Chapter 30 #2
I stood in the doorway and felt the tremor become something more than a tremor.
It became a pressure, a weight, a force that pushed against the inside of my chest with an intensity that was, by my standards, extraordinary.
The force was not anger, though anger was present in it.
It was not fear, though fear was present too.
It was something else, something I had never experienced with this intensity, and the novelty of the sensation was itself a source of disorientation, because I was accustomed to understanding my own responses, to categorising them, to deploying them with the precision of tools, and this response was not a tool.
It was a force of nature, something that operated outside the framework of my control and that could not be managed or directed or suppressed.
It was possessive rage.
I recognised the term from the clinical literature I had studied in my father's library, the literature on the more extreme manifestations of human attachment, and the recognition was immediate and precise, because the clinical description matched my experience with an exactitude that left no room for doubt.
Possessive rage was the response of a person whose claim of ownership over another person had been challenged, and the response was characterised by a fury that was disproportionate to the provocation, a fury that was not directed at the challenger as a person but at the challenger as a symbol, a symbol of the threat to the possessive bond, and the fury was the fury of a creature defending its territory, its offspring, its claim, and the defence was instinctual, involuntary, and, in its rawest form, violent.
Edmund was mine. Not in the legal sense, though the legal sense was relevant, because as his sister and his guardian, I exercised a degree of control over his life that was, in practical terms, absolute.
But the possession was not legal. It was deeper than law, deeper than social convention, deeper than the arrangements of family and inheritance that governed the formal relationships between people.
Edmund was mine in the way that a limb is mine, or a faculty of the mind: he was part of me, not metaphorically but literally, an extension of my being that I could no more relinquish than I could relinquish my own heartbeat, and the thought of Sebastian approaching him, speaking to him, drawing him out, extracting information from him with the patient, kind, methodical attention of a man who knew how to make people trust him, the thought produced in me a response that was not calculated and not controlled and not part of any strategic plan but was, instead, the raw, primal response of an organism defending the thing it could not survive without.
I controlled the response. The control was automatic and absolute, the reflex of a lifetime of discipline, and the suppression of the rage was so complete that Edmund, looking at me from his desk, saw nothing in my face but the familiar composure of his sister.
"The man you met," I said. "What was his name?"
Edmund's brow furrowed. "I do not know. He did not say.
He was tall and thin, with dark hair that was going grey at the sides, and he had a scar on his jaw, a thin one, like a line drawn with a pencil.
And his eyes were brown, very brown, like the colour of strong tea, and they were kind eyes, the kindest eyes I have ever seen on a person I did not know. "
The description was Sebastian. The scar, the dark hair, the grey at the temples, the brown eyes.
Edmund had noticed these details with the precision of a naturalist cataloguing a specimen, and the precision was, in its own way, a testament to the perceptiveness that made him both so valuable and so vulnerable.
"You must not speak to that man again," I said.
The words were spoken quietly, but the quiet was not the quiet of calm.
It was the quiet of control, the quiet of a woman who is suppressing something enormous and who is using every ounce of her training to prevent the suppression from failing.
Edmund, who could not read the subtleties of my tone but who could read the directness of my words, heard the instruction and reacted to it with the distressed confusion of a child who has been given a command that contradicts a previous permission.
"But I invited him," he said. "I told him I would show him the scarab beetles. If I do not come, he will think I was lying, and I do not lie, Cecilia. I cannot lie. You know I cannot lie."
"You do not need to lie. You will simply not go to the Museum next Thursday. I have other plans for you."
"What plans?"
"That is not your concern. You will do as I say."
The words were harder than I intended. The hardness was a failure of control, a crack in the composure that I maintained with such effortless precision, and the crack was visible in Edmund's face, which went from confused to distressed in the space of a heartbeat, and the distress was the distress of a person who has been scolded without understanding why, and the lack of understanding was, I knew, the cruelest aspect of the interaction, because Edmund could not defend himself against an accusation he did not comprehend.
"I am sorry," he said, and the apology was immediate and automatic and utterly without comprehension, the apology of a child who has learned that apologies are the appropriate response to adult displeasure, regardless of whether the child understands the cause of the displeasure.
"I did not mean to do wrong. I only wanted to show the man the scarab beetles. He seemed nice. Are you angry with me?"
The question pierced me. Not emotionally, because emotion was not the mechanism through which I experienced the world, but physically, a sharp, sudden sensation in the region of my chest that was not quite pain and not quite pressure and not quite anything I could classify, but that was, whatever its nature, acutely uncomfortable.
"No, Edmund. I am not angry with you."
"Then why are you speaking in your angry voice?"
The observation was devastating in its accuracy.
Edmund had identified, with the unerring instinct of a person who has spent his entire life learning to read the emotional states of others because he could not read them through the normal channels of social cue and contextual inference, the precise quality of my voice, and the quality was, despite my best efforts, the quality of anger.
Not anger at him. Anger at the situation, at Sebastian, at the world that was, moment by moment, narrowing the space in which I could operate and threatening the one element of my existence that I could not bear to lose.
"I am tired," I said, and the lie was, I acknowledged, the first lie I had told Edmund in months, because I did not lie to Edmund as a general principle, not because I valued honesty for its own sake but because lying to Edmund was unnecessary and inefficient, since he could not detect lies and therefore could not be managed by them, and the deployment of a lie where none was needed was, by my own standards, a sign of compromised judgment.
"I am tired, and I should not have spoken sharply. You did nothing wrong."
"I did not do wrong?"
"No."
"And I may go to the Museum next Thursday?"
The question hung in the air between us.
I looked at Edmund, at his open, trusting face, at the grey eyes that were so like mine and so utterly unlike mine, at the hands that were still resting on the drawing of the mummy case, and I felt, with a force that nearly broke through the control I was maintaining, the full magnitude of the choice that lay before me.
If I forbade Edmund to go to the Museum, I would protect him from Sebastian's inquiries.
The protection was, in strategic terms, the correct course of action.
It would deny Sebastian access to the one person who could provide the most damaging testimony, and it would preserve the security of the locked cabinet and everything it contained.
But the forbidding would also distress Edmund, who valued his Museum visits above all other outings, and the distress would be visible and persistent, and it would, I knew, produce a change in his behaviour that Dorothea would notice and that Dorothea, despite her fear of me, might feel compelled to report to Sebastian, who would interpret the change as evidence that I was restricting Edmund's freedom because I had something to hide.
If I allowed Edmund to go to the Museum, I would expose him to further questioning.
Sebastian would return, as Edmund had invited him to do, and he would continue the conversation, drawing out more information, more details, more of the guileless observations that made Edmund such a dangerous witness.
The exposure was, in strategic terms, reckless, the kind of gamble that a person in my position could not afford, because the potential cost of the gamble, the exposure of the cabinet and the destruction of everything I had built, was catastrophic.
But beneath the strategic calculation, in the deep, unlit territory where the tremor had become a pressure and the pressure had become something I could not name, there was another consideration, a consideration that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the thing that Edmund represented in my life, which was not love, because I did not experience love, but was something adjacent to love, something that occupied the same space and served the same function and that was, in its own way, the only thing in my existence that I could not categorise or control or explain.