Dolly Read Free

again, when my ears picked up a slight and distant sound. I knew what it was at once, and it acted like a pick stabbing through the ice of memory. It was the sound of crying. I got up and opened the window. The taste of the fog came into my mouth and its damp web touched my skin. But through its felted layers, from far away, I heard it again, half in my own head, half out there, and then everything came vividly back, the scene with Leonora in Aunt Kestrel’s sitting room, her rage, the crack of the china head against the fireplace, my own fear, prompting my heart to leap in my chest. All, all of it I remembered – no, I re-lived, my heart pounding again, as I stood at the window and through the fog-blanketed darkness heard the sound again.
    Deep under the earth, inside its cardboard coffin, shrouded in the layers of white paper, the china doll with the jagged open crevasse in its skull was crying.

PART TWO

2
    Two children were travelling, separately from different directions, to Iyot House, Iyot Lock, one hot afternoon in late June.
    ‘Where am I to put them?’ Mrs Mullen had asked, to whom children were anathema. ‘Where will they sleep?’
    Kestrel, the aunt, knew better than to make any suggestion, the housekeeper being certain to object and overrule.
    ‘I wonder where seems best to you?’ Images of the bedrooms flicked in a slide show through Aunt Kestrel’s mind, each one seeming less suitable than the last – too dark, too large, too full of precious small objects. She had no experience of youngchildren, though she was perfectly well disposed to the thought of having her great nephew and niece to stay, and had a vague idea that they were easily frightened of the dark or broke things. And were they to sleep in adjacent rooms or with a communicating door ? On separate floors ?
    ‘The attics would suit best, in my view,’ Mrs Mullen said.
    Shadowy images chased across Kestrel’s mind, troubling her enough to make her get up from her writing desk. ‘I think we had better look. I can’t remember when I was last up there.’
    She went through the house, three flights of wide stairs, one of steep and narrow. Mrs Mullen did not trouble to follow, knowing it would all be decided satisfactorily.
    The summer wind beat at the small latched windows but daylight changed its nature, making it seem a soft wind, and benign. The floorboards were dusty. Kestrel opened a cupboard set deep into the wall. The shelves were lined with newspaper and smelled of nothing worse than mothballs and old fluff. One of the rooms was completely empty, the second contained only a cracked leather trunk, but the two rooms next to one another, in the middleof the row, had furniture – an iron bed in each, a chest of drawers, a mirror. One had a wicker chair, one a musty velvet stool. And cupboards, more cupboards. She had lived here for over forty years and remembered a time when the attic rooms had been for maids. Now, there was Mrs Mullen, who had the basement, and a woman who came on a bicycle from a village on the other side of the fen.
    The rooms could be made right, she thought, though vague as to exactly what children might need to make them so. Curtains? Rugs? Toys?
    Well, linen at least.
    ‘The attics,’ she said, coming down from them, ‘will do nicely.’
    Kestrel Dickinson had been an only child for fourteen years before two sisters were born, Dora first and then Violet. Dora was plain and brown-eyed with brown straight hair and placid under the spotlight of everyone’s attention. Their mother tried to conceal her disappointment, firstly that Dora was not a boy and secondly that she was not beautiful, though her love for both girls was never in doubt. Violet was born two years and two days after Dora and grew into a pert and extremely pretty child, with blonde bubble curls and intensely blue eyes, andwas adored. She smiled, lisped, talked early, looked beautiful in frills, never got her clothes dirty, and laughed with delight