“It’s your birthday?” I said.
“Tomorrow, actually,” said Leanne.
“We’re going to raise a glass at midnight,” said Eldric.
This was a birthday party. I was glad her birthday was tomorrow, which was the first day of August. I didn’t want her to have been born in July. July was a jolly sort of month, not all hot and puffed up on itself.
Oh, August One! I remembered making Eldric laugh that day in the Alehouse, when I was guessing at his birthday. And here we were: Leanne was an August One. Wouldn’t Eldric remember how we’d laughed?
I paid little attention to the conversation, although I did hear Mr. Clayborne say that Eldric looked perfectly dreadful, which I’m glad to say he did.
“Briony!”
I jumped, but it was only Rose, tugging at my sleeve, announcing that the Mirk and Midnight Hour was upon us.
I pressed my hands to my ears. What had I been thinking—or not thinking! I’d let Rose’s ten o’clock bedtime slide by, but Rose had kept an eye on the clock. She’d warned me of the midnight chimes.
My hands on my ears hardly muffled the chimes, which are wonderfully penetrating. So was Eldric’s voice, calling for attention. “Let us raise our glasses to Leanne on this, her twenty-third birthday!”
“Why, Eldric!” cried Cecil. “I never thought you’d take up with an older woman!”
That’s about as clever as Cecil gets, but everyone laughed. It was the champagne, no doubt. Cecil positively glowed. I do have to admit he has lovely skin.
Rose pulled my hands from my ears.
Eldric acknowledged Cecil with a flat Cheshire Cat smile, then tugged it into a real smile as he saluted Leanne with his glass. “To Leanne, the best companion a man could ever have.”
The guests broke into a chaos of laughter and teasing. Eldric blushed. Leanne didn’t. Perhaps she runs on petrol, not blood.
Eldric had been thinking of Leanne that night, the night of our communion, the night of the Bitch. He hadn’t been communing with me at all. He’d been communing with thoughts of Leanne.
“The party’s over.” Rose’s voice was choked with tears. “And Robert didn’t come.”
“The party’s not over,” I said, which was idiotic, as I oughtn’t to encourage Rose to stay up.
“Yes, it is,” said Rose. “It’s always over at the Mirk and Midnight Hour.”
“Let’s go, then.” I couldn’t bear to look at Eldric with Leanne anymore. I was jealous. And why not?
There are no preconditions for jealousy. You don’t have to be right, you don’t have to be reasonable. Take Othello. He was neither right nor reasonable, and Desdemona ended up dead. I wouldn’t mind Leanne ending up dead. I wouldn’t mind exploding her into fireworks of peacock and pearl.
Who cares about pearls, anyway? They’re overrated, in my opinion. What is a pearl but a bit of sand and oyster spit?
Rose and I went inside. I didn’t say good-bye. This is the advantage of having a sister like Rose. You never have to say good-bye.
Up we went, up the crumple of stairs to our room, with Rose crying the whole time and worst of all, the Brownie following. He wasn’t begging yet, but he soon would be, begging for his story.
“Read me a story,” said Rose.
“But Rose—”
“Please, mistress!” When the Brownie looked up, one saw mostly the sharp tip of his long nose. “Make me my sweet story!”
“There are no stories!” I spoke to Rose, of course, only to Rose. The Brownie needn’t think I was speaking to him.
I said what I always said about the books having burnt, and Rose said what she always said about wishing her book had burnt, and I didn’t ask what I always don’t ask, which is what on earth is her book? Then I laid myself down where I belonged, on my side of the do-not-cross line. I belonged in the imprint of my own self, which as always, was right next to Rose.
17
Mooncrumbs
I awoke at once. Darkness leaned on me, panting in my ear. I looked over the do-not-cross line into the moonlit window. Eldric’s face floated in the glass. I clutched the neck of my nightdress before sliding out of bed. There was too much Briony, too little nightdress.
I pulled at the casement, released his face from the glass. He reached through the window, his beautiful hand, his five beautiful fingers outspread. If I were a poet, I’d write about hands, nothing but hands. I touched the whorled petals of my fingertips to his; our hands made the roof of a house.
But, wait: Eldric had been ill only five days ago, the night of the garden party. How could he be so entirely recovered?
“The time has come,” he whispered. “Time for wolfgirl to come into the night.”
Into the night! An electrical thrill ran between my shoulder blades. “But my nightdress?”
“Into the night!”
I gave him my hand. My whorled fingertips bloomed. Into the night!
The roof was slippery with moonlight. A skitter of roofs ran below, the view spattered with dormers, chimneys, corbels, oriels. Our descent was planned in ingenious bad-boy fashion. Ropes ran over the roofs, dipped over edges to roofs below, where other ropes waited.
Eldric showed me his bad-boy technique. You lay your middle on the rope and squizzle yourself along the rope and over the edge. It is generally thought a good idea to hold tight.
Down he went. I did the same. You might read about such an adventure in a book, but it’s different in the moonlight, different to experience it in three dimensions—the rope pressing into your middle, feeling thicker than it looked; the slates too, larger than you’d imagined, smelling of dampness and stored-up weather. Your nightdress bunching up beneath as you slip over the edge, and the passing thought that at least you’re wearing undergarments of an unventilated variety. Your feet finding a knot in the rope, which you don’t need, but getting another little thrill when you realize that the lion boy-man attended to every detail with you in mind.
Eldric would never plan an initiation for Leanne. He never could. Even if Leanne didn’t mind sacrificing her blue-green skirts to the rooftops, she’d never be able to haul herself up and down ropes. She had too much heft up top.
I was fast, I was strong. I almost laughed to see Eldric strolling about on the roof below, as though he weren’t tensed to leap should I fall. But I had my own bad-boy muscles. He’d learn to trust them as I did.
We scribbled down the last ropes, tumbled into the garden, which was heavy with the scent of azaleas. Eldric must be feeling very much recovered indeed, to have arranged not only for a full moon, but one of unusual brightness. She was dazzling, glinting off the Flats and the Quicks.
I looked at Eldric. The moon hung in his eyes.
“Into the Slough, wolfgirl!”
Into the Slough!
Impossible that Eldric could love Leanne. Not a girl who thrilled to the hanging of a witch. Not a girl who in the land of metaphor game was a motorcar.
“Bible Ball first.” Eldric snatched a gossamer bag from some fold of air.
From what I understand, motorcars are all hot air and rude noises, vented from certain unmentionable regions.
Eldric tied the bag round my wrist with pale taffeta ribbons. Within lay a Bible Ball. Even a Bible Ball was dressed up tonight!
Wolfgirl and lion-boy loped past tangles of blueberry bushes. The moon followed us into the Slough. We snickled through ferns and scrub and moon shavings and root tangles and logs frilled with overlapping mushrooms.
We leapt into snickleways, waded through velvet ooze. We dripped out the far side, trailing smells of sulfur and rotten eggs.
We laughed at the sulfur. We laughed at the rotten eggs. We laughed at the drifts of moon-peel. We laughed.
“Behold the task that lies before you.” Eldric took my shoulders and turned me toward a log. “Follow the trail of breadcrumbs until you have found the great treasure of the swamp.”