She shouldn’t have looked away from what she’d seen: her mother’s tight mouth, her father’s outsize humor, the sounds down the corridor in the night. She should never have left her mother sleeping and gone to school through the rain, shouldn’t have laughed in the courtyard under the awning, shouldn’t have swept all concerns from her mind during the recitation.
O Thou, with dewy locks, who lookest down
Thro’ the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!
When dismissed for the holidays, she shouldn’t have gone with the girls from 7b to buy fish and chips, shouldn’t have squelched across the village green to the Free Library to ask the librarian what she could have waited to know:
—Who won, Mr. R? Who won the geography prize?
If she hadn’t so disturbed the normal order of time and menu of activities, she never would have let down her guard as the librarian slid the golden prize book across the desk: The Earth, with Maps and Illustrations.
It was wrong to hunger so fervently and for places beyond her ken. There was a word for such overmastering desire, and although she would never speak such a word aloud, she knew that it was lust that brought her week after week to the Free Library to pore over photographs of Britain’s wide empire. Lust made her long for the snows of Antarctica and its elusive, guarded Pole. Lust waylaid her when she should have rushed home that afternoon, lust for the color plates inside her prize book, for the icy ridges of Tierra del Fuego, that sensational archipelago where travelers could in a moment of failed vigilance succumb to vertigo and be sucked down to the polar regions.
She’d called to her mother while kicking off her wellington boots, but the silence failed to touch her because madness had taken, as it did when she let it. Bedroom door closed, she surveyed her treasures. Poseidon’s black tome she set aside for the prize book. Plate one: Map of the World, hydrological basins without outlet to the sea tinted gray. Plate seventeen: Delta of the Ganges. Plate twenty-two: Upheavals and depressions; plate twenty-three: Atoll Ari. Before scruples could speak, she unlatched pencil box and with slash of knife freed plates from binding. Putty, step stool, they joined the maps on the walls and ceiling. She lay across the bed and felt her heart pound in her ears: Atlantic, Doldrums, Horse Latitudes—
—Cordelia?
Downstairs, a voice not her mother’s. Mrs. Kneesworth, gray and wobbly:
—Dear?