In Enigmate, Chapter I

Prologue

~ * ~

‘Look, Susan, the clinic,’ Jenny called. ‘We’re here!’

Susan stumbled after her, and the long, low building appeared around the bend. From the open doors, its ill and injured queue extended far down the path; Jenny and Susan took their place behind a young pregnant woman in threadbare jeans. There were few civilians among the camouflage, and no other women.

‘Queue very long lah,’ the woman said in broken accent; ‘long time to wait.’

Susan nodded, stifling a cough in her sleeve. Her head was still throbbing, and now that she had arrived, she wanted only to go home.

‘Where you come from? America?’

Susan shook her head, and Jenny answered, in the same accent, ‘We always stay here.’

‘Ah, yes, yes,’ the woman said, and added under her breath, ‘Meiguo ren.’

‘No, not American,’ Jenny said firmly. ‘Irish.’

Shivering a little, the woman pressed a hand against her womb. She looked at them steadily with dark eyes, eyes that did not understand, and shaped words with unsure lips. At last, she said, ‘You very kind lah. Very kind lah.’

‘Thanks. Xiexie.’ Jenny grinned so that both gaps showed in her teeth.

‘How o’re you?’

‘Nine,’ Jenny said proudly, ‘jiu; and Su is nineteen, shi jiu. You?’

‘I—shi ba, e’teen.’

The queue moved forward a few steps. Susan glanced down its length and suddenly, she felt sick with weariness. ‘Jenny,’ she began and paused to cough. ‘Jenny, let’s go home.’

‘Why? You aren’t any better yet.’

‘I know, but it will be dark before I see a doctor, and I—’ Her voice caught, and she coughed again; she must not cry in front of Jenny. ‘And I want to go home.

Jenny sighed. ‘All right, but we have to walk.’

‘I can make it,’ Susan said bravely. She took Jenny’s hand; it felt so cold.

‘Good-bye,’ Jenny said, waving to the young woman, who smiled in return. The two sisters turned back toward the main road. ‘Actually, I’m glad we’re going home,’ Jenny went on. ‘My sneakers are getting wet. And maybe Molly will make us tea, if we have any tea left.’

‘We don’t.’

They left a stand of pines for the bare road, now whipped by the wind. Susan wrapped a fold of her shawl over her head, but the cold still ran through, like water through a fishnet. Jenny, bundled in Susan’s outgrown coat, drew her nose back behind her scarf. ‘Is it too cold for you?’ she asked loudly; Susan shook her head, almost choking. By providential kindness, the wind did not oppose them but pressed them forward.

Though Jenny did not walk quickly, Susan soon lagged farther behind her. She was thinking nothing; she was hearing nothing; with eyes open, she was seeing nothing but the endless snow and her brown sneakers rising and falling, as cold and heavy as the sandbags heaped on the rise where Jenny had stopped to wait for her. Three steps, two steps, one step—She reached the pile and sank down against it.

‘There’s someone following us,’ Jenny said in an excited, conspiratorial tone from beneath her scarf.

‘Who?’ Susan asked, panting, and added hastily, ‘Don’t look.’

‘I don’t know. He has boots like a soldier and a blue jacket. I think he was at the clinic.’

Susan stiffened. ‘We have to go faster.’

‘Who is it?’

‘I don’t know any more than you do,’ Susan said, but she did; naive as Molly tried to keep her, she had caught enough of grown-up conversation to hear about girls and soldiers and deserted roads. ‘Likely he just happens to be going in the same direction. But we need to go faster, or it’ll be dark before we get home, and Molly will give us an awful scolding.’

‘Give you an awful scolding. You’re responsible.’

‘And you lost our bus fare for the way home. We’re both at fault.’

‘I didn’t mean to—’

‘It’s no use arguing.’ Susan dragged herself to her feet. ‘We have to hang together.’

Jenny glanced behind them. ‘Susan, he’s—’

‘Don’t,’ Susan snapped. ‘I told you not to look. Ignore him.’

‘But why?’

Susan folded her arms to still her trembling fingers. ‘I can’t explain right now, Jenny, love. You’ll understand later.’ She held out her hand, but Jenny shook her head.

‘It’s too cold,’ she said, drawing her arms deeper into her sleeves.

‘Come on,’ Susan sighed.

They walked beneath the shelter of the bare hillside, scraped vertical to make way for the road. At the first hairpin, they turned to face the wind with half-closed eyes. Jenny’s hood blew off her flying braids, and she struggled with numb fingers to pull it back into place before her scarf unwound completely. Its length caught around her arm; she shook it off, and it flew across the road and down, like an odd green stork, to perch in a gnarled, leafless tree. Jenny skipped back to the hairpin, shouting something that Susan, upwind of her, could not make out.

Above wheeled a hawk, riled by a motley handful of crows and their kin. Susan glanced to Jenny, just dashing across the road, and then back to the hawk, diving low to shake off its pursuers, circling around and around.

Snow sprayed across her as a lorry flew past, up the road, and left tracks dyed with streaks of crimson.

~ * ~

Marie-Claire pulled the middle drawer out of her desk and poured it onto her bed to ransack the half-ream of disorganised papers. She allowed disorder in only one drawer; the odd thing, she thought, was that most of her papers seemed to migrate to that very drawer, rather than out of them as she intended. Here was a rough sketch of Ophelia gathering upward-wilted flowers, her nose bent irretrievably sideways and one arm longer than the other; here was a list of trigonometric identities with a unit oval; here was a page from the dictionary—hourglass to housewife—which she had thought lost forever. The last she set on her desk to paste back into place. Between an essay on the character of Turnus and a graph of a parabola, she found the blue envelope marked AIRMAIL. It was a bit wrinkled in one corner; she scratched it flat with her fingernail and printed in black pen:

Marie-Claire Overman
1814 Liebig Street, Easthill
REPUBLIC OF ANGUO

She sealed the envelope with a silver star sticker, loosely enough that the officials at the post office would be able to open it without tearing it, and brought it and the cup sticky with Milo down to the kitchen. Jane was dicing peeled potatoes, and a recipe for chicken curry lay on the table. Marie-Claire set her cup in the sink.

‘May I go to the post office?’ she asked.

‘If there’d been a letter for you, miss, Dr Overman would have brought it home,’ Jane said without looking up. The knife slid through the potatoes with a damp crunch and thudded on the wooden board.

‘Oh, I’m not looking for mail. I want to post a letter to Grandmother.’

‘It’s snowing tonight, miss. Dr Overman can post it tomorrow on his way to the hospital.’

‘Daddy always forgets. And it’s not snowing very much, and I’ll wear my coat.’

Jane set down the knife with a sigh and opened a small drawer. ‘One—two—three dollars, twenty—forty—sixty—eighty—ninety—ninety-five cents.’ She counted the coins into Marie-Claire’s hand. ‘There you are, miss, unless they’ve changed the rates since Tuesday. Be back in an hour for dinner.’

‘I will. Don’t worry.’ Marie-Claire went out to the coat tree and poured the handful of change into her pocket. She felt decidedly like a pirate, storing away her plunder from some unlucky ship; or perhaps she was the skeely skipper Sir Patrick Spens, and the envelope held the braid letter from the king. She put on coat, hat, gloves, and boots, and went out into the street.

Picking her way around the snowy slush—for she was laith to wet her cork-heel’d shoon—she walked two blocks past high walls and high gates enclosing tall houses, trim yards, and shiny automobiles. A few schoolgirls passed her, swinging violin cases, smiling and chattering to each other. The bank and post office sat on the corner, and Marie-Claire slowly climbed the broad steps between parthenonian columns. The glass doors, guarded by a statue of a nearly-naked Ares, swung open, and she came into the warm air of the office and took off her gloves.

People in leather coats and fur coats, carrying briefcases, surrounded the counter, and Marie-Claire sat down on one of the sofas to wait. Between two potted palms, she saw Abigail sitting on the carpet, twisting her long braid; a trace of forlornness had broken through her impassive face, and Marie-Claire felt suddenly sorry for her.

Slowly, she rose and walked over to her. ‘Abigail?’ she said, and the girl looked up with her face cold again. ‘I—I’m Marie-Claire. I’m in your Catullus class, and I’m new to St. George’s this year.’

Abigail nodded.

‘Where do you come from?’ Marie-Claire asked hesitantly.

‘I’ve always lived here in Easthill. You?’

‘So have I,’ Marie-Claire said with a short laugh. ‘But I didn’t go to school before now because I had a tutor. My father comes from California, and my mother lives in Germany.’ She paused. ‘What’s your favourite class?’

Abigail looked at her warily, with dark, narrow eyes. ‘Literature,’ she said quietly.

‘What are you reading right now?’

‘Pride and Prejudice.’

‘That’s one of my favourite books. How do you like it?’

‘Well,’ Abigail said ambiguously. She twisted her braid again and then added suddenly, ‘We shan’t be reading Hamlet, though.’

‘Haven’t you read it before?’ Marie-Claire asked before she caught herself.

‘Not yet. I’ve meant to, for a while, but I haven’t found a copy.’

‘I have one, if you want to borrow it.’

Abigail did not smile, but she seemed to relax a bit. ‘I don’t want to take it if you need it.’

‘No, I don’t.’ Marie-Claire glanced to the counter; the crowd had begun to clear, and one window was open. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You must have been waiting for a while.’

Abigail rose, not quite gracefully, but with a little spring like an unconscious flourish, and went to the window. Behind her, Marie-Claire heard her ask: ‘Is there any letter from Braidedge for Abigail Leigh?’

The lady behind the counter frowned and shook her head. ‘I told you yesterday that they’d stopped the mail from the war zone. Nothing has changed.’

Abigail’s shoulders drooped a little, but she said bravely, ‘Thanks, ma’am.’

‘Wait for me,’ Marie-Claire whispered as she turned to go. Marie-Claire mined the change from the abyss of her pocket and set it on the counter with the letter. The lady counted it and flipped open the envelope, skimming over the lavender notepaper. Marie-Claire waited, unconcerned; it was only a note of thanks to her stepmother’s mother, who always sent her a book for Christmas. This year it was Birds of Asia, a small book with large, lively print and coloured pictures. The lady slid the note back into the envelope, sealed it, and stamped it. ‘Thanks, Miss Overman,’ she said with a smile. ‘Have a nice evening.’

Marie-Claire smiled back. She turned to speak to Abigail, but she was gone. With a sigh, she went out the glass doors, past Ares, and down the steps. Abigail was standing beside a column.

‘I can give you the book tonight,’ Marie-Claire said, ‘and you can read it this weekend. My house is just two blocks down the street. It’ll only take a moment.’

Abigail paused, looking down the street. ‘All right,’ she said.

They walked the first block without speaking; then Marie-Claire asked, ‘Who lives in Braidedge?’

‘My brother Elijah was drafted two years ago.’ She said this serenely, but Marie-Claire remembered her slight wilting when she heard that there was no letter.

‘I’m sorry,’ Marie-Claire said kindly.

Abigail straightened. ‘Don’t apologise. It’s not your fault: Fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum.’

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