“Let us abandon the charade where we both pretend to have no idea what happened to my locket. Where we pretend you have been a saint since Detective McCreadie brought you to me. I did not expect sainthood, Catriona. I fancy myself more worldly-wise than the charitable matron who gives a ha’penny to a beggar child and is shocked to find her pockets picked. My birth placed me three rungs up from you on the ladder of life. I am reaching down to give you the boost denied by fate. That is all.”
She folds her hands on the desk. “I did not expect you to immediately abandon your old ways. It was half a year before Alice stopped picking the pockets of our guests. I did not scold her. I simply gave her the support she required to finally accept that her life here was secure, that she would not soon need those pennies to survive.”
Isla rubs a hand over her face. “Now I sound exactly like those I seek to rise above, the matron so smug about her goodness and charity. I am tired, Catriona, and I am frustrated, and I am trying to explain something that you already ought to know, because you are not a ten-year-old child. I know you have stolen from me. I know Mrs. Wallace has caught you and not told me. Little goes on in this house of which I am not aware. My point is that I know you stole my locket, and I will no longer dance around the accusation. You have it, and I want it back. It is not like the pennies Alice stole, easily replaced. Return it, and we shall speak no more on the matter.”
“I…” I take a deep breath. “I do not doubt that I stole it, ma’am, and I have upturned my room searching for it. Idohope to find it. Only I cannot remember that I took it and where I put it.”
“On account of your head.”
“Yes, ma’am. My memory is worse than I have been letting on for fear of losing my position, but I do not feel right hiding it from you.”
“Your memory is damaged, and yet you clearly remember how to speak, even better than before. Your vocabulary is much expanded, your diction is higher, and you have suddenly remembered your ability to read and write. It is almost as if that blow to the headimprovedyour memory rather than damaging it.”
“I realize that may seem odd,” I say, “but I suspect it’s not that I’ve suddenly remembered manners or vocabulary. Rather I have forgotten that I am supposed to be playing a role. Clearly my life before this was such that I learned to hide my upbringing and education for fear of seeming to act above my station.”
“Which you continued with me, lest I think you were putting on airs knowing how to read and write.”
“Er…” I remember saying something like this to Gray, and his obvious confusion. That makes much more sense now that I’ve met Isla. Also now that I’ve realized that when Alice disappears for half the afternoon, she’s doing lesson work. I’ve seen Mrs. Wallace reading, and I suspect Simon reads, too.
“I have long suspected you may have lied about your ability to read and write, Catriona. This is Scotland, after all. Your excuse always seemed exactly that.”
Okay, so maybe it’s not just this household where a servant would know how to read and write. Was Catriona truly an exception? Or did she lie?
I clear my throat. “I no longer remember why I chose to hide it. I must have thought there was some advantage to pretending. As Dr. Gray has pointed out, my handwriting is atrocious, and if you asked me to pen letters for you, as a lady’s maid might do…” I trail off, realizing my excuse is getting even more ridiculous by the word.
“I do not know my reasoning,” I say finally.
“You only know that you barely remember your old self and feel like an entirely different person, because of the injury to your head.”
“Yes. That is it exactly.”
She folds her hands on the desk. “Do you know where I have been today, Catriona? Consulting with experts in the field of neurological science. My brother may be the medical doctor, but the brain does not interest him. Well, not unless it is splattered around a dead body. He has doubtless read some journal article on personality changes due to brain trauma, and so he has decided that explains your situation because it is a convenient solution.”
She taps an ornate wooden box. “This is what my brother likes to do with inconvenient and inconsequential problems. Box them up and shove them aside so that he may focus on the meaningful ones. His maid seems different? That is odd, but she is still filling his coffee cup and cleaning his house, so it is of no matter. She suddenly knows how to read and write? Also odd, but she can take notes now, and that is quite useful. Once, when we were children, I thought to play a delightful trick on him. Each day, I’d move something in his room at night. I planned to blame ghosts. Except my brother didn’t mention the moved objects until I pulled his dresser into the middle of the room, and he banged into it in the night. While he had noticed items had moved, until they inconvenienced him, he presumed some logical cause and carried on. Hugh joked that even if Duncan had discovered itwasghosts, he would only have processed the information and carried on, so long as they did not cause him any trouble.”
I say nothing. I know where this is going, and I’m not rushing it along. I’m too busy thinking of a way out of it.
“My brother believes brain trauma is the answer, and so he has neatlyboxed that up and moved on. He sees no harm in our maid having a new personality, not if it is a far more pleasant one. But I see harm, Catriona, because I see deceit. You are up to something. I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt, and so I consulted with experts, all of whom assured me that what I described is impossible. You hit your head. You did not suffer actual damage to your brain, not the type seen in personality changes. In short, you are lying.”
I say nothing. I need to let that accusation sit, to give it room and weight before I reply. When it’s had what it needs, I say, slowly, “Is it possible, ma’am, that if I am deceiving you, my motives are indeed harmless? If my brush with death has made me realize the—”
“—the error of your ways, and now you repent, and have become a changed person? Like Ebenezer Scrooge after facing his three Christmas ghosts?”
“I know you are mocking me, ma’am, but I do want to do better, and perhaps I wouldliketo forget who I was. I am simply going about it the wrong way, blaming the injury.”
“That’s the truth then? That this is the new Catriona Mitchell? Not a guise pulled on to please?”
I frown at her.
She leans back in her chair. “Come now, Catriona. Do you think me that gullible? You were attacked in the Grassmarket, where you ought not to have been. I was on holiday, and you took advantage. You became involved in something that led to a near-fatal attack. When you woke, you feared my brother would send you on your way. If not, surely I would when I returned. Is it possible you had a change of heart? A near-death turning point? Yes, but you are presenting us with an almost unrecognizable Catriona. One who is well mannered yet not fawning. Confident yet not haughty. Intelligent. Hardworking. Respectful to Mrs. Wallace. Kind to Alice. And instead of your usual disgust at working for an undertaker, you aregreatlyinterested in his studies, even reading a thirteenth-century translated work on it.”
“Ididread that. Iaminterested.”
“This is not you, Catriona. Unless you are claiming to be proof of changelings. A human girl who has cast out her fairy doppelgänger and reclaimed her rightful place.”
“I—”
“You have been here long enough to assess what type of young woman we’d most like in our home, and you have called upon your upbringing and education to become her.”
“That is not the case, ma’am.”
“No? This is the new Catriona, is it? Not a brain injury but a transformation?” She doesn’t give me time to answer. Looks me in the eye and says, “Then return my locket by morning or you will pack your bags.”