CHAPTER 32
COLD, STIFF, AND spent, his leg paining him almost beyond endurance, Oskar limped into the house the next morning. I had not waited breakfast for him but was already eating a soft-boiled egg with a slice of real bread and plum jelly.
“Did you see her?” I rose to boil another egg. I was afraid that if I looked at him, my face would reveal what I knew—that although he had gone to the Indian, the Indian had come to me. Well, almost to me.
I need not have worried. Oskar took no notice of me, though I must have looked peculiar with my mismatched sleeve, sewn from what remained of Archie’s shirt.
He collapsed into a chair. “I suppose she spotted me. Or smelled me. It’s clear she doesn’t trust me.” His jacket bulged at his sides; the seams strained at his shoulders. The pockets were stuffed full.
“You took more!”
He began to pull items out and lay them on the table. “Damned heavy.”
They were stones, mostly. The jade-like necklace that I’d stopped him from taking the first time; a red rock, big as his palm, with an edge chipped away to make a blade; a white stone, smooth as kneaded dough, with a depression in its center, together with one that fitted comfortably into his hand—they seemed to work together like a mortar and pestle. There were more, some flat, some sharp, some worn smooth.
“Did you leave her anything?”
“Of course I did,” he said calmly. As if I were the one behaving outrageously. “I only borrowed a few representative pieces. I did take this, though.” He unbuttoned his shirt. Against his torso was a wad of blue silk. “It’s as bad to give her things as to take them away, you know. Worse. You make a mockery of her with this frippery.”
“Oskar,” I answered indignantly, snatching the silk from him, “I have no idea how she got this. I had nothing to do with giving it to her, although I wish I had!” I held my dress by its shoulders and tried to shake the wrinkles out. “You’ve smashed the bustle!” I was crying, although I cared nothing for the state of the dress. I was thinking of the girl I’d been only a year before, when I’d worn it to the panorama and believed that my life was about to flower. I looked at my husband in his unbuttoned shirt and sagging jacket, caressing the loot he’d spread before him on the table.
“Mrs. Swann, why do you have the mermaid’s dress?”
It was Jane’s piping voice. Oskar, in his exhaustion, had neglected to shut the door behind him, and the children had come straight in, expecting to start their lessons.
I wiped my eyes quickly on the silk sleeve. “The mermaid’s dress? This is my dress. Remember, I gave it to Mary to wear in our play?”
“I thought you said I could keep it.” Mary’s voice was slightly tremulous.
“I did. And you may. It’s only that somehow it ended up with . . . well, the mermaid.”
Oskar leaned toward them as if sharing a secret. I saw that his hair and beard had begun to grow into one another. “Do you know how this came to be in the cave?” he asked shrewdly.
“We gave it to her,” Nicholas said.
“It didn’t fit Mary very well, you know,” Edward added.
“We didn’t think you’d mind,” Mary said. “We thought you’d given it to me for keeps.”
“It was Jane’s idea,” Edward said.
“It seemed like the kind of dress a mermaid would wear,” Jane explained in a quiet voice. “All watery-like.”
“She was grateful to have it,” Nicholas said, defending his sisters. “She let it fly up over her head in the wind, like a flag. It’s much better as a flag than as a silly dress.”
“You saw her with it?” Oskar looked from face to face. “You gave it to her with your own hands?”
“We put it on the stones for her, but when she’d got it, she came to find us,” Jane said. “Like she always does.”