Carrion Crow

Marguerite Périgord had been confined for the sake of her wellbeing. That’s what her mother had said, on that foggy February morning when she took Marguerite up the stairs with a small stack of books and an armful of bed linen and settled her into the cramped attic of the family home.


Marguerite, Cécile’s eldest daughter, was on the brink of putting herself out into the world, on the brink of marrying herself off to a man, and Cécile felt it necessary to bless her daughter with everything she knew about being such a thing – a woman, married to a man. There are some facts about the world that only your mother can teach you. So into the attic Marguerite had gone, climbing the stairs towards her promised freedom, and she would stay there until she had learned the lessons that would prepare her for the real world, the lessons that only a mother could teach. Such a queer girl. It was for the sake of her own wellbeing. The Périgord family lived in a smart house in Chelsea, a residence befitting their blood, which was aristocratic, as Cécile would often remind them, and French aristocratic at that, which was the best type. Marguerite had never lived anywhere but the Chelsea house; she was born within its walls. Cécile had expelled her eldest child in her bedroom on the first floor, screaming into a pool of her maternal blood while holding the hands of staff who’d delivered their own babies in tin baths, alone. After her long recovery and countless fruitless efforts to expand the family, more than six years later came Louis, and after that, in quick fashion, Thérèse, and then there were no more children because there was no more husband at all. From then it had been the four of them: the wellborn Périgords.

The family home was on a street called Cheyne Row. It had three storeys above ground and a room perched at the top. A tall, thin house, like a top hat, with a secretive underworld in which all the work had, formerly, been done. In the basement, a front and back kitchen, a larder, a coal cellar; an old well came up in the front kitchen and had to be covered, for the odours that came up from the ground were offensive to the nose and inappropriate for the preparation of food. On the ground floor, a large reception area where, in the better days, Cécile would take her guests, where the good china watched from highly polished furniture, where the family had received the man whom Marguerite intended to marry and served him their most expensive tea. On the first floor, the cisterns, a grand bedroom for Cécil, with wrought-iron balcony front and back; on the second, a bathing room that held a magnificent eagle-clawed tub. On the third floor, a bed- room for Louis, and one for Thérèse, and the room in which Marguerite had previously lived. A moderate and untended garden reached out from the backside of the house, and in it were trees as old as the Périgord family, twisted inwards and heavy with their own weight, their branches lowering with each passing year. Above all this, Marguerite was now cocooned.

The attic was the best place for her; it was self-contained and petite, and so small as to be easily kept neat at all times. The hatch into the attic was covered by a piece of flooring that could be pushed upwards and aside when her mother wished to enter from below. To do so, Cécile would stand on the disfigured stairs beneath, bent and curled like the bodies dredged up from the bed of the Thames. Cécile had covered the floor around the hatch in thick rugs, once gold and rose and plum, now greyed and beiged with years of footfall; the rugs overlapped, as if to permit no sound from the attic. For rest, Marguerite had an iron-framed bed on which lay two pillows, feather-thin, for the straightness of the neck, and a cover for all seasons. At the end of Mar- guerite’s bed was a desk of very thick wood, yellow-brown, with knots engraved on the front of each wide leg. This was Marguerite’s primary torment, for she wished to sit at the desk and rewrite her Hugo stories, or draw a picture of her brother and sister, or press the bodies of the small insects that made their way out of the attic room’s woodwork, but she could not. Affixed to the desk was a black and gold sewing machine with a stabbing needle and a heavy wheel, the mechanisms of which crowded the underneath, making it painful to sit at and awkward to avoid.

In the far corner from the bed head was a tiny pedestal sink, by Doulton Sanitary Works of Lambeth and proudly marked so, and on the tops of the nickel taps were the words chaud and froid. The sink’s presence in the attic, almost certainly a late addition to the house, suggested that the space had previously been prepared for someone’s resi- dence there, but the sink was unreliable, giving out only a trickle and often running filthy for days at a time. Next to the sink, Marguerite had a small area in which to relieve herself.

From the other side of the sink ran a wall which was mostly left free, as the hatch, through which her mother would appear, was placed directly in the middle of it. In the corner opposite the sink, however, she had a shelf of tidy books, the pages of which had become wet-weathered and ripped with the ferocity of repetition. Her mother encouraged her to read the works of Victor Hugo, which she said had been written by a fine Frenchman who knew about families like theirs. Marguerite tolerated these huge books, one of which ran to almost a thousand pages over three volumes, by selecting small sections, reading a scene or two and remaking the world in her head in a manner she would better enjoy, adding decadence and some fun for the characters. In the books of Victor Hugo there were a million dreary half-worlds to remake for yourself.

The other book Cécile encouraged her daughter to engage with religiously was Mrs Beeton ’s Book of Household Man- agement. The copy on the attic shelf was the one that had been given to Cécile on the event of her own marriage, and within its worn pages were notes scribbled in pencil as to the reception of the many dishes that had been served in the Périgord household over the years since: taken very well by Mr and Mrs Lincolnshire alongside a slice of tongue; Cook reports that this jelly did not set, perhaps due to an excess of blood in the veal; made young Louis vomit bile. Cécile held firm in her conviction that, mistress of a house or simply a wife needing to feed her working husband, every woman stood to learn something useful from Isabella Beeton. During her time in the attic, Marguerite had found this to be incontrovertibly true.

On the floor underneath her bookshelf was a set of cast- iron scales in black, with a gold bowl on one side and on the other a circular platform where weights would sit. There were only two weights left, the two heaviest of the set, and these were not intended for Marguerite, but were a remnant of one of Cécile’s tempers; Thérèse, when she had been no more than four, had dropped the weights into the bath and caused the ceramic to crack and split, after which both weights and scales had been banished to the attic, as was Thérèse for two days, or perhaps it was three. Poor Thérèse had cried for the entirety of her confinement, and it was only when she grew silent, having fallen faint due to lack of food, that Marguerite herself had stormed the top of the house and rescued her. Cécile had carried on her day as if nothing was amiss, and from somewhere she found the money to have the ceramic on the bathtub mended, though it was never as grand afterwards, and not one of the children mentioned it again. But the scales remained in the attic, tarnished with badness.

The attic had no windows. There was only a small sky- light where the two sides of the roof met, no more than the width and height of a book, so that Marguerite might acquire the upper-class pallor that Cécile said she needed.

She had spent too much of her youth in the sun. Her attic space was far from the kitchens, so she might shed some of the childhood weight around her face and arms. On the walls of the attic were portraits of Queen Victoria, three in total, and, pinned tidily, a few of Marguerite’s favourite let- ters from her betrothed, and behind them the deeply embossed repeating patterns of the Lincrusta-Walton paper, installed some years prior with grand fanfare throughout the home, Cécile declaring, with assistance from a pamphlet, that it would not warp or be eaten by worms, was not cold in winter or hot in summer like stone or terracotta and was impenetrable and resistant to wet. Above Marguerite’s head there was a ceiling which rose to a point, or rather which sank at either edge of the room, making it difficult for her to stand near the walls.

The paint covering the wood above her had flaked in places, and through the timber many-legged insects had burrowed, leaving small holes through which draughts sometimes blew.
At the head of Marguerite’s bed, sitting on a small set of drawers between mattress and shelf, there was a creature dead and stuffed and mounted on a wooden plinth. It was a black bat, and it stood straight up instead of hung, its head tilted upwards as if howling, its wings half mast, its tiny claws lifted in celebration, and at the bottom of its strange legs were the feet of a small duck. If you lifted the creature into the light you would see that its wings were skin-paper, and if you ran your finger pad over its face you could feel its tiny teeth. Its borrowed feet were spread with dark grey flaking between each toe, a heel appendage at the back to help it stand, and Marguerite could fathom no reason for this debasement of both animals other than that the artist had needed to keep the artwork upright and thought he could improve on each of God’s creations. Still, she could not part with it. Its progenitor had been a gift from her grandfather to her mother, the replacement passed on to Marguerite, and it reminded her that you can throw away the rules of life and let your creative instinct take over; that you can put strange, unfitting parts together and create something atypical but beautiful, something truly unique.