least glimpsed books with brilliant illustrations of the Alps and the lakes of Italy and Switzerland, Paris, Rome, the temples of Greece. Those visions seemed so remote from their circumstances, to openly conjure them would have seemed plain cruel with anyone else. But they had each other, and they somehow gave each other permission to dream aloud—perhaps the greatest intimacy of all.
“I think I should like to be … the first lady prime minister of England,” Hattie announced at one point, with her mouth full of plundered pork crisp and what passed for quince paste (and later passed as gas, which set them both snorting). She had put on her best, crispest “elegant” white accent for this confession, and it set Lloyd chortling, trying to stifle his hilarity—with his own mouth full of what he hoped was smoked side ham. For someone whose thoughts had stretched into abstruse realms far beyond his years, he had done precious little laughing. It was like balm for his inner being. But it did not stop him from ribbing her.
“I don’t … think … that they’ll let you be … prime minister,” he asserted at last, almost hiccupping.
“ ’Cause I’s a girl?” Hattie retorted, chucking his cheek.
“Because … because … you’re not English!” Lloyd replied, which made them both collapse into the delicious foolishness of shared hysterics.
They both seemed to want dogs—several of them—so the hounds could keep one another company. They wanted dogs, books, art. Hattie stressed the importance of music, Lloyd the essentiality of science.
Hattie wanted horses, too—she had never been allowed to ride. Lloyd insisted that new forms of transportation were already taking shape (and he recalled the bizarre locomotive, seemingly made of glass, that Schelling had shown him).
She named him Li’l Skunk. It was not easy for her to express affection, in spite of her passionate nature, so the nickname conveyed more than it appeared. She had first thought of Li’l Pig, to help Lloyd own the evil that had preyed on him and to turn it around—to transform shame into a badge of honor, which was how she felt about her scars and welts. But she knew instinctively that those words rubbed too close to the wound. He would have to make his treaty with them himself now. She had shown him the way.
She chose Li’l Skunk instead, because he was both black and white, because a skunk protects itself through ingenuity rather than physical strength and aggression, and because it gave concise expression to her joshing about his body odor. She meant, in part, that he already had a man smell about him, even though he was still so young.
Rather than taking offense, Lloyd found any comment about his scent amusing, because he was pretty certain that if either of them was more odiferous it was she. Both in a womanly way and because he had the refuge of an official cabin with a washtub, while she was stranded down in her hiding place.
He dubbed her the Brown Recluse, a moniker that at first puzzled and almost pipped her temper. “Why you call me that? A spider? And a dangerous spider, too.”
“There’s something of the spider in all females,” he replied. “And a spider is the first thing I remember, other than my dead sister. It used to come down to visit me on an invisible thread in the kindling scuttle I slept in as a baby. She taught me about time and light, and how to make something out of thin air. But brown recluses don’t spin webs—they hunt on their own, just like you. And in case you didn’t know, you are dangerous,” he told her. “You are very dangerous. You aren’t afraid of things you should fear and that others would. You’re clever and brave, and you have the control to strike when you have the advantage but the sense to conceal yourself, as a rule. You would go about your business without disrupting anyone, yet you have poison enough if the need arises.”
Hattie had to smile at this. Presented thus, the title seemed more a badge of honor than she could have imagined. It was like a promotion in life rank—a reflection from out of the depths of a very subtle mirror of all that she valued and hoped to be seen as—to be.
How often we forget, or are forced to overlook because of lack, that the true fire of connection between hearts and souls is fundamental. Are you seen by the adored as