Theresiabaru Rewrite: Chapter 05: HYACINTH: THE YEAR I DID NOT SPEAK (Patreon)

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CHAPTER 05

HYACINTH: THE YEAR I DID NOT SPEAK

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The hyacinth grows from a bulb that must be frozen before it will flower, which is why it belongs to the end of winter and to nobody else. The oldest story says a god killed a boy he loved by accident, and could not undo it, and so made this instead, and wrote his grief into the petals in a language that has since been lost. People give it now to say that they are sorry. Almost none of them know that they are quoting an apology that was never accepted.

Time in that room was measured in trays.

The trays came three times a day. They were set on the low table beside the door by a maid who did not speak, because Miriam had given instructions that nobody was to speak, and they were collected again four hours later by the same maid, and on the third day they began arriving with the food cut smaller, which meant that somebody downstairs had noticed that she was not using the knife.

Theresia Astrea lay on top of the covers with her boots off and her dress on and counted trays, because counting trays was a thing that could be done without thinking, and thinking was the enemy.

Twelve trays was four days. Ninety trays was a month. She stopped keeping the running total somewhere around two hundred because the total had begun to feel like an accusation.

She was not doing anything in there. That was the part she found hardest to explain afterward, on the rare occasions when anybody asked, which was almost never, because in that house one did not ask.

She was not grieving in any of the ways she had read about. She was not weeping into pillows or tearing at things or shouting at a sky. She had done some of that in the first week and it had been exhausting and it had not helped and she had given it up in the way a person gives up an unprofitable hobby.

What she was doing, hour after hour, for four months, was running the sequence.

The wood. The birds that were not there. Captain Oren's hand moving to sit on top of the hilt rather than beside it. The ground dragons. Her mother's arm coming across her chest. Her father saying stay inside, and the half second when he looked at her and there was nothing in his face, and the other look later when there was.

And in the middle of it, always, the eleven or twelve seconds when she had gone away.

That was the piece she kept taking out and turning over. Not the death. The absence. The fact that at the exact moment when something was required of her, some part of the machinery had quietly disengaged, and she had gone and stood on a tile floor in a city that no longer existed, and had left her body kneeling in a carriage being shaken by a woman who would be dead within the year.

Twice now. Two separate worlds, two separate sets of parents, one single response.

She did not think she could have saved him. She was seven years old and weighed as much as a sack of flour and there had been nine of them. She had gone over that and over it and she knew, in the part of herself that did sums, that there was no version of that road where a child changed the outcome.

That was not the point and it never had been.

The point was that she had not tried. The point was that some deep and permanent wiring in her went inert under load, and that this had now been demonstrated twice under laboratory conditions, and that whatever happened for the rest of her life, whoever needed her, she was going to be exactly the same shape when it mattered.

That was what she did in that room for four months. She sat in the dark with that.

Karan came every day.

He never knocked, because knocking invites a refusal and Karan had worked that out inside a week. He simply sat down on the floor of the corridor with his back against her door and talked.

He talked about nothing. That was his method and it was an act of genius that he was not clever enough to have designed on purpose. He talked about a ground dragon that had bitten a groom. He talked about a running argument in the guardroom concerning whether a particular dead swordsman had actually existed. He talked for forty minutes on one occasion about a hat.

He never once mentioned their father, or the road, or her.

"Nobody has asked me to do this, by the way," he said through the door, at some point in the second month. "Thames thinks I am being a nuisance. Mother has not said anything one way or the other. I want that on the record, in case you ever come out of there and decide to be grateful, because I intend to hold it over you for the rest of your life."

She lay on the bed and did not answer, which was what she did every day.

"Right," said Karan. "So. The hat."

Carlan's method was different. Carlan read aloud.

He would come at about eight in the evening with whatever he happened to be working through, and sit down in the corridor, and read at the door in a flat nine year old monotone for an hour, and then stop mid sentence and go to bed, and pick up the following night from the middle of that same sentence. He got through a history of the southern campaigns, a dull treatise on falconry, and two thirds of a book of maritime law before the year was out.

He never said anything at the beginning or the end. He just read, and stopped, and left.

Casiles came once, in the third week, and said all the wrong things with tremendous sincerity, and said them loudly through the door, and finished by telling her that their father would not want her to be like this.

She got up off the bed for the first time in eleven days, crossed the room, and threw a water jug at the inside of the door hard enough to take a piece out of the panelling.

Casiles did not come back. Not out of anger. He told Karan afterward, in the stables, that he had heard the jug go and had understood that he was making it worse by being there, and had decided that the kindest thing available to him was to stop.

He was fourteen. He was correct. Neither of them ever mentioned it again and both of them remembered it for ever.

And Thames came exactly one time, in the second month, at two in the morning.

He did not sit down and he did not talk about a hat.

"I am eighteen," he said, to the door. "I am head of this house as of the fourteenth. There are nine hundred people on this land and I am responsible for every one of them and I do not know what I am doing and there is nobody left to ask."

A long pause.

"I am not telling you that so you will come out. I am telling you because I have not said it out loud and I needed to say it out loud to somebody who is not going to repeat it."

Another pause.

"Right," said Thames. "Goodnight."

She heard his boots go all the way down the corridor. She was sitting up in the dark by the time he got to the stairs, with both hands over her mouth, and she still did not open the door, and that was one of the four or five things in her life that she never entirely stopped paying for.

Outside the room, her mother was dying, and nobody realised it because it did not look like dying.

For the first two weeks, Tishua van Astrea was magnificent.

That was the word the household used afterward, every one of them, independently, which is how Theresia eventually pieced together what had happened out there while she had been counting trays. Magnificent. She ran the funeral. She received three hundred guests and remembered every name. She went through the estate accounts with the steward and found two errors. She wrote personally to the families of the four dead escorts and did not use a secretary, and she got the children's names right in all four letters, and in one of them she got the name of a dog right.

She sat with Thames for six hours on the night of the fourteenth and walked him through the tenancies farm by farm.

She did not weep where anybody could see it.

And then, at some point in the third week, she stopped.

There was no event. Nobody could point to a day. She simply began, very slowly, to be less present in each room than she had been the week before, the way a lamp goes down when the oil is low and nobody is watching the flame.

She kept doing all of it. That was the deceitful part. She came down to meals. She answered letters. She went out with the steward. But the letters got shorter, and then began going out unsigned, and then stopped going out at all, and the meals went on happening with her sitting at them and the food going back to the kitchens almost untouched.

Bram noticed first, because cooks always notice first. He started sending up small things. A thing she had liked as a girl. Then another. Then he started cooking things badly on purpose, because she had always been unable to resist correcting him, and for about a week that worked, and then it stopped working too.

Miriam noticed second, and Miriam was the one who said it out loud, to Fribal, in the corridor outside the stillroom, in November.

"She is not eating, my lord."

"I know."

"She is not sleeping either. I have had the fire lit in her room at four in the morning three times this week."

Fribal van Astrea stood in that corridor for a while.

"Is there anything to be done?" Miriam said.

"I do not know," he said. "I have seen it before. Not often." He turned his hat over in his hands. "It is not a sickness. You cannot feed it out of somebody. My grandmother went the same way and they fed her for eleven months."

"And?"

"And she died," said Fribal, "in the eleventh month."

Winter came down hard that year. The road north was shut for three weeks in January and the estate village lost four elderly people and a child to the cold.

Tishua van Astrea died on the second of February, in her own bed, of no particular thing at all.

The physician wrote a grief of the heart on the certificate because the certificate required something, and then apologised for it to Thames afterward, and Thames said that it was fine, because it was accurate.

Theresia learned this eight days later, in the corridor outside her own room, because her uncle came and got her.

He did not sit down on the floor and talk about a hat.

She heard the boots stop outside the door at about ten in the morning, and then she heard something she had not heard in four months, which was a key.

"You will want to be on your feet," said Fribal through the panel. "I am giving you the count of five."

She was not on her feet at five. She was not on her feet at all. She was lying on top of the covers in a dress she had been wearing for an indeterminate number of days, in a room that smelled like a room where somebody has been living without opening the window, with her hair in a condition that would have made Miriam sit down on the floor and cry.

The door opened.

Her uncle stood in it for a moment and looked at the room, and did not say anything about it, and she watched his face and there was nothing on it, and then he crossed the floor in four steps and picked her up off the bed like a bale.

She fought. It was not much of a fight. She had not eaten properly since the autumn and she weighed nothing and her arms had gone to string, and she got one good hit in on his collarbone with the heel of her hand and then he simply went on carrying her, and after about ten seconds she stopped and hung there and let it happen, which she was ashamed of for years.

He carried her down the west stairs. The house was very quiet.

He carried her out through the terrace doors and across the lawn, and the cold came in through the dress like water, and the light hurt so much that she had to keep her face against his shoulder for the first thirty paces, which meant she did not see where they were going until they had arrived.

He set her down on her feet in the wet grass under the yews.

There were two new stones.

She looked at the second one for quite a long time. The earth in front of it had not settled yet and the turf had been cut and laid back down and had not knitted, so the outline of the grave was still visible as a rectangle of slightly wrong green.

"Eight days ago," said Fribal.

Theresia did not say anything.

"Nobody told you. That was my decision, not your brothers'. Thames wanted to and I stopped him." He put his hands behind his back. "You may hold that against me. I would like to be clear that I would do it again, because I did not want you told through a door, and I did not want you at the service in the state you are currently in, because there were two hundred people there and every one of them would have carried the memory of it out of the gate with them and it would have followed you for forty years."

She stood in the wet grass and looked at the rectangle of wrong green and felt absolutely nothing at all, which frightened her considerably more than grief would have.

"She stopped eating," she said. It was the first thing she had said out loud in four months and her voice came out wrong, thin and scraped, like a hinge.

"Yes."

"When?"

"Properly? The end of April."

Theresia did the sum, which was the only thing she had ever been reliably good at.

April. Four days after the funeral. Which meant that her mother had begun dying at almost exactly the same hour that Theresia had gone up the west stairs and shut the door, and that the two of them had spent nine months in the same building doing the identical thing in two different rooms, and neither of them had known.

"I could have—"

"No," said Fribal.

"You do not know what I was going to say."

"I know precisely what you were going to say, because I have said it, and because every person in this house has said some version of it to themselves in the last eight days, including Bram, who has been cooking for her since she was nineteen years old." He turned to look at her. "You could not have. She was not waiting for you. She was not waiting for anybody. She had simply decided, in a place too far down to be reached with words, that she was not going to do the next forty years, and there is no sentence in any language that would have changed it."

"You cannot know that."

"No," he agreed. "I cannot. Neither can you. And that is the whole of what you will be left with, and you will have it for the rest of your life, and you will get used to the weight of it eventually, the way a man gets used to a limp."

The wind moved in the yews.

"I have something to say to you," said Fribal, "and then I am going to leave you out here, and you may stay as long as you like, and nobody will come and fetch you, and there will be a fire lit in your room when you want it."

"Say it, then."

He looked down at the first stone. His brother's. The one with a belt under it.

"My brother died protecting your life," he said. "Do not dishonour him by wasting it."

It went in like a blade going in, which is to say that the pain of it did not arrive at first. There was only the sensation of something entering.

"That is cruel," she said.

"Yes."

"You are allowed to be kind to me. I am seven."

"You are seven," said Fribal, "and you are the cleverest creature in this house by a distance that frightens me, and you have been lying in the dark for four months doing sums about your own worthlessness, and I could be kind to you for another four months and you would still be in there, because kindness has been tried by four boys, two of whom love you more than they love themselves, and it has not worked."

He put his hat back on.

"I told you once," he said, "on a wall in the garden, that if you were ever tired enough to want it, you should come and find me."

Theresia's hands closed.

"You did not come," said her uncle. "So I have come and found you. That is the arrangement, and it stands for as long as I am alive. I would very much prefer that you use the other half of it."

And then he walked back up across the lawn to the house and left her standing between the two stones in the cold with her shoes soaked through.

She stayed out there for six hours.

She did not cry. She wanted it on the record, in the private ledger where she kept everything, that she stood over her mother's grave for six hours in February and did not produce one single tear, and that she went on not producing them for a very long time after that, and that she never worked out what that meant about her.

When the light went she walked back up to the house on her own feet, and the terrace door was unlocked, and there was a fire lit in her room, and a tray, and the tray had the food cut small.

She ate all of it.

It was the first proper meal she had eaten since October and she was violently sick afterward, and Miriam held her hair and did not say one word, and then washed her face and put her to bed as though she were eleven months old again, and sat in the chair in the corner until she was asleep, and did that every night for six weeks.

And then there was the year.

That was how the household came to refer to it, quietly, years later, when it came up at all. The year. Not a period of mourning, because the house had been in mourning before, twice, and this was structurally different.

Theresia got up. She dressed. She came down to meals and ate what was in front of her and answered when she was spoken to, in complete sentences, politely. She sat through her lessons and did the work and did it correctly. She walked in the garden in the afternoons.

She was, by every available external measure, recovering nicely, and the physician said so twice, and the tutors reported that her progress was unaffected, and one of them used the word resilient in a letter.

She was not there.

That was the thing none of them could see and all of them could feel. She had come back to the surface and left the rest of herself somewhere at the bottom, and what was walking about the house was an extremely capable arrangement of habits wearing her face. She did not argue with the natural philosopher. She did not go into the kitchens. She did not invent anything, or fix anything, or read anything that had not been assigned to her.

She did not go near the flowers.

That was what Aldous noticed, and Aldous was the only one who understood what it meant, because Aldous had spent two years watching a small girl sit down in front of a bed and talk to it, and had never once mentioned it to a living soul, and now she walked past the beds on the gravel with her hands folded and her eyes forward as though the garden were a corridor.

The south border went to ruin that summer. He let it, deliberately, because he had a theory. It did not work. She walked past it for eleven weeks and did not so much as turn her head.

So in September he gave up on theories and simply cut the whole of the neglected anemone bed back to the crown, which was a savage thing to do to anemones in September and which he knew perfectly well was a savage thing to do, and he left the cuttings piled on the path where she would have to step over them.

She stepped over them.

Then she stopped, about four paces past, and stood still for a moment with her back to him.

Then she turned around and came back and crouched down and picked up one of the cut stems and looked at it, and said, in a voice like a hinge:

"You have killed them."

"Aye."

"It is September. You do not cut anemones back in September, you cut them back after the frost, and you know that, because you told me."

"I did tell you that."

"So why have you done it?"

Aldous leaned on his fork and looked at her steadily, an old man with soil in his knuckles, entirely unafraid.

"Because you would not look at them any other way," he said.

Theresia van Astrea crouched in the gravel with a dead stem in her hand and cried for four straight hours.

It came out of her the way water comes out of a stopped pipe, badly, in the wrong order, with noises in it that she was ashamed of at the time and stopped being ashamed of much later. Aldous sat down on the wall and did not touch her and did not speak and did not go away. At some point in the third hour Miriam came out to see what the noise was, took one look, and went back inside and shut the door behind her.

When it finally stopped she was hoarse and blotched and could not feel her hands.

"They will come back," Aldous said. "Not this year. They will be poor next year and then they will be better than they were. That is generally how it goes with a hard cut. It is not a kindness at the time."

"I hate you," said Theresia.

"Aye," said Aldous.

She sat there until it was dark.

Then she went inside and up to her room and lit the lamp, and she did not go to bed.

She took out a sheet of paper. Then she took out eleven more, because one was clearly not going to be enough, and she squared them on the desk, and she uncapped the ink, and she sat for a long moment with the pen over the first sheet.

The problem with wells, she wrote, is that we are digging them in the wrong place and to the wrong depth, and everybody knows this, and nobody has said it, because the men who dig them are paid by the hole.

She wrote until four in the morning.

She was eight years old, and both her parents were dead in two separate worlds, and she had one working strategy for staying alive and she had known what it was since she was six.

She was not going to stop moving.

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