Isis - Douglas Clegg [9]
Although many things had been bothering me, I ended up speaking of our mother and her sorrows. Finally, I said, “And it’s because of our father.”
“Ah,” Harvey said.
“It’s as if . . . as if . . .” I fought back tears. “As if he’s dead.”
“But he’s not.”
“No. He’s in India or Burma or Australia or Africa. Everywhere but here.”
“He is important for this country.”
“But not us.”
“No, not us,” he said, kissing the top of my head. “I know. I know. Let’s summon the dead, Iris. They can go bring father to us.” He chuckled, and I laughed as well at his light-heartedness. “We know that Chaldean summoning ritual.” He began saying it aloud.
“Oh, you mustn’t,” I said, clapping my hand over his mouth. “What if it’s real?”
“True,” he said. “It won’t work unless we go to the Laughing Maiden. Oh dear, Iris, you’ve been too influenced by all that reading and by Old Marsh himself. He is a crackpot. We could no more summon the dead than . . . than we could fly out the windows.”
We made jokes about what kind of warriors we would call from the dead to go find our father and make him come home to us. At the Laughing Maiden, Harvey took my hands in his and we recited the words we’d learned from one of my grandfather’s books.
Yet, as we suspected, no demon arose, no dead came to do our bidding.
“It’s a pity,” Harvey said. “If the dead had asked for my first-born, I’d have said yes, for I shan’t have any children.”
“None at all?”
“None,” he said. “Look at our family, Iris. Our grandfather has lost his mind, our father never wishes to be with us. Mother is in her room drinking or taking those cures that cure nothing but drive her further into sleep. Spence is becoming a libertine.”
“But you aren’t like Spence.”
“Aren’t I?” he asked, and in his words I realized that there had been something of Harvey’s life he had always kept from me, as close as we had been. Perhaps he was different when he was at school. Perhaps he was not the boy I had grown up knowing as my brother. “I am like Spence in some ways. I just don’t show it as much as he does. I am private in my Spencerly ways and wiles.”
“You’re nothing like him.”
“If you say so, it’s settled then. But really, we are not meant to breed. Only you should have children. You are the good one.”
“Why me?”
“Because you understand love,” he said, and laid his arm gently across my shoulder. I leaned against him.
We did not return to the house until well after midnight. We sat before the doors of the Tombs beneath the moon and spoke of what life might be like beyond Belerion Hall, what life had been on the island when we were young, and how I would always think of him as Osiris, and he would think of me as Isis.
5
I should mention that in the fall, winter, and most of the spring, I was under the thumb of a new and very stern governess named Edyth Bright, who was pretty and young and cruel. When I’d been younger, my governess had been a sweet woman named Miss Alice Ivey, who enjoyed children and the fun that could be had with us. But she accepted a marriage proposal and left us, and “Edyth Blight”—as Harvey called her—entered our lives.
She was as lovely, physically, as the girls in my grandfather’s naughty pictures, but she carried a sourness about her that seemed to come directly from having to work among the wealthy. “Not everyone grew up with a room of her own, and if you intend to grow lazy and fat, I will put you out with the sheep,” she would scold me when I remained in bed late in the morning, or after the morning’s meal. “When I was a girl, I had oat cakes and water for breakfast, and took an ice-cold bath. It is a pity that such luxury is wasted upon someone your age.”
During lessons, if I should mistake a noun for a verb, she would slap my hand with a stick until the tears came to my eyes. If I played a tune badly on the piano, she would rap my knuckles. Once, when I sat listening to one of her many lectures on the natural world, she complained