So we’ll come to nothing, Simon said. Not to Harriet, who stood before him, but to the list of names, of which Harriet’s was only one.
Or—not quite nothing—a few additions to somebody’s wardrobe, or a Catherine wheel window in some mansion a few miles from here. That was the true end their acts pertained to, the result of everything they thought they did for each other’s sake. Each breath they drew condoned this end. On the upside, his part in it wouldn’t go on for very much longer. Like his parents and their parents, there was little likelihood of living past the age of fifty. That’s how he’d found the nerve to marry Margot even though it seemed likely they’d make each other terribly unhappy sooner rather than later.
Simon said: Come here, Harriet Leveque.
That wasn’t her name. Also, the look in his eyes suggested it wouldn’t be a good name for her to suddenly answer to. He lunged at her, and she sidestepped. Lunge, sidestep, lunge, sidestep, but she didn’t run; she had to stay—it was this Harriet Leveque who had to leave them. Finally, he seemed to grow drowsy or to awake—he rubbed his eyes: Harriet, I’m sorry, I . . . and he walked toward the closed door of the bedroom he shared with Margot, his steps very slow—it didn’t seem as if he wanted to go in, but he was waiting for a better idea to occur to him. He placed a hand on the doorknob but didn’t turn it. Margot might very well have locked him out, and it looked to Harriet as if he was afraid of that. Simon Lee held the doorknob for another moment, held it gingerly, as if it would break in his hand, and then he left the cottage. Harriet followed him through the fields with a flashlight and blankets; he was clearing space with his hands and feet, squinting up at the crescent moon and thinking about where the sun would be when it rose. He was looking for a good place to lie down, and not necessarily just for the night, a good place to just lie down with no thought of standing up again. When Harriet saw that her father had curled up on the ground with fronds of mercy leaf flattened beneath him, she waited until she heard him snore before creeping over with three blankets, which he accepted wordlessly, without looking at her. And yet he asked her not to go. He kept telling her he couldn’t sleep, and it worried her very much that he choked out those words even as he slept. So she had no choice but to watch him until morning, when the two of them were surrounded by combine harvesters chugging along with only a slight modification to their preordained paths. Then Harriet Lee returned to her mother, who’d just completed a particularly large batch of gingerbread by way of neighborly apology for any nocturnal disturbance.
* * *
—
GINGERBREAD BAKED TO THE Lee recipe takes at least three days to really come into its own. Once that had happened, Harriet went from cottage to cottage doling out gingerbread. Only the very young and the very old were at home, looking after one another. Harriet heard someone say that Simon should’ve married Gwen Cook instead of Margot. This was muttered when Harriet’s back was turned, so she didn’t see who said it, and when she looked over her shoulder, there was no one there. Whoever it was, they were probably right. Gwen Cook was a gentle and capable woman who mainly handled grain storage, and it was hard to imagine her stirring up an atmosphere as foul as the one that festered in the Lee home at that time. Harriet’s parents kept trying to kill each other. You couldn’t tell from listening to what they said, but they were tearing each other limb from limb. They snarled at each other and smiled at Harriet, snarled and then smiled . . . she shuddered to think of it and sought out silver linings. Let’s see: there was the gingerbread, and the ease it brought. But she didn’t even feel she could argue that there wouldn’t be any gingerbread if her mother hadn’t come to the farmstead. The recipe had been right there in Simon’s cottage when Margot arrived. Gwen Cook (or any other alternative bride) could get just as good results from it as Margot did. Gwen and Simon’s daughter or son would’ve delivered gingerbread exactly as Harriet did, obediently refraining from tasting it as Harriet did. They’d be a Lee, after all.
She had one more cottage to visit: Maggie Parker’s, in the far west. Then she’d join the other kids of working age: Thibault, Titus, and Dottie Cooper (Dottie flew into rages if you called her Turandot); the Cook cousins, Erzurum (Zu for short), Elsa, Atif, and Nathan; and Maggie Parker’s grandsons, Raphael and Jiaolong, the latter of whom really did look like a dragon, especially about the eyebrows.
Harriet passed an array of plant-vertebrate combinations. There were two new ones, droopy-eared rabbits. She watered them with the watering can she left out for rainfall. She passed a cabbage patch and a carrot patch, cottages, cottages, a miniature crop circle. Sparrows have such an appetite for grain that she was supposed to chase away any sparrows she saw, but she asked them what the crop circle depicted. What’s that you say? I really don’t want to know? So you sparrows are just going to eat all you want and not even spy for anybody . . . ?
Harriet passed a bucketful of muddy boots and a winnowing fan she picked up as a bargaining chip for when its owner, probably Nathan or Thibault, realized he’d lost it. She passed a willow-cane carriage sans horses (a lesser landmark), Gretel’s Well, more plant-vertebrate combinations, almost there . . .
The sun set. The wheat field had done it again, stolen the afternoon. Harriet had already missed the threshing-floor sweep. Maggie Parker was the hospitable type, and her family had bred homing pigeons for just under a century, though the pigeons’ homing ability seemed to lessen by the generation. That or the Parkers’ talent for training them. The three Maggie herself had raised were a washout—it had been four years since Maggie had accepted a challenge from a pigeon breeder on the neighboring farmstead and released her birds in the capital city. As yet none of the Parker pigeons had returned to their nests, so the other pigeon breeder won by default, and Maggie was probably the only Parker not to view this incident as the unmentionable end to a grand legacy. By the time Harriet had drunk half a jumbo pot of tea and heard some tales from the annals of Parker’s Pigeon Post, they’d be well into nighttime. But it wasn’t just that. The darker it got, the sharper Harriet’s senses grew, and the sharper Harriet’s senses grew, the better the gingerbread smelled. Rich, sweet embers, nourishment of djinns and other fire-eaters. Harriet in the waning light, with only the wheat and the crickets and the cicadas to see. Maggie always tried to make Harriet take a piece away with her, so there was no substantive distinction between taking one now and taking it at Maggie’s bidding.
Just a piece? Harriet could eat the entire packet and go without recrimination for a while. Maggie wasn’t expecting her this evening. She usually sent thank-you notes, but even the most scrupulous forget to send notes sometimes. (Zahir Leveque would’ve appreciated these calculations of Harriet’s. Not to the extent that he’d reconsider her potential as a grandchild, but enough to make him wonder from time to time whether he’d written her off too quickly.) Margot had told Harriet to leave the gingerbread alone, though, and Harriet always did what her mother said. They had an agreement.
Harriet, do you like responsibility?
Me? N-no . . .
Thought not. I was the same when I was your age.
What did you do about it?
Tried to get other people to take responsibility for me.
And did they?
No. But I will for you, if you’d like.
Yes, please.
OK. I’ll take responsibility for anything you do on my say-so. But if you go against me, Harriet Lee—if you do something I expressly told you not to do—you have to handle the rest all by yourself. Do you understand?
Harriet’s soul quaked. I understand.
Good.