with a rose-patterned robe tied over her nightdress. Beyond the horrible fact Bertha Grizzlehurst’s dreams had been shattered, Clarke’s vexation pulled at me with the drag of a hundred tiny fishhooks.
“He’s . . . a little better than a murderer, Clarke,” I corrected, lighting two tapers on my desk.
“He just killed his own baby!” she hissed.
Pondering how easy it was to lose control, I developed an intense interest in retying my grey dressing gown.
“She has to leave him! Jane. Jane, are you listening? She has to get away from here, she’ll never be able to look him in the face again without knowing—can you imagine the torment?”
I sat upon the edge of the bed so as to concentrate on the tie, which was proving unexpectedly taxing.
“We have to help her,” Clarke decided.
“How?”
“Surely she can seek out a relative—have you ever heard her speak of parents or siblings?”
Raising an eyebrow, I wordlessly reminded Clarke of the number of sentences we had heard Mrs. Grizzlehurst utter.
“We’ll just have to ask—and if she has somewhere to go, we can help her. I have it now!” Clarke exclaimed, clapping her hands.
Diving at the bed we shared, Clarke pulled my trunk from beneath the frame. I recall the exact set of her shoulders, the quizzical turn of her head as she searched, the way I sat watching her, not understanding, until the instant I did understand, and horror clawed at me, and I stupidly gasped, “Wait, don’t—” just as Clarke chirped, “Here!” and darted to the brightening window with her prize.
“Don’t touch that,” I growled in the voice of a cornered beast.
Clarke had already lifted the dinted silver watch to the light, however; at my outburst, she nearly dropped it, but she had seen the initials VOM etched onto the metal. Pushing a curlicue of hair away from her eyes, she slowly turned.
“You said you had a silver watch of your father’s when we left.” Her high voice was considered but flat, as she had sounded when working out algebraic equations, which positively wrecked me. “This . . .” She stopped, her head whipping up. “This is Vesalius Munt’s watch, isn’t it?”
Desperate, I cast my mind in all directions for a lie which might serve, any lie, every lie, the right lie.
“Yes. I . . . I was leaving school, alone I thought, and had hardly any money.”
“What else do you have of his?” Clarke’s tone had frosted, placid as a winter lake.
Stomach churning, I pulled out The Garden of Forbidden Delights. Clarke took the book, pursing her lips in puzzlement. I committed this insane blunder for two reasons which, in my distress, seemed actually sound. First, aware that Clarke possessed zero tolerance for my falsehoods when directed at her, I offered her a secret like a penance; and second, it seemed prudent to remind her that I may have had a lunatic mother and a history of stealing from dead headmasters, but was her own father not also subject to trivial quirks of ethics?
As Clarke flipped through the pages, her grip began to tremble; we had encountered the obscene on London’s streets before, but never produced by her own parents. I darted to her, tossed the book away, and took her hands, kissing one and holding the other over where my heart ought to have been.
“It’s all right, their business doesn’t affect my opinion of you,” I breathed. “Oh, please don’t look like that! I took the watch thinking I would be friendless and I’m sorry I lied to you, but you’re so particular. That book—you should never have seen it. Mr. Munt wanted to turn me against you, but I never loved you any less.”
I fell silent as Clarke’s eyes grew swollen with dread. She snatched her hands away, staggering back, knocking one of the candles over; wax spattered the floorboards, began to congeal and to harden.
“Wait, I only meant to say that you—you’re family to me. Are you hurt? What’s come—”
“He gave this to you that day, to spite the pair of us?”
“Yes, but it didn’t work, I told—”
“When you found Mr. Munt in his study, you said he was already dead, Jane!” she shrieked.
Time seemed to ripple, an eddying effect which left me reeling. Clarke shook her head back and forth, back and forth, like a metronome without any click, click.
“It’s not what you think,” I whispered.
It was, however.
“I never realised,” she said hollowly. “I thought how natural it was that the same thing should happen to both of us, we