The Graveyard Wedding

He is the love of my life. For years, we’ve spent each day coming closer together in every possible way — emotionally, physically, spiritually, logistically — until it only made sense for us to take the biggest step of all. Now, after months of complex preparation, here we are. It’s not an altar, but it means something to us. We stand in a small cement rotunda ringed by Grecian columns on the top of a hummock in the oldest graveyard in Illinois, our family and friends seated in scattered clumps on high-quality white folding chairs among the monuments and gravestones around us. This rotunda, this folly, was erected by my distant ancestor, whose surname I still bear, to commemorate his massive achievements: in business, in politics, in progeny, in power. I was the first, at least in living memory, to think of using this rotunda as a stage for a wedding. Everyone found it fitting, from my innumerable relatives to his scant few family members, seated nearby behind him, looking proud though slightly uncomfortable.

Being married here is a pledge to my family. My parents died when I was young, and I was looked after by my aunt and uncle by law, but also by all the cousins and great-aunts and grandparents and various Babbages the world over, as I was the sole heir, the True Inheritor. I was my parents’ only child, and as the direct descendant as defined in Thomas Babbage’s 250-year-old will, the rightful owner of all that entailed. Now I have met the love of my life, and I will take his name, and for the first time in generations, the True Inheritor will cease to be a Babbage. The least I could do to soften the blow was pay fealty at the ceremony where the name would break.

He offered, David. He offered to take my name. But I never reveled in the fortune or the lands. Much to my aunt and uncle’s annoyance, I insisted on being raised in their comfortable but modest suburban home, attending public schools and being raised with the same chore-based allowance as my peers, while skeleton staff maintained the grounds of our ancestral home and my bequest moldered in various accounts until I came of age and decided what to properly do with it. I was supposed to spend my college years dreaming big, but I found myself more drawn to dreaming about, forgive me, myself. I wasn’t enthralled by the Babbage legacy and all its trappings. I simply wanted happiness, personal growth, and, more than anything, love. Which I found in David during my junior year abroad.

He’s handsome, to be sure — tall and strapping and kindly about his eyes, with a jaw that catches attention and hazel eyes that seem perpetually flecked with golden energy — but he also knew immediately how to converse with me. We became instantly intimate, sharing deepest thoughts and wildest fancies, holding nothing back from each other. Falling in love with David was like sliding into shoes that fit for the first time. I felt lighter, quicker, more stable, and more alive. I know this is goofy talk, but being in love with David, and feeling his intense love for me, feels like … like I’m an appliance the runs on the current of joy I get when I’m plugged into him? Something like that. People in true love will recognize the strain I’m feeling, trying to describe it.

Neither one of us was particularly charmed by London, so our initial bond was that of two Americans longing for the end of this semester and a return flight home. We agreed that the promised adventure had turned out to be, instead, a series of disappointments and mild hardships. Our lodgings weren’t as nice, our professors were unkind, and our impression of British life was “bluh.” David confessed to being a Francophile since childhood, so maybe that was the origin of his let-down. For myself, I hadn’t anticipated the weather. Great Lakes seasons, harsh and sunless as they can be, still hold uncountable charms compared to the incessant drear of London skies. Yet even in this cocoon of British gray, we found the kaleidoscope of love. It’s no wonder we clung to each other so much in those fervent first months.

Now here we are, three years later, and I refuse to let David take my name, because to me, the legacy of the Babbage name is just as dreary and enveloping as the London weather. My inheritance only seems to provide comforts that are cold and mildew-scented. These are still comforts to be sure, and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for a life without the fear of poverty or even want. But something in my nature has always yearned for a fresh and sunny start, and David promises that with his every fiber. He’s endlessly optimistic, and he has a strength and grace and bravery when facing big decisions that makes me feel empowered with possibility, something the Babbage name only strangles in its old associations with yesteryear. I look at him now, so handsome in his tuxedo, framed with all the beautiful white flowers and the clear blue summer sky, and I know that my future will belong with him. Our life is ours. Before the ceremony, I tied our fortunes together, and while that alarmed my family — they could not conceive of what a lopsided transaction this was — I have no regrets. They don’t understand that David has never once, not in all his deepest desires and words, mentioned the fortune or what we might do with it. It’s as if, for him, it doesn’t exist at all.

Oh, we talked about it, of course, but I was always the one to bring it up, and whenever I said “fortune,” he would reply, “Fortune is a future word. Your inheritance is the past. The only fortunes that matter are the ones we make together.” Do you see how safe I feel in his arms? Who says things like that? He’s a poet in his soul, but so practical of mind and industrious in action that I do not fear for our prospects in the least. Let the Babbage estate and the bank’s dingy digits stay locked up for some other day, when it’s clear to us what their purpose should be. Today, we are wed, and we are us. This is what I want my family to witness. I want them to see our new life begin with just us, then witness us walking out of the graveyard where so many unhappy dead Babbages rest, the path strewn with rice and hope.

Oh! And it’s already time for me to speak my vow. Shall I love this man with all my heart until death do us part? “I shall.”

*

My Margaret is mine. She may not be the choicest fish from the ocean. You would not spot her across a crowded bar and feel that urge to woo her with drinks and charm. Her hair is dirty brown and holds no shape. Her eyes are downturned and a dull tan. Her cheeks are overly large and meet at a chin that already, in her twenties, threatens to droop and jostle. Her figure is so nondescript, I fear I have not the inspiration to describe it at all. She’s stocky, I suppose. Quite short. She looks up at me with love that borders on worship, and that is the garden I have cultivated. She is the plant I have created with my own seeds, mine and mine alone, completely separate from the girl her relatives cared for and remolded into my own vessel. In moments, I will ring her finger, and declare my ownership to the world.

How delicious and fitting that I will do so while standing on the ruins of her great family’s legacy. I love the ceremonial duplicity of wedding in her cemetery, and I wish only that I had prevailed in also having the reception here, so that I might literally dance on their rotting Babbage graves. While it’s not hard to hold the mask I donned when I first forced our encounter in London three years ago — I have practiced this friendly demeanor so often, I’m at risk of genuinely feeling it — there’s an impatience I must contain, one kicked into high gear the moment we signed the prenuptial yesterday evening. This ceremony isn’t strictly necessary to complete my triumph, but having that triumph witnessed and celebrated by the very old Babbages I intend to destroy is very much the point.

I fear my parents are not doing as well in this department. It’s an acting job that all our plans and dreams require, so I know they’re doing their level best, but a quick glimpse behind me — one intended to look like a loving son’s sheepish need for reassurance — shows that they are antsy as hell, and would urge the old minister to hurry it along if they weren’t keenly aware of how ghoulish that would sound. Is it not enough that she is mine? They are bright, but not brilliant, and it has always fallen to me to take stock of the long view, the big picture, the ultimate goal. Grandpa died in a Babbage mine, crushed by the fruits of their filthy wealth. I will return the favor with a paper cut, a slice from the edge of clever legal maneuvering the moment my Margaret joins her ancestors somewhere in this macabre wedding venue. Perhaps — ha — perhaps in the very dress she wears today.

Something borrowed, something blue, something old, something new.

There are four parts to any undetectable poison: agent, reagent, slow action, and brain death. You cannot administer something that’s already deadly without it being traced back to you, so finding a poison that’s created by the victim combining two substances themselves is key, and it’s so much the better if its toxicity only accumulates days later, so that combination is nowhere near tied to the onset of symptoms. And finally, the death must be to the brain directly when at all possible, leaving no trace in the digestive system. Seizures are best, particularly in young lasses with strong hearts. The Babbages, for all their faults, have no history of heart disease. It took my entire time and energy in college to discover the perfect formula — which is why I barely graduated with sufficient grades, something my Margaret dismissed as irrelevant, so certain is she of my prospects in life — but I did. With surreptitious tests on alley rats I was fortunate enough to trap behind our new home, I confirmed that it will complete the task of making me the True Inheritor.

I contrived for her to borrow my “grandmother’s silver locket,” which was true silver but of false provenance, something I picked up at a pawn shop for cash. For the blue, I strung it with a gorgeous ribbon of blue silk. For the old, I placed within the locket a photo of us on our first date in London, which I said qualified because we had taken that date at 57 Wapping Wall, the Devil’s Tavern, in operation for 400 years. And for the new, I affixed two small sprigs of parsley, an inside joke of ours because I told her, falsely, that I had never tasted parsley in my life! This amused her to no end, and it became a byword of all the wonders she foolishly thought she could show me in our new life together. This parsley, of course, was actually cicuta, or water hemlock.

So this one innocent device will do the deed. The photograph is backed with a special paste that is slowly heating the locket as we speak here. It will reach a high enough temperature only by the reception, when our general merriment and dancing will overshadow any mild discomfort on her bare chest. The silver is heavy, which holds it in place and causes it to rub the silk — finely sprinkled with invisible shards of glass — on her skin, creating a small irritation that the parsley will also rub against with all its toxins. A few hours of exposure will be enough to trigger the blockage of her GABA receptors, closing off her brain’s exposure in the chloride channel. The chaining effect of this will have its full flowering in about four days, at which point she will have a large seizure and die.

In the worst case scenario, the police may suspect poisoning, but the administration of the poison to her chest will bypass the digestive system, and nothing she will have eaten will raise any suspicion, especially given her propensity to photograph and post every meal she will have between now and the end of our honeymoon … and her life.

I will live under suspicion my entire life, but this I can abide, for I will live in the Babbage estate, slowly dismantling its accounts piece by piece to return the currents of its hoarded wealth to where it belongs: my family, and all the families of all the workers their terrible machine has crushed for centuries.

But it’s my time to speak the final vow. Shall I destroy this family and everything it stands for by joining in this sacred union? Oh, yes. “I shall.”