She read about the house on Fenwick Street, the early mornings, the first winter together, the way Thomas always left his books on the wrong shelf and Eveline always put them back, and neither of them ever mentioned it because some small negotiations are easier conducted in silence.
The fear did not vanish from the entries. Clara noticed this. On bad days, her mother still could not go out. The weight of other people's unfinished business still pressed too hard sometimes, still sent her to churches and quiet rooms and the garden with the gate latched. But something had changed in how she carried it — it had somewhere to go now, at the end of the day. Someone to set it down in front of.
Clara thought about Edmund buying Martha tea from the market stall. About the way Martha had pressed the seams of her dress that morning with short, efficient strokes and not said a single unnecessary word.
She thought: I know what that looks like now. I know where I learned it.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, which she had not planned to do, and turned the page.
Near the back of the diary, the handwriting changed again. Slower. More deliberate. As though each word was being chosen very carefully.
12th September, 1848
Clara was born four days ago.
She is very small. Thomas says all babies are very small, but I think she is especially so — she fits entirely in the crook of my arm, and she has the most serious expression I have ever seen on a person of four days old.
She has my eyes. Thomas says they might change but I know they will not. They are already exactly the colour they intend to be.
I held her this afternoon by the window and I checked her, the way I have been checking her every day since she arrived — fingers, toes, the small perfect arrangements of her. And I found something.
Behind her left ear. Very small. The colour of a bruise fading — not quite skin, not quite mark. I almost missed it. I would have missed it if I had not been looking.
I don't know what it is. Thomas says it is nothing — a birthmark, a shadow, it will fade. And perhaps he is right. Perhaps I am simply a new mother looking for things to worry about.
But I have spent my whole life learning to trust the feeling that something is not ordinary. And this feeling —
This feeling is not ordinary.
I will watch it. I will write it down. If it means something I want there to be a record.
Clara went very still.
She read the entry again.
Then she reached up slowly and pressed two fingers behind her left ear.
She had never had a birthmark. Her uncle had said so. Her aunt had confirmed it. The royal physician had found nothing.
But her mother had seen something. Four days after Clara was born. Something small and fading and wrong enough to make a woman who had spent her life learning to trust her instincts reach for her diary and write it down.
She turned the page. Three more entries — small, domestic, the ordinary texture of early motherhood. Thomas bringing her soup. Clara refuses to sleep. A particularly good afternoon in the garden.
Then one final entry, dated three weeks later. The handwriting was different here at the end, as though the writer had been interrupted or had simply run out of time.
4th October, 1848
I keep thinking about the mark. Thomas says I am tired and that new mothers see shadows everywhere and I know he is right but I cannot —
There was a spirit in the nursery last night. I have never had one come into the nursery before. She was very old — almost entirely without form, just the suggestion of a woman, faceless, standing beside Clara's crib. Not threatening. Not reaching for her. Just —
Watching.
I went to her and asked what she wanted and she showed me something. Just an image. A dark sea. And Clara — older, Clara grown — in a red
The sentence ended.
Blank page.
Clara sat at her writing desk in the cold north-facing room with her mother's diary open in her lap and looked at the unfinished sentence and felt the hair rise on the back of her neck.
Her mother had seen it. Seventeen years before the raven came through the palace window. Seventeen years before the physician's hall and the covenant and the full moon rising.
Eveline Peri had seen it, and had sat down to write it, and had never finished the sentence.
Clara closed the diary carefully.
She set it on the desk beside her mother's hairbrush and her father's ink-stained memory and the wooden horse she had brought down from the attic and placed on the windowsill where she could see it.
Then she folded her hands in her lap and sat in the quiet and let herself understand, completely and without flinching, what she had always known was coming.
The candle burned down to nothing.
She did not light another one.