula her grandfather had made, camphor and salt of tartar and the powdered calcium oxide that burned the fingertips if you weren’t wearing gloves, and she never wore gloves, because Uncle Rorke said gloves dulled the feeling in your hands and a taxidermist without feeling was a bricklayer.

Uncle Rorke said a great many things. He said them once, in a voice like a cabinet being closed, and you either remembered or you didn’t, and if you didn’t, there was a consequence that lived in his hands — not a blow, exactly, but a correction, a repositioning, the way he would take your wrist and move it to where the wrist should be. The correction was worse than a blow because it was precise, because it contained in its precision the whole philosophy of his craft: that every living thing had a correct position, and his job, his art, his life’s purpose, was to find that position and fix it there forever.

Peg had arrived when Nell was six. Nobody called her by her full name — Margaret or Marguerite or whatever the paperwork said; she had been Peg from the day Uncle Rorke brought her through the kitchen door in November, holding her by the hand, a child of five with a face like something scraped. Nell’s mother had been alive then, barely — the consumption was already in her lungs, already making her beautiful in the way the dying are beautiful, translucent, the bones coming through like the armature under a mounted hide. Nell’s mother had looked at Peg and said, “Another one for the collection,” and laughed, and coughed, and been dead by Easter.

Nobody ever explained where Peg came from. Uncle Rorke said a situation and that was sufficient. Peg was dark where the Rorkes were fair, angular where they were blunt, inclined toward silences that lasted whole afternoons and then sudden bursts of language so vivid and disarranging that Nell would feel the floor tilt under her. Peg read whatever she could find, which in Uncle Rorke’s house meant treatises on preservation and the occasional parish circular, and she remembered everything she read, and she moved through the workshop with a particular quality of attention that Uncle Rorke mistook for obedience and Nell recognized as something else entirely: a cataloguing, a study, the careful observation of a creature that knows it is in a cage and is memorizing the position of every lock.

They were sisters. The town said so. Uncle Rorke said so. The parish register said so, or near enough — Margaret Rorke, ward, inscribed below Ellen Rorke, daughter. Sisters in the house of specimens, among the foxes in their glass-fronted cases and the kestrels on their branches and the great horned owl that presided over the stairwell with an expression of permanent, glassy outrage. Sisters who shared a bedroom, a washstand, a mirror in which their faces appeared side by side each morning as they pinned their hair.

What sisters do, Nell thought. We do what sisters do.

The morning of the day everything changed — or the morning of one of the days, because things had been changing for years, slowly, the way arsenic changes you, cell by cell, a cumulative alteration you don’t notice until your hands shake and your gums bleed and the doctor writes constitutional weakness on the chart — that morning, Peg was in the workshop sorting glass eyes.

Uncle Rorke kept them in a mahogany cabinet with forty-two drawers, each labeled in his architectural hand: Accipiter gentilis, 12mm amber. Buteo buteo, 14mm golden-brown. Sciurus vulgaris, 8mm black. The eyes arrived quarterly from a firm in Lauscha, a glassblowing town in Thuringia, packed in cotton batting, each pair nestled together in a compartment of a wooden tray. They were exquisite things — hand-blown, hand-painted, each iris a miniature landscape of color, the pupil a bead of pure black glass fused into the amber or hazel or fierce raptor-gold of the surround.

Peg had all forty-two drawers open. She was sitting on the floor with her legs crossed, her skirt pooled around her, holding a pair of eyes up to the light — sixteen-millimeter, the tawny amber of a barn owl — and turning them slowly between her fingers.

“What are you doing?” Nell asked from the doorway. She was carrying a bucket of soaking hides that needed scraping, and the lye water was cold on her wrists.

“Looking.”

“They can’t look back.”

“That’s why I like them.” Peg set the barn owl eyes down and picked up another pair — smaller, darker, the near-black of a mink or polecat. “Every animal Uncle Rorke mounts, he gives it eyes that were made for looking. But these eyes have never seen anything. They were made in a factory in Germany by a man who shapes glass over a flame, and they’ve traveled across Europe in a wooden box, and they’ve sat in this cabinet for months or years, and they have never once been used for sight. They are the most innocent things in this house.”

Nell set the bucket down. The lye water slopped. “Innocent is a strange word for glass.”

“Everything in this house is strange. We live among the dead and call it a profession. We rub poison into hides and call it preservation. We pose animals in attitudes they never held in life and call it art.” Peg looked up, and her face had the quality it got sometimes, the scraped quality Nell remembered from the day Peg arrived — as if something had removed a layer that was meant to be there. “What do we call ourselves, Nell?”

“Sisters.”

Peg’s mouth moved. Not quite a smile. “Sisters.”

Uncle Rorke had a commission from the Whitby Museum: a pair of short-eared owls, Asio flammeus, to be mounted in a diorama representing the North York Moors. He’d shot the birds himself on Fylingdales Moor in October — Nell had been with him, carrying the game bag, her boots sinking in the peat, the wind pulling at her coat with a violence that felt personal. The male owl had come down in a tumble of tawny feathers, wings still half-spread, and Uncle Rorke had picked it up by the feet and swung it to break the neck, a motion so practiced it looked casual, and Nell had watched the wings go slack and thought: that is what he does. He takes the flying thing and makes it still.

Now the owls were in the workshop, skinned and preserved, their hides painted with arsenical soap — Nell’s hands still tingled from the mixing — and Uncle Rorke was building the diorama: a wooden base painted to represent peat and heather, with dried bog myrtle wired into clusters to suggest the habitat. He’d sent Peg out to gather the bog myrtle from Blackamoor Edge, which was a two-hour walk across open ground, and Peg had come back with armfuls of the stuff, its leaves releasing that sweet resinous scent that Nell loved and Uncle Rorke tolerated only because it masked the workshop’s chemical stink.

“The female should be higher,” Uncle Rorke said. He was adjusting the wire armature, bending the owl’s wing into a position that Nell recognized from the field guides: a banking turn, the primary feathers spread, the head rotated forty-five degrees. “She’s quartering. Looking down. The male is on the ground. He’s found prey — a vole, something — and he’s mantling over it, wings out, protecting the kill. She’s coming in to take it from him.”

“Is that what they do?” Nell asked. “The female steals from the male?”

“It’s not stealing. It’s the dynamic of the pair. She’s larger. She’s dominant. He hunts and she takes what she needs.” Uncle Rorke’s hands moved on the wire, and the owl’s wing shifted, the feathers flaring as if caught in wind. “In nature this lasts a moment. A second. The wing at this angle, the head turned, the talons reaching. In my work it lasts forever.”

Peg was sweeping the floor at the far end of the workshop, but Nell knew she was listening. Peg collected Uncle Rorke’s declarations the way Uncle Rorke collected specimens — carefully, without visible emotion, filed away for later use.

“Forever is a long time for a dead bird,” Peg said, not looking up from the broom.

Uncle Rorke’s hands stopped moving. The pause lasted three seconds — Nell counted, because she had learned to count Uncle Rorke’s pauses the way a sailor counts between lightning and thunder, calculating distance, calculating danger.

“The bird is not dead,” Uncle Rorke said. “The bird is preserved.”

“There’s a difference?”

“The difference is my life’s work.” His voice had the cabinet-closing quality. “Sweep in the corners. There’s down behind the chemical press.”

At night, in the room they shared, the room with the sloped ceiling and the window that faced the moor, Nell lay in her narrow bed and listened to Peg breathe.

The room was directly above the workshop, and through the floorboards she could smell the chemical trace of the day’s work — the residue of arsenical soap, the turpentine Uncle Rorke used to clean his brushes, the faintly sweet stink of the soaking hides. On windy nights the smell rose through the gaps between the boards and mixed with the bog myrtle Peg kept in a muslin sachet under her pillow, the resinous leaves she gathered each autumn from the drainage ditches on the moor. The bog myrtle was supposed to keep moths from the bedding, but Nell suspected Peg kept it for different reasons — because it smelled like outside, because it was the one thing in the room that had not been selected or approved or positioned by Uncle Rorke, because it was wild and it was hers.

This was the truest thing she knew: the sound of Peg’s breathing in the dark. Not the rise and fall of a sleeping body but something more specific — the slight catch on the inhale, as if breathing were a decision Peg made freshly each time rather than a reflex. In the dark, without the obligations of the workshop or the performance of the dining table or the choreography of sisterhood that the household demanded, Peg’s breathing was the only honest sound in the house.

Nell had never touched Peg. Not in the way she meant when she said never touched — they had shared a washstand for thirteen years, they had braided each other’s hair, Nell had held Peg’s hand walking home from church when Peg was small and the path was icy. What Nell meant by never touched was the thing she could not name, the thing that had no name in this house, the gesture that lived in her hands as a constant almost — the almost of reaching across the space between their beds, the almost of pressing her palm to the notch of Peg’s collarbone where the breathing was visible, the almost that kept her awake night after night among the dead and the preserved and the glass-eyed watching things.

She thought about the glass eyes. Eyes that had never seen. She thought about how Peg had held them up to the light and turned them, studying their useless perfection. She thought: I am like the glass eyes. I was made for seeing, and I see everything, and I have never once looked properly.

“Nell,” Peg said.

“I thought you were sleeping.”

“I don’t sleep. You know that.”

Nell knew that. Peg slept in patches, lightly, always half-awake, always listening for something approaching across the dark.

“I want to tell you something,” Peg said.

“Then tell me.”

A silence. Outside, the wind was moving across Blackamoor Edge, and the house creaked in its joints, and somewhere in the workshop a specimen case rattled against the wall — a fox, probably, the red dog fox Uncle Rorke had mounted last spring in a posture of alertness, ears pricked, one forefoot raised, ready to bolt. The fox rattled in its case when the wind was strong, as if the glass and the wood and the arsenical soap weren’t quite sufficient to keep the wildness from answering the weather.

“I found something,” Peg said. “In the cabinet. Behind the drawer labeled Cervus elaphus — the red deer, the sixteen-millimeter brown. There’s a false back. Uncle Rorke built it into the cabinet. Behind the false back there’s a space, and in the space there are letters.”

Nell’s breath stopped. “What letters?”

“Letters from someone who brought me here. From the woman who — I don’t know the right word. The woman who was my mother, or who chose not to be my mother, or who was prevented from being my mother. The letters are to Uncle Rorke, and they are asking him to take me, and they are explaining why.”

Nell sat up. The dark of the room was complete — no moon, the window showing only the deeper darkness of the moor — and Peg’s voice came from somewhere inside that darkness, disembodied, stripped of everything except the words.

“Why?” Nell asked.

“Because my mother was a woman named Bridget who worked in this house before I was born, and my father was — my father was nobody. My mother was Bridget and she loved someone she was not permitted to love, and I was the proof of something the household could not accommodate, and so I was given a different name and a different story and put in this room with you.”

“Loved someone she was not permitted—”

“A woman. My mother loved a woman. The letters don’t say it plainly — they dance around it, the way letters always do, unsuitable attachment, unnatural character, a situation requiring removal. But I can read what they mean. And what they mean is that my mother was like me, and they put me in a house full of dead things as a punishment for being born alive.”

The wind hit the house broadside. The specimen cases rattled — not just the fox now but the whole workshop below them, a percussion of glass and wood and mounted bone, as if every preserved creature were trying to move at once.

“Like you,” Nell said.

“Like me.”

“Peg.”

“Yes.”

“I need to — I need you to say it plainly. Not the letters. Not your mother. You.”

Another silence, longer than the first, and inside it Nell could hear her own heartbeat and the wind and the rattling specimens and the house groaning on its foundations, and then Peg said, “I love you. I have loved you since before I had the words for it, and this house has spent thirteen years trying to make that into something dead and manageable, and I am so tired, Nell. I am so tired of being preserved.”

What happened next was the simplest thing. Nell reached across the dark and found Peg’s hand, which was cold, which was always cold — Peg’s circulation had never been good, and Nell had always assumed it was constitutional, but now she wondered if it was the arsenic, if thirteen years of living in a house where the preservative was in the air, in the soap residue on every surface, in the dust that settled on your skin while you slept, had been working on Peg the way it worked on the specimens, making her still, making her cold.

She pulled Peg’s hand toward her and pressed it against her own chest, where the heartbeat was, and held it there. Not a pose. Not a position selected from a field guide of acceptable gestures. Just two bodies making contact in the dark, graceless, urgent, the opposite of everything Uncle Rorke had spent his life perfecting.

“I know,” Nell said. “I know. I have always known.”

And Peg made a sound that was not a word, a sound that came from the same place the wind came from, the moor, the raw exposed ground where nothing was preserved because nothing needed to be.

In the morning, Uncle Rorke found the glass eye cabinet open. All forty-two drawers pulled out, the eyes catching the early light from the workshop window, a thousand empty gazes reflecting the room. He looked at the cabinet for a long time. Then he closed every drawer, one by one, in order, and said nothing about it.

But after breakfast he said, “Peg, the bog myrtle on the diorama has dried wrong. The leaves are curling. Go out and get more.”

“It’s blowing a gale,” Peg said.

“Then walk into the gale.” He didn’t look at her. He was sorting dermestid beetles from a jar — the small dark insects he used to clean the skulls, to strip the last flesh from the bone, nature’s own meticulous preparators — and his concentration on the beetles was itself a kind of violence, a statement about what deserved his attention and what did not. “Take Nell with you if you need company. You can carry more between you.”

They walked into the gale. The moor opened before them — Blackamoor Edge rising in a long brown swell toward the ridge, the heather still winter-dead, the ground saturated from weeks of rain so that their boots sank at every step and the peat sucked at their soles. The wind came from the northwest, unbroken, carrying rain that hit their faces in horizontal lines. Within ten minutes they were soaked. Within twenty they had stopped caring.

Peg walked with that cataloguing alertness, but out here, away from the house, the attention shifted. She wasn’t studying her cage. She was studying the sky, the ground, the way the dead heather moved in the wind like something breathing, the way a curlew’s cry came across the open ground and dissolved into the rain. She was allowing herself to be part of the landscape rather than apart from it, and Nell watched this and felt something in her own chest unlatch, some wire armature she hadn’t known was holding her in position.

They found the bog myrtle growing along a drainage ditch near the old sheepfold — knee-high shrubs with their resinous leaves, the scent cutting through the rain. The old women in the town said bog myrtle had uses beyond moth-repelling — that the leaves, steeped in water, could end a pregnancy, could prevent a future the body was being prepared for. Nell did not know if this was true or if it was the kind of knowledge old women kept alive to frighten young ones into caution. What she knew was that the plant grew in the wettest, most inhospitable ground on the moor, and that it thrived where cultivated things would rot, and that Peg loved it the way Peg loved everything that survived without permission.

Peg broke off branches and handed them to Nell, and their fingers touched, and the touch was nothing — was everything — was a branch being passed from one hand to another in the rain on a moor in Yorkshire in March, and was also the continuation of what had happened in the dark, and was also a promise, and was also a question with no answer.

“We could walk,” Peg said. She was looking north, toward the ridge, toward the valley beyond it and the road that led eventually to Whitby, to the coast, to somewhere else. “We could keep walking.”

“Into what?”

“Into anything. Into the weather. Into whatever comes.”

“We don’t have money. We don’t have clothes. We don’t have—”

“We have each other. That’s the thing Uncle Rorke can’t mount and pose and label. That’s the only thing in the house he can’t preserve, because it’s the only thing that’s alive.” She paused. The wind tore at her hair, pulling strands free from the pins, and the rain had darkened it so it lay against her neck like something painted on. “I found more in the letters, Nell. My mother didn’t go to a situation. She was sent to an asylum. The unsuitable attachment — the woman she loved — they were separated by force, and my mother was declared unfit, and I was given to Uncle Rorke because a taxidermist knows how to keep things in their cases.”

The wind shifted. The rain eased, just slightly, and for a moment the light broke through and turned the wet heather to silver and the standing water in the peat cuttings to mirrors and Peg’s face to something Nell had never seen before — or had always seen and refused to look at directly, not because it was too bright but because once she’d looked she could never unsee it.

“I’m frightened,” Nell said.

“Of what?”

“Of what happens when we go back.”

“Then don’t go back.”

“Peg—”

“I know. I know we have to go back. But I want you to know that there is a version of this where we don’t. Where we walk north until the moor runs out and we come to the sea and we — I don’t know what happens after the sea. But I want you to know the version exists.”

They went back. The house was waiting. The specimens were waiting, the foxes and the owls and the peregrine on the landing with its permanent stoop. Uncle Rorke was in the workshop, and he looked at the bog myrtle they’d brought — a large armful, fragrant and wet — and nodded once and said, “You were gone three hours.”

“The myrtle was farther out this year,” Peg said. “The drainage has shifted.”

Uncle Rorke studied her face. Nell watched him study it and recognized the look — it was the look he gave a specimen before beginning work, the assessment of angle and attitude, the calculation of what position would look most natural, most correct. He was reading Peg the way he read a dead animal, and Nell understood with a cold clarity that he had always read them this way, both of them, their entire lives: as creatures to be posed.

“There’s a supper at the parish hall tomorrow,” Uncle Rorke said. “The Whitsun committee. You’ll both attend. Nell, the blue dress. Peg, the grey.”

It was not a question. It was a positioning. The blue dress and the grey dress were the positions in which the household wished to display them — Nell fair and suitable, Peg dark and deferential, sisters, the taxidermist’s respectable family, every feather in place, every wire invisible.

“Of course,” Nell said, because she had spent nineteen years learning to say of course, because the house had trained her to accept the pose, because she was, in the end, the daughter, the one who belonged, the one who had something to lose.

But Peg said, “No.”

The word landed in the workshop like a stone in standing water. Uncle Rorke’s hands stopped. The dermestid beetles in their jar continued their mindless industry — consuming, stripping, reducing to bone — and the sound of their small bodies against the glass was suddenly the loudest thing in the room.

“No?” Uncle Rorke said.

“I won’t go to the parish supper. I won’t wear the grey dress. I won’t sit next to Nell and perform the devoted sister while the committee women look at us and decide what we are.”

“What you are is my ward. What you are is grateful.”

“What I am is not your specimen.”

Nell watched the muscles in Uncle Rorke’s jaw. She watched his hands, which were still, which were dangerously still, the stillness of a man who spent his life making things still and was calculating whether this particular living thing could be made still too.

“Go to your room,” he said.

“No.”

He moved then — not a blow, true to form, but a correction, his hand closing around Peg’s wrist and turning it, repositioning it the way he would reposition a wing joint, and Peg allowed the motion for exactly one second before she twisted free with a violence that sent the jar of beetles crashing to the floor, the glass shattering, the beetles scattering across the boards in a dark living tide, and Uncle Rorke recoiled — not from Peg but from the beetles, from the sudden uncontained life of them, from the tiny mandibles that could strip a skull to white perfection and were now free, now loose, now moving in every direction at once across his pristine workshop floor.

And in that moment of recoil, Peg ran. Not out the front door — out through the back of the workshop, past the chemical press and the soaking bins and the shelves of mounted skulls, out through the back door into the wind, and she was gone.

Nell stood in the workshop with her uncle and the scattered beetles and the preserved animals in their cases and the glass eye cabinet with its forty-two drawers labeled in his perfect hand, and she felt the wire inside her — the armature he’d built in her over nineteen years, the framework that held her in the correct position — and she felt it bend.

“Stay here,” Uncle Rorke said. “She’ll come back. They always come back.”

Nell stayed. She stayed for four hours, which was enough time for the light to fail and the wind to build to something that shook the house in its foundations. She stayed through the rattling of every specimen case, the foxes and the owls and the great horned owl on the landing creaking on its branch. She stayed while Uncle Rorke swept the beetles back into a new jar, examining each one, and she stayed while he ate his supper in silence, and she stayed while he lit the lamps and went to his workshop and began, with terrible patience, to adjust the wing angle of the female short-eared owl.

At nine o’clock, she went to the bedroom. Peg’s bed was empty and made and cold. On the pillow, Peg had left the pair of barn owl eyes — the sixteen-millimeter amber ones she’d been holding that morning, a lifetime ago. Nell picked them up. They were warm from the pillow, which meant Peg had put them there recently, which meant Peg had come back to the house and left again without being seen. Which meant Peg knew the house the way she’d always known it — every door, every passage, every blind spot in Uncle Rorke’s field of vision.

Nell held the glass eyes and thought: eyes that have never seen anything.

Then she put on her coat and walked out into the storm.

She found the workshop first. The door was open, and the wind was pouring through it, and the lamps were lit, and she could smell — before she saw — the turpentine and the camphor and beneath those the sharper smell of arsenic, and beneath that something else, something hot and wrong, something that was already flame.

The diorama was burning. The bog myrtle they’d gathered that morning, the dried specimens, the painted peat-colored base — all of it alight, the fire feeding on turpentine and preservation chemicals, the flames climbing with an eagerness that was itself a kind of wildness. The mounted owls were burning. The female, wired into her banking turn, her wings spread, her head angled — the fire took her first, and the feathers went up in a rush that looked, for one impossible second, like flight.

Uncle Rorke was standing in the far corner of the workshop, holding a bucket of water, and he was not throwing it. He was watching. Nell had never seen her uncle watch anything burn. His whole existence was predicated on the opposite — on preventing destruction, on making things permanent, on fighting time and weather and the body’s natural drive toward dissolution with his soap and his wire and his glass eyes. And now he was standing with a bucket of water, watching his workshop burn, and his face had the expression of a man who has just realized that tides do not care about the hands that oppose them.

The fire was spreading. The specimen cases along the wall were catching, the glass cracking in the heat, the foxes and the stoats and the kestrels inside them beginning to smolder, the arsenical soap in their hides releasing a thin, sweet, poisonous smoke that made Nell’s eyes water and her throat close.

She looked for Peg. Peg was not in the workshop. Peg was not in the house. Peg was somewhere on the moor, in the storm, in the dark, and Nell could go after her — could walk out through the back door and into the wind and keep walking north until the moor ran out and there was only sea — or she could stay, and help Uncle Rorke save his specimens, and be the daughter, the one who belonged, the one who stayed.

She stood in the doorway with the fire on one side and the dark on the other. The glass eyes in the mahogany cabinet were catching the firelight — all forty-two drawers, all those pairs of eyes that had never seen anything, reflecting the flame that was consuming the house of their purpose.

Uncle Rorke said her name. He said it the way he said everything — once, flat, with the expectation of obedience. He said, “Nell, the bucket.”

She was already moving. Toward the back door or toward the bucket — her body knew before her mind decided, and the wind was coming through the doorway, and the fire was climbing the wall, and the glass eyes watched with borrowed light.

The parish sent two men to survey the damage. The workshop was gutted. The house was standing but smoke-blackened, the smell of burnt arsenic and charred feather worked so deeply into the walls that it would never come out. Uncle Rorke stood in the yard and answered questions, and his answers were precise and flat and contained no information: the lamps, the turpentine, the wind through the open door.

He did not mention Peg. When the men asked about the ward, he said, “She went to a situation in Scarborough. A family who needed a companion.”

The men nodded. Girls went to situations. It was the sort of thing that happened. No further questions required.

In the bedroom with the sloped ceiling and the window facing the moor, one bed was made and one was not. On the pillow of the unmade bed there was nothing — no note, no glass eyes, no proof that anyone had ever slept there. The room smelled of bog myrtle, which Peg had kept in a sachet under her pillow for years, the sweet resinous scent that masked the arsenic and repelled the moths and, in old wives’ accounts, had other properties — properties of ending, of prevention, of refusing the future the body was being prepared for.

On the moor, the heather was still winter-dead, and the peat was saturated, and the bog myrtle along the drainage ditch was beginning to bud. If two figures had walked north across Blackamoor Edge in the storm, the moor would not say so. The moor kept nothing and preserved nothing.