Pandora(26)

Hezekiah blinks blearily. ‘Surely you remember?’

Dora hesitates. It has been so long. She was eight years old when her parents died and now, at one and twenty, the memories she has of her childhood are fragmented, glimpsed as if looking sideways at the shards of a broken mirror. She remembers her time in London – her father’s business gatherings at Christmas, those weekly visits to Mr Clements with her mother which had meant so very much. And then in Greece, she remembers learning her Greek alphabet and numbers every morning, remembers bedtime stories when her mother would recount her love of history and Grecian myth. She remembers star-gazing on mountaintops, how both her parents taught her to identify Orion, Centaurus and Lyra, the Ursas Minor and Major.

She swallows. Dora remembers the dig site that fateful day, the man who pulled her from the wreckage, who later returned her mother’s cameo to her, its carved edges pitted with dirt. Those, those are the large shards. But the smaller ones … those are more fleeting, more difficult to grasp. She remembers al-fresco picnics at dusk, her parents’ laughter as they walked along sun-baked plains hand in hand. She remembers the cameo brooch, more recently the key. Her father’s face she struggles to picture, but her mother’s is more vivid: olive skin, dancing eyes, a quick and easy smile. She smelt, Dora thinks, of orange blossom.

‘Some things I remember,’ Dora says quietly. ‘But I knew her only as my mother, not as a woman. Not as a friend, as she would have one day been.’

She cannot keep the wistfulness from her voice. Lottie huffs into her glass.

Hezekiah breathes a deep, lethargic sigh. ‘Your mother was the most enticing woman I have ever known. So fine. So accomplished. She could draw, she could sing. Yet she had no qualms about wearing a pair of breeches and gallivanting around in the dirt when it suited her …’

Her uncle’s voice falters, trails off. Hezekiah stares a long moment at the large map on the wall and Dora wonders what memory he is picking apart. But then Lottie clears her throat, unlaces the top of her bodice, begins to fan herself with Hezekiah’s discarded wig and his attention goes immediately to the plump creamy curves of her breasts pushing up teasingly from their stays.

‘Why think of her when I’m here,’ Lottie murmurs, and she resumes rubbing Hezekiah’s calf with her stockinged toes.

The relationship between Lottie Norris and her uncle has never been a secret. It did not take Dora long to understand where Hezekiah had found her – Lottie had barely lived with them a week before it became apparent she was no cook or clean. Those tasks did not come naturally to her. Those tasks she learnt as the years went along. No, Dora knows what profession Lottie held before this, but until now she has never had to witness the proof of it and grimacing, Dora looks away. Sitting so close to him she hears the moment Hezekiah’s breath hitches. From the corner of her eye Dora sees Lottie raise the hem of her skirt. Hezekiah reaches for her and Lottie giggles as she is pulled onto his lap.

‘You’re far too warm,’ she whispers in his ear, fingers teasing his cravat. Then Lottie twists, reaches for the gin, fills her and Hezekiah’s glasses to the top.

Dora looks again to the bottle. Half left.

Very slowly she edges her seat away. The couple do not notice. Lottie tips her glass, lets the gin drip onto her chest. Hezekiah dips his head. The housekeeper laughs.

If, Dora thinks, she is very quiet and still, they will forget she is here.

Her attention turns to a tall thin cabinet in the corner of the room. Sitting on a shelf behind a glass door is a small globe of the world. Hezekiah brought it with him – along with the map on the wall – when he moved into the apartments, set it at first on an octagonal table in the hallway. Dora had been fascinated by the globe’s pitted ochre surface, its intricate detailing that set land and sea apart, and she used to spin it wildly on its axis until Hezekiah caught her and forbade her to ever touch it again. It was relegated then to the cabinet, stored safely out of reach from her ‘meddling hands’.

There is a sigh, a groan. Dora closes her eyes, tries her best to ignore what she cannot, focuses on her breathing, counts down from one hundred. Finally, just when she thinks she can bear it no longer, there is the dull chink of an empty glass dropping onto the rug. Dora opens her eyes. Hezekiah’s have begun to droop. Lottie sleeps, head resting on his breast. Hezekiah unsteadily raises his glass.

‘Are you tired yet, Uncle?’ Dora says softly and he grunts then, turns his head to look at her, and for a moment he stares at Dora as if he does not know her at all.

‘You always were difficult.’

His breath causes one of Lottie’s curls to ruffle.

‘Difficult?’

He wets his lips. ‘Why didn’t you listen to me? All you had to do was listen …’ Then Hezekiah’s chin falls onto his chest, and to Dora’s relief he begins to snore.

Finally. It is done.

Dora rises unsteadily from the chair. She sways slightly on her feet and, nauseous at what she has just witnessed, reaches for the now near-empty gin bottle, finishes the lot in four hard dregs.

Her eyes water. She coughs into her hand.

To work.

She looks at Lottie’s head resting against Hezekiah’s chest, wonders how far down the chain goes, if pulling it free will disturb her. Thanks to Lottie his cravat is now loose and, cringing, Dora slips her fingers between silk and skin slick with sweat. She reaches deep within the folds of his neck, pressing her fingers into its fleshy creases. When she feels the coarse thread of hair Dora pinches her eyes closed in disgust. Hezekiah sniffs, turns his face, and for one agonising moment Dora thinks she is trapped, but then she dares move her fingers and feels the rough links of chain beneath her nails. She begins to pull.