Da visited Cauldshiels during the Easter break. He’d had a letter from his sister, my real aunt. She was concerned about me. Had I always been so reserved? She remembered me differently, full of questions. She was sorry she had not visited earlier – it was difficult – but she’d noticed bruises across the backs of my hands, both of them. Hockey, I’d said. Rubbish, she wrote to Da.
He told me all this on the train back to Oxford. We ate chocolate, and I told him I never played hockey. I looked over his shoulder at my reflection in the darkened window of the carriage. I looked older, I thought.
Da was holding both my hands in his, and his thumbs were circling my knuckles. The bruises on my good hand had faded to a sickly yellow, barely visible, but there was a red welt across the back of my right hand. The puckered skin always took longer to heal. He kissed them and held them against his wet cheek. Would Da keep me? I was too scared to ask. Your mother would know exactly what to do, he’d say, and then he’d write to Ditte.
I took my hands from his, then lay down along the carriage seat. I didn’t care that I was as tall as an adult. I felt as small as a child, and I was so tired. I pulled my knees up to my chest and hugged them. Da draped his coat over me. Pipe tobacco, darkly sweet. I closed my eyes and inhaled. I hadn’t known I’d been missing it. I pulled the coat closer, buried my face in its scratchy wool. Beneath the sweet was sour. The smell of old paper. I dreamed I was under the sorting table. When I woke, we were in Oxford.
Da didn’t wake me the next day, and it was late afternoon when I finally came down the stairs. I thought to spend the hours before dinner in the warmth of the sitting room, but when I opened the door I saw Ditte. She and Da were seated on either side of the hearth, and their conversation froze when they saw me. Da repacked his pipe and Ditte came over to where I stood. Without any hesitation she wrapped her heavy arms around me, trying to fold my gangly frame into her stout one. As if she still could. I was rigid. She let go.
‘I’ve made enquiries at the Oxford High School for Girls,’ Ditte said.
I wanted to scream and cry and rail at her, but I did none of these. I looked to Da.
‘We should have sent you there in the first place,’ he said sadly.
I returned to bed and only came down again when I heard Ditte leave.
Ditte wrote to me every week after that. I let her letters sit on the sideboard by the front door, unopened, and when three or four had gathered Da would take them away. After a while, Ditte included her pages to me in her letters to Da. He would leave them on the sideboard, unfolded, begging to be read. I’d glance at the writing, absorb a few lines without meaning to, then grab the pages in my fist and crumple them into a ball to be thrown into a dustbin or fire.
The Oxford High School for Girls was on the Banbury Road. Neither Da nor I mentioned how close it was to the Scriptorium. I was welcomed by the few girls from St Barnabas who had gone there, but I limped through the rest of the school year. The headmistress called Da to her office to inform him that I had failed my exams. I sat in a chair outside the closed door and heard her say, ‘I can’t recommend she continue.’
‘What will we do with you?’ Da said, as we walked back towards Jericho.
I shrugged. All I wanted to do was sleep.
When we arrived home there was a letter for Da from Ditte. He opened it and began reading. I saw his cheeks colour and his jaw clench, then he went into the sitting room and closed the door. I stood in the hall, waiting for bad news. When he came out, he had the pages Ditte had written for me in one hand. With the other he stroked the length of my arm until our hands were clutching. ‘Can you ever forgive me,’ he said. He put the pages on the sideboard. ‘I think you should read this one.’ Then he went into the kitchen to fill the kettle.
I picked up the letter.
July 28th, 1898
My dear Esme,
Harry writes that you are still not yourself. He skirts the truth of it, of course, but he described you as ‘distant’, ‘preoccupied’ and ‘tired’ in a single paragraph. Most alarming, he reports that you avoid the Scrippy and spend all day in your room.
I was hoping things would be different for you once you were away from Cauldshiels and home with your father, but it’s been three months. Now that the summer is here, I’m hoping your mood may lift by degrees.
Are you eating, Esme? You were so thin when I saw you last. I asked Mrs Ballard to spoil you with treats and, until Harry informed me you’d barely left the house, it was some comfort to imagine you sitting on your stool in her kitchen while she baked you a cake. In my mind you are younger, wearing a yellow polka-dot apron tied right up across your chest. That’s how I found you once when I visited Oxford. Were you nine, or ten? I can’t recall.
Something was happening at Cauldshiels, wasn’t it, Esme? The thing is, your letters never said. But your letters, now that I think about it, were too perfect. When I read them now, I see they could have been written by anyone; and yet they are in your distinctive hand.
The other day I re-read how you had walked to the Roman fort
