Chapter 67 Darcy

67 DARCY

NOW

She sits in her cell at HMP Bronzefield, knees drawn up to her chest as she reads.

She’s reading the works of William Blake, and when she gets a chance to use the computers, she’ll print out some of the poems she likes best. In her knitting classes she is working on a collection of knitted tigers to gift to premature babies at the local hospital, and she would like to accompany each toy with a copy of the poem that inspired it.

The workshop leader, Heather, is deeply impressed by Darcy’s plans for the toys. It makes Darcy beam with pride. It doesn’t matter at all that she’s in HMP Bronzefield, that she has swapped her school-run uniform of floral day dresses for a drab prison uniform of gray sweatpants and matching T-shirt. She’s found a way to shine still, and, for now, that is making her happy.

She doesn’t receive much mail, but today a certificate arrived. She grimaced a little when she saw it, felt an urge to rip it up. But now, she folds it, inserting it in her copy of William Blake as a bookmark. A keepsake.

This new life in prison has made Darcy aware of the moment she realized she had a special power that made her different from everyone else. A power that set her apart from all the rules.

She was a child of four or five, walking through a street in the Cotswolds with her father. He must have been on leave from the navy, and she isn’t sure where her mother was in this memory, but the one thing that stays bright in her mind is the garden she admired while they walked. A beautiful garden at the front of an equally beautiful cottage. A patch of beautiful sunflowers grew there, and she told her father she wanted them.

“On you go,” he said, and she ran into the garden and plucked them all, taking them back to him.

“Good girl,” he told her. “You see what you want and you take it.”

She knew then that a wildness crouched inside her, indiscriminate, volatile, and without remorse: tenderness twinned with ferocity, indifference met by brutality.

Only one thing has ever mattered to Darcy: her father’s approval. He had told her that she was Queen Darcy, indefatigable, unsurpassable, unequaled. She sensed that they were twin souls, that he had the same coldness at his heart, the same incapacity to feel things that other people mentioned: shame, empathy, love. She wondered, too, if her father had struggled with his own coldness the way she did, if he had had to seek out his own ways of finding satisfaction, or a sense of achievement. Darcy marveled at and sometimes envied people who seemed to experience joy in things like meeting friends for coffee, or caring for relatives, or reading a book. Darcy never read, because every character seemed ridiculous. She couldn’t relate, couldn’t empathize, and she could not for the life of her figure out why anyone would want to care for someone, and take pleasure in it, without wanting praise and acclaim. Sometimes it drove her mad, the lack of happiness. The vast, icy space where her heart should be.

But then, she found a way to experience delight: the rodents and birds she trapped in her garden. She relished slicing them up in her potting shed, inspecting their beautiful structures. Feeling the life leave them in her palm.

That was how she discovered excitement, or pleasure, though it was never as gorgeous as the moments after the killings in the guesthouse. As she listened to the stillness afterward, it was as though a blissful, heady nimbus had gathered around her, a burning exuberance leaping in her heart. Perhaps the same elation that other people found in baking a birthday cake for a friend.

How did that wildness get there in the first place? Was it germinated in grief, her profound sense of loss after her father’s death? Was it nurtured by her mother’s scorn? Or was it there from the moment of her conception, its blazing stripes rippling inside her DNA?

Who can say?

Darcy had worried about losing her reputation, her dignity. That fear had kept her in check for many years. It had pinioned her to the role of wife and mother, kept her from unleashing her impulses on people who crossed her over the years, and on people who did nothing, but whom she found herself daydreaming about killing. Her father would have wanted her to be a loyal wife, and so she was. Until now. She reasons that he would still be proud of her. You see what you want and you take it.

In prison, she is known for being a vicious, ice-cold killer, and so she is left alone. She has a little fan club, too, a group of fawning women who all clamor to do her bidding.

So, it’s not at all as she feared—quite the opposite. She is finally stepping out of the shadows and telling the world, This is who I am.

Look at me if you dare.