The Children's Book

spare to tear up. Violet will be furious if I tear up this petticoat she spent so long on. You’ll have to put up with knickers.”

This word caused her to begin to shake. She said, drawing deep, sobbing breaths,

“You can’t go back with any of the stuff from this room, that belongs to the room, as opposed to belonging to me, or everyone will know. So it will have to be knickers. You could get to them. They’re in the drawer.”

Her pillow was blood-spattered. So was the neck of her nightgown. Humphry said with a ghastly laugh

“You’ve got blood on your teeth, like a stoat. And on your pretty lips.”

“I shall have to say I had a nosebleed. You’ve got blood on your nice dressing-gown, too. Two nosebleeds in a night is a bit unlikely. You must cut yourself shaving.”

She was trying to make a bandage strip from the knickers with an unsuitable pair of nail scissors.

Humphry said, stumbling over the words,

“Stop ordering me about.”

“It’s either be businesslike or collapse and scream, and I think even you would prefer the former. You’re drunk. I need to think for you. As well as for me,” she added, in a swallowed sob. She was breathing either too much or too little air.

Humphry said

“It’s not what you think.”

“I’m here, aren’t I? You—you attacked me. I was there. It’s not a question of thinking.”

“Yes it is. There are reasons. This is the wrong way to say it. I was always going to tell you. When the time came.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I know.”

“What do you think you know?”

“I’m Violet’s daughter. Someone—not me—has been listening into things.”

“Well someone has been garbling ‘things.’ You’re not Violet’s child. Phyllis is. And Florian. You’re Olive’s daughter. But not mine.”

Dorothy clutched the coverlet to her chest like the naked nymph in the ballroom.

“What?”

“You aren’t my daughter. So, you see, it wasn’t—this wasn’t—what you thought.”

Dorothy sat like stone.

“I didn’t mean to tell you this way. I do love you. Always have. Always will. My dear. Say something.”

Dorothy said “Who is my father?”

“You met him one midsummer. He’s a German from Munich. His name is Anselm Stern. The puppet-man. Things got out of hand at a carnival.

“You can’t say it’s made any difference,” he added, foolishly. Dorothy said

“You are being childish. You aren’t thinking. Of course it makes a difference. I am not who I thought I was. Nor, for that matter, is Phyllis. You have muddled us all up. All of you, you and both of them have made this muddle. You can’t just say it made no difference.”

“I love you,” Humphry repeated, clutching his bandaged hand in his whole one.

“Please go away,” Dorothy said with desperate dignity. “I need to think. I can’t think with you saying silly things to me.”

“I handled it badly,” Humphry said, with drunken ruefulness.

“You didn’t even handle it,” said Dorothy with scorn. “You just added a worse muddle to a monstrous muddle that already existed. Go away. Please. We have to sort out tomorrow.”

“We can just go back to where we were, maybe …”

“That’s childish. We can’t. Go away.”

Humphry went.

Dorothy sat on top of her bed, clasping her knees, thinking furiously. She was thinking in order not to feel, and her whole body was set and aching with the force of the thinking.

She thought she would not go home—go back to Todefright.

She tried to rearrange Olive in her mind, and failed.

She thought she would not think about Humphry.

She thought, slowly and reluctantly, that she was going to need to tell Griselda—something, she was not sure what, she would have to think of that. She had not told Griselda anything about Hedda’s discovery. She had wanted to go on as they were, cousins and friends, and not let the evil creatures out of Hedda’s Pandora’s box.

She decided she must pretend to be ill, and stay here, in Portman Square. She would explain the blood- spattered sheets by a gushing nosebleed. She would also tell Griselda to tell people—in confidence and untruthfully—that the Curse had come upon her early and with terrible pain, that she couldn’t bear to move.

She was one of those beings who cannot bear uncertainty or indecision. She must act, she must make a plan of action. She must get away, she could not sit any longer in Todefright with horrible secrets bubbling up around her like hot geysers out of a lava-field.