House of Peine by Sarah-Kate Lynch

Author:Sarah-Kate Lynch [Sarah-Kate Lynch]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781775533665
Publisher: Random House New Zealand
Published: 2012-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

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“What have you been snivelling about?” Mathilde accosted Sophie as she sneaked back into the house some time later. “Don’t tell me the little mouse and the big ox have fallen out. I heard Clementine blubbering her way up the stairs just before. What’s going on?”

“Sophie!” La Petite’s voice was not strong but it had a strange way of carrying itself, sort of in a waft, like smoke. Sophie and Mathilde both looked up the stairs as if they could see it snaking its way towards them. “Sophie!” the old woman called again. Mathilde physically recoiled.

“Now you’ve gone and woken Yoda,” she hissed. “So get up there and see what she wants before she starts making a nuisance of herself.”

Actually, La Petite had hardly made a nuisance of herself at all since the vendange began, although it was true that before that she had appeared a little on the demanding side, sending Sophie to the butcher for a particular slice of charcuterie or asking Clementine to mend a tear in her ancient bloomers, for example. Mathilde’s sisters had been most obliging, they were women starved of their mothers, after all, so they were lured in by La Petite’s matriarchal leanings. Mathilde, however, avoided her like the plague. So desperate was she to avoid detection by the old woman she even slipped her heels off and tip-toed past her room. She never did hear that scratchy old voice call her name, but she could feel her pull nonetheless. Instead of letting it reel her in the way her sisters did, though, she pulled against it, leaned further and further away, still furious that La Petite had exposed her one real weakness, Edie.

The subject of her 10-year-old daughter had been robbing Mathilde of sleep ever since the child’s existence had been revealed in that smelly little room. She had her reasons for leaving Edie behind, she just didn’t want to have to justify them to anyone, especially her two dim-witted sisters and some half-deranged, wizened-up old raisin. She knew how it looked to them, how it would look to everybody — she was in PR after all — but it was nobody’s business but her own; her own and George’s and perhaps that of the highly strung little madam they had brought into the world all those years ago and who had spent every minute of her life screwing up Mathilde’s.

She’d been cursing La Petite for exhuming her buried family, so invasive was she finding her thoughts of them. In fact, her entire body had revolted, breaking out in an unsightly rash that she had kept hidden for the first few days but which was now spreading up her neck towards her face. She could read the questions in her sisters’ eyes every time they looked at her, felt her skin crawl with every obvious thought. “You’ve been here all this time and you have a 10-year old daughter at home?” She kept hearing that sow Clementine’s disbelieving voice ringing in her ears.

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