Tamar said they’d see about that. But in the meantime, she swore on her son’s head that the sachet would get Perdita to Druhástrana in one piece. After this, Perdita drank some of the purple tea and enjoyed it.
Perdita Lee may have refused to be dragged into an inheritance drama, but Ambrose Kercheval must have been more mindful of how difficult it is to stay out of such a story, especially when somebody else is hell-bent on that being the way things play out. By the time things passed a point of no return (that is to say by the time Tamar had chased Perdita all the way out of the house, shouting, Just take that powder and go back . . . I’m sending you back), Ambrose had switched the sachet several times. Several times because Perdita had cottoned on and kept switching it back. They tried to do this as if it was all just another part of the evening’s circus act, but Perdita wasn’t going home with a sachet of mere powdered sugar. She was taking the sachet Tamar had given her. It was that or nothing.
Ah, but Ambrose Kercheval. Ambrose, who would live such a peaceful life if it weren’t for his brother and his sister-in-law . . . looking back on the rest of that evening reinforces Perdita’s intention to give the man a monster hug next time she sees him. The evening was one long interview—funny overall, Perdita thinks, but speckled with woe—Perdita being interviewed for the position of granddaughter and Ambrose being interviewed for the position of grandfather. Perdita was ready to go ahead, and Ambrose seemed keen too, but they had to think of all the people they’d have to check with before the bond could be made official.
Harriet is embarrassed that she’s left her daughter so starved of fatherly and grandfatherly affection that the girl’s just going around pledging herself to any male Kercheval who crosses her path.
“Well, good,” says the doll named Lollipop. “You should be embarrassed about that.”
After dinner, Ambrose put Perdita up at a hotel for the night. He took the room next to hers, just in case Tamar had further plans of some sort. Harriet’s guessing Ambrose didn’t sleep a wink and trembled all night.
The next day, Ambrose saw Perdita home and left once he’d made sure that she used the sachet he gave her in the gingerbread she made. She really did use the powdered sugar—in the first of the two batches. And yes, the dolls saw this themselves, Ambrose did lie down with the girl he wanted for a granddaughter and sang to her—she asked him to.
What is it with you Lees and the way you appear before us Kerchevals like . . .
“Fairies,” Harriet says, but the doll named Bonnie corrects her: “Like a fairy, he said. Singular, not plural.”
Ambrose sang every Druhástranian lullaby he knew. He cried over her—she didn’t know why, and she didn’t ask. Her stomach was hurting; she feigned sleep, and Ambrose went home. When Harriet presses Perdita to talk about meeting Gretel, the real Gretel, Perdita’s mind wanders, as does her gaze. She says a strange thing about the wheat-sheaf ring being “in” her hand . . . I put my hand in my hand and there it was, something like that.
The trust with which Perdita took the powder that had been given her—Harriet can’t think of any form of trust more insanely severe, more probing of the other party’s intentions.
Perdita’s trust was so severe that at the very last minute, possibly unsettled by the girl’s refusal to blink first, reality took her side. And now Harriet’s daughter shrugs and yawns hugely before asking her what she wants to do for her birthday.
14
Hmmm . . . still here?
Huh, then it seems you wouldn’t mind hearing about the three houses. I mean the three places where Gretel and Harriet agreed to meet again. And you can’t hear about those without hearing about how all three Lees returned to Kercheval House one rainy day about six months after Harriet’s long night with Perdita and the dolls. Perdita and her therapist had been working hard, and six months, more or less, was the time it took to confirm that her speech was fully intelligible again. The therapist admitted a niggling feeling that Perdita had recovered even sooner than this and that the date would’ve been easier to pinpoint if she hadn’t been working with somebody whose mind seemed so comfortable operating on that border between inability to form speech and preference for withholding it. Basically by the final month or so Perdita Lee’s therapist was almost sure her patient was malingering but couldn’t definitively prove it.
As soon as she saw that her daughter was all better, Harriet Lee began thinking of revenge. That’s what the return to Kercheval House was about, and that’s how Harriet encountered Tamar standing outside the gates. Tamar, dressed entirely in red and holding a purple umbrella, was talking on her phone—interesting that there was no room inside that sprawling property that she deemed appropriate for whatever conversation she was having—she was talking on her phone and dragging a high-heeled foot back and forth over the patch of earth she stood in, as if triple-and quadruple-sealing a minuscule gravesite. Harriet saw Tamar from a long way away and knew who it was even before the face came into focus. Tamar saw Harriet too. She ended her phone call and stood there waiting as Harriet, dressed entirely in black and also carrying a purple umbrella, walked faster and faster and then, no longer able to put up with the delay imposed by this long stretch of grass and lampposts and shaggy-leaved shrubbery, broke into a run. Margot grabbed the hood of Harriet’s jacket to try to hold her back, but the hood just ripped off as Harriet put on more speed and outran her, outran Perdita too; Harriet hurtled toward Tamar with her teeth bared, her umbrella raised high, and the soles of her trainers catapulting mud. And as she ran she was thinking, This is mental! Tamar’s Mum’s age; how can I hit her, even though she has put us through all this . . . please let her be scared that I’m running at her like this, please let her be gone by the time I get there. But Tamar stayed where she was, only lifting her arm to deflect Harriet’s blow with her own umbrella before bashing her attacker right back. There followed a tumultuous clashing of spokes and springs and ferrules and purple nylon . . . the rain fell so hard that both women were blinded by it; they heard Margot and Perdita shouting, but nobody tried to pull them apart, and to Harriet the fight was like being in a self-inflating, self-deflating canopy. When she felt the rain coming in through her shredded clothes, coming in to wash all the new cuts, Harriet knew Tamar had won. Did the weather bow before money too? It maddened her that there didn’t seem to be a day on which she could win a fight with Tamar Kercheval, even when she deserved to.
The funny thing (funny-ish) is that Tamar thought Harriet had won. She thought this not because of any wound she felt but because Harriet was still standing. Once she’d ascertained that that wasn’t going to change, she dropped into a crouch and croaked, Go inside, then, in the tones of a guardian spirit that had been bested in battle. Margot and Perdita stepped over this fallen lady in red and pressed the buzzer beside the gate and told Rémy: Yes, it’s us. We’re here. The gate opened, and Margot and Perdita went through; Harriet stayed with Tamar, who held her crouch and mumbled that she could lose to Harriet this once, that it wasn’t really a loss, anyway, really she was letting Harriet off, because—
“Because?”
Harriet tried to make eye contact with Tamar, but it wasn’t easy; Tamar seemed to see a chessboard where her face was, a series of threatening moves. “By rights you could have gone after Gabriel,” Tamar said.
“Eh?”