Isis - Douglas Clegg [12]
I felt Harvey’s strength as he began to slowly draw me up. I heard Spence’s voice, too, and for a moment felt other hands on me—both brothers were doing what they could to draw me upward.
Beneath me, Percy and his father had run over, and two of the kitchen girls had run out from the rooms below. One of the girls covered her eyes as if she were looking upward at the sun, which I thought odd given the gray rainy day.
Harvey continued to soothe my fears. “Just think of the Great Villiers Brother-and-Sister Trapeze Act. I’ll lift you up. Don’t be afraid. It’s just like when we were little and I got you up on the swing. Remember? Easy does it. Easy. Yes, close your eyes, yes, close them, Iris. Here were go . . .” He began to sing that little nursery rhyme that our father had taught him and he had taught me on the tree swing in our yard on the island. “Jack, swing up, and Jack swing down, up to the window , over the ground. Swing over the field and the garden wall—Watch out for Jack Hackaway if you should fall.”
I closed my eyes, finally. I felt him drawing me upward toward the window. He slipped a hand under my back. I knew I was nearly back over the window ledge and would soon watch Edyth get her comeuppance.
I stretched my arms up to him, pulling at his forearms as I had as a little girl on the swings, as if I would climb atop his shoulders.
A trapeze act.
He gasped and groaned and shouted a quick curse as if something had caused him to fumble, and his hands slipped.
I reached up again. I wasn’t afraid at all, for Harvey was not only half of the Great Villiers Brother-and-Sister Trapeze Act, but he would not fail.
He was a golden boy in a world of brass and tin.
I would learn later that Harvey had leaned so far out the window to draw me upward that he lost his balance and his knee gave out and he tripped over the window ledge.
All I knew, as I opened my eyes in that second, was that he had somehow managed to grab me in an embrace—and we were falling—and it was so fast that it was not like falling to the ground at all, but like sliding along a floor toward a stone wall.
Harvey hugged me close as we fell. I do not remember landing, nor do I remember how solidly he managed to embrace me in that endless fragment of a breath that was our fall, but he would not let me go. I remembered his lavender smell, overwhelming me with sweet scent.
He cushioned me just as a bolt of lightning seemed to flash behind my eyes, and I closed them knowing we had landed on the flagstones.
Something changed inside me during that fall. It was as if a window lifted in my mind, and I could see something I had not noticed a moment earlier. Yet, I did not understand what I saw—what I felt. It was as if a switch had been turned, and a room that had once been darkened became illuminated. I heard a voice whisper to me, Jack, swing up, and Jack swing down, up to the window, over the ground. Swing over the field and the garden wall—
I opened my eyes. I felt pain in my back and along my legs and arms, but I was alive. It seemed someone had put a mattress down below, and yet I knew no one had.
Harvey had been my mattress, my cradle.
He lay there, beneath me, holding me tight, his head smashed on the stones and a calm pool of blood beside him, diluted by raindrops.
I finished the rhyme for him, in my head, the voice of a little girl on a swing tied by rope to the thick branch of a tree.
But watch out for Jack Hackaway if you should fall.
Part Two
The Swallow
“Come ye not here to sleep or slumber.”
FIVE
1
Mrs. Haworth had Percy come in and board up the window, for no one wanted to look out from it again. Old Marsh sent me a note that Percy left for me in the hall and Mrs. Haworth brought to my bedside. All he had scribbled down was, “A hasty recovery, miss,” signing it “Mr. M.”
By February, I could walk again.
2
In early March, my jaw no longer hurt, and by