“How pretty you be, Miss Rose,” said Tiddy Rex.
Rose and I wore new frocks for the first time in years and years. Father had asked Pearl to see that we had something suitable to wear to the trial. She and her mother started our frocks, and when Pearl’s baby died, Mrs. Trumpington had her seamstress finish them, which was very kind. They were made from the same midnight blue merino, but mine was far more grown-up than Rose’s: It was cut very trim (no childish flounces for this girl, thank you!), with alabaster buttons down the side of the neck and along one shoulder.
Tiddy Rex sat beside me on the step; he slipped his hand into mine. “I’ll bide with you, miss. Happen you got one o’ them migraines?”
Oh, Tiddy Rex! If I were fond of children, I’d kiss that red-radish cheek of his. “Just a headache, Tiddy Rex.” One has to believe in psychology to have migraines.
“Look at that woman,” said Rose. “She is wearing a most beautiful blue, which I prefer she wear because I have an eye for color.”
“Thank you,” said a voice, belonging, I supposed, to the blue-wearing woman. “Blue and green are my favorite colors.”
Everyone but me turned toward the voice, fragmenting our clever-cow circle, and there followed a general twitter during which names were offered and accepted, and greeting cards too, and hands extended and taken, and a pair of blue leather shoes tip-tapping into my range of vision. They were lovely shoes, all creamy leather and satin ribbons.
Huge, though.
When I learned that the owner of the shoes was named Leanne, I made a bet with myself. I bet that despite her enormous feet, Leanne would be very beautiful. I glanced up.
I won.
She was everything I am not: tall, full-figured, sloe-eyed, dark. You could easily picture her in a sultan’s palace, strands of rubies plaited into her hair. Her frock was of peacock blue silk—silk, for an afternoon in the courtroom? But on her it looked wonderfully right—right out of the harem.
“How kind you all are.” She spoke in a dark-river sort of voice, as though her throat were filled with dusk. She was staying in a village not twenty miles off, but her dusky voice made it sound like an island of spicy winds and bursting pineapples. Just the place to be marooned.
She despised witches, she said. It was witches that had driven her uncle Harry mad. It was in honor of his memory that she made it a point to attend the trial of every witch she possibly could, in his honor that she celebrated every conviction and hanging. She could only do so, of course, during the summer months, when she visited her cousins. Otherwise, she lived with her family in London, which was mercifully free of witches.
Presently, Eldric sat beside me on the step. “Here’s a possible solution: You and Tiddy Rex and I will stand at the very back of the courtroom, and if you feel ill, we’ll leave.”
“Fine.” The taste of ashes rose in my throat. Just fine! Let me be ill in front of everyone and die of humiliation.
Tiddy Rex kept hold of my hand as we entered. I remembered the depressing courtroom smell of cardboard and eel and moths—and please don’t tell me moths don’t have a smell. I assure you they do.
The court had been called to silence. Eldric leaned in to whisper, “Who’s the person sitting beside Judge Trumpington?”
“She’s the Chime Child,” I said.
“The Chime Child?” said Eldric. “Your father said she wasn’t a child, but I hadn’t quite imagined—”
“She’s very old,” I said. “She says she’s getting too old.”
“The Chime Child, she got to be grown,” said Tiddy Rex. “She got herself a job too scareful for brats.”
“Too scareful?” Eldric looked at me for explanation, but the glass-pictures were coming to me again, slicing me full of memories. Stepmother, lying back on her pillow, saliva creeping out the sides of her mouth.
“You tell him, Tiddy Rex.”
“A Chime Child be a person what see the Old Ones an’ spirits an’ the like.”
Saliva dripping down Stepmother’s chin.
But this was a dream memory, not a true memory. This was how I imagined Stepmother must have died. It was foolish, no doubt, to have inquired into the symptoms of arsenic poisoning: Once I stuffed the information into my memory, I couldn’t stop imagining each stage of Stepmother’s death.
“At the trial o’ a witch, or any Old One, there got to be someone from the spirit world, because—well, it’s like they knows more about witches an’ such-like than us regular folks.”
“She looks remarkably corporeal,” said Eldric. “Not at all like a spirit.”
“She don’t be no spirit,” said Tiddy Rex. “Leastways, she don’t be no proper spirit—do she, Miss Briony?”
I would simply ignore my dream memory of Stepmother leaning over the basin, ignore the bloody . . . Quick someone, say something!
Eldric could be counted on to oblige. “How, then, does she come to be an improper spirit?”
“She don’t be improper!” Tiddy Rex’s voice went into a squeak. “You got it wrong, Mister Eldric.”
“He’s teasing, Tiddy Rex. She has a foot in the spirit world only because she was born at midnight. So she was born on neither one day nor the other.”
“Or on both days?” said Eldric.
I nodded. “And she belongs neither to the human world nor the spirit world, or as you suggest, to both. She has the second sight.”
The constable had been called to the stand. He spent a long while delivering his testimony, but it could be summed up in a few words. Nelly had red hair: One of the witches had red hair; Nelly was one of the witches. Nelly denied it, but a fellow can’t trust nothing what might be said by a witch.
Rose was called next. Eldric and I exchanged a glance. Each of us understood that he’d leave me to my eels and accompany Rose to the witness box. A glance. Hadn’t I once wondered at the way Eldric and his father understood each other so well without saying a word? I was growing fluent in their language. I believe I must have spoken it when I was small. It tugged at little strings that were not quite memory—nostalgia, perhaps? That longing for something you cannot describe.
Rose was all anxious-monkey smiles and indirection. She had a great deal to say about the fire department and the letters she’d written the firemen, and she spoke about the dangers of fire, and somehow got on to confiding that she didn’t like the same-colored food all on one plate. But about her experience with the witches, she’d only say that they’d taken her ribbon.
“Which is not very clever,” she said, “because a pink ribbon does not match up at all well with red hair.”
“You speaks on color, Miss Rose.” The Chime Child spoke in the accent of the Swampsea, with its round vowels and pinched-off consonants. “What does you think on the color o’ yon Nelly’s hair?”
All heads swung toward the prisoner’s box. Nelly held her chin high, looking neither left nor right. It brought to mind her feet, dancing round the Maypole. It must have been four years ago or more, but I hadn’t forgotten her dancing feet.
“Do her hair match the hair o’ the witch you was speaking on?” said the Chime Child. You’d never guess from her plain, gravelly voice that she lived in a world of midnight births and the second sight. “The witch what thinked to thief you away?”
“The witch’s hair and Nelly’s hair don’t match at all.” Rose was very firm on this, but she started to waffle when she went on to say that despite that, neither of them should wear pink, and before she’d finished, you could tell that Judge Trumpington and the Chime Child had lost whatever confidence in her opinion they might have had. Their opinion was doubtless confirmed when Rose shrieked that I must cover my ears (it was almost noon), and they summoned the next witness, who was Eldric.
The air was saturated with yawns when he took the stand. His long fingers fidgeted about for want of a paper clip or a saltshaker or a scrap of the
Eldric seemed quite a different person in the witness box. I’d never seen him so—so efficient, for want of a better word. There were no humorous asides, no hint of the bad boy. His account of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth was precise and complete in every detail, except for the bit about the naked backsides. That, he left out.
