“You will not be welcome here again,” Aunt Patience spat. “I must offer you my congratulations, Anne-Laure. To so completely cut yourself off from polite society, and then to offend the one person who graciously allows you to sit at the same table—what an extraordinary effort on your part. Very well, I shall oblige both our tastes. If you cannot control that harpy you call a daughter, do keep entirely to your residence in future. I certainly shall to mine.”
My mother’s defiance crumbled, leaving a wistful look. Aunt Patience’s plodding nature would have been forgivable had she been clever or kind, I decided; but as she was common and gloating, I hated her and would hate her forever.
Mamma softly pulled her fingers into small fists.
“Please in future recall my daughter’s rights, all of her rights, or you will regret it,” Mrs. Steele ordered, giving the table a single nod.
She departed without a glance behind her. Mamma often stormed away so, however—ferocious exits were decidedly her style, so I remained to assess what damage we had wrought this time.
Aunt Patience, though purple and fairly vibrating with rage, managed to say, “Would you care for more cake, Edwin and Jane?”
“I goaded her, Mummy. I’m sorry for what I said before,” Edwin added to me, his tooth clenching his lip. He wore a stiff collar that afternoon, I recall, above a brown waistcoat and maroon jacket, and his neck bulged obscenely from its confines.
“That’s all right, Edwin. Thank you for tea, Aunt Patience.” Like most children, I loathed nothing more than embarrassing myself, and the sight of the fragmented china was making me physically ill. I rose from the table. “I had better . . . Good-bye, then.”
Aunt Patience’s eyes burnt into me as I departed.
I went to the stables that evening, where I could visit the docile mares and peer into their soft liquid eyes, and I could stop thinking about my cousin. Thinking about Edwin was a private class in self-loathing: I hated myself for indulging his mulish attraction, yet it had been a tidal pull for me over years of reluctant camaraderie.
Flattery, I have found, is a great treat for those born innately selfish.
For the hundredth time, the thousandth time, I stood listening to soft whinnies like lullabies, pressing my cheek against sinewy necks; whether the horses at Highgate House liked me or my sugar cubes I have no notion, but they never glowered, nor warned me I teetered upon the hair-thin tightrope of eternal damnation. Smelling sweet hay and their rich, bristly coats always calmed me—and I calmed them in turn, for a particularly fidgety colt often stilled in my presence.
My thoughts drifted from the horses to the uses I might make of them. I daydreamed of riding to an apple-blossom meadow where my mother and I should do nothing save eat and laugh; I envisioned charging into war, the heads of Aunt Patience and Edwin lying at my feet.
Mamma and I never took more than a light supper in the springtime, and following a departure as precipitous as the one she had just executed, I knew that she would lock herself away with her novels and tonics, and thus I stayed out until the wind began to nip through the slats in the great stable door and the horses’ snuffles quieted under my caresses . . . never realising until the following day, in fact, that I had been left entirely, permanently alone.
The ominous liquorice aroma of spilt tincture of opium drenched our cottage when I arrived home at eight o’clock. I learnt my mother had retired to bed at seven, which was unfortunate timing, as I never saw her again. Our servant, Agatha, found her the next morning, still and cold in her bed, marble eyes directed at the window.
TWO
What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection!
You cannot attend,” Aunt Patience explained in a strained drone for the third time. “You are far too hysterical to appear in pub—”
“Please, oh, please—I won’t say a word, won’t make a sound!”
“Gracious, child, show a little restraint!” my aunt cried. “Pray for her soul, and accept God’s will. It is a hard thing to lose your mother so suddenly, but many others have lived to tell the tale.”
I took the news that I would not be allowed at my mother’s funeral precisely as well as I took the news of her inexplicable death. Skilful knives had carved the heart out of me, leaving me empty save for the sick, unsteady fear flickering in my bones telling me alone, all alone. I could not claw my way out of the horror of it. I screamed for my mother on the first day; sobbed for her on the second; and on the third, the day of her funeral, sat numbly in an armchair with my eyes pulsing hellfire red—that is, until my aunt Patience arrived. Being forbidden to attend Mamma’s funeral felt as if I were spitting on her grave, and questions swarmed through my pate like worms through an apple.
What will they do with me now that she has gone? Assurances that I would always reside at Highgate House now seemed reliable as quicksand.
How did my mother come to die at all? She had taken a sudden bad turn, according to Agatha; Aunt Patience muttered of fits.
Why should I not see her put in the ground? Both agreed I should not be present, but neither would explain the reason.