Hungerstone

by Kat Dunn

To be a woman is a horror I can little comprehend.

This anxious work of mine that has driven me for ten years, the precise and unassailable positioning of Henry and myself both in the upper ranks of society, gives the meaning to my life, makes walls and floors and borders in a borderless, insecure land. But it exhausts me.

Same girl same

laudanum

She really said its time for the opium

My body is my enemy, and I will use every weapon in my arsenal against it.

long, low stone edifice of medieval and Tudor foundation that, unlike its distant neighbors, Chatsworth and Lyme, has not been wrapped in a Palladian façade.

images of monks and knights, an England we have long fled.

I am an unerring general in the campaign for our social standing. No rule of etiquette is obscure to me, no occasion too difficult to host.

That is what Henry bought in me: taste, refinement, high birth, and good blood.

a married woman of thirty

I am a beauty. It is well-known My eyes are cornflower blue and my skin like spilt cream. When we were courting, Henry would take down my hair from its pins and wind its heavy locks around his fingers like honey around a knife.

White, blonde, blue-eye

Not even the thick cloud can dull the glossy shine of Henry’s hair or wash the color from his cheeks.

I am only a wife, but I hold more of Henry’s reputation in my hands than he has ever been able to accept.

the pretty head of a young woman, a sweet, heart-shaped face and eyes that

I find myself wondering what it was Henry felt compelled to destroy by fire.

This was my induction into a motherless world, alone and met with fear and horror.

is a mouth closed around a secret, a promise unspoken. Ancient, and unreal.

Henry does not sleep beside me. He rests as far away from me as he can. And then the next thought follows: the woman from the crash had been a few feet from me all along.

The darkness is oppressive, so I move towards the shutters and throw them open.

For so many years there has been only Henry to call me by my Christian name alone, so plain and unadorned with title or status. She assumes command in this house that I have yet to bring to

The two pinpricks I felt in the dream were nothing more than that: a dream, surely.

Perhaps it is better not to do a thing and let the dim candlelight hide our many sins.

am overwhelmed. This is more than the running of an estate. This is the salvage of a shipwreck, timbers snapping all around me as the waves surge higher. This house,

Henry’s reputation, our marriage: I am responsible for it all.

I am struck by how perfectly and totally alone we are.

There is bloodshed already. For a decade, I have carried the burden of his secret, and now he brings another hunting party to our door. How simple it is for him to bury the past. I only pray we do not resurrect

“Strange she won’t say where she’s from or where she’s going. It’s like she appeared out of nothing.”

This is my house. I am master here.

Let this life of mine be about more than pain.

papered in an unpleasant shade of yellow

Yellow wallpaper reference ?

“It is naive to think one is owed anything from life. We endure it; we survive it. That is enough.”