uncle knows of your mother on the spans, he’s pieced together like a quilt—a word here, a rumor there. He never spoke to anyone who knew her. That is, other than me; and he’d prefer not to know what I know because it might spoil the picture he’s framed. He knows nothing of how she lived or what she did to survive. His account’s a fabrication. When I arrived here with you, your existence only confirmed everything he’d invented about her. That she must have been a wanton to produce a child and then abandon it was all too clear to him, and he set it like a minaret atop the story he’d already invented. You’re the crowning piece whether you wish it or not. Here you are and Leandra nowhere to be seen.” He slid the puppet back inside the case.
“But she was dead!”
“Which made no difference to him. That she’d left you in my care, in Bardsham’s care, before she went off is what matters, you see. In his mind, she abandoned you. Her death’s a mere inconvenience after the fact. An orphan proved what he already believed. She was unfit. Unfit to be his sister. And that’s the real issue.”
“Was she—” and here she stopped, poised at the brink of asking the critical question that would either vindicate or damn the image she retained, her mind shaping words the specifics of which were beyond her, but the depravity of which she’d inferred from the way her uncle’s mouth twisted and his eyes went hard as he uttered the name. “Was she really the Red Witch? Did she have powers?”
“Red Witch?” The name troubled him, she could see. “Where do you”—he tried unpersuasively to sound amused—“where do you get such a name?”
“From you,” she answered, and she watched as he hesitated, tried to recall when he had let this slip.
He squeezed shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “Oh. Well. It was just a name, that’s all, Leodora. A reputation. The same way that Bardsham was a name.” Orinda fell over and lay still on the box. “That’s enough now, I’m tired.”
But she would not be diverted by his pretense of exhaustion. This was too important. Her world was taking shape. “Was she the Red Witch? Did she lure men to their deaths?”
He stiffened. Slowly his hand uncovered his face. His bilious eyes distorted his haggard features into something inhumanly furious—gaunt and hard and evil. One corner of his mouth curled as he replied: “Ask your father. She lured him.”
He rose up, gathered the puppets, and shoved them back into the cases. Ignoring her as if she were no longer in the room, he carried the cases back to the dark pantry.
Although he let her stay through the night, Soter remained unapproachable, refusing to answer when she tried to speak to him. The subject was closed.
After that he tried never to mention Leandra again. If she asked a question, he wouldn’t answer with anything concrete or helpful. Mostly he feigned that he remembered too little to be of any use.
She couldn’t trust her uncle to tell her anything concrete because he did nothing but call his sister “the witch,” much the way the villagers did. To ask him was to invite trouble. Her aunt was especially reticent when Gousier was around, but even when he was absent she professed to have come to the island only after Leandra was gone and so be unable to provide any help. Leodora suspected this wasn’t true, but she didn’t want to accuse her aunt and lose the sympathy of the only person who ever sided with her.
Beyond Bouyan, her mother was nothing but a half-condensed phantom, a legend, a myth. On Bouyan she was a scourge, a harlot, an abomination.
While she couldn’t probe him for information, she did induce Soter to teach her about the puppets. He accepted her apprenticeship reluctantly at first, but with increasing devotion as, over time, her dedication and skill emerged. It wasn’t just a casual interest in puppetry she displayed. Nor were his first impressions of her dexterity off the mark. Leodora had her father’s gifts. Many times during the first years of her training, Soter proclaimed it.
The secret practice sessions gave meaning to her life. They made the indignities suffered at her uncle’s hands almost bearable. They gave her a goal to strive for—a means to leave the island, to strike out on her own.