The Marquesan Tattoo, Part IV: “An Unmistakable Teacup”

On the evening he murders his wife, a London timber merchant receives a mysterious portrait—a tale of Victorian horror in five parts. Part Four: An Unmistakable Teacup

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Marriage and murder, ghoulish and grim. Episode IV of the Marquesan Tattoo…”

In the nights that followed, Rowan Wanamaker became a man obsessed. He found himself caught between the oscillations of bravado and terror. A lust would surge to expose the tattooed secrets below her painted surface—then an opposing dread countered, of pain gouged from his flesh.

Through the sweltering London summer this mania escalated, and the timber merchant neglected the affairs of his enterprise. In the evenings, he drank, sitting in a wingback chair angled near the hearth. He glowered at the shrouded portrait. At times, he staggered to the painting and ran his hands over its muslin covering. The sensation of the fabric was cool, but he could not bring himself to remove it.

The tide shifted inexorably towards resolute action. After an evening of considerable drunkenness, the timber merchant convinced himself of his capacity to endure the greatest of agonies. He appealed to his courage with urgent murmurings. The earlier sensations had been the product of the fatigue of travel or, more probably, the ravings of a fevered mind.

“Sheer madness,” he intoned. He resolved to tolerate any sympathetic tortures that might arise upon his flesh.

And so concluding, he cast aside a decanter and raced to his desk drawer, where he seized his father-in-law’s bejeweled letter opener. In a headlong bolt, the timber merchant then threw himself at his murdered wife’s shroud. He clambered upon his footstool to face her. Balanced there precariously, the gentleman summoned his fortitude and yanked the ash grey muslin to the floor.

“A harlot’s garb,” he sneered, before daring to look back at her.

There she stood.

But where he had expected to confront her viperous smirk, he was struck rather by the placidity of her expression. Despite the chips torn from her marred cheek, she remained rendered as she was in youth, comely, even beseeching, daring him to disrobe her.

“Your mettle has been rewarded. You have been a fool to fear her,” he told himself.

His confidence fully restored, the gentleman carved lustily. “You have the endurance to suffer agonies.” His attack recommenced on the surface of the oil painting, along the expanse of her bare, descending arm. If nothing further lay beneath the blistered surface of her forearm, he would be done with her directly.

“Or perhaps I’ll hang you in the foyer like this,” he laughed, roughly gouging at her painted skin. When he leaned in and supported himself with the picture frame, he found it warm to the touch, but his progression was unstoppable. His strained mirth exhausted, he counseled his will uneasily and at repetition. With every hard scrape of the letter opener, he intoned her name.

“Elisabeth Wanamaker… Elisabeth Wanamaker…”

He ground her forearm free of its blistering. There, below the outer surface of her white gloved hand, lay exposed a second image—an inner hand, depicted in the devilry of Marquesan tattoo. A hand below a hand, delicate and pallid.

He distinguished an unmistakable teacup of household china. It dangled limply from the tips of her fingers on the threshold of balance.

The appearance of the teacup, half-buried and subliminal, dredged the horrors that had held him firmly at bay. Sudden spikes of needled pain raced along the back of his own hand, a phantasmagoric echo that drove the letter opener clattering from his grip. The skin on his hand was now as scarlet and blistered as the surface of the portrait. He clawed at the bubbled surface of his own hand, dreading what damnations he might discover there.

He raged in anger at the image of his wife. “Elisabeth, your fate was just. Even in death you remain a living infection.”

The timber merchant leaned to the light of the hearth to inspect his revealed wound. Below the red surface that now ran from the back of his hand to his fingertips, the wraithlike trace of a tattoo began to manifest upon his own skin. Gradually the image revealed itself. He saw that the barbaric image contained the selfsame, sinister pattern of the china cup with which he had served her on the eve of her fate.

More ghastly still, his wife’s fingertips began to loom upon his own. He gasped, lurching to a mirror by a gaslight and firmly parted the hair of his beard. In the buried hues exposed there, he revealed Roman lettering, the horological dial of his wife’s watch.

The watch hands were set at IX, the approximate hour of her death. Compounding his fright, the acrid scent of poisonous nightshade flooded his senses.

A sepulchral quiet fell. The gentleman could hear only distant coughing beyond his doors, then the muffled chime of midnight from a far-off grandfather clock.

The stillness that followed overwhelmed his faculties. Reeling into the hallway of brass and paneled walnut, he cried for the club’s old footman; but when the servant arrived still in a somnolent daze there was, to the man’s great confusion, no task at hand.

“My apologies. There’s a sharp smell, sir. Is there something that we have neglected? I can wake the boy.”

Wanamaker’s misery grew unsupportable. He struggled to cover her again with the muslin, but the torments etched across his tattooed hands overwhelmed him. The old footman pressed in closely to be of service.

“May I help you, sir? There you go, sir. Don’t trouble yourself.”

“Cover her now. With that gray rag.” Wanamaker’s eyes were closed and he could only indicate vaguely with his freshly scarred hand.

His back turned safely from the gentleman’s gaze, the old footman relaxed his professional mask at once and studied the softness of the murdered woman’s features. He feigned a struggle with the muslin to study her scarred surfaces more closely.

A spectral beauty, pale and composed, held his gaze in the flickering gaslight. The footman shivered.

“By the snatch or the match,” the footman thought, and turned away.

Next: “A Heathen’s Ring” ➡️