It would make a better story if I could describe how her skull made a sharp crack, if I could describe how her blood pooled on the rock, how it matted the grass and dried in her yellow hair. But I have learned that life is both less exciting and more horrid than stories.
No crack, no blood, just Rose crumpled on the ground. Just Rose screaming.
Rose, screaming. Rose screaming in the memory-time of the swings; Rose screaming in the now-time of the Slough.
Eldric crunched at my hand.
“That hurts!”
“Sorry!” Eldric let go at once.
“Go ahead, plug your ears,” I said, not looking, never looking at him, never looking at him again. My face must be in the crimson-streak stage, which lasts forever. “It’s not rude, not if it’s when Rose is screaming.” Pine needles drifted round our feet.
“But I don’t want to miss anything!”
What would that be like, not wanting to miss anything? How wearisome to be forever grabbing at bits of life. Look at Eldric now, stepping over to Rose, bending over her, asking perhaps if she’d been hurt. I sat at the foot of an alder, leaned against its trunk, just waiting. Light-needles glinted off the pale gold of Rose’s hair. I felt a little distant from myself, as though I sat in the audience of a production of my own life.
There would be no surprises in this production. I’d be caring for Rose in every scene. In the next scene, for example, the curtain would open upon me hanging about Tiddy Rex’s sickbed, comparing his cough to Rose’s. I mustn’t neglect to play that scene, even though it had just occurred to me that a person with the swamp cough might be unable to scream so very enthusiastically. But I couldn’t take any chances. It’s my fault Rose is the way she is.
It’s my fault that Rose screams. That she screamed this morning, that she was screaming now. She screamed like a river, the longest river you could imagine, and from time to time, words bobbed to the surface, like sticks. I could make out the words, although I doubted Eldric could. Rose screamed for her hair ribbon. It was her favorite ribbon and it matched her frock. And although she didn’t say this, I knew that without the ribbon, she’d refuse to wear the frock.
Rose is finicky about colors.
Finish the story, Briony. You know the rules. You have to tell yourself the other horridly unexciting events. That you jumped from your own swing, rather hoping you might hurt yourself, just a little, so that Stepmother would fuss over you too. That Stepmother spent such a time crouched beside Rose, touching Rose’s head. That the hummingbirds had flown from Stepmother’s fingers.
That Stepmother rose and looked down upon you. That you looked up at her, at the crisp V of her jaw, at the thin openings of her nostrils. That she waited such a while to speak.
“Oh, Briony!”
That was all she said at first, and then:
“We mustn’t ever tell your father.”
5
Help to Get Them Witches
“Flying branches?” said Mr. Clayborne, who’d only been in the Swampsea six months and had never seen a witch.
“It be a snag,” said the Swamp Reeve, who’d taken the chair nearest the fire. The Brownie used to curl up under that chair, back in the old days, before Stepmother and I forbade him the house. “Us calls it a snag.”
The firelight played over the bit of frayed carpet where the Brownie used to lie. I used to look at him and marvel that no one else could see him. But now I had to remember that it was better he was gone. That he and I were dangerous together, the Old One and the witch.
“A snag rode by a witch,” said the constable.
“Us needs must talk to Miss Rose.” The Reeve wore his neck-skin too tight. You could see his Adam’s apple bounce around, which made my backbone cringe. “She be the lass them witches thinked to thief away.”
I shifted in my seat but couldn’t get comfortable. The old swamp craving had returned. I hadn’t felt it for years. It had come upon me the first few months after I stopped visiting the swamp, after Stepmother realized the Old Ones ignited my wickedness, made it run out of control.
“I want Briony to read to me.” Rose sat beneath the parlor table, bits of paper scattered around her. Rose is attracted to paper of all sorts, sweets wrappers, shopping receipts, Valentine’s Day cards, instructions for games we never played, the last page of any book—this, in particular, is annoying.
When Father is irritated, he speaks more precisely than usual. “Please come out from under the table, Rose.” He curled his sentences as carefully as a schoolgirl curls her hair. “You are a grown-up girl now.”
“I don’t prefer to.” Rose shuffled the papers about. I knew she was testing the colors, deciding which combinations would look best in her collage. “I want Briony to read to me.”
But Rose was not a grown-up girl. She would never be a grown-up girl. She knew perfectly well that my stories were nothing but cinders, and she was not unintelligent, so what was she thinking? Did she suppose I could paste the ashes of my stories together, the way she pastes her bits of paper into a collage?
Rose has great faith in my abilities.
“Happen I might approach Miss Rose?” said the constable.
“Scissors are dangerous,” said Rose.
“Danger?” said Eldric from across the room, where he and Mr. Dreary were stuffing Clayborne books into Larkin shelves.
“I need someone to cut my papers,” said Rose. “Stepmother used to cut for me, but she’s dead.”
“I’m just the man for a dangerous job,” said Eldric.
“Happen I might talk to Miss Rose direct-like?” said the constable. “Tell her us needs her help to get them witches.”
“Certainly you may,” said Father.
Certainly, Father? Do you have any idea what’s going to happen once the constable sticks his face beneath the table? That face of his, with those saggy eyelids turned inside out and the red bits showing?
“I don’t prefer to speak to the constable.” Rose’s breath snagged on her words and set off a spasm of coughing.
“Hand to your mouth, Rose,” I said.
“He’s only going to ask you a few questions,” said Father. “If you act like a grown-up girl and answer them properly, you’ll never see those witches again.”
The constable approached the table. Forge ahead, O mighty enforcer of the law. May you be stout of heart and eardrum.
When Rose takes to screaming, she starts loud, continues loud, and ends loud. Rose has a very good ear and always screams on the same note. I’d tested her before I burnt the library, and our piano along with it.
Rose screams on the note of B flat.
We don’t need a piano anymore now that we have a human tuning fork. In any event, Rose and I never played very well, despite Father’s insistence that we practice an hour a day. We’d never be like Mother, who’d played the piano beautifully, or so Father said. I sometimes wondered if Father really remembered her. Seventeen years is a long time.
It was wonderfully restful to stand back and do nothing. I heard Father call in the reinforcements, who are named Pearl. I watched Pearl escort Rose from the room. I heard Rose scream all the way upstairs.
The pitch of B flat has uncommon carrying power.
Strange how her screams eased the swamp craving, just a bit. It’s like rubbing your elbow after you bump it, I suppose.
The mighty enforcer of the law returned to his seat. Eldric had taken Rose’s place beneath the table, fidgeting with bits of paper and working the scissors. There’s little to compare between Eldric and Stepmother, except they were the only people I’d ever seen join Rose under the table. How patient Stepmother had been, her hummingbird fingers cutting the papers into bits at Rose’s direction, and those bits into smaller bits, and those smaller, and smaller still.
There fell what a novel would call an “awkward silence,” save for the sound of Eldric chopping at the air with the scissors. I fixed my gaze on the bookshelves. Before the flood, they’d been filled with a rainbow of fairy tale books and dog-eared Latin histories and all the novels of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters (except that sniveling Anne). Now they were empty, begging hands. The flood had turned the books into bloated corpses that had to be shoveled up and hauled away in barrows.