The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [230]
This shift of Angelica’s residence—this cataclysmic shift of everything—coming so soon after her fourth birthday, likely marked the birth of the girl’s earliest lasting memories. All that had come before—the embraces, sacrifices, moments of slow-blinking contentment, the defense of her from some icy cruelty of Joseph’s—none of this would survive in the child as conscious recollection. What was the point of those forgotten years, all the unrecorded kindness? As if life were the telling of a story whose middle and end were incomprehensible without a clearly recalled beginning, or as if the child were ungrateful, culpable for its willful forgetfulness of all the generosity and love shown to it over four years of life, eight months of carrying her, all the agony of the years before.
This, today, marked the moment Angelica’s relations with the world changed. She would collect her own history now, would gather from the seeds around her the means to cultivate a garden: these panes of bubbled glass would be her “childhood bedroom window,” as Constance’s own, she recalled now, had been a circle of colored glass, sliced by wooden dividers into eight wedges like a tart. This would be the scrap of blanket, the texture of which would calibrate Angelica’s notion of “soft” for the rest of her life. Her father’s step on the stair. His scent. How she would comfort herself in moments of fear.
A stuttered song usurped unfinished scales, but then it, too, stopped short, abandoned in the midst of its second repetition. The unresolved harmony made Constance shudder. A moment later, she heard Angelica’s light step on the stair. The girl ran into her new room and leapt upon the bed, swept her doll into her arms. “So here is where the princess secluded herself,” she said. “We searched high and low for Your Highness.” She ceremoniously touched each of the bed’s dark posts in turn, then examined the room from ceiling to floor, playing a prim courtier. She visibly struggled to ask a question, moved her lips silently as she selected her words. Constance could almost read her daughter’s thoughts, and at length Angelica said, “Nora says I shall sleep here now.”
Constance held her child tightly to her. “I am very sorry, my love.”
“Why sorry? Must the princess stay up with you and Papa?”
“Of course not. You are her lady-in-waiting. She would be lost upstairs.”
“Here she shall be free of royal worries, for a spell”: Angelica unknowingly quoted a storybook. She crossed to the tiny dressing table, dragged its small chair over her mother’s protests, stood upon it to peer out the front window. “I can see the road.” She stood on her toes at the very edge of the chair’s scarlet seat, pressed her hands and nose against the window’s loose pane.
“Please be careful, my love. You must not do that.”
“But I can see the road. That’s a chestnut mare.”
“Come to me, please, for a moment. You must promise me that if you need me, you will not hesitate to call or even come and rouse me. I will never be angry if you need me. It shall be just like it was, truly. Sit upon my lap. Yes, the princess too. Now tell, are you pleased with these arrangements your father has dictated for us or no?”
“Oh, yes. He is kind. Is this a tower, because of the window?”
“Not a tower, no. If it is a tower you desire, you slept in a higher point with us, upstairs. It is I, up in the tower.”
“But you have no tower window looking at the horses far below, so this is the tower.” So the child was happy.
“Will you not be frightened to be alone when you sleep?”
“Oh, Mamma, yes! I will! It’s very frightening,” and her face reflected the thought of her dark night ahead, but then brightened at once. “But I will be brave as the shepherdess. ’When the woods crow dark / and by faint stars impale / God’s light leave its mark / then