“It was an accident pure and simple, or at least as pure and simple as any accident can be. Tragic. Still, in the circumstances, there was nothing for it but to get on with things. There was a war on. Everybody, in one way or another, was suffering loss. It was a bad time to be deprived of a little girl.”
“Were you here when it happened?” I asked, shocking myself. Where did this sudden boldness come from?
A shadow crossed Father’s face. The kitchen clock ticked on.
“No,” he said after a moment. “I wasn’t.”
He had, as I well knew, been with Dogger in a prisoner-of-war camp. It was not a topic of discussion at Buckshaw.
How odd, I thought: Here were these four great grievers, Father, Dogger, the vicar, and Cynthia Richardson, each locked in his or her own past, unwilling to share a morsel of their anguish, not even with one another.
Was sorrow, in the end, a private thing? A closed container? Something that, like a bucket of water, could be borne only on a single pair of shoulders?
To make matters worse, there was the fact that the entire village was sheltering each of them in a cocoon of silence.
Those dear damned people! Both the blessers and the blessed!
I felt the color rising in my face as I remembered that I had vowed to place flowers, publicly, on Hannah Richardson’s grave.
But I would not trouble Father by telling him that. He had enough to worry about.
“What are we going to do with you?” he asked suddenly.
“I don’t know, sir,” I replied.
The “sir” came out of nowhere. I had never addressed my father in that way before, but it seemed perfectly the right thing to do.
“It’s just that sometimes … sometimes—I think that I am very like my mother.”
There! I had said it!
I could only wait now to see what damage I had done.
“You are not like your mother, Flavia.”
I gulped at the blow.
“You are your mother.”
My mind was a swarm—a beehive, a tornado, a tropical storm. Were my ears actually hearing this? For the past several years my sisters had increasingly tried to convince me that I was adopted; a changeling; a lump of coal left by a cruel Father Christmas in their stockings.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this for some time,” Father said, fidgeting as if he were looking for something lost in the pockets of his dressing gown. “I may as well come straight to the point.”
My chin was trembling. What was going to happen? What was he going to say?
Was he about to tear a strip off me for ruining my best coat?
“I am aware that your life has not always been—” he began unexpectedly. “That is to say, I know that you sometimes …”
He looked at me in misery, his face flickering in the candlelight. “Damn it all,” he said.
He began again. “As was your mother, you have been given the fatal gift of genius. Because of it, your life will not be an easy one—nor must you expect it to be. You must remember always that great gifts come at great cost. Are there any questions?”
Dear Father! Even the most tender of his moments was a parade-square lecture. How I loved him.
“No, sir,” I said, as if I were a sapper being charged with blowing up the enemy lines. “No questions.”
“Very good. Very good,” Father said, standing up and rubbing his hands together. “Well, then, you’d better get some sleep.”
And with that he was gone, leaving me alone at the table.
I thought over all that he had said.
His remarks about Harriet were not the sorts of things one ponders at a kitchen table. I needed to review them later, in the privacy of my room. In the comfort of my bed.
One thing, though, was clear. Father had not expressly forbidden me to go near the church.