“You think he will murder her?” asked Mrs. Blessingham.
“Her, who?” asked Genevieve. “I don’t know who dies. A woman, yes. But I don’t know who. Of course, Glorieta does prefer Willum.”
“That may be the trouble,” said Mrs. Blessingham. “They both do. In this case, it seems there’s nothing I can do about it. Thank you, Genevieve. We needn’t mention this to the scrutators.”
“Of course,” she murmured. Of course. Even mother had been quite clear that there were certain things one did not mention to the scrutators. About this particular thing, Mrs. Blessingham was the only one who knew, the only one who asked, the only one who used whatever it was Genevieve could do. How Mrs. Blessingham had known about her talent, Genevieve couldn’t say. She had never inquired, and Mrs. Blessingham had never told her. This was another of the things Genevieve didn’t really want to know. Knowing would mean she had to think about it, plan for it, acknowledge it. She refused to accept it, any of it at all.
During the medical examination, the doctor had taken note of Genevieve’s dreamy detachment and had asked many probing questions that Genevieve had tried to answer truthfully while not betraying herself.
“Can you remember being a child? What is your earliest memory?” the doctor asked, head cocked, hands busy taking notes.
“I try not to think about when I was little. It makes me sad.”
“You were how old when your mother died? Eleven? You should remember your mother very well.”
“I don’t think about her,” whispered Genevieve. “Really, really, I don’t.”
This was a lie. She remembered her mother often, but the remembered mother was the cellar mother she couldn’t talk about, the mother it was dangerous even to think about! Everything she remembered of the covenantly upstairs mother was implicit in the final scene: the shadowed room, the smell of sickness, though even then it was the cellar mother who had whispered, her voice full of desperate urgency:
“Remember what I have told you, darling girl. It will be hard and perhaps loathsome to you. I am sure the hard road is the one you must take. Yours may be the last generation, the one for whom all the practices were meant. Oh, I hope so. Remember our times together. Follow your talent. And, my love, listen for word from the sea!”
Those were her last words to Genevieve. No one else had ever called her darling. She tried to explain to the doctor without explaining. “I’d rather not care about things too much, doctor. When I do, it becomes . . . troublesome.”
On hearing this, the doctor frowned. The life expectancy among noblewomen was unaccountably short, and the doctor felt many of them died from this lack of involvement, this separation from life. She was sufficiently concerned that she spoke to Mrs. Blessingham about Genevieve’s detachment.
“Well, that dreaminess is so typical of dear Genevieve,” said Mrs. Blessingham disarmingly. “Her mother was much the same. Thank you, Doctor.”
Later she spoke to Genevieve herself. “Is it true you cannot remember your mother?”
Genevieve started to say yes, remembering in time that this was Mrs. Blessingham, who knew almost everything.
“No, ma’am. I remember her perfectly well. I just don’t want to talk about her.”
“Why is that?”
“Because of what she said when she was dying. She said I was to walk a hard road. She said it might be loathsome.”
“I see.” Mrs. Blessingham puzzled a moment. “So, since it will be hard and loathsome, you choose to take as little notice of it as possible?” Genevieve flushed. Perhaps that was true.
Mrs. Blessingham, who almost never showed emotion, actually grimaced, as though with pain. “Genevieve, your mother was here. She was schooled here. I was an assistant here in those days, no older than she, and we were friends. It was her dying request of your father that you be sent here, to me. It was she who told me about your talent, for she had it, also.”
Genevieve gaped, hearing this with a shock of realization. “Oh, Mrs. Blessingham, if she saw my future laid out for me, she must have had it, mustn’t she?”