resulting picture looks nothing like her. I cannot capture her no matter how hard I try; her image eludes me.”
I didn’t know what to say to this, so I changed the subject. “What more have you learned of Thornley?”
Because I rarely left my room, I depended on Matilda for household gossip, and it was rare that she disappointed. Although Nanna Ellen was the focus of her sleuthing, my brother was a close second, and she could often be found lurking in his shadow.
“Oh, Thornley.” Matilda turned the page of her sketchbook to one filled with text. “Last night, I saw him leaving Nanna Ellen’s at nearly two in the morning.”
“Why would he be in her room?”
Matilda tapped at her pad. “That’s not all. He was fully dressed, and after he left her room, he didn’t go back to his own; he went outside.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“In the middle of the night.”
“What did he do out there?”
Matilda frowned. “I don’t know. I lost sight of him near the barn. But he was out there for nearly twenty minutes, and when he came back in, he was filthy.”
“Did he see you?”
“Of course he didn’t see me.”
“So this is what? The third time?”
She shook her head. “This is the fourth time in as many weeks that he has snuck out like this. If he does it again, I plan to follow him.”
“You should tell Ma.”
She wouldn’t. I knew she wouldn’t. The way she closed her sketchbook and left my room in a huff told me so.
* * *
? ? ?
MY FEVER WORSENED. By the ninth hour of that night, my body screamed with pain and my bedsheets were drenched in sweat. Ma sat at my side with a bowl of water in her lap and a damp cloth to wipe the sheen from my forehead. At one point, I fought her. I was so chilled, the cloth felt like ice against my skin. My arms flailed to bat her away. It was then that Thornley and Pa came into the room, holding me down, pinning my arms and legs at my sides. My moans echoed through the house, guttural sounds more like those of a wounded animal than a child.
Down the hall, I heard Baby Richard crying out from Nanna Ellen’s room, and Ma asked Matilda to see to him. I remember her protesting though her words escape me. She didn’t want to leave my side, but Ma insisted. She wasn’t permitted to bring the baby into my room for fear of his catching whatever ailed me. I think we all knew this to be illogical—my illness had persisted for years and no one else in the family had contracted it—yet we all seemed to be agreed it was best not to risk a contagion with the infant.
Matilda rushed from my room, and I heard Pa cursing Nanna Ellen for taking leave only hours earlier. They depended on her, and she was needed now more than any other time, and yet she was gone, leaving for reasons known only to her. In my fevered mind, the sketches Matilda had shown me glowed: dozens of women all blurring into one, resembling Nanna Ellen for a fraction of a second before breaking apart into the pictures of strangers, women of various ages and appearances, all different, all the same. Their eyes went from the black-and-white of a pencil sketch to the most vibrant blue found only in oils, peering at me through a veil of swirling darkness. I could hear Nanna’s voice, but she sounded so far away, as if she shrieked from across the harbor and the fog devoured her cries. Then her face was but inches from mine, her full red lips moving to speak but uttering no sound. A moment later, Ma was back, wiping it all away with that icy cloth, and I wanted to swat her away but my arms no longer obeyed. All went black, and I felt as if I were falling down a well, the world vanishing above me as I was swallowed by the earth, my back on fire as I raced towards Hell. I heard Ma