Still, she’d kept silent, went the whispers, and that made her an accomplice, didn’t it?
She caught herself wishing that her husband were still alive, so that she could talk to him about it.
“And that is very nearly insane,” Althea told the mirror in her bedroom, “since he was the one who killed all those poor women in the first place.”
She still couldn’t believe it. She knew that it was true, of course, she’d been the one to go into that awful charnel room in the first place.
Still.
Whatever his other faults—ha—he’d been easy to talk to. She had never exactly been in love with him, but they’d been good friends. His offer of marriage had gotten her away from her house and the prying of her sisters.
She set the hairbrush down and went to the window. Trees looked back at her. She was living in the hunting lodge, now, many miles away from the accursed manor house.
She wanted to go home. Even knowing that awful room was there, even knowing what was in it. The manor had been her home for twenty-seven years. She was the mistress of it. She knew every inch of it, except for the room at the top of the tallest tower, and….well.
“Well,” she said aloud. “Well. Here we are.”
They asked the same question, all of them, friends and foes alike. “How could you not look? How could you live with that room there and never look into it?”
The answer was simple enough. She’d never looked because she had believed that she already knew what was inside.
Her father had a room that his daughters were not allowed to look into, and her sisters, prying and spying as they always did, had jimmied the lock one day and snuck in. Althea had peeped around the doorframe, half-curious, half-terrified.
It wasn’t much. A dusty room with big chairs leaking stuffing and taxidermy on the walls. Glassy-eyed deer stared down at her. There was a side table with some etchings of naked nymphs doing improbable things with goat-legged men. Her sisters thought this was hysterical. She just felt sick.
Her sisters had always been like that. She had never been allowed a diary, a corner of the room, even a single box that was not opened and pawed through. Her sisters wanted to make sure that she had no secrets, so she kept them all behind her eyes and committed nothing to paper.
When Bluebeard had brought her home from the honeymoon and handed her the great iron ring of keys, he had singled out the smallest one and said “This opens the door at the top of the tower. That is my room. Never, ever open it.”
Aha, she thought, another room of overstuffed furniture and pornographic etchings. Probably bad taxidermy as well. Well, everyone is allowed their privacy.
She pried the key off the ring and handed it back to him. “You should keep this, then.”
He stared at her, his eyes absolutely blank. She did not know him well enough yet to read his moods, and so she laughed a little and said “My dear, don’t you think I know how men are? Everyone needs a room to put their feet up. Take the key.”
The key was very small in his large hand, and gleamed as golden as her wedding ring. “But—”
“Really, I can’t think why I’d want the key,” she said. “I’m not giving you the key to my diary. I hope that doesn’t bother you.”
“Ah—no, of course not—I—” He took a step back. “But—ah—if I should lose my key, I will want to know that there is another one—”
“Oh, well, quite sensible,” she said. She plucked the key from his hands, looked around the room—they were in the library—and saw a bookend on a high shelf, in the shape of a woman holding an urn. “There, that will do.” She pulled out a chair, climbed onto it—Bluebeard hurried to grab the chair back and steady her—and dropped the key into the urn. “There. If you lose yours, you know where it is now, and none of the maids will bother to dust it up there.” She brushed her hands together.
“You are a marvel,” said Bluebeard, lifting her down from the chair, and kissed her forehead.
He had not been a bad husband, truly he hadn’t. He had even been concerned with her relationship with her sisters. When he left on travel, which he sometimes did, he always suggested that she invite her sisters to stay with her.
“Most certainly not,” she said, sitting in the library again, in her favorite chair. Her husband grasped the back of the chair and looked down at her, and she tilted her head back to look up at him. She smiled upside down into his eyes. “My sisters are appalling people, and I have no desire to have them here, prying into everything and telling me how to do everything better and leaving me no scrap of home to call my own.”