I don’t mention that I saw Roman at the orgy. I didn’t see Henry Partridge, though, which is a relief. If he’d been there, fucking other guests, I would have felt obligated to tell my sister.
An hour later I’m in my nightdress, settled on the couch beneath blankets. My mother and sister went upstairs a fewminutes ago, so I’m finally alone. At last I can fulfill the promise I made to Beresford, to play with myself while thinking of him.
Just as I’m about to put my hand between my legs, I hear quiet steps on the stairs again. Quickly I place both hands on top of the blanket just before my mother enters the sitting room.
“What is it?” I try to keep the impatience out of my voice. Hopefully she just forgot something and she’ll go away again.
But she pulls our only remaining footstool closer to the couch and sits down on it. “I can’t stop thinking about what you said, my dear. That secrets are safeguards.”
“And?”
“They can be safeguards. They can also be dangerous.” She purses her lips. “I’ve kept a secret from you, believing that I was sparing you from additional pain, but now things are changing. You’re falling in love, you’re asking about the Barrow, and you say you’ve seen something more dangerous, something that isn’t the little creatures you summon.”
“Mama.” I reach for her hand. It’s ice cold. “What are you trying to say?”
“I want to tell you that story, the one I almost told when I was drunk all those years ago, when you were only five years old. Your ability had manifested for the first time that summer—I don’t know if you remember.”
“I do.”
“Right.” She twists the hand I’m holding so she can weave her fingers with mine. “You didn’t talk for a long time, Sybil. Not until close to your fifth birthday. I visited some physicians in the city and gleaned advice from them, and I worked with you, trying to help you express yourself. You learned to make signs with your hands to show us what you wanted or needed. You could understand everything we said to you, even when you were tiny. But you couldn’t speak.”
“You never told me this. Does Anne remember?”
“I’m not sure,” Mama replies. “I had made peace with the fact that you might never speak, that you would communicate in other ways. But then, one day, you were standing on the front path, staring at Wormsloe, and you spoke three full sentences. Do you know what they were?”
There’s a lump in my throat, and dread hollows my soul. “No,” I whisper.
“You said, ‘He is in the woods. He is hurting them. They need help.’”
“What?” I rasp. “What did I mean?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. You never explained, and you never spoke of it again. You didn’t even seem to remember saying it. But after that, you could talk. And a week later, just after you turned five, you summoned your first demon.”
“And you never mentioned it?” Tears prickle in my eyes. “You didn’t think it might be important for me to know?”
“I didn’t understand it!” She clasps my hand between both of her own. “It didn’t make sense. I asked you about it a few times, but when you didn’t remember, I stopped asking, because… because I was afraid, Sybil. Because of the story about the Barrow.”
My throat works as I try vainly to swallow the lump. “Tell me.”
“I will. But please know that I withheld this out of love. Even if I’d told you sooner, it wouldn’t have changed anything.”
When I don’t reply, she says, in a quivering voice, “Once upon a time, there was a man who desperately wanted a baby boy.”
7
“Your father always wanted a son,” my mother says. “He wanted to name our firstborn ‘Andrew.’ When your sister was born, I saw the look of disappointment on his face before he could hide it. My love for him died slowly, and that look was the beginning of the death.
“Three months after Anne’s birth, he was already talking about trying again. Trying for a boy. He wanted someone to carry on his legacy, to travel with him. He wanted a younger version of himself. Maybe he was beginning to feel his own vulnerability to time, and he thought that a male heir would provide some level of immortality. Men have strange impulses and beliefs about such things.
“I had torn badly when I birthed Anne, so I persuaded him to wait, and when persuasion didn’t work, I rebuffed him outright. At last he openly threatened to leave me and find someone else to bear children for him. So I yielded, and we began trying for a second child only seven months after Anne’s arrival.
“Your father arranged his travel so that he would be home around the times when I might be fertile. When he was visiting other cities, he would speak with physicians, herbalists, and fortunetellers. He asked each of them how he might ensure that his next child was a son. Many of the people he consulted were probably charlatans, but he swallowed their words like the purest truth and paid them accordingly. He made me take all sorts of strange tonics, despite my protests. He would slip powders into my food and stir strange herbs into my tea, until I became very ill.
“When I got sick, he confessed what he had been doing. I made him promise to stop all the potions and superstitions. Slowly I recovered, and we resumed our attempts to have a child, this time naturally… or so I thought.
“Believe me, I didn’t know what he was doing. I thought he had come to his senses. He only told me what he’d done years later, when I was fretting to him about your lack of speech. I’m not sure why he confessed. Surely he knew it would make me hate him more. But perhaps hewantedmy love for him to die. He had already strayed from our marriage bed by then, and perhaps he thought my hatred would ease his own guilt, if he had any. I’m not sure he could actually feel regret.” Mama’s voice trails off, her gaze growing distant.
“Tell me what he did,” I say quietly, though the urgency in my soul wants to scream the words.
