My hand stopped writing.
Wasn’t it “passing strange,” as Daffy would say, that although Harriet had visited Jocelyn Ridley-Smith at Bogmore Hall—frequently, it would appear—that she had never demanded he be set free? Why not? That, perhaps, was the greatest question of all.
My pencil broke with a snap!
I realized suddenly that, between words, I had been gnawing on it and chewed the thing almost in half. I would have to continue later.
Esmeralda gave a cluck and I saw that the eggs had boiled nearly dry. I had probably ruined them. I turned off the Bunsen burner and extracted the steaming eggs from the flask with a pair of nickel-plated laboratory tongs.
Using a glass funnel stuck into a flask as an eggcup, I gave the first egg a sharp crack with a graduated measuring spoon I had pinched from the kitchen, and lifted off the top.
The smell of hydrogen sulfide filled the air.
Rotten egg gas.
“A overcooked egg smells like a you-know-what,” Mrs. Mullet had told me, and she was right, even though she didn’t know the chemical details.
Besides fats, an egg contains magnesium, potassium, calcium, iron, phosphorus, and zinc, along with a witches’ brew of the amino acids, vitamins (which were not believed in by the Royal Navy until quite recently), and a long list of proteins and enzymes including lysozyme, which is found in milk as well as in human secretions such as tears, spit, and snot.
It made no difference: I was hungry.
I was spooning out the first mouthful when the door flew open and Daffy stormed into the room. I must have forgotten to lock it.
“Look at you!” she shouted, her pointing finger trembling.
“What?” I said. As far as I knew I hadn’t committed any recent wickedness.
“Look at you!” she said again. “Just look at you!”
“Would you like an egg?” I asked, gesturing to an empty stool. “They’re a little overdone.”
“No!
“Thank you,” she added. Good manners were as persistent in Daffy as a speck of dust stuck in the eye.
“Well, sit down anyway,” I said. “You’re making me nervous.”
“What I have to say to you needs to be said standing up.”
I shrugged.
“Shoot yourself,” I said, but she gave me not so much as the ghost of a smile.
“Have you no sense?” she shouted. “Have you no sense at all?”
I waited for the explanation, which I suspected would not be long in coming.
“Can you not see what you’re doing to Father? He’s crushed, he’s ill, he doesn’t sleep, and you’re off stirring up trouble. How can you live with yourself?”
I shrugged. I could have told her, I suppose, that just last evening, I’d had a perfectly civilized chat with him.
And then I remembered that I had found Father sitting alone in the kitchen in the dark.
Better to wait out Daffy’s anger. Even a flying bomb runs out of fuel eventually. But for the moment, Daffy was so infuriated that, even though she had glanced at her several times, she had not really registered Esmeralda.
I listened for what must have been ten minutes as Daffy raged, pacing up and down the room, waving her arms, citing chapter and verse of my offenses since the day that I was born, dredging up incidents that even I had forgotten.
It was an impressive spectacle.
And then suddenly she was in tears, sobbing like a little girl lost, and I found myself at her side, my arm around her, and my own vision inexplicably blurred.
Neither of us spoke a word and we didn’t need to. We stood there clinging to each other like squids, damp, quivering, and unhappy.
What was going to become of us?
It was a question I had been hiding from myself for longer than I cared to remember.
Where would we go when Buckshaw was sold? What were we going to do?
These were questions which had no answers. There were no happy outcomes.
If we were lucky, the sale of Buckshaw would bring in enough to pay off Father’s debts, but we would be left homeless and penniless.
Father, I knew, would never accept charity. It was not in his blood.
There was that word again: blood. It was everywhere, wasn’t it?—dripping from the severed head of John the Baptist, falling from the face of a wooden Saint Tancred, staining my hair ribbon, oozing in all its red wonder on glass plates under my microscope …
Everywhere. Blood.
It was what tied us together, Daffy and Feely and Father and me.
I knew for certain in that instant that we were one. In spite of the stupid tales with which my sisters had tormented me, my blood was now screaming out to me that all of us were one, and that nothing could ever tear us apart.
It was the happiest and yet the saddest moment of my life.
We stood there for the longest time, Daffy and I, hugging each other, not wanting to break away and have to look at each other. Faces, at times like these, were best left buried in shoulders.
And then, incredibly, I heard myself saying, “There, there,” and patting Daffy’s shoulder.
We might have laughed at that but we didn’t. Daffy at last, snuffling, pulled away and made for the door. Our eyes did not meet.
Things were back to normal.
I felt rather odd as I walked slowly down the east staircase. What was happening to me?
On the one hand, something had made me follow Daffy from the room: some need to continue the contact that we had just made. On the other, I wanted to kill her.
Of my two sisters, Daffy was the one of whom I was most afraid. It was, I think, because of her silences. She was most often to be found curled up with a book which in itself was a pretty enough picture, but curled up, nevertheless—coiled, like a snake.
One never knew when she was going to attack, and when she did, her words were poisonous.
I stopped on the landing to reflect.
I was being torn apart from the inside: pressed with a sort of dopey gratitude which was trying to expand me, and at the same time crushed in from the outside by the enormous weight of our situation.
Would I explode or would I be squashed?
I continued, half in a daze, to the bottom of the stairs and made my way, without realizing it, to the kitchen.
Mrs. Mullet was up to her elbows in a sink full of pots.
“What’s the matter with you, dear?” she asked, drying her hands and turning toward me. “You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”
Perhaps I had.
Perhaps I had seen the ghost of what our family life might have been if all of us were not who we were.
It was all so damnably complicated.
Mrs. Mullet did something she had not done since I was a little girl. She knelt down and put her hands on my shoulders and looked up into my face.
“Tell me about it,” she said softly, pushing my hair back out of my eyes. “Tell Mrs. M all about it.”
I suppose I could have, but I didn’t.
“I think it’s just the thought of Feely getting married and moving away,” I said, my lower lip trembling. “I’m going to miss her.”
Why is it, I wondered, even as I spoke, that we lie most easily when feelings are involved?
It was a thought that I had never had before, and it frightened me. What do you do when your own brain vomits up questions to which you don’t know the answers? Questions that you don’t even understand?
“We’re all goin’ to miss ’er, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said. “We shall miss ’er lovely music in the house.”
That did it. I burst into tears.
Why?