Chapter 54 Ormdale
Chapter fifty-four
Ormdale
Una didn’t really want to go back to the muniments room at all. In the end, that is why she did it. If she was going to face it again—and she had to face it someday—she ought to do it on an afternoon like this, when she felt relieved and happy because Aunt Emily had come home.
She would have left Oolong downstairs, but he followed her stubbornly, almost as if he knew where she was going, and wouldn’t have her face it alone.
Una climbed the stairs with him padding beside her. In the aftermath of her confession to Violet, Una felt almost weightless.
“Is this how you felt, Oolong,” she whispered to him, “when the glasshouse was built, and you began to use your wings to fly again?”
When they got onto the roof she remembered: Pip had never returned the keys. How very absent-minded she had become! It must be because she hadn’t slept very much lately. Well, now that she was here, she ought at least to check whether he’d remembered to lock up the tower afterwards.
Sure enough, the door opened when she turned the knob, which was no more than she expected. What she had not expected was to find Pip himself, in a posture of alarm by the table, wearing, incongruously, an overcoat.
“What are you doing here?“ he demanded, though this was manifestly a question which ought to be asked of him.
He looked so guilty that she stared.
“I’m getting the nail clippers for Oolong,” she said. “What about you?”
“I—I—I’m sorry, Una,” he said, going red. “I said I checked on the relic, days ago. But I didn’t. I didn’t think it was very important. But I’ve checked on it now, and it’s there! So that’s all right, isn’t it? No harm done.”
Una didn’t feel it was all right. “But why—why would you lie about that?”
“I don’t know!” he snapped, making Oolong startle. “Just—just leave it alone.”
Perhaps because Una hadn’t been here since her attack, the room felt small and stifling. She reached for the clippers. As she did so, her eyes fell on the box that contained the reliquary.
“You’ve forgotten to lock the box,” she said, pointing to the loose latch.
“Oh, dash it!” he exclaimed. “How stupid of me!”
He crouched down to lock it. Una turned to leave. Afterwards, she could not quite say why she didn’t, other than that she knew something was wrong. And Una could not walk away from something that was wrong.
“Oh, I’ll do it after all,” she said, turning back. “I think I must see it myself, or I won’t feel secure.”
Pip made no movement to restore the key to her. He began to chatter as he fumbled with the lock. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve done it for you, Una, so you don’t have to. It’s just your nerves, Una, you know it is. You worry over nothing. You always have.”
Oolong’s tongue went in and out, as if tasting the air. Dragons did that sometimes. George said they had a special organ which helped them scent things with their tongue—even, perhaps, emotions.
“Pip,” Una said very quietly, taking a step closer to Pip. “May I have those keys back, please?”
Pip went still, crouched over the box, his usually-tidy hair falling over his eyes so that she couldn’t read his expression.
“Pip?” Una said. “May I have them?”
The muscles in Pip’s face went rigid.
“No,” he said, his voice as hard as his face. “You mayn’t.”
He rose to his feet. He seemed big and strange. Una felt as if the Pip she knew was slipping away before her eyes, so that somebody else could appear in his place. Somebody she didn’t want to be in a small room with.
Oolong climbed up onto the table to watch them.
“Pip, please,” Una said, her chest tightening. “I don’t understand. But—whatever is wrong—you can tell me.”
“No, I jolly well can’t,” he said, looking down. “I can’t tell you who I really am. You don’t know me at all.”
Una stared at him. “What are you talking about? Of course I do! We’ve known each other all our lives! You—“ she took a breath, for she knew that this time she must say it—”you’re a brother to me, Pip. More than Percy ever was.”
Somehow this set him off, for he bent close to her and began to shout, his breath making her blink. “I’m not your brother, Una, and I’m not your nephew! I’m not even a gentleman’s son! I’m nothing!”
To Una’s amazement, Pip was now crying—great tears he had to dash away from his face as if they angered him.
“I’m done!“ he said. “I’m done waiting for scraps from your family. I’m taking what I want—and what I want is the best.”
His hand went to his overcoat pocket, where something bulky and square was hidden.
Yes, that was what had made him move so oddly—hiding the relic in his pocket.
Una felt unconcerned about the loss of the thing itself.
What did it matter, really? Saint George was in heaven, and Pip very much wasn’t—at this moment he seemed headed in quite the opposite direction.
It was Pip that mattered. Pip, who was crying in front of her because everything he had pinned his hopes on had turned out to be untrue. Violet had been right. Some horrible man had hurt Lily all those years ago, and now it had all come back to hurt Pip, too.
Una was filled with the purest rage at the thought of it. This must be the sort of anger her uncle had been talking about—the anger that drove you to fix things. She couldn’t fix this for Pip, but perhaps just being angry for him and with him was something.
Una reached out to touch him. At the same moment, Oolong made a rush across the table towards him.
“No, Oolong!” she cried out, stepping between them, for she couldn’t bear the possibility of Pip striking Oolong, even in self defence.
Pip made a dash for the door. Oolong slid down Una’s skirt to land safely on the floor. Una made her own rush for the door, but she was too late.
Pip banged it shut between them. She could feel, in the fierce tension in the handle, that he still held the other side to stop her from opening it. Then she heard the scrape of him jabbing the key into the lock.
“No!” Una gasped, not just because it was a horror to her to be locked in the tower, but because it would make everything worse for Pip, too. “Please don’t, Pip!”
“It’s only a few hours till supper. That will give me time to get away,” Pip’s voice came through the door. “You’ll be safe as houses.”
“Pip, no! I won’t tell anyone until tomorrow morning, if that’s what you want,” Una said. “I promise. And you know I never break a promise, Pip. You know I never do!”
When Pip’s voice came again, he sounded, if possible, even more miserable than she did. “Come on, Una, it’s no worse than a game of hide-and-seek. It’s not frightening at all! They’ll all come looking for you. Everyone loves you. You’ll be all right. And Oolong’s in there, too.”
For a moment, Pip might have been a little boy again, a little boy who was anxious for her approval. Had he ever cared about her at all, Una wondered, or had she just been the squire’s daughter all along—someone to be flattered and pleased until no longer needed?
But perhaps, in this state, he might listen to her. She had to try one last time.
“Listen, Pip,” Una said as cheerfully as she could over the horrible pain in her chest. “Nobody here cares about that old relic! Please don’t steal it. Come with me and talk to Uncle George. I really think he’d give it to you, if you need it.”
“That’s a nice speech, Una,” he said sadly.
“But we can’t go back to the way things were.
It was all a fairy tale. And you—well, we were stupid, naive children, both of us.
” He laughed bitterly. “I may be nobody, but I can’t be your charity case.
In fact—if you can keep from hating me—you oughtn’t to think of me at all, after this. Do you hear? Forget about me.”
She certainly heard the despair in his voice. Charity case? Was it Una’s fault that Pip believed this? If she hadn’t been so distracted with Violet…
No! Stop trying to find a way to blame yourself for everything!
Violet had snapped at her, and the words struck her with new force, because that’s exactly what she was trying to do now.
What was easier? To blame herself, or to face the fact that something was terribly wrong with a person who meant so much to her?
That someone she loved was betraying her?
“Yes, I hear you,” Una said, altering her posture so that her hands were flat on the door, as if she could touch him that way.
She must speak quickly. Even though it changed nothing, she must tell him what was in her heart.
“But now you can listen to me. I think you’re trying to smash things up, just like you did at art school.
It doesn’t matter a jot who your father is.
Do you hear, Pip? You’re my brother because I love you.
Whether you lock me in or not. You can’t make me hate and you can’t make me forget. ”
There was a kind of victory just in saying it. This, at least, was a choice that was entirely hers to make. One she had never had the chance to make with Violet.
There was no answer from the other side. Had he even heard her? She hoped that he had. Without testing the handle, she backed away from the door. Had he locked the door, and she so overwrought with emotion that she didn’t hear the sound of it?
Oolong pressed against her ankles.
And then Una had a very bad moment. It was that familiar feeling—the horrible feeling of being left behind.
The feeling of being useless, small, and forgotten.
Una had felt this after Violet had left, too.
When she was known as Baby, she used to cover her eyes and go perfectly still when bad things happened.
It had made a sort of sense. If she wasn’t really there, she couldn’t be hurt.
But Una was very much there, and Una was hurt. She sat down on the floor and hugged her knees. Oolong licked her cheek, then settled next to her, and Una breathed through the pain in her chest until it went away.
You are the very last person I expect to need rescuing, her teacher had said.
It was so quiet now that Una could hear the wind whistling about the tower.
It came down from the fells, carrying with it the wet smell of heather and peat, the tuneful cry of larks, the warning cry of lapwings.
It had wreathed round the abbey tower like this for hundreds of years.
She knew some people thought it a mournful, ghostly sound, but to Una it seemed like a mother singing to her child.
Gwendolyn had been trapped here, Una understood that. And perhaps because of that, her leaving had always felt like an escape. But to Una, the abbey was not a dark curse or a lonely burden. It was simply—home.
Janushek was right, she thought. Una didn’t need rescuing, because this was where she wanted to be.
At least for the time being. She had never felt more free to leave than she did now, today, when her promise not to leave the tower for the afternoon kept her inside—whether the door was locked or not.
Una breathed a long breath and opened her eyes. This was her home, and the room was mellow with a light that made the dust motes dance, as if they, too, heard the song of the wind.
She had a choice. She could yell out the window until someone came. But she would keep her promise to Pip, too.
“Well, Oolong,” she said shakily, dropping a hand to his back, “let’s see to those claws of yours, shall we?”