I am stomping out new memory paths.
It is difficult. There are too many I am wicked paths crossing and crisscrossing my memory. I don’t believe the nice things I say to myself.
I like you! I tell myself.
I answer myself: What a stupidibus!
Stop saying that, Briony. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
I like you!
Briony pinches her lips. She says nothing.
I like you!
I don’t believe it now. I shall have to reverse the false memories that Stepmother stomped into my brain. You’re a witch! She trod out paths to memories that never existed. You hurt Rose. She trod them out over and over, so they appeared to be real, even though they led to nothing at all.
I like you!
It would be easier to believe myself if Eldric said something. I love you. He said it once. But he hasn’t said it since. It would be so easy: He sits a mere table’s width away. But he stomps out no paths. He is indifferent.
“Wrap that bit around the end, will you?” he says.
“The squiggly bit?”
“That’s the one.”
It’s only March, but today comes with a whiff of spring. From the front porch, Eldric and I have a terrific view of the square. Father and Eldric rebuilt the porch after the trial, while I was ill. I’ve seen Dr. Rannigan any number of times, but he never says I told you so! I was ill for months. You’d think a person who’s lost his hand would need a great deal of time to recover, but it seems that a person who wanders the swamp in her petticoat, then bides in jail for five weeks, needs even more.
A river of steel flows into the village. On it stands the five thirty-nine, snorting and pawing the ground. She’s ready for her run to London. But for now at least, the plans to extend the railway into the swamp have been suspended. There’s been no draining of the swamp since Halloween. But Mr. Clayborne’s contemplating the possibility of sinking great posts into the swamp and floating the railroad on top of them. Then the queen will be happy and the Boggy Mun will be happy.
“This fidget needs a bit of a twiggle,” says Eldric, and I twiggle. We have a terrific working vocabulary. But Eldric needs my help less than he pretends. He’s worked out a way to tie a knot with just the one hand. I’ve seen him.
“Tell me the story again,” says Eldric. He says his memories of the Dead Hand and the swamp are like a dream. He remembers, but he doesn’t remember.
“Which version do you want?” I say. “The one in which I am terrifically heroic? Or the one in which I am extraordinarily heroic?”
“The latter,” says Eldric, but then he looks at me sideways, and I know what he’s going to say.
“For goodness’ sake!” I say. “I am not too tired. Would you and Father please stop treating me as though I’m going to break?”
“But you did break,” says Eldric. “That’s hard for us to forget.”
“You broke too,” I say. “But you don’t see me worrying about you.”
“But you do worry, I think. You worry in a different way.”
Eldric’s right, although I’ll never admit it. I do worry about him. I worry that he has horrid feelings about having lost his hand, his dominant hand. He was a boy-man who boxed and fidgeted and climbed roofs, and now—What does he say to himself when he’s alone?
I hate myself? Is that what he says?
I can only guess at his feelings. I know what Dr. Freud would guess, but he’d be wrong.
“You could at least complain,” I say. “I adore complaining. It calms the nerves.”
I wish I’d lost my hand instead. I have no particular need for it, except for writing. But even so, I need only the one.
“Ha!” he says. “You didn’t see me all the while you were ill. Just ask my father if I didn’t complain. Or Pearl. Pearl knows.”
It’s true. I’ve lost time, all sorts of time. I’ve lost memory time with Stepmother; I’ve lost real time with Eldric. I feel as though he and I are just now meeting all over again. I try to identify what’s shifted between us. Perhaps the best word for it is guarded. Eldric has grown guarded.
I tell a highly colored version of our journey through the swamp on Halloween night. But there’s enough truth that I let Eldric shake his head and say, “How did you do it, though? All those miles, and me, such a weight!”
“Robust,” I say primly. “You’re robust.”
“You’re very kind.” Here comes his curling lion’s smile. “I rather think my father would call me hulking.”
“Only when you ask for thirds at supper. You tell him I say you’re robust, and that I’m the one to know.”
The five thirty-nine whistles. Eldric and I jump, then laugh. The skip-rope girls scatter. The five thirty-nine tosses her luminous hair and chuffs away from the station.
Someday I will gallop away with the five thirty-nine to London. And someday, I will take one of her sisters from London to Dover, then sail to France, and I know just what I’ll say. “Pardon, monsieur.” I will be very polite. “Le restaurant Chez Julien, il est sur le Boulevard Saint-Michel, à droite, si je ne me trompe pas?”
I mention this to Eldric, but he shakes his head. “Let me remind you of the correct phrasing, and please note my perfect accent: The restaurant Chez Julien, she is, if I do not mistake myself, down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, to the right?”
I speak again in my French voice. “I must note one error, monsieur, one oh-so-small error. A restaurant, he is a boy, not a girl.”
“Really!” says Eldric. “The French have certainly got that wrong!”
“You can correct them on your next visit.”
“I shall be sure to.” Eldric sweeps his newest fidget into his palm, admires it from all sides. “We are ready for paint. Or, as they’d say in Paris, Voilà! French is an admirably economical language.”
“I’ll fetch Rose.” I peel off my lap rug, but Eldric springs up first.
“I’ll do it.”
“I am not going to break!”
“Not if you keep quiet,” says Eldric. Dr. Rannigan has told Eldric and Father he was astonished I managed to hang on through the end of the trial. But he also says he’s seen it before. That sometimes people stave off the symptoms of illness to finish something else. Then, though, the illness comes crashing down upon the person like an avalanche. It makes Father and Eldric feel guilty, which is nice, but tiresome.
Eldric speeds through the front door, but I call after him. “I won’t stay in this chair. You’ll come back sometime to find I’ve disappeared.”
Hmm. When might sometime be? It might be this evening.
It might, and it will. I mean to walk to the fields to check on the green mist. That’s what the Swampfolk used to do every spring when I was small. We’d rise before dawn. We’d wait and watch. For days and days, we’d watch the sun rise over fields of plain brown earth, and we’d turn about and go home. But one morning, the sun would rise on fields of green mist, and we’d stay to welcome the earth. We’d tell her how glad we were she’d awakened once again. We’d sprinkle salt and bread on the ground and say strange old words that no one understands anymore.
Tonight wouldn’t be like those not-so-very-old days. I’d be watching in the evening, and I’d be watching alone. But I wouldn’t let another day pass without watching for the earth to awaken.
“You may as well have let me fetch her,” I say as Eldric emerges with Rose. “While you were gone, I ran around the square. Twice.”
“Don’t even think about doing that,” says Eldric.
“Or?” I say. I listen to myself. I sound, perhaps, a touch childish.
“Or I’ll pound you into a pulp,” says Eldric with the utmost good humor.
“I know that’s a joke,” says Rose.
“Quite right, Rosy Posy.” I hand Rose the box of paints. “I have a color request for this fidget.”
Rose opens the box.
“Let’s paint it the exact color of the motorcar.”
“I’m the one who has an eye for color,” says Rose.
“I’m the one who’s ill,” I say.
“You’ve been ill too much,” says Rose.
“Hear! Hear!” says Eldric.
I feel the prickle of tears behind my cheekbones. I lie back and close my eyes. They’re joking, I tell myself. Or at least Eldric is. Rose doesn’t know how to joke. But sometimes I cry at the stupidest things.
Rose sets out the paints; she mumbles over them. Eldric whispers. Mumble, whisper, mumble. Finally, Rose says, “What color is the motorcar, Briony Vieny?”
Eldric has coached her, of course.
“Cardinal.” (Hallelujah! Hallelujah!)
The two of them rattle about in the paints.
“Is this one cardinal?” says Eldric.
“No, it’s this one,” says Rose.
“You’ve got an eye for color, right enough,” says Eldric.
I get what I want, but I still feel like crying. What a stupid baby!
Stop, Briony! Don’t you remember about treading out the paths? You don’t want to deepen the path to stupid baby. You want to tread out a path to kindness. What might Father have said? Poor girl, you’ve been so ill, and no one’s looked after you for such a long time.
That’s actually no longer true, although truth is entirely irrelevant to the treading out of brain paths.
Eldric sends Rose to the kitchen. We need a bite to eat, he says. “Ask Pearl for some of those sunset buns your sister likes so well.”
I smile. I know Eldric sees it. He may be indifferent, but at least he forbids me to say I’m not a hero. There! Another brain path in want of scuffing.
I’m a hero. Briony Larkin is a hero.
I am drifting into sleep. I’m thinking mad, mixed-up thoughts, or perhaps I’m dreaming, but my dream thoughts are true, true in the real world. I wish that Eldric had cared for me while I was ill, as he did when I was recovering from my encounter with the Dead Hand. But, instead, it was Father who cared for me. He sang, and bathed my forehead, and took to singing again at night. It’s awfully silly with daughters who are eighteen, but I don’t have to pretend not to like it. Rose likes it, which means that even if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t say so because one doesn’t say one doesn’t like things if Rose likes them, unless one doesn’t value one’s hearing.
After a few pints of ale, Father even manages a few I love yous. He was devastated that he’d left us alone with a Dark Muse—even now he can hardly bear to say the words. I tell him he couldn’t possibly have realized she’d turn to us for her next snack.
I tell him it was reasonable to think he’d dealt her a death blow when he stopped singing and locked away his fiddle. She should have unwound and died.
But Stepmother was too clever, of course. The very day Father locked away his fiddle was the day she told me—“reminded” me—that I hurt Rose and that I was a witch. And that meant I couldn’t leave the Parsonage. Stepmother had made me believe it was too dangerous to enter the swamp, and anyway, I couldn’t leave her alone to care for Rose. Stepmother made sure I’d stay close by. Stepmother wasted no time in beginning to feed off me.
I tell Father no one imagined a Dark Muse could feed on girls.
Father tells me it’s awful to realize how long ago she started planning; taking her first steps when I was seven; making me believe I was wicked; keeping me tethered to her larder should Father discover what she was.
I wish he’d told me from the beginning, when he realized the truth about Stepmother. But it wasn’t possible for him, the Reverend Larkin, to tell his daughter he married a Dark Muse. It was too shameful. He had to hide the fact. He left her to die for want of feeding, or so he thought. He never thought she’d feed upon his girls.
I hear Eldric pause, hear him pad over to me, lion soft. He pulls the coverlet up to my chin. He often performs these small kindnesses for me when he thinks I’m asleep. And when I am asleep too, I suppose.
But I wish he would do the same when I’m awake. I wish he’d help lay down new brain paths for me and scuff out the old. I wish he’d tell me how perfect I am, just as Father did when I was small. That he’d exclaim over my darling apricot ears and perfect fingernails. That he’d scuff out the paths Stepmother stomped into existence, paths of wickedness and guilt.
I fall into mad dream thoughts of fingernails and babies. I put a baby on the wrong train, and no one can find it, and I’m running about, looking for the baby, but the air is thick as glue. What a relief to wake up and realize I’ve been asleep. Rose has gone, leaving behind half a plate of sunset buns and a litter of crumbs. Eldric holds the paintbrush in the tips of his fingers.
“Damn!” he says.
“I can give it a go,” I say.
The paintbrush pauses. “Sorry, did I wake you?”
“I don’t think so.” I try to shake off my dream.
He reaches for the plate of buns. “Give it a whirl, will you, while I get things warmed up.” He glances at the bowl of soggy cream. “And get things colded up.”
I give it a whirl. Painting a tiny fidget is not as easy as it sounds. Every little mistake looks huge. A dribble of paint has run into a corner and dried.
“Damn,” I say. I was never as wicked as I’d thought, so I have some extra goodness to balance out a bad word or two.
The truth will set you free. That’s both true and not true. It was certainly liberating to learn I’m not a witch. To learn I hadn’t hurt Rose, or even Stepmother, at least not with Mucky Face as my weapon. To learn that Stepmother was never really ill, except for a brief period after the fire, before she turned to Rose, and of course, the last day of her life. It was not so liberating to remember I poisoned Stepmother, but for that, I am forgiven. It seems that if someone (Stepmother) is killing someone else (Rose), the law permits you to kill the someone in order to protect the someone else.
I like myself.
I like myself.
Or, for example, the law permits Eldric to wing the constable in order to protect Briony Larkin.
Eldric returns with a sunset-lathered bun. We speak of a certain person who has an eye for color but can’t manage to finish painting a certain fidget. We speculate that she has gone to visit Robert: Rose has become awfully independent these days. We are relieved of our conversation when Tiddy Rex comes running by.
Eldric looks at me. “Shall we?”
“Is it dry?”
Eldric nods.
I call Tiddy Rex onto the porch. “You are just the boy we want to see. We hope you will agree to join our secret society.”
“The Fearsome Four,” says Eldric.
“The mission of the Fearsome Four is to fight for justice,” I say.
“To go on quests,” says Eldric.
“I never been on no quest,” says Tiddy Rex. His eyes are wide and exactly match the color of his freckles.
“In the olden days,” I say, “people set off on quests by horseback. But in these modern days, heroes go by motorcar.”
“Motorcar!” Tiddy Rex’s voice is just a squeak.
“The existence of the Fearsome Four is a solemn secret,” says Eldric. “Will you join us and dedicate yourself to our mission?”
Tiddy Rex flushes. “Aye, aye!”
“Kneel, then, Tiddy Rex, that you may be sworn into the secret society of the Fearsome Four.”
Tiddy Rex kneels. I glance up as though this is a holy moment. The sky is all stretchy clouds, like elastic lace. “Do you solemnly swear to face all perils in order to rescue those in need? Do you swear to be relentless in the eternal quest for justice?”
“Aye, aye!”
“Do you solemnly swear to motor from one end of the world to the other, rooting out evil wheresoever you may find it?”
“Aye, aye!”
Eldric rises. He sets a leather cord around Tiddy Rex’s neck. “I now pronounce you a member of the Fearsome Four. Welcome, Tiddy Rex! Rise and walk among us.”
Tiddy Rex’s face is a starry map. He touches the fidget hanging on the cord.
“Mister Eldric!” he says, for the fidget is a brilliant copy of the motorcar, right down to the tiny brass eagle. The eagle’s not made of brass, of course, but it’s painted gold, and you can see its beak and its every talon.
I look at Eldric and he looks at me. That was fun! For a moment, we actually had fun.
I’m expected to rest after supper, to prepare myself for the next grand adventure in life, which is sleep. Father and Eldric think they’ve bullied me into this with the suggestion that I shan’t be well enough to study with my new tutor. Yes, Father has engaged a tutor for me, just as brilliant as Fitz. James Bellingham. I haven’t yet told him his pet name. I wonder if he’ll like it?
But neither Father nor Eldric is particularly skilled at bullying. I sit on the upstairs landing until I hear Pearl bid Father good night. I think about Jim Bellingham. What would have been better? To have allowed Father to send me away to school, or to have remained in the Swampsea, to have met Eldric?
But I had no choice, had I? Stepmother saw to that, making me believe I called Mucky Face and injured her. She knew I couldn’t leave her then, not for school, not for anything.
I slip downstairs. I have an excuse ready, should anyone see me, but I don’t need it. I slip out the kitchen door, over the bridge.
I step in the hoof prints of the Shire horses, as Eldric and I used to do. But I’m lonely, and I’m already tired. I shuffle along, I ignore the hoof prints. All I want is to see the green mist. Tears come to my eyes.
Honestly, Briony, enough of the self-pity. What a baby you are!
Stop, Briony: Amend that thought!
What a darling baby, and such delightful apricot ears!
I clamber up the riverbank and cut across the Flats. But it’s harder to walk on the sloppy ground. Where’s wolfgirl? She never minded a bit of slop.
I’ll have to reinvent wolfgirl too. But she won’t be so hard to reinvent. I’ll have to stomp out muscle paths for her, not brain paths. Muscle paths are easy; the brain is a tricky thing.
I think of the moment I discovered that Stepmother was a Dark Muse. I remember my hand moving across paper, my pen leaving a trail of ink. I remember myself, sitting in a sea of crumpled bedsheets, beside the do-not-cross line. I remember that I was ill, that the pen was heavy.
I wrote that Stepmother brought me writing materials. I wrote that the more I wrote, the sicker I got. I wrote about Father’s illness and of his immediate recovery once he abandoned the fiddle and left the Parsonage. I wrote myself into understanding. I wrote myself into realizing I had to make sure I could write nothing anymore. I knew I hadn’t enough power to refuse to write. I couldn’t resist Stepmother’s spell.
I wrote myself into understanding I had to burn my hand.
But the brain is tricky. I couldn’t allow myself to remember what Stepmother really was. I made myself forget. I scuffed out my own real memories while Stepmother trod in false memories.
“Such a vasty time to bide away, mistress!”
I have come upon the Reed Spirits. I’ve not been to the swamp since All Hallows’ Day.
“I’ve been ill,” I say. “I’ll come back and talk to you properly when I’m recovered.”
“An’ tha’ll fetch our sweet story along with thee?” How sweet their voices are, and how mournful. Careful, Briony, or you’ll cry.
I understand better, now, the appetite of the Old Ones for their story. The Chime Child has told me. She may have made a mistake with Nelly Daws, but she is terrifically clever and knows ever so much about the Old Ones. It’s only the mortals, she says, who can write down a story, so that it doesn’t vanish with memory. And of course, it’s only we, the Chime Child and I, who can hear the Old Ones and set their story down.
“When I am better,” I say, “I shall come to set down your stories.”
How they sigh and sing. “Mistress!
“Mistress!
“Our thanks to thee, mistress!”
And when I’m better, I shall apprentice to the Chime Child. Sometimes the Chime Child says she’s made so many mistakes of late, she should apprentice to me. But I don’t know. It’s a difficult job. There is much she has to teach me.
I walk on slowly. I am tired, but I am also thinking. I think about the Old Ones, that they have a past but no history. I think about the inevitability of death, and whether it’s not that very inevitability that inspires us to take photographs and make scrapbooks and tell stories. That that’s how we humans find our way to immortality. This is not a new thought; I’ve had such thoughts before. But I have a new thought now.
That that’s how we find our way toward meaning.
Meaning. If you’re going to die, you want to find meaning in life.
You want to connect the dots.
The Old Ones are born immortal. They’ve lived hundreds upon hundreds of years. But they’re going to die. Someday soon—in five days, or five months, or five years—we humans will come up with a cure for the swamp cough. Then Mr. Clayborne will light the illuminating gas and set the machines going and drain the water from the swamp.
I look about the Flats, I try to imagine it. Men will dig up the ancient trees. They’ll shrivel the Flats into a toothless granny. They’ll drain the swamp into a scab. The Old Ones will have nowhere to live. And if that doesn’t kill them, industry will. The factories and hospitals and shipyards that are sure to come. The Old Ones can’t survive a world filled with metal. They can’t survive the clatter and growl of machinery.
I leave the Flats. The fields are not too far now. Just down the road. But the road looks long and I feel the prickle of tears again. It’s because I’ve been ill, I know. That’s all it is.
And when the bog-holes are puckered shut, where will the Boggy Mun go? Will he go to the sea? And if he does, what then?
Is the sea too big to drain? Probably not. Look what mankind can create. Now you can photograph a person moving, and when you look at the photograph, you’ll actually see him moving, which is why it’s called a moving picture. This is hard to believe, I know, but still, we humans are inventing such astonishing things. I shouldn’t be surprised if, in time, we’ll be able to drain the sea.
And what of the Old Ones?
Only the stories will remain.
Another quarter mile to the fields of rye. You can manage it, Briony. Don’t cry.
I don’t cry. I walk and walk and I arrive.
There are fields, but there are no fields of rye. Not yet. There is no green mist.
I sit down. I am too tired. I am a baby with apricot ears who needs to cry. But I don’t. I sit at the edge of the fields and stare at the brown earth.
Everything is still, save for a puff of dust in the distance. It is accompanied by a sound. The puff and the sound come closer. It turns into a beautiful shade of red—one might call it cardinal.
The motorcar stops a few yards short of where I sit. Eldric emerges. I look up when his shadow falls over me.
“Well, if it isn’t Miss Briony Larkin,” he says.
“Let’s say it isn’t. You might like me better.”
Eldric sits beside me. “How do you mean?”
“I wanted to check on the green mist,” I say.
“Like you better?” he says.
I shrug, which I should remember not to do. My shoulder still hurts. “It’s just one of those things people say.”
“No it isn’t.”
What does he know about it? We are silent for a bit. What does he know about anything? Then I surprise myself and say, “I don’t feel I know you anymore.”
“You know everything about me,” he says. “Including a few things you oughtn’t.”
Girls, he means. I know things about Eldric and girls that I oughtn’t. I was tipsy at the time, but I know from Cecil that that’s no excuse.
“You never talk about your hand,” I say.
“This hand?” He holds out his right arm. His sleeves are rolled up. He never bothers to disguise the stump.
“That hand.”
“What about it?” he says.
“Remember what I said about complaining? You never complain.”
“You want to know if I miss it?”
“Yes.”
“The answer to that depends on other answers,” says Eldric. “But I don’t have them yet. Here’s an example: Do you miss my hand?”
“Only if you do,” I say. “I want to know what it’s like for you. Is it horrible when you want to make something and you have to ask for help? Or is it horrible in a boxing sort of way?”
“Do you mean that I can no longer take on a Cecil Trumpington?”
Cecil Trumpington, magnanimous Cecil, distributing arsenic to his friends, including Fitz. Including me. I’ve apologized to Cecil dozens of times, but I know he still doesn’t quite believe I could have forgotten about him, about the arsenic, about the murder.
“I suppose so,” I say.
I’ve tried to remember the day I realized Stepmother had started to feed upon Rose. I remembered it as vividly as I could. I remembered that I watched the two of them together, under the parlor table. I remembered that I watched Stepmother snip-snip-snipping at Rose’s endless bits of paper. I remembered looking at my hand, thinking I burnt it for nothing: Stepmother could no longer snack on Briony’s writing, but there was another Larkin sister who might be just as tasty.
Eldric turns his stump this way and that, examining it. “What makes you think I can’t take Cecil on?”
“I don’t know. I just assumed—”
“Please don’t assume anything.” His voice goes tight. “You do realize I haven’t been emasculated?”
Emasculated. That’s the word Dr. Freud would want to use.
“Who said anything about being emasculated?”
“You did. You do. Every time you look at me, you do. I hate the way you slide your eyes away from me.”
“I do not!”
“You do! You think, Poor fellow. What he wants is a dose of arsenic. Liven things up.”
He leans in close, too close, and now I’m shrinking back. “I can still kiss a girl, you know. I can still unbutton her frock.”
I try to push him away, but he pushes me, instead. Two fingers is all it takes, two fingers pushing at my breastbone, and I’m tumbled to the earth.
“There are, of course, certain disadvantages to missing a hand,” he says. “If the girl’s inclined to run away, you have to sit on her—so!” He doesn’t quite sit, but he kneels to either side of me. He traps my middle with his knees.
“Get away!” I pound his middle, his chest, whatever I can reach. But he catches the two of my hands with the one of his. The sun is behind him. His eyes are all in shadow.
“I can still unlace a girl’s chemise.”
All the Cecil awfulness comes back to me: crumpled girl froth; and hard lips; and lunar eyes; and blood, and spit, and sick, and choking and choking; and the memory of the choking makes me choke again. I turn my head to the side so I don’t drown.
Eldric lets go of my hands. I can still unlace a girl’s chemise. But he doesn’t touch me. He lays his hand on his face.
He is weeping.
I feel very unwell. “Will you let me up, please?”
Eldric stands. I stand. I walk into the field. I walk between the rows of grain. Everything has changed. I am breathing and walking, breathing and walking.
I won’t say I hate myself.
I won’t say I hate myself.
It’s difficult, though. There was a certain comfort in hating myself. Then, at least, I knew what I was. But now that I know I’m not a witch, I’ve lost my way to myself.
I will not hate myself.
I stand in the middle of the field. It is a Chime Child time of day, an in-between time. The sky pushes her blue shoulder through bits of the moon.
“Briony!”
I walk faster.
“Briony!”
“Go away!”
He’s coming close. I whirl around. “Don’t touch me!”
He stops. He raises a hand of surrender. He’s a messy crier. He has great red splotches on his cheeks. “Please let me show you the real reason I came to find you.”
“You didn’t come to rape and pillage?”
He flinches. “May I show you?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Let me show you. Then you’ll know.”
“Show me, then leave me alone.”
He opens his fingers. On his palm lies the tiniest fidget. “I have to confess I didn’t make it all by myself.”
The fidget is a dazzle of gold and pearl, except that pearl doesn’t glitter and this does.
“I don’t expect you to take it. But I wanted to show you that I didn’t come to—” He bites at the insides of his lips, but tears come to his eyes.
“On Halloween night,” he says, “I told you I loved you. You didn’t say anything then, you haven’t said anything since. I meant to tell you again, tonight, but the very first words out of your mouth were about my liking you better if you weren’t yourself.”
Why did I say that? If I weren’t so angry, I might be ashamed.
“But I can’t possibly like you any better than I do. And when you said that—well, I’ve taken a lot of blows in my life, boxing and whatnot, but I’ve never felt one like that. Like a mule kick it was, to the chest.”
Why did I say that?
“A person gets to wondering, he gets nervous, he loses his confidence along with his hand. The girl laughed with him when he had both hands. The girl kissed him when he had both hands. But now she hardly looks at him. He blames his hand.”
“That,” I say, “is the stupidest thing I ever heard. You don’t laugh with your hand. You don’t kiss with your hand.
“Do you Blackberry-Night with your hand? I wouldn’t know, of course, because I had no young man on Blackberry Night. He ran away.”
“I didn’t run away!” says Eldric, but his lion’s lips begin to curl.
“I find myself wondering what a proper Blackberry Night might be like,” I say. “The sort of Blackberry Night where the young man doesn’t remember words like virtue or Advent wedding. The sort of Blackberry Night where the young man stays in the rye.”
Eldric is smiling.
“You can get by without a hand.”
“You don’t love a person for his hand.”
“What do you love a person for?” he says. “I mean, what do you love a person for?”
Here it comes at last. I have to admit I don’t love anyone.
“I love a person for knowing I need to be touched. I love a person for cleaning blood off my forehead. I love a person for knowing I need to be a baby again and singing lullabies. I love a person for knowing I’m not a Dresden figurine. I love a person for fidgeting me up a wolfgirl.”
What am I saying? I’m brave when it comes to punching Petey or fighting the Dead Hand, but I’m a coward with words. What am I saying? My scalp crawls with centipedes of fear. But how can I know something if I don’t say it?
“I love a person for communion, communion with wine and coats and help and trust—even if that person feels he’s doing all the trust and gets grumpy. I love a person for knowing I’m the Amazon of the Swampsea, and for helping me be even more Amazonian, although he oughtn’t to deal out those little butterfly punches, because that’s cheating.
“I love him for making me laugh, and I love it that I make him laugh—”
There are no end to the things I might say. I feel my heart unfolding. I’ve felt that unfolding before, but I haven’t let it be real. Pay attention, Briony; pay attention!
“I love a person for knowing I should run about on Blackberry Night, even if I didn’t know myself, and even if certain unforeseen and complicated things ensued, and I love him for playing with the children, and for making the children adore him, and for trusting that I can be Robin Hood—”
Really, I could say anything, and it would be true. Except—
“Except when a person acts like Cecil, and worries about his own manliness, and thinks it a good thing to show a girl he’s manly, because girls love strong men, of course they do, they love it when someone holds their wrists too hard, and makes their lips bleed, and crushes out all their lace and froth and gleam.”
Eldric draws a forearm across his eyes. He’s crying again. “How stupid I am.”
“Yes,” I say.
He laughs and he cries. “You’re right, and I can’t bear it. I never thought that I could ever act like Cecil.”
I lay my hand on my heart. Our parents teach us the very first things we learn. They teach us about hearts. What if I could be treated as though I were small again? What if I were mothered all over again? Might I get my heart back?
My heart is unfolding.
But isn’t that what Eldric did? He mothered me and fathered me and gave me back my heart. I have to tell him.
I tell him my theory about the treading in and scuffing out of brain paths. I explain about going back to being a baby.
Eldric cries and he laughs.
“Every so often,” I say, “I might like to hear about my adorable apricot ears.”
He laughs, he cries, he holds out his arms.
I step toward him, I let him fold his arms around me. It’s not embarrassing when Eldric cries.
“I’d like to look at your fidget,” I say, “but I feel I must warn you about all the paths I have to scuff and tread. It hardly seems fair. Perhaps you should return when I’m grown.”
I’m joking, of course, except that I’m not. By the time I’m grown, Eldric will have moved on to a girl who’s really grown-up.
“This is the grown-up girl I like,” says Eldric. He takes my hand. He slips his fidget on my finger. “The watchmaker was very kind,” he says. “He let me use his shop, and he loaned me his two hands.”
Moonstones. Those are the non-pearls that glitter. I don’t recognize the yellow sparkling stones. I ask and he tells me. The ring is set with moonstones and yellow diamonds.
“I think of us as sun and moon,” he says.
My heart is a smushy mess. If hearts truly had strings, I’d say he was plucking mine.
He whispers to the baby Briony. He adores her darling apricot ears and tiny fingernails. He whispers to the grown-up Briony. “I don’t want another girl. We can tread out the paths, I know we can.”
“But I don’t know if I’ll ever sing again.” And now, at last, I’m crying. One can stomp out brain paths, but one can’t stomp out a voice path.
“But you trod out the path of the memory of your darling apricot ears,” says Eldric. “Did you think you ever would?”
I did not.
“Then we can tread out other paths,” says Eldric. “We’ll stomp them out, just like that. Some will be hard, some will be easy. We’ll do it together.”
Perhaps he was right. I look at the ring. “How did you know it would fit?”
“I don’t know the twelfth declension,” he says, “but I know how you like your cream and jam. I know every one of your fingers.”
“I love it,” I say. “Did you know I would? Did you know that too?”
“Yes,” he says.
We walk to the motorcar. I step on the running board, but he catches at me.
“I love you.”
Word magic. If you say a word, it leaps out and becomes the truth. I love you. I believe it. I believe I am loveable. How can something as fragile as a word build a whole world?