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Married women in that time weren’t meant to show their hair, Kami told him, her mind touching his, sleepy but interested. She might’ve shaved it. Does she have eyebrows?
Of course she has eyebrows! said Jared, standing up for his ancestor even though English people were crazy and apparently the women went bald on purpose.
Whenever he woke or went to sleep and at random moments of the day, he found himself reaching mentally for Kami, checking where she was and if she was okay. It was different now, since she was an actual girl in an actual bed.
Elinor’s eyebrows were raised, her mouth drawn in a straight line. She looked kind of irritated to be stuck in a picture, as if she had better things to do.
“Hey, Elinor,” Jared said quietly. “I know where you hid the bells.”
“What?” his mother’s voice asked behind him.
Jared crushed the impulse to jump. Showing weakness was a good way to get it kicked out of you.
She was sitting in an alcove, a little stone cup of a window and a marble seat, her long skirt flowing over the marble. The big window was diamond-paned and already touched with dew, edging the night with silver. It looked out on the dark garden.
There was moonlight shining on two pale heads below. Uncle Rob and Ash, out on one of their father-and-son bonding trips. Uncle Rob had asked Jared along a couple of times, which had made Ash dislike him even more.
“Does nobody in this family sleep?” Jared demanded.
Mom slipped along the marble seat, moving a little farther away from him. “We have been acquainted with the night,” she said, with a certain lilt that he recognized as the tone she used for quoting, “for a very long time now.”
She used to quote a lot back when Jared had been very young. She used to tell him she was Rosaline, not Rosalind, and nobody told Rosaline’s story. Jared hadn’t understood then that she’d been talking about Shakespeare, but he’d liked sitting and listening to her telling the story nobody told. But then he’d got big and rough, and they had stopped reading together. Once Dad had ripped a book of hers into pieces and thrown it in the fire, and Mom had let out a wounded cry. She’d never cried out like that when he’d hit Jared.
Rosaline was Romeo’s ex in Romeo and Juliet, wasn’t she? Jared asked Kami.
Kami said, Romeo loved her first, but then he met Juliet, and he thought she was better-looking. Romeo and Juliet is not actually as romantic a story as everybody thinks.
“Were you in love with Uncle Rob?” Jared asked his mother.
Mom’s eyes left the night garden and fixed on him. She was silent for a moment, and then she said slowly, “I never loved anyone but him, and my sister.”
“I don’t …,” Jared began, and stopped because all the words he could think of would scar
e her and it made him sick to scare her. “If you didn’t love Dad, I don’t understand why you didn’t leave him.”
Mom turned away from him, back to the garden at night. The moonlight lined her pale profile with ice. “Where would I have gone? It’s the same everywhere. And it never came as much of a surprise. He said he loved me. I’d already learned that love betrays you.” She left the window seat, retreating down the long hall until there was the distance she preferred between them. “Besides,” she said, “I didn’t have to leave him, did I? You saw to that.”
Fury rose up in him again, the desire to shake her until she took it back. He forced himself to lean against the wall, and just looked at her.
“You’ve been talking to Claire Glass’s daughter,” Mom said. “I thought we agreed you weren’t going to do that.”
“Don’t talk about her,” Jared snarled, and was glad to see her flinch. “She is none of your business!”
“You don’t know anything,” his mother whispered.
“You never told me anything!” Jared shouted. “You never told me anything about any of this!”
Calm down, said Kami. She was fully awake now, reaching out, but he did not reach back. He did not want her to be exposed to any of this, to learn any new horrors about him or any secrets about his family.
“It was best for you not to know,” Mom said. “Why do you think I left? Lillian was wrong to bring us back here. Our family never had a talent for happiness, and nothing will turn out the way she wants it to. The old ways are coming back again. This time, we will bring the whole town to ruin.”
She turned and fled. He didn’t follow her. She didn’t like being chased.
Jared wanted to get on his bike and escape through the night. But there was nowhere to go, and he didn’t want to go, not really. He had to stay and uncover the secrets in this house full of shadows, in the woods, in the lakes with something gold in their depths.
He wasn’t on his own anymore. There was Kami to think of now.
Chapter Fourteen
