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only when it is very late and very dark. You need not try to spare my feelings. I know full well that I
am not good enough for you.”
“Will you hush? Will you hush and draw breath for a minute? Of course you are good
enough for me. You are as fine as silk. Our problem, Emma….”
“ Ah yes, please, tell me now. What is our problem?”
“You have seen my home, yes, and you have seen my family. Leanna is married and
William is soon to be. Both admirably matched, just as you say. Hannah and William love nothing so
much as to stroll the grounds of Rosemoral, pointing first in one direction and then the other. All the
while discussing what sort of shed or what marvelous breed of cattle or worthy plant they shall
deposit here or there. We have spoken of an Eden and they intend to build just that, those two, which
they shall then entrust to Leanna and John. And what my brother began, my sister shall finish. Yes,
Leanna and her own admirably suitable husband shall expand this little paradise to include health
care and legal rights for all.”
“What does any of this have to do with us?”
“I will never marry. I will not have children. These are decisions I made long ago.
And I shall tell you something now that I have never told anyone. I am a dark seed.”
To his surprise, and somewhat to his offense, she laughed.
“Dark seed?” she said. “Is that a medical term you learned at Cambridge?”
“Listen to me,” he said fiercely. It was hard to argue with a woman you couldn’t see, a
woman who was little more than a disembodied voice in the darkness. “I am trying to explain
something and it is a truth I have never uttered aloud. Never even articulated fully to myself. The
Bainbridge family is split, and not only in the way that everyone imagines. William and Leanna are
like my grandfather….they build things. They always have. When we were children, they would
make forts and doll houses and railroads. They were always creating for some wonderful little
world, then climbing within it and shutting the door. And my brother Cecil and I would then come
crashing in, you see, just like our father - determined to destroy whatever it was that they had just so
painstakingly built. Anything good and proper, we were compelled to attack it, and can you even
imagine what I am saying? I remember one time, at Brighton on holiday… Have you been there?” She
shook her head, another gesture which he could not see, a limitation which scarcely mattered, for he
rushed on with his thought. “Leanna had worked all morning on a sand castle and I kicked it. Simply
kicked it level for reasons I cannot say. I can still hear the sound of her screaming in fury. She said
she hated me.”
“And you find all this unusual? Really, Tom, it is how children play. How siblings
sometimes talk to one another.”
“No. No, Emma, it is more than that. All my life I told myself that my destructive
impulses were nothing more than my older brother leading me astray. And now Cecil is gone and I
see…I see I am still flawed. That the forces which corrupted my brother and my father live deep
within me too.”
“None of this makes your soul unique,” Emma said. “We all have our bitter secrets,
relatives whose motives are mysterious to us, pieces of the family history we try to keep hidden.
What of my sister Mary?”
“What of her?”
“She left a respectable job to walk the streets. There are many women forced into
prostitution. Not so many, I would guess, who choose it.”
“That is an entirely different situation.”