Picture the Dead

“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.

Will is dead. The days are interminable. Uncle Henry uses business as his escape, and he takes the carriage to Boston nearly every morning. Aunt refuses to leave her room. She won’t see visitors and accepts only tea and holiday fruitcake brought to her door by a twice-outraged Mrs. Sullivan, who thinks liquor in cakes is a sin and that food in bed brings mice.

Quinn may be his mother’s favorite, but she is far too lazy to commit herself to the daily duties of his care. I move in quickly. Bustling about him, serving or clearing or tidying up, my hands are never idle.

I yearn to ask him more about Will, but Quinn makes conversation nearly impossible. Clearly he prefers his books and privacy to anyone’s company, and when I arrive with fresh pitchers of water or bowls of soup or clutches of firewood, he exchanges only the barest pleasantries, and always in a voice that suggests he’d prefer our chats to be as brief as possible. But this is how he’s always been save last winter, when he’d stolen a kiss behind the pantry door, his breath sweet with mulled wine, his silver eyes sparkling with mischief as his hands made a vice round my waist.

“Twenty-one inches, I wager.” His words wet in my ear, and I was sure he’d have moved for a handful of my bottom next if I hadn’t wrenched away, too shocked to speak. I’d never mentioned the incident, neither to his brother nor mine, and I was sure he’d long forgotten it.

“He is still so arrogant,” I whisper to Toby’s sympathetic silence.

But that’s not quite true. Quinn is different. His sleeping is fitful, and more than a few times I’ve entered his bedroom presuming he was deep in conversation with Uncle Henry, only to find him quite alone and talking to himself. When he does leave his room, it’s always without warning, and always many hours after the house has retired, to roam outside. Empty bottles of morphine are strewn on the floor beneath his bed. His strange behavior isn’t lost on the others.

“I do think Quinn’s gone off his head a bit, Miss,” Mavis confesses.

“He’s in mourning. We all are.”

She curls her lip, unconvinced. “He’s reliving his battles in his head. Many’s the night I spied him through my window wandering the garden, cursing and shouting. The day girl’s seen him, too.”

“He’s in pain. When the morphine subsides, it makes him wakeful.” Outwardly I shrug it off, though I, too, have stood in moonlight at my dormer, watching Quinn pace the garden border.

“Missus Sullivan says she’s got a mind to give him a talking-to, what with all the cursing. Not to mention the mud he tracks through the house,” Mavis continues. “But she doesn’t know the half of it. At night, when he’s up and about, he goes and hangs blankets over the mirrors not just in his room, but in the hallway, the parlor. I yank ’em off in the mornings when I’m lighting the grates. It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?”

I nod. “It is. And you mustn’t speak of it either, Mavis. Quinn’s health is nobody’s business but our own.”

In her too-hasty nod, I sense Mavis has told her sister, Betsey, who is the Wortley family’s cook. “Why’d he cover the mirror, d’you think, Miss?”

“He doesn’t like to see his face, with his eye so badly wounded,” I guess. “We’ll have to be patient. It will take a while for his eye to heal.” I can tell that my answer leaves Mavis unsatisfied.

My old friends at Putterham School would look down their noses at my intimacy with Mavis, but I take comfort in her company the same way I take warmth by the kitchen hearth, where I’m rescued by practical tasks. There is no place in wartime for a lady of leisure, and the kitchen is Pritchett House’s hub of information. A spy can move in any slipstream. Scrubbing parsnips or peeling carrots, listening to the odd wag from the delivery boy, eavesdropping on the hired man’s ribald jokes or recounts of his exploits at The Black Eye his tavern of choice I can loosen the hinges on my troubles. I collect gossip in much the same way I collect items for my scrapbook: warily, delicately, and with great care that I am not observed.