‘You have said it yourself. I am mad. Mad for grieving my mother, mad for detesting my father for marrying my aunt, mad for railing against those who mistreat me.’
‘Madness is not the same as being self-absorbed and cruel. You are not the only person in the world to have felt loss.’
‘So you agree with Claudine.’
Cecilia all but throws her hands up in frustration. ‘I have loved you and loved you, and you toy with me and mock me andhurtme. Perhaps youaremad if you want to destroy all that you have.’
Odette falls silent.
There is a horrible, dizzy, lurching feeling that makes Cecilia place both hands on the floor to steady herself.
‘I am sorry I have disappointed you,’ she says. ‘I .?.?. I do not know how else to be other than how I am.’
‘You do not believe me,’ says Odette again.
‘HowcanI?’ says Cecilia, angry and distraught. ‘This is – it is too much. I do not know how to help you anymore.’
Odette turns away. ‘Then stop trying. I don’t need your help.’
‘Fine. As you like.’
Trembling, Cecilia goes.
Odette does not need her. There it is. That is the truth.
Beneath her, the world cracks open, a void dropping all the way down into the core of the earth, into Hell.
10
Odette
ODETTE WAKES EARLY.
There doesn’t seem much point in sleeping anymore. She does not dream – or, she thinks she doesn’t, but she wakes clammy and sick, twitching at sudden noises and with a need to scrub herself all over in the ice water left from yesterday on the washstand. She heard Penelope and Leo take Cecilia home very late last night. No maid has come to replace it with fresh, hot water, nor to stoke the fire. They have been forbidden to, she supposes – Claudine marking out her territory within the house and placing Odette outside of it. She may be present, but she is not welcome.
Or perhaps it is a punishment.
She deserves it, she thinks.
Her mother isn’t here.
It is strange, how this apparition has gone from a horror to a comfort. Easier to bear, maybe, now she has accepted her fate. She will never escape her mother. Whether she is here or not, she carries her mother inside her, in her mind and her heart.
She dresses in black: black stockings, black petticoats, black bombazine skirt and black bodice, black jet at her throat and ears, and pins her hair up in a simple style, then sits at her writing desk. The drawer hangs loose from where it was wrenched open last night, pitifully empty. She has not unpackedmost of her things from Cambridge: the desk is bare save an empty inkpot, a pad of blotting paper. Through the window, she can see past the leafless trees to Cecilia’s room in the Gate House. Odette leans forwards, straining to see her. If she could just catch one glimpse of Cecilia, it would be like a light breaking through cloud, like a benediction.
It is empty. The light is out.
Cecilia has abandoned her.
It is only right, after what she did.
And it is safe. It is better this way.
There is no way out now, onlythrough.
A knock on her door interrupts her thoughts.
It is her father.