‘I forgive you for your childish blunders. If you will only listen to me and do as you’re told, all will be well.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
Cecilia slinks back to her bedroom. The air is heavy. She feels the beginnings of a pressure headache descend like a weighty hand on the top of her head. In the distance, a rumble of thunder rolls across the city.
When she goes to open the window, she spots Leo standing beneath it, tucked into the lee of the building, smoking. She goes downstairs, slips on a coat and joins him beneath the mulberry tree that hangs over the front path.
‘Evening, Cessy,’ he says. ‘Come for some fresh air?’
The wind is strong enough that he has to hold his hand cupped around the cigarette to keep it lit.
‘Couldn’t stand to be indoors. It’s all so .?.?.’ She trails off.
‘Mother ploughing around like a stately barge, sending backwash through every room?’
She smiles. ‘Something like that.’
He smokes quietly, and she lets the companionable silence stretch out for a moment. Leo has always moved more easily under their mother’s assessing gaze, but he is still an ally against her dramatics. Cecilia is not sure he knows how different it is for her with Penelope than it is for him – why should he, after all? It is not Leo who their mother will see herself in, not Leowho will face the world in a way their mother recognises. Cecilia understands that she draws her mother’s ire because her mother fears for her in a way she does not fear for Leo. Her fate matters in a way Leo’s does not.
But it is something, to have a brother. Something, not to be the only one. She has not considered before that it must be a different kind of difficulty to be Odette, and stand alone. There is no one who must suffer Lydia and George as she does – did.
Cecilia shoves her hands deep into her pockets.
‘You really didn’t know that we had no money?’ she asks eventually.
She cannot imagine Leo being ignorant of something like that. He is her older brother, always quicker and smarter than her, always more of the world.
He grimaces. ‘Mother was a fool for keeping it from me. If I had known I could have looked at the arrangement, spoken to Uncle George and Aunt Lydia about formalising it – but now it’s a mess. I’ve looked at the numbers; Mother is right that we are in trouble. A good thing that she’s so cosy with Claudine, I suppose. They were great friends back when they were young, so says Mother, but then Claudine went abroad the same year Father died, and that apparently was that.’
Cecilia is struck again with the thought of how little she really knows of her family’s past. Lydia and George are old family friends, yes, and her father died before she was born, a riding accident, a mundane tragedy – these are the facts that add up to less than the sum of their parts.
What was it Leo just said?
Claudine went abroad the same year father died.
Odette told her, back in the summer, about the incident at the stationer’s, the woman who had mentioned banns being read before Claudine abruptly left the country. It seems hard to read that as anything other than a broken engagement that meantClaudine felt she had no choice but to go. And now they know that it was around that time that their mother became financially dependent on Lydia, after their father died. Their mother, who had been Claudine’s friend first, then switched allegiances because of a secret that Lydia knew, the same one that Claudine now used to bring Penelope back to her side, and turn on Odette.
There is something that catches in Cecilia’s mind about the order of events. She cannot tell if there is a piece missing or if she is simply overlooking the obvious.
She wants badly to speak to Odette about it all, to share her burden. But she cannot.
She thinks again of Odette, standing before Lydia’s painting of Lancelot and Elaine. The true, real grief on her face – and that strange, hunted look when she turned suddenly, as if searching the room for someone who had called her name. Cecilia was surprised to see the painting hung unfinished – such a thing had never been Lydia’s way. She would guard her work closely, spending days – weeks – agonising over the final touches of the brush until she declared the canvas must be taken away or she would cut it to ribbons in frustration. Still, someone had got hold of it for display and—
Mr King.
There, anyone knows about the paintings it will be him.
She must return to the gallery as soon as possible. She must find Mr King and ask him directly.
The memory comes of his hands on her waist, his hot brandy breath on her face, but she pushes it away forcefully.
For once, she can play Lancelot. For once, she can save Odette. She will find the money and come to her with hope, with another path. Odette is lost, and she needs Cecilia to come into the dark to find her.
‘You fret too much, Mousy.’ Leo knocks her shoulder affectionately. ‘Don’t take everything to heart so.’
‘Don’t you feel uneasy about it all? Claudine and Uncle George?’
‘Why should I?’ He drops the cigarette butt and stubs it out with his toe.
