Singer from the Sea by Sheri S. Tepper Read Free Book Online Page A

Blessingham, though in a gentler voice.
    Genevieve sighed. “I feel that someone dies. I see a body, a young woman. I don’t know whether it’s Carlotta or Glorieta or someone else, but whatever is happening is connected to them. I know Willum is in it, for I see his face. I hear his voice and a baby crying. I smell blood.”
    Whenever people came into her certainties, she could only identify those she already knew. Others were indistinct, almost like manikins, stand-ins for real people. She saw someone doing something without being able to see why it was done, or by whom. Sometimes she would see people she did not recognize at all, but this time she knew it was Willum, that same Willum she had recently seen with Glorieta on the terrace, his face full of fear and longing.
    “You think he will murder her?” asked Mrs. Blessingham.
    “Her, who?” asked Genevieve. “I don’t know who dies. A woman, yes. But I don’t know who. Of course, Glorieta does prefer Willum.”
    “That may be the trouble,” said Mrs. Blessingham. “They both do. In this case, it seems there’s nothing I can do about it. Thank you, Genevieve. We needn’t mention this to the scrutators.”
    “Of course,” she murmured. Of course. Even mother had been quite clear that there were certain things one did not mention to the scrutators. About this particular thing, Mrs. Blessingham was the only one who knew, the only one who asked, the only one who used whatever it was Genevieve could do. How Mrs. Blessingham had known about her talent, Genevieve couldn’t say. She had never inquired, and Mrs. Blessingham had never told her. This was another of the things Genevieve didn’t really want to know. Knowing would mean she had to think about it, plan for it, acknowledge it. She refused to accept it, any of it at all.
    During the medical examination, the doctor had taken note of Genevieve’s dreamy detachment and had asked many probing questions that Genevieve had tried to answer truthfully while not betraying herself.
    “Can you remember being a child? What is your earliestmemory?” the doctor asked, head cocked, hands busy taking notes.
    “I try not to think about when I was little. It makes me sad.”
    “You were how old when your mother died? Eleven? You should remember your mother very well.”
    “I don’t think about her,” whispered Genevieve. “Really, really, I don’t.”
    This was a lie. She remembered her mother often, but the remembered mother was the cellar mother she couldn’t talk about, the mother it was dangerous even to think about! Everything she remembered of the covenantly upstairs mother was implicit in the final scene: the shadowed room, the smell of sickness, though even then it was the cellar mother who had whispered, her voice full of desperate urgency:
    “Remember what I have told you, darling girl. It will be hard and perhaps loathsome to you. I am sure the hard road is the one you must take. Yours may be the last generation, the one for whom all the practices were meant. Oh, I hope so. Remember our times together. Follow your talent. And, my love, listen for word from the sea!”
    Those were her last words to Genevieve. No one else had ever called her darling. She tried to explain to the doctor without explaining. “I’d rather not care about things too much, doctor. When I do, it becomes … troublesome.”
    On hearing this, the doctor frowned. The life expectancy among noblewomen was unaccountably short, and the doctor felt many of them died from this lack of involvement, this separation from life. She was sufficiently concerned that she spoke to Mrs. Blessingham about Genevieve’s detachment.
    “Well, that dreaminess is so typical of dear Genevieve,” said Mrs. Blessingham disarmingly. “Her mother was much the same. Thank you, Doctor.”
    Later she spoke to Genevieve herself. “Is it true you cannot remember your mother?”
    Genevieve started to say yes, remembering in time that this was Mrs.