I fell to my knees, tearing at my aunt’s stiff black skirts.
“Don’t bury Mamma without me there,” I begged. “However much you might have hated her, hate me still, please don’t do this. I won’t survive it.”
“Have you no control over your passions?” Aunt Patience’s toadlike face was ashen. “I ask for your own sake, you unprincipled animal. You will come to a bad end if—”
“I don’t care what end I come to, only let me—”
“That is a monstrous thing to say,” she cried, and then slapped me across the cheek.
Falling sideways, gasping, I clutched at the place where my skin throbbed and my teeth rang. Her slap was painful, but her visible disgust far worse.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, reaching for her wrist with my other hand. “Please, just—”
My aunt recoiled, striding towards the hall. “The situation is a hard one, Jane, but what you ask is impossible. Try to calm yourself. God sends comfort to the meek and the chaste, whilst the passionate inflict agonies upon themselves.”
Aunt Patience stopped—hand splayed on her broad belly, eyes frozen into hailstones.
“You are very like her, are you not,” she whispered. “The bitter fruit of a poisonous tree.”
The front door clicked shut.
Grief until then had bound me in spider’s silk and drained me with her pinchers. Afterwards, however, I wanted to inflict exquisite agonies upon Aunt Patience; and had I been informed that a few weeks later, I would serve her the deepest cut imaginable, I am not certain that I would not have smiled.
? ? ?
Morbidity has always been a close companion of mine. Hours were spent meditating on my lost kitten and all the ways it could have (must have) died because of my inflamed temper. My late father was the source of infinite questions—was my slender, sloping nose like his since it was not like my mother’s? After Mamma died, however, I thought of nothing save her lonesomeness under the earth; and when I did think of her in paradise, I next thought, but they’ll never allow me into heaven, and so I still will never see her again.
There are doubtless worse hobbies than meditating upon your dead mother, but nobody has ever suggested one to me.
Agatha knelt with me in the garret a week after the funeral, because I wanted to go through my mother’s trunk. For seven days, life had been a sickening seesaw between fear that calamity would befall me and the desire calamity would take me already and have done with it. Now I wanted to touch Mamma’s gowns and her gloves and her letters, as if I might combine them in a spell to summon her; even today, if witchcraft existed by means of toadstools and tinkers’ thumbs to bring her back, I should do so in an instant.
“Well, ’ere we are,” Agatha said in her broad rasp as she drew out an iron key.
Our servant, Agatha, who trudged about with wisps of blond hair falling in her squinting eyes, spoke entirely in platitudes. She was my sole comfort throughout that hellish week; hot broth mixed with sherry and soothing pats on the cheek are greatly cheering, even to juvenile she-devils.
The lock clicked open and I surged to plunder the trunk’s contents. We had a pair of tapers, but the light was dim and ghostly, and when my seeking fingers struck lace, I hardly knew what I held.
“Ah, what ’ave we ’ere?” Agatha rumbled from my right.
“Mamma’s summer parasol,” I recognised as I lifted it.
“Aye, Miss Jane, and what a parasol.”
There was no refuting this, so I drew out more relics—cracked men’s reading spectacles, a fawn carryall. We went on until I was so sated with untrimmed hats and books of pressed flowers that I scarce noted I held a pair of empty laudanum bottles.
Agatha placidly took them away. “Now, Miss Jane, them’s in the past, them is, over and emptied, so you just put ’em clean out o’ yer mind.”
I supposed Agatha meant Mamma was no longer ill, so I nodded. Diving into the trunk once more, I emerged with a lock of nut-brown hair very like mine woven into a small lover’s knot and pressed under silver-framed glass. I had seen it before, when it sat on Mamma’s mantelpiece, but it had long since vanished.
“This was my father’s. Were they married long before he died, Agatha?”
“Not as long as yer mum would’ve liked, poor dear.”
“Cousin Edwin told me she was no better than a parasite,” I whispered.
“Now, Miss Jane,” Agatha growled kindly, “there’s sorts as you can trust to speak plain, and there’s sorts as will say whatsoever suits. And if those two kinds o’ folks were only obvious, wi’ signs or marks o’ Cain or the like, a heap o’ trouble would be saved.”
A worm of guilt stirred in my gut. I had lied to her that very morning, when I said I would take buttered porridge and then dumped it by the pond so as not to worry her.
Lying has always come as easy for me as breathing.
“Did my father prefer living at the cottage too?”