against her side I could feel her breathing. It felt like she was the only thing holding me up. My head felt strangely light and far away, as though I might just drift off at any moment. And there was a simple great ache in my chest, as though someone had punched the heart right out of me.
The Matriarch and Maxwell and Victoria finally stopped talking and stepped back to give me some space. They looked at one another, but I couldn’t read the expressions on their faces. It did seem to me that there were things I should be saying, should be doing, but I couldn’t think what. I was just dazed. Lost. Molly moved in closer so she could stare into my face. She looked worried.
“It’s all right to cry, Eddie,” she said quietly. “It’s all right, if you need to. No one will stare.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t cry. Not ever. I just don’t. Because I discovered very early on that crying didn’t help. The bad things still kept happening when I was a child, and my parents never did come back, no matter how much I cried. So I just . . . stopped. What was the point?”
“It might be good for you,” said Molly. “Make you feel better.”
“No,” I said. “It wouldn’t.”
“Then I’ll cry for you,” said Molly. And she did, with quiet, respectful dignity. And apparently quite genuinely.
“I’ll never see my uncle Jack again,” I said. “Never talk to him again. Never have him place one of his big engineer’s hands on my shoulder when he wanted to make a point.”
“You’ve lost people before,” said Molly, sniffing back her tears.
“Not like this,” I said. “Uncle Jack was always there, from my earliest childhood. I could depend on him to always be there. I really thought he’d go on forever. That even after I was gone he’d still be the Armourer . . . He and Uncle James were the nearest things I had to father figures. And I killed one of them and disappointed the other.”
“James would have killed you,” Molly said carefully, “if I hadn’t finished him off first. And Jack was never disappointed in you.”
“That’s not what it feels like,” I said. “I have to find my parents now. Charles and Emily. They’re all I’ve got left.”
“You’ve got me,” said Molly.
I managed a small smile, for her. “Yes,” I said.
“Isabella and Louisa wanted to come with me, to pay their respects,” said Molly. Tactfully changing the subject. “But we all decided that probably wasn’t a good idea. All three of the Metcalf Sisters, in one place? We didn’t want to make your family feel nervous, at such a delicate time. Besides, somebody would be bound to say something, and Iz or Lou would be bound to overreact, and before you know it there’s frogs hopping everywhere. Which is bad, especially at a funeral.”
“You were right,” I said. “Drood funeral services are always only for the family. There’ll be a wake later, somewhere else. For friends and colleagues.”
One of the family vicars came forward to start the service. Rather younger than I expected, but granted a certain gravitas by the old family robes and vestments, which hadn’t changed a bit since Tudor times. His voice was calm, confident, and reassuring, as he read from his Bible the old words of comfort and farewell. I didn’t recognise him, but then, we’re a big family. And I haven’t felt the need to attend family services since I got old enough to say no and make it stick. I pretty much gave up on prayer when I gave up crying, and for the same reason: because it didn’t help. These days, when I do feel the need to pray, I do it directly. I don’t feel the need for an intermediary. Ritual has never been a support or comfort to me. Probably because there’s always been far too much of that in the family.
Molly leaned in close beside me, so she could murmur in my ear. “I’m surprised your family has vicars.”
“We have everything we need,” I said quietly. “We have to be totally self-sufficient, because we can only trust and depend on each other. He’s Protestant, of course, because Droods won’t stand for any outsider having authority over us. But that’s as far as it goes. We don’t do denominations.”
“Are your family’s funerals always this . . . big?” said Molly.
“No,” I said. “This is special. A much-larger-than-usual gathering; for an important and much-loved member