Mr. Munt was tantamount to suicide; unfortunately, I had not yet grasped that suicide was the topic.
“Your mother,” Mr. Munt enunciated, relishing every syllable, “was a debauchee who perished deliberately by means of self-administered laudanum. She was thus buried with minimal services by the only minister willing to overlook her Gallic Catholic affiliations and willful self-slaughter, and your sainted aunt spared you the indignity of witnessing such a barren sight. Tell me, why should mourning your mother be praised as any sort of virtue when her tainted spirit so obviously haunts your own immortal soul? Your mother was a disgrace to the natural order—an embodied disaster.”
He had known all along, I realised.
There had been no mourners in crepe at my mother’s funeral, I understood: only the overripe aroma of earth unwilling to accept yet another unpaid houseguest. Suicide was high treason, for what greater violation existed than thwarting God’s will?
My sentence (a week of missing dinner) was announced and Taylor invited to rejoin the ranks of the fed; but the pit of my stomach swelled into a cavern long before hunger descended.
Mr. Munt had won; I had not been prepared for the truth. A small hand interlaced with mine.
“You don’t cry out so very often,” Clarke whispered, wide-eyed and earnest.
“I will now,” I managed hoarsely before disengaging myself and opening our prayer book with palsied fingers.
• • •
Ihave learnt since that a great many people are ill intentioned and yet behave well. I might have followed suit—winked into the mirror of a morning and worn a white sheep’s coat all the livelong day. Jane Eyre was told to pray to God to take away her heart of stone, that she might be gifted a heart of flesh; but my heart of flesh bled for my mother, my mother whom I would apparently never see again if I was good.
The wind howled that November night as if mourning a lost love; and the decision I reached in my hard bed with Taylor’s cold toes prodding my calves, sobbing as silently as I could, went as follows:
If I must go to hell to find my mother again, so be it: I will be another embodied disaster.
But I will be a beautiful disaster.
EIGHT
“I might have been as good as you,—wiser,—almost as stainless. I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure—an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?”
It would have been possible for me to survive Lowan Bridge for longer than the bleak seven years I spent there had Mr. Munt not taken it into his head to kill Clarke.
Oh, we were subjected to daily indignity, each Reckoning more creatively vicious than the last; but small moments of happiness touched us deeply. In a mansion, blessings are lost amidst bric-a-brac; in a pit, they shimmer like the flash of dragonfly wings.
There was Miss Lilyvale’s boundless capacity to ruin even the simplest music. There was Fiona Fiddick’s faculties for both humour and sewing, which enabled her to hide the words FEED ME in an embroidered nosegay of coral peonies which Miss Sheffleton proudly hung upon the classroom wall. There were horses, and riding lessons, and I learnt to love galloping through the daisy-dotted meadows, pretending I need never return. There were the holidays, when Mr. Munt was out lecturing, and there was Clarke’s fierce, small-lipped smile when she arrived back after Christmas with her carpetbag and delivered an impetuous peck to my cheek.
Reader, I had miraculously acquired a companion; Clarke’s existence owned me, opened me, left me helpless with stifled giggles at midnight. Becky Clarke was brilliant and ridiculous, an effortless scholar who insisted on honour when honour led only to missed meals; she was three years my junior, so I could shrug her off as an irritating protégée the instant anyone raised an eyebrow; and she responded to both compliments and criticism with the same casual piping responses, as if baffled anyone had noticed she was there at all. Her simplicity was droll, her mind captivating—had anyone asked whether I thought her a genius or an idiot, I should not have had a satisfactory answer.
“Would you like to watch the sun rise?” Clarke would ask when the weather was fine, and madly I would accompany her to the roof, yawning and cracking sluggish joints, and we would sit there quite contented, always gazing at the murky haze of London not so very far away from