Chapter 29 #2
Eldest couldn’t find anything to say. She got under the blankets, still in her rags, and curled up, facing her older sister. It seemed strange to still carry the name “Eldest” when she wasn’t, but she had worn it so long she found it hard to set aside, although she did remember being little Mol.
The two girls spoke in whispers for a while, sharing memories of the doll, Woodweana, of climbing the wall into the garden where apple trees grew, of chasing through the alleys.
The recollections were less important in their specifics than they were in establishing the truth of their shared lives and ensuring that neither was sleeping with an enemy.
Rebekka grew tired, the whispering slowed, and she slept.
It seemed unlikely that sleep would find Eldest that night.
For a long time, she pretended to sleep in case her parents should look in and be disappointed in her.
Father had said she was safe. Waiting there, curled in the dark with a razor-edged crescent of mirror glass in her hand, was tantamount to Eldest calling him a liar.
For a while, there in the dark that lay so much thinner than that of the mansion, she thought of Strong.
Had his broken crawl taken him to the street door?
Had some miracle left it unlocked for him?
Had he slipped beneath the notice of the rest of the city too, and starved in some cold corner? Had he…
She woke, startling into a sitting position.
Beside her, Rebekka lay coughing, loud enough to wake the dead.
Eldest had to grab the wrist of her own right hand to stop herself from covering her sister’s mouth and hissing for silence.
If Night-Father found her here it would not be because of a girl’s coughing.
“Are you…all right?” Eldest asked when a gap in the painful hacking presented itself.
“I’ll”—Rebekka wheezed in a painful breath—“be fine. It’s…just a cough.”
When near-silence returned, Eldest lay listening to the rattling of her sister’s breath and the sharper rattle of the shutters in the wind.
The enormity of her changed circumstances kept her eyes wide, staring at the darkness.
This was the life that had been stolen from her.
Question circled question. How had it happened? How could she stop it happening again?
In time she closed her eyes, only to see in the new darkness the image of Milk-Eye’s desperate face, framed by the broken base of the chimney pot.
She’d left them. She’d been the eldest, the one who worked to keep them safe…
and she’d left them. For the longest time she lay, unable to rid herself of Milk-Eye’s accusing stare.
At last, she let the blackness unwrap from the marrow of her bones, and rather than have it hide her, she turned it inwards, drawing night’s curtain over her sister’s betrayed face, over the memory of her siblings, quieting their voices until she found a measure of peace.
The last thing she remembered when she woke the next morning was the soft sound of crying from her parents’ room.
Her first thought on waking was that she had never walked in her sleep within the mansion.
That must have been because she never had the chance to dream deeply enough, she reasoned.
She lay in the grey dawn wondering if she should tie her ankle to the bedframe in case it happened again now she was back.
The following day was a day for remembering. Every touch, every smell, every sound came freighted with reawakening memory, all of it blurred by the lens of the small child Eldest had been when those days had imprinted themselves on her mind.
They ate breakfast, more plain fare, simple porridge but wonderfully free of taint.
Eldest’s mouth and belly rejoiced. Her father watched her, encouraging her to eat, saying how happy he was that she had returned to them.
And Eldest, unable to remember a single kind word in any of the preceding years, had to blink rapidly to keep back the tears.
Her father worked in a little attic room above the bedrooms, hunched over a desk where his quill scratched its way across endless pages. Copy work in the main, scribing documents for various concerns who hired him by the day or by the week.
When the light failed, he would cap his ink and put down his papers.
The job seemed skilled but didn’t pay enough for the candles needed to pursue it into the night.
Rebekka whispered that the medicine Father took for his nerves slowed him down and that sometimes he had to throw away whole pages because of mistakes.
During the day Rebekka had chores, though only light work because she’d taken ill recently.
Eldest helped with the cleaning of the house.
There were also ingredients to grind for the various inks their father would use, and parchment to be cut and trimmed and sorted. Father bought cheaply and made do.
Rebekka explained that she had been learning the skills she’d need to be a scribe.
In their grandfather’s time a woman would never have been accepted in the role, and even though it was still a hard path for a girl to tread, Rebekka had been ready to try.
For some months, though, Father had been too busy to teach her, and she had had to practise by herself.
The second meal, the one in the evening, took Eldest by surprise, even though she remembered it as soon as the word “dinner” was mentioned. Her mother gave her the biggest portion, and again it proved delicious beyond imagining.
They had sat in the main room, all of them together, with a tiny fire in the hearth and the skittering of mice in the rafters.
Rebekka had darned a sock, their mother knitted, and Father sharpened his quill with exquisite care.
The comfort of it was as if Eldest had been sunk in warm water, floating in perfect tranquillity, the pain and sorrow lifting from her limp body leaving only scars and bruises in their wake.
In bed Eldest had still lain with her sliver of glass, listening intently for any approach.
The sense of security and remembered normality were both a wonder and a torment.
Somehow even if the possibility that Night-Father might find her here felt far more remote than in the mansion, it also felt far worse.
The idea of his sick grin and the glimmer of his eyes in this place, this sacred place of sanctuary and warmth, felt so wrong it made a knot of Eldest’s stomach, so tight that it threatened to return her meal.
The day of her escape had been the only time she had actually seen Night-Father.
She had glimpsed him through the broken chimney in the filtered daylight.
And while they had always known Night-Father and Day-Father were the same man, Eldest had believed that he must adopt some monstrous skin in the darkness that ruled beyond the parlour.
He had looked just the same, though, and that was somehow more terrible than if he’d grown horns and fangs.
Eldest drifted in and out of sleep, weaving a pattern through the night. She was awake, blade in hand, when Rebekka woke herself with that dry, hacking cough of hers.
“Sorry,” Rebekka whispered when her lungs allowed a pause. “I get like this for a few nights, and then it’s better. For a while.”
Eldest didn’t ask why her sister was whispering. She’d been loud enough to wake the neighbours on both sides. Eldest could hear them stirring. “Don’t worry about me. I don’t sleep much.”
“You used to.” Rebekka stifled a cough. “I practically had to drag you out of bed. You’d come down the stairs half-asleep.”
“Not anymore.”
Rebekka had asked Eldest about where she’d been.
Her parents hadn’t spoken of it yet. Eldest preferred silence on the subject.
To speak about the mansion, the monster beneath it and the cruelty that stalked its halls, would be like throwing up across the dinner table or fouling the bed.
It would introduce something obscene into the precious thing that she had found.
To her sister’s questions she had answered only that she had fallen into a terrible dream and been unable to break free.
“I would have come for you, if I’d known where you were,” Rebekka had said. “After all, I’m the eldest. It’s my job to protec—”
The violence of Eldest’s sobs, driven by the acid guilt that ate her, shocked her sister into silence and stopped her questions. Rebekka put her arms around Eldest, who flinched away. “I’m sorry.” Her sister squeezed her tight and they had hugged for the longest time.
Morning came. More light, more food. And already it started to seem as if the universe was fulfilling some promise to her, returning to her the life that had been snatched from her hands.
The weight that was slowly lifting from Eldest felt almost physical, and it was one she hadn’t properly understood had burdened her.
Each new day she felt lighter, stronger, more whole.
When she had first remembered that she had another family, a true one, it had seemed an awful, wondrous, dangerous thing, carrying as it did the possible salvation of having once had worth, and having been loved, but also the riddle of why she had been rejected, which in turn served only to make her think that maybe she deserved what had happened to her.
Now the thought that she was tainted, that the mansion might be where she belonged, was fading.
Eldest was shedding layers of protection with each passing day along with the dirt and rags that had accompanied her on her escape.
The nagging guilt of having left the others behind still stalked her, and though it pained her like a knife to the skin, she didn’t reapply her skills of forgetting to it.
That would be too easy on herself. And in this soft new life that she didn’t deserve, she couldn’t absolve herself of all pain.