CHAPTER TWO
The village doctor came later that night, gave Jepson's swollen yellow legs one swift glance, handed me his certificate, and left. His assistant and I had ended up needing to take the shed door off its hinges to carry Jepson's body up to the house, even though he'd weighed nearly nothing for being so tall, poor old man.
After the doctor came the undertaker, and now, three days later, it's the rector I'm shaking hands with. His glassy blue eyes are speculative at mine although his tone is as affable as always. Somewhere in the back of his mind he's wondering how much of a hand I've had in this death. He's trying, I can tell, to suppress this thought, but a faint scent of fear is wafting out from his robe whenever he raises his arms. He's known of our family all his life but has never made it past Harthome's front door. For most of mine, he's been trying to wrangle Jepson into his confessional. Now Jepson's finally his. Too late for it to do either of them any good. When the rector turns away, I realize I've been smiling.
It's a cold morning and the dead-ivy churchyard still has the touch of winter to it. These low stone walls we have gathered inside are pastoral enough that Agnes' modern crepe bonnet looks slightly ridiculous. She and I are, in our own ways, dealing with our grief: I am acidic, and she is brisk. She does all of the speaking for the two of us, as usual. I nod in agreement with her condolences. The rector watches us from the corner of his eye.
The crowd at the grave is small, of course. Jepson's sister, in from the sticks, looks distressingly like him except for grey ringlets and a thick layer of pink powder. Through Agnes, I'd offered her the use of a room at Harthome while she meets with the solicitors. Through Agnes I also received her polite refusal. Now throughout the service, as she sends me a volley of tiny, horrified glances, I realize that, no matter how vehemently he would deny it if he could, Jepson's told her.
How much he told her I don't know. She doesn't look as though she has the sense to keep it to herself, which means I might need to watch out for her, which is a tiring prospect. The rector's voice drones on and crows call overhead and I reflect on how credible, anyhow, Jepson's story would sound to anyone from the outside.
Although it's true. All of it. In the sewing room, on parchment, in a chest bricked up behind a murky oil of a long-dead Brack in plate armor, lies the charter which delineates our family holdings and their qualifications: Harthome and its lands remain a gift to the Brack line, under condition that the estate bind within its walls the family's eldest sons, who suffer from a malady. The nature of the malady is left undefined.
I am the eldest, Henry Blessington Brack, Lord Harthome, and my own malady came earlier than expected. I was almost eleven when it happened, a tall and stubborn and otherwise completely average child, dark like my father and fine-boned like my mother, and my main concern at the time was a slingshot I had carved which I was not supposed to use but did.
It was summer; we were living at the villa, for my mother disliked the city and my father humored her in absolutely everything. The day itself was much like any other except for a shivery restlessness which made it all unsatisfactory- my omelet, Agnes' voice, the piano lesson which I already despised, the long hour of Latin, my father's cough echoing in the hallway, the croupy wailing from my baby brother, my eventual escape down to our pond where I flung stones at a turtle's shadow skating beneath the surface. Everything that day was prickly and sour. I distinctly recall fighting the urge to run out through the stone arches, down the lane, anywhere I could, fast as I could.
I still regret that I didn't.
Agnes collected me from the pond's edge and reminded me that it was early-bedtime day, and it is rude to not answer when one is being called, would I please come along to my bath, would I not throw stones, where were my shoes? I responded by screaming that I hated her, then shot in a blind fury to the house. Was wrangled into a bath where I simmered, soapy and vicious. Was hustled, red with rage, wet hair sticking up, into my bedroom by an exceptionally grim Agnes who then, as always on my monthly early-bedtime night, kissed me perfunctorily on the forehead and locked me in.
I heard the key grate in the door and her steps fade. I kicked at the door's brass footplate. I called out all of the swear words I knew. Then I felt the pulling coming in through the window. I turned to it.
Dusk had fallen. Over the jagged treeline on the horizon broke the vast gold disc, wreathed with clouds, enormous. Of course I had seen the moon all my life. Of course it was unremarkable that the sun should set and the moon should rise. But through the open curtain I could feel the long spears of light touching me, attaching themselves, pulling at me, and the restlessness became acute, a panic. I paced in circles, the moonlight throbbing through the glass, my room lit yellow by it, my fast breath hollow in my ears. I couldn't look at it. I could feel it rising over the trees. My throat closed. I screamed for Agnes and then for my mother, and then the moon rose in full, and I fell down.
On the mantel of the fireplace was my collection of best things: marbles, a dried-up lizard, an arrowhead, a large fossilized snail-shell that I'd brought home from the coast. This last is what I used to smash out the windowpane. I never learned if they couldn't hear the crash from the sitting-room, or it was that I hit the ground rolling and started to run so wildly that by the time they realized what I'd done all they could see was the parted brush at the far edge of the lawn.
Whatever the reason, they didn't find me till morning. Which was for the best. In the night I leapt through the wild dark, I ran in the wash of my moonlight. I lived my entire short life's worth in those few hours.
At dawn my father pulled me up from the nest of bent grass at the edge of the pond where he'd found me asleep, naked and limp and peaceful, covered in dried blood and scratches and downy feathers. My father held me to his chest and sobbed. In the night I had eaten the doves in the villa's cote and then my middle brother's pet rabbit. Then rats, perhaps. Other things I'd caught. I was carried home bleary and bewildered; I was washed gently and put in my mother's bed with cough-syrup and a hot-water bottle. I remember waking and my mother beside me holding my hand. More vividly than anything I remember the sensation which the moon had left in me: the last drops of an unutterable, savage joy.
I slept a deep and dreamless sleep a full day and night and when I woke, my parents bid me goodbye. Agnes and I took the train and then a wagon to Harthome. I've been here ever since.