Interior Monologue

Lord Pierce stood in his finest suit as the coffin lowered into the cold ground. He half expected it to jerk and shift, his Lady still alive and struggling to escape, but it continued into the hole without incident. Mary had been beautiful in life and would be beautiful in death for a time. He hoped she would not require the use of the pistol, but there really was no telling. The Lord experienced a strange settling sensation as the coffin sank into the cavernous opening of the earth, as though he himself were also being lowered. This settling sensation ended with weightlessness, however, and when the first shovel of dirt struck the lid of the coffin, he could not help but find the sound comforting. The Lord was not unhappy with his wife, not exactly, but he now saw her passing to be an unexpected windfall. He was sorry to see her go, in a sense, but she would not leave any tangible hole in his daily life.

In truth, her removal simplified his life, which he found secretly delightful. The Lord Pierce was a straightforward man for whom the confines of marriage were more a necessity than a desire. He required an heir for his twilight, someone who would be honor-bound and fiscally obliged to care for him in his advanced years. A young wife was a sensible bridge between his youthful prime and the time when his own heir might take responsibility for his care. The Lord did not worry that such a transactional relationship with his kin might bear poor results; for Lord Pierce, all relationships were transactional. The thought of his own son mistreating him or attempting to shorten his life for the sake of financial gain, was so foreign a thought as to never have occurred to him. He had needed an heir; hence, he had needed a wife.

His first wife had died young, which had proven fortunate, given her mental state. That she had left him no male heir was decidedly unfortunate. His daughter was pleasant enough, but he was all too aware of the eventual dowry payment to ensure a good match. The Lord needed his daughter to marry well, so that she might also care well for him. There was no guarantee that he would ever have a male heir, and so bets must be hedged.

The young Mary had been another stroke of luck. She, also, was a necessity, but had proven to be beautiful, and resourceful, and dutiful. And so, the Lord had been rewarded with a son. He felt then that however long her life may prove to be, the Lady was a worthy investment. She had produced a male heir, and she was also young enough that she herself could (and would—he felt this to be true) care for him in his old age. So, the Lord’s bets were carefully hedged, and he felt secure in his future.

And then the Lady became ill. When it became clear that the illness was sufficiently serious to warrant regular care, the Lord worried about this new drain on his resources. He was not a monstrous man, only monstrously practical. He ensured that the Lady had medical care of sufficient quality to satisfy the reasonable observer, but never pursued expensive, modern, or experimental treatments. Neighbors chalked this tendency up to his sensible nature. And sensible it was, although the assumed motivation was not the same as the true motivation.

Lord Pierce considered himself a good man, and he attributed any deviance from conventional wisdom or generally accepted behavior to his keen intelligence. He was a smart man, brilliant, even, in his own estimation. Friends and family reinforced this perception at regular intervals, and, oddly, the notion of confirmation bias never crossed his expansive mind.

Regardless, the loss of his second wife was a blow to Lord Pierce, both mentally and financially, as funerals are not inexpensive. The Lord’s financial strategy would now turn to saving, and to self-preservation, although it occurred to him that the health of his male heir was now of the utmost priority. And he could now divert money from his daughter’s dowry into other endeavors, which was good.

It was late on the day of the burial, and as life began to settle back into a more or less ordinary pattern, Lord Pierce began to have a strange sense of unease. He would have been hard-pressed to describe it, given the opportunity, but of course he discussed it with no one. For the first hours, he ignored it entirely. The unease grew, however, and that evening manifested itself as a strange noise beyond the window of the manor.

Lord Pierce had been reclining after dinner in the parlor, reading and enjoying his pipe, when the newly familiar sensation that something was amiss crept upon him. He adjusted himself slightly in his overstuffed chair, and returned to reading, intent upon shaking off this pervasive sense of discomfort. He turned a page and heard the noise for the first time. To call it a moan would have been melodramatic, but not technically incorrect. He calmly turned his gaze to the window, refusing to be roused, mentally dismissing the sound as a myriad of alternatives in a single moment. The sound stopped.

As he returned his gaze to the page, the noise began anew, insistent and increasing in volume. This time he sat up in his chair and craned his neck to see out of the glass, but darkness obscured any view of the yard. The noise continued in volume and intensity, and he thought for a moment that he might direct one of the staff to investigate. Then he remembered that he had given the staff leave after the burial, and that the children were staying with the Lady’s parents, and that he was alone in the house, at his own request. The sound stopped again.

The Lord sat, resolutely opposed to any open acknowledgement of the present situation: namely that his wife was buried in the ground, and that he had not been entirely certain that she was dead when he had ordered her buried. Whatever the case, she was certainly dead now, and had likely expired silently and painlessly through asphyxiation before ever regaining consciousness. What had possessed him to put that hammer and chisel in her coffin he would never know; perhaps some latent sense of duty or obligation for his wife’s well-being had overtaken him in a rare moment of vulnerability. The motive was unimportant; the objects were buried with his wife. If anything, those objects lent him plausible deniability in the event she somehow miraculously escaped her coffin. Why would any man intent on prematurely burying his wife give her the means for survival? Surely he was not to blame for her death. Any rational actor would reach the same conclusion.

—

Lady Pierce drifted in and out of consciousness, and time became impossible to track. She thought idly about the pistol but rejected the thought of suicide outright. She would rather suffocate. Her limbs were stiff from laying still for so long, and she tried stretching a little in the small confines of her tomb. She stretched her fingers down by her thighs, and as she relaxed, her left hand landed on a heavy thing in the expansive pocket of her gown. She reached inside, and discovered her husband’s final gifts: a hammer, and a chisel.

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