She did not know such numbness was possible. It is as though she has been cleanly severed from her body by the surgeon’s knife, soul and meat cleaved in twain, and without a chest to ache, a stomach to knot, pain is nothing – it disappears.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk
Keats. Oh, she needs Keats. How can she be alone with her own mind? She is so alone now. One by one, everyone leaves.
Cecilia thinks about opening all the windows and screaming until her mouth is bloody.
There is a neat little edition of Keats on her bookcase upstairs, bound in blue cloth, a nightingale upon a branch stamped into the front cover. Odette’s favourites were always ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ or ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, and Cecilia would read them to her gladly, her long hair spread out across her lap as they dozed in the shade of the great oak tree on the grounds of Herne House.
But privately, with herself, she always came back to the Odes.
Nightingale. Grecian urn. Psyche. Autumn. Indolence. Melancholy.
Grief, loneliness, betrayal, corpse, murder, death. She could write her own.
Love. Should there be one on love?
Her grey hands that once touched Odette. Her dead hands.
Do they all know yet that she is dead?
‘Lord, the tea is cold. Mary? Mary!’ Leo stands at the parlour door, yelling to the maid. ‘Hot tea this time – we are all soaked through, and you feed us tepid water.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The tea is taken away, and Leo returns to the fire, kicking the coals and holding out his hands to the flames. His anger seems outsized, overdrawn to fill the space where once were three but now live only two.
Cecilia laughs.
A ghost: that is what they need. Just as Odette claimed she saw. If the ghost of their mother were to join them now, then they would be three again, and Leo would not need to blusterand shout. Cecilia would not drift unmoored.
‘What on earth could possibly be funny at this moment?’ says Leo in irritation.
‘Oh, nothing. Nothing. Only life.’
Leo is not placated. Top hat removed, there is a dry ring of hair around his crown, while the ends are wet, stuck to his forehead and temples and neck from the sideways rain.
What a silly thing. How made up of the sublime and the ridiculous and the cruel is such a thing as life. What if Leo had hair that was wet in the middle and all that ringed around was dry? What if her mother had stumbled left instead of right?
What if she had never met Odette at all?
Cecilia laughs again.
‘What is wrong with you? Neither of us should be laughing. Life is a serious thing, and you will have to take it seriously now Mother is not here to shield you.’
Cecilia looks at him blankly. ‘Shield me? From what?’
Leo kicks a log further into the fire with his boot. ‘Mousy, Mousy, I am never quite sure if you are really this naive or if it is all put on. I love you but I often feel like I don’t know you at all. Sometimes, you can be so sly, then at other times, it is like you were dropped here by the fairies.’
‘Fairies are the cunning folk, so that would make me sly either way.’
He stares at her for a long minute. She does not know what grief looks like on him or how to read his misery. Surely, he is as broken as she is, but it has turned them into strangers.
‘I looked into that secret you said Claudine was blackmailing Mother with,’ he says.
A memory from the past, from the before her mother died, swims into view. Yes, the document.Penel. art. The blackmail. All these things she cared about, because she cared about Odette.
