Читать книгу Captivity - Deborah Noyes - Страница 10

They’ve gone. Clara hears his voice from a long way off, waking with her head on her father’s shoulder. His thin arm in lint-specked dinner-jacket sleeve folds Clara close, prevents her drooping forward and toppling down the stair. He has removed his tie and looks uncharacteristically rakish for a man of his years, smiling sideways with his ruined teeth. Clara smiles back fuzzily, lulled and small.

She feels and looks, she supposes, exactly like a child who’s surrendered to sleep whilst spying on the grown-ups downstairs. Except she’s nearly forty years old and aching soundly, the grown-ups have gone home, and the smile on her father’s lips is not one of exasperation or bemusement but concern.

“Well, then.” A voice behind them startles her out of her wits—or into them. It belongs to the Widow Bray, seated at the same narrow table Clara collided with earlier. “You nodded off in mid-entrance, Clara. At least we two waited for the dessert tray to arrive.” The widow and her vast shadow set the candleholder on the table, tame ample skirts into submission, and join the other two on the step. O cozy horror.

Clara lifts her father’s sheltering arm away and stands with a palm on the wall to steady herself. She sidles past them, crossing to the abandoned chair. To retreat outright would be unforgivable, and she and Father have very little but forgiveness left to offer one another.

“Clara,” he tries, not unkindly, as they gape at her. “Please.”

She looks them over, looks away.

Life as Clara knows it is ending. The widow has found her slipper-hold, clearly. She’ll have ideas and advice. Tidy wisdom. Even now, her small hand rests on Father’s sleeve, enlisting him for the sake of a unified front.

Floundering in her skirts again, the widow struggles to her feet with Father’s help. The wretch can’t kneel in all those layers—Clara doesn’t suppose the widow would kneel—so strides forth with hand extended as to a child. “Come, join us downstairs for tea. Your father will look fondly on your willingness.”

Clara knows that when it comes to guarding what’s dear, enough is never enough. Ferocity is not enough. She winces to make the widow disappear, but plump fingers close round her bony wrist. Clara feels a fluid buzzing in her body, a riot of blood and nerves. She is unused to being touched or coerced. Unused to many things. Unused.

“Up, now, and spare his mind, won’t you?”

Who is this woman? The question roars in Clara’s eyes, but her father won’t meet their gaze. Look at me.

The widow is a member of Amy Post’s circle, not a Quaker but a reform-minded sort with a mind to do good at any cost. Her husband, much respected and many years dead, was a physician. This Clara knows. But who is she? Clara would demand if she could. Who is she to us? And, What have you told her? Answer me.

Forsaken, she admits a surge of the same bloody reel that soothed her the last time meddling women influenced her father … eyes craving glass, fists resolved to rake her own flesh with willing shards. Clara never acted on it, of course, this or a thousand other petty acts of violence. But like a magic-lantern show, like any good diversion, the reel gave her pause. It gave her rest. The insurance of youth: that when the time came and no amount of subterfuge would do, she might act against her own flesh to free the unhappy spirit.

Look at me, old man.

The widow lets go Clara’s wrist almost gently, but her words keep like a clamp. “You must rally, Clara. You’re no longer a young woman … quite. I don’t like to say it, to press a wound, but you’re approaching an age … we might say that with your habits, you’re unlikely to marry or bear children.”

Father purses his lips, not quite nodding.

“A woman in your circumstances must care for her elders, not tax them. You’re neither frail nor a fool. Take responsibility for your life. I beg you. Relieve him.”

“I thank you, mum, but I believe we endured very well before … without you.”

The widow sighs, her interest waning. “Enough drama now.”

Even this deep in dismay, Clara must credit her opponent: Mrs. Bray will have the last word. She will have her way.

She turns once more and desperately to Father, who keeps his back to her, facing away as he ever has when a strong woman has hold of him. Clara speaks to the back of his head, to the vulnerable neck nicked by his barber’s shaving blade, in a voice quietly savage. “The only consolation I require, sir—you know this, and you know why—is solitude.”