As ever thank you to all of you reading and/or reviewing. I know I've been sporadic, but I've finally got the last few chapters pinned in place, so the last few chapters shouldn't take quite so long to get to you.
By May the weather had softened, and grown warm, the air thickly smelling of narcissi, sycamore and fresh-cut grass. The days were long and the light stretched late into the evening casting shadows that ran the length of the Swallowgate sitting room. It was idyllic if not conducive towards revision for the ever-looming exams. Presently the girls were gathered among the squashy chairs, sewing discarded in favour of Faith's latest letter.
Beware heliotrope cyanosis it began, minus its customary greeting to the girls who pinned hopes. Mara, who had the reading of it, noticed this and broke off, frowning.
'Headache bothering you?' asked Poppy.
'In fact I was wondering why Faith can't write a letter in English the way normal people do. But as you mention it, that too.'
'My fault,' said Nan, reaching for the letter. 'You caught that spring cold off of me, I'd lay money on it.'
'Heliotrope cyanosis,' said Mara, ignoring headache and diversions both. 'Does anyone know what it is?'
'It sounds like the sort of flower Mara would pick in the woods and put by,' said Nan, now struggling to decipher Faith's handwriting.
'It sounds Greek,' said Poppy, surprising them. Seeing this she shrugged and said, 'I picked up the odd word when Faith was dabbling in it back in first year. Something blue?'
'Right, we'll take care then, no blue flowers,' said Mara and pressed her hands to her eyes to fend off the light.
'That's it,' said Poppy, rising, 'I'm making tea. Don't come to any conclusions without me.'
'Mouse,' said Mara through her fingers, 'I don't need –'
'Well you look as if you did,' said Poppy. 'Besides, it will do us all good. Stop us from lying awake all night running mentally through revision until sun-up.'
She went and in the lull her absence occasioned Mara crossed to the windows and drew the curtains. In the shelter they afforded she pressed her forehead against the lead of the frame and the throbbing in her temples eased.
'All right?' said Nan from her corner of the floor.
'Nothing Poppy's tea won't settle,' said Mara.
'I thought you didn't need it?'
'Well. Perhaps a little.'
Poppy returned, china rattling and knelt awkwardly, trying to preserve the contents of her tea tray. Brewed from feverfew and camomile it tasted sharply of hay and dust, and the scent one got from breaking holly stocks. It galled the inside of the throat a little and stung Mara's sinuses. She must have grimaced because Poppy said apologetically, 'we're out of honey. I'm sorry.'
Mara cupped her hands around the cherry blossom china and held it level with her lips, letting the steam soothe her nose. 'Never mind, Mouse. It's not the taste that's important. Though,' with a smile, 'I'll be glad to be rid of it.'
It didn't go though, or even lessen. Rather Mara's headaches increased in intensity as the exams approached, a circumstance she used to illustrate her argument that they induced by revision. Confronted with the collective insistence that exams had never provoked headaches in her before, Mara argued that the previous years' exams had never mattered so much. Then Di began to complain of them, and more than that, of a prickling in her throat, 'As if it were full of pebbles,' she said. She sounded as if this were true too. But when pressed by the others, she took Mara's part saying ,'We could all do with a day away from our books, I think.'
Accordingly they spent an indulgent day searching the stores for graduation clothing. Nan favoured a lustrous gold organdie with a narrow waist and embossed yoke, Poppy a lavender taffeta with buttons like pearls. Di was struck by a green crepe and Mara by a watery blue silk that seemed far too extravagant under the circumstances. Nan wouldn't let her give it up though.
'We don't get occasions often,' she said.
'That's rather the argument against it, you,' said Mara and laughed.
'No, I mean it will still have wear in it for other occasions –for after. And there will be an after, and there will be lots of occasions then.'
'Oh? Name one, can you?'
'Well,' said Nan with affected consideration, 'Jem's wedding, I shouldn't wonder. He'll never wait until the end of his stint here, you watch. '
'Faith might have a word about that, don't you think?'
'Of course I do –but it will be an affirmative one. I 'm right, Ariel, you know I am.'
'No,' said Mara, 'but I know better than to argue with you in a mood like this.'
They hunted gloves and hats, and seized by the spirit of the day had lunch out in a tea room on Mercat street. The tea was weak, the air stuffy and the irises on the table beginning to fray, but it was the first time they had eaten out in months and they felt the full luxury of it like a golden, smooth and sheer as a satin wrap.
Later, satisfied with their treasures, they took a picnic into the woods. It was only cold potatoes and a light salad, but Nan built a fire and Mara guddled fish and a feast sprung up almost effortlessly before them.
They ate the fish with their fingers, mindful of singeing them, and cooled their hands in the river afterwards.
'You see,' said Di, 'Good as new. All of us.'
It couldn't last though; Mara felt the rising pulse of a headache even as they came into Swallowgate. Poppy's cheeks were bright with exertion, and Nan too, but Di fell into one of the squashy chairs with an exhaustion that seemed etched bone-deep.
'Our next day off is going to be spent here,' said Mara seeing her, 'preferably playing patience or something equally mindless.'
'We needed an occasion,' said Di, but her throat was hoarse again, whether from the evening breeze or Nan's spring cold no one could have said.
'Would it be worth asking to defer the exam?' said Poppy on the evening before Mara's final exams begun.
'Hardly,' Mara said. 'A day or two ago, maybe, but not now.'
'Only,' said Poppy, ignoring Mara, 'it doesn't sound like revisionitus anymore. And there is supposed to be something going round the houses.'
'Is there? Now you tell me.'
'I only just heard. One of the boys at Peter's boarding house has got it, and from the sound of things, so has half the student body. I'm sure if I went and spoke with…'
'Mouse,' said Mara affectionately, 'there are maybe six good days in the year when I can do what I do well. On none of them am I asked to perform. I can sit an exam with a headache.'
It was more than a headache. She sat her first exam with chills dancing down the length of her spine, skin prickled in gooseflesh. Halfway through a comparative essay on Ibsen and Strindberg, God expressed his sense of humour by sending a smith to set up shop in her head and fire anvils there. She paused long enough on her final essay, about the reality of A Doll's House to drum her fingers against her forehead. It didn't lessen the throbbing, but it made her feel she could do something about it. The second set of exams made her eyes ache. She was tolerably sure that whatever-it-was had turned into a head cold and would break out in good earnest the moment she allowed her body to relax. She wrote about stagecraft in Peter Gynt while fighting against the haze of cotton wool that was trying to cover her brain.
Di's experience must have been similar because when they met in the quad afterwards, eyes watering in the sunlight and free forever of the evil of written examination, she said to Mara, 'The nice thing about a degree you enjoy is that you can write it pretty well under any circumstance and acquit yourself with competence.'
'Better, of course, if the circumstance is agreeable in the first place,' said Mara.
The heyday of exams over, Mara relaxed into the sudden expanse of leisure time that had opened between exams and As You Like It, and the head cold, seizing its chance blossomed into fever. She wasn't aware of it happening but woke two days after her last exam stifled by the weight of the bedspread.
'You've got apple spots,' Poppy said, looking up from pinning her hair.
'Have I?' asked Mara. She put her hand to one cheek, half expecting to feel the change. She couldn't, but she had no trouble believing it, as she was also under the distinct impression that the light was too bright, and her skin had shrunk half a size. She was going to observe as much to Poppy when mercifully the world dropped away and darkness fell.
Mara could never accurately account for the days that followed. She retained a shadowy sketch of Poppy hovering suddenly and improbably tall over her, the apple-scent of Nan tied to news (what?) about Di, and Pilgrim at her feet, always at her feet like an Egyptian Sphinx, daring anything to harm her. When it passed she woke too see Poppy owl-eyed and anxious, her face patterned with the leaves of the sycamores from the angle the sun struck her.
'You're awake' said Poppy. She lunged for and squeezed Mara's hand through the quilt with a relief forcible as a gale.
'Oh God, you're awake.'
'You've got apple spots,' said Mara.
That was why, when it came not the point, it was Mara who spoke with Poppy's lecturer and not the other way around.
'It's a waste of energy,' said Poppy, 'he'll hate it.'
'He'll cope,' said Mara stopping Poppy in the act of prising a damp cloth off her forehead. 'And you'll get over this. What exactly did you do when I had it?'
'Can't'member' said Poppy thickly. 'Headhurts.'
It occurred to Mara to tease her about her stubbornness, but then she looked at the apple-spots in the hollows of Poppy's cheeks, saw that they had darkened to plum and changed her mind.
'Go to sleep, a charaid,' she said instead.
Poppy wasn't wrong about her lecturer. Confronted with Mara, still spectre-pale from recent illness and harrowed with nursing, he said immoveably, 'This fever, I take it that it impedes her handwriting?'
'No,' said Mara, 'her breathing,' and turning on her heel she stalked off in a whirlwind.
She hadn't said it to shock either. She had left Poppy with a disconcerting rattle in her throat. It had appeared overnight, a skeletal sound like autumn leaves in a gale. At first, with a thought for her sister's wee, asthmatic Duncan, she had sat beside her Poppy and breathed through pursed lips. Nan, observing her, had left off her news of Di (none of it good) and had done it too. Wakeful, Poppy had seemed just present enough to catch on, but asleep her breathing had become shallow and Mara gave up. At any rate the rale wasn't bad; she had to press her ear to Poppy's chest to hear it. Still, a traitorous voice whispered to her that it too, like the fever, could worsen.
This it did in due course, progressing from rustle to susuration to a racking that hurt to listen to, much less experience.
'Had we better write to your father, do you think?' asked Mara of Nan in the small hours of one mizzley May morning.
'Yes,' said Nan. 'I know all the talk in town calls this a fever, but the more it goes on the more it begins to remind me of the year mums had pneumonia. We haven't got Faith, and Mara if that's what it is –'
'Don't you dare finish that thought,' said Mara. The words came out almost in a hiss, startling Pilgrim, who had hitherto been asleep on her knees.
'Sorry,' said Nan.
'Don't be. Go be useful and write to people who can do something about it.'
Nan went, and it seemed that just the act of writing was enough. It often felt in the days that followed that they had been granted if not grace then perhaps stasis, as neither Di nor Poppy worsened notably. Their cheeks still were the purple of damsons neither had they darkened. And always, horribly like the hum of some perverse cicada, the mucous rale in their throats. It was a rattle, a shudder, a whirlwind and it terrified them all equally. It seemed days that they battled it, Mara and Nan with cold cloths and steam, Poppy and Di from nests of blankets. In the long, grim hours between sunset and sunrise, Faith's letter came back to them, Beware heliotrope cynaosis.
'But we can't be,' said Mara to the kitchen as she stood boiling water for tea of feverfew and camomile. 'We can't beware of it, because you never said what it bloody was.' She threw the tea towel she had wrapped her hand and didn't miss it until the handle of the kettle scalded her palm. She brought it away with a hiss, but it was a small thing at the end of the day, only an angry patch of skin and as nothing next to the hurt she might be asked to bear.
As when Mara had been ill, Pilgrim took up residence at the foot of Poppy's bed, and absurdly that heartened Mara. He sat their with his ears laid flat, daring anyone to move him. Once Mara had, forcibly extracting his claws from the quilt in order to change the linen. On that occasion he had sprang from her arms like a canon to settle on the bedpost, where he sat like an aggrieved deity until Poppy was back in bed, the quilts pulled up to her chin. Then he lay down at her feet, severe and sphinx-like as ever.
'There's a ghost,' said Poppy, 'just there, do you see?'
Mara looked, not out of any expectation to see a ghost, but because Poppy looked so sure. Here eyes were wide, she was looking at something.
'Anyone we know?' said Mara. She was trying to keep terror out of her voice. She could feel it, raw and primal running through her veins, in the pulse of her neck.
'No,' said Poppy. 'I don't think so. Can't you see? Just there.' She pointed for amplification. Mara fixed on the corner that fascinated Poppy and forcibly choked down a wave of fear. Pilgrim was still there on the bed, his fur bristled and ears flat. Pilgrim wouldn't give Poppy over to the ghost, if that's what it was.
Nonsense, Mara thought, but it was trust to nonsense or give in to panic. She couldn't panic because if she did she would be no help to Poppy, and if she couldn't help Poppy –but she wouldn't think about that. Nothing was going to happen to Poppy because she was going to keep her head and battle the fever at least until Dr. Blythe could get to them. He was coming, Nan swore he was coming, though it had been nearly a week and they hadn't heard from him. But Nan swore he was coming, so Mara swore it to, and until he could get to them, Pilgrim would keep the ghosts at bay.
'You,' Mara said, seizing Poppy's hand in hers, 'are not allowed go away, a charaid, have you got that? You. Are. Not. Allowed. To. Go. Away.'
'And that,' said a voice from the murky dark, 'is doctor's orders.'
