The Odin Inheritance (The Pessarine Chronicles Book 1) Page 12

  “I would be happy to do so, Lady Brentwood,” June said, moving toward the door.

  “New outfits?” I asked, looking from my aunt to June and back. “What new outfits?”

  “That’s what’s in the package. I thought you’d like a few new dresses and some other things, so I bought them in London and had them sent up.” She sighed. “I had hoped you’d wear them at an assignation with a clandestined gentleman friend—“ she teased.

  “I don’t—“

  “—but since you don’t have one,” she continued smoothly, “you’ll just have to wear them for me tonight and tomorrow.”

  Aunt Miranda shooed me off in the direction of the door, where June waited patiently. “Off with you, child. June knows what to do. I’ll see you in an hour.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  June was a model of efficiency. As Aunt Miranda had requested, I was undressed, bathed, and re-dressed with new undergarments and stockings which June then covered with a new peach-colored cotton dress in the height of fashion. June buttoned the dress up the back and then pulled my unruly hair up in a soft Gibson-style bun, leaving some red curls to frame my face. Looking at myself in the mirror after her efforts, I could see why my crafty aunt had hoped I’d wear the dress to some sort of assignation. It was beautiful and suited me perfectly though it was not an outfit I’d ever have chosen for myself. I thanked June and made my way to Aunt Miranda’s room and the dinner she’d ordered.

  In her room, a table for two was set in the middle of the chamber while two waiters quickly and quietly set out the food covered with silver domes that came from a wheeled cart beside the table. My aunt sat at the dressing table with her back to the door. She was responding to some of the correspondence she’d received earlier, seeming very relaxed. She wore a simple white cotton dress that was high-necked. She’d covered that with a blue silk kimono that had a pattern of gold medallions woven into the fabric. Her hair was up in a chignon, per usual, and she turned as I entered the room. Taking in my appearance, she was obviously pleased.

  “I knew that dress would be lovely on you,” she said, nodding. Putting down the pen and turning over the paper so what she’d written couldn’t be seen, she waved a hand at the waiters. “I told Sanderson I wanted us to eat family style, without staff. I hope that’s all right with you?”

  “We eat that way at Towson House,” I said. “So that’s fine with me.”

  “Excellent.” Aunt Miranda got up and looked over the progress of the dispersion of food. “What do we have on offer, gentlemen?”

  What followed was a list of French dishes I didn’t really recognize. As the waiters lifted the silver domes I could see baked herbed potatoes; asparagus grilled with cheese; some sort of baked chicken that smelled heavenly; a plate of cheeses and fruits, and finally a fruit trifle in a stemmed bowl. There was a carafe of white wine and two glasses on the cart yet to be placed on the table. The sight of the food made my stomach rumble.

  “Please tell the chef he has outdone himself,” my aunt said. “This is perfect. You may leave the cart and I’ll call down when we’re done.”

  “As you wish, madam,” one of them intoned, and the two of them left us to the meal without further comment.

  We sat at the table and Aunt Miranda took it upon herself to serve me, loading my plate with portions that were hearty without being un-ladylike, and then doing the same with her own plate. She picked the glasses up off the cart, set them on the table and poured each of us some of the wine, setting the carafe back on the cart.

  “Please, child,” she said, picking up her fork with one hand and a napkin with the other. “Eat. I can hear your innards growl. We can speak of trivialities over the meal, and get to the heart of the matter with the rum.”

  The meal was outstanding. Everything was flavorful and well prepared, and the white wine suited the food admirably. As we ate, I spoke about my current assignments, the upcoming Tripos exam and the recent campaign to get women kicked out of Cambridge. Aunt Miranda regaled me with a tale of a London society dinner party where the hostess’s dachshund had somehow made it onto the table in the dining room and sampled morsels from all the first course plates, which had been pre-set, covered in food. Then there was a catastrophic chase through the house after the beast, who yipped and yapped his way through the crowd and barreled through the legs of several of the ladies present, tearing petticoats and causing mayhem in his wake.

  “I stood along the wall of the hallway and tried to stay as flat as possible,” she said, smiling as I chuckled, “while the host—a pleasant but horribly rotund man who shouldn’t ever run anywhere —bobbed and weaved his way down the hall, chest heaving from the exertion. I believe he was a bit too familiar with some of the ladies he encountered as he bounced from one wall to the other though I doubt he intentionally wished to cause offence.”

  “And the dog?” I asked, setting down the wine glass.

  “Caught by a footman. The poor thing was overwrought by all the excitement and expelled digested food in various forms from both ends. That effectively ended the evening. I took a cab back to my house and had Cook make me a cheese sandwich.” Aunt Miranda looked at my plate. “Done, my dear?” she asked.

  “Yes, thanks,” I said, wiping my mouth with a napkin. “That was a wonderful dinner.”

  “I’ll call down and have them come take the food and the plates. Will you put our dishes on the cart for me?”

  I did so, and shortly after the call, the waiters arrived and took the dinner remnants away, leaving a bottle of golden brown Jamaican rum on the table with two small glasses. Aunt Miranda opened the bottle and poured half an inch of the rum in each glass, then sat down opposite me at the table.

  “We don’t need much, and you’ve already had half that glass of wine,” she explained. “No need to overindulge.” I agreed.

  “You’re worried you’re at the center of something you don’t understand,” she began. “The storytelling, the attack by that Laufeson fellow, the dreams... yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can provide some insight, I think,” she said, drawing her glass of rum closer to her, “but you may find my explanation to be too...” she pursed her lips in thought, “...pedestrian, perhaps?”

  “I think I’d prefer pedestrian,” I said.

  Her eyes sparked at that. “Wouldn’t we all?” She took a sip of rum, swallowed it and set the glass back on the table. “Are you aware that your mother lost three babies before she finally gave birth to you?”

  I blinked in surprise. “No,” I said, and I couldn’t keep the shock from my voice. “We don’t discuss such things, and it never occurred to me to ask.” I ached for my parents, imagining how sad they must have been. “That’s horrible. What happened?”

  “There are those whom God gifts with the ability to have children easily. Your mother, bless her, was not so fortunate. There were three boys lost to miscarriage in the first years of your parents’ marriage despite your mother’s and the doctors’ best efforts.” Aunt Miranda looked down at her right hand and traced circles on the tablecloth with a finger. “I felt so sorry for your parents then, the poor dears. The loss of those boys affected them greatly, and when your mother found she was pregnant with you, whatever joy they might have felt was tainted with the sorrow of prior losses and the knowledge you might be lost as well.”

  I nodded, understanding and sorrow in my heart.

  “Then, about six months in, your mother started to bleed. The doctors warned that she was losing you and that this time, she might die as well.”

  I brought a hand to my chest. No one had mentioned any of this to me, ever. Why had nothing been said?

  “Your father, desperate, called on me for help,” my aunt continued. “I have, as you know, travelled widely, and, therefore, have friends with medical and other skills that differ from those of English doctors. He and your mother were willing to try anything to keep you alive so your mother could carry you to term. My good friend, a hea
ler named Jeremiah, came and managed to save both of you though he told your parents there would be no children after your birth.” She smiled gently and looked at me. “Thus you came into the world.”

  I reached over and picked up my glass of rum, taking a small sip and feeling the warm liquid flow down my throat. “So far,” I said, setting the glass down, “this hasn’t seemed a very pedestrian conversation.” The revelations about my parents were saddening and somewhat alarming, to be sure, but I didn’t see what any of that had to do with recent events in my life.

  Aunt Miranda tilted her head and conceded the point, then sat back in her chair, regarding me thoughtfully. “You’re odd creatures,” she mused. “Every one of you. Odd, and delightful, and maddening and worrisome.”

  “Creatures?”

  “Children,” she clarified. “I never had any myself, of course, but I’ve cared for several in my time. I never cease to be amazed by the resiliency of childhood even as parents find themselves stunned by what the product of their love has wrought on their lives. They think they know what the child will be like—they know themselves and assume a result of their union will share their traits and personalities. Sometimes that’s exactly what happens. Often, it isn’t, and the resulting loveable creature,” she pointed at me, “is a complete mystery to those who brought her about.”

  That was hardly news to me. I knew I’d confounded my mother daily growing up though Father had been more understanding even as my childhood exploits astonished him. They loved me greatly—and now I had a clearer picture of why that love was, at times, fierce in its intensity—though I knew they didn’t quite understand me.

  “You, my dear,” my aunt continued, “walked at ten months and ran at eleven. You refused to wear shoes and disrobed at the most inconvenient times. The nurse had to put your clothes on backwards so you couldn’t wriggle out of them.”

  “Yes,” I said, a little embarrased.

  “You started speaking in full sentences by the time you were eighteen months old, and your father taught you to read at three so he could have a moment’s peace while he worked at his desk. You then proceeded through all of the children’s classic stories and your parents hired a governess to help guide your avid mind into more... how shall we say... appropriate avenues of scholarship. Then you had an accident.”

  That brought me up short. “Accident? What accident?”

  Aunt Miranda held up a hand. “No, you wouldn’t remember. You were four at the time. You were very gravely injured—the particulars of how you came to be injured would take too long to explain tonight. Suffice it to say the medical skills of my friend Jeremiah and others had to be employed to save your life. After that, at my request, you lived at Brentwood Close with me in Aberdeenshire for a year while you continued your recovery.”

  I swallowed. “I don’t remember living with you for a year,” I said, not sure what to make of what I’d been told.

  “Hardly a surprise. It was a difficult time for you. You didn’t sleep regularly for months. You refused to go anywhere without Bow-Bow, your long-suffering stuffed muslin rabbit, and more than once we had the groomsmen and locals out in the countryside looking for you after you’d made yet another escape from my house. You were very good at escaping.”

  I nodded. I’d been good at escaping all my life, as Mother’s stories of my very early days showed.

  “I stayed up with you when you couldn’t sleep, and we made a fair dent in my library at the Close. We read the myths of various cultures together, along with the Roman and Greek classics. Had you stayed longer, we probably would have started on Shakespeare next. When you were not with me, our noses pressed into some tome, you trundled about the house and garden, ‘helping’ the staff. You weeded the rose garden by pulling up all the roses, wanting to find rose bushes that had no thorns. You took apart the library mantle clock with surgical precision one afternoon, and it took the local clockmaker three weeks to reassemble the damnable thing. You half unraveled a tapestry in the dining room—but you get the idea.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, amazed at and troubled by the activities of my younger self.

  Aunt Miranda waved off the apology. “You did none of these things with malicious intent, Ariana. The accident presented your mind with experiences you didn’t understand, and everything you did while you stayed with me was a childish effort to figure out what had happened to you. After that year, you returned to London and your parents, and while some of your unique exploits continued—“

  “Like trying to insert the knives in the boulders in the garden,” I interjected.

  “—you’d grown out of many of the others,” she finished. “Once we realized it was the stories that encouraged you to act out, your parents encouraged you toward mathematics and the sciences. With time, your year with me and everything you did at the Close faded from your memory... until now.”

  I leaned forward. “You’re saying that the stories I told at the pub—the ones I don’t remember telling—came from the reading the two of us did together when I stayed with you?”

  Aunt Miranda nodded. “I think so, and I think the odd dream with the pig and the huge tree is part of that as well. We read the Aeneid and the Norse myths all those years ago. This time, instead of acting out the stories, you created vivid versions of them to tell for the entertainment of others or, at least so far as the dream goes, for yourself.”

  “But I don’t know how to tell a story—not like that,” I maintained.

  “Nonsense,” she replied. “You tell a fine story – they just tend to be factual or science-based.”

  “Lizzie said my stories were magical, but magic doesn’t exist in the real world.”

  “Spoken like a scientist.” Aunt Miranda thought for a moment. “Shall I tell you a story?” she asked.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Aunt Miranda cleared her throat. “Here’s a tale I know you’ve never heard,” she began. “One of the items you’ll inherit when I pass on is a small island in the Orkneys. It’s so small as to be nearly worthless, but my father and I spent a very eventful few weeks there when I was about twenty years old. Father was a bit of an amateur archaeologist though that’s not what we called it then. There was a Viking tomb on the island. We went there and dug it up.”

  I furrowed my brow, doing the math on when this excavation had happened. If Great Aunt Miranda was nearly eighty now, that meant when she and her father excavated the tomb it had been –

  “You and your father opened up the tomb in 1845?” I asked. “That’s... what... thirty years before Schliemann started at Troy?”

  “It is.” Aunt Miranda smiled. “Father was far more careful and fastidious than Schliemann was, but he had that sort of mind. Everything documented, everything in its proper place was his way of doing things. Schliemann was a thief and scoundrel.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I agreed, my interest in the story growing. “So... what was the island like?”

  “It was terribly windy there, since the island had no trees or large rocks to block the gales.”

  Aunt Miranda continued to speak, describing what the island looked like in detail. I could see it then, framed by a windswept sea. The air smelled of salt with a hint of dead fish, and the pebbles at my feet clicked against each other as I walked. There was no soil to be seen, and a few unfortunate plants fought for life here and there, stunted and twisted by the wind and lack of earth. Waves hit the rocky shore in rhythmic slaps, and small whitecaps appeared and disappeared on the water’s surface in reaction to the winds.

  It was midday. The sun warmed me despite the constant wind that pulled my hair from its pins. Through the winding tendrils of my loosening hair I could see one end of the island in front of me, pointed west. I turned to see the other end, which rose to a hillock that also held the mound of the tomb and the billowing white tents beside it. I marvelled. The whole island was only a trifle bigger than Towson House and its garden, and it would take perhaps ten minutes to walk the perimete
r of it. The islands around the tiny island I stood on looked equally rocky, but they were bigger and had more grass and soil on them.

  Aunt Miranda’s words came to me on the wind. “Our tents blew down every other day, and there were some nights we couldn’t keep a fire lit due to the winds, but we soldiered on. After a few days of digging, we found two skeletons in the tomb: a man and a woman. Father was overjoyed to find the tomb hadn’t been looted, and we spent the next two weeks cataloguing the artifacts the tomb contained.”

  I walked toward the tomb. It was the size of a London omnibus, and it stuck five feet above the hillock. Large grey-black granite slabs, carefully fitted together and spotted with moss and lichen, made up the walls and roof of the tomb. Smaller stones and gravel sat in patches on the roof and in piles along the walls. One rectangular slab that had been the entrance to the tomb lay on its side, revealing the dark interior of the structure. It was clear from the piles of earth around the entrance that opening the tomb had taken time and effort. Two shovels stuck out of one of the piles.

  “What did you find?” I asked, staring at the tomb.

  “The inside of the tomb was damp and smelled of mold and decay,” Aunt Miranda told me. “The structure itself was very carefully constructed, but the constant moisture destroyed many of the more fragile items.”

  I walked toward the tomb and ducked my head to enter the dark space, partially lit by the sunlight streaming through the entrance. Under the cover of the tomb, the wind stopped whipping my hair around. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness inside, and the smell of damp earth and long decayed wood and animal skins overwhelmed me briefly. When I could see, I found myself standing between two stone beds made of granite slabs just like those that made up the walls and roof of the tomb. Each one contained a skeleton in the repose of death. No flesh remained on the bones, and scraps of fur and coarse-woven wool were the only indications of clothing, now rotted away. The skeleton on the left had a helmet and shield placed near him, indicating his masculine gender. An ornate gold armband that resembled a wolf in full run drooped on his right armbone, and in the midst of the jumble of his finger bones at the end of the right arm was a simple gold ring.