The Music Box: Chapter Fifty

A slanting diamond of sunlight framed by the window rested on the kitchen floor. Isabelle wondered what would happen if one stood in it for too long; if the floor might open up and whisk you away, closing behind as if you had never been.

Going back over her dream of last night, a dream that hung in the air this morning like her own personal rain cloud hovering over her own head, she wondered at what it all meant.

It was true that she hadn’t had as much time to spend with Emily lately. While Percy worked by day and finished his book by night, a study on bird life that had received interest from a publisher he had met quite by chance passing through Seaforth, she had been working overtime to keep the house in order.

Percy, meanwhile, had been distant for some weeks. It wasn’t that he was deliberately avoiding them or anything like that, but even when he was there, at the dinner table or on their evening walks, you knew his mind was really in his papers, worrying over a wingspan or a flight pattern or a nesting habit.

Isabelle was immensely proud of Percy and his work, but she nevertheless felt a terrible loneliness when he was in his writing and sketching frame of mind, detached from her and impossible to form a connection. Emily always seemed to take it quite well, seemingly understanding that what he was doing was quite important to him.

The creaking door brought Isabelle back to her senses. Stepping carefully through the doorway, Emily shuffled through into the kitchen. In one hand she was holding a boar-bristled hair brush, in the other a length of buttercup-yellow ribbon. The way she held them out towards her mother seemed almost a peace offering, which Isabelle took it to be since Emily hadn’t come to her to have her hair brushed for a long time.

Wordlessly, she took the proffered brush and began stroking it through Emily’s hair. A pang of tenderness made her heart flutter. All her anger of last night began to dissipate. Isabelle thought back to when she was Emily’s age, the impossibility of relating with her parents, the troubled childhood that their chilly indifference to her existence entailed.

She wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to that fierce, independent spirit. Her family life was in many ways ideal – Percy was a loving, considerate, caring man; Emily was a bright, intelligent and generous daughter. They made ends meet and lived in relative comfort, certainly more so than she had ever imagined possible as a child.

Yet somewhere along the way, with all her needs met and a comfortable, untroubled life, something of her essence, her fire, has been snuffed out.

When the wolf had appeared at the window, everything changed. What had scared Isabelle most, what had terrified her more than the prospect that the wolf would enter the house and devour her, was the frisson of excitement that she felt, the sense that, finally, something was happening in her life again.

She did not dare admit anything like that to poor old Percy, particularly because she was unsure herself what it even meant. Spying Aloysius that night – for she knew it could be no other – she was given a glimpse into a world that could have been hers. She knew, of course, it was not a world for her, that she had followed her heart and that she loved Percy and Emily more than anything in the world, but it was nevertheless a shock to discover in herself these strange feelings of ambivalence to this life and an uncomfortable attraction to the danger of the unknown.

This had all messed with her fragile mind terribly and she put up little resistance to some time away to regather herself, relieved to be away from the scene of her encounter.

“Mother?”

“Yes Emily dear?”

“Tell me what you are thinking.”

Isabelle realised she had been brushing Emily’s hair in the same place over and over, quite absentmindedly. She reached for the ribbon and looped it underneath, crossed the ends and formed a quick bow.

“Oh, nothing particular,” Isabelle said in what she hoped was an off-hand fashion.
“Just thinking about what we might get up to today.”

Emily put her hand up to her hair, felt the ribbon in place and turned around.
“Mother?”

“Yes dear?”

“I’ll help you with anything you like today. But can I ask you one thing?”

“And what’s that?”

“Tell me about your time living in the woods.”