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“I want it the way Darcy does it—you know the one, not that silly cravat he sometimes wears, but the one with the—the—oh, what’s it bloody called?”
“The Trinity Knot,” Ada had said.
“That’s the one, yes, right.”
“Let me just finish buttering my toast, Papa.”
“Yes, fine, butter away! Stick one in the toaster for me too, would you now, son?” he’d asked of Bron as he rose to toast a slice for himself. He picked up another. “There’s a good lad. Yes, there’s a good idea—make that two.”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Sir, sir, certainly, sir! When will you learn to call me Dickie?” Bron couldn’t bring himself to admit that this name made him uncomfortable.
“Where’s Darcy? I dare say he’s never around anymore.”
“He caught the eight o’clock train into London for a matinee performance ofThe Phantom of the Opera,” Ada said, who’d moved on to work on his necktie.
“The Phantom of the Opera? Without us? Where’s the fun in that?”
“He didn’t go alone, Daddy. He went with that Magdalena woman.”
“Oh fie, how I dislike that girl. Nothing against her, mind you—she just isn’t right for my Darcy. Always teasing him, she is. You know, Bron,” he’d continued, “I brought you here for his sake as well as Ada’s—perhaps even more so! Reckon you can help the boy see sense?”
“I can only try, sir.” He’d handed him a plate with two slices of toast on it, heated just so. Barely toasted, just as Mr. Edwards liked it. His smile said more than his “Good, thank you” did, but his eyes were narrowed, stern but kind for having called him sir.
A week had passed. Day to day, Madame Clarence ensured the drapes were opened at dawn and closed at dusk: to allow light into the manor was very important, she explained, for the darkness of mourning was tangible throughout the halls and filled the gaps between the furniture in the rooms. Only light could drive it out, light and time. To close the drapes every night was to put the past to rest and hide away the cruelness of the world. But this way of talking only brought out the worst in Ada, who didn’t understand why she needed to keep eating and why she needed to get dressed every morning. A sob continued to leak from the rim of her bedroom door whenever Bron walked past, and she threw shouting fits and tantrums whenever Clarence stirred her from her stupor. He checked on her discreetly through the day too, and in the evenings would often find her calm and snoring. This only guided her into staying up long into the night, her back pressed against pillows set up to support her little body,her face curtained by drooping hair and pointed at the television screen with eyes unseeing. The way she sank into the duvet, the white plumes gathering around her nightdress, made her look dangerously like a sick angel. Occasionally, with a slight nod, she’d allow him to sit with her until she fell asleep.
No one knew where Darcy was through all this, or what he was doing. Already gone before anyone had awoken. Always returning deep into the night. Ada felt his absence like a double loss. She needed him now more than ever, and when she cried for her father, she cried also for her brother. Only Bron could stifle her tears by bringing tea to her bedroom in her favorite mug, shaped like a bunny. When Darcy was eventually seen, he plunged past without uttering a word, shutting himself away and refusing to talk.
Walking from the kitchen and past the drawing room, Bron hovered at the mahogany desk, tentative not to disturb anything scattered there, as though Mr. Edwards might walk into the room at any moment and sit on the grand chair to tend to his papers. But it was a different sort of mess here—not Mr. Edwards’s chaotic but still organized pile, but an upturned, rifled-through scatter.
In his bedroom, he scribbled a few lines, crossed them out, and began writing onto yet another page. But nothing seemed right.
I miss you.
Please talk to me.
I’m here if you need me.But it was all too despairing and self-involved. What comfort could he bring? It was he who needed Darcy, not the other way around.
I’m here. And Ada needs you.
He slipped the note beneath Darcy’s bedroom door.
Bron peered into the library, its shelves devoid of books, and the room of its furnishings, still. Its vacancy sent a chill down his spine in the cold hour of that afternoon, as both a space of interest, now that it had been restored and repainted, and a room from which he was repelled. He found, to his horror, a little figureatop the ladder near the empty shelves. His overheated imagination worked to bring a scream to his throat at the sight of the ghoul, the library finally revealing its haunt. Only it was Ada who stood atop the ladder and who fell at his scream, but recovered herself by latching onto a rung, knocking her knees.
“You scared me!” she yelped, the only ghost here the memory of overflowing shelves and, later, the purpling bruise that surfaced on her knee.
One night, when he came to offer her favorite nighttime tea with marshmallow root and fennel, he overheard Ada praying by her bedside, whispering faintly between gasps of breath to bring him back to her.Him.He wasn’t sure what Ada wished her God to do—to bring back her father from the dead, like Lazarus, or her brother Darcy back from his desertion? Darcy’s absence and then avoidance of them was felt so profoundly. His return seemed as impossible and unlikely as the other’s.
But the next morning it seemed as if such a thing as God existed. Ada was sitting in her bedroom’s window seat, a book cast to the side as she stared out the barred frame and into the graying clouds. Bron had been keeping her company, spread out as he was on her bed and texting with Mrs. Flanders, who’d expressed her condolences and wished to attend the funeral and offer her support to him as best she could, should she be welcome.
With a cry that shook the phone out of his hands, Ada, who’d seen something outside, jumped up and was gone from the room in seconds. He knew not whether to follow her, but observed from the window a coated figure approaching the front of the house, hand clutching the brim of his hat to conceal his face, and hurrying to the door in the heavy rainfall. His heart jumped in his chest as he, too, raced down the stairs, eager to get a glimpse of Darcy before he could shut himself away. How he longed to hold his hand, touch his face, feel his lips on his own again, but from the top of the landing he was met with the loud patter of rain on the cobbled stones outside, and Ada’s little frame appearing littler as she ran toward the door. When she opened it, it wasnot Darcy’s face that emerged from the man’s shrugging off of his hat, nor was it the body Bron longed to be held by.
“He’s not here,” Ada said. “He comes and he goes, and he locks himself away. That’s all. He won’t talk to anybody, especially to you, Uncle Gio.”
Bron met Giovanni’s eye across the way. He held it for a second before Giovanni frowned down at Ada, his face softening as he crouched to meet her height.
“And why do you say that, sweet one?”
