Goodness. If I didn’t know better, Jennie, I’d think you suffer from club foot.” Aunt Clara doesn’t take her eyes off her toast. Her delicate jet earrings tremble as her knife scratches at the toast like a cat’s paw, buttering every inch. Strange how even the most mundane habits of dislikable people can strike such harsh chords. I even hate the way Aunt butters.

“I’m sorry, Aunt.” I tiptoe to my chair. It’s all I can do to keep up a pretense of normalcy. The idea of food and polite conversation is very nearly unendurable.

Will is gone. Will is gone.

“Don’t be sorry to me. It’s Quinn you’ll wake.” Her eyes are silver, like a wolf. They are Quinn’s eyes, but cruel.

“He’s already awake,” I return. “I took him some blooms from the garden.” I unfold my napkin as Mrs. Sullivan bustles through the dining room with the sausage and eggs and offers the tray to Uncle Henry. The yolks of the eggs glare at me. I swallow the bile in the back of my throat.

“Perchance your billy goat’s trot is even more effective than Hannibal’s wake-up call.” Aunt poses it as a witticism, but I feel the lash of her thought. I’ve never been Aunt Clara’s ideal specimen of niece, with my flat feet and too-curly black hair and wide-lipped laugh though there’s been no reason for laughter these past months, and certainly not this morning.

Aunt Clara has alternately thrown her thunderbolts of disdain and rained down her indifference on me from the day Toby and I arrived at her door, nearly four years ago. Uncle Henry’s half sister’s orphaned children. Not only were we barely blood relations from the bottom of the social heap, but we were willful youngsters at that, prone to speaking without thinking and doing without asking permission. If it hadn’t been for our doting eldest cousin, Aunt probably would have turned us away within that first month.

“He wants to see you after breakfast, Aunt,” I say. “He has something to tell you.”

She nods, but her lips sink and her face goes pale. “That was my intention.”

“He’s asked me to tend to him regularly, though. As his nurse.”

“Nonsense,” says Aunt Clara, with a sweep of the jam spoon. “That’s a mother’s duty.”

Uncle Henry rubs at the back of his balding head, his overused signal that he is uneasy with the friction in the room. Neither Aunt nor I pay him any attention.

“He was very specific,” I insist, my words racing out quicker than my understanding of them. I am lying, but a spy must embrace the unexpected. If I don’t put myself to good use, I’ll have no reason to be here at Pritchett House, and Aunt Clara would like nothing better than to pounce on this point.

After all, I am sixteen years old, nearly grown, my school days finished, my fiancé dead on the battlefield, my future as valuable as a wooden nickel. Death tolls are delivered with the paper every morning, and it’s not as if I haven’t imagined this dark hour. I need Quinn as never before. He’s Aunt’s favorite, her baby boy, but Aunt doesn’t have the patience to nurse him or for that matter, anyone to health. If I care for him with diligence, or so I tell myself, the family’s gratitude will keep me here until I find a better plan. But if I’m ahead of Aunt Clara, it is only by a step.

“Absurd,” she mutters, almost as an afterthought, but then she’s silent.

Perhaps this is our last breakfast together. Once Quinn shows her the letter, Aunt Clara might take to her bed, her antidote to the unexpected. Days could pass without a glimpse of her. Possibly she will become deranged, and Uncle Henry will pack her off for an extended stay at Taunton, the state lunatic hospital.

It could happen. In the years that I have lived under the Pritchett roof, I’ve witnessed Aunt’s sulks and tantrums, her mood shifts from shrieking laughter to boiling rage, followed by withdrawal. Yet her resentment of me is a constant foul weather. It is little help that I resent her right back. In my scrapbook I’ve taken out my anger on her picture, knowing she’d never pull her bulk up the stairs to snoop through my possessions.

In the baleful silence, I watch her chew her toast, taking her time. Deliberate, controlled, delaying what waits for her upstairs. No, she would never indulge herself even the briefest lapse of real sanity. Not while I am under this roof.

If anyone is in danger of being packed off, it is I.


5.