I stomped out of the room and went upstairs to sit on the roof terrace, needing to cool down alone for a while.
Ten minutes later, he came to sit next to me on the silk sofa, one hand still clutching the book.
‘What’s really wrong, CeCe? Tell me.’
I chewed on my lip for a bit, staring out at the people swimming in the ocean below us. ‘Look, it’s really cool of you to go to the effort of getting that book. It can’t have been easy to get it so quickly. I just . . . I’m not good with books. I never have been. That’s why I haven’t looked up anything about Kitty Mercer. I’ve got . . . dyslexia, really bad dyslexia actually, and I find it hard to read.’
Ace put his arm around my shoulders. ‘Why didn’t you just say so?’
‘I dunno,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m embarrassed, okay?’
‘Well, you shouldn’t be. Some of the brightest people I know are dyslexic. Hey, I know, I’ll read it out loud to you.’ He pulled me to him so I was nestling into his shoulder. ‘Right,’ he said, and began turning the pages before I could stop him.
‘Chapter one. Edinburgh, Scotland, 1906 . . .’
Kitty
Edinburgh, Scotland
October 1906
6
Kitty McBride lay in her bed and watched the tiny house spider weaving its web around a hapless bluebottle that had flown into its trap in a corner of the ceiling. She’d seen the bluebottle buzzing across her ceiling last night before she turned out the gas lamp – a hardy last remnant of a warm autumn turning to winter. She mused how the spider must have been busy all night to mummify the bluebottle within its silken threads.
‘That will surely be a month’s supper for you and your family,’ she told the spider before drawing in a determined breath and throwing off her covers. Shivering her way across the freezing room to the washstand, she gave herself a far briefer lick and spit than her mother would have approved of. Through the small window, she saw a thick early morning mist was shrouding the terraced houses on the other side of the narrow street. Pulling on her woollen vest and fastening the buttons of her dress across her long, white throat, she scraped her mane of auburn hair off her face and into a coil on the top of her head.
‘I look like a veritable ghost,’ she told her reflection in the looking glass as she moved to the undergarment drawer to retrieve her rouge. She dabbed a little on her cheeks, rubbed it in, then pinched them. She had purchased the compact at Jenners on Princes Street two days ago, having saved all her shillings from the twice-weekly piano lessons she gave.
Father, of course, would say that vanity was a sin. But then, Father thought most things were sinful; he spent his time writing sermons and then preaching his thoughts to his flock. Profanity, vanity, the demon drink . . . and his favourite of all: the pleasures of the flesh. Kitty often wondered how she and her three sisters had arrived on the planet; surely he would have had to indulge in those ‘pleasures’ himself to make their births possible? And now her mother was expecting another baby, which meant that they must have done the thing together quite recently . . .
Kitty baulked as a sudden image of her parents naked flew into her head. She doubted she would ever be able to remove her vest and bloomers in front of anyone – least of all a man. Shuddering, she replaced her precious rouge in the drawer so Martha, one of her younger sisters, wouldn’t be tempted to steal it. Then she opened her bedroom door and hastened down the three flights of wooden stairs for breakfast.
‘Good morning, Katherine.’ Ralph, her father, sitting at the head of the table with his three younger daughters sitting quietly along one side of it, looked up and gave her a warm smile. Everyone always said she resembled her father in looks, with his full head of curly auburn hair, blue eyes and high cheekbones. His pale skin had barely a line on it, even though Kitty knew he was in his mid-forties. All his female parishioners were deeply in love with him and hung on every word he spoke from the pulpit. And at the same time, she thought, probably dreaming of doing all the things with him that he told them they shouldn’t.
‘Good morning, Father. Did you sleep well?’
‘I did, but your poor mother did not. She is plagued by nausea, as she always is in the early stages of her pregnancies. I’ve had Aylsa take up a tray to her.’
Kitty knew this must mean her mother was most unwell. The breakfast routine in the McBride household was usually strictly adhered to.
‘Poor Mother,’ Kitty said as she sat down, one chair along from her father. ‘I shall go up and see her after breakfast.’
‘Perhaps, Katherine, you would be kind enough to visit your mother’s parishioners today and run any errands she needs?’
‘Of course.’
Ralph said grace, picked up his spoon and began to eat the thick oat porridge, which was the signal for Kitty and her sisters to begin too.
This morning, being a Thursday, breakfast was punctuated by Ralph testing his daughters on their addition and subtraction skills. The weekly timetable was sacred: Monday was spelling, Tuesday, capital cities of the world. On Wednesday, it was the dates of when the kings and queens of England had ascended the throne, with a potted biography of her father’s choosing on one of them. Friday was the easiest as it covered the Scottish monarchy, and there hadn’t been many Scottish kings and queens after England had taken over. Saturday was used for each child to recite a poem from memory, and on Sunday Ralph fasted to prepare for his busiest day and went to his church before anyone else in the household was up.
Kitty loved Sunday breakfasts.
She watched her sisters struggling to combine the numbers and then swallowing the porridge quickly to give the answer without their mouths being full, which would have elicited a disapproving frown from Father.
‘Seventeen!’ shouted Mary, the youngest sister at eight, who was bored of waiting for Miriam, her older sister by three years, to answer.
‘Well done, my dear!’ Ralph said proudly.
Kitty thought this was extremely unfair on poor Miriam, who had always struggled with her numbers and whose nervous personality was overshadowed by her more confident sister. Miriam was Kitty’s secret favourite.
‘So, Mary, as you have beaten your sisters to the answer, you may choose which parable I will tell.’
‘The Prodigal Son!’ Mary said immediately.
As Ralph began to speak in his low, resonant voice, Kitty only wished he had taught them more parables from the Bible. In truth, she was very weary of the few he favoured. Besides, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t understand the moral behind the tale of the son who disappeared for years from his family’s table, leaving another son to take on the burden of his parents. And then, when he came back . . .