The English Descendants

37

1893- Entry 1

There is no bank in this city that will accept this idea.

So we begin again. Margaret McDermott. She is many years my senior. We marry on Sunday after mass. She wants to be well cared for in her age and she thinks a baronet must be able to do so. I do not think she will be impressed when she sees the crumbling edifice of Allerdale Hall.

1893- Entry 2

Margaret is not as strong as Pamela and the tea has taken its toll on her so much faster. I cannot bear to watch. She is older, yes, but when I met her, she was sharp-witted and delightfully funny. Now she is cold nearly all the time, her fingers turning blue in the chill. I wrap her in blankets, I keep mittens and gloves throughout the house for her, and I am as gentle as I can be. I have tried to discourage the tea when I can, but it is warm and she craves that in her hands. She will be gone soon.

1893- Entry 3

Lucille says Margaret will die today. I do not know. I hate watching her weaken. I am not at Allerdale Hall and I do not plan on being so until quite late. I am out riding.

My thoughts, however, are with heaven and hell, guilt and betrayal, and the ever-present accusation of our mother that we are monsters. I cannot help but believe we are- if we were not then, we have become so now. And yet I also feel as though I need to be rescued, as the damsels in the old children's stories. I know there must be a way out of this, but I cannot see beyond Lucille. Can monsters be rescued, or are they always slain by the knight in white?

Some days, I wish my sister would drink her own damn tea.

I am not looking forward to tonight.

1893- Entry 4

She was excited to deposit Margaret's body in the clay. I was fighting the urge to cry. Or to hit her until she screamed that she hated me. Hatred would be better than this, if this is love. There is something of my father in me, after all.

But with the night, Lucille was, as last time, the gleeful and giddy girl she was long ago. This is how we are. She grows sour and morose, intense and demanding, our nights sometimes painfully rough, when I have a wife. Then, once she is gone, there is girlishness and a wish to play and to please, to flirt and to explore.

I have suggested once and only once that she consider marrying so that she and her husband can be so playful every night, letting me find myself a suitable bride as well, but she screamed at me that I had betrayed her with the very thought. I had promised never to fall in love, hadn't I?

I had forgotten that. I am twenty-six. I made that promise a decade ago out of desperation. But she remembered. She remembers everything.

I hope that the mining machine, now sitting in pieces in the house, will work as soon as I put it together. That there is enough coal to feed it. That my design is good and that it works, a steam powered dragon pulling treasure from the depths. That the clay is rich and beautiful still, ready to build cities the world over. That someone believes me when I tell them this. That there are no more bodies to deposit in the clay.

I cannot help but feel as though everything is too late for me. I missed the great Columbian Exposition, the gathering of brilliant minds in that wondrous American city of Chicago. There were articles about it in the papers in Edinburgh. Sketches of beautiful glimmering buildings built on the plans of the innovator, Burnham, and landscapes that transported visitors out of the city in a moment designed by the great Olmsted. And amidst all this, Ferris built his wheel, Tesla cast electricity through the air, and the hall of machinery chugged with such a great din that there were few who dared explore it- I would have been in my element, hearing be damned. The whole world descended upon the White City. But not me.

I was luring a woman to her death in the grey of Edinburgh.

What hope is there for me in this?