Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz Read Free Book Online Page B

Wintermute stiffened. Clara had touched a nerve. He was ashamed of it, but he often found himself wishing that Charles Augustus had been the twin to survive the cholera. It was his most terrible secret. He loved Clara. He was quite sure he loved her, though he sometimes felt he didn’t know her very well. But a man needed a son. Dr. Wintermute had placed his dearest hopes in his firstborn son. Charles Augustus had been a promising boy, bright and strong and handsome. The deaths of baby Quentin and his other two daughters were deep wounds, but nothing was worse than the loss of Charles Augustus.
    Clara’s breath was coming in gasps and spasms. Dr. Wintermute forced his attention back to his daughter. “Clara,” he said, “please stop crying.”
    Clara averted her face.
    “Your mother will forgive you in time,” Dr. Wintermute assured her. “You must remember”— with a twisted smile —“you’re the only little girl we have. Your mother loves you. As do I.” He forced himself to lean over the bed and kiss his daughter’s wet cheek.
    Clara clung to him, pressing her face against his sleeve. He could feel her shaking. “I ought to have eaten the watercress,” she said. “If I’d eaten the watercress, I’d have —”
    Dr. Wintermute could bear no more. “For God’s sake, Clara!” he said. “You must not say these things. You are making yourself ill.” He heard footsteps on the stairs: Miss Cameron was returning with the glass of hot milk. His heart lifted. All at once he could not wait to return to his quiet study, with its glowing fire and decanter of port.
    He pried Clara’s arms loose and stood up, smoothing his wrinkled coat. Clara looked straight into his face. Her eyelids were red, but her gaze was like a lance. Dr. Wintermute had a sudden, uncomfortable conviction that she had seen into his soul. It was a look he was to remember often in the weeks to come.

N ovember the sixth was also the witch’s birthday. There were no parcels, no letters, and no cake; Cassandra did not expect anyone to wish her many happy returns, and she would have been rude if anyone had. She saw no visitors but the doctor, who examined her mutilated hand and tried, once again, to explain that the safest course would be to amputate. Cassandra made use of her good hand to seize the tray of medicine bottles by her bed and hurl it at him. The doctor backed up, stammering apologies, and the servants hastened to show him out.
    Exhausted by her tantrum, Cassandra fell asleep and did not awaken until after dark. The pain in her hand was sharper. It throbbed like a drumbeat, making her head reel. She felt like a wolf with its paw in a trap. She wished she had a wolf’s courage and could bite off her hand at the wrist, separating herself from the pain.
    She sat up and drew the bed curtains, craving cold air. Her thumbnail scratched at the filigree locket, feeling for the spring that would release the fire opal. At last she found it, and the phoenix-stone fell onto the counterpane. Cassandra rubbed it against her swollen hand, rolling it like a child playing with a marble.
    The pain changed. It did not leave her but became a fierce and gnawing pleasure. Tears of relief filled the witch’s eyes. Cassandra knew that the phoenix-stone would heal her. Underneath the swollen flesh, the bones were knitting. She fixed her eyes on the jewel as it tumbled and twirled.
    The colors held her spellbound. For seventy-one years, she had gazed into the stone and never grown weary of it. Sometimes the colored flames inside it were sharp edged, like sparks or crystals; at other times they were long and sinuous, like eels in a scarlet sea. No pleasure in her life could rival this: the glamour of the shifting colors and the dulling of her pain.
    How could she have dreamed of crushing the stone? She had come close to losing it; she had wielded the silver mirror with force enough to shatter the metacarpal bones in her hand. If her arm had not changed