Away from the leather-and-meat-pie smell of the carriage, he noticed for the first time the smells of rural East Sussex—clay and flowers and a whiff of a distant dairy. It was all a long way from the musks of sick people and the sharp reek of vinegar-washed hospital walls.
He had got his bags free, and he set them down on the road’s gravel verge just in time for the boy, rushing back again, to pick them up and wrestle them in a sort of running waddle back toward the house. Remembering that Josephine disapproved of her sister’s marrying a physician—particularly one who currently specialized in an area of medicine that was by tradition the domain of unprofessional old women—Crawford pretended not to see her, and instead made a show of greeting her father and aunt.
“Julia’s upstairs,” her father said as he led the new arrivals toward the house, “worrying about her hair and her clothes. You know how brides are.” Crawford thought he heard Josephine mutter something behind him, and then the old man seemed to realize that he had said something awkward. “By which—uh—I mean merely—”
Crawford forced a smile. “I’m sure she needn’t worry about such things,” he said. “I’ve never seen her looking less than splendid.”
Visibly relieved to have got past his apparent reference to Crawford’s first wife, old Mr. Carmody nodded rapidly, blinking and smiling. “Oh, to be sure, to be sure. The very image of her departed mother, she is.”
Crawford was glancing back toward the road and the carriage as Mr. Carmody said this, and so he saw the expression on Josephine’s narrow face change instantly from spite to vacuity; she kept walking, but her arms and legs were stiff now, and her head, when she looked away, moved in one abrupt jerk, like the instantaneous movement of a spider. Her nostrils were wide and white. Clearly this was her mechanical pose.
He looked ahead at her father, expecting more apologetic mumbling for having brought up what was clearly another subject, but the old man stumped on unaware, grinning and shaking his head at some comment Appleton had made.
Crawford raised an eyebrow. The old man didn’t seem unobservant or thoughtless—but surely, if the subject of his deceased wife was so evidently traumatic to one of his daughters, he ought sometime to have noticed? He’d have had twenty years to stumble across the fact, for the twins’ mother had bled to death minutes after having given birth to Josephine, the second of them.
Once inside the house, the travellers were given mugs of cider and plates of bread and cheese, and, as they worked their way through the refreshments, they pretended to enjoy the efforts of the young man wringing doomful melodies out of the bagpipe. At last Mr. Carmody halted the recital and offered to show his guests to their rooms.
Crawford obediently went to his room and washed his face in the basin on the dresser, but then he went back out into the hall and stole down to Julia’s room. She answered his knock and proved to be alone in spite of the wedding preparations, and she was still dressed casually in a green cotton dress. With her shoes off she seemed even shorter than usual, making her abundant figure and narrow waist even more startling. Her long brown hair was still slightly damp from a recent washing.
“You’re nearly a full day late,” she said after she’d kissed him. “Break a wheel?”
“Delayed by a rough delivery,” he told her. “A charity ward case—her family only got her to the hospital after some midwife had made an almost fatal hash of the job.” He sat down on the window seat. “I finally got to see your sister, out front just now. She really doesn’t look well.”
Julia sat beside him and took his hand. “Oh, poor Josephine is just upset that you’re taking me away. I’ll miss her, too, but I’ve got a life of my own. She’s got to … become Josephine.” Julia shrugged. “Whoever that may turn out to be.”
“Somebody in some trouble, I think. How long has she been doing that mechanical trick?”
“Oh, ever since she was a baby, practically—she asked me once when we were children what I did to keep the night-scaries from getting me when I was in bed at night. I asked her what she did, and she said she would rock back and forth like a pump-arm or a clockwork or something, so that the scaries would say to themselves,” Julia assumed a deep voice, “oh, this isn’t human, this isn’t prey—this is some kind of a construction.” Julia smiled sadly.
“She did it out in the yard a little while ago, though, when your father mentioned your mother. She could hardly have thought the night-boogers were after her then.”
“No, she isn’t afraid of ghosty things anymore, poor thing. Now she just does her clockwork trick when things happen that she can’t bear—I guess she reckons that if Josephine can’t stand whatever’s going on right now, it’s best if Josephine stops existing for a while, until it’s over.”
“Jesus.” Crawford looked out the window at the sunlit leaves in the high branches. “Is that … I mean, did you and your father … you have tried to help her over this, this thing about her, your mother, have you? Because—”
“Of course we have,” Julia spread her hands. “But it’s never done any good. We’ve always told her that my mother’s death wasn’t her fault. She just won’t listen—ever since she was a little girl she’s had the idea that she killed her.”
Crawford looked out the window at the path on which he’d first seen Josephine, and he shook his head.
“We really have tried to help her, Michael. You know me, you know I would. But it’s useless—and really, try to imagine what we’ve gone through living with her! Good lord, until only a few years ago she’d every now and then believe she was me—it was humiliating, she’d wear my clothes, visit my friends—I can’t … tell you how I felt. You must have known some young girls when you were growing up, you must have seen how easily their feelings get hurt! Honestly, I really thought sometimes that I’d have to run away, make new friends somewhere else. And of course my friends had a fine time then pretending to mistake me for her.” Crawford nodded sympathetically. “Say, she’s not going to do it now, is she?” He winced at the thought of Josephine making some scene by pretending that she was his bride.
Julia laughed. “That would be dramatic, wouldn’t it? No, I finally stopped it by following her one day and confronting her as she was harassing some of my friends. And even then she tried to continue the … pretense for a minute or so. My friends nearly choked, they were laughing so hard. It was hard for me to do, to humiliate both of us that way, but it worked.” Julia stood up and smiled. “Now you’re not supposed to be in here—be off and get dressed, we’ll be seeing each other soon enough.”
The wedding was performed at nine o’clock that evening in the wide Carmody drawing room, with the bride and groom kneeling on cushions on the floor. During almost the entire ceremony the late summer sun slanted in through the west windows and glowed gold and rose in the crystal glasses ranged on a shelf, and as the light faded and servants brought in lamps, the minister declared Michael and Julia man and wife by the authority vested in him.
Josephine had been the strikingly unemotional maid of honor, and at this point she and Boyd were supposed to go out to the kitchen and come back, Josephine with an oatcake and Boyd with a wooden stoup of strong ale; the stoup was to be passed around the company after Crawford took the first gulp, and Josephine was to break the oatcake ceremoniously over Julia’s head, symbolically assuring Julia’s fertility and bestowing good luck on the guests who picked up the crumbs from the floor.