I still will never see her again.
There are doubtless worse hobbies than meditating upon your dead mother, but nobody has ever suggested one to me.
Agatha knelt with me in the garret a week after the funeral, because I wanted to go through my mother’s trunk. For seven days, life had been a sickening seesaw between fear that calamity would befall me and the desire calamity would take me already and have done with it. Now I wanted to touch Mamma’s gowns and her gloves and her letters, as if I might combine them in a spell to summon her; even today, if witchcraft existed by means of toadstools and tinkers’ thumbs to bring her back, I should do so in an instant.
“Well, ’ere we are,” Agatha said in her broad rasp as she drew out an iron key.
Our servant, Agatha, who trudged about with wisps of blond hair falling in her squinting eyes, spoke entirely in platitudes. She was my sole comfort throughout that hellish week; hot broth mixed with sherry and soothing pats on the cheek are greatly cheering, even to juvenile she-devils.
The lock clicked open and I surged to plunder the trunk’s contents. We had a pair of tapers, but the light was dim and ghostly, and when my seeking fingers struck lace, I hardly knew what I held.
“Ah, what ’ave we ’ere?” Agatha rumbled from my right.
“Mamma’s summer parasol,” I recognised as I lifted it.
“Aye, Miss Jane, and what a parasol.”
There was no refuting this, so I drew out more relics—cracked men’s reading spectacles, a fawn carryall. We went on until I was so sated with untrimmed hats and books of pressed flowers that I scarce noted I held a pair of empty laudanum bottles.
Agatha placidly took them away. “Now, Miss Jane, them’s in the past, them is, over and emptied, so you just put ’em clean out o’ yer mind.”
I supposed Agatha meant Mamma was no longer ill, so I nodded. Diving into the trunk once more, I emerged with a lock of nut-brown hair very like mine woven into a small lover’s knot and pressed under silver-framed glass. I had seen it before, when it sat on Mamma’s mantelpiece, but it had long since vanished.
“This was my father’s. Were they married long before he died, Agatha?”
“Not as long as yer mum would’ve liked, poor dear.”
“Cousin Edwin told me she was no better than a parasite,” I whispered.
“Now, Miss Jane,” Agatha growled kindly, “there’s sorts as you can trust to speak plain, and there’s sorts as will say whatsoever suits. And if those two kinds o’ folks were only obvious, wi’ signs or marks o’ Cain or the like, a heap o’ trouble would be saved.”
A worm of guilt stirred in my gut. I had lied to her that very morning, when I said I would take buttered porridge and then dumped it by the pond so as not to worry her.
Lying has always come as easy for me as breathing.
“Did my father prefer living at the cottage too?”
“Bless you, he never lived ’ere after marrying yer mum. They met in Paris, where Mr. Steele dun banking—I figure he preferred being wheresoever she was.”
My head fell upon her burly shoulder. Agatha smelt of lye and the mutton she had been stewing, and just when I was too exhausted to contemplate getting my weakened legs under me and leaving the darkening garret, I pulled something I had never seen before from the trunk.
It was a letter—one in my mother’s elegant Parisian script with its bold downstrokes like a battle standard being planted. It read:
Rue M——,
2nd Arrondissement,
SUNDAY
Dear Mr. Sneeves,
Pardon, s’il vous plait, for my writing in haste, but I can hardly shift a muscle for the grief now oppressing me: my J—— has expired finally. The doctors could do nothing, and I am desolate. Doubtless your legal efforts upon my behalf and that of my daughter have been heroic, but in the absence of my husband, I must confirm our complete readiness for relocation to Highgate House. Si ce n’est pas indiscret, as my beloved J—— was ever a faithful client of yours, I request an immediate audience, for every second may prove invaluable. And please return this letter with your reply, as I live in horror our plans will be anticipated by those who would prevent us.
Veuillez agréer mes salutations empressées,
Mrs. Anne-Laure Steele
At first I had imagined that the letter was two pages, but it was kept together with the reply in a crabbed male English hand:
Rue