She breathes hard for a moment, white hot and unreal with fear.
Almost too quietly to be heard, she whispers, ‘Mama?’
Cold fingers close around her throat.
Shock runs through her from her toes to the top of her head.
Odette thinks of the cold grave dirt under her hand at the cemetery. Undisturbed. Her mother isdead.
Then breath, rank with rot and loam, hissing in her ear. ‘Odette, why do you run from me?’
She says nothing, moves not an inch. She cannot breathe; she cannot even let herself think, for fear this apparition willcomprehend it.
‘Why do you leave me alone, in the dark and the cold?’ The voice is soft and sibilant, like air whistling through bone. ‘Why do you not save me?’
She can almost feel desiccated lips against her skin. The voice is so close, as though it is coming from inside her own soul.
‘Odette, let me hold you.’
Two rangy arms close around her in a vice-like embrace. She breaks. She cannot tell herself this is not real because itis– she can feel it, hear it. She can neverstopseeing her mother’s mouth howlingrevenge,murder, and she would rather leap from a bridge into the Thames than hear it a moment longer.
She flings herself from her chair with a howl, fighting to be free, and she is blind, desperate, struggling. She knocks the table, hears something fall, and there is shouting, the clamour of voices, Mrs Weston’s and Cecilia’s, and Odette stumbles until she hits a wall, hands grasping in the dark for the doorknob. She has to get out – she has to get out.
Behind her comes a flare of brightness as Mrs Weston lights an oil lamp, but Odette has found the door and is stumbling into the corridor, half falling down the stairs, cold fingers chasing at her throat.
The Summer
August 1898, Herne House, Suffolk
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
‘Ode to a Nightingale’, John Keats
1
Odette
ODETTE LETS HERSELF INTOthe studio.
A long cane chair is positioned so that Lydia can look out across the grounds. It is piled with cushions and rugs, despite the sultry summer heat that lingers. Lydia is leaning back, book open in her hands, but she looks over the top of the pages to theElainecanvas that still dominates the room. Odette and Cecilia have sat several more times, but the painting is not yet finished.
‘Mama?’ Odette comes slowly into the room, waiting for her mother to register her presence.
Lydia comes back to herself, vacant face slowly warming. ‘Darling.’
Illness has stripped the flesh from her bones; her cheeks are hollowed, the lines of her collarbones clear where her house dress falls loose at the throat. Of all the changes, it is this one that has upset Odette the most: her mother’s body, almost as familiar as her own, is suddenly that of a stranger.
Odette pours fresh water into the glass at Lydia’s side, gathers the untouched lunch things onto the tray and leaves it by the door for the maid to collect.
Lydia has always been temperamental – the kind of thing called nerves or hysteria,women’s trouble, easily dismissed. But now she is truly, dangerously ill.
