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the years. And the man who had hired her, the one who was to pay her wages? His face was familiar
too. He had been in the farmyard on the day of hell. He was the one who had driven the carriage.
And he was also the one who had later taken her to the orphanage.
Her first impressions of the house had been confusing to the point of being nightmarish,
but over time she came to accept the truth and to fill in even more detail. She began to notice pictures
all through the house of a boy. A boy gradually growing up, just as boys always do. A photograph at
three or four, pulling a wagon. Then older, maybe seven, looking serious in what must have been his
first school uniform. The boy on the steps of a church, on the shore of a beach, the boy laughing and
then pensive. A picture of him in his teens, on a gay boat…was this a yacht? She had heard the term
but never seen a picture. And finally the great portrait of him just on the brink of manhood, this time
with paint dabbed on top of the photograph, hanging like royalty in his mother’s room.
Through the years she had, of course, wondered what had ever become of her baby
brother. But she had imagined his fate to be a masculine parallel of her own – that he had been taken
to a home for foundling boys. Now she could see the truth.
She had been rejected, but he had been kept.
Whenever she was alone in the pale woman’s bedroom she would walk up to the portrait
and consider it. A garish thing it was, the man’s cheeks tinted a ludicrous shade of pink. But there
was no doubt that the face staring out at her was the face of her father. Her brother had been not only
kept, but cherished. Simon had not only lived, he had become the son of a wealthy household.
If she had been able to stop and think of it, she might have understood. Simon was the
right age for an adoption. Could be more readily passed off as a true child of the pale woman, while
where there was no way to explain the sudden presence of a five-year-old girl without raising any
number of inconvenient questions. Not to mention that she had been old enough to have a memory –
fragmented but still there and damn inconvenient. While he, an infant, had none.
But of course she had not been able to stop and think. All she could do was despise
them. The fury hardened in her heart, day after day. The pale woman and the large man, the twin
demons of her banishment. She hated them, but she hated discreetly and she hated with patience. She
devoted herself to understanding the rituals of the household. How the brown powder was to be
scooped out into the thin white cup. The cup that the kitchen staff whispered was used by both the
woman and the man.
She plotted her measurements with care, for she was not the fool the world took her for.
She knew a bit of math and she knew the sort of tree that would help her. One of them so obligingly
grew in the garden of the Weaver household, the very garden she had explored as a child. Even more
dotted the grounds of the orphanage. Enough that she could practice and plan. The suicide tree, they
called it, in acknowledgement that while there are those who cling stubbornly to life, no matter what
pain it might have dealt them, there were also those who pursued death with equal fervor.
Death did not frighten her. It had been, one might say, the only true constant of her life.
Her father had been killed in the first week of the uprising, her mother run through in the very
doorframe of her house. Her big brother Artie and her younger brother Allen and her sister
Kathleen…all dead. Only she and Simon had escaped and now Simon was someone else. A man
named Michael Everlee, a man who lived half a world away, a man who wore silk and rode in fine
carriages while she….
Her plan had met with mixed results. The woman was dead and while her husband
lived, the word had come from the street that they had put him in the jail. She had seen a newspaper
with his picture on the cover. ACCUSED the headline had screamed. ACCUSED. So she had not