The Music Box: Part IV: Chapter Forty-Two

Isabelle Button heard the front door creak heavily on its ageing hinges. From where she stood at the stove, she couldn’t see directly through to the hall, but she could tell by the way the door was slowly being swung back into place that Emily was trying to keep as low a profile as she could.

And no wonder - it was well past the time she should have been home. Isabelle hadn’t been too worried, she knew Mrs Tibbits would send her off if she was too underfoot, but it wasn’t like Emily to stay out so long after she would have known her mother would have expected her back. Isabelle put the lid back on the stew she had been keeping warm over the stove and turned to face the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron.

She waited for Emily to appear in the doorway, but heard her footfall moving up the stairs.

“Emily Button, I would like to see you please,” she said firmly, flinching as she realised her ‘no-nonsense’ voice was not a long way from that her own mother used to use. This softened her slightly, for she prided herself on being nothing like her own mother in any respect. “Please come to the kitchen.”

“Yes mother, I’m just going to freshen, I’ve been helping out in the garden and I have just seen my hands are still quite dirty.”

Isabelle acquiesced, busying herself with the cutlery and plates on the table, rearranging them for at least the third time. She liked to think she was an easy-go-lucky, carefree kind of mother, but the truth was ever since her turn she had been drawing a protective wing tightly around Emily. She wasn’t sure if this was for Emily’s protection or there was more to it than that, as though she needed the weight of motherhood as an anchor to keep her grounded, stop her being spirited away by whatever malevolent influence was able to have its affect on her vulnerable state.

She had resisted going over to the Tibbits residence herself to check on Emily. While she may be fretful, she was also wary of showing her concern to the rest of the village. The last thing she or any of the Button family needed was for there to be more talk than there already must be.

Finding herself standing at the window, Isabelle gazed out into the darkening twilight. The bare trees were sending their long slender fingers clawing up into an indigo sky. Darker, bruised clouds hung near, in anticipation she felt - waiting to hear what admonishments she had in store for her only daughter. Lower, through the trees and sitting just above the horizon line, the pale liquid violet that marked the last of the day, fast scampering away, sat brimming with resistance to its banishment. But even as she watched the heaviness of the blanketing evening squashed it lower and lower until there was barely a trace to be seen, as though the very day itself had buckled under the sheer dense triumphalism of night.

The day had been a relatively fine one, enough sun to put a reddish rose into her cheeks and only the odd bright cloud lazily sweeping overhead, dancing beneath the sun but never really threatening its reign. Yet by the middle of the afternoon that warmish breeze that had rolled over the hill was in retreat, in its place the salted bluster of the sea. Short, sharp gusts that swept even the light away, for it was a tired, wan light that closed out the day, the sun tiring in its fight against the wind and bedding down. It sank silently behind the sea, which responded by lessening the violence of the wind it sent, not so much a graceful victor as one that simply lost interest once the struggle was over and won.

None of this escaped Isabelle’s notice. It didn’t sit there at the front of her thoughts, but registered at a deeper level, it was part of her make-up, the seasons and nature’s unpredictable dance in a way at the very centre of her own relationship with the world.

She had been a child of the sea and nothing had really changed. While she might not have spent her days out on the ocean, dropping nets into its invisible depths and rounding up what mysterious bounties could be divined, it was no less coursing through her veins than it had been of anyone else in her family.

Her childhood skin had been scoured with its abrasive promises. She would lie awake at night, picturing a life out on one of those boats such as her father’s, absent-mindedly tasting the salt crust on the back of her hand. One night she had stayed away at the home of a distant aunt and uncle and was terrified by the silence, the missing roar of the night ocean like a missing body part. Her thumping heart was terrifying her more, the blood in her ears making her want to cry out. It took all her will not to swing her legs out of bed and tear off into the night and for home.

She slept not a wink and vowed she would never return.

Though the wind had dropped, the sound of the sea was now carrying up through the stillness of the night. Isabelle listened to her faint lullaby, knowing it wasn’t to be trusted. There was something a little off-kilter in it tonight, a wisp of a warning, but Isabelle closed her thoughts to it so as to better concentrate on the tasks at hand. Her mind was brought back to the house by the sound of wood scraping on polished wood – Percival in the study upstairs moving his chair back from his desk. She knew, from experience, that this did not signal an impending arrival, but was the first in a series of little rituals that would eventually deliver him downstairs and to dinner.

First he would push back from the desk, his hard-backed chair sliding across the floor rather than being lifted. But it would be some time before he took advantage of the extra space to depart the chair.

He would twirl his quill lightly in his right hand, replacing it carefully in its stand. Next he would remove his glasses with his now free right hand, holding them by the arm while he rubbed his tired eyes with his left fingertips, which would move from his eyes up to his creased forehead where they would continue to rub.

He would close the book before him, the leathery weight of the binding producing a small whump as it pushed the pages together. He would run a hand over the cover, feeling its texture, its light rises and falls. Finally, he would replace it on its side at the end of the line of such volumes collecting at the furthest reach of his desk, then close his eyes.

Here he would sit for another few minutes, drawing his thoughts away from the front of his mind, where he had been juggling them and attempting to fit them together like a jigsaw, filing them away for next time.

Isabelle heard Emily’s light step coming back down from the top of the stairs, a pause after each left-right step to delay the telling off she knew would be coming her way.

Finally she appeared in the doorway, resting a small delicate hand on the doorframe, the flickering light of the lantern casting a strange shadow across her face.

“Hello mother.”


It's been a little while since the last chapter... jump back to July posts if you need a refresher as to what on earth is going on