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In a house, by a lake, there is a man and a girl.
The man is tall and thin, his brown deerskin coat hanging off his shoulders like loose skim. His eyes are the blue-grey-white of clouded glass; his closely cropped hair is the colour of dry, barren earth. His most distinctive feature is the port wine stain birthmark, a patch of discoloration running down one side of his forehead and blurring into the puckered pink skin of an old scar. His face is one which could almost be considered attractive, but not quite. His features are handsome in isolation, but there is something about the way they fit together which makes him strange, almost upsetting to look at. It's as though his face was carved out of clay by an artist who, though skilled, had only ever seen human faces in photographs.
The girl is young—old enough to be a person in her own right, but not old enough to have left the realm of childhood. She is sallow and severe, her expression unusually guarded for one so young. She wears a fine black doublet over a fine black frock and fine black petticoats, although she is not in mourning. Her hair is a striking red, kept short and tidy. She cut it herself; her father does not know how to cut a woman's hair and he does not care to learn. Her eyes are so dark as to be almost black. She is beautiful, though in an abstract and somewhat roughly-hewn sort of way.
She is working on a cross-stitch; he is sketching.
"Papa?"
Albert (for this is the man's name) hums, not looking up. His sketch is a blueprint for a cube-shaped mechanical device, covered in panels and buttons. It is drawn with militant precision and loving attention to detail. Beside it is an open book, yellowed and fragile with age.
"Why did Aunt Emma kill herself?"
Albert pauses. He looks up from his desk.
"Where did you hear about that, Turtledove? That's not something for little girls to be talking about."
"I saw her tears. In a little bottle."
Rose (for this is the girl's name) fiddles absently with the gold key on a chain around her neck. Her cross-stitch is of a grey parrot with green markings. She's managed to make his eyes look remarkably human.
Albert does not know what to make of her words, and so he chooses to make nothing of them at all.
"That was a long time ago, lamb. You don't need to be worrying about it. That's what we do in this family, we move forward."
"I don't think that's true."
"No?"
"No. You can never really move forward. Everything's tied to what came before. If we move too quickly, we get all the more tangled in it. If we try to cut it off, it strangles us."
The corners of Albert's thin lips twitch upwards slightly. "You're a very clever girl Rose. You get that from me."
She knows. She knows it's from him. She knows that her mind is from him, and her nose is from him, and her long-fingered hands are from him. She thinks that the incessant, desperate fire in her chest is probably from him too.
Her hair isn't from him, though. Neither are her deep-set brown eyes, or her low, melodic voice, or her sense of the scale of things. She's not quite sure where these things are from, but she's been looking at the old photographs and she is starting to suspect.
"Uncle Leonard told me that she used to have a son. And that he disappeared. And that it made her so sad that she couldn't go on."
"He's not your uncle."
"He said I could call him Uncle Leonard if I wanted to."
Albert sets down his pencil.
"Did he now."
It is not a question.
"He did. And he's teaching me to play some of the card games he learned when he was a soldier. They're relatively simple and inelegant games, but they can be really quite engaging."
"That's nice, Rose."
A bird cries outside the window. The sound is shrill and plaintive
"I'm glad he came back from the war. Aren't you, Papa?" Although her voice is light and casual, Rose is staring shrewdly at her father. This is one of the games that they play, the two of them, and it is more complex than any military card game.
"Of course I'm glad, Fluttermouse."
Rose blinks owlishly.
"The house felt very empty without him."
It had. It still does. The house always feels empty, nowadays. It was built to be a lively place, a sprawling manor house filled with generations of family and a small army of servants. But the Vanderbooms are too proud and too fond of their secrets to keep servants, and all but one of James' children have now met their ends. Now, the house is populated only by the lone survivor, his oddity of a daughter, and his orphaned nephew.
There are so very many empty rooms.
"I never met her. What was she like?"
"Who, Emma?"
"Yes."
Albert sighed, resigned.
"She was... a fool. A soft, selfish, sentimental fool, who acted without thought for anything beyond indulging her own petty whims."
"Ah."
Rose ties off a grey thread, and cuts off the excess with a quiet snik of scissors. She pulls a roll of green thread from her basket and starts anew.
"Is that all?" She asks.
Albert looks out the window. The branches of the Vanderboom tree are visible from where he sits, just beginning to bud with the first tender leaves of spring.
He hates the thing. It's an eyesore, a disgusting home for insects and filth which obstructs his view of the lake. It would have been cut down years ago if it were his decision. But she had liked it, and her son insists they keep it, and so it stays.
He taps his pencil against the desk distractedly.
"No, that's not all. She was... kind, sometimes, and she liked plants. She loved to read, all three of us did. Sam liked those silly adventure stories, and I preferred... practical reading, even as a child. But she liked the fairy stories best, with the princesses and the secret kingdoms and whatnot. Frivolous things, with no real value in them, but they were magical to her.
She was full of love. Love for the world, love for our parents, love for our brother, love for her son, when he came around.
And she was never anything other than cruel to me. I was... the dirt beneath her shoes. Something to be prodded and tormented when it interested her, and discarded when it didn't. She wouldn't even look me in the eyes."
He goes back to his diagram. For a moment, the scratching of pencil on paper is the only sound in the room.
"You never answered my question, Papa."
"Which question was that, Rose?"
"Why did she kill herself?"
Albert pinches the bridge of his nose. "I don't know, Rose. She was strange and we didn't talk much. I suppose your 'uncle Leonard' has the right of it, her brat went and got himself disappeared and she snapped. Hung herself from that blasted tree, and serves her right. I don't know what you want me to tell you." His voice is quiet but his teeth are gritted.
"There's no need to be angry, Papa." She says mildly.
"I'm not angry, Rosebud."
She doesn't reply.
After a moment, the scratching of the pencil resumes. Rose pricks her finger on her needle, probably by accident. She blots the drop of blood onto her skirt, where it disappears instantly into the black wool.
"So, what happened to her son?"
The pencil stops again.
"I have no idea." He says, with a tone of finality. "He just disappeared one day. I assume he is dead."
She knows he's lying. He knows she knows he's lying. For a family so rife with secrets, they are all remarkably bad liers.
"That's unfortunate."
"That it is."
A silence, shorter this time.
"What was his name?"
"Franciscus. Stupid name. He went by Frank."
"What did he look like? He's not in any of the photographs."
"I don't know, Rose." He said impatiently. "A child? He had glasses, I think. And ginger hair. Not like yours," he adds, upon seeing Rose perk up slightly, "a sort of... Ugly, dusty orange colour. Nothing like yours."
Rose deflates, although the movement is as subtle and understated as her initial excitement had been.
"What was he like?"
"I don't know. We didn't talk much. He was seven."
"Oh."
Rose has set down her needlepoint on her lap now, her attention fixed entirely on her father.
"What about Uncle Samuel?"
"What about him?"
"What was he like?"
Albert taps the table with the tip of his pencil, pondering how best to answer that question.
"He was a bastard."
Rose waits for further elaboration. When it doesn't come, she decides to move on to her next question. Carefully though, slowly, so as not to startle the butterfly on the mantle into fluttering away before she can trap it in her jar. Look at it closely, study its frantic movements, and finally pin in to a corkboard where the patterns of its wings can be properly observed.
Carefully, slowly.
"I was looking through our library yesterday, I found a rather interesting book."
"Is that so?" Albert seems unperturbed, perhaps relieved, by the sudden change of subject.
"Yes. It was about fortune telling."
He freezes like a startled rabbit.
Careful, Rose. Slowly. Gently.
"It was written by a woman named Ida Reiziger. I think she was Leonard's mother, right?"
She tries to frame it casually. As though she has only a passing knowledge of the woman, and has not been staring at her photograph for months now, trying to puzzle out the emotions that the image evokes.
Albert doesn't speak; he doesn't move. He stares fixedly at the desk.
"Did you ever-"
Rose is cut off by the sound of a book snapping shut. Albert stands abruptly, jerkily, like a puppet with cut strings. He shoves the book into a cabinet along with his unfinished diagram, closing the drawer and locking it with a small silver key. After straightening the cuffs of his shirt, he walks around the desk and out towards to door.
"I'm sorry Rose, I'm quite busy. I don't have time for this right now."
The old oak door rattles on its hinges for moment after Albert slams it shut behind himself.
Ah.
Not careful enough, then.
Perhaps next time. If there is a next time, that is. Her father is rarely so open in his communication as he was today. He had still lied, of course - this she knew - but there had been a density to his lies, a clarity, fictions built to cover the foundations of truth. So often there was nothing behind his lies, no drive or truth or greater motivation, just skin stretched taught over the hollow surface of a drum.
Perhaps though. Perhaps there would be a next time, and she would get the answers she craved.
Until then though, she will continue to read, and to look at photographs, and to practice her needlepoint.
She will continue to play games with Leonard, who calles her Rosie Posie and sings her songs and takes her on walks down by the lakeshore. She likes him very much, even though he refuses to ever look her in the eyes.
She will continue to study under Albert's tutelage, clinging to his strange rambling lessons about chemistry and alchemy and theology, because those are the only times they're able to have a conversation that doesn't feel like a carefully calculated game of chess.
She will continue to spend her evenings in the attic or the hidden room in the basement, having slow, painstaking conversations with William and carrying out his instructions with the utmost care. She doesn't understand everything he says, but she is learning.
She will continue to lie awake at night, listening to the groaning and the weeping coming from somewhere deep beneath the house.
She will continue to cling to the memories of a family she never knew.
She will continue to greet the present kindly as it comes, and she will continue to let theoast trail out lazily behind her as it pleases.
There is no rush.
After all, the past is never really past.