she was close, and he could not long abide being away from her. Or perhaps she told it all to him in the early days of their loving, and had then sworn him to silence.
One way and another, all that was said and unsaid about love by my parents gave me to understand it was marvellous and intoxicating; but the more wondrous it was, the greater the cost. It was not until after Papa died that it occurred to me he had never spoken of giving up anything or of being forced to pay for his love. Even dying first had meant it was Mama and not he who must bear the cost in pain of that mortal parting. Yet for all her anguish, Mama never wished she had not loved Papa.
For me, the most difficult facet of her grief, aside from the loss of any sense of normality, was the almost morbid fear she developed for my welfare. She hated me to be away from her and would insist she loved me with an intensity that embarrassed and even alarmed me a little, though I tried not to show it, for I did not wish to hurt her further. I told myself such fierce protectiveness was the natural consequence of what had happened, for if a husband could die, then so might a daughter.
But I want to tell you of my stepfather.
A year passed and the dreadful corrupting grief that had assailed Mama since the death of Papa ebbed to a bleakness in the eyes and a twist of pain about the lips. Mama entered a new phase of sorrow, where she began to have nightmares, waking night after night with screams. I knew the nightmares were about me, because the first thing she would do upon waking from them would be to fly to my bedroom to hold me and whisper reassurances to herself that I was safe. Sometimes she would beg my forgiveness, though what I must forgive her for I could neither imagine nor discern from her gabbling hysteria. I wondered if she was asking me to forgive her for having given birth to me, since, being born, I must suffer. Someone honed by grief might have such a conceit.
Papa visited her nightmares too, for sometimes when her cries woke me, I would hear her begging him to forgive her. I wondered what she imagined she had done to harm him. After all, he had not died because of any action or inaction of hers. Even the fever that killed him was from a recurring sickness he had picked up in the tropics years before they had met.
I was wise enough not to reason with fear, any more than I had tried to reason with grief, and eventually the period of nightmares gave way to a sudden spate of journeying abroad. Despite her concern for my welfare, or perhaps because of it, Mama left me behind. Of course I had tutors and chaperones and a house full of servants who clucked around me like mother hens, but they were on the other side of the chasm that Papa’s death had opened up, and I was lonely and afraid when Mama was absent, half convinced she meant to disappear, or even, in darker moments, to cast herself from a cliff or the prow of a ship. My imagination was fuelled, you see, by the romantic, ghoulish novels that boredom made me steal from the bedrooms of the chambermaids. But each time, Mama returned safe to smother me with kisses and tell me again and again that I was precious and wondrous and rare, worth the price of pain I cost her. I took this to be an oblique reference to the birth pain she had endured in bearing me, the mention of which I found a little shocking.
Then a day came when Mama returned with flushed cheeks and vivid eyes to announce that we would be moving to the end of the earth. Her face glowed with such delight that I did not dare ask her why and risk causing her to fall back into grieving for my father. I told myself in the flurry of preparations that there was not the time to ask, but when we were on the ship, and there was a sea of time, I floundered and could not think how to ask. Her moodiness and unpredictability, and my habit of being careful and watchful with her, had stifled my ability to