“Why not?” I asked.
Julia stared ahead toward her room’s entrance. There stood Mr. Elgin, his arm useless in the sling, his face blank with grief.
She leapt from the bed, charged him, and clawed at him as he backed into the parlor. He doubled over when one of her blows struck his groin. The visitors stared, deaf to her screams and shocked that she moved, as I ran to stop her. She pushed through the adults toward her mother, who reached her arms out in a gesture of entreat, not consolation.
The girl slapped her mother across the face. “You did nothing. You never have, and Lucas believed you never would.”
Harmyn darted past me and circled Julia in her arms.
“I’d rather die if I had to be like you. But I don’t. I won’t be,” Julia said.
I touched Julia’s shoulder. She turned from Harmyn and clutched my waist. I couldn’t look either of her parents in the eye.
Seated on her bed, I held her. She wept for her brother, but she also wept for herself. She didn’t have to tell me why. As she hugged me, my arms ached to the marrow for the times I reached out for nothing and finally learned it hurt less to hold back. Like me, she should have been able to turn to her mother for comfort, but how could she when her mother was a source of the pain?
Harmyn sang lullabies until Julia slept again, peaceful.
“Why did Lucas leave?” I asked.
“There wasn’t enough love to keep him here.”
WEEK 23
I HADN’T SEEN CHARLOTTE SINCE Nikolas’s departure banquet a year and a half earlier. When she sent a note she wanted to visit, I almost refused. I’d written to her about my bruise and various pains, but I didn’t want her to see me so damaged. My mood rarely lifted beyond apathy but invigorated to a seething anger when the knot at my navel tightened and the ache below intensified to a churning throb. In the end, I relented with some hope seeing her would cheer me.
She arrived for afternoon tea. As she stepped into the parlor, I saw a nurse holding an infant and a little girl in tow. The children, Tom and Liddy. I stood with effort, forcing a smile. Tears slipped down Charlotte’s face as she kissed my right cheek. Her mouth moved as if she were speaking, then she stopped, reached into a tapestry bag, and took out a notebook.
Sorry, she wrote. I’m not accustomed to the silence.
I gestured for them to sit. Charlotte lowered next to me on the settee as the nurse took a chair, with Liddy at her knee. My hands tingled as I poured our tea. The weakness in my arms had become worse within the past days. I pushed cups and saucers to the nurse and Liddy, who eyed me with horror and fascination. With my silver hair, tawny skin, mismatched eyes, purple bruise, and wizened shape, I surely looked like a monster. From Charlotte’s expression, she appeared to instruct her stepdaughter not to be rude.
I took out my notebook. We haven’t any cookies for her. Rations remain strict.
Please no, I understand, she wrote.
She studied my face and hands and burst into tears again.
Secret, I’ve so missed you & I am so happy to see you but forgive me you look as if you’re in terrible pain. Have you not told me the truth in your letters? she wrote.
No lies, only not whole truths. Didn’t want to worry you, I wrote.
My parents did the same, she wrote. Father is so thin. He’ll hardly eat. He says he can’t stomach it. Mother has the blot & her body shrunk—like yours. He’s lethargic but Mother walks through the house looking behind drapes & under beds & in wardrobes. I asked her why & she said she wants to make sure he didn’t come back but wouldn’t say who he is. She’s imagining things. Charlotte paused, then added, Let me introduce Liddy.
Charlotte called the girl to us. Liddy had large brown eyes, a broad forehead, and perfect auburn ringlets. I gave a welcoming smile, but her bottom lip puffed out and her eyes grew wet. Charlotte hugged her and, although I couldn’t hear what was said, I could tell Charlotte spoke to her kindly. A moment later, Liddy took the nurse’s free hand and walked across the room toward a pastoral painting which filled a fourth of the wall.
She’s a good-natured girl yet often shy. Perhaps I should have left them back, but I wanted you to meet them before—Charlotte held her pencil—before you sleep. Are you afraid?
Yes, I wrote.
Weekly Post reported 729 children died thus far. No warning. They stop breathing & they’re gone. I couldn’t bear it if that happened to mine.
I could give no reassurance her children, once sick, would survive.
To the extent we were able, Charlotte and I had a conversation. She asked about my father and Nikolas; I asked her of her husband and home. Charlotte hoped she might meet Harmyn—I’d written of the young singer in my charge, but nothing of her uncommon abilities—and I said she was helping a friend pack for a move, but didn’t say that was my father. She inquired what I planned to do after the plague; I inquired what she would do while we slept for three months. While she amused me with anecdotes about her new life, I was glad my affectionate feelings for her hadn’t changed, despite distance and circumstance.
During a rest while we drank another cup, the nurse walked over to give the baby to Charlotte before she and Liddy bustled away to explore another room. His wispy hair was the same color as his sister’s. Charlotte held him on her lap, clapped his tiny hands, and kissed his fingers. Tom smiled with his whole face, dancing his arms and legs. Gracefully she lifted him and offered him to me. I raised my hands. My strength was unpredictable, and I’d never touched an infant, much less held one. Charlotte persisted. I kept my groan silent as I extended my withered arms.
When his warmth touched my chest, my heart flooded with tenderness. I had no discomfort as I cradled him tighter. He was awake, his brown eyes on mine. He gave me careful study. I brought him to my shoulder. I pressed my cheek to his heavy little head and breathed. What Nikolas told me about his nephew Iwen, I thought, Babies do have a scent. I closed my eyes when I felt him sigh.
I glanced at Charlotte. She held up a message.
Looks like you’re ready for your own, she’d written.
That instant, the pain oozed back into my body. I returned Tom before my arms slackened and the loneliness turned my blood icy. My muscles contracted against my bones; my organs seemed to shrivel.
I’ll not have any children, I wrote.
Of course you will. After this horrid sickness you’ll find a smart, kind man & have darling little Secrets. You shall. You must! Charlotte peered around, then wrote in small letters, I recommend the bother before. She arched her eyebrows.
I shook my head as a flush rose to my cheeks, not for her suggestive remark but for the blunt realization which came to me: I have the power to end this.
Charlotte didn’t stay much longer. I promised to arrange our next visit so she could meet Harmyn and see Nikolas. We clutched hands, she kissed me, and I went to my room.
Yes, I thought as I sprawled on my bed, whatever inheritance I carry from Aoife can finally be spent. Indeed, if she’d never become pregnant or had purged herself of the twins, she wouldn’t have married Wyl. She might have continued to map Ailliath or journeyed away to another kingdom. There would have been no exile. No travel to a distant Guardian settlement. No marriage to Leit, no birth of Wei. Skip across generations—no fraught mothers and troubled daughters, no Katya, no Zavet, no Secret.
Yet, there I was, the last daughter of this line. I knew, because my mother had been one, there were Voices in my blood. As Aoife had explained, a Voice could be conceived only if the father had Guardian blood himself. So, if more of these strange children had to be born, let them come through someone else, as Harmyn had. Let those dormant seeds split into growth. And if I were not to bear a Voice, only a daughter, odd as I was or not, she need never exist at all. Our miserable legacy could die with me.
By dinner, the revelation’s comfort had worn off and my dark mood returned. I was in bed by the time Harmyn sang her lullaby to the castle and asleep as she dragged Nikolas throu
gh another maelstrom of shadows.
During my slumber, I plunged into a dream.
A crow called. Glass cracked. There were screams—animal, human, either, both. The feral stink—the ogress was near. I saw a black feather, falling. I reached for it . . . and I dropped to a forest floor. A familiar voice called my name. I ran to embrace Fig Tree, covered in fruit, but the ground tremored, rent apart, and pulled me away from her. The ogress leapt over the abyss, and when her feet touched the earth, she revealed her full face. Mother. She grabbed my arm and eyed my hand, which had turned into a mushroom. “My little fungus,” she said. Her maw gaped wide and—
When my eyes flew open, they met Harmyn’s, lit by candles. The black hole in my chest expanded until its edge threatened to turn me inside out. I rose up and knocked away Harmyn’s extended hand. Leave me alone, I said.
I ran to the second floor. A whoosh filled my ears. The pendulum clock ticked. The guard outside Nikolas’s room snored in a chair. I leapt on Nikolas’s bed, burrowed under the covers, and clung to his side. He roused with a start, then he held me as I trembled.
“Don’t let me go,” I said.
“What’s happened?” he asked.
The lurch in my gut brought up bile and certainty I didn’t dare swallow but couldn’t spit out. “A terrible dream,” I said as a hideous feeling came over me, worse than dread, a pure mortal terror. My bruised cheek pounded.
“Breathe, Love.” He shook me. “Why aren’t you breathing? Secret, what’s the matter?”
That, I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t know. What crushed me wouldn’t be named. I crawled on top of him. “Don’t send me away. Please. Let me lie here for a while.”
He cradled my head against his bare chest. A moment later, I heard no heartbeat. Dead silence.
WEEK 24
THE RING OF KEYS PRESSED against my leg as I sat at Julia’s bedside, tidied the Misses’ apartment, and walked to my father’s house.
At the door, I turned the three locks and set them once inside. Father wasn’t there. He’d moved to the castle the day before. Father donated the food he’d hoarded to the Aid and Relief League and left everything else in the house except for some clothing, some bedding, and his three-hundred-year-old map.
With the drapes drawn, near dusk, I could hardly see in the parlor. I found a lamp on the mantel. The simple act of lighting it flared my memory of certain dark rooms in another quiet house.
The truth is, I didn’t know what I’d come to find. When I stood in the place where Father had discovered her dead, I wondered where she’d found the mushrooms. Child of a forest that she was, surely she learned from her own mother what was safe and what was poisonous. On one of her afternoon walks, had she crossed the green, entered the woods, and searched the shade for her last meal? Had she bought a pint from a market vendor and noticed someone had made a lethal mistake, as had happened before?34 How great her misery must have been to welcome the deliberate agony of that death. The fortitude she had to not take to her bed but to sit at her table, waiting for the final throes.
With the lamp turned high, I went to the third floor into Father’s bedroom. Everything seemed in order, although his pillow was missing. I peeked into his wardrobe. There hung his fine suits. Then I looked into hers, full of blouses and skirts, a coat, evening gowns, walking shoes, slippers; the drawers packed with undergarments, stained cloths, handkerchiefs. On the dressing table, the items appeared to be in the places they’d always been.
I went downstairs to my old room. The boxes of diaries hadn’t been disturbed since my last visit. One deep breath, then another, and I pulled out the diaries from the year before I was born through the first years of my childhood. There were the bleed days and the absence of them. No marks for three months and a page torn from the binding—a note from my father, expunged?—words, words, words, then nothing from the twenty-second of September to the seventh of October. From that date onward, while some entries seemed shorter, there was no break for anything other than a typical off day.
I huddled with my head to my knees. How many hours I’d spent in that same position, barely breathing to enter the quiet blackness where I felt nothing, not even the urge to cry.
Within myself, the thump of my heartbeat whispered in my ears. Louder then, I heard the flutter of a page, a little girl’s giggle, and a hiss. Again and again, the sounds repeated until they came to me as if sung in a round. There came random hitches of silence as the flutter, giggle, and hiss looped.
I felt myself contract, drawing me into the shortened sleeves and hem of my dress. Three quick throbs surged under my ribs and with them, three separate images of my father, his turned back, his eyes on a letter, his tight mouth pressed shut.
Crouched there, I was once again a little girl, alone with my books, so quiet, so quiet, because there would be a hiss for the slightest noise, an observational “oh” or tiny titter, and sometimes Father, present but absent, stood by and did not defend my simplest expression.
Look at me! I screamed inside, the words I couldn’t say as the mute little girl with the knot at her navel tied to her tongue.
He must have seen what she did to me, yet did nothing, I thought, or did not see, because he couldn’t face the truth.
She didn’t want me.
Oh yes, she did her duty. She kept me fed, clean, and warm. She kept me out of harm’s way, behind that pen in a corner when I was very small, sealed off in the house and courtyard when I was older.
Duty is not love, I thought. This wasn’t a revelation, but Aoife’s own words about her twins, whom she didn’t despise but admitted she tended with the diligence of an animal mother without the love of a human one. A cruelty, to bring innocent lives into such absence. My palms and soles stung as I tried to recall a single hug or kiss for comfort or affection from my mother—and could not. Not once.
I returned to the diaries. That my mother worked as much as ever after I was born seemed impossible, not without help.
Suddenly, a light blinded me. Elinor and I didn’t hear each other scream. She dropped a stack of folded sheets on the floor, knelt down, and looked at me with concern. I knew she’d worked for my parents since I was too young to remember. Although she’d expressed sympathy after my mother died, we had never spoken of her.
I fumbled in my pocket for my notebook. Why are you here?
Forgot to cover ferniture for dust, Elinor wrote.
May I ask you questions? I wrote.
She nodded.
Who took care of me when I was a baby?
Not sure what you mean, she wrote.
Mother worked much, I wrote, then gestured toward the diaries.
My daughtur Bess she had her second boy then. Wet nerse. Mrs. R milk didn’t drop. My face must have betrayed my feelings because she added, Common. No shame.
Did Bess live in my parents’ house or with her family? I wrote.
She kept you. Bess very fond of you. Quiet gentel little babe. Mr. R came to see you every day but Mrs. R nervuse mother. Cried when she held you. I told her she was new to it that was all.
Dear Elinor, I thought, assuming my mother was merely frightened rather than resentful. My father? I wrote.
So proud. Big smile when you were in his arms. Elinor glanced at me, lingering on the bruise. You grew to a fine young woman. She was a good mother.
No, she wasn’t. You felt the silence in this house. I slammed the notebook closed and picked up the pile of sheets. Lamp in hand, I waited for her in the hall. I followed her from room to room, pulling furniture into groups and draping them with the fabric, as if we were about to leave for a long holiday.
When I saw her to the door, she touched the left side of my face. I pressed my hand against hers, rough and kind. She kissed me, walked down the steps, and waved to the lamplighter attending his work.
Door locked, vesta in hand, I returned to my room. I burned the diary page by page. Although I wanted to destroy the others, I knew what would satisfy me most. From
the faded blue chest, I took the nesting dolls. I wrenched them apart, matched their hollow bodies, and lined them up. To the fire I fed them, one by one, screaming into the flames’ fury as the thirteenth blazed and its solid core turned to ash.
THIS, I THOUGHT, WAS A dream.
My body swayed with the sweet notes of a lullaby. When I opened my eyes, I found myself in my gown, covered with my cloak, my boots laced, standing in the glade outside of Old Woman’s cottage.
“You must call on the animals. They must be witnesses for the children,” Harmyn said.
“Haven’t I done enough? Don’t I have a say in this?” I asked.
“You do. But you know better than anyone the gentle alchemy which happens when something, or someone, listens.”
I remained silent.
“The plague is almost over for them, but shadows still hide what they must see,” she said. “Please, Secret. We need you.”
The bare trees reached toward first light. My breath hovered as a mist as I said, “Hear me. Heed me. Come to our aid.” A gust whipped my silver hair as a chorus answered. Whir chirp hum yip grunt bell screech howl.
Children streamed out from among the trees. Babies slept in the arms of the older ones, and the younger ones trailed hand in hand. As they gathered to sit on the ground, the animals came to join them, creatures of every kind for whom the woods was home.
“I need something to stand on. Call a stone for me,” Harmyn said.
“I can’t do that,” I said.
“Only because you’ve never tried before.”
I tried, and failed, to roll a stone from the abandoned wall and the huge rounded rock in the woods. Then I touched my hands to the earth, asked for a piece of its deep heart, and felt the ground rumble. A hidden power welled up within me. Under Harmyn’s feet, a jagged gray rock cracked through. As I stood, she rose above me, higher than my shoulders.
Harmyn called for the children’s attention. “There are things left unsaid. You’re here to speak them. Unless you do, you will remain trapped in the shadows.”
The Plague Diaries Page 41
