CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Unauthorized, he purchased several things against my account besides the tea. I did not reprimand him for this. Agnes has brought her cup to the sitting room where she is furiously writing a letter, I assume to my mother, I assume detailing the chaos to which our household has descended.
One of those things was a rope of licorice candy, which he and Rosalind are happily eating in the kitchen, so that the house is now ripe with sugary stink. Some smells carry too much of my childhood with them. I take my book outside to the garden, to the stone wall and the fresh air, sit in the angled ray of gold light, open the book in my lap, tilt my face to it, and proceed to think furiously under the guise of reading.
Another purchase was a new hat, just as he'd told me he would. He came back wearing it, tilted at an angle against the sun, and winked at me when I frowned at it.
The last thing he bought he tossed to me, casually, out of the grocer's box as he walked into the kitchen. I looked into my hand. A brass cigarette lighter, shining and new.
.
Vague sounds from the house: the kitchen pump, doors closing, the drone of voices. I barely see the pages in front of me. For once in my life, it is the people around me rather than the characters in a book that have their hold on me. Each layer of the mystery I am in clears away to reveal a denser, more inexplicable mass. What I found in the cottage has borne out the thread of suspicion I've formed. But I can't believe it.
The map. The answer is in the map. I'd looked right at it. Why had I not searched out the last journey he'd taken, the one that led him here? I put my face in my hands for a moment, exasperated.
A shout. Someone has called my name, angrily. A hollow, tight, unrecognizable voice. But when I look back to the house no one is there, just the curtain blowing out from the library window.
"Henry."
I turn. It's Seamus, walking fast up the path towards me.
His face is contorted. Twisted with rage. A stranger. My mouth opens. He jogs the last few steps, breathing hard, shoulders high and tense, ready to fight. I stand and the book drops from my lap.
"Someone was in t' room." Anger thickens his accent. I have to work to understand him. "Someone open my chest. Was it ye?"
"I'm sorry," I say. I can't think of an excuse, so I don't offer one. "It was."
"Ay?" he says, and his face suddenly leaches so pale I feel myself flushing with shame.
"I'm so sorry. It was curiosity. I didn't mean- " Now, of course, is when I explain my prying and ask of him, finally, Why are you here, how did you find me, what do you know? But in two quick steps he reaches me. One hand wraps around the back of my head and I feel my hair catch in his knuckles. I freeze. The other hand palms the side of my face. In it I can feel his strength, much more than I had credited him, and his rage. He clenches, pulls me, tilts my face down close to his. His pupils are wide, pushing aside the green. My reflection is in them. Sweat is standing out on his brow. I am bigger than he is; it's no matter, he could break my neck.
Our faces nearly touch. "An you didnae take it?"
"Take it?" I repeat, shocked.
"Take it. You gaed lookin for it." His mouth, an inch from mine, voice unrecognizably harsh. It's a question.
I open my mouth and shut it. I can feel his breath.
"And you didnae?"
"I don't want-" I say, clumsily. Take it? He can only be speaking of the fur. "It's yours, I don't want- I wouldn't- "
Somehow this was the right thing. "Ay," he says, hollowly, releasing me, "tis mine." There's a tremor in his voice. I straighten. He steps back and rubs his face. I watch him compose himself. When he looks at me again it is with a strange, distant speculation, as though we were meeting anew.
He looks down, opens his fists. "All right. 'As anybody ever betrayed you?"
I'm caught off-guard by the question. Then, involuntarily, I think of my parents at the station, my father's voice bright with the effort of forced casualness. My mother smiling, not speaking, swallowing hard. Her red eyes. Her hand waving goodbye. The two of them framed in the yellowed window, smaller and smaller on the platform as the train picked up steam.
"Yes," I say.
"D'you remember how it felt?"
"Of course," I say. I do. I remember Agnes' thin arm around my shoulders and her voice explaining to me, that first night at Harthome, in the enormous dust-smelling bed, what was wrong with me and why I could never leave. I remember the taste in the back of my throat: dust, mold, despair, acidic tears; that was the flavor of betrayal.
He clears his throat, looks somewhere over my shoulder. His hands are shaking violently. I didn't notice earlier, when they were fists, or when he was gripping my head in them. "And will you betray me?"
It's only a piece of fur. I know a thing about secrets. I've found empty bottles in the shrubbery, old letters crumpled angrily under drawers, the petty, forgivable things my loved ones have hidden. But not once have I seen the expression Seamus has now on any face besides my own. Whatever he is hiding, I understand this fear.
"Of everyone you've ever met," I hear myself saying, "I'm the one who wouldn't."
His shoulders drop. He puts his shaking hands in his pockets. His face is unreadable. He's making a decision. And then he whistles a low note, under his breath.
"I'll hold you to that, Henry," he says, and turns, walks stiffly back to his cottage, still shaking like a leaf.