Jem Flockhart 03 - The Blood by E. S. Thomson

Author:E. S. Thomson [Thomson, E. S.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781472126597
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2018-04-04T23:00:00+00:00

I sent Will and Gabriel out into the street to look for a carter, for I wanted to take some plants I had potted up to the Blood, and we could not carry them there ourselves. I sat with Pestle Jenny by the glowing embers of the fire while the sun vanished behind the branches of the peach tree. It was unusual to have a girl about the place – I checked myself. I was a girl – a woman – of course I was. And yet there was nothing that was girlish or womanly, or ladylike, about me. I had never worn stays, or petticoats; I had never sat in silence while men talked, had never modified my words or behaviour so as to guard against showing any man up as a fool or to preserve his self-worth. I walked the streets without fear of having my virtue threatened, I went wherever I wished, and I might smoke and spit as I pleased. It was my father who had first dressed me as a boy; he had passed me off as his son from the moment of my birth to all at St Saviour’s, condemning me to a life of disguise. All I knew was that I was one half of a twin, that my brother had lain dead beside me as I grew in the womb, and my mother was killed by us both as we emerged into the world. Had my father been punishing me for being a poor substitute for the wife and son he had lost? Was he helping me to achieve things that most women could never even dream of? I would never know, for he had never explained his actions. He had wanted an heir to run the apothecary, and that was what he had got. It was the only life I knew, and I lived it as best I could.

I thought of what Will had said to me, how tightly he had held my hand, how my heart had seized in my chest when I had found him crumpled at the foot of the stairs inside the villa at Deadman’s Basin, and my heart was torn. Was I right in what I had said to him, or was I simply too afraid to admit how I felt? I could never submit to the subservient position that women seemed obliged occupy, though I knew in my heart that he was not asking that of me. He loved me as an equal, as a man, for that was how he saw me. Did he know I was a woman? I was sure he did, and yet neither of us had ever mentioned it outright.

I sighed, and rubbed my eyes. But the thoughts still swirled in my head, and my heart. Surely if I dressed as a man and acted as a man, then I was a man? What was there, apart from uterus and breasts, that was woman? Why should I be defined solely

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