“You,” Aunt Patience spat.
Her careful mourning attire had been abandoned for a capacious black robe fastened with silk ties. Patience Barbary had shed her smug bravado as snakes do skins; everything about her was new, from the swollen pink edges of her eyelids to her raw expression, tender as a cut where the scab has peeled away. Years of trials I did not know about had hardened her, but now here she was—in desperate need of a shell, and stripped of her defences as she had been stripped of her son. Her habitual mourning was an ostentation, I realised, maybe even a dig at my mother’s pale Parisian frocks; this was her, bared to the ravages of the whimsical world.
I wanted to be glad of her ruin—but I was only sad in a sweeping, sky-wide way, and sorry for myself despite the unforgivable thing I had done. I wanted Edwin back, and months previous, so that I could scream when I was meant to and none of this would be my fault.
“Tell me,” Aunt Patience demanded. “You are the one who found him. I must know all.”
Hesitating, I cast my eyes down. My silences were beginning to shift from weapons into shields. Now I have a wide array, a blood-crusted and blow-battered arsenal; but then I was still learning.
“He was already peaceful, Aunt.” My throat worked. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know anything.”
“You know more than I do.” Her voice had been ground to sand with weeping.
“Nothing that can help.”
We talked—or rather, Aunt Patience questioned, and I lied. The untended fireplace watched us. No, I did not think Edwin had been in any pain. Yes, it must have been an accident. No, he had not been angry with her any longer when we parted ways.
“He loved me very much,” Aunt Patience choked, pressing smelling salts to her flat nose. “He loved you too, his only close kin—he was as affectionate a boy as I ever saw. Why did Edwin have to die in such a meaningless way? It ought to have been you.”
Numbly, I digested this; and then I understood.
As if a prophecy had been painted in the carpet’s flourishes under my feet, I knew what I must do to survive my cousin’s death. I loathed the prospect; but then I pictured my existence with only Agatha for company, and I knew I was right.
What I did not know was that an inexorable force tugged at my torn sleeve.
Scientists believe that the Earth twirls upon a great pole like a spinning top; this rotational point is theoretically located in the Arctic North, where the land is so desolate and lovely that daylight and nighttime cannot bear to give it up, and trade shifts in six-month intervals. These scientists are mistaken about the Arctic North; for I know in my heart that though the Earth does spin, and spin far too quickly for many of us to bear, London is the centre of the axis.
London is the eye of the circle and the heart of the globe, and London would be the saving of me. I did not know then that Highgate House was a mere overnight journey’s away; neither did I know that Lowan Bridge School was even closer to its suburbs. What I did know was that if Aunt Patience looked at me for another second, I would scream.
“Perhaps I see too much of your mother staining you,” she husked. “But—”
“Aunt Patience,” I announced, “I want you to send me away to school with Mr. Munt.”
FIVE
Probably, if I had lately left a good home and kind parents, this would have been the hour when I should most keenly have regretted the separation: that wind would then have saddened my heart; this obscure chaos would have disturbed my peace; as it was, I derived from both a strange excitement, and reckless and feverish, I wished the wind to howl more wildly, the gloom to deepen to darkness, and the confusion to rise to clamour.
If the reader has ever prized solitude, you can imagine my revulsion when a vortex of attention formed in the wake of my desiring an education.
“Well, ye knows what’s best for yerself,” Agatha said doubtfully, laying out my supply of dresses, pinafores, and pantalettes. Her scrunched rabbit’s eyes had a wary cast to them, and a hurt one.
“Here there is no scope,” said I.
“Well, if that don’t beat everything,” Agatha muttered, rolling my hair ribbons and tucking them into a muslin bag. “Nature will out, though, sooner or later.”
“What do you mean, Nature will out?” I asked, thrilling with fear.
“Why, only that children can’t ’elp a-taking after their parents. And if innocent lasses pretend to need scope when meaner sorts are driving ’em away, ’arassing and pestering-like, then the world ain’t what it ought to be.”
I flung myself at Agatha, helpless to check the gush of feeling; my spindly form met her strong arms, and I held her tight. “No one is driving me off. I only . . . I can’t stand it any longer.”