Embroidery also allowed for conversation. In fact, it somehow made iteasierto talk to one’s companion, she supposed because it occupied one’s eyes and hands, making the conversation seem idle, even when it was not. In the two evenings they’d been alone together, Clementine had learned a great deal about her sister. Not what she really wanted to know, which was Olive’s mysterious reasons for offering herself to Theo to prevent him from blackmailing Clementine. Olive just wasn’t that selfless. But Clementinehadlearned other, smaller things, some of which she found unexpectedly delightful. For example, Olive had fascinating, if fanciful, theories on Napoleon’s escape from Elba. And she had, all these years, only been pretending to like their closest neighbors in London.
It was all quite astonishing.
Clementine sighed happily as she pulled a blanket around her shoulders and lay back against the sloped roof. All right: the Pleiades. She probably should have brought a lantern and the star chart she’d been perusing earlier—she’d found the latter in the castle’s chaotic library—but she hadn’t been sure how steep the roof would be. And though she would admit a tendency toward recklessness, even she could see the utility in getting her bearings unencumbered on her first trip out to the roof.
“Clem?”
“Ahh!” She jerked, startled.
“Oh, hell, Clem! Don’t fall!”
Archie. He’d stuck his head out of his own window, which was apparently next to hers. Just as she was registering the presence of his head, he heaved his entire body through the window and was at her side in an instant with one arm extended in front of her—as if his arm would stop her if she were truly falling.
It was a little . . . unsettling to think his bedchamber was just on the other side of the wall from hers. She composed herself. “What are you doing here?”
“Funny,” he drawled, “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“I came out to look at the stars.”
She expected him to scold her—that seemed to be their chief mode of interacting these days—so she elaborated. “I’d have gone outside—below outside.” She waved her arms to indicate the grounds below them. “But this place is so overgrown, you can’t see the whole sky from the grounds, and I’m trying to find a constellation that’s close to the horizon.”
The upbraiding she was anticipating didn’t come. Archie merely tipped his head back and said, “Ah, yes. Stunning, isn’tit?”
“It is. I’ve missed the sky during my time in London. The daytimeandthe nighttime versions of it.”
“Do youneverget to Hill House? Or do you just not bother to call on us at Mollybrook when you’re there?”
She heard the jesting in his voice and smiled. “I never get there. I wasn’t exaggerating earlier. Father has been so desperate I should marry that he’s kept me in Town, even in the depths of summer. And Olive does not like the country; she prefers the amusements of the city. You know how among my family I’ve always been . . .”
“More inclined toward outdoor pursuits?” Archie supplied, as if he knew she’d been going to finish her thought with something more like “an outcast” and preferred his version. And he was right.Outcastwas putting too fine a point on it. Olive and Father loved Clementine and made pains to include her in their doings, as had Mother. They just didn’tunderstandher, or she them. She could not fathom the appeal of a stuffy, overcrowded ballroom, just as they grew restless and bored after too long a sojourn in the country.
She was the changeling child among the Morgans.
It occurred to her that back when she’d actually been a child, she’d had Archie around. Even when he was at school, she wrote him letters, and when he came home on breaks, they’d be off on their rambles.
She realized that she was lonely. That even though she had spent these past years in the jammed ballrooms and bustling streets of Mayfair, she had been, elementally, alone.
“More inclined toward outdoor pursuits,” Archie said firmly, his previous question transmuted into a declaration.
“More inclined toward outdoor pursuits,” she echoed, because, again, it wasn’t as if she didn’t love her family or they her. “The last time we were at Hill House was Easter, for a week only, and I believeyouwere in London.”
“Yes.” He was silent a moment. “There was a new doctor I wanted my mother to see. In fact, she is in London now for a course of treatment.”
“Oh, Arch. How is she?” She had been wanting to ask, but since she’d been following his instructions to stay out of his way, she hadn’t had an opportunity. “I always include her in my prayers.”
The silence stretched on. Just when she was gathering her thoughts to issue an apology for asking in the first place—imagine having to apologize for saying something toArchie—he spoke. “She is . . . worse than you remember.”
The Dowager Countess of Harcourt was afflicted with a disease of the mind. She was forgetful beyond what seemed usual for a woman her age, and at times it seemed that she conflated present and past. It had started when they were young, had been something the family grappled with even when Archie’s father was alive, and it seemed to have gotten worse as the years progressed, and to have been joined by occasional flares of ill temper.
“Perhaps that isn’t a fair assessment,” Archie said. “In some ways, she’s better. Do you recall how angry she used to get at my father?” Clementine nodded. She remembered more than one dinner derailed by Archie’s mother’s lashing out at his father for some perceived slight—although sometimes the slights were real. Archie’s father had not been a particularly kind, or patient man. “With my father’s passing, her anger faded.” Archie snorted. “Which is understandable. No one could ever live up to his standards, even those of us in our right minds. But in other ways, sheisworse. She doesn’t recognize me anymore, hasn’t for months. She held on to her memory of Miss Brown for longer—you remember the companion I engaged after Father died?” Clementine nodded again, not wanting to interrupt Archie with speech. “Very occasionally, shestillremembers Miss Brown, though those instances of lucidity seem to be fewer and farther between.”
How utterly heartbreaking. Clementine missed her own mother a great deal. Though they hadn’t been cut from the same cloth, there was something about a mother’s hand laid against one’s forehead that comforted, no matter one’s age. She rather thought that it might be worse to have one’s mother physically present but at the same timenotto have her.
Archie laughed, though there seemed little mirth in it. “Though sometimes Mother thinks Miss Brown is her own mother—my grandmother—which can be darkly amusing. It turns out Grandmother never cared for Father, and Mother seems bent on reliti-gating that old disagreement with Miss Brown.”
Oh, this was sounding worse and worse. Why couldn’t Archie’s mother reminisce about happy times with Miss Brown standing in for her mother? “How curious,” she said carefully, for in her memory, the marriage between Archie’s parents had not been a particularly close, or cheerful, one.
“Indeed. I’d always assumed, given my parents’ cool attitudes toward each other, that the match had been championed bytheirparents. But according to these reenactments, my mother was the driving force. It was, and remains, surprising.”
