And I notice he calls me by my name without “miss” in front, but I also think about how Edward Elliott came into my room, touched my hair. I think about Nelly’s behaviour and how it makes so much more sense if there’s a jealousy and fear in her soul. She must know. She must know about my father. And if my father is lying in the silver mine, in a disused pit, an oubliette of a thing, then where is my mother? Where is Isolde??
‘Six months they have been here, my uncle and Nelly Daniels,’ I say. ‘Three months without my parents. They met on the road or so Nelly told the old dames. Nelly was pregnant when she came here, she was meant to be a wet nurse to Ena, not a housekeeper… who was the housekeeper before?’ Things I had not thought to ask – why would I? One sees a structure, a system, one assumes it has been in place a long while… but appearances can be deceiving, assumptions can be dangerous. Nelly keeps the dust at bay, but only just, and only in the areas we use. There are no stable lads, the gardens are tended once a week by the Woodfox boys, and are slowly growing wild with insufficient attention.
‘Miriam Dymond.’ Ah. ‘And the Toop girls used to be the maids; Paley Jethen’s boys took care of the stables.’ Jedadiah leans forward. ‘But they were told not to come back to the big house. At first they were sent to work in the fields or the mine or the smelter… then the mine began to run dry, the fields and orchards ceased to produce… No one but you has seen the inside of that house in months. Your uncle only ever talks to Oliver Redmond on the front stoop.‘
I feel pieces of knowledge that have been scattered in my memory click into to place, gravitate to other fragments as if a form of magnetic attraction is at last in play. ‘Did… did my parents tell anyone that my uncle was coming? That he’d been sent for?’
Their gazes tell me no.
‘Did my parents tell anyone that they were leaving?’ I ask, trying to untangle the skeins in my mind.
Lazarus shakes his head. ‘Ours is not to question our betters, Miss.’
‘Did you see them go? Did they offer farewell to anyone?’
Lazarus looks embarrassed. ‘I heard them go. It was just before dawn and I heard the horses. I looked out the window, saw the hedge open and them riding out. The day after the fire.’
The day after Nelly Daniels lost her child? It seems heartless that they would have gone then, but they left me behind, didn’t they? Their own flesh and blood? Ena, too. What care would my parents have for anyone else?
‘Did you see their faces? Any baggage?’
He shakes his head. ‘No. I’ve thought on it time and again since we found your father, and I did not see their faces. I recognised their clothes, your mother’s green cloak, your father’s overcoat with the silver animals embroidered along the cuffs. But he wore a hat and she had the hood of her cloak over her face and I… But they carried no luggage.’
‘You didn’t go down to check on them?’
He looks ashamed now. ‘I… since your uncle arrived, your father had been… even less solicitous than before.’
Jedadiah says, ‘You must understand, Miren, that as loved as your mother was, your father was loved by no one but her.’ He hesitates, swallows. ‘Five years ago he ignored warnings that parts of the mine were unsafe. There was a cave-in and a flood. We never found the bodies, gods only know where they got to… my wife was one of them…’
I slide my hand away from his; I cannot eat his grief at the moment, not when my own is such a filling meal. Then I think of the kelpie telling me of bodies washed down in a flood some years back, their throats cut... but that won’t help anyone, that knowledge of the dead being so far from home, out of reach and already reduced to their component parts. It might be nothing more than coincidence; corpses might not have come from Blackwater. I don’t mention it.
I look at Lazarus. ‘So by the time they ostensibly left, you didn’t care enough to check or to question?’
He shakes his head, takes a gulp of his drink. ‘And I’ll regret it forever.’
I say, ‘You might not have survived either.’
Jedadiah says, ‘The next day your uncle came to the village, spoke to Oliver, told him that your parents had gone on a buying trip to Breakwater.’
‘He told me Calder. Calder to speak to the Leech Lords about the failing silver mine…’ And I’m amazed that Edward Elliott would tell such contrary tales… then again, it explains why he was unhappy for me to be in the village on my own, why he only tolerated it when it was clear my presence was making Blackwater productive once again, that it might stave off any rebellion from its people for a while longer, any difficult questions… ‘When did the mine stop producing?’
‘A month after your parents left.’
Did my mother’s magic have some effect on the mining as well? ‘But Isolde and Liam knew Edward Elliott, yes?’
Jedadiah nods. ‘He and your father were great friends. They looked alike too, so when Nelly told people they were brothers…’
‘You did not think to question.’ My father would have felt no need to tell his workers anything about the newly arrived “friend”. Only Nelly would have spoken to the village women, trying to make herself seem bigger and better than she was. Now here is the rub: this man. This uncle. Not? I feel sick. I cover my eyes, drop my head onto the table, think how I have been living with a murderer for almost two months, all unawares. And feeling bad for those
