Lilly yelled directions at me from the dry path along the marsh. She’d just gotten a new pair of boots that week, her first new boots in three years, so she was not stepping into any slushy goop to offer help unless there was more at stake than wet feet. She stayed put and yelled helpful advice. Not Mr. Boppit. Ears up, tail streaming out like a flag, Mr. Boppit charged to my unnecessary rescue: He got a big mouthful of my jacket, braced himself, and yanked me right off my feet and through a good five feet of ice water before I stopped yelling. As soon as I was quiet he released me and stepped up to lick my face. That’s the kind of dog he was.
Of course, Snyder used Mr. Boppit’s nature against the poor animal. I think Janey was the only creature on Earth Snyder loved, but still he’d pretend to hurt her just to torment Boppit. He’d grab our little sister and make-believe whack her. The dog got positively hysterical—whining, barking, trying to push himself between Snyder and Janey while Snyder fake-yelled at her and windmilled his arms around her head, fake-attacking. That’s the sticky little dark place where Snyder lived. Boppit was helpless in these situations—too sensitive and good to imagine what Snyder really was.
At night Boppit slept on the floor between our bed and Jane’s cot. He would have climbed into bed with us and wedged himself between Lilly and me if Lilly had let him. I would have let him. My sisters were sound sleepers but sometimes I’d wake up anxious and confused, climbing out of some bad dream. I’d look over and there would be Mr. Boppit looking across at me in the dark all calm and alert. He would watch me as I’d try to remember what I was dreaming, fail, and calm down. Sometimes he’d step up to the bed beside me and lay his head on my pillow until I told him I was all right. I’d say I was fine and he should lie down. I’d shut my eyes to convince him I’d fallen back asleep, but when I opened them again to see if I’d fooled him, his eyes would be shining at me; his tail would thump on the floorboards. He was on guard, shielding me from whatever it was that had woken me.
NEAVE
The Pirate Lover
Mrs. Daniels regularly sent me home with paper bags of Violette’s cookies or brownies. In our backyard a sweep of birches stood between the rock and the kitchen window so we were invisible to our mother, who said charity was for the weak. Uncertain if this idea extended to free cookies, I distributed them in secret. In bad weather we met in Snyder’s bedroom; in good weather we met on the big rock at the back of our property. The first autumn afternoon that the air turned crisp Mrs. Daniels had Violette put a huge pile of coal in the grate—as much coal in one fire as my family used in a day. We toasted bread and slathered it over with jam during breaks from reading. My whole life wasn’t heaven, but those parts of it were.
I’d been waiting for the moment when I could get an up-close look at the forbidden shelves of her library, and it finally came one afternoon when Mrs. Daniels excused herself for a slow trip to the facilities. She turned the corner into the hallway and I was on my feet and across the room in a flash. I told myself that I was going to take only a quick look, but that didn’t last a second longer than it took to see the first cover: The Pirate Lover. Well, I told myself, I would borrow it for a very short amount of time and just skim a few chapters before returning it. By the time she got back, The Pirate Lover was jammed into my book bag and I’d rearranged my face into an innocent blank.
I took my stolen book to the bedroom closet that Daddy had built as a storage space for old snowsuits and clothes waiting for the next kid in line to grow into them. At the back was a perfectly usable if very tiny space that was out of sight and sound of family life. It actually had an electric socket, which made it easy for me to read with the help of a yard-sale lamp our mother had bought and abandoned in the garage. I dragged in a stolen pillow and a borrowed blanket and settled in with The Pirate Lover as soon as I could do so unobserved. The first afternoon I hid there I folded the blanket into a fat square seat, flicked on the yard-sale lamp, and just sat regarding my kingdom. It was raining and the drops hit the shingles just inches from my head with a soothing rapraprap. Thus began the part of my life that was lived in book romances.
All I can say in my defense is that I was just looking for the truth.
Also love, which I hoped was a true thing.
THE PIRATE LOVER
Electra Gates was a young woman so beautiful that she had commanded the attention of the men around her from the age of twelve, and though she had been an obedient and proper young woman, or perhaps because she had been an obedient and proper young woman, she had yet to taste passion herself though she had inspired it. She had hated no one, desired no one, loved no one. So when she encountered Basil Le Cherche, her feelings were a revelation to her.
She first encountered his coolly assessing gaze in a Parisian drawing room in the spring of her eighteenth year. Electra’s mother was French, her father had been British, and when he was alive they had moved easily from one world to the other. But upon his death his widow had been shocked to discover how far beyond their actual means they had been living. His creditors swarmed their home and picked it clean, and the world they had known evaporated in a matter of weeks. It took only one social season in London for her mother to see how utterly their new poverty had changed her world. Where once she had known only flattery and smiles, now she met an endless stream of small humiliations. She took her daughter and withdrew from the London rooms they could no longer afford. They would take what they still had and go to Paris, where she could live more cheaply—and discreetly. Her mother had lived there in her youth with distant relatives, so this world felt familiar to her as well as far from their current difficulties. There she would bide her time, waiting for her daughter to reach the full flood of a beauty that could secure the attention of Paris society—and its wealthiest men. Two years had passed in this manner. Now the waiting was over.
“We have saved every sou in preparation for this last chance,” her mother had said to Electra. “We must play out our hand now.”
Even as they were reduced to worn cotton and broken shoes from seasons many years past, Electra’s mother had studied the little dolls dressed in Paris’s latest fashions that made their way to every small village and major capital where women owned mirrors. She had sold their sticks of furniture and every jewel she owned to pay for the Chinese silks and extravagant carriage fees that would provide her and her daughter a kind of disguise—the trappings of wealth and security, neither of which did they actually possess. She bet her future on this last gamble.