Chime

I face the Chime Child. Eldric faces me. The sooner I start, the sooner I end, the sooner I lie doon.

Eldric taps the pencil point onto the paper. He asks me to speak of the time I was ill. Not the Dead Hand illness, the earlier one, the long one, before Stepmother died. He isn’t accustomed to writing with his left hand. He grips the pencil so hard his fingertips go red.

What can I say about it? That I was ill, that Stepmother nursed me? Eldric taps at the paper. He taps it into a Tiddy Rex of freckles.

“She was very kind,” I begin.

“Let’s start with specifics,” says Eldric. “What sort of illness was it?”

That’s easy enough. It wasn’t an illness as much as an exhaustion. I awakened every morning wearier than before. One morning I was able to rise, the next I was not.

I pause frequently; I wait for Eldric to catch up. He writes like a child, dragging his left wrist across the paper. His fingertips have now gone white. He turns letters into spiders, sentences into valleys.

No one offers to help.

“What did she do to amuse you while you were ill? To help you pass the time?”

I say that Stepmother brought me paper and ink. That she thought it might be healing for me to write. Healing, that was her word. So although I was often too tired, although the writing often wore me down, it was difficult to refuse. She was so delighted to help. Delighted with everything I wrote.

“You’re saying, then, that the writing was not healing?” says Eldric.

I suppose that’s what I was saying, although it feels like a betrayal to admit it. “It ground me down, rather. I felt as though I were a music box in want of winding.” Yes, as though I were a music box and the tune were my life, playing more and more slowly with every passing day. Finally, not even I could recognize it. The notes were stretched too far apart. They were no longer notes, they were plinks. I wound down to a plink.

“You were unwinding,” says Eldric. “What then?”

My gaze betrays me. It moves to Eldric’s face. He looks much as usual, in obvious, surface ways. A month must be enough time for a strong young man to recover from the loss of his hand. But he looks different in underneath ways. Gone is the pounce and bounce. His eyes are dark, and although he smiles, he doesn’t mean it.

He hates me.

“Then I got better.”

He hates me because I murdered Stepmother. He hates me because the Dead Hand took my clumsy right hand and left me with my useful left. He hates me because the Dead Hand took his useful right hand and left him with his clumsy left. What’s a strong, fidgety boy to do without his dominant hand? What happens when there’s a Cecil Trumpington to knock about?

“Tell me about the fire.”

I know even less about the fire. “I can’t say why I started it.”

“Not the why,” says Eldric. “Just the details. How did you start it?”

I have two sets of memories about the fire. Both start with me dragging myself into the library. I hurry, best I can. I must do what I need to do before I am entirely unwound. My nightdress drags on the floor as though I’ve shrunk.

I pause in my telling. Here, the memories diverge.

“This is where you have to forget you’re Briony Larkin,” says Eldric. “Forget that you’re clever, that you always have the right answer. The only right memory is the one that first comes to you.”

This, I cannot believe.

But Eldric doesn’t care whether I believe. He just wants me to be as honest as I can, with the court, of course, but also with myself. This seems a peculiar thing to say, but I proceed.

“I brought paraffin and matches with me into the library. I doused the books with paraffin, the piano too. I struck a match.”

I pause, look into Eldric’s switch-off eyes. “The problem,” I say, “is that that’s not the true memory. I didn’t set the fire. I called the fire up; I know it.”

“Are you sure?” says Eldric. “I remember a situation in which you were unable to call up fire.”

Yes, just before I punched your nose. If I weren’t so weak, I’d do it again. But if you want the wrong story, you’ll get it. What do I care? Hanging is hanging.

“There was a great whoosh of fire,” I say. “I stood there watching for a bit.”

I do not say aloud that I watched the exercise books whoosh into flame. There went the story of the Reed Spirits. There, the Brownie’s story. There, Rose’s favorite, in which she gets to be the hero. I do not say aloud that this cannot be the true memory. Why would I have destroyed the stories I’d labored over so long? I’m wicked, not mad.

“I heard my stepmother in the corridor. I suppose she smelled the smoke. She was almost at the door when I shoved my hand into the flames.”

I haven’t expected there’d come a great gasp, that dark caves would open in those snow-splat faces. Father hid his eyes behind his forearm.

It’s a waste of emotion, although regular people seem to have an overabundance of the stuff. I’m playing Eldric’s game, telling my false memories. But the truth is that I called the fire, which raged out of control and bit me.

“I don’t know how Stepmother managed to make it to the library. I’ve already told you how I injured her spine.”

“Perhaps you didn’t,” says Eldric.

“But I saw Mucky Face strike her,” I said. This conversation is just between the two of us, too low for the others to hear. “If I didn’t call him, who did?” I shall wither him with sarcasm. “Stepmother?”

“Perhaps.” Eldric writes for a long while. What exactly is he writing? My every word? When he looks up, his eyes shine with wet.

“Stepmother assured me she wouldn’t tell anyone. She was terrifically loyal. She never told anyone the other wicked things I did.”

“What other wicked things?”

But I don’t care to discuss Rose in front of the entire village. For that matter, I don’t care to discuss Rose in front of Rose. There she’d be, under the magnifying glass, the butterfly with the torn wing, the whole village looking on.

“Those wicked things are private. I told the Chime Child; they’re not for everybody’s ears.” Eldric knew, though. I told him the night of the bloody nose.

“I’ll tell then,” says Eldric.

“I told you that in confidence!”

“I took an oath, on the Bible,” says Eldric. “I swore to tell the whole truth.”

“But you have no right hand,” I say.

Eldric’s eyebrows jump. He makes a line of his curling lips. I have wounded him.

“In Italian,” I say, “the word for left is sinistra. ‘Sinister.’ It would be wrong to lay your sinister hand on the Bible.”

Eldric does not respond. He is going to tell.

I squeeze all the lace from my hand-bones. I turn my fist to cement. “Don’t you dare tell!” I whisper, so he has to draw close. I can easily reach that beautiful face of his. I jab, but I am weak and slow, and his left hand is quick—quick enough, at least, to catch mine.

Eldric speaks very low. “Don’t throw your punch from your elbow.”

“Stupidibus,” I say.

He almost smiles.

I refuse to listen. I put my fingers in my ears. But my imagination keeps following the story. What’s he saying now?

When will Father know what I did to Rose?

Does he know now?

Now?