His acting is superb. His eyes sparkle as he hides a kiss in my palm.
“Enough!” Jasper says. “Go back to keeping it secret, would you? Anyway, I did not come here looking to find a lovers’ tryst. I came to find you, O’Neill, so that we could venture into town and buy a horse. Because, as you so often boast, you know horses like you know your own left foot. Whatever that may mean.”
“Right,” O’Neill says, releasing my hand. “I will help you gather wood later, Clara.”
Jasper slaps O’Neill on the back, a little too hard for a friendly gesture. “Is that your code now? Perhaps Clara would like to ‘gather wood’ with me later.” He pushes O’Neill along the path. What was O’Neill thinking, provoking a madman to jealousy?
Well, it cannot be undone.
And would I wish for it to be undone?
As I pick up twigs, as I step over fallen branches, as I bundle kindling and tie it with lengths of young wild grape vine, I think of the kiss. My first kiss. How I would give a year of my life to have it back, just so I could have it once more from him.
But O’Neill loves Maren, doesn’t he?
Or has that changed somehow? Could I dare to hope for such a thing? Would it be wrong to hope for it?
I am so confused. My stomach churns. Maybe I did need that dose of tea, after all. Maybe O’Neill did, too. Maybe we are both insane from the lack of it.
My foot catches in a tree root and I fall facedown into a patch of moss. O’Neill pulls me to my feet and wipes away the bits of green fluff clinging to my cheek and hair. I cannot decide what the look in his eyes means, why he has come back.
“Sorry,” he whispers as he hands me the kindling.
“For what?”
“You know. The kiss.”
“Oh,” I say. I look at the ground as Princess Hatsumi would and I try to gather enough pride to keep from bursting into tears.
“I didn’t know what else to do when I heard him coming. I panicked.”
“It is fine,” I say as my heart shatters. “You did what had to be done.”
“Come on, O’Neill,” Jasper shouts. “Where are you now? Not kissing again, I hope! Let’s get on the road, shall we?”
I follow O’Neill out of the woods. My eyes are dry, but inside I am weeping.
Yet would I wish he had never kissed me? Honestly, I cannot say.
As I stir the porridge, I hate O’Neill.
As I spoon the porridge into Dr. Phipps’s favorite blue-and-white china bowl, I love O’Neill more than life itself.
As I fetch water from the creek for Soraya (so that she might bathe her husband’s pale face), I detest O’Neill.
As I sit beside Maren and mend a skirt Soraya gave me (stabbing the needle through the fabric and yanking the thread into an ugly row of puckered stitches), I hate him with a passion. He had no right to give that kiss to me—it ought to have been Maren’s.
I hate him for stealing my first kiss from me. It was precious, and he robbed me of it.
Was it his first kiss? Or did some gypsy girl claim that from him long ago, under a full moon, beside a lake full of alligators and flying fish?
I touch my mouth, remembering the pressure of his lips, the warmth of his breath, how he tasted of summer rainstorms. I love him, and it is wrong. And hopeless.
Maren taps on the glass. She questions me with her eyes. As she has since we were infants, she senses when I am troubled. “It’s nothing,” I lie. “The sun is so bright today that it is giving me a headache.”
She shakes her head, clearly unconvinced by my falsehood.
“Did I show you this skirt?” I hold it high, hoping she might focus upon it instead of my face. My lower lip quivers. “Look at the embroidery along the edge. Can you see the little deer and trees? It must have taken a year to sew such an intricate pattern.” I am choking on tears.
Soraya beckons me, and I am relieved. “I will be back soon, sister,” I say. I set my sewing beside the mermaid’s jar and flee her searching gaze.
I hate O’Neill.
Almost as much as I hate myself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The contents of Soraya’s cauldron boil and bubble over into the fire with a loud hissing, all but obscuring the birds’ twilight songs. A heady aroma spews forth and swirls through the air: the stench of simmering bones, garlic, sassafras bark, peculiar pink-and-yellow powders, and one of Dr. Phipps’s woolen socks. I hold a handkerchief over my face in a futile attempt to avoid breathing the tainted air.
I remember countless hours spent stirring Auntie’s mixtures over an outdoor fire. Some of them are pungent, to be sure—but none reek as much as Soraya’s. Auntie cooks up potions to cure warts, elixirs to clear congested lungs, syrups to tame aching stomachs . . . as many as a hundred different medicines in a season. The day before I took to the road with Maren and O’Neill, I helped Auntie make a potent sleeping draught. I am surprised by how much I miss such a mundane task.
A sleeping draught, I think.
Such a simple thing might be our salvation.
It is a thought to mull over.
“Do you really believe that will help Papa?” Jasper says, pinching his nostrils. “It smells like a possum carcass rolled in fish guts.”
Soraya stirs the sputtering concoction with a long-handled wooden spoon. “Of course. It is an ancient remedy my mother taught me. If it smelled good, it would not be so powerful.”
Inside her jar, Maren is blessedly unbothered by the smell. I watch her for a moment, floating like a small angel in a cloudless sky. Not that I have ever heard of an angel with a fish’s tail.
Poor Maren. She is shrinking again, bit by bit, and she is increasingly listless. While Soraya has been caring for her husband, she has neglected to add the mysterious preservatives to our mermaid’s jar.
O’Neill, too, is watching Maren. The expression on his face cannot be named. There is no word for the emotion between pity and love, or for the one between longing and sorrow. Just as words cannot describe what I feel right now, something between envy and shame, and between compassion and disappointment.
“We move on tomorrow,” Jasper announces. “We have lingered here long enough. We sell nothing camped in the wilderness. And I am bored.” He accuses me, with a hard glance, of being the reason for his boredom. His jealousy of O’Neill’s impetuous kiss still festers, obviously.
“Very well,” Soraya says. “You are the man of the family until the doctor recovers his strength.” She scoops a spoonful of liquid from the pot and holds it beneath her nose. “Hmm. It needs more amber dust, and another hour of cooking.”
I stand, unable to bear the stench any longer and eager to be alone with my thoughts of sleeping draughts. It is a relief to have something to think of besides O’Neill’s brazen kiss. “I am going for a walk,” I declare, expecting Soraya to object.
“Night will fall soon,” she says calmly. “Do not wander far. I have heard wild things growling and creeping nearby these last few nights.”