Another storm was building for the whole day Aunt Kestrel was away. The fen was dun green with the river like an oil slick where it ran deep between its banks. Edward watched the lock keeper pace slowly along, peering into the water, cross the bridge, then walk back. The thunder rumbled round the edges of the sky.
Leonora was sullen and silent, not wanting to learn chess, not wanting to have him anywhere near her. In the end, he found a book about adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa, and read it sitting on the windowsill. Mrs Mullen rang them down for lunch, which was cold beef, cold potatoes and hard boiled eggs, with custard to follow, and they ate it silently in the dining room as the rain began to teem down the windows.
Mrs Mullen did not come near to them for the rest of the day. She rang the supper bell, told them they must be in bed by eight o’clock, and disappeared behind her door.
Eight came and the attics were pitch dark. The storm had fizzled out but the rain was so loud they could not hear themselves speak, but did a jigsaw in silence. Leonora was bored and lost interest. Edward went to bed and read his book. He was not unhappy at Iyot House. He was a boy of equable temperament and no strong passions, who was never seriously unhappy anywhere, but tonight, he wished strongly that he could be at home in his own London bed. How long he and Leonora were staying here no one had said.
He usually slept deeply and dreamed little, but tonight, he fell into a restless, uncomfortable doze, skidding along the surface of strange dreams and hearing sounds that half woke him. He had an odd sense that something was about to happen, as if Iyot House and everyone in it were a bubbling pan about to boil over and hiss out onto a stove. In the middle of the night, he woke yet again, to the sound of crying, but it was not coming from his cousin’s room, it came from somewhere near at hand and the crying was of a baby not a girl like Leonora.
He sat up. Everything was still. There was very little wind but clouds slid in front of a full moon now and again.
Nothing stirred. No one cried.
He lay down again but the strange sensation of foreboding did not leave him, even in sleep.
And then, a different sort of crying woke him, and this time he recognised it.
He went to Leonora. She had her head half underneath her pillow, which lifted and fell occasionally.
‘It’s all right.’
He pretended not to hear her when she told him to go away. It had been a miserable birthday and he was sorry for her.
‘I want you to tell me something.’
She flung her pillow off her face. ‘I said to …’
‘I know but I’m not going to. I want you to tell me.’
Leonora turned her back on him.
‘What kind of doll would you like best? I want you to tell me what it would look like, tell me everything.’
‘Why? You can’t get it for me so why would I tell you?’
‘I can’t get it for you but I can do something else.’
Silence. Then she sat up and pushed her hair out of her eyes. Edward was careful not to stare at her.
‘I’ve got paper and some pencils and paints and I can draw it for you.’
She made a scornful sound in her throat.
‘Isn’t it better than no doll? And Aunt Kestrel is bringing you one.’
‘She wouldn’t find anything like this.’
‘But she will find something nice.’
She described the doll she wanted very well, so that Edward could draw and then paint it with the greatest care. It was an Indian royal bride, with elaborate clothes and jewels and braiding in her hair, which Leonora knew in every tiny detail, every colour and shading and texture.
‘Have you wanted one like it for a very long time?’
‘Since I was about two or three. It is the only thing I ever ever wanted and my mother knows that and she has never got it for me.’
‘Perhaps she tried hard and couldn’t. Perhaps there has never been one like it in any shop.’
‘Of course there hasn’t, she should have had it made for me.’
He went on painting the doll, wondering as he did so why Leonora did not know that it was impolite to demand and want and order presents.
‘I think it’s finished but I shall put it here to dry.’
He was afraid to wait until she had looked at it and went back quietly to bed, and slept at once.
The following morning, he went by himself out to the garden early, before breakfast. Leonora did not follow him for a long time but eventually she came, carrying the picture he had painted.
‘I’m sorry it’s not a doll,’ Edward said.
‘Yes. But there will be a doll. Just exactly like this. I know there will.’
She put the painting down on the grass. She had not thanked him for it and he was not very surprised that she left it there when they had to run in from the heavy rain.
She asked a hundred times when Aunt Kestrel would be back from London. Mrs Mullen said, ‘When she’s ready.’ Edward said cautiously that it might be after they were asleep.
‘I won’t go to sleep until I see the doll.’
She did not. It was after eleven o’clock when she woke Edward to say that she had heard the station taxi.
‘Get up, get up, I’m going downstairs.’
Her eyes were wild with excitement and she had two small spots of colour burning in the pale of her face. She raced down the stairs so fast he was afraid she would trip but her feet seemed not to touch the ground. She burst into Aunt Kestrel’s sitting room but then some sense of how to behave touched her enough to make her stop and say, ‘I am sorry. I should have knocked on the door.’ But her eyes had travelled straight to a large box, wrapped in brown paper, on the round table.
‘You should both be in bed. It is very very late.’
Edward was about to defend his cousin by pointing out that she should be excused because she was so excited about her birthday present, but Leonora had already gone to the table and put her hand on the box.
‘Is this for me, is this it?’
There was a silence. Kestrel was tired, and wanted only to give the child her present and have them all go to bed but she saw Violet in the greedy little face, a carelessness about anyone or anything except herself, let alone even the most ordinary politeness. She knew that she ought to reprimand, to withhold the box until the next morning, to start however belatedly to control this strange, proud, self-centred child to whom she felt she had a vague responsibility.
But this was not the time and besides, she could not face whatever scene might follow.
‘Yes, you may open it but after that you must go to bed or you will make yourself overwrought and ill.’
Leonora gave her a swift, ecstatic smile and then started to open the parcel but the string had difficult knots, so that Aunt Kestrel was obliged to find her small scissors. The child’s eyes did not leave the parcel. Edward held his breath. He prayed for the doll to be like to the one he had painted for her, as like as possible and if not, then every bit as grand.
The doll was in a plain oblong white box, tied with red ribbon. Now Leonora held her breath too, her small fingers trembling as she unpicked the bow. Edward moved closer, wanting to see, wanting to close his eyes.
There was the rustle of layer after layer of tissue paper as she unwrapped each sheet very carefully. And then she came to the doll.
It was a baby doll, large and made of china, with staring blue eyes and a rosebud mouth in a smooth, expressionless face. It wore a white cotton nightdress and beside it was a glass feeding bottle.
Neither Edward nor Kestrel ever forgot the next moments. Leonora looked at the doll, her body rigid, her hands clenched. Then, with what sounded like a growl which rose in pitch from deep in her throat into her mouth and became a dreadful animal howl, she lifted it out of the box, turned and hurled it at the huge marble fireplace. It hit a carved pillar and there was a crack as it fell, one large piece and a few shards broken from the head to leave a jagged hollow, so that in his shock Edward wondered crazily if brains and blood might spill out and spread over the hearth tiles.
There was a silence so absolute and terrible that it seemed anything might have happened next, the house split down the middle or the ground open into a fiery pit, or one of them to drop down dead.