striking that even after her death, a long time after, I could summon up that expression of desperation clearly.
‘I don’t understand,’ I told her with perfect honesty.
‘No,’ she said as Rose came skipping back to report that the carriage was not there. Mama’s expression changed and she gave Rose a brisk warm smile and held out her hand. Rose took it and then reached out as she always did to take my hand, too, giving me her sweet, open-mouthed smile.
Thinking back on those early days in the apartment, I noticed anew the way Mama had always been brisk and cheerful with Rose, rather than tender. She had cared for her and played with her and dressed her up like a doll and sung her songs and tickled her. My mother had needed little enough to fly into a rage with me, but I had never heard her speak a cross word to Rose. Of course, Rose was so good it would have been hard to find a reason for anger, yet I had never felt jealous, because all the overt attention and showy affection Mama bestowed upon Rose had seemed to me a compensation for the fact that she did not love Rose as she loved me. I ought to have felt sad for my little sister, but in truth it had not always been pleasant to be loved so intensely. Indeed, I had sometimes felt Mama’s love for me as a rich, lustrous fur blanket that was beautiful and wondrous but too heavy. Now, pondering the difference in Mama’s treatment of her two daughters, I found myself wondering if she had loved me more intensely than Rose because she had loved Papa more than she had loved Ernst. Certainly her light, affectionate love for Ernst matched the lightness of her love for their daughter, just as her possessive love of me matched the depth of passion she had borne my father.
For some reason, my thoughts drifted to a night some months after the memorial service for Rose, when the solicitor and some business associates and their wives and daughters whom he wished to introduce to Reynaldo had come to dine. After the meal, when Reynaldo and the men withdrew to the library, they to drink porter and smoke their pipes and he to observe how men of substance deported themselves in the absence of women, I suggested a walk in the garden to the wives and daughters. The older women declined, but urged their daughters to go with me.
‘The men go out so they can exchange their secrets, then the older women send their daughters away so that they, too, can tell secrets,’ said Bernice, who was the oldest and boldest of the daughters. ‘I think that we should make up our own secrets in revenge. Let us talk about which of us should be married off to Reynaldo.’
‘You are a terrible cynic to speak of such a thing,’ said one of the others, a tiny, dark girl called Magda. ‘Besides, my mama said it is Willow who is to be married off.’
Bernice, who was frankly and contentedly ugly, smiled and said she supposed I could marry Reynaldo, since he was not related to me by blood and the gap in our ages was not so very great.
‘I think of him as a brother,’ I said firmly, wondering how long it would be before I could be alone again, wondering too if it was true that Reynaldo was trying to arrange a marriage for me. Certainly he had not spoken of it, and in truth it was my stepfather or Silk who ought to manage the matter, but Reynaldo was never averse to taking control of a situation.
Bernice sighed as if I had taken a tray of sweets away without giving her time to choose one. ‘Well then, one of us must certainly be wed to Reynaldo, since we are all daughters of the wealthiest families in the town.’
‘Oh, you are such a silly,’ said Friday, the fourth of our party. ‘First he is too young for any of us, and second, a girl who has a fortune, such as we all will have from our parents, need not marry save for love, and I do not think any of us feels that for Reynaldo.’
‘It matters not what man we wed, so long as we will be safe and cared for, since our husbands will not be the love of our lives,’ Bernice said calmly, stolidly.