Free Pinkerton's Sister by Peter Rushforth Page B

center of her palm, glowing red above the accumulated buds of cotton. The clouds were massing above the Hudson, level upon level, heavy with more snow. She watched them for a while.
    It was like the ending of
Villette
(Charlotte Brontë was certainly pushing her way forward this morning):
The skies hang full and dark — a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms — arches and broad radiations
. She saw figures unfurling slowly above her, moving with large, stately gestures, and reached up toward them, straining for a direction in which she might begin to move. Sometimes she would watch them for hours at a time from the window, or lying on her bed gazing up through the skylight, languid and irresolute, like a Victorian lady, an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, suffering from the vapors or consumption. She was, after all, born a Victorian (surely, even the most patriotic of Americans born during the presidency of Andrew Johnson would not think of herself as a Johnsonian?): her childhood, her young womanhood, had been
last century
. Though it was now more than three years into the twentieth century, difficult though this was to believe — 1900 1901, 1902 — she still found herself — when she wasn’t concentrating — beginning to write the year with an
18
instead of a
19
. She left a trail of scribbles and crossings-out on checks and bills, and disliked the untidiness. Harry Hollander had written a song about the beginning of the new century: “Let’s All Be Naughty in the Naughts (Do All the Things We Really Shouldn’t Oughts)”. Grammar sometimes took second place to rhyme in Harry’s songs.
    The clouds — it was oddly soothing — formed and re-formed, and the wind was howling round the house as it had been howling all night. This was not soothing.
    She concentrated her thoughts back onto the clouds, as if she were at 11 Park Place, trying to read shapes in the clouds, with Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster scribble-scribble-scribbling behind her.
    Tell me what you can see in those clouds, Miss Pinkerton.
    There was his voice again, telling her what it was she had to do.
    He was in the room, voyeuristically loitering in this Eve-of-St.-Agnes weather, hiding away and waiting to see her, like Porphyro spying on Madeline in her chamber, tantalizingly spreading out his seductive feast of candied apple, quince, plum, jellies, manna, dates, as she slept, as she dreamed…
    We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits …
“No,” said Lizzie: “No, no, no…”
    In the subterranean caverns of the mountain upon which the palace was built, the goblins lived. They were dwarfed and misshapen, they had strength equal to their cunning, and they planned to dig their way up into the palace and carry Princess Irene away to be a mate for their grotesque prince.
    Alice watched the shapes, shifting and changing, never at rest.
    The Shape of the Clouds.
    It could be the title of a novel.
    She tried to hide this away in a corner of her mind, to remember it, and moved Annie’s ring — she always thought of it as Annie’s ring, as if it were something she had borrowed in perpetuity, not something she had been given — from her middle finger to what she thought of as her wedding finger, to nudge her memory. Sometimes, if an idea came to her in the night, she would do this, or drop her handkerchief onto the floor, so that she would know — when she awoke — that there was something to remember. Annie’s ring, the little mirror, reminded her of what she ought not to forget. She collected titles, names for characters, ideas for her writing.
    Below her, in the early-morning darkness at the back of the house, lines of gas-lamps stretched away through the snow, marking out the lines of the streets that had not yet been built, the new developments where the fields and orchards had once been. It was strange to see the gas-lamps there before the houses had been built. They seemed to stretch away in a