When it was time, I went to Emmeline’s quarters. It was the first time I had been there as an invited guest, and the first thing I noticed, before I eveered the bedroom, was the thiess of the silence. I paused in the doorway—they had not noticed me yet—and realized it was their whispering. On the edge of inaudibility, the rub of breath over vocal cords made ripples in the air. Soft plosives that were gone before you could hear them, muffled sibilants that you might mistake for the sound of your own blood in your ears. Each time I thought it had stopped a hushed sussuration brushed against my ear like a moth alighting on my hair, then fluttered away again.
I cleared my throat.
‘Margaret.“ Miss Winter, her wheelchair positioned o her sister, gestured to a chair oher side of the bed. ”How good of you.“
I looked at Emmeline’s fa the pillow. The red and the white were the same red and white of scarring and burn damage that I had seen before; she had lost none of her well-fed plumpness; her hair was still the tangled skein of white. Listlessly her gaze wandered over the ceiling; she appeared indifferent to my presence. Where was the difference? For she was different. Some alteration had taken pla her, a ge instantly visible to the eye, though too elusive to define. She had lost nothing of her strength, though. One arm extended outside the coverlet and in it she had Miss Winter’s hand in a firm grip.
‘How are you, Emmeline?“ I asked nervously.
‘She is not well,“ said Miss Winter.
Miss Wioo, had ged i days. But in her disease was a distillation: The more it reduced her, the more it exposed her essence. Every time I saw her she seemed dimihinner, frailer, more transparent, and the weaker she grew, the more the steel at her ter was revealed.
All the same, it was a very thin, weak hand that Emmeline was grasping in the clutch of her own heavy fist.
‘Would you like me to read?“ I asked.
‘By all means.“
I read a chapter. Then, “She’s asleep,” Miss Winter murmured. Emmeline’s eyes were closed; her breathing was deep and regular. She had released her grip on her sister’s hand, and Miss Winter was rubbing the life bato it. There were the beginnings of bruises on her fingers.
Seeing the dire of my gaze, she drew her hands into her shawl. “I’m sorry about this interruption to our work,” she said. “I had to send you away once before when Emmeline was ill. And now, too, I must spend my time with her, and our project must wait. But it won’t be long now. And there is Christmas ing. You will be wanting to leave us ah your family. When you e back after the holiday we will see how things stand. I expect… ”—it was the briefest of pauses—“we shall be able tain by then.”
I did not immediately uand her meaning. The words were ambiguous; it was her voice that gave it away. My eyes leaped to Emmeline’s sleeping face.
‘Do you mean… ?“
Miss Winter sighed. “Don’t be taken in by the fact that she seems s. She has been ill for a very long time. For years I assumed that I would live to see her depart before me. Then, when I fell ill, I was not so sure. And now it seems we are in a race to the finish line.”
So that’s what we were waiting for. The event without which the story could not end.
Suddenly my throat was dry and my heart was frightened as a child’s.
Dying. Emmeline was dying.
‘Is it my fault?“
‘Your fault? How should it be your fault?“ Miss Winter s
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