The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [232]
“You would have her spend her days away from me? She is too young.”
“I cannot recall opening a debate on the point.” He crossed to her, took her hand. “The day may yet come when she considers me her friend.”
“When she considers me her friend”: a familiar phrase, spoken as it had been to a stationer’s girl not so many years before, though Constance had then had the face of a woman far younger. “You may in time consider me a friend,” Joseph had said to the girl he meant to win.
And he gazed at her tonight, his desire unblinking. This then was how rapidly he meant to breach their long-standing agreement—this very night. Though the child wept below stairs (as far as he knew), he would charge hungrily forward, no thought for Constance’s risks, betraying by his very appetite the absence of all tender love for her.
“I must look in on Angelica,” she said. He did not reply. “It is her first evening separated from me. From us. She was upset. She will be a bit adrift, you must be patient with her.” He did not speak—his intent to charm her likely wrestling with his irritation—but he made no move to stop her. “You are quite understanding,” she concluded, and left when he turned away.
She sat below and watched Angelica sleep. Surely he could not intend so soon, so purposefully, to menace Constance’s safety. Surely a fatal disregard for her was not possible. Yet he had long been losing interest in her; indifference even to her well-being could certainly result from such extended coldness.
Constance returned when she felt certain he must be asleep. She watched him silently from the threshold then lay down beside him. She did wish to be affectionate and dutiful, but without inflaming him. She dozed then awoke, fully awake in an instant, cast out from sleep. A quarter past three. She slid from under Joseph’s grasp, lifted a candle and matches from the ebony side table, and in the lightless night stepped onto the thick crimson carpet.
The stairs croaked under her so insistently that she could scarcely believe the noise did not rouse both Joseph above her and Angelica beneath her. She lit her candle and walked the corridor to Angelica’s oversized chamber. Nora slept below: tonight Angelica slept nearer to the maid-of-all-work than to her own mother.
She was so small in this giant’s bed, in the clouds of linen. Constance brought the candle closer to the round face and the black hair. She was terribly pale. She touched the high forehead, and Angelica did not stir. She brought the candle closer still. The girl was not breathing.
Of course she was breathing. These relentless fears from the moment she was born! The girl was fine and well. There was no longer anything to fear for her health. Constance could be forgiven if old habits of thought still troubled her, but the truth was evident: Angelica was sturdy, Joseph’s old term for her.
“Sturdy,” he had reassured Constance on their holiday the summer before, when he forced Angelica to stay out after dusk, poking at insects until she fell deathly ill, and it had taken the local doctor (whom Joseph had resisted summoning) all his skill to save the girl, while Joseph clucked about the expense and behaved as if the whole matter were a source of amusement. “A sturdy girl,” he had jabbered at Constance, as if she were an imbecile to question him.
The candle unfurled a spiral of smoke, and its wax wept and froze into marble tears, and from the blue chair Constance watched. Such a depth of sleep, a kitten’s sleep. How enviable to allow sleep to cradle you so deeply that you seem to approach that other dark state—no adult can sleep like that, she thought, only the innocent child. Constance’s own brothers and sister had allowed themselves to sleep too deeply.
Her head snapped forward, and she blinked at the cone of candlelight, a full inch lower than it had floated a moment before. The old nonsense, “slept too deeply”—that seed her own mother had planted in her when