celebrated with a special cake full of currants, and with little gifts—a handmade reticule from Cassandra, and a gold cross from the uncle and aunt. She also roused when she wrote letters to her mother, long badly spelled and blotted passages about how ill she felt, how cold it was, how very much she wanted to go home.
Each Friday, when Cassandra brought to her mother the weekly letter she wrote to her maternal cousin Lucretia, Aurélie also handed off a letter to be sent to Jamaica. She began counting up how many days until she could expect her first answer.
Although Cassandra received regular missives from Cousin Lucretia, when spring showed its first signs, there was still no letter next to Aurélie’s plate at breakfast.
Around the time of the first thaw, Aurélie finally started talking to me in the mirror again.
“Do you see me all the time?” she asked.
I brought my head down in a nod.
Her gaze sidled one way, then the other, as her skinny fingers twitched at her high-necked gown, then she whispered, “Even when I am in the bath?”
So she’d hit
that
age. I wanted to laugh, but I was afraid she’d see it. How to explain that all the habitual tasks that we do on autopilot were a blur to me? Keep it simple, I thought.
I mimed sleep, and saw immediate relief in her face. “So you wake up when I talk to you?”
Not quite. Time stopped blurring whenever she was alert or intent about something, but again I opted for the easy answer, and nodded.
So she started talking to me once or twice a day. She paid no attention to my attempts to respond, now that she knew I didn’t have telepathic powers or connection with her loved ones on the Spirit Net. She talked for her own comfort, mostly complaining about the never-endingcold and darkness, her confusing dreams, and how tedious were her lessons, mixed up with anxious wonderings about why
Maman
had not written back.
Maman
seldom went into Kingston—there might be hurricanes—the English ship might have gone off course, or had to stop at the other islands.
She also reminisced wistfully about her life in Jamaica, including what she’d learned from Nanny Hiasinte. I gathered that
lwa
and duppies, as supernatural beings, were too strange to be understood. Like adults and their inexplicable behavior, only more so. Maybe that was why she had no apparent interest in me, except as a listener. And until we figured out how to actually talk, I wasn’t going to be much use, but I figured it had to come.
My biggest worry was always Alec. I kept telling myself that there had to be a way around this time travel thing—that if I managed to get Aurélie safely to Dobrenica, I’d find myself stepping out of that mysterious door a second after I’d stepped in, in which case Alec would never even know I was gone.
I held hard to that image.
Meanwhile, life went on at Undertree.
Lessons were strictly organized. Aurélie adapted quickly, except for the French lessons. She and Miss Oliver clashed, neither being intelligible to the other. Being a marquis’s daughter, Aurélie was exempt from the threat of the ruler, unlike poor, near-sighted little Diana, who often blotted her paper as she crouched over it to write. But the governess was adamant when she declared first that it was unbecoming for girls to correct their betters, second, that Mrs. Kittredge had hired her specifically for the elegance of her French (it was the same French that Aunt Kittredge had been taught) and furthermore, Aurélie’s accent was decidedly “colonial.” I could have told Miss Oliver that her French, unlike Aurélie’s, only slightly resembled anything actually spoken in France, but nobody was asking me!
Aunt Kittredge ended the matter by declaring that Aurélie was excused from French lessons. She was permitted to read any of the French texts in the schoolroom, but she must not interfere with Miss Oliver’s teaching of the other girls.
Time whizzed by uneventfully after that.
When the
Each Friday, when Cassandra brought to her mother the weekly letter she wrote to her maternal cousin Lucretia, Aurélie also handed off a letter to be sent to Jamaica. She began counting up how many days until she could expect her first answer.
Although Cassandra received regular missives from Cousin Lucretia, when spring showed its first signs, there was still no letter next to Aurélie’s plate at breakfast.
Around the time of the first thaw, Aurélie finally started talking to me in the mirror again.
“Do you see me all the time?” she asked.
I brought my head down in a nod.
Her gaze sidled one way, then the other, as her skinny fingers twitched at her high-necked gown, then she whispered, “Even when I am in the bath?”
So she’d hit
that
age. I wanted to laugh, but I was afraid she’d see it. How to explain that all the habitual tasks that we do on autopilot were a blur to me? Keep it simple, I thought.
I mimed sleep, and saw immediate relief in her face. “So you wake up when I talk to you?”
Not quite. Time stopped blurring whenever she was alert or intent about something, but again I opted for the easy answer, and nodded.
So she started talking to me once or twice a day. She paid no attention to my attempts to respond, now that she knew I didn’t have telepathic powers or connection with her loved ones on the Spirit Net. She talked for her own comfort, mostly complaining about the never-endingcold and darkness, her confusing dreams, and how tedious were her lessons, mixed up with anxious wonderings about why
Maman
had not written back.
Maman
seldom went into Kingston—there might be hurricanes—the English ship might have gone off course, or had to stop at the other islands.
She also reminisced wistfully about her life in Jamaica, including what she’d learned from Nanny Hiasinte. I gathered that
lwa
and duppies, as supernatural beings, were too strange to be understood. Like adults and their inexplicable behavior, only more so. Maybe that was why she had no apparent interest in me, except as a listener. And until we figured out how to actually talk, I wasn’t going to be much use, but I figured it had to come.
My biggest worry was always Alec. I kept telling myself that there had to be a way around this time travel thing—that if I managed to get Aurélie safely to Dobrenica, I’d find myself stepping out of that mysterious door a second after I’d stepped in, in which case Alec would never even know I was gone.
I held hard to that image.
Meanwhile, life went on at Undertree.
Lessons were strictly organized. Aurélie adapted quickly, except for the French lessons. She and Miss Oliver clashed, neither being intelligible to the other. Being a marquis’s daughter, Aurélie was exempt from the threat of the ruler, unlike poor, near-sighted little Diana, who often blotted her paper as she crouched over it to write. But the governess was adamant when she declared first that it was unbecoming for girls to correct their betters, second, that Mrs. Kittredge had hired her specifically for the elegance of her French (it was the same French that Aunt Kittredge had been taught) and furthermore, Aurélie’s accent was decidedly “colonial.” I could have told Miss Oliver that her French, unlike Aurélie’s, only slightly resembled anything actually spoken in France, but nobody was asking me!
Aunt Kittredge ended the matter by declaring that Aurélie was excused from French lessons. She was permitted to read any of the French texts in the schoolroom, but she must not interfere with Miss Oliver’s teaching of the other girls.
Time whizzed by uneventfully after that.
When the
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