The Residence by Andrew Pyper

Author:Andrew Pyper [Pyper, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781982149079
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

22

When Jane’s youngest brother, John, took ill at the age of three, he was assigned to a bed in the nursery. Jane discovered his dying offered her a new power: the observation of horror. She stayed at his side, tending to his fever as best she could, but mostly watching him. Death wrapped itself around her little brother, everyone’s favorite, and Jane was at once panicked and awestruck.

She was there for it, closest to it, because she was her mother’s “little helper.” While she attended to her housecleaning and laundry chores with languor (her illnesses were most severe when asked to do things she didn’t want to), Jane was a devoted caregiver to the boys. She hovered around the three of them with hands that wiped and stroked and slapped, calling them “my tiny ones,” doting on them with a maternal passion that well surpassed their own mother’s. In a practical sense, Jane was their mother. And she cherished the license that came with the position: the responsibility, the discretion as to who was fed or warmed first, the choice between offering or denying comfort.

John’s passing—the moment itself—was transformative. For the boy. But also for Jane. The life in him undeniably there. Then undeniably not. A line between the two that most couldn’t see, or turned away from. Not Jane. She saw it for the arbitrary thing it was. A rule that, like any rule, might be broken if you were possessed of the will and means.

Three days after John died Jane entered her father’s study and took the pendulum game out of the bottom drawer.

That was why she was able to do it without being detected, why the house was empty except for her. It was the boy’s funeral. All of the Appletons were gathered by the hole in the ground of the Bath Road cemetery, tossing earth upon the box. Jane was too ill to attend. Her stomach. Her headache. She offered her parents different excuses but they weren’t really listening, ascribing her pains to grief.

The truth was Jane wasn’t interested in putting things into the ground. She wanted to see what would come out of it if you asked.

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