One
A question had been playing on Calais’ mind for a while.
She toyed with her food, involuntarily separating everything into portions. Breakfast was always served at nine and consisted of boiled peas, lumpy mashed potato served with a blackish soup and a tall glass of water.
The servants of the house kept themselves hidden from Calais. Cousin Mildew didn’t want her to mingle with the servants or pick up their common ways. She never saw them lay the table or put out the fire in her room, and if she spotted them along the hallway they scattered like marbles across a sloped floor.
Cousin Mildew and Wilbur ignored her existence. Silence wafted around the room and settled around the four corners.
The room was bare and only contained a long table with high chairs around it. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, the crystal glass smudged by dirty fingers that had once replaced the lights. Calais looked up at them. They looked like moths in a glass and she imagined them fluttering inside.
Mildew extended a long arm and forced Calais’ head down. She was at the head of the table with Wilbur on her right and Calais on her left. The rest of the chairs were empty, pathetically hoping to be occupied one day.
Wilbur had finished his breakfast. Calais wasn’t surprised to find his plate gone and assumed a servant must have taken it away while she was preoccupied with the imaginary moths.
She shivered. It was cold as usual. The burning fire did little to warm them, the flames distracted her momentarily—she was sure something had moved among the logs and squinted for better vision. Her attention span was very short. She gave up and anxiety pushed her to draw attention.
“Cousin Mildew?”
The woman sipped her tea. Her thoughts were elsewhere while her ears were open for discussion, she hoped the child would forget it had spoken and leave the room. She saw the child’s mouth open from the corner of her eyes.
“Are you pregnant?”
Calais had plunged into the question. The words slipped out as if a foreign tongue had spoken them and she awaited her cousin’s response.
Mildew coughed and sent a spray of tea hissing across the table. The brown liquid rained onto the polished table and slid down the side of an empty frosted vase, a puddle formed around the base and quickly connected with other spots of splattered tea.
She gripped a hand around Calais’ collar and forced the girl to stand on her feet. They came face to face, breathing the same musty air. She had moved with such ferocity that the girl almost jumped in fear and fled the room.
“No!” Mildew screeched.
Calais’ eyes widened in awe at the woman’s anger. “Are you going to have any children?”
Mildew’s eyebrows shot up, hidden by a fringe of chopped black hair and she virtually screamed with fury. “What a thing to ask, insolent child!”
“It was only a question, Cousin. I’ve been thinking about your fortune,”
Wilbur snorted. His eyes scanned the words of his paper at an impossible rate, taking in information, yet he couldn’t help but listen to the conversation.
“What would you know about that?” Tight-lipped, Mildew eyed her suspiciously. The eyebrows descended and threatened to pulverise Calais with their V-shaped angle.
Calais held her guard. Her cousin wasn’t particularly a bright woman but saying the wrong thing would rouse a deadly notion inside her—she was notorious for experimenting on all the cruel ways, possible, to hurt a child.
“I want to know who gets everything when you’re dead,”
“Humph!” Mildew shoved her aside and sat comfortably on her chair. “You ought to know the answer, there are very few surviving members of our family left and your parents did leave everything to you,”
“Does this mean... you’ve been living on my inheritance all this time?”
Wilbur turned his paper to the crossword at the back. “Sew her lips, darling,” he said with irritation.
“Shut up,” Mildew said to Calais.
“All right.”
The matter was closed and Mildew wiped her lips with a napkin. She was tall and extremely thin, her bob cut gave her a boyish look and she dressed in tight trousers and shirts with ruffles—men’s clothes.
Wilbur, Mildew’s husband, was a bookish man. His dark hair was plastered to his skull and glossed to shine. He had thin lips, nothing but a long line pointed downward at the ends, to represent his mouth, and fathomless eyes that could see through lies and stone walls—he often knew when Calais was prying around downstairs. He was always wearing a tailored suit with a snuffbox hidden in the breast pocket.
The man frequently looked down at Calais through his gilt framed spectacles, sometimes he took them off to inflict a strange power of hypnosis over her. She didn’t like it when this happened.
