Free The Memory of Lost Senses by Judith Kinghorn

willy-nilly. It smacks of one thing . . .”
    “Mm, what’s that?”
    Rosetta put down the rolling pin and leaned toward Cecily, her broad hands flat on the table. “Lustfulness.”
    “Lustfulness!” Cecily repeated.
    “You may well smirk, my girl, but it’s what robs men of what little sense they’re born with and sends women to the county asylum.”
    Lustfulness. It was not a word Cecily had heard spoken out loud before, or not that she could recall. Lustfulness: is that what had driven their new neighbor from one country to another, one man to another?
    “And it all comes from the French . . .” Rosetta was saying, stuck on her theme now. “I don’t want to know what they get up to over there, and I don’t want them bringing it over here neither.”
    Diminutive, dark, and comfortingly round, Rosetta, Cecily thought, would have made a brilliant actress. She understood drama, knew how to deliver lines. But her talent had been wasted—in service, and in a kitchen, someone else’s kitchen. For that was where she had spent her life. She had never been married and Cecily couldn’t be sure how old she was. Like so many others, she appeared to be aging and old at the same time. She was suspicious of any written word apart from those in the Bible, which she read most evenings, and she took enormous comfort in prayer. “I’ll make sure I include him/her/them/it in my prayers,” was one of her stock replies, and to almost anything. And though she liked to complain about the rector—his choice of hymns, his sermons, and his fondness for the New Testament—she was an ardent churchgoer, attending all three services on a Sunday in her waist-length cape and tiny bonnet tied tightly under her fat chin.
    The only thing Cecily knew for sure, the only thing she could relate to, was that Rosetta had loved and lost. She had only mentioned him once: someone named Wilf. He had been killed in the Boer War.
    “But if she has known great love over and over, is it so very wrong for her to have accepted it? How many hearts could have been broken? How many tears shed? And which is nobler, to take love and cherish it, or to throw it back because one has already known it?”
    But Rosetta appeared not to hear her. She continued with her rolling pin, eyes cast downwards, and said, “And who knows where she’s come from . . . could be anyone at all . . . anyone at all . . . I’ve read about folk who go overseas and come back all la-di-da, oh yes . . . could be anyone at all. Makes you wonder what happened to all them husbands,” she added, glancing up at Cecily with wide eyes.
    Cecily laughed. She said, “Oh Rosetta, only you would suspect the poor old lady of murder!”
    Rosetta made no reply. She pursed her lips and stretched her short neck as though trying to swallow words. Then she said, “You should go and tidy yourself up, missy. The Foxes are due here at seven.”

    Cecily Chadwick had been born toward the end of a century, and toward the end of a life. Her first proper word, whispered—as she’d been taught—was “Daddy”; her first sentence, with a finger to her lips, “Daddy not well.” She had taken her first steps the day of a great earthquake in Japan, but there had been no tremor of excitement in her small hushed world. And then, at the end, it had gone quieter still and all black and white as her ashen-faced mother, already in mourning, with the nurse and the rector by her side, explained, “Daddy has gone.”
    Since that time there had been little physical alteration in Cecily’s life. She had stayed on at the village school teaching the infants, and continued to live with her mother and sister in the house her father had built. But lately she had begun to feel a suffocating tightness about the village, like a gown she had outgrown but was still forced to wear. The sameness of each and every day was inescapable, the prospect of change remote. A yearning for excitement, she had been told,