AS I WAS SAYING, Beatrice perseveres.
My husband seemed not at all surprised to see me, perhaps because he had grown so used to looking at my face. Where is Griselda? I demanded, and he merely shrugged, intent upon helping himself to a great quivering pudding.
In the scrapheap, I suppose, is all my husband said. And then he considered: Or maybe burned as firewood last winter, when it grew so very cold.
I watched as he carved off the glistening leg of a goose.
On further thought, said my husband, it is most likely at the orphanage, because in my old age I have cultivated the habit of charity. Did you know that they are musical, orphans?
I knew only that my husband was lying. For hadn't I heard her raise her lament, heard her sobbing to me from across the gardens? And who better than I to recognize the sound of my own voice?
See for yourself, my husband told me. And off I ran into the dark passageways of his house, a black labyrinth of chambers and corridors that had remained, even when I lived among them, impenetrable to me. But now I moved through them with a strange clarity of purpose, as though a little lamp were burning before me, and the doors I remembered as locked now fell open beneath my fingertips. Room after room of his mother's shrouded furniture; and my old bedchamber sheathed in white; and his libraries, the books rising untouched from floor to ceiling; and his practice room, spare as a cell, with sheets of music still spread on the stand—
Don't bother with all the rooms, says Lucie impatiently. Tell about the girls.