Her father does not raise his voice. Not even now.
He only becomes cold as marble, every human thing in him closing off. He is a stranger, not the father who has loved her since she was born.
‘Fine. I understand the message you have delivered. I am not welcome here.’
He does not look at her. Maybe this is how his true fury takes shape.
Is he really angry at her for how she has behaved towards Claudine? Or is it that she will no longer play his game?
‘If that is how you choose to interpret it, I cannot stop you.’
A lightness takes her as she leaves. That is the end of that.
It is all so simple now.
If she is to lose, she will take Claudine down with her.
In her room, it is there, just as she left it. The oblong of folded pages, tucked carefully away on her desk. The memorial. Her last memory of her living mother.
It is like a dream. She can barely recall writing the words before her, though it is her slanting hand, her erroneous spelling. It has not been much more than two months, and yet those days after the death feel like a fiction she has built for herself.
She turns the pages like the delicate leaves of an old bible, tracing her finger along each line as she reads. The last time she saw her mother, she was frail, a little distant, muddled by the laudanum, but their eyes met; there was a sense of communication between them, of interest in her presence.
There must be evidence here of Claudine’s actions, if only she could find it. Claudine was hurting her, Odette is convinced, and there must be some telltale clue within this record. But there is one unassailable fact before her: her mother is dead and buried. This is not a detective novel. There is no body to examine, no crime scene to assess. If she has her suspicions, then they are only taken from the situation as she knows it.
It dawns on her, slowly, heavily, like the weight of a tide drawing back to expose the soft and sinuous things on the seabed: if there is no proof, then the only path is to force a confession.
What a thought.
A confession? Could she really do it?
The rain comes now, drumming against the window loud enough to drown out any noise from upstairs.
How could she do it?
There is something so impotent about her position that it half makes her want to smash the window, break the furniture. How can she bring her will to bear on Claudine?
Does Claudine hope no one will ask about Lydia, think about her? That the memory of Lydia will dissipate from the world until no murder was committed at all?
There. That is it.
Odette cannot let her forget.
Odette must make her remember.
As her mother’s ghost has come to her, she must bring her ghost to Claudine.
If Claudine is guilty, then it will burden her conscience, and any weight Odette brings to bear upon it will make it untenable.
If she is not, then any antics Odette performs in aid of her goal will be easily cast off as grief, madness.
Very well. She will take it on as a mantle, as armour. Let them believe her driven from her senses with grief, believe that she is blind and deaf to anything beyond her own misery.
Let them think her mad.
So this is it then – the task before her.
She locks the memorial into her desk drawer. She must keep it safe.