I found Feely in the drawing room, seated at the piano, her face white and her eyes the red of raw meat. Her fingers were moving over the keys but no sound was coming from the instrument. It was as if she hadn’t the strength to summon music from the thing. I stood for a moment or two at the door, trying to guess by watching her fingers what silent melody she might be playing.
The very least I could do was to begin the conversation on a civil note.
“I’m sorry, Feely,” I said at last. “I know how difficult this must be for you.”
Her head came slowly round and her swollen eyes settled unsteadily on me.
“Do you?” she asked. And then after an immensely long time she added, “I’m glad.”
She certainly didn’t look glad.
In ordinary circumstances, although I never tell her so, my sister Feely is strikingly beautiful. Her hair shines with a golden glow and her blue eyes sparkle vividly. Her complexion—at least since its volcanic activity settled down—was turning out to be what the cinema magazines called “English peaches-and-cream.”
But now, with Feely hunched miserably before me at the keyboard, I had a brief glimpse of what she was going to look like when she was an old woman, and it was not a pleasant picture. In fact, it was frightening.
Worse, I felt an overwhelming wave of pity.
I longed to tell her how desperately I had tried to bring Harriet back from the dead so that we all of us, she and Father and Daffy and I, and not forgetting Dogger and Mrs. Mullet, of course, should live happily ever after.
It was, in a way, like Dr. Kissing’s story: half truth, half fairy tale. But which half was which?
I no longer knew.
Was this nightmare pulling me towards reality or fantasy?
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked, fighting the undertow of my tired mind.
I realized how little sleep I’d had and how powerfully it was affecting me.
“Yes,” Feely said. “There is. Don’t do anything this afternoon to embarrass us.”
As if I were a tramp at the kitchen door.
I think it was the “us” that hurt the most. Just one more of those little words with long shadows: two plain little letters, u and s, that transformed me from a sister into an outsider.
“Has Aunt Felicity had her talk with you yet?” Her voice suddenly as cold and stiff as whipped egg whites.
“Talk? What talk?”
Feely turned back to the keyboard and her hands crashed down in the most harsh, the most grinding, the most tortured series of chords imaginable.
I clapped my hands to my ears and fled the room.
I raced along the hall and across the echoing foyer—hang the gaping mourners!—up the staircase and into the east wing.
I flung open the door of my laboratory, dashed inside, slammed the door behind me, and pressed my back against it.
A tall man turned round, and in his raised hand was the test tube which he had been examining.
It was Sir Peregrine Darwin.