The Dress

The dress floated on its hanger, haunting the wardrobe. A spectral confection of yellowing lace and frayed ribbon.

The Bride reached out to caress one of the faded sleeves before dropping her hand and catching her reflection in the antique mirror. It was tarnished, like most of the furniture crowding the room. In this desolate stretch of land, the damp seeped into your bones and traced a fine speckling of mildew on everything it touched. The face staring back at her in the milky glass seemed pale and unfamiliar.

………………

She had been impressed when he first brought her here. Her impending Groom, as darkly inscrutable as the cliffs on which his home had been built so many years ago.

The house seemed to hover over the landscape like a galleon on the sea. Light shining from a hundred windows, warped and buckled by the coastal air, gave the place a hazy, lopsided warmth; a friendly drunk calling out across the moors in greeting.

The Bride spent her first night under the canopy of the bedframe, lulled by the sound of waves on the spit of beach below the cliffs. Her sleep was childlike in its austerity, a pure and dreamless nothingness. The light which woke her the next day was as sharp and clean as a knife, and illuminated the empty space next to her in the marital bed with a cruel precision. Her Groom had business in town, and would be back within the week. A note written in his spidery hand was resting on the coverlet, its edges already curling in the morning air.

In the days since she had drifted from room to room, lifting dust sheets and fogging up the windows with her sighs. The welcoming air of the house had dissipated. She felt like an uninvited guest, the ghost at the feast. The charwoman who came twice a week to mop the floors and polish the silver barely glanced in her direction. The man who tended the garden met her cheerful greeting with a dour nod. Even the cat which prowled the corridors ignored her enticements.

She saw in every downcast look and mumbled response a barely-concealed contempt for the new mistress, living in sin with the man she was soon to marry. He laughed at her protestations when she begged him not to visit her bed before the wedding night, told her to pay no heed to the old-fashioned morals of the servants. The stone on her finger, cold and heavy as a curse, should be enough to put paid to any gossip on that account.

The wedding preparations, she had been assured, were in hand. Nothing to trouble herself with, the Groom had told her, tilting her chin towards his face. He had returned from town with packages under his arm; her bridal trousseau, and a wedding dress altered to fit by a trusted seamstress. The priest would marry them in the squat grey chapel on the headland the Sunday after Hallowmas.

The Bride had naught to do in the meantime but stalk the boundaries of her new home, her new life; the parlour facing out onto the granite sea, the kitchen whose very walls were damp to the touch.

By day, she walked the moors or struggled across the coarse sand of the beach. She wore her loneliness like a threadbare coat, ready to cast off at a moment’s notice.

The house creaked and twisted in its moorings, refusing to yield its secrets. And beneath it all, that pervasive, graveyard smell of rot.

………………

She had been hopeful when the whey-faced girl arrived from the village to prepare their meals for the next few days but she was shy and taciturn, barely raising her eyes to meet her new mistress’ face. Loitering by an open window, the Bride had caught snatches of conversation between the girl, who was peeling potatoes in the weak sunlight of the garden, and the charwoman pinning out the washing.

“After what happened to the last one it’s hardly a surprise he keeps her hidden away like a secret.”

The charwoman muttered something darkly in response, which the Bride had not quite caught.

The girl replied with an air of finality. “If his version of events is to be believed, she were wandering, confused by the fog, and lost her footing.”

There was a pause.

“They say the moon was so full that night you could see the Irish coast from the mainland. It were three days ‘efore they fished her from the sea.”

She knew of this tragic first marriage, but she’d always imagined a gentler demise, a slow wasting away rather than such a violent departure. An image came to her unbidden; a woman, hands outstretched, stumbling towards the sheer edge of the headland. And at her back, a shadow.

She dreamt that night of the clifftops. The waters below seethed against the black rocks in the bay but the scene was eerily quiet. She could see ahead of her someone standing motionless before the wide expanse of sea and beyond that the horizon, unfurling like a bolt of fabric.

She had wanted to call out a warning, to reach and pull the stranger back from the edge of the cliff but her voice had withered in her throat. She saw now that the figure was a woman, clothed in white with a veil that drifted and snapped in the wind. Her feet were bare and threaded with seaweed, and her hands were puckered like fruit left out in the rain.

As the woman began to turn the Bride felt dread rise in her throat like bile. She woke before the face of the figure, the thing, on the cliffs was revealed.

The only detail she could recall with any certainty, when she woke the next morning in a shaft of that barbed coastal light, was the recognition of the dress in her dream.

It was the same one that hung in the wardrobe, heavy with the legacy of wedding feasts left to moulder, of bridal parties long since turned to dust. And the terror she had felt when the figure had started to turn.

Her fear, she realised now with a feeling akin to falling, was that it was her own face she would see.

………………

With each turning of the tide, the sea spewed up its secrets. A hint of opalescence from within the bones of a gull caught the eye. She extracted the object from the vaults of the ribcage, picked clean by the brackish air, and studied it. The sheen had been tarnished, but it looked like one of the ivory buttons stitched into the back of her wedding dress.

The beach felt suddenly hostile, the steep bluff at her back as watchful as a sentinel. The Bride could have sworn she saw a figure in white pacing the clifftops above her. Or perhaps it was simply the kettle of birds that would dip and wheel in the updraft, drifting apart before flocking abruptly back together as though tied by invisible strings.

After that, she began to wheedle him for a new dress, something silken and ivory to replace the decayed antiquity of the garment he had laid out on the bed for her like a flayed hide. Something to symbolise their new marriage, their blossoming love. He had demurred. The dress was ancestral, an heirloom, much like the house itself. It was a tradition, the Groom told her. Every woman in his family had worn it on their wedding day. Besides, he had said as he flashed a wolfish smile, it would fit her perfectly.

So the Bride buried her sense of unease. She wanted to please her Groom, the man who had opened her up like an oyster, exposed her tender flesh. The man she hardly knew.

………………

She had awoken to a harsh cawing, as toneless as an incantation. A gull was perched on the sill of the window in her bedroom, a window she was sure she had bolted against the violence of the wind the night before. As she crossed the room to wave the bird away, something alien and strange nagged at the edges of her vision.

The mist feathering the ground made it difficult to see with any clarity, but there was a piece of fabric snared in the skeletal branches of a tree beyond the marshland. At first, she assumed it was a tablecloth that had escaped the confines of the washing line. But then the mist parted slightly and the apparition come into focus.

It was her bridal veil, uncannily white against the bleakness of the heath. It looked to the Bride like a flag waved in surrender.

……………..

The night before the wedding was spent in separate rooms, as custom dictated. From its wooden casket, the dress seemed to whisper a warning.

The same whey-faced girl arrived the next day to prepare her for the ceremony. Silenced by the solemnity of her task, there was no more talk of drowned wives and clifftop wanderings. Her hands trembled as she laced the Bride into her gown and dressed her hair with the heather which grew on the moors.

Trussed up in a dead woman’s clothes, with weeds woven into her braids, the Bride was led, mute and compliant as a lamb, through the lychgate.

Her Groom awaited in the nave of the chapel, hand outstretched but eyes turned towards the looming stained glass window behind the altar. Abraham raising his knife to Isaac; a blood sacrifice like the ones demanded by the gods of old.

He was right about one thing, it did fit perfectly. The dress clung to her like a shroud.