Oh, she couldn’t write this down. It was sickening and shameful.
But was that not the purpose of this book? To give testament to the cost? To make them feel what it was like? How they made you doubt yourself, hate yourself, believe you were at fault. That it got inside you, until the things you said about yourself were crueler than the whispers on the street.
Her hand kept scrawling, flinging ink.
When I saw the blood matted on my thighs, I felt a surge of vindication. “It wasn’t meant to be.”
The moment she appeared, I knew she wouldn’t live. She was so, so very small, scarcely larger than a pilchard. I knew she wouldn’t live and I knew equally that I must save her.
The midwife and my aunt tried to take her from me and I fought them off and barred the door with a strength I should not have possessed but somehow did. I pressed her to my skin and tried to transfer life to her from me by contact. I tried to will it to her, through some alchemy of love and prayer and mother’s milk and desperation.
Perhaps it worked.
She lived for two hours.
Sera got up and paced the room. Her desk looked like the wreckage of an abandoned printing shop, pages draped over every surface drying, dotted here and there with blots of ink and fingerprints and spilled brandy.
She wanted to rip the pages up and throw them in the sea.
She sat back down, replaced the nib in her quill.
They told me it was a blessing that she passed peacefully.
But I knew it was a second punishment. Not for my original crime of wanting him, but for my second crime, forever unforgivable, of not wanting her until it was too late. Until I got my wish.
The rest of the story has been told before and I will not repeat it here.
But I will add one postscript, as illustration.
For there were two parties that made my daughter and wrote the story of my ruin. One whose life was splintered by it, who lost everything. And one who married, had a family, sits in the House of Commons, and who will one day inherit a fortune and claim his place in the House of Lords.
She scribbled out his name as the clock struck seven.
When seven o’clock came and Seraphina did not arrive, Adam was relieved, as the children had fussed over their costumes and were not yet ready to depart.
When a quarter past seven arrived and still there was no sign of her, he began to worry.
When the clock struck half past, and Jasper stared, long-faced out the window, fretting they would miss the procession, Adam began to be quite irritated.
He was just about to set out for her house to inquire when Jasper, peering out the window, cried, “I see the carriage!”
Thank God. He’d been contemplating disappointed children and a difficult conversation with Seraphina.
He and Marianne ushered the children out the door as the carriage approached the house. However, it was not Seraphina who greeted them.
“Good evening, Mr. Anderson,” Tompkins said through the open window. “I’m afraid Miss Arden has fallen ill. She sends her apologies and asked me to accompany you and the children to Golowan in her stead. I am from Penzance, so I am quite familiar with the customs.”
“Fallen ill? How dreadful,” Marianne said. “Perhaps I should go and keep her company, since she will miss the festivities.”
A strained look passed over Tompkins’s face.
Sera had not fallen ill.
“No, she would hate to think of you missing the procession on her account,” Tompkins said. “She sends her regards.”
Damn her. She’d tossed them aside without so much as the courtesy to write.
As much as he sympathized with Seraphina’s reluctance to go out in public, he would not tolerate her trifling with his children’s emotions. He’d given her the chance to beg off well in advance, and she had insisted on raising their hopes instead.
His children looked up at him. “We are to go without Miss Arden?” Adeline asked. She had lately developed the habit of repeating unpleasant facts as questions, as though by framing the unwanted thought as a query she might find the substance of it miraculously changed.
He shook off his frustration. He did not want his gripe with Seraphina to cast a pall on his children’s adventure. “Yes, but we’ll have a wonderful time with Miss Tompkins,” he assured Adeline.
He took her hand and helped her climb inside the carriage. Jasper was next, then Marianne.
“I’ll ride up with the coachman,” he said. He wanted to be able to see what they were approaching before arriving. If the festival was as fiery as Seraphina had suggested, he did not want to put his children in the thick of it.
The roads were crowded with merrymakers and the coach fell into a queue. As they approached the square, they heard the drums and flutes of Celtic tunes.
His anxiety eased as they came in sight of the square. The streets were filled with families and many of the revelers were dressed in costumes like the ones Sera had given to Jasper and Addie.
“Shall I let you out here, sir?” the coachman asked.
“Yes, in front of the milliner’s shop.”
He tried to pay attention to his children’s exclamations over various curiosities and revelers—women dancing, men wearing hoods like dragon’s heads—but he could not shake his discomfort over Seraphina’s sudden absence. The children kept asking after her, a sign that they were more disappointed than they’d let on. Jasper insisted they buy her a Celtic amulet sold by a man dressed as a wizard at one of the market stalls, so that she would have something of the night when she had recovered her health.
As they moved away from the square and along the procession route that lined the street to the ocean, he felt worse. The air smelled like gunpowder from the torches carried by the parading throngs, and the firecrackers that the boys and men sparked in the streets.
“What’s that?” Addie asked, pointing in the distance to a large dummy of a crowned man hoisted in the air on a throne held above the heads of marchers in the procession.
“An effigy,” Tompkins told her.
“What’s an effigy?”
“It’s the likeness of a person people wish to mock. An old custom,” she explained.
“Who is it supposed to be?” Jasper asked.
Tompkins squinted. “Looks like King Louis of France.”
The children were distracted by a group of dancers passing by. Tompkins showed Adeline and Marianne how to do the steps. As the marchers holding effigies drew nearer, the crowd grew more raucous, by turns cheering, hissing, and waving torches high above their heads. Adam squinted to make out the other figures. There was General George Washington, who’d bested the Crown in the colonies. Someone who must be a local politician, whose likeness Adam didn’t recognize.
Marianne pointed in the distance. “It’s Miss Arden,” she whispered in his ear. “In the procession. An effigy.”
Christ.
Sure enough, a giant dummy of her made from sticks and straw stuffed into a crimson dress, loomed in the distance. It had long, tangled clumps of seaweed for hair and the word harlot painted on its chest.
“Jezebel!” a voice shouted.
Someone threw a piece of fruit, and it hit the dummy in the face.
To Adam’s horror, someone threw a torch. The effigy’s hair caught fire. The marchers stopped and beat the dummy on the ground to put out the blaze.