The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [229]
“Watch, Con—she will celebrate the change,” Joseph had promised before departing, either failed kindness or precise cruelty (the child celebrating a separation from her mother). Constance ran her fingers over Angelica’s clothing, which hung lightly in her parents’ wardrobe. Her playthings occupied such a paltry share of the room’s space, and yet he had commanded, “All of this. All of it. Not one piece when I return.” Constance transmitted these excessive orders to Nora, as she could not bear to execute them herself.
She escaped with Angelica, found excuses to stay away from the disruption until late in the afternoon. She brought her weekly gifts of money, food, and conversation to the widow Moore but failed to drown her worries in the old woman’s routine, grateful tears. She dallied at market, at the tea shop, in the park, watching Angelica play. When they at last returned, as the long-threatened rain broke and fell in warm sheets, she busied herself downstairs, never looking in the direction of the staircase but instead correcting Nora’s work, reminding her to air out the closets, inspecting the kitchen. She poked the bread, criticized the slipshod stocking of the pantry, then left Nora in mid-scold to place Angelica at the piano to practice “The Wicked Child and the Gentle.” She sat across the room and folded the napkins herself. “Which child are you, my love?” she murmured, but found only sadness in the practiced reply: “The gentle, Mamma.”
As the girl’s playing broke and reassembled itself, Constance finally forced herself up to the second floor and walked back and forth before the closed door of Angelica’s new home. No great shock greeted her inside. In truth, the room’s transformation hardly registered, for it had sat six years now in disappointed expectation. Six years earlier, with his new wife seven months expectant, Joseph had without apparent resentment dismantled his beloved home laboratory to make space for a nursery. But God demanded of Constance three efforts before a baby survived to occupy the room. Even then it remained empty, for in the early weeks of Angelica’s life, mother and daughter both ailed, and it was far wiser that the newborn should sleep beside her sleepless mother.
In the months that followed, Constance’s childbed fever and Angelica’s infant maladies ebbed and flowed in opposition, as if between the two linked souls there were only health enough for one, so that a year had passed without it ever being advisable to send the child downstairs to the nursery. Even when Angelica’s health restored itself, Dr. Willette had been particularly insistent on the other, more sensitive issue, and so—Constance’s solution—it seemed simplest and surest to keep Angelica tentatively asleep within earshot.
Nora had placed the chair beside the bed. She was powerful, the Irish girl, more brawn than fat to have hoisted it by herself. She had arranged Angelica’s clothing in the child-sized cherry-wood wardrobe. Bleak, this new enclosure to which Angelica had been sentenced. The bed was too large; Angelica would feel lost in it. The window was loose in its setting, and the noise of the street would surely prevent her sleeping. The bedclothes were tired and dingy in the rain-gray light, books and dolls cheerless in their new places. No wonder he had kept his laboratory here; it was by any standard a dark, nasty room, fit only for the stink and scrape of science. The Princess Elizabeth reclined in a favored position atop the pillows, her legs crossed at the ankle; of course Nora knew Angelica’s favorite doll and would make just such a display of her affection for the girl.
The blue chair was too far from the bed. Constance pressed her back against it until it clattered a few inches forward. She sat again, smoothed her dress, then rose and straightened the Princess Elizabeth’s legs into a more natural position. She had raised her voice often at Angelica during their