I’d left Eldric behind in the Alehouse. I’d left Nelly behind in the square. But I couldn’t leave Rose behind, I could never leave Rose. I stood outside the bedroom we shared. I listened to her cough.
Rose had been feeling poorly, Pearl had said. Rose had gone early to bed.
I was glad to hear it. I needn’t tell Rose at once. I needn’t tell her she’d been right, that Nelly had been no witch, that the witch’s hair didn’t match Nelly’s, that the judge and the Chime Child ought to have heeded Rose. But the judge and the Chime Child had dwelt mostly on the fact that Nelly could not account for her whereabouts on the night of the flying snags.
Rose coughed as I trudged up the stairs. Rose coughed as I set my hand on the doorknob. Rose coughed. She had a wet, skin-scraping cough. She had the swamp cough.
I let my hand drop. There was nothing for me in that room. If I went in, I’d just lay myself in our bed, in the hollow I’d left of myself.
Life and stories are alike in one way: They are full of hollows. The king and queen have no children: They have a child hollow. The girl has a wicked stepmother: She has a mother hollow.
In a story, a baby comes along to fill the child hollow. But in life, the hollows continue empty. One sister continues lonely and unloved; the other coughs behind the door. I sat in the hall. I waited. Father returned from the Alehouse. I waited. He sat before the fire in the parlor. I waited.
Sometimes, of course, the sister’s the wicked one, not the stepmother.
I’d lived in a hollow all the past year. A Fitz hollow, a Brownie hollow, a Stepmother hollow. When you live in a hollow, your life is small. It’s all paper snips, and dust, and cold wax drippings, and the scab on leftover gravy.
I waited. Father went to bed. No more waiting. Time to go, little witch. Your sister has the swamp cough.
Wind had replaced the rain. It slammed sticks and scum and willow peels against the far bank, it slammed me across the bridge. The fishermen have a name for the northeast wind. Don’t tell Father I know it. They call her the Bitch.
The Bitch thwacked the Flats with the side of her hand. She thwacked the breath from my lungs.
The Bitch could easily push a seven-year-old girl from a swing. Was it the Bitch I’d called that day? Was it the Bitch who’d smacked Rose to the ground?
Probably.
If Briony Larkin, age seven, wanted to call up a wind, she’d have called up the most powerful wind she could. She might not have been quite aware of what she was doing, but I know enough about that younger Briony to know that when she did a thing, she did it thoroughly.
So did the Bitch. She had the water on the run. Gone were the stagnant pools, the creeping trickles. She turned the ooze to slither, which whipped along on its belly, smacking its lips.
The Bitch kept me on the run too. She pushed at me, she tugged at me. She made me long to turn back. She made me yearn to lie in the warm hollow of myself and hate myself in comfort, but I had to keep on.
Try to care about someone other than yourself, Briony. Think about Rose, lying at home, coughing her lungs into bits. Remember Rose, as the Bitch snickers round you, whistling beneath her breath. As you slog through burble and splat, as you sloggle through slurple and smack.
I had no other choice. I’d once thought I could turn myself in and save Rose. But I knew better now. Remember what the constable said at the trial? A fellow can’t trust nothing what might be said by a witch.
What would have happened if I had turned myself in as I’d planned? If, after having trounced Petey, I revealed everything to the constable. I’d have been hanged and the draining would have continued.
The pumping station rose just ahead, even more red brickibus and stuck-upimus than before. None of the Old Ones was out. Not tonight, not with the Bitch on the prowl. They were staying snug in the jellyfish earth.
I clawed through the Bitch, leaned against the pumping station wall.
I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down! screamed the Bitch. She pelted me with leftover rain and sea salt and grit and twigs and venom.
She didn’t have a chance. The bricks might be stuck up, but they were stuck up tight. I edged along the wall, toward the door. Just a few yards more and I’d round the corner into that lovely little nook, where the Bitch couldn’t reach.
Round I went. The lantern flew from my grasp. “Nabbed!” said a great voice. There came a crash of darkness, a crunch of collar. I couldn’t breathe. I swatted at a jacket, at a sleeve.
“Well, I’ll be,” said the voice. “A girl!”
Light again, pressing into my Bitch-squinted eyes.
“Miss Briony!”
The hand let go. I tumbled onto brick. Air leapt into my lungs like silver fish.
Robert? I tried to speak, but my voice was folded flat.
“Sorry you taked such a tumble, miss.” Yes, it was Robert, Rose’s firefighter. He drew me to my feet. “But I never been so—what I means to say, well, it be you, miss? You what be the—?”
Robert paused, swallowed, and into the silence came Eldric’s voice.
“It’s all right, Robert. You may leave Miss Briony to me.”
Robert’s light bobbed about, shone on Eldric. Why was I surprised that he looked so utterly like himself, a greatcoat, a tease of a tie?
“Begging your pardon,” said Robert, “but it be your pa what setted me to watch this place come the darklings. He telled me to seize the culprit an’ fetch him to his own particular self.”
“Culprit?” said Eldric. “You don’t mean to say you suspect Miss Briony!”
Robert looked at me for a good while. “I can’t say how sorry I be, miss,” he said at last. “Sorry to treat you so roughlike.”
“It was your job, Robert.” I wheezed through my accordion throat. “You had to do your job.”
Robert left, still apologizing and protesting. Eldric and I were alone, in the quiet. I looked at Eldric. Could I come up with a plausible excuse? I’d never get lost in the swamp; Eldric knows that. Eldric looked at me. Each of us was waiting for the other.
“I’ll start,” said Eldric. “I saw your lantern through the window, and being the nosy parkerius that I am, decided to come along.”
I refrained from correcting his Latin. “Did you know your father had posted a guard?”
“Yes,” said Eldric.
“Did you suspect me?”
Eldric paused. “I didn’t not suspect you.”
“Now you know,” I said.
“Now I know.”
A little silence. Good thing Eldric started. He saw me leave—he’d have known any story I might have invented to be a lie.
“Shall I ask why you did it?”
I slid down the wall, sat.
“Good idea,” said Eldric. “Let’s make ourselves comfortable and wait for the wind to die down.”
I slumped against the wall.
“Why did you do it?” said Eldric.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Perhaps I can find out this way.” He brought the lantern to my face. “Don’t they say the eyes are the windows to the soul?”
I closed my eyes.
“But now, the only thing I can discern is the vivid blueness of your lips.”
He heaped his greatcoat around me. I protested, as one must do; I even opened my eyes for extra politeness. But he insisted he was warm in his slouchy tweeds. He defied me to find a trace of blue in his lips.
This is what I want. I want people to take care of me. I want them to force comfort upon me. I want the soft-pillow feeling that I associate with memories of being ill when I was younger, soft pillows and fresh linens and satin-edged blankets and hot chocolate. It’s not so much the comfort itself as knowing there’s someone who wants to take care of you.
“What are you thinking?” said Eldric.
“I’m thinking of what will happen when you tell your father, and he tells my father.” I’d been thinking of exactly that, but in an inside out sort of way. I’d receive the very opposite, the opposite of satin edges and hot chocolate.
“And finally the constable will show up to fetch me.”
“And you’ll spend your life in jail?”
I closed my eyes again. Eldric thought I was joking.
“Father’s a righteous man,” I said.
“You’re mad!” said Eldric. “Of course he’s not going to call the law on you.”
“Not if your father does it first,” I said.
“Do you really believe your father would turn you in, or mine?”
I did believe it. Stepmother had believed it too. That’s why she promised again and again never to tell Father. She knew what would happen were he ever to find out.
I thought of the constable, of his droopy eyes and sloppy lips. Would he have to touch me to arrest me?
“I won’t tell anyone,” said Eldric. “My father, your father, no one.”
“But that’s not fair!”
“How is that?” said Eldric.
“I destroyed a very expensive pumping station, and haven’t paid anyone back, and besides, it wouldn’t be fair to Robert. He’s supposed to tell your father.”
“Let me take care of my father,” said Eldric. “I’ll lie if I have to. And if you need to pay me back, here’s what you can do. I’ve been wanting to have a garden party, at the Parsonage, but I’m a visitor and don’t like asking your father.”
“You want me to ask Father?” I said. “That hardly makes up for an expensive pumping station.”
It was wonderfully comforting that Eldric would lie for me. He would? Really, he would?
“There’s such a thing as being irritatingly ethical,” said Eldric. “That’s you, right now.”
That’s a pleasant change. Witches are rarely accused of being irritatingly ethical.
“Now,” said Eldric, “for a talk about the Fraternicus.”
“Fraternitus,” I said.
“I was just testing you,” said Eldric. “You passed. Now, tell me the meaning of Fraternitus.”
“Fraternity.” Where was this going?
“And what’s a fraternity?”
“A brotherhood.”
“In a brotherhood,” said Eldric, “each of the members trusts the others.”
Oh-ho! “You’re not going to talk me into telling you why I did it.”
“It appears not,” said Eldric. “But I have something I want to say. I feel it with every fiber of my bad-boy being. When I put my unscholarly mind to work on why you’d destroy the pumping station, I can think of only one thing: You’re in some sort of trouble.”
“Maybe I’m one of those people who likes to watch things burn.”
“You’re being irritatingly ethical again,” said Eldric. “But without the ethical bit.”
“I’ll show you how ethical I am.” I reached for the satchel and drew out a bottle.
“It’s from the church?” Eldric spoke softly, as though he were praying.
“From the church.”
“Communion wine?”
“Communion wine.” I knew that Mr. Clayborne was no fool, that he wasn’t the man to let the illuminating gas cause a second accident. He’d have turned it off, or contained it somehow. So I’d stuffed my satchel with the kinds of treats that appeal to fires—paper and rags and paraffin and alcohol.
“Brilliant!” said Eldric.
How lovely to no longer have the option of destroying the pumping station. What a relief! It wouldn’t be a relief the next day when I awoke to hear Rose coughing. But I might as well enjoy it for now.
I drew off the cork. “How does one drink it?”
“Right from the bottle.”
“A swig?” I said. “I’ve never had a swig.”
I drank. The smell shivered against the roof of my mouth. I wiped my mouth with Eldric’s coat sleeve, just like a bad boy. “I’ve swigged.” I handed the bottle to Eldric. “Or is it swug?”
“Swug,” said Eldric. “It is in bad-boy circles, at least.” He swug. “It tastes much better outside church.”
“It’s the picnic principle,” I said. “Things taste better outdoors. And if it’s a forbidden thing, so much the better.”
“I’m sorry I called you irritatingly ethical,” said Eldric. “I was clearly mistaken. Now back to my idea, from which you are clearly trying to distract me. I’m not saying that Fraternitus members mayn’t have secrets from each other. Sometimes that’s inevitable. But don’t you think we can trust the other and ask for help?”
There was no point in saying what I really thought. I nodded and swug again.
“Perhaps our initiation will bind us in mutual trust and aid.”
“I’ve been waiting and waiting,” I said, “but no initiation.”
“Keep waiting,” said Eldric. “Now that I’ve mentioned it, I shall have to delay it for months. The initiation must never come when you expect.”
We were most companionable, passing the bottle between us. I made myself forget about the next day. We leaned against the wall, very gradually sliding toward each other. I leaned my head on his shoulder; he rested his head on the top of mine; and the astonishing thing is that it wasn’t at all awkward.
I wouldn’t worry about tomorrow. I’d let today be enough.
We laughed a lot and I grew warmer still, lovely and warm. I do realize that some of that warmth was due to the wine, but there was much more to it than that. There are two distinct aspects to Communion wine: one aspect is the wine itself, the other is the idea of communion. Wine is certainly warming, but communion is a great deal more so.