Helen's pov.
I sit, shivering, on my bed. The heavy breathing of my sleeping classmates is drumming through my skull. Yet, even if all were silent, I would not be able to sleep, for my racing thoughts are too captivating to be momentarily put aside.
It happened again today. Miss Scatcherd was even more vigorous with the whip than usual. My neck is still stinging with all its might. I have written to Father repeatedly, but he is always rather vague as to what he is going to do with me.
He seems awkward whenever I mention my disagreeable teacher. In fact, he is ill at ease whatever I do since Mother died. I cannot help but think that he wishes I had died instead of his dear wife, that I was the one slumbering in a grave with my stillborn brother, that I was the girl whose lock of bark-brown hair was kept captive in a silver locket by his bedside.
It is with a grim mind that I gaze at Mother's portrait on the days I return home. It is the only one of her on view, for the childhood painting of she and her sister is in the attic, wrapped in yellow muslin and parcel string. I do not know why.
Inside the oaken frame, she sits in her sewing room, embroidering some blue silk with intricate patterns. It is how I remember her best. My brain is full of images: fingers flowing over a piano, feet waltzing in satin slippers, green-grey eyes in a colour I have come to hate, for they are the eyes of Miss Scatcherd.
I can hear my Mother's laugh, the sort that makes the listener think of music. I can hear her chattering to my Father at dinner; hear her scolding me for slouching or tapping my fingers.
Oh, how I wish I could not remember the bad times, the hours that stretched into days, days filled with a silence interrupted only by a cough as she moaned in her sickbed. I did not want a sibling. I wanted Mother to get well again so we could talk properly once more. If the child was another girl, I dreaded my Father's anger. He has paced the floor every time a daughter has been born, and every time the daughter has died within the week. All except me, that is.
I cried for each one of them, my sisters. They were buried, unnamed, into the churchyard. At least, the graves showed no Christian name and I could not bring myself to ask a parent. I called them all such pretty things inside my head: Isobel, Rebecca, Judith.
Yet this boy, Thomas was the only one who mattered. I am glad he was born dead. Anything would be better than living as Father's child.
The colours green and grey refuse to leave my head. All we Burns children have been born with those shades in our eyes. The same shades that glare at me every day in the tired face of Miss Scatcherd.
I do not know what to believe now that I have made this connection. My heart yearns for a coincidence, a chance similarity. But I cannot sleep until I work it out. I will continue to lie awake at night, continue to perform badly in reading, continue to be whipped by the dying twigs that rest by the window in the book-closet.
I will carry on dreaming of the impossible until that day in which I will turn twenty-one, receive my inheritance and be free. Yet, until then, I can only wait.
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