“There was little Claude, who ran off to the city,” said Grandma Therese, tapping a white finger against her chin. “Then my eldest, born a villain…what did I name him?”
She looked at Tess sidelong, her eyes two chips of opal, and Tess suspected that her grandmother knew his name, knew she was playing a game. Jean-Philippe stepped close, arms akimbo, ready for a quarrel.
“I remember!” said Grandma Therese brightly. “The elder was called Jean-Philander, and he was a beastly sack of malfeasance, like his father.”
Uncle Jean-Philippe raised a hand as if to strike her. Tess, with a cry, wrapped her arms around the old woman to shield her from the blow. Her uncle stayed his hand, using it to tug his mustache as if that had been his intention all along. “She’s yours, little slut,” he said, rocking on his heels. “That’s what you’re here for, officially. I wish you joy of her. She’s pleasant now, believing you’re Agnes, but Heaven help you when she decides you’re her mother.”
Though she hated to credit Papa with wisdom, Tess soon realized he’d kept his children away from Dombegh Manor for a reason. She was already growing afraid of her uncle. Luckily, Jean-Philander was easily avoided: Tess had only to stay by his mother’s side.
Left to herself, Tess might’ve filled her days with weeping or plotting ways to end it all—the manor had nice high gables overhanging flagstone yards, or there was always that old standby, the well. Her grandmother needed her, though, and Tess found the old woman’s company surprisingly pleasant. They were like merry children together, even if one was pregnant and the other a venerable seventy-eight years old.
Grandma liked having her hair brushed; she’d close her eyes and practically purr. They had tea parties and tried on all the jewelry and antique gowns. Grandma Therese liked to embroider, but everything came out muddled, patches of uneven satin fill, a thicket of wild herringbone, a scattering of seed stitch. Eventually she’d realize it looked terrible and weep with frustration. Tess would trade hoops and turn her blobs into fanciful animals and landscapes, delighting her grandmother, who seemed not to recall her part in creating them.
Tess envied her forgetfulness, a bit. It would have been such a relief to forget Will, Mama, all her shame and loathing, but Tess was doomed to remember everything she didn’t actively push down. St. Siucre had answered Tess’s prayer, her blessing a curse.
Grandma Therese’s other favorite pastime was napping, which Tess felt herself well suited to. They’d doze off in the parlor in patches of spring sunshine, a lovely, comradely way to pass an afternoon. Tess did not at first realize that her grandmother was tired because she was up half the night, wandering the gardens in her nightdress, weeping and lamenting. The spooky sound woke Tess three or four times before she dared open her shutters and peek out.
What she saw frightened her more than any ghost. Her grandmother was going to get lost or hurt or eaten by wolves. (Tess’s imagination still worked, even while she was pregnant.)
Grandma Therese’s door had a bolt, but the maid refused to employ it. “It’s an insult and an indignity to lock the dowager baroness in her room,” the woman insisted, glancing over her shoulder. “Besides, I’ve tried it. She screams and bangs on the door all night. The baronet will have none of it. She can’t hurt herself in the garden.” The maid looked back again and lowered her voice further. “Her son is the greater danger—to all of us—if she annoys him too much.”
“You couldn’t stay in her room at night?” Tess pleaded.
The maidservant looked offended. “If she needs me, she’ll ring. Plus she snores. I need rest, too, you know.”
Tess began bunking down on the floor outside her grandmother’s room, waking to chaperone the old woman’s wanderings. Grandma Therese always took the same route, through the topiaries to the rose garden, where she circled for hours. Sometimes she walked until dawn, despite Tess’s pleas to go back indoors.
The midwife, Chessey, checked up on Tess weekly, prodding and measuring her beneath the peevish gaze of the cherubs on the ceiling. At their sixth meeting, she declared everything right as rain, “except that you’re clearly not getting enough sleep.” She glared from under her single stern eyebrow.
“I’ll nap more,” said Tess. Her eyes refused to focus; she gave up trying to keep them open. “Only I’m afraid for my grandmother.” She told Chessey the whole sorry story (with her eyes closed)—how threatening Uncle Jean-Philippe was, how he let his own mother wander the night unsupervised. “Surely St. Loola’s has a hospice nearby?” Tess asked. The midwife wore no habit, but she would have been trained by the nuns, without a doubt.
“Tried that,” said Chessey, mouth flattening. “Your uncle threw our Mother Superior out on her ear. St. Loola’s isn’t prestigious enough, he claimed. He has a point—a rotten, selfish point—but plenty of holy houses would take her. St. Clare’s, St. Katy’s. He could scrape up enough dowry that monks might take her, even, and she’d be out of his sight forever, but he won’t spend the money. I think he wants her here, suffering where he can see her.”
Soon after, Tess was on her way to her grandmother’s room, carrying the quilt she slept in and two bolsters. Dombegh Manor was a chimerical structure, like a house made of other houses; the corridors didn’t match up, and some were rarely used. The shortest path between Tess’s room, the chamber of peevish cherubs, and her grandmother’s took her through a dark, unused part of the house, where the doors were nailed shut (ever curious, she’d tried a few).
Her uncle stepped out into the corridor ahead of her, and she stopped short, afraid.
Uncle Jean-Philippe looked harried; he’d clearly come in from outside. His boots were muddy, his cloak sodden. Tess pressed herself to the wall, hoping he’d pass by without speaking, but he saw her. His breath was so heavy with alcohol that she could have ignited it. He grabbed her roughly and cried, “I know you’re devoted to the old crow, little slut!” He spit while he ranted; his nails dug into her. “She looks so sweet and innocent to you, and I look like the devil, but who made me? Who made your namby-pamby father? When you grow up with a bitter, backbiting bitch of a mother, what hope is there for turning out well?”
He began to weep. “Every good thing I ever tried to do, she ground under her heel. Any tenderness in my soul was a plump partridge for her to sink her teeth into. She’s a monster, and it isn’t fair that her mind is going. She can forget her cruelty, rename herself a senile Saint, and I can’t. I can’t.”
He released Tess and staggered into the darkness, periodically trying to force open an unopenable door.
Tess was quaking like a mouse. Outside, thunder rumbled.
Tess hurried to her grandmother’s door, arranged herself on the straw pallet the maid had put out for her, and tried to sleep. Lightning illuminated the windows, and branches tried to claw their way in, but it wasn’t the storm keeping her awake. Tess’s thoughts were a jumble of terrible mothers and unforgiveable cruelties. Why shouldn’t Grandma Therese remake herself? She’d been kind to Tess; that wasn’t nothing. Was there redemption for anyone in the end, or would there always be some Jean-Philippe of your own creation, injured and obsessed, out for blood? Tess’s mind mixed mother with child, Saint with sinner, cruelty with kindness. Between her turmoil and the storm’s fury, she hardly noticed how her back ached and stomach cramped.