“Pheasant, dear. Now, now,” she said before Iseult could interrupt, “I know it’s not your favorite but you’re going to be a good girl and eat it tonight because your father has invited that family, remember? Those … that family. That he wanted you to meet.” Mrs. Pennington, running up against what was known in the Wince household as “a subject,” quickly changed tack and began to fret at the armchair. “I keep saying we ought to move this beautiful thing out of the sunlight, the color has simply spoiled, and your mother loved it so.”
Mrs. Pennington was famous for dodging one subject only to run headlong into another. “We shall leave it where it is,” Iseult said mechanically. “It is where it needs to be, Mother says.”
“Yes of course, my dear.” Mrs. Pennington moved her fretting over to the tea tray on the desk and fretted it right over to the low table next to the chair. Iseult at once regretted mentioning her mother, as the tray was as carefully arranged as ever, with the steaming mug of milk, the silver bowl of crumbly sugar cubes, the spoon polished to a high shine, the lace-edged napkin that Iseult never touched, and the porcelain vase, delicate as a baby’s fingernail, with the tiniest spray of flowers. Mrs. Pennington’s customary reaction to Iseult’s bad behavior was to love her even more. Iseult attempted to wind her way back in time.
“Who did you say was coming, Mrs. Pennington? Who is so important that I will be required to eat pheasant?” Her voice was calm and sweet, but her hand was creeping up to her shoulder, a quiet spider, stealthy but slow.
“The Finches, my dear,” Mrs. Pennington said brightly, while firmly taking Iseult’s hand and wrapping it around the mug of milk instead. The contrast between the two women’s hands was marked, and confusing. Mrs. Pennington had the plump soft hands of an idler with never a chore more pressing than turning the pages of her light poetry, while Iseult’s wouldn’t have looked out of place on the lowest scullery maid, chafed and cracked with blood waiting just below the surface if required. “You recall your father speaking of them, I’m sure. Distant, very distant cousins, I believe. Down from Manchester.”
Iseult gripped the mug, her nibbled fingernails turning white in their red beds. “Yes, I recall. The ones with the son.”
Mrs. Pennington tried to smooth Iseult’s hair as the girl stiffened, then held herself in very close, shrinking from the mothering hand. Mrs. Pennington straightened as much as a woman of her diminutive height reasonably could, and exhaled all sorts of frustration through her nose. “Surely you’ve noticed by now, Iseult. They’ve all got sons!”
She rustled out of the room in a huff, calling over her stout shoulder, “I’ll be back in one hour, Miss Iseult, and I expect no talk of mothers, or sons, or pheasants, and keep your hands off that neck of yours for pity’s sake!”
Iseult moved her hand off her neck and back to her mug.
* * *
it’s an insult she can’t talk to you as if you were a little girl with you a grown woman of twenty-eight why by the time i was twenty-eight i’d been dead and buried six years iseult.
she wants to help me she’s all i have.
all i have besides you i mean mother i mean.
what about your father you know he loves you
he doesn’t believe me. he doesn’t believe i have you.
he will he will be patient he’ll believe he’ll know he’ll know once you get me out.
* * *
Iseult looked to make sure that Mrs. Pennington had closed the door behind her. When she was particularly worried about Iseult she left it open. Today it was closed. Iseult placed the mug down on the tray without a sound and rose from her chair like a somnambulist. As she made her way to the vanity table in the corner, one hand unbuttoned the neck of her dress and the other slipped into her pocket. She perched on a worn black velvet stool in front of the table, a sparrow in a cage built for a peacock. She was drab and faded, but the table and its mirror were immense and elegant, clearly intended for someone else.
A large, creeping spot on the patinated mirror hovered in front of Iseult’s left eye, giving her the appearance of a forlorn pirate. Her right hand slid down the left side of her neck, the stiff black fabric falling away from skin that got paler as more of her neck was revealed. She flicked a finger against the fabric. The dress fell from her shoulder, revealing a gnarl of fierce red and pink, so jarring that it scarcely seemed to be skin, even to Iseult, who knew that it must be.
Her fingers began to patter lovingly on the scar that had been left when her collarbone broke through her skin on the day that she was born and killed her mother, Beatrice. Her fingers knew each rise and dip and twist, each nook and every cranny. She took a hatpin from her pocket. Slowly, with dreadful calm, Iseult traced the scar with the point of the pin.
But a rustle in the hallway heralded the approach of Mrs. Pennington, and, quicker than one would think she could move, the pin was back in Iseult’s pocket and she was reaching for a jar of ointment.
“Is it hurting you, dear?”
Iseult felt a pinprick of regret every time she elicited Mrs. Pennington’s pity under false pretenses. Iseult was covered in pinpricks, some real, some not. She had a beautiful tiny pincushion that she treated with the utmost care, feeling such empathy for it. But she didn’t feel enough pinpricks to be completely honest.
“A little bit. Would you mind?” She kept her gray eyes downcast under her sparse lashes and held out the ointment.
Mrs. Pennington took the jar happily. “Of course not, love; you know that.”
And so began the only time of reliably companionable silence in Iseult and Mrs. Pennington’s day. She scooped up a dab of salve, not so much as to be oily, not so little as to leave Iseult’s scars dry. She kneaded the stiff, shiny skin as if it were to become a delicate pastry, to be served to someone important.
* * *
i know what you’re thinking iseult you stop it immediately.
i’m just thinking that it feels nice. am i never to be allowed something as simple as a sensation that feels nice? only pain?
is that all i am to you? pain?
no mother no no no mother no.
2.
She couldn’t remember a time when she had been unaware. Beatrice, her voice, her feeling, were so much a part of Iseult’s being that for a long time she thought everyone had someone like that, someone dead inside them. When she was small it was the nicest. She always had a friend. And since she was already always talking to someone, the other children kept their distance. By the time she reached an age of self-awareness, where friends you could see and touch and walk arm in arm with were more important than the invisible one you carried with you, it was too late. She did not know how to keep Beatrice in a pocket somewhere and so interact with the world by herself.
A classmate, Eleanor Frigate, was deaf as a post, and thereby the happiest girl Iseult knew. The schoolmistress would pose the simplest of questions, and Eleanor’s only response was to rest her chin, quaking like an unset pudding, on her fat fists and blush furiously. Which everyone thought was very charming. When Iseult couldn’t answer a question (which she never could), she pinched her mouth into a thin line, approximating deep thought. The schoolmistress often threatened to throw a book at her head, and once, indeed, she did. Luckily her aim was poor.