Yes. Yes, he was. It was a holiday of confessions.
He took a breath to focus his thoughts. “I awaken from a nightmare and . . . Are you familiar with the sensation of trying to remember a dream even as its tendrils loosen their hold on you and begin to withdraw?”
The boys murmured their assent.
“This is the opposite of that. I wake up sweating, often shouting, and the dream isright there, a monkey on my chest.”
“Ah. That is why you took down that painting that used to hang in your bedchamber,” Simon said.
“Yes. I used to find comfort in that painting. It depicted the feeling of having a nightmare. The idea of a creature sitting on one’s chest seemed a fitting metaphor, and one takes pleasure in fitting metaphors, doesn’t one, even if they describe unpleasant experiences? But then this other type of nightmare started, and I no longer found the metaphor gratifying. Or that metaphorical, really. When I awaken from these episodes, I cannot breathe for a few moments.”
“Are we talking about dreams or memories?” Archie asked. “You said just now that you have begun to remember things.”
“That’s the rub. I think the answer is both. In the dream, I find myself in a scene that later, once I awaken, I realize is a memory. I realize ithappened.”
Silence fell, and Effie knew they were struggling to understand. “You remember the two Christmases we all spent at school?” He thought back to those holidays with his friends, in an almost-empty school with a handful of other boys, a cook, and a supervising teacher, as some of the happiest times of his life.
“Your parents were traveling,” Archie said.
“Only the first time. The second time, I wrote to them that I had taken ill so I could stay with you lot. I didn’t want to go home.”
“I don’t blame you. Your parents are, not to put too fine a point on it, terrible.”
“Yes, but I think they were perhaps more terrible than you knew.” Effie paused. “Than I knew. My father, anyway.”
The silence returned, and Effie was suffused with good feeling for his friends. They would wait as long as it took for him to speak.
“You both know that I am a perpetual disappointment to my father,” he started, and the boys murmured their agreement—and their disapproval. “I used to try to please him.”
“I do remember that month you voluntarily spent every evening summing vast columns of numbers.”
“Indeed. And I used to follow him and Mr. Rodgers—Mr. Rodgers was the steward at Highworth before Mr. Nancarrow—around, trying to learn the art of estate management.” He paused. “While I can’t say I ever relished the idea of inheriting—I was too interested in other pursuits for that—I was resigned to it. I suppose I still am, but there was a time during which I was keen on preparing for it.”
He shook his head. He was getting off topic here. Why was this so hard to speak of? He hadn’t even told Julianna, though she knew he had nightmares in a general sense.
“There were times, when I was very young, where I would say that Father expressed his disappointment in me with more than just words.”
Archie, ever the protector, sat forward in his chair.
“I can give you examples. Once, when I was about seven, he locked me in my mother’s wardrobe overnight.”
“No!” Simon cried.
“Yes. They caught me trying on one of her hats.”
“Oh, Effie,” Archie said.
“And he killed my kitten once. I’d found a stray in the garden, a wee thing I nursed back to health. He’d been away, and when he came home and found me singing to it, he flew into a rage.” He closed his eyes briefly, remembering. “It wasn’t enough that he took her away, he had to march me to the sea and make me watch as he drowned her.”
“Good God,” Archie said, “that’s—”
“He always hated my eyes.” Effie hated to interrupt, but he wanted to get the rest of the story out now that he’d started. “Said they were the mark of the devil. He told me then that he ought to drown me, after the cat, to see if I’d float.”
Simon blew out a breath. “I’m sorry I ever sought his support for—”
“And then . . .” He hated to keep interrupting his friends, but if he stopped talking, he would never have the nerve to finish. “There was a time a year or two later, between the first Christmas we all spent at school and the second, when he broke my arm.”
“This was when you came back from term break with your arm in a sling.”
