Your own talent is a crabbed, mean little thing, unworthy of notice. That, in itself, is a blessing beyond price. It has allowed you to walk the halls of money and power without drawing unwanted attention, to trade on your handsome face and good name to endorse Arden Hall Young Ladies' Academy to investors and despairing parents. Even when you must purchase a child's indenture from workhouse or transport yard, you have remained above suspicion. It has, in short, granted you the freedom to move unfettered in the world, to act as your conscience deems fit.
You are marked by an intractable difficulty with numbers and sums—no small deficiency, for a man of business, but invisible enough. Your employers have turned a blind eye to this vulnerability: any fourteen-year-old apprentice can balance accounts, but your penchant for unconscious prophecy is less easily come by.
Kate insists that mathematics is at its core a mode of prediction; you arrive at prediction by a radically different method, she says, one that proves incompatible with the conventional stratagem. She reminds you over and over, as though you are one of her pupils, that your faculties are by no means deficient, merely different.
You have always sent the children to Kate with their questions. Peculiar talents are, after all, the chief study of her adult life. Her husband Frank has procured her a small medical library, and the elder Cheerybles send her the most recent publications from Paris and Zurich; and then there are her own children, and yours, not to mention her pupils at school and the Crummles' motley entourage. On occasion, you even glimpse Little Kate acting as her medium for impassioned debates with your cousin's ghost.
But you have spoken too little, it seems, of talent and infirmity. It has become a forbidden topic between you and your children, too painful—perhaps too dangerous—to acknowledge. You had intended a tidy presentation of family history, but it has struck the heart of the silence between you. To explain your cousin's life, you must also explain what was done to children like them.
You trace the bare outlines of your confession. Your thoughtless promise, little more than smoke and fairytale, to meet your cousin out in the wide world, to help him however you could once you were both free of that wretched place. His desperation, despair, and flight; the bitter cold that night, and the next, when you prayed he would freeze to death before his masters caught him. His apprehension and punishment, when your temper frayed and finally snapped. Your graceless brawl with the headmaster: you had never before raised a hand to your fellow man and felt sick with it, a bone-deep revulsion you could direct at no one but yourself. And the boys—Lord, how they looked at you, horror and delight and nausea and awe. You had reduced the living god who ordered their destinies to a sniveling petty-tyrant who wet himself with fear. You fled from them then in your moment of apotheosis, and emptied your stomach in the snowy courtyard.
You did not look for your cousin. You did not think to look for him. You were nineteen and frightened, and you did not yet know that he was kin.
If you did one kind thing for him—one kind thing for any of those boys—it was that when you quit the estate for the last time, you left its gates unlocked.
Your voice fails; Edmund has taken your broad hand between his own, bless him. Pearl bites the inside of her lips, waiting for you to elaborate.
"If you left your cousin there," Little Kate asks at length, "then how did he come to be buried in our back garden?" Surely, she seems to suggest, you realized your mistake and went back for him.
"He followed me," you reply. "From a distance, mind—I hadn't any idea for the first few days. He didn't work up the courage to show himself until I'd traveled too far to return him to his masters." You shiver to say so; but you'd hardly given him reason to think better of you. "I wouldn't have done so; I'd like to think I wouldn't. I had my mother and sister to think of, but—well." Your sister would have had it out of you sooner or later, and she'd have turned you out to sleep in the road if you'd dared purchase her comfort with another's misery.
Edmund lets out a heavy breath, shaken but visibly relieved. "That's not so different from the story he tells."
You doubt it, but you do not say so. You were callow and intemperate and a thousand times thoughtless, and he was more badly injured than you realized. If not for the intervention of strangers, your petty neglect would have been the death of him.
"I was lucky to have him by my side," you admit instead. "I had never traveled any great distance by foot, much less in the dead of winter, and I was utterly unprepared. I had with me a small leather valise—" You point to the eastern corner of your study, where it lies tucked away beside your desk. "—packed with all the wrong things. My father's old Bible, a sheaf of stationary, a novel about a boy kidnapped by pirates. Three changes of clean clothes. My shaving kit. A locket, one of your Auntie Kate's, with a miniature of my father inside. The four shillings I had left to my name. I tucked my top hat under my arm; when the time came to leave, I could not find my hat-box." You can almost smile at your own foolishness. Almost. "My cousin was a more practical sort. He'd stuffed the pockets of his oilskin with oatcakes and sausage and dried apples. Witch hazel for the cut he'd taken. Flint and tinder, too, and woolen gloves for the both of us—even a flask of brandy, though Lord knows how it came to be in his possession. He knew the land, and he knew privation, and he was...prodigiously talented. He will tell you that I saved his life, out there on the road—but truthfully, it was he who saved mine."
Between the four of them, your children seem to be having an impassioned argument comprised entirely of shrugs, glares, and cocked eyebrows. You can't quite tell the topic or your offspring's relative positions, but you are very nearly certain Pearl is winning. You are surprised, then, that it is Edmund who speaks.
"It must be very difficult to talk about him," your son observes. "You must have often felt quite helpless."
You cannot be certain of his words; you are flickering in and out of your body; but that seems to be the gist of it. He has hidden a hundred questions inside that bland statement.
He wonders whether your cousin truly died of consumption, or if the adults in his family have concocted this fiction to protect some dangerous secret. He wonders whether the experiences of your youth have, as he fears, broken your faith in God. He wonders what it was like for you to have a small gift, something so easily overlooked, and to stand beside a man who was at once so strong and so vulnerable. He wonders how you came to be so close to your cousin—closer than a brother, closer even than a spouse. He wonders, in point of fact, just how close the two of you came to be. He wonders why, if your grief for your cousin lies so fresh upon your breast, you have never asked Little Kate to serve as your medium. He wonders what prevents you, still, from saying your cousin's name.
You wonder the same thing yourself.
"I was often less helpless than I felt," you tell them. You do not know how to answer the rest. Perhaps it is better to dismiss your children for the night and answer their questions in the morning—preferably with Kate by your side.
But your older daughter, keen to the danger that you will put an untimely end to this interview, blurts, "Tell us about your time on the road."
You utter a diffident syllable deep in your throat.
"Pleeease," she begs, pressing her hands together as if in prayer. "You can't leave off there—I'll never manage to get to sleep if you don't—I'll be up all night thinking up all the ways your adventures might have gone, and when I doze off at breakfast and Mother is cross with me it'll be all your fault!"
"Tell us what his gift was really like," Dora adds.
Pearl elbows her hard in the ribs. "Never mind that. Tell us how you came to have two shadows."
Every forest is Arden, your cousin said once. You had laughed and called it pithy, and called it sentimental nonsense, and mussed his hair so it stood up in patches like a mangy animal's. But you think you understand what he meant. When you try to talk about him, every question is the same question. Every story is the same story. But where to begin? The hazel wood? King Lear?
The year without summer. Perhaps you should start there.
No. You know where to begin.
"Eleven years ago," you tell your children, "there was no Arden." They should not believe you; they should be fools if they did. The trees tower ancient and primeval, thrice as tall as your house. The loam is springy with centuries of fallen leaves. But what you are telling them is true all the same. "There was no orchard, no hazel wood down by the road. There was a solitary oak tree, perhaps eighty or a hundred years old and mossy at its roots; and beneath it we'd buried my father."
When you brought your cousin from London to your childhood home—when he was ill for the last time—
(No. When he was outgrowing his humanity so swiftly it frightened you. That is how it happened.)
For a fortnight, you walked with him through these grassy hills and told him everything you could remember about your childhood. You strolled together down the cobbled Roman road with a bag of roasted hazelnuts between you, tossing the shells over your shoulder. Yours lay quiet in the dust. His swelled back into live seeds, and put down roots there in the hard-packed earth, and sent up green questing shoots while you watched.
You never buried him. He lay there on the damp grass, so near your father's headstone, and told you his vision of the garden that was and ever will be, and whispered his last secret. He said that he was happy. That you had made him happy. That you must remember that, in all the years to come. Then the last of his humanity slipped away, and the earth swallowed up his bones, and a forest burgeoned into life all around you, and the air lay thick with birdsong.
He did not die, your cousin; he became something else. He became Arden. He has watched over your family ever since.
But you are getting ahead of yourself. There was so little strength left in him, that first awful January, when he fought the pigs for slops and slept with the dogs in a corner of the stables. His power lay dormant in the winters, and he suffered just as anyone else might. His joints stiffened and swelled like crabapples. He came inside for chores with chilblains on his hands and skin chapped raw from the cold. He nearly escaped your notice altogether. But when he breathed, the wind blew. When he closed his eyes it was night. And when he cried out to Heaven—
(But you cannot tell them about that. That is a story you will take to your grave.)