“Surely she can seek out a relative—have you ever heard her speak of parents or siblings?”
Raising an eyebrow, I wordlessly reminded Clarke of the number of sentences we had heard Mrs. Grizzlehurst utter.
“We’ll just have to ask—and if she has somewhere to go, we can help her. I have it now!” Clarke exclaimed, clapping her hands.
Diving at the bed we shared, Clarke pulled my trunk from beneath the frame. I recall the exact set of her shoulders, the quizzical turn of her head as she searched, the way I sat watching her, not understanding, until the instant I did understand, and horror clawed at me, and I stupidly gasped, “Wait, don’t—” just as Clarke chirped, “Here!” and darted to the brightening window with her prize.
“Don’t touch that,” I growled in the voice of a cornered beast.
Clarke had already lifted the dinted silver watch to the light, however; at my outburst, she nearly dropped it, but she had seen the initials VOM etched onto the metal. Pushing a curlicue of hair away from her eyes, she slowly turned.
“You said you had a silver watch of your father’s when we left.” Her high voice was considered but flat, as she had sounded when working out algebraic equations, which positively wrecked me. “This . . .” She stopped, her head whipping up. “This is Vesalius Munt’s watch, isn’t it?”
Desperate, I cast my mind in all directions for a lie which might serve, any lie, every lie, the right lie.
“Yes. I . . . I was leaving school, alone I thought, and had hardly any money.”
“What else do you have of his?” Clarke’s tone had frosted, placid as a winter lake.
Stomach churning, I pulled out The Garden of Forbidden Delights. Clarke took the book, pursing her lips in puzzlement. I committed this insane blunder for two reasons which, in my distress, seemed actually sound. First, aware that Clarke possessed zero tolerance for my falsehoods when directed at her, I offered her a secret like a penance; and second, it seemed prudent to remind her that I may have had a lunatic mother and a history of stealing from dead headmasters, but was her own father not also subject to trivial quirks of ethics?
As Clarke flipped through the pages, her grip began to tremble; we had encountered the obscene on London’s streets before, but never produced by her own parents. I darted to her, tossed the book away, and took her hands, kissing one and holding the other over where my heart ought to have been.
“It’s all right, their business doesn’t affect my opinion of you,” I breathed. “Oh, please don’t look like that! I took the watch thinking I would be friendless and I’m sorry I lied to you, but you’re so particular. That book—you should never have seen it. Mr. Munt wanted to turn me against you, but I never loved you any less.”
I fell silent as Clarke’s eyes grew swollen with dread. She snatched her hands away, staggering back, knocking one of the candles over; wax spattered the floorboards, began to congeal and to harden.
“Wait, I only meant to say that you—you’re family to me. Are you hurt? What’s come—”
“He gave this to you that day, to spite the pair of us?”
“Yes, but it didn’t work, I told—”
“When you found Mr. Munt in his study, you said he was already dead, Jane!” she shrieked.
Time seemed to ripple, an eddying effect which left me reeling. Clarke shook her head back and forth, back and forth, like a metronome without any click, click.
“It’s not what you think,” I whispered.
It was, however.
“I never realised,” she said hollowly. “I thought how natural it was that the same thing should happen to both of us, we were always so kindred, but it never entered my mind that . . . you . . . and you scour the papers for crimes every day and they never found his killer, Jane, never found any clue.”
This was not precisely true; Sam Quillfeather had released a statement that, thanks to the complete lack of witnesses, his privately held suspicions could never hold up in court, and thus should remain unspoken for the sake of peace and healing. This ambiguous, insinuating news had eradicated my appetite for four days, which I explained to Clarke as a nasty attack of la grippe.
“You murdered him.” Clarke swayed, pulling at handfuls of her curls.
“Sit down, you’ll hurt yourself,” I pleaded. “Oh, Clarke—”
“How could I never have worked it out?” She collapsed on the bed with rote obedience.
“Well, it wasn’t the likeliest scenario on earth, was it?” I laughed, and she looked at me as if I had turned lupine, as if all my absences during the full moon now made perfect sense.
Kneeling before her, I seized her elbows. “Listen to me. You’ve always listened to me, and I’m sorry I lied about the watch, and—”
“Being sorry for lying about murdering our headmaster might be more—”
“He was killing you.” The tears which had risen were not lies, reader. “He would never have let you eat again, and I went to the study, meaning to alter his food supply records, and he caught me, and I never meant to hurt him.”