Cecilia wishes she could look away from her mother but she feels as though at the mercy of some mesmerist. ‘I cannot hide this from Odette,’ she forces herself to say.
‘You can, and you will.’
How does Leo laugh their mother off so easily? He has always done so and it has made her a jealous sister since they were children.
‘Leo is right.’ She throws his name in like some blocking move of a fencing sword. ‘Uncle George will not throw us out.’
‘Good God, girl – you act like you were raised to be stupid. A new wife will want a clean house. She will want her own allies, not to sleep in the sheets of a dead woman.’
‘Wife?’ says Cecilia, barely above a whisper.
‘Don’t look so shocked. All of good opinion know that it is only a matter of time before the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill passes. Until then, there are ways and means. George and Lydia had not been husband and wife to each other for a long time; surely you understood that. I loved Lydia, but George was a saint to put up with her ways. Of course he was desperate to find a sensible woman.’
‘Is that what Claudine is? Sensible?’
Penelope darts up and pins Cecilia’s jaw in her hand. ‘Stop that. Do not make it complicated. It is quite simple: our future now lies with Claudine. Not with Lydia, and not with Odette.’
‘But—’
‘If Claudine takes against us, there is no university for you, and as you do not seem inclined to marry, you will be on your uppers, my girl, and I don’t think you have the first idea what that means.’
Cecilia summons her courage. ‘I don’t want to lie to Odette. She trusts me.’
‘This is not some childish game, Cecilia. Honour and virtue no longer come into it. If it comes to it, do you think Odette will put you first without thought to her own interest? Lord love her, she is a clever girl, but she is troubled – of course she would be, with a mother like that. She has eyes only for her own problems. Do not hitch your star to the wrong wagon.’
Cecilia thinks of the sharpness of Claudine’s gaze, the way she seems to always be taking stock of the world before her and finding it wanting.
‘I don’t think Claudine likes me,’ says Cecilia.
‘Then you must change your tack.’
There is a noise at the door, and Penelope darts away, leaving Cecilia with an ache in her jaw where her mother pinched it so tightly.
Masie, Penelope’s lady’s maid, has come with her tonic, andit is as though the conversation has been spirited away. Once more, they are a normal, loving family exchanging pleasantries before bed, shutting up the house, dousing candles and coming together in comfort after a day of grief.
Lydia has died, and she has taken the world with her.
6
Cecilia
THE SECRET BEATS LIKEa second heart beneath Cecilia’s chest.
A day or two passes, the mellow light of autumn slowing time and drawing the nights closer. There is so much to do. Death is a messy business.
She sits with a stack of black-bordered note-cards and writes to the world of Lydia’s passing. Someone must do it, and the task has fallen to her. A clergyman, with a punched nose and widow’s peak, all in black like a crow, comes to discuss the order of service. The undertaker arrives with a bag of samples. She is struck by the mundanity of their tasks, the separate world they have been pushed into. The chores. The detail.
And everywhere, lies.
Each time she looks at Claudine and Uncle George, she cannot bear the pressure that builds within her. She must tell Odette. It is unconscionable that she is keeping this from her.
But then, as she stands at the French windows that open onto the meadow-garden, rich with late-blooming flowers and the vines that climb the stone boundary wall, and again, as she replaces a book of Coleridge onto the shelves that teem with fine leather and gilt and endless, endless dreams – it strikes Cecilia that she might die if she were ever forced to leave this place.
There are two deaths waiting for her: the loss of Odette, and the loss of her safety. For so long, they have been one and thesame, but now they have been split apart, and she does not know which road to follow. If her mother is right, then without Claudine’s approval, without the continuation of the financial support that Lydia gave, no safe future is possible.
But without Odette, she can see no future at all.
Money and Odette. There must be a way to make these two things be one and the same.
