Pearl returned to us the day before Nelly’s trial. We welcomed her, and we shook her hand, and some coins passed from Father’s hand to hers, and we went our various ways, all except Edric, whom I overheard offering to help with supper.
Pearl said it was very kind of Mister Eldric but she didn’t need no help, and anyways, she knew her place, she was sure, which was more than she could say for Mister Eldric; and Eldric said never mind about that, he thought she might like some company just now; and Pearl burst into tears and cried and cried, with Eldric saying things too low for Briony to hear; and Briony realized she should admit she was turning overhearing into eavesdropping, in which case she might as well sit down and enjoy it, which she did; and she heard Pearl’s sobs turn to laughter from time to time, as when Eldric tried to peel an onion with the butter knife or said he didn’t mind gathering herbs from the garden if Pearl could tell him where to find the mint sauce.
How does Eldric manage this so easily? When I told Pearl how sorry I was about her baby, she merely said, “Thank you, miss,” and turned back to the sink. Perhaps she could tell I was sorry about her baby, but only in my head. That’s just a thought, not a feeling.
The next morning, Eldric also helped out in the kitchen, or pretended to help but really spent most of his time making up disrespectful rhymes about Judge Trumpington and the Chime Child. He even made Father and Mr. Clayborne laugh, although Father couldn’t help but comment that Judge Trumpington does not rhyme with wages of sin, and never will.
We were on our way to the courthouse, more than an hour later, when I realized that the whole morning was a trick of Eldric’s to set us all at ease. Rose and I, in particular, were nervous.
How does he manage it?
The courthouse was tucked behind the jail, overlooking a sullen little street, clotted year-round with mud. Father and I paused on the courthouse steps to have an exchange of words. They were actual words with actual meanings attached to them. It was not a pleasant experience.
“But you’ve been called as witness,” said Father. He kept his voice low, as we were in public. No one must suspect that the Larkins have their little family disagreements.
Father and I, together with Rose, Eldric, and Tiddy Rex, made an inward-facing circle, like cows, only more intelligent. The Brownie stuck his long nose between Eldric and Tiddy Rex.
Go away! But I didn’t bother saying it anymore.
“Eldric is nice,” said Rose. “Do you think he’s nice?”
“Very nice,” I said.
“He gave me a pink ribbon,” said Rose.
“So he did.”
“He gave it to me because the witches took my first pink ribbon.” Rose was talking now to Eldric. “When I told Briony you gave me the ribbon, she said, ‘Oh, that Eldric!’ She meant you’re nice.”
“When you’ve been summoned as a witness,” said Father, “you are obliged to enter the courtroom.”
How had Stepmother managed to shrug off Father’s notions of propriety? She always said he needn’t know what we girls were doing. That it wasn’t lying, that it kept him from worrying and kept us free to do what we wanted to do.
“But I can’t testify if I’m ill.” My words had actual meanings, but none of them penetrated Father’s mind. It appeared to be hermetically sealed. “I always get ill in the courtroom.”
“Always?” said Father. “You’ve only been there once.”
“I saw Briony be ill,” said Rose. “I didn’t prefer her to, but she did.”
“It’s the way the courtroom smells,” I said. “It smells of eels.”
Father sighed. “Please spare me these arguments of yours.”
“Whose arguments should I use?”
Father’s clergyman mask slipped. His scratch-lips actually ripped themselves apart. But he couldn’t have been more surprised than I was. The shock of hearing myself uncoiled like a spring. One might be wicked, but one wasn’t pert. Not to one’s father.
My own mask stayed just where it ought. I’ve had lots of practice.
“Listen here,” said Father. “I’ll not tolerate this sort of rudeness.”
“What sort of rudeness will you tolerate?” My Briony mask hadn’t slipped. That was exactly the sort of thing she’d say, only more so.
When did the pictures start sliding through my mind? Perhaps I’d been seeing them all along; perhaps that’s why I had a headache. I saw pictures of Stepmother—Stepmother, as she was at the beginning, wrapped in pearls and lace. Stepmother, as she was toward the end, her hair spread across the pillow. Stepmother, as she was at the end, her skin like waxed paper.
They were not quite memories. Perhaps they were dreams, or merely reflections of memories—memories caught on broken glass.
I had a headache; I sat on the steps, let my head droop over my knees. Father spoke behind my back. “The inquest of her stepmother’s death took place here not four months ago. Briony was terribly upset.”
I haven’t gone deaf, Father. I can hear you. But do you really think I’m upset because of something that happened here months ago? Have you been reading Dr. Freud? Don’t tell me you believe in psychology!
“But of course I wouldn’t wear a pink ribbon with this new frock,” said Rose. “I’m wearing a blue ribbon.”
“You have quite an eye for color,” said Eldric. “The ribbon exactly matches your sash.”
“Why, so it does,” said Rose, which was exactly what Father said when she pointed out her matching ribbon and sash, but Father said it with an exclamation mark.
“How pretty you be, Miss Rose,” said Tiddy Rex.
Rose and I wore new frocks for the first time in years and years. Father had asked Pearl to see that we had something suitable to wear to the trial. She and her mother started our frocks, and when Pearl’s baby died, Mrs. Trumpington had her seamstress finish them, which was very kind. They were made from the same midnight blue merino, but mine was far more grown-up than Rose’s: It was cut very trim (no childish flounces for this girl, thank you!), with alabaster buttons down the side of the neck and along one shoulder.
Tiddy Rex sat beside me on the step; he slipped his hand into mine. “I’ll bide with you, miss. Happen you got one o’ them migraines?”
Oh, Tiddy Rex! If I were fond of children, I’d kiss that red-radish cheek of his. “Just a headache, Tiddy Rex.” One has to believe in psychology to have migraines.
“Look at that woman,” said Rose. “She is wearing a most beautiful blue, which I prefer she wear because I have an eye for color.”
“Thank you,” said a voice, belonging, I supposed, to the blue-wearing woman. “Blue and green are my favorite colors.”
Everyone but me turned toward the voice, fragmenting our clever-cow circle, and there followed a general twitter during which names were offered and accepted, and greeting cards too, and hands extended and taken, and a pair of blue leather shoes tip-tapping into my range of vision. They were lovely shoes, all creamy leather and satin ribbons.
Huge, though.
When I learned that the owner of the shoes was named Leanne, I made a bet with myself. I bet that despite her enormous feet, Leanne would be very beautiful. I glanced up.
I won.
She was everything I am not: tall, full-figured, sloe-eyed, dark. You could easily picture her in a sultan’s palace, strands of rubies plaited into her hair. Her frock was of peacock blue silk—silk, for an afternoon in the courtroom? But on her it looked wonderfully right—right out of the harem.
“How kind you all are.” She spoke in a dark-river sort of voice, as though her throat were filled with dusk. She was staying in a village not twenty miles off, but her dusky voice made it sound like an island of spicy winds and bursting pineapples. Just the place to be marooned.
She despised witches, she said. It was witches that had driven her uncle Harry mad. It was in honor of his memory that she made it a point to attend the trial of every witch she possibly could, in his honor that she celebrated every conviction and hanging. She could only do so, of course, during the summer months, when she visited her cousins. Otherwise, she lived with her family in London, which was mercifully free of witches.
Presently, Eldric sat beside me on the step. “Here’s a possible solution: You and Tiddy Rex and I will stand at the very back of the courtroom, and if you feel ill, we’ll leave.”
“Fine.” The taste of ashes rose in my throat. Just fine! Let me be ill in front of everyone and die of humiliation.
Tiddy Rex kept hold of my hand as we entered. I remembered the depressing courtroom smell of cardboard and eel and moths—and please don’t tell me moths don’t have a smell. I assure you they do.
The court had been called to silence. Eldric leaned in to whisper, “Who’s the person sitting beside Judge Trumpington?”
“She’s the Chime Child,” I said.
“The Chime Child?” said Eldric. “Your father said she wasn’t a child, but I hadn’t quite imagined—”
“She’s very old,” I said. “She says she’s getting too old.”
“The Chime Child, she got to be grown,” said Tiddy Rex. “She got herself a job too scareful for brats.”
“Too scareful?” Eldric looked at me for explanation, but the glass-pictures were coming to me again, slicing me full of memories. Stepmother, lying back on her pillow, saliva creeping out the sides of her mouth.
“You tell him, Tiddy Rex.”
“A Chime Child be a person what see the Old Ones an’ spirits an’ the like.”
Saliva dripping down Stepmother’s chin.
But this was a dream memory, not a true memory. This was how I imagined Stepmother must have died. It was foolish, no doubt, to have inquired into the symptoms of arsenic poisoning: Once I stuffed the information into my memory, I couldn’t stop imagining each stage of Stepmother’s death.
“At the trial o’ a witch, or any Old One, there got to be someone from the spirit world, because—well, it’s like they knows more about witches an’ such-like than us regular folks.”
“She looks remarkably corporeal,” said Eldric. “Not at all like a spirit.”
“She don’t be no spirit,” said Tiddy Rex. “Leastways, she don’t be no proper spirit—do she, Miss Briony?”
I would simply ignore my dream memory of Stepmother leaning over the basin, ignore the bloody . . . Quick someone, say something!
Eldric could be counted on to oblige. “How, then, does she come to be an improper spirit?”
“She don’t be improper!” Tiddy Rex’s voice went into a squeak. “You got it wrong, Mister Eldric.”
“He’s teasing, Tiddy Rex. She has a foot in the spirit world only because she was born at midnight. So she was born on neither one day nor the other.”
“Or on both days?” said Eldric.
I nodded. “And she belongs neither to the human world nor the spirit world, or as you suggest, to both. She has the second sight.”
The constable had been called to the stand. He spent a long while delivering his testimony, but it could be summed up in a few words. Nelly had red hair: One of the witches had red hair; Nelly was one of the witches. Nelly denied it, but a fellow can’t trust nothing what might be said by a witch.
Rose was called next. Eldric and I exchanged a glance. Each of us understood that he’d leave me to my eels and accompany Rose to the witness box. A glance. Hadn’t I once wondered at the way Eldric and his father understood each other so well without saying a word? I was growing fluent in their language. I believe I must have spoken it when I was small. It tugged at little strings that were not quite memory—nostalgia, perhaps? That longing for something you cannot describe.
Rose was all anxious-monkey smiles and indirection. She had a great deal to say about the fire department and the letters she’d written the firemen, and she spoke about the dangers of fire, and somehow got on to confiding that she didn’t like the same-colored food all on one plate. But about her experience with the witches, she’d only say that they’d taken her ribbon.
“Which is not very clever,” she said, “because a pink ribbon does not match up at all well with red hair.”
“You speaks on color, Miss Rose.” The Chime Child spoke in the accent of the Swampsea, with its round vowels and pinched-off consonants. “What does you think on the color o’ yon Nelly’s hair?”
All heads swung toward the prisoner’s box. Nelly held her chin high, looking neither left nor right. It brought to mind her feet, dancing round the Maypole. It must have been four years ago or more, but I hadn’t forgotten her dancing feet.
“Do her hair match the hair o’ the witch you was speaking on?” said the Chime Child. You’d never guess from her plain, gravelly voice that she lived in a world of midnight births and the second sight. “The witch what thinked to thief you away?”
“The witch’s hair and Nelly’s hair don’t match at all.” Rose was very firm on this, but she started to waffle when she went on to say that despite that, neither of them should wear pink, and before she’d finished, you could tell that Judge Trumpington and the Chime Child had lost whatever confidence in her opinion they might have had. Their opinion was doubtless confirmed when Rose shrieked that I must cover my ears (it was almost noon), and they summoned the next witness, who was Eldric.
The air was saturated with yawns when he took the stand. His long fingers fidgeted about for want of a paper clip or a saltshaker or a scrap of the London Loudmouth. I found myself wondering what he’d think when Rose and I stole away to London. Who’d tell him we were missing?
Eldric seemed quite a different person in the witness box. I’d never seen him so—so efficient, for want of a better word. There were no humorous asides, no hint of the bad boy. His account of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth was precise and complete in every detail, except for the bit about the naked backsides. That, he left out.
I noticed particularly.
I had, so far, withstood the courtroom and the eel-sick. But after Eldric had finished, the reflection-slices returned. I saw Stepmother and the white pillow and the black hair and blood and spit. I saw myself too, saw my own bird hands holding a spoon. My hands were feeding Stepmother. My hands were feeding her soup.
And then the sick-sandy smell of eel saturated the courtroom. I tore my hand from Tiddy Rex’s, I pushed through the courtroom door. But the smell followed me down the courthouse steps, round the side alley, where only the dogs could see me heave my breakfast onto the cobbles.