CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
What can I say of the night that follows? In its way it's much like my first arrival at Harthome. I walk from room to room in a state of unreality. I stare for a long time at the portraits on the wall, at the armored Brack in the sewing room. My dinner goes cold before I finish it. Agnes' voice sounds as though it's calling from down a long hallway, even as she sits across the table from me. I am in bed early, while the nightbirds still sing outside my window, but stay awake late, feeling the pulse of the sky through the ceiling's plaster. Throughout all of this permeates the understanding that once again my life's path has been clipped short, and I am veering through the bramble where there is no trail.
.
It's mid-morning, and I am finishing a letter to Seamus I don't intend to give to him, when up from the entryway rises a familiar voice. I wince and put down my pen and, looking down over the stairwell railing, see the top of a dark, expensively barbered head, broad shoulders, and faultless tailoring all belonging to my middle brother, who would endure just about anything rather than waste his Saturday on a train out to the country, and who is yet standing in the hallway with his hands in his pockets, letting Agnes coo over him. He's come to pester me. More accurately, he's been sent to pester me. I should've known this was coming.
The dark head tilts back. He squints up at me. "Hullo, Hart."
I give up, go back to the desk to crumple the letter, and make my way down the stairs. "Juke. I suppose you were in the neighborhood."
Julian rocks back on his heels, surveying me. "Yes, well, I must be glad to see you, too. Three hours, did you know, not counting the wait at the station? And all the dust. She won't let me have a drink this early and I know you can change her mind. I've earned it."
Agnes makes a protesting noise. She's clutching at his sleeve as if he were an enormous doll. We both ignore her. "All right. I've whisky, but I hope you weren't expecting ice," I tell him, and he follows me to the sideboard, sighing.
.
Looking at Julian is always a shock, not least because I see him so rarely. It's our dissimilarity that creates it. Standing side by side in the sideboard mirror, adults now, we are both very tall and dark, both of us with the jagged, high-boned Brack profile and black widow's-peak; were someone to glance over casually we might make a handsome portrait. At least till they looked closer. I am never so monstrous as when standing beside my domesticated brother, with his affable dark-blue gaze, his easy smile filled with blunt, short teeth. He is like a window into a second life in which I am human. Julian's never mentioned it, but the reverse effect must also distress him- a carnival glass in which his features are sharpened into feral caricature. But Julian's tougher than he looks. He, at least, can meet my eyes, unlike our youngest brother, who was a baby when I left, who is even more of a snob than Julian, and whose stilted conversation with me sounds as if he's speaking to a titled relative who he believes consumes the flesh of men. I learned early to smile only with closed lips around Guy, else he leaves the room.
I've always thought, of everyone in the family and including myself, that it was Juke who was most damaged by my sudden removal to Harthome. As a little boy he was my shadow and loved me ferociously, and when I was taken away it was I he was angry with, not my parents. That anger is with him still. Beneath his rind of cool urbanity there's a layer of hurt at my betrayal, and it shows when we look directly at one another, even now. Beneath that, thankfully, is the love he still bears for me, which I suppose is really why he's come.
We're in the sitting room under Agnes' supervision, our conversation skipping along the surface. Yes, I am doing well, and so is he. Junior partner at the firm, looking around at townhouses to buy, really a shame the prices, banal details I am only half-listening to as our deeper concerns hang around us like a fog. But Julian's left shoe betrays his emotion. It's bobbing back and forth on his knee even though the rest of him is determinedly relaxed in his armchair. "Nice weather up here, though, I suppose," he says.
I put my drink down on the side table and clear my throat. "Very. Would you like to see the grounds?"
This was how we escaped Agnes from time immemorial. It still works. He gives me a quick conspiratorial wink and empties his glass, stands up, shakes his trousers out, and follows me from the room.
.
Out in the garden, whose beauty he seems not to even notice, Julian stops me with a hand on my elbow. His eyes on mine are searching, flicking quickly back and forth. "You got out, I heard."
"I did. By accident. You can tell her I didn't do anything." It's not quite a lie. I still have not found what I killed.
"She's driving me up the wall over it. Saying I must come live with you, to keep an eye on you." He's referring to our mother, of course, who's clawed him away from his comfort and sent him here to investigate.
I laugh. "You can't. It's not in the contract. Anyhow, you'd hate it here. How did she find out so fast? Divination?"
"Agnes rang her. Talked to her for fifteen minutes and then reversed the charges." He snorts. I have an image of Agnes huddled inside the booth in the coatroom of the Bell, her hand over her mouth, whispering all my troubles into the receiver. As if rumors don't fly fast enough on their own, now the village has toll calls. I can't help but wonder if she's also divulged the worst part, the reason I have not let Seamus go.
"Is it true? Your new groundskeeper unlocked the door, and on purpose?"
I grit my teeth in response, and glance over to the cottage. Julian's gaze follows mine.
"He's asking for money, isn't he?"
I suppose he can't help it. Like the majority of his public-school brethren, he assumes all interaction to be economic at base. To explain what Seamus and I are wrangling over would take an honesty I am not capable of, and even then I doubt Julian would understand. My hesitance, my subjugation, all of it absurd for two men in our respective class. Were Seamus a woman, Julian would not be staring at me with such frank confusion, and I would be relieved of the obligation to explain; we could merely be mutually embarrassed.
"No," I say, and watch relief suffuse him. "No, and I've already handled it. It's not what it sounds. It was his mistake. You needn't have come, though it is nice to see you. Don't even think of moving in. I don't think you could bear the plumbing."
He laughs, face clearing, and our talk slowly turns to the trials of his own heart. "Adeline says to tell you hello," he tells me. Now that he's married, half of Julian's remarks begin with "Adeline says." Adeline is twenty-two, self-absorbed, vain, with the melting beauty of a Bouguereau shepherdess and the whip hand firmly in place: I like her. She is wary of me, though we only met once at the wedding and even that was afterward, in the dark flower-stuffed hall of the reception where she looked up into my eyes with palpable shock. Julian's family secret, out from the castle keep. Luckily she couldn't see my sadness for her. I doubt anyone has yet told her the way in which she will lose her firstborn son.
It's uncanny, how Juke catches my thoughts. He's been recounting his domestic difficulties and stops short, gazes at me. "I might have to stay with you if I'm in the doghouse much longer. I'm to pick up flowers on the way back." A deep breath. "Did you know, her family runs to girls? All daughters, her mother has."
My heart catches. I wrap an arm hard around his shoulder. "Juke, wait a bit, if you can. And tell her first. Please. She has to know before it's too late for her to decide."
He frowns, and his arm comes around my waist. His chin puckers. For a moment he's the stubborn little boy I remember.
"All girls every time," he mutters, almost to himself.
I pull his shoulder into me. "I'd give anything," I say, and we leave it at that.
We've just begun walking back towards the house when, by chance, I turn back to see Seamus out in the field, leaning against the pasture fence, watching us. There is an attitude of sharp attentiveness to him, a keenness. I give a slight nod and he returns it, looks hurriedly away.
.
Agnes has spent the entirety of our walk devising ways to coerce Julian into staying the night, and I nearly feel sorry for her, watching him deflect them.
"At least for dinner," she's wheedling, neatly inserting herself between his body and the front door. "We'll finish in time for your evening train."
"Thank you, but I take her to eat at Latry's, weekends, or there's hell to pay. What's dinner, anyhow?"
"Jugged hare," Agnes replies, not looking at me.
"I'll pass," he laughs. "You're something, Hart. No electric, no car, no ice for your drinks, and jugged hare to come home to. You're aware we've made it to a whole new century?"
I snort, say something vague about keeping me out of it.
"The future'll catch up to you if you're not careful," he says, and for a moment the distance in his eyes falls away, a kind of plea.
"I hope not," I answer, and instead of shaking the hand I offer he puts one arm clumsily around the back of my neck and pulls my forehead down to touch his, the way he used to do when he was young, before he turns to go.
.
I didn't believe her, but this glossy joint in the center of my stew can be nothing else. I look at it and then over at Agnes, brows raised.
"Jugged hare?"
She hasn't met my eye since Rosalind set the bowls down, and now her lips are tight and a slight flush has settled over her.
"Rosalind's grandmother's recipe," she says, with a brisk tone that informs me she intends to say nothing else about it. I shrug. And although I don't think I have an appetite, the first bite is delicious, and the next, and when we are done I've finished what Agnes has left.
.
I can't fall asleep. There are nebulous words in my mind, something I heard when I was young. But from whom? I can count my confidants on one hand. A story... a fairytale... I shake my head. No one ever told me fairytales; that would be impolite, seeing as how I am one. So, not a tutor, not even Jepson, and as I'm trying to match the face to the words, a blue square opens in front of me.
I open my eyes and sit up. Read when I was young; that's it, I read it, it's in a book; a pale blue cover and the essence of the words. Brief. Something about a ship and a theft. I light the bedside candle and cross the hall to the library, quiet. There's no reason to be secretive, but I am.
It takes some time to find the book out of the hundreds. When I finally do, it's smaller than I recall and the cover has faded from the remembered blue to a muddy gray; the spine has no title. Because of this I passed it on the shelf perhaps three times before I forced myself to go slow, take out each volume, look closely at each. Then there it was. On the cover an embossed school of golden fish circle the title. I've read all of these books at one point, and some of them many times, but most, I'd assumed, hadn't made any real impression. And yet the few lines of this particular book which interested me more than a dozen years ago have come back for me when I needed them. I drop the book in my pocket and, hands and feet numbed by the chill of the library, get back in bed.
By candlelight I make myself acquainted, again, with a ponderous and clearly anecdotal history of British fishing ships. And what I half-remembered is actually right there, printed, real. After several pages detailing the forgettable history of the sixern is a short passage, just a few lines, recounting the saga of a Shetland captain and his beautiful wife. Whom, it recounts, the captain stumbled across by chance on a remote shore, and whom he wed by stealing away the sealskin that she wore. Wed, he's quoted, with no comment on the euphemism. Wore, it states, with no further detail. That is all. Yet to me it speaks volumes, and a bright light of understanding floods the page. How these two lines caught themselves in my memory I don't know. But with them my unconscious guess is corroborated.
I set the book on the bedside table, then, thinking better of it, shove it far back in the drawer beneath and cover it with papers. My heart is beating fast. Reality is what it is. This should not be possible. It's a myth. It's a tall tale in an old book.
As, of course, am I.
He still has the fur hidden away. Where is the wife? What has he done?