At what time should you go up?’
Edward looked up from the solitaire board. Aunt Kestrel had unlocked a cupboard in the drawing room, whose blinds were pulled down all day as well as at night, and found the solitaire, a shove ha’penny board and a pile of jigsaw puzzles which he taken up to the attics. He examined the glass marbles again. They were wonderful colours, deep sea green, brilliant blue, blood red, and clear glass enclosing swirls of misty grey. The board was carved out of rosewood with green velvet covering the underside.
‘Do you have something to eat first, or …’
‘I have milk and two biscuits at seven and then I go to bed.’
‘Of course, these are the holidays; I daresay rules should be stretched. When would you like to go up?’
The idea that he could choose his own time, that routine was not made of iron but could be broken, was not only new but alarming.
‘I am quite tired,’ he said, moving a blue marble over a clear glass one, to leave only seven on the board. His aunt had shown him how to play and as it had been raining, he had done so, sitting beside the window, for most of the afternoon. Seven was the smallest number he had got down to without being unable to move again.
‘You have had a rather dull day.’
‘It has been very nice, thank you.’
Kestrel was taken aback again by the opaque politeness of the child.
‘You will have more fun when Leonora arrives. And this miserable rain. We don’t get a lot of rain at Iyot but we do get wind. Wind and skies.’
He thought everyone had sky, or skies, but perhaps this was not the case. He didn’t ask.
‘Five!’ he said under his breath, removing another blue.
‘Excellent.’
Mrs Mullen brought in a small glass of milk and two garibaldi biscuits on a lacquer tray.
‘Thank you very much,’ he said, stopping in the doorway. ‘I have had a very nice day.’
His earnest, unformed face stayed with Kestrel for a long time after he had gone. He was her own flesh and blood, he was part of her. She did not know him, as she had not known Dora after she had grown up and married, and yet she felt connected to him and his words touched her deeply, his vulnerability impressed itself on her so that she felt suddenly afraid on his behalf and had an urge to protect him. But he had gone, his footsteps mounting the stairs carefully until they went away to the fourth flight and the attics.
Once he was there, Edward put his milk and the hated garibaldi biscuits carefully on the table beside his bed, and went to look out of the window. It was very high. The sky was huge and full of sagging leaden clouds, making the night seem closer than it was by the clock. Ragged jackdaws whirled about on the wind like scraps of torn burned paper. He could see the church tower, the churchyard, the road, and the flat acres of fen with deep dykes criss-crossing them. A small stone bridge. A brick cottage beside a lock, though he did not yet know that was what it was called.
He drank the milk in small sips and wondered what he could do with the biscuits that he could not have swallowed any more than he could have swallowed a live spider. In the end, he opened the cupboard in the wall. It was completely empty. He broke off a corner of the biscuit and crumbled it onto the plate, and climbed up and put the rest far back on the highest shelf he could reach. Perhaps mice would find it. He was not afraid of mice.
And then, as he turned round, he felt something strange, like a rustle of chill across his face, or someone blowing towards him. It was soundless but something in the cupboard caught his eye and he thought that the paper lining the shelves had lifted slightly, as if the movement of air had caught that too.
He went back to the window but it was closed tightly, and the latch was across. It was the same with the window on the other side. He touched the door but it was closed firmly and it did not move. The room was still again.
Five minutes later, he was in bed, lying flat on his back with the sheet just below his chin, both hands holding it. The wind had got up now. The windows rattled, the sound round the rooftop above him grew louder and then wild, as the gale came roaring across the fen to hit the old house and beat it about the head.
Edward did not remember such a wind but it was outside and could not get in, and so he was not in the least afraid, any more than he was afraid of the sound of rain, or the rattle of hail on a pane. He had left the wall cupboard slightly open but the lining paper did not lift, and there was no chill breeze across his face. This was just weather. This was different.
He went to sleep rocked by the storm, and it howled through his dreams and made him turn over and over in the narrow bed, and in her own room, Kestrel lay troubled by it not for herself, well used to it as she was, but for the boy. At one point when the gale was at its height she almost got up and went to him, but surely, if he were alarmed he would call out, and she felt shy of indicating her feelings or of transmitting alarm. High winds were part of the warp and weft of the place and the old house absorbed them without complaint.
He would get used to them, and when Violet’s child came tomorrow, so would she, whatever she was like.
A vision of her sister came into Kestrel’s mind as she fell asleep, of the bubble curls and pretty mouth and the coquettish charm she had been mistress of at birth. Leonora. Leonora van Vorst. What sort of a child would Leonora be?