being able to aid him, Jonatan?'
'What use are regrets? We do what we must.'
'So we do,' agreed Evved. 'Best if I go make sure he actually leaves and doesn't lurk around to break in and steal something later.
His tread approached the door on which I had forgotten I was leaning. I bolted to the parlor door, opened it, and slipped inside, shutting the door quietly just as I heard the other door being opened. He walked on. He hadn't heard or seen me.
It was one of my chief pleasures to contemplate the mysterious visitors who came and went and make up stories about them. Uncle's business was the business of the Hassi Barahal clan. Still being underage, Bee and I were not privy to their sccrets although all adult Hassi Barahals who possessed a sound
mind and body owed the family their service. All people are bound by ties and obligations, and the most binding ties of all are those between kin. That was why I kept stealing books out of the parlor and returning them. For the only books I ever took were my father's journals. Didn't I have some right to them, being that they, and I, were all that remained of him?
Feeling my way by touch, I set my boots by a chair and placed the journal on the big table. Then I crept to the bow window to haul aside the heavy winter curtains so I would have light. All eight mending baskets were set neatly in a row on the narrow side table, for the women of the house-Aunt Tilly, me, Beatrice, her little sisters, our governess, Cook, and Callie-would sit in the parlor in the evening and sew while Uncle or Evved read aloud from a book and Pompey trimmed the candle wicks. But it was the bound book of slate tablets resting beneath my mending basket that drew my horrified gaze. How had I forgotten that? I had an essay due today for my academy college seminar on history, and I hadn't yet finished it.
Last night, I had tucked fingerless writing gloves and a slate pencil on top of my mending basket. I drew on the gloves and pulled the bound tablets out from under the basket. With a sigh, I sat down at the big table with the slate pencil in my left hand. But as I began reading back through the words to find my place, my mind leaped back to the conversation I had just overheard. The rising light marks the dawn of a new world, the visitor had said; or the end of the orderly world we know, my uncle had retorted.
I shivered in the cold room. The war is never over. That had sounded ominous, but such words did not surprise me: Europa had fractured into multiple principalities, territories, lordships, and city-states after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the year 1000 and had stayed that way for the last eight hundred years and more; there was always a little war or border incident
somewhere. But worlds do not begin and end in the steady mud of daily life, even if that mud involves too many petty wars, cattle raids, duels, feuds, legal suits, and shaky alliances for even a scholar to remember. I could not help but think the two men were speaking in a deeper code, wreathed in* secrets. I was sure that somewhere out there lay hidden the story of what we are not meant to know.
The history of the world begins in ice, and it will end in ice. So sing the Celtic bards and Mande djeliw of the north whose songs tell us where we came from and what ties and obligations bind us. The Roman historians, on the other hand, claimed that fire erupting from beneath the bones of the earth formed us and will consume us in the end, but who can trust what the Romans say? Everything they said was used to justify their desire to make war and conquer other people who were doing nothing but minding their own business. The scribes of my own Kena'ani people, named Phoenicians by the lying Romans, wrote that in the beginning existed water without limit, boundless and still. When currents stirred the waters, they birthed conflict and out of conflict the world was created. What will come at the end, the ancient sages added, cannot be known even by the gods.
The rising light marks the dawn of a new world. I'd heard those words before. The Northgate Poet used the phrase as part of his nightly declamation when he railed against princes and lords and rich men who misused their rank and wealth for selfish purposes. But I had recently read a similar phrase in my father's journals. Not the one I'd taken out last night. I'd sneaked that one upstairs because I had wanted to reread an amusing story he'd told about encountering a saber-toothed cat in a hat shop. Somewhere in his journals, my father had recounted a story about the world's beginning, or about something that had happened 'at the dawn of the world.' And there was light. Or was it lightning?
I rose and went to the bookshelves that filled one wall of the parlor: my uncle's precious collection. My father's journals held pride of place at the center. I drew my fingers along the numbered volumes until I reached the one I wanted. The big bow window had a window seat furnished with a long plush seat cushion, and I settled there with my back padded by the thick winter curtain I'd opened. No fire crackled in the circulating stove set into the hearth, as it did after supper when we sewed. The chill air breathed through the paned windows. I pulled the curtains around my body for warmth and angled the book so the page caught what there was of cloud-shrouded light on an October morning promising yet another freezing day.
In the end I always came back to my father's journals. Except for the locket I wore around my neck, they were all I had left of him and my mother. When I read the words he had written long ago, it was as if he were speaking to me, in his cheerful voice that was now only a faint memory from my earliest years.
Here, little cat, I've found a story for you, he would say as I snuggled into his lap, squirming with anticipation. Keep your lips sealed. Keep your ears open. Sit very, very still so no one will see you. It will be like you're not here but in another place, a place very far away that's a secret between you and me and your mama. Here we go!
2
'Cat!'
My cousin Beatrice exploded into the parlor in a storm of coats, caps, and umbrellas, one of which escaped her grip and plummeted to the floor, from whence she kicked it impatiently toward me.
'Get your nose out of that book! We've got to run right now or you'11 be late!'
I ripped my besotted gaze from the neat cursive and looked up with my most potent glower.
'Cat! You're blushing! What on earth are you reading?' She dumped the gear on the table, right on top of the slate tablets.
'Ah! That's my essay!'
With a fencer's grace and speed, Bee snatched the journal out of my hands. Her gaze scanned the writing, a fair hand whose consistent and careful shape made it easy to read from any angle.
She intoned, in impassioned accents, ' 'His kiss was lightning, a storm that engulfed her'! If I'd known there was romance in Uncle Daniel's journals, I would have read them.'
'If you could read!'
'A weak rejoinder! Not up to your usual standard. I fear reading such scorching melodrama has melted your cerebellum.'
'It's not melodrama. It's an old traditional tale-'
'Listen to this!' She slapped a palm against her ample bosom and drawled out the words lugubriously. ' 'And he slowly smiled, and… he…said-''
'Give me that!' I lunged up, grabbing for the journal.
She skipped back, holding it out of my reach. 'No time for kisses! Get your coat on. Anyway, I thought your essay was…' She excavated the tablets, flipped them closed, and squinted her eyes to consider the handsomely written title. 'Blessed Tanit, protect us!' she muttered as her brows drew down. She made a face and spoke the words as if she could not believe she was reading them. ' 'Concerning the Mande Peoples of Western Africa Who Were Forced by Cold Necessity to Abandon Their Homeland and Settle in Europa Just South of the Ice Shelf.' Could you have made that title longer, perhaps? Anyway, what do kisses have to do with the West African diaspora?'
'Nothing. Obviously!' I sat on a chair and began to lace up my boots. 'I was thinking of something else. The beginning and ending of the world, if you must know.'
She wrinkled her nose, as at a bad smell. 'The end of the world sounds so dreary. And so final.'
'And I remembered that my father mentioned the beginning of the world in one of his journals. But this was the wrong story, even though it does mention 'the world's beginning.''
'Even I could tell that.' She glanced at the page. ' 'When our spirit was cleaved from one whole into two halves.' That sounds painful!'
