The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

“Do they really?” She was surprised at this string of empathy that linked her own travails to a fifteenth-century Dutchman who had battled through similar circumstances without even the prospect of an aspirin to ease the pain.

“No,” laughed Bertie, apologetically. “But they should.”

She swatted his arm and walked farther in, feeling a little sturdier already for the—rather Daddish—joke. There were benches set among the spindling natural columns that held up the ceiling of the vast chamber, and she took a seat in front of the widest wall of the cavern. On it, a thirty-foot-high dystopian Judgment Day scene faded out into Brueghel’s Fight Between Carnival and Lent.

Effie scanned the lumpen face of the Carnival clown, drunkenly riding his barrel of mead as, in the background, village maidens danced in a circle, and wondered if his was the role she had been cast in on this trip. Then a fading and a dimming of what low light there was, as the next image—another Bosch—appeared on the rocks, in which a demon held a flagon of beer up to a man’s lips and another pinned him down forever.

On the wall to her left, grisly phantoms peeled back a curtain to watch a pair of heedless lovers fresh from bathing in a vat of wine. What was that stupid internet phrase?

“I feel seen,” she said simply to Bertie.

He knew not to laugh, as Anna and Lizzie might, and Charlie definitely would have. She couldn’t have said it to Ben either, she realized: he didn’t seem to know where to put negative emotions, and instead focused only on being upbeat and positive.

Instead Bertie nodded slowly. “I think that’s exactly how they wanted you to feel.”

“Dirty and guilty and—”

“And utterly, totally, downright, disgustingly, inevitably human.” Bertie turned to her in the dark, and now that Effie could see all the demons from around the room reflected in his good, wholesome—yes, a bit nerdy—eyes, they didn’t seem to be closing in on her anymore.

“Are you okay, Effie?” he continued.

She played with the buckle on her bag where it rested in her lap. “I don’t know.”

Effie told Bertie about how she had woken up after the wedding night—the real, unedited version. About the dent in the pillow, the short, dark hairs, and the other glass on the nightstand. About the lost parts of her memory and her clothes on the floor, the snatches of things that might have happened: laughter, a shriek, a man’s voice, and tears. About how Charlie had behaved around her ever since, and about what she thought that might mean. About how it could ruin things with Ben, when he’d been just what she needed after James.

The devils continued their waltz around them, peasants feasted and farmed, and the cavern began to fill up with people as the day wore on toward lunchtime. Their group—the bridal party, as Effie still thought of them—had been among the first to enter the cave, and though it was not uncomfortably full yet, there was the sense of a crowd forming. As the newcomers scrutinized the wall to fathom the deeper meanings of early modern life, nobody noticed the two figures on the bench trying to riddle out what had happened only a few days ago.

Bertie was quick to grasp the situation and—most importantly for Effie—judgment-free. He agreed that Charlie seemed the likeliest candidate for having shared the honeymoon suite, but not Effie’s sense that it was a catastrophe if he had.

“There might still be another explanation,” he said, awkwardly patting her shoulder.

“Yes, you’re right,” she said, blinking dry her eyes, which had become wet with relief and gratitude during the course of their conversation. “I’ve been trying to hold on to that. It’s just, Ben and I were having such fun in London, and this has made me overthink it all….I just don’t know what I—”

Effie’s thoughts ran out as she peered into the gloom at a painting on the other side of the vast cavern. A head, a nose, a stance that all seemed familiar. A face in a crowd, realistic and expressive like one of Brueghel’s burghers, only sleek and modern, trim and handsome. Effie closed her eyes to refresh them and squinted again, incredulous at the trick her mind was playing on her.

Then movement. Not a part of the painted scene but standing in front of it. Looking right at her, gesturing wildly.

What?

Effie stood up abruptly, and Ben darted toward her from within the depths of the crowd.

“Come now,” he said urgently. “We need to leave.”

30. Lizzie

I couldn’t let him win.

I had done as he asked, played my part, thought that was an end to it—that was what we had agreed back in London.

But then I realized he was making up the rules as we went along. The way he’d just turned up out of the blue and was raising the stakes, changing the script, demanding more, even though I’d already given everything I had.

Given everything up, more like.

So this time, I refused. Refused to go along with it, refused to let him ruin my “wedding”—if that was what he still insisted on calling this trip.

He had pushed me so far already; I wasn’t willing to go over the edge.

So I clung on. I was stubborn—at times, cheerful even. I didn’t want him to see what he was doing to me.

That was a mistake: trying to beat him. It just made him even more determined that I should be the one to lose.

31. Anna

As they waited outside the cave for the others to emerge, Charlie took pictures of Iso, who had come out that morning dressed in a long blue-and-white striped kaftan embroidered with a hot pink Aztec design and strappy leather sandals with golden wings at the heels.

She had an endless supply of the sorts of things Anna never seemed to see in the shops—not that Anna had any interest in wasting her weekends