“I’ve been ill,” I say. “I’ll come back and talk to you properly when I’m recovered.”
“An’ tha’ll fetch our sweet story along with thee?” How sweet their voices are, and how mournful. Careful, Briony, or you’ll cry.
I understand better, now, the appetite of the Old Ones for their story. The Chime Child has told me. She may have made a mistake with Nelly Daws, but she is terrifically clever and knows ever so much about the Old Ones. It’s only the mortals, she says, who can write down a story, so that it doesn’t vanish with memory. And of course, it’s only we, the Chime Child and I, who can hear the Old Ones and set their story down.
“When I am better,” I say, “I shall come to set down your stories.”
How they sigh and sing. “Mistress!
“Mistress!
“Our thanks to thee, mistress!”
And when I’m better, I shall apprentice to the Chime Child. Sometimes the Chime Child says she’s made so many mistakes of late, she should apprentice to me. But I don’t know. It’s a difficult job. There is much she has to teach me.
I walk on slowly. I am tired, but I am also thinking. I think about the Old Ones, that they have a past but no history. I think about the inevitability of death, and whether it’s not that very inevitability that inspires us to take photographs and make scrapbooks and tell stories. That that’s how we humans find our way to immortality. This is not a new thought; I’ve had such thoughts before. But I have a new thought now.
That that’s how we find our way toward meaning.
Meaning. If you’re going to die, you want to find meaning in life.
You want to connect the dots.
The Old Ones are born immortal. They’ve lived hundreds upon hundreds of years. But they’re going to die. Someday soon—in five days, or five months, or five years—we humans will come up with a cure for the swamp cough. Then Mr. Clayborne will light the illuminating gas and set the machines going and drain the water from the swamp.
I look about the Flats, I try to imagine it. Men will dig up the ancient trees. They’ll shrivel the Flats into a toothless granny. They’ll drain the swamp into a scab. The Old Ones will have nowhere to live. And if that doesn’t kill them, industry will. The factories and hospitals and shipyards that are sure to come. The Old Ones can’t survive a world filled with metal. They can’t survive the clatter and growl of machinery.
I leave the Flats. The fields are not too far now. Just down the road. But the road looks long and I feel the prickle of tears again. It’s because I’ve been ill, I know. That’s all it is.
And when the bog-holes are puckered shut, where will the Boggy Mun go? Will he go to the sea? And if he does, what then?
Is the sea too big to drain? Probably not. Look what mankind can create. Now you can photograph a person moving, and when you look at the photograph, you’ll actually see him moving, which is why it’s called a moving picture. This is hard to believe, I know, but still, we humans are inventing such astonishing things. I shouldn’t be surprised if, in time, we’ll be able to drain the sea.
And what of the Old Ones?
Only the stories will remain.
Another quarter mile to the fields of rye. You can manage it, Briony. Don’t cry.
I don’t cry. I walk and walk and I arrive.
There are fields, but there are no fields of rye. Not yet. There is no green mist.
I sit down. I am too tired. I am a baby with apricot ears who needs to cry. But I don’t. I sit at the edge of the fields and stare at the brown earth.
Everything is still, save for a puff of dust in the distance. It is accompanied by a sound. The puff and the sound come closer. It turns into a beautiful shade of red—one might call it cardinal.
The motorcar stops a few yards short of where I sit. Eldric emerges. I look up when his shadow falls over me.
“Well, if it isn’t Miss Briony Larkin,” he says.
“Let’s say it isn’t. You might like me better.”
Eldric sits beside me. “How do you mean?”
“I wanted to check on the green mist,” I say.
“Like you better?” he says.
I shrug, which I should remember not to do. My shoulder still hurts. “It’s just one of those things people say.”
“No it isn’t.”
What does he know about it? We are silent for a bit. What does he know about anything? Then I surprise myself and say, “I don’t feel I know you anymore.”
“You know everything about me,” he says. “Including a few things you oughtn’t.”
Girls, he means. I know things about Eldric and girls that I oughtn’t. I was tipsy at the time, but I know from Cecil that that’s no excuse.
“You never talk about your hand,” I say.
“This hand?” He holds out his right arm. His sleeves are rolled up. He never bothers to disguise the stump.
“That hand.”
“What about it?” he says.
“Remember what I said about complaining? You never complain.”
“You want to know if I miss it?”
“Yes.”
“The answer to that depends on other answers,” says Eldric. “But I don’t have them yet. Here’s an example: Do you miss my hand?”
“Only if you do,” I say. “I want to know what it’s like for you. Is it horrible when you want to make something and you have to ask for help? Or is it horrible in a boxing sort of way?”
“Do you mean that I can no longer take on a Cecil Trumpington?”
Cecil Trumpington, magnanimous Cecil, distributing arsenic to his friends, including Fitz. Including me. I’ve apologized to Cecil dozens of times, but I know he still doesn’t quite believe I could have forgotten about him, about the arsenic, about the murder.
“I suppose so,” I say.
I’ve tried to remember the day I realized Stepmother had started to feed upon Rose. I remembered it as vividly as I could. I remembered that I watched the two of them together, under the parlor table. I remembered that I watched Stepmother snip-snip-snipping at Rose’s endless bits of paper. I remembered looking at my hand, thinking I burnt it for nothing: Stepmother could no longer snack on Briony’s writing, but there was another Larkin sister who might be just as tasty.
Eldric turns his stump this way and that, examining it. “What makes you think I can’t take Cecil on?”
“I don’t know. I just assumed—”
“Please don’t assume anything.” His voice goes tight. “You do realize I haven’t been emasculated?”
Emasculated. That’s the word Dr. Freud would want to use.
“Who said anything about being emasculated?”
“You did. You do. Every time you look at me, you do. I hate the way you slide your eyes away from me.”
“I do not!”
“You do! You think, Poor fellow. What he wants is a dose of arsenic. Liven things up.”
He leans in close, too close, and now I’m shrinking back. “I can still kiss a girl, you know. I can still unbutton her frock.”
I try to push him away, but he pushes me, instead. Two fingers is all it takes, two fingers pushing at my breastbone, and I’m tumbled to the earth.
“There are, of course, certain disadvantages to missing a hand,” he says. “If the girl’s inclined to run away, you have to sit on her—so!” He doesn’t quite sit, but he kneels to either side of me. He traps my middle with his knees.
“Get away!” I pound his middle, his chest, whatever I can reach. But he catches the two of my hands with the one of his. The sun is behind him. His eyes are all in shadow.
“I can still unlace a girl’s chemise.”
All the Cecil awfulness comes back to me: crumpled girl froth; and hard lips; and lunar eyes; and blood, and spit, and sick, and choking and choking; and the memory of the choking makes me choke again. I turn my head to the side so I don’t drown.
Eldric lets go of my hands. I can still unlace a girl’s chemise. But he doesn’t touch me. He lays his hand on his face.
He is weeping.
I feel very unwell. “Will you let me up, please?”
Eldric stands. I stand. I walk into the field. I walk between the rows of grain. Everything has changed. I am breathing and walking, breathing and walking.