*Trigger Warning
Swinging from a beam, I shudder, not in fear or fright, but glee, that I have the power (even in my state) to rub myself clean. On the cusp of my neck snapping, tugging as the coarse grains of the noose tighten further, against my pallid, exposed neck, I smile, cupping a near to full-term pregnancy in my hands.
His. Of course, it is his.
Before the final curtain, dark and blessedly velveteen as it is, memories fly past of his every touch. His love weeps from pages of a tale that no-one shall know of, not for the foreseeable. For our story, our blessed, corrupt passion has bled forth only in this room: Room Fifteen. The room that made me. The room that has equally destroyed me. It is both sun and moon. Life and death. Beating heart and slicing scythe.
Struggling more so now against the deathly O of the noose, my feet kick and batter the air, instinctively fighting for a life I have no affection for. Not anymore. No longer. Creaking of bones course through my jittering body, as I thrash and thrive whilst a storm brews outside my windowpanes; long, wet hands bleed watery marks, thwarting my vision into a blurred mess of loss and heartache. A tumbling, unravelling blindness.
I’m so very close now.
Nearly there.
A mute, guttering candle-flame on a sideboard stills my thoughts, puttering pathetically, mirroring me as life drains from its core. A chimera of a life. Before the fatal, non-returnable snap, my vision bends into the flame’s twisted neck, demon-red at its centre, thrashing against the breeze from the opened window; nocturnal moonbeams streak in as yellowed monstrous hands stitch a morose tapestry upon the chilled floorboards.
Dwindling consciousness now pulls me to final edges, cliff-like, precipitously steep. I teeter there as a spinning top, near to toppling. The final drop. The ever-long fall. The babe, thwarted as it is, kicks hard, protesting against the fleshy edges of me, punishing me for a lack of love, concern for its welfare. How could any mother bear such an evil to its child, it thinks? I see, feel its pain, shed a singular, molten tear in mourning a life that I shall never swaddle in my arms, for its face shall turn eggshell blue, along with mine. We shall be parallel twins, in mere moments now. The gladdened clasp of death strokes my cheek, whispers ice-hot kisses, seducing me to the afterlife, one in which I shall burn. For this is doubly a biblical sin, in taking both my own life and that of an innocent babe, one whom never will stand the chance to breathe freely in this world. Perhaps I have done it a blessing, for she, or he, will know nothing of love and its torturous barbs. In that, there is some hope, a strangled relief, of kinds, macabre as it is. Am I protecting it? I dare to consider.
Morbidly, I grasp his lock of hair, my lover’s, imprisoned once in a heart-shaped locket he bought for me. As my hands lose force to cling onto it, I imagine it turning in circles as it drops from my lifeless fingers, dancing small jigs in the November night, before it comes to a final standstill, beneath my deadened, slate feet. The breeze shall toy with it, as it will me with my corded corpse, swinging me gently back and forth, until Molly, a maid, finds me at the break of dawn.
*
Now it is done. You must know my story. My whole story, not mere fragments.
I was a housekeeper. A housekeeper of The Swan Inn at Lavenham. An inn that boasts so many tales within its timber-strutted walls. Mine will just be one amidst a plethora of all the travellers, guests and lovers that have slept under its roof. I cannot be the only one to have loved and lost, for it is an age-old tale, that of ecstasy and pointed grief. For men love well, too well in my case, offering women the world, when all they truly have to offer is a small fledgling of a gift. Stolen kisses in corridors. Fumbles in the dark. Love-making under the metallic moon in wildflower fields after the heat of a summer’s day. Smears, semblances of a great love, but enough to pierce, deflate my wanting heart.
I should have known that a rich merchant’s son, a prided clothier of Lavenham, the capital of England at the time, would never commit to the likes of me. A serving girl. A girl from fields and farming, not the majestic wool trade with its high profits and returns. His father had already planned his marriage to another. I had no chance, not in reality. Yet, as many others, he spun the lines I needed to hear, seducing me to allow him to bed me, time and time again. Sometimes, daily, nightly, when we would steal fleeting moments together. If he had been downstairs, below my chamber, in The Wool Hall, he would seek me out. His father never noted his absence, always too driven by wool prices, and the talk of trade amidst other rich merchants.
Months passed and my menses ceased, as I knew they would. It was an inevitable truth. In secret, I tried to lose the babe, cut her or him loose, before the threading of my womb became too densely knit. At night, I foraged for tansy plants by the river, finding them in glimmers of moonlight, which I then ground into leaves, making a brew of brownish red, a tin-hued tincture. Each morning and night I would drink its warming sadness, swallowing it down as the babe began to wriggle its way further into the world. Quickening started.
I’m too late, I concluded. Too late for tansy leaves to work their cure. I’ve never been stupid, yet I kept drinking the lethal broth – to no effect.
As the babe wove itself deeper into the walls of my womb, my lover noticed by naked shape changing. He even asked if the babe was his which caused me to bar him from my door. I managed two days and nights before relenting. I’d eye him from my private window above the hall, sat next to his father. Our eyes would catch, snag, but I shook my head, telling him no. His father remained blessedly ignorant – as always.
On his eventual return to the warmth of my bedsheets, he vowed to marry me, make an honest woman of me. Cupping his hands around the swell of new life, he kissed our child, whispering that he would provide and care for us both. To be abandoned, jilted by him now, would prove to be a death sentence, for what other man would touch spoiled wares such as I, trailing a bastard babe in my wake through the judgemental market streets of Lavenham.
My whole fate, and the babe’s, lay solely in his interlaced fingers, readying either to place a ring on my own, or to cast me out, pointing a finger of damnation upon my hated form. I would become a heap of despair. A target for venom if this was his choice.
In contrast, to my complete deviance of power, he was a God, buoyed high upon a crown of wool and profit-making.
Blessedly, a wedding was arranged. Mine. Secret and private: clandestine as our stolen meetings for the past few months.
A servant girl, one younger and timider than I, laced me into my best gown, poor, dearest Molly, denting my glow of pregnancy. I placed sprigs of lavender in my hair and curled it to frame my face, pretty as a picture, I hoped he’d say at the altar.
On arriving at a small chapel on the outskirts of town, in the village of Brent Eleigh, an unnatural cold greeted me. The warmth of summer was long gone, for wintery down had sown its frigid tendrils around the stone of the church, draining away all its religious heat. It felt like a slab to me akin to a hurdle for burial. A charnel house instead of a house of God.
Upon frozen feet even though wearing my best Sunday boots, I stood for hours, surveying every twitch of sound that echoed from outside: twittering of larks in gorse bushes; the flurry of hares through bush and field beyond. The priest, bored and inert, finally left me to it, placing his Bible in my hands to peruse, perhaps for me to pass the time or pray for my sins, for he noted the swell of a new child within my belly. Smiling upon me as my father used to, he placed a hand of benediction on my cowered head before parting.
“I am sorry, child,” he mutely breathed at the door, leaving me totally bereft and alone.
Unwed.
*
A week dragged its cumbersome feet, heavy, tired, bleeding from wounds, until the fateful day of my release arrived. Not able to summon the strength to rise from my bed, I took to shutting the whole world out, cocooning myself into the drugged, poisonous haze of Room Fifteen. Refusing to eat or drink, Molly panicked so for my safety, eyeing the rotund belly of pregnancy beneath my thin chemise, whilst bringing me watery ale to drink as sustenance and crusts of sour dough. She need not ask any questions, for so tangible was my grief, it weaved its ivy vines around Room Fifteen, barring up all sense of daylight, reason and hope. I had become my own prisoner, drowning in an abject misery that veiled my every move, thought. He had chosen to place doom upon me, and all I could do was comply, coming apart, day-by-day, as frayed edges of a once pristine collar.
On the night of my death, damson-bruised, as it was, I gave myself a license, breaking forth from chains of judgement that had sewn grey night perpetually around me. I had one strength. One bow left, quivering as it was before being aimed and then fired into flight.
My life. It was mine for the taking, and I took it.
*
Centuries have passed, and I have changed. I am a thing of legend, talked about by new guests staying at The Swan and even managing to reach national newspapers. My nightly flights of passion are a lifeline, where I toy with the living, taking small mercies from the contented. I have done so since my death in 1737. Hundreds of guests, lovers, newlyweds, have slept as I stood guard, protective, even now, of Room Fifteen. My only home. Where love once existed.
The hotel owners in short-sightedness have made Room Fifteen the honeymoon suite (poor new brides) and have rebranded it as Room Seven, The Churchyard Suite. For too long, I found glee in torturing the newlyweds, appearing in my long, black cloak by their bedside, framed against moonlight in the middle of the room, beneath the infamous beam. My own private graveyard. They have always stared in fright, eyeballing me, with peaked fear, before resettling, most often, to sleep, telling themselves it was merely a dream or a wisp of a nightmare.
Victims of late have included both a nun and a security guard. He looked too much like my lover, the guard, so I chased him down the panelled corridors, billowing my black cloak around him like oversized raven wings, until he fell to the floor, weeped as a toppled babe. It made the press. Google it. I nearly felt sorry for him. Poor bastard.
The nun, well, I couldn’t resist. After taking to bed, reading her prayers to The Lord from her Bible, I let her sleep, before fiendishly waking her, tickling her feet. This made the press too. You’ll find many of my legendary naughty tricks online.
One last guest I must bid you give me more time to tell of. A writer. Spiritual. She purposefully sought me out, bringing me forth from wooden beams, not afeared to learn more of my story, eager to fill in the gaps, peep through hidden holes. I survey her, as a shared level of respect grows between us, as she searches for ways to begin my twisted tale.
In the height of the July heat, the fan fails to cool her, so I stand sentinel by her bedside, fanning her flushed face as she sleeps fitfully. I thought to provoke her, as I did the nun, but she is different. She sees me although I’ve kept hidden. It is as if she senses my presence and wants my story to be heard. The real one. She is a lamb really, duped into thinking that she’s staying in Room Seven, but she knows not how they switched all the numbers. In fear of me, I think. They didn’t want to put guests off the honeymoon suite – perhaps that is the reason – to keep the afeared traveller away from infamous Room Fifteen. The room of ghostly legend. My pleasure palace. My rack of pain.
I eye her as she searches for ways to begin my twisted tale sat in the courtyard beneath Room Fifteen the next morning. She wishes to give me a voice. A proper one. A gritty, truthful one, bearing grisly, barred edges. An ugly rhyme. For that is I. I am no pretty ditty or lyrical sonnet.
Glancing up for inspiration, even though she notes only her own child in the windowpane of Room Fifteen, she starts to type, flicking fingers quickly on her phone screen. The fledgling of my story. It becomes greater, begins to grow dappled feathers on its wings and chest. Gathering confidence and strength, she moves closer to me, intuiting, although not knowing until she checks out later today, that we have shared the same room. I, the cooling breeze, and the macabre muse, for her writings. As her child plays and her husband loses time playing games before check-out, she sits beneath the beam of Room Fifteen typing these words.
I inspire her to continue, and this, what you have read here, is her story.
My story.
The woeful housekeeper of Room Fifteen.
Photo by Steinar Engeland on Unsplash
