always felt as if I could never get enough of it, having had so little of it in my life.
I went upstairs and found that Janet had done an excellent job tidying my trunk. I decided I would close it up now and leave the few belongings left over to be packed in a separate valise. I was buckling the straps to the compartments when I noticed a tear in the leather straps that bound the edge of the interior wood frame. I silently cursed. No doubt the handiwork of Mr. Danby’s rough handling. That disagreeable old goat must have dropped it right on the corner, which I could see had been patched before.
I told myself not to worry over it; the tear could be repaired again. But this was my mother’s portmanteau. My father had given it to her for their wedding trip to France. Her name was written in gold letters on the front, worn away now but with the impressions of the embossing still evident. I liked how large it was, how it opened like a double-hung wardrobe on two sets of hinges to best display all that was packed inside, how I could cram quite an astounding amount in it. The leather was cracked, the brass hinges green with age, but it was infinitely precious to me.
My fingers smoothed the tear, as if rubbing would mend it, and I noticed something written on the underside of the hide covering. Prying it up, I found words printed in faded India ink, written in a jagged, spidery scrawl.
Darkling I listen: And for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death.
My heart did a queer flip and bump. My mother’s hand? I did not know, for I had never seen anything written by her, not even her name on the inside cover of a book. But it had to be hers. My hand shook. It was as if she had reached across time, across space, to speak to me. I struggled for a moment against a surge of emotion, sadness warring with the thrill of hearing something from the woman I had longed to know all of my life.
But, oh God, what words these were. Half in love with easeful Death . . . I recognized the line. It was from Keats. His Ode to a Nightingale was one of his best-known works, a moody treatise to the night bird, a harbinger of death. He had written it while mortally stricken with tuberculosis. In a grim period in my early adolescence, I had reveled in the lines, finding a match for my pubescent suffering and my unfortunate preoccupation with death. Those had been the hardest years, with Judith at her most domineering. I had found kinship with the suffering poet, who longed for the release of eternal sleep.
I closed my eyes tight against my raging emotions. Laura, my mother, could not die, though she, too, longed for death—real death, that is. Deliverance from the fate which I only recently learned had been her misfortune to bear. I vowed again—this must have been the hundredth, perhaps thousandth time—to find her, release her, do what I was born to do. To kill her. No. I mustn’t think of it that way. To bring her the gift of death.
Of easeful death.
The hour was late. I tucked the flap of hide back into place. Dashing the wetness from my eyes, I undressed and climbed into bed.
With her so much on my mind, I expected to dream of my mother. I was wrong.
My sleep was ravaged by something else, something unexpected and raw, even wicked. It reared into my dreams, dreams that whipped through my mind like a tempest. Erotic charges, like a heat storm playing over my flesh, darted and flashed through my nerve endings. Images of lust were cast in my mind in shades of gold and shadow, sequenced with shocking clarity: of me making love with a man.
I saw myself upon a bed with silken sheets and gauzy bed curtains tangling around me, their movements as sinewy and sensual as my own, touching my naked skin like a caress. Hands—a man’s hands—touched me, trailing in the wake of the silk. I reached for him, my unseen lover, my limbs languid and heavy with desire. His naked torso emerged from the undulating fabric, gleaming in light
I went upstairs and found that Janet had done an excellent job tidying my trunk. I decided I would close it up now and leave the few belongings left over to be packed in a separate valise. I was buckling the straps to the compartments when I noticed a tear in the leather straps that bound the edge of the interior wood frame. I silently cursed. No doubt the handiwork of Mr. Danby’s rough handling. That disagreeable old goat must have dropped it right on the corner, which I could see had been patched before.
I told myself not to worry over it; the tear could be repaired again. But this was my mother’s portmanteau. My father had given it to her for their wedding trip to France. Her name was written in gold letters on the front, worn away now but with the impressions of the embossing still evident. I liked how large it was, how it opened like a double-hung wardrobe on two sets of hinges to best display all that was packed inside, how I could cram quite an astounding amount in it. The leather was cracked, the brass hinges green with age, but it was infinitely precious to me.
My fingers smoothed the tear, as if rubbing would mend it, and I noticed something written on the underside of the hide covering. Prying it up, I found words printed in faded India ink, written in a jagged, spidery scrawl.
Darkling I listen: And for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death.
My heart did a queer flip and bump. My mother’s hand? I did not know, for I had never seen anything written by her, not even her name on the inside cover of a book. But it had to be hers. My hand shook. It was as if she had reached across time, across space, to speak to me. I struggled for a moment against a surge of emotion, sadness warring with the thrill of hearing something from the woman I had longed to know all of my life.
But, oh God, what words these were. Half in love with easeful Death . . . I recognized the line. It was from Keats. His Ode to a Nightingale was one of his best-known works, a moody treatise to the night bird, a harbinger of death. He had written it while mortally stricken with tuberculosis. In a grim period in my early adolescence, I had reveled in the lines, finding a match for my pubescent suffering and my unfortunate preoccupation with death. Those had been the hardest years, with Judith at her most domineering. I had found kinship with the suffering poet, who longed for the release of eternal sleep.
I closed my eyes tight against my raging emotions. Laura, my mother, could not die, though she, too, longed for death—real death, that is. Deliverance from the fate which I only recently learned had been her misfortune to bear. I vowed again—this must have been the hundredth, perhaps thousandth time—to find her, release her, do what I was born to do. To kill her. No. I mustn’t think of it that way. To bring her the gift of death.
Of easeful death.
The hour was late. I tucked the flap of hide back into place. Dashing the wetness from my eyes, I undressed and climbed into bed.
With her so much on my mind, I expected to dream of my mother. I was wrong.
My sleep was ravaged by something else, something unexpected and raw, even wicked. It reared into my dreams, dreams that whipped through my mind like a tempest. Erotic charges, like a heat storm playing over my flesh, darted and flashed through my nerve endings. Images of lust were cast in my mind in shades of gold and shadow, sequenced with shocking clarity: of me making love with a man.
I saw myself upon a bed with silken sheets and gauzy bed curtains tangling around me, their movements as sinewy and sensual as my own, touching my naked skin like a caress. Hands—a man’s hands—touched me, trailing in the wake of the silk. I reached for him, my unseen lover, my limbs languid and heavy with desire. His naked torso emerged from the undulating fabric, gleaming in light
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