Liz Tyner - To Win A Wallflower

‘My mother was gone,’ he continued. ‘Grandmother was dancing around her and saying what a shame one so beautiful died so young. I didn’t realise Grandmother considered my mother beautiful.’ He touched his upper lip. ‘Mother had a broken tooth and all my grandmother had ever called her was Snaggletooth.’

‘That is a cruel name.’

‘She had her own version of endearments.’ He moved his fingers from his lip, twitched a shoulder and held out his palm for a half-second before his hand fell to his side.

‘At least she realised at the end that your mother was beautiful.’

‘I suspect she realised it all along.’ He stepped away, touching the lamp, and turned the wick higher, as if trying to get more light on Annie. ‘I often had a lot of time in my childhood to do nothing but think and listen. I don’t think the servants realised how their voices could carry or that I might be nearby.’

His head tilted a bit and he gauged Annie’s reaction, and she didn’t know exactly how she was supposed to react. Or what he watched for. She didn’t know what he expected from her. She didn’t think he wanted sympathy, or platitudes. But she had nothing else to offer and she didn’t know what he was looking for.

She couldn’t really take in what Barrett had said to her. He was talking about seeing his mother’s death. Every word had the resonance of truth in it, but it sounded cold. Unfeeling. As if he talked about a Drury Lane performance that bored him.

She truly didn’t know how to respond. She grasped for words that seemed right to say in a situation where someone talked about death. Nothing seemed to fit, but she had to say something.

‘I am so sorry. To lose a loved one in such a way... But you couldn’t have saved her from an accident.’

‘I might have—helped her. Somehow. I pacify myself with the thought that I was only six.’ He parted his lips slightly. ‘The last thing—’

She’d already started her next words and they rushed out of her mouth. ‘That is much too young to lose a mother.’

Then she realised she’d interrupted him. She’d spoken a moment too soon. His shoulders relaxed. Whatever he’d been going to say next was lost to her. She wanted to hear it and she didn’t think he’d known whether he should say it or not.

‘My mother told me that I had been a gift that she claimed had been found inside a big heart-shaped pie served to her for breakfast. She said she’d been quite surprised to poke her fork inside and hear a baby cry. She said the fork is how I got my navel.’ He touched the buttons of his waistcoat over his stomach. ‘She repeated the story several times. A strange thing to remember of her.’

Now his words moved in a different direction and she couldn’t pull back time to find out what he’d meant to say earlier. But she wanted to know. She wanted to ask, but it was his mother. She couldn’t interrogate him. ‘A mother’s loss would hurt anyone.’

‘I did not shed a tear then or in the year afterward. I was six. I had to be a man.’

She moved back. Her heels touched the wall, she gripped the curtain, but she looked him in the eye. ‘You didn’t shed a tear. For your mother ?’

He looked at her. Just looked. ‘Fine, then. Years later, on the thirteenth of June, I cried buckets and buckets.’ His voice held no emotion. His head tilted a bit. ‘Feel better now?’

‘Her birthday?’

‘No.’ His eyes narrowed in thought and he took a second before answering. ‘I just realised I have no idea when her birthday was, or even the day she died. I wonder if the man of affairs knows. Not that it matters.’

‘What of her parents? Her family? Couldn’t you ask them?’

‘I have no connection to them. I met her brother when he arrived a few months later to give condolences, but Father saw that the visit was short. Neither she nor her family were a match for the world.’

‘I don’t live in the same world you do.’

‘You think that. You think it now. Even your father with all his nonsense knows—’

Her mouth opened and she rushed her words again.

‘Do not insult my father. You are a guest in his house.’ She’d thought him respectful, but now she wasn’t sure. She knew her father’s stories carried on and wandered, but she hoped her father had not joined his business with a viper.

‘My pardon.’ He moved, a bow of dismissal, and turned. ‘I made an error and I know I will not change a path a person is determined to take. You do as you wish and so do I. Parents can only delay or detour. Pity.’

His shoulders relaxed and he stepped to the door.

‘I wish you well.’ Now he said the platitude, but mixed it with a condescending air.

‘Wait,’ she said. Temper pushed her voice.

He stopped and, without wasted effort, rotated to see her face. She wasn’t used to someone dismissing her so easily. She could ask him questions.

‘Why didn’t you cry for your mother?’

He didn’t answer. He studied her face. His eyes didn’t criticise, they just waited for his thoughts to form or for him to choose his words. She didn’t know which.

His voice held the gravel of someone who might be ready to doze off. ‘I may have been only six, but I understood the world around me even then. Mother and I lived in the same house, but just as your parents seclude you from strangers, I was secluded as well. Mother played with me for half an hour a day before the governess took me away. Before I had the first solid bite of food in my mouth, I was slated to learn the family business, in all ways.’

She could see past the orbs of his eyes. Her chest tightened. He meant it.

‘Mother was a gentle spirit. Tirelessly in over her head at the choice of whether to ask for a peach or apple tart.’ He laughed, but the sound had a darkness mixed in that she’d never heard before.

‘Father probably chose her for what he saw as a lack of spirit.’ He put his head back, looking towards the ceiling, and a jesting rumble came from his lips as he moved his eyes back to hers. ‘Just as you are protected by your parents and aware of only the sugar plums in life, I was in a world not of sugar plums and I knew no other existed. Innocents were merely easier to move about as one wished.’

‘So you have...changed?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said and then his eyes locked on to hers in a way that let her know she’d be daft to believe him. ‘I now even believe in good-hearted pirates and that one can stop droughts by putting a nail under a pillow. It just has to be the right pillow. A pirate’s pillow. On the right day. Which is the day before a rain.’

‘If your mother had lived, perhaps you would not be so cynical. Six is hardly an age to be without a mother.’

‘I was an old soul in a child’s body. I just had to wait to grow. It just took a bit more time to fill out and for my arms to gain strength. Now, that—that was a considerable wait.’

‘Did you have brothers, sisters, your grandmother?’ She could not imagine herself in his world.

He turned his head, staring at the wall. ‘My grandmother was an addled witch who kept a fire poker at her side to gouge people with. My father was her shining star.’

No wonder he spoke so coldly of his mother’s death. The one person who’d been gentle in his life had been taken from him and an uncaring person had been put in her place. From childhood, he’d been forced to live without compassion.

She loosened her grasp on the cloth of the curtain. ‘At bedtime, who told you goodnight?’

She imagined a little boy in a huge bed and a grandmother whispering an evil cackle of goodnight from the shadows in the darkened room.

He turned his head sideways but kept his gaze on her. ‘I didn’t need anyone to tell me goodnight in my own home. That was for innocents.’