The Marquesan Tattoo, Part III: “Buried in Poplar”

On the evening he murders his wife, a London timber merchant receives a mysterious portrait—a tale of Victorian horror in five parts. Part Three: Buried in Poplar

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Hearths and hell, mayhem and murder… Episode III of The Marquesan Tattoo

In the weeks that followed Elisabeth Wanamaker’s murder, the constable’s investigations into the timber merchant’s alibi and whereabouts were duly performed, if half-heartedly. When the oppressive condolences no longer demanded his attentions, Rowan Richard Wanamaker resumed his affairs as a free man, a bachelor who’d learned his lesson for the third time.

But despite the lavish funeral—a detail twice underlined in the constable’s notes—speculation around the nature of her fiery death and parsimonious entombment spread through the R— Club and far beyond.

“Well, was or wasn’t cold-blooded,” they whispered in the R— Club kitchens, “the man still buried her in common poplar.”

Before departing London for British New Guinea on long-deferred affairs, Wanamaker made arrangements that his wife’s portrait be relocated to a lately acquired mansion flat in Knightsbridge. During his absence, however, the old footman at the R— Club slyly arranged that the portrait be unveiled from its muslin and hung over the hearth of his temporary quarters.

“A beautiful woman shouldn’t be under wraps,” he explained to the boy as the two hoisted her into a view dominating the room. The broader implication was not lost on the boy, and he was quick to respond in kind.

“Poplar, I heard,” said the boy, while they adjusted the portrait’s angle. Neither exchanged glances.

In this exchange of silent gossip, neither footman nor hall boy noticed that they had hung the portrait wires perilously on its fittings.

§

In late spring, after settling a rash of matters with his colonial interests in Papeete, Wanamaker returned to London. The harbormaster and the resident magistrate had used his absence to their advantage, but matters were rectified. The workers had not been so bold, and the plantation ran itself agreeably.

During the interval abroad, he’d thought but briefly of his murdered wife or her disturbing portraiture, but as he stood on the foredeck of his steamer and spotted the matchstick masts bobbing in the Pool of London, an abrupt memory of her insolent expression rekindled.

Preparation of the mansion flat in Knightsbridge had been delayed, so the gentleman returned to his apartment at the R— Club. He ordered his trunks, ledgers, and freight books unpacked and surveyed his quarters.

He was shocked to find his wife’s image hung over the hearth without his instruction, on account of both the impertinence and his late wife’s towering command of the room. He could not tolerate the scandal of ordering her removed. There are limits.

“Between the devil and the deep, ain’t he?” the footman muttered to his charge, closing the trunks.

She was more alluring than he’d remembered, but in equal measure her beauty had taken on an unmistakably ghoulish insolence. He refused his supper and prowled the room at feral pace, stricken by a polarity of lusts: the desire to stand below her and witness her astounding beauty—and the urge to diminish her for impertinence.

He settled on the former, mounted a footstool beneath her image, and inspected her more closely.

He reached up to touch her oil-rendered lips. The surface about her mouth had grown subtly raised. His fingertips sensed a bubbling there, a blistering ripple of blemishes. His mind raced with macabre horrors, but the idea that her mockery might be the product of the poor application of paint and not the supernatural steadied him.

“Your tarot and talismans had begun to spill over to me, woman.”

Something like a forced cackle emerged from his thin lips. In a burst of motion, he retrieved a jewel-encrusted letter opener from the Davenport—a wedding present from the young bride’s father. “May our communications be ever felicitous” was inscribed on its handle.

Wanamaker edged its tip into the distended bubbling at the parting of her lips, then drove further upward into her cheek. The pressure applied to the stretched canvas distorted her expression into a mask that rendered her appearance grimly laughable.

But as he released the pressure of the letter opener at a rate to preserve the distortion, her confidence and contempt resurged twofold. Momentarily her expression twisted into a tortured sneer. Loose chips of oil paint dangled from the parting of her mouth, and, once again, with the puncture of the painting’s blisters, a sickening rush of perfume bloomed in his nostrils.

“My god, woman, you smell like the theater.”

And yet, he stood there rapt, spinning the opener in his hand. It was as if he anticipated the ghastly events, if only dimly.

“I shall cure you of this recent flaw,” he informed her. “Haven’t I always kept my word?” he hissed and raised his index finger to her as a warning.

His attention caught by a flake of paint peeling loose from the canvas. Again he pressed the flat of the letter opener to the canvas and carved a crude, blistered path from the mouth to the cracked edge of her cheekbone. Where the cheek more stubbornly resisted, he scoured and pried at the hardened paint.

He knew the tides of this anger, even welcomed them—a matrimonial fury, dark and ancestral. The pattern had played out before; it would play out again; he had the eerie certainty that he would eventually destroy this painting in full. The matter was beyond the sovereign domain of his will.

The first chipped flecks broke free and scattered to the foot of the hearth.

Wanamaker was surprised to discover a small clearing below the surface of the excavation. Upon the canvas of this exposure, the chipped paint revealed a second layer—this one illustrated—beneath the first surface. A painting below painting and skin below skin. Though no larger than a parlour puzzle piece, and though the image itself was vague, its style and pattern was unmistakable.

Beneath the paint he had revealed a tattooed illustration by a Marquesans, one of the many barbarous arts of his plantation workmen.

§

These patterns awoke profoundly unpleasant memories: his wife's scandalous affection for these men, her public defense of them, her insistence on turning their occasional groans into martyred cries.

She had become particularly sympathetic to one of them, a pet covered head to toe in their sorcery. She swooned over his gruesome wood carving and littered the rooms with his savage totems.

For too long he tolerated the willfulness. In her idle time—time he would have done well to schedule for her—she had grown infatuated with his handiwork and the self-mutilation of the tattooed villager.

Her patronage was not lost on the genteel.

Gossip spread in the verandas and parlors of the Queen Victoria that the timber merchant’s wife had herself been tattooed or otherwise defiled. As headstrong or as guilty as she was, his young wife did nothing to gainsay it.

The disappearance of the docility that had once drawn her to him—and to her father's estate—reached its inevitable breaking point. Her arrogance left their marital relations beyond mutual interest or repair.

A conflict over these relations with her pet brought matters to a head.

Under express and punitive command, the merchant’s plantation foreman reported that the man had been witnessed exposing the mythologies of his bare back to a gathering of Englishwomen—the “tea spiritualists,” they were called at the Victoria.

The foreman, with hands trembling from the dread of delivering this news, informed Wanamaker that his wife was possibly numbered amongst them.

Wanamaker returned to his home, conducted his Elisabeth Wanamaker to her chambers and stripped the woman down to her wedding ring. He ordered a housemaid—a younger one he trusted to gossip—to satisfy him that her skin was free of devilry.

To his surprise, he found her skin was undefiled, but his young wife was neither scandalized by her treatment nor rid of a mounting obstinacy. His wife held his gaze through the whole sordid business, until the maid whispered in her mistress’s ear.

“Look away from him, ma’am. Your innocence needn’t weigh heavier on you than it does.”

Wanamaker ordered the home searched top to bottom and cleared of heathen art. The woodwork was torched on the grounds in the presence of the assembled staff. Her native was released from his duties and stripped of the modest status she had secured for him within their home.

The craftsman among his people was banished in the devilry of his painted nakedness.

“Let his sorcery cover his immodesty.”

Wanamaker was, however, cautious. He spared the laborer the most grievous punishments because his foreman cautioned Wanamaker about the man’s rank among their tribe.

“He has high standing as a tuhuna tā tatau among our people. We are a superstitious lot, as you know,” the foreman said with calculation. “We’ll have our hands full.”

“We?” Wanamaker retorted to the foreman.

The foreman corrected himself, with a more deferential apology.

“You, sir. You will have your hands full.”

Wanamaker forbade the villager to approach a civilized woman again or persist in the defilement of his people. “Not while he stands on the Christian soil of Britain.”

“Ejected like Lot, as you say, sir.”

Yet Wanamaker’s anger would not settle, and his wife's rank disobedience throughout the evening gathered force.

“A curse on your own flesh, Rowan Richard,” she shrieked at him with hellish protests. If the beast hadn’t defiled her body, without a doubt, he had defiled her Christian heart.

“Strike me, you coward, but don’t dare speak to me of barbarity, Rowan Richard,” Elisabeth Wanamaker hissed at him, a hellcat, indeed.

§

Now, standing on a modest footstool before her portrait, a letter opener driving beneath the surface of her painted skin, he recalled these bilious humiliations. He stabbed the tip of the letter opener through the canvas. It gave way like skin.

With this, Wanamaker felt the sudden, piercing flare of a fever blister at the corner of his mouth.

It arose at the same precise point as the insolent parting of his wife’s lips. The pain then coursed further into his cheek, along the exact path where he had scored her. Again, he stabbed at the canvas and again the pain erupted.

This misery ran beneath the expanse of his beard. He rushed to the mirror, where he parted a thicket of beard to expose a rutted channel. Even in the dim light of the gas lamps, he discerned scarlet skin and recoiled at the sight of its gouge. Matters escalated rapidly, and it was as if some acrid and bitter perfume rose from within his very flesh.

Terrors surged within him.

He did not dare to look back at his wife staring down at him impassively. He rang for a basin of ice water and a compress. When the housemaid entered, he ordered her to cover his wife’s features with the muslin wrap.

When at last she fully covered the wife, he found he was too terrified to dismiss her. Offering no explanation, he demanded she stand idly near him.

“Face away from me.”

He sat with his head in his hands. At last, the heat in his cheek subsided.

“Oh, wasn’t she lovely, sir? Is that her perfume, sir?” she said.

Wanamaker ordered her out, but she angled towards him on her departure.

“Shall I first open a window, sir? The air is close here.”

It was only for the flicker of a moment, but the housemaid dared to look at the gentleman who’d laid his wife to rest in common poplar.

Next Chapter: “An Unmistakable Teacup” ➡️