Rottenheart

Chapter 2

Cecilia

A DRIVING RAIN CHASES CECILIA into the Gate House, Leo dashing behind her, holding his coat over his head.

The funeral was washed out. The rain was strong enough that it eroded the sides of the fresh-cut grave, and Cecilia, stepping too close, felt the ground give way beneath her feet.

It was only Leo’s swift, strong hand on her arm, hauling her back, that saved her from entering the grave before her mother did.

Claudine did not think it proper for anyone but family to attend, sending instead a carriage on behalf of herself and Uncle George, and though they had sent out notices to many, there were only two mourners, Leo and Cecilia.

Cecilia has read of funerals that were attended by no one.

She should be grateful her mother was at least spared that.

In the hall they shake out their clothes, stamp the water from their boots. Cecilia does not feel the cold, nor the sodden wool against her skin. The colour has run from her hastily dyed dress, leaving a grey cast to her hands when she removes her gloves.

She can feel nothing.

How strange.

She did not know such numbness was possible. It is as though she has been cleanly severed from her body by the surgeon’s knife, soul and meat cleaved in twain, and without a chest to ache, a stomach to knot, pain is nothing – it disappears.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk

Keats. Oh, she needs Keats. How can she be alone with her own mind? She is so alone now. One by one, everyone leaves.

Cecilia thinks about opening all the windows and screaming until her mouth is bloody.

There is a neat little edition of Keats on her bookcase upstairs, bound in blue cloth, a nightingale upon a branch stamped into the front cover.

Odette’s favourites were always ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ or ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, and Cecilia would read them to her gladly, her long hair spread out across her lap as they dozed in the shade of the great oak tree on the grounds of Herne House.

But privately, with herself, she always came back to the Odes.

Nightingale. Grecian urn. Psyche. Autumn. Indolence. Melancholy.

Grief, loneliness, betrayal, corpse, murder, death. She could write her own.

Love. Should there be one on love?

Her grey hands that once touched Odette. Her dead hands.

Do they all know yet that she is dead?

‘Lord, the tea is cold. Mary? Mary!’ Leo stands at the parlour door, yelling to the maid. ‘Hot tea this time – we are all soaked through, and you feed us tepid water.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The tea is taken away, and Leo returns to the fire, kicking the coals and holding out his hands to the flames. His anger seems outsized, overdrawn to fill the space where once were three but now live only two.

Cecilia laughs.

A ghost: that is what they need. Just as Odette claimed she saw. If the ghost of their mother were to join them now, then they would be three again, and Leo would not need to bluster and shout. Cecilia would not drift unmoored.

‘What on earth could possibly be funny at this moment?’ says Leo in irritation.

‘Oh, nothing. Nothing. Only life.’

Leo is not placated. Top hat removed, there is a dry ring of hair around his crown, while the ends are wet, stuck to his forehead and temples and neck from the sideways rain.

What a silly thing. How made up of the sublime and the ridiculous and the cruel is such a thing as life. What if Leo had hair that was wet in the middle and all that ringed around was dry? What if her mother had stumbled left instead of right?

What if she had never met Odette at all?

Cecilia laughs again.

‘What is wrong with you? Neither of us should be laughing. Life is a serious thing, and you will have to take it seriously now Mother is not here to shield you.’

Cecilia looks at him blankly. ‘Shield me? From what?’

Leo kicks a log further into the fire with his boot.

‘Mousy, Mousy, I am never quite sure if you are really this naive or if it is all put on. I love you but I often feel like I don’t know you at all.

Sometimes, you can be so sly, then at other times, it is like you were dropped here by the fairies. ’

‘Fairies are the cunning folk, so that would make me sly either way.’

He stares at her for a long minute. She does not know what grief looks like on him or how to read his misery. Surely, he is as broken as she is, but it has turned them into strangers.

‘I looked into that secret you said Claudine was blackmailing Mother with,’ he says.

A memory from the past, from the before her mother died, swims into view. Yes, the document. Penel. art. The blackmail. All these things she cared about, because she cared about Odette.

Odette who left her long before she was bodily gone.

Cecilia blinks. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter now.’

‘Unfortunately, it very much does.’

Leo goes to the writing desk and unlocks a drawer to remove two buff pieces of paper. He holds them out to her, and when she does not come to take them, he pushes them into her hand.

‘Go on then. This is what you wanted to know.’

Cecilia looks down at the papers, both oblong in shape, printed with red ink and black where they have been filled out by pen.

Leonard Moore Hart. Born 1876.

Mother: Penelope Hart.

Father:

Cecilia Moore Hart. Born 1879.

Mother: Penelope Hart.

Father:

They are both blank. The spaces for a father.

She looks over them again.

‘I don’t understand. What is this? Where is Father?’

‘Where indeed.’

‘Is it some error?’

‘They weren’t married, you fool. That is the secret Mother was keeping.

The secret Claudine was using to blackmail her.

You know, I went digging in all sorts of places looking for some sort of nastiness in Mother’s past and I found nothing, but when I was organising Mother’s things after she died, there it was.

In the simplest, most obvious place: our birth certificates.

’ Leo has returned to the fire, as though its heat gives him some anchor amidst his fear and anger. ‘We are illegitimate.’

Cecilia stares at the certificates again.

Oh yes. She sees it now.

It is quite neat. Claudine must have sent Penelope a copy to show she knew about her secret.

‘But Mother had a ring,’ she says slowly. ‘She told us all about their wedding.’

‘Because no one ever lies, do they, Mousy? There’s no marriage record I can find, so it was all, as they say, utter horseshit.’

No wonder her mother was terrified.

Cecilia wonders if she should be feeling anything yet.

Leo gives the fire another kick. ‘The worst thing is, the more I think about it, the entry for “father” being blank must mean that Father wouldn’t attend the registration.

He could have gone with Mother and agreed to have his name on the paper.

Hell, they could have even lied to the registrar and put themselves down as a married couple.

But they’re both dead now, so I suppose we can never ask them why they did the stupid things they did.

We just have to live with the legacy of their actions.

’ Leo laughs. ‘I suppose you had the right of it. Life’s quite funny really.

We were only financially ruined before – now we’re socially ruined, too. ’

‘If we tell anyone.’ There is something else welling up inside Cecilia, like the laughter, only wilder.

‘Yes, Mousy, if we tell anyone. I’m sure everyone will be flocking to see a bastard lawyer. Well. The good thing is you’ve no marriage prospects, so we hardly have to deceive anyone there.’

Penelope tried so hard to protect them, and she has ended up dead for all her troubles.

It is as though her mother’s death has revealed a grand secret to Cecilia, far grander than this talk of illegitimacy and ruin.

The special knowledge with which she is now privileged is that there is no sense to the world.

Just and entirely that. Sense is a conspiracy that people walk around creating together, telling each other that the unjust are punished and hard work gains reward.

That it is possible to make plans, to live in an ordered way, to exert one’s will upon one’s life. But it is all an illusion.

Chaos is all there is. Directionless, unexpected chaos.

Fresh tea is brought in, but Leo and Cecilia leave it unpoured. Leo sits in an armchair, on the edge of the cushion, elbows on his knees and hands clasped so that he can lean forwards in some mimicry of a serious pose he has seen men adopt at his office.

‘I suppose we’d better talk about it now. Sit down.’

Cecilia sits down.

Perhaps tomorrow, she will wake up and it will be summer again. Perhaps the house will burn down in the night. Perhaps she will be the Queen of Sheba or a house cat, or the trees will start to speak.

She cannot play the game anymore. She cannot pretend.

‘Do you think we can eat jam tarts for supper?’ she asks Leo.

His expression doesn’t change. ‘Odette isn’t here to humour your silliness. The both of you have been given far too much free rein and look where that got Odette. She should have been brought under control long before now. You must listen to me.’

‘Only they are so colourful and everything is so grey. We could eat all the colour and then we’d carry it around inside us and we’d never have to feel grey again.’

Leo ploughs on as though she hasn’t spoken.

‘Mother was right when she said that after Aunt Lydia died, we were living on Claudine’s good graces.

Claudine has spoken to me, and while she was happy enough to let the three of us live here, things are different now.

Mother is dead. I’ve been considering moving into digs with some friends for a while.

It so happens that a place has come up, and I was rather meaning to move out. Which just leaves you.’

‘Me,’ she echoes. Last on the list.

‘Yes. And it doesn’t really seem a good use of the place to house only you, especially if you’re off at university half the time. We can’t afford to pay for you to have two places to live.’

Cecilia pours a cup of tea for something to do with her hands.

The china is fine and delicately painted, and the heat burns against her cold fingers.

The set was an unexpected gift from Lydia, found in Herne House and given with that confusing generosity Lydia had, which sometimes seemed more like self-flagellation.

‘I don’t want to go back to university,’ she says. ‘It isn’t what I imagined. It is the greyest place.’

Leo laughs, harsh and unkind, and for the first time Cecilia wonders whether the love between them will be enough to withstand the hate they have been left with. She understands now that she is the only thing Leo has inherited. Another difficulty to overcome.

‘That’s your problem, Cessy – always imagining, never thinking. The tuition fees and your accommodation are already paid up for the year, so you’d better go back, as there won’t be anywhere else for you to go.’

‘But what about Mother’s stipend?’ she asks, hating herself for how plaintive she sounds. What about Mother’s stipend, what about Lydia’s paintings, what about Odette. There are no simple answers, yet she keeps searching.

‘Will you listen? There is no stipend. Mother and Father never married – when he died, we were left with nothing. All we have inherited from Mother is debt. She said she had the finances sorted, but the truth is: she kept up appearances, running up bills anywhere that would credit her. It’s all come due now.

Claudine has said she and Uncle George will cover the debt, but they cannot fund us now we are grown.

As I said, you’re paid up at Oxford for another two terms, but after that, you can look for positions as a governess.

Claudine said she might know a good family or two who’d have you. ’

Cecilia curls back into the chair. ‘Oh.’

‘Now, don’t look at me like that. It’s not my fault you dallied around with Odette instead of finding yourself a secure match. And now – well. You’re a bastard. No man will take you.’ He speaks so plainly. It is fact.

‘Spoilt goods,’ she says. ‘Bruised fruit from the market floor.’

‘If you want to be dramatic about it. I don’t think Mother did you a kindness by indulging you.

She let you believe you and Odette were the same for too long.

You will have to take a position as a governess, and now you have looked at reality head-on, if you don’t like that idea, you can work out something else. ’

Cecilia stares into the tea, pale with too much milk, just as she has always drunk it, since she was a child. ‘I don’t think I’ll be any good as a governess.’

‘Then work out how you can be.’ Leo rises, takes his coat from where it has been drying by the fire. ‘I am just as alone as you are. I will have to work for my bread. I know it is harder on you as a woman. I am sorry, but that is simply how it is.’

He shakes the last droplets from his coat as he puts it on and knots his scarf tight around his neck.

‘I’m going to the office. Probably won’t be back for dinner, so don’t wait for me. I suppose Cook can have a tray brought to the parlour for you.’ He pauses, one glove on, and regards her curiously. ‘I suppose you are mistress of this house now, even if it will be only for a short while.’

Mistress of the house. Employment as a governess. Yes, yes. All these plans.

Claudine has so many plans. Why is it that she alone has brought her will to bear upon the world? What magic does she possess to be so in control of her life? Has she struck some strange bargain that grants her a freedom withheld from the rest of them?

The front door slams behind Leo, and Cecilia watches from the window as he dashes through the rain, umbrella overhead. He has somewhere to go.

All Cecilia has is herself.